“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” Douglas Adams

And why was it a bad move? Because of its consequences; atoms bonded together to eventually form “complex objects” that functioned on the rather arbitrary rule of self-replication. This started The Malicious War of Self-Replication amongst these objects – and the physical property of these objects that enables them to participate in this War is called “Life”. The idiocy of this War is highlighted by the fact that none of these objects guide their arms race (or “evolution” as they call it) with reason or rationality! All advances in their arms race are random mutations – which is the equivalent of waiting for an acorn to drop from a tree, instead of climbing it to retrieve it directly.

This is why after billions of years, the most advanced creature Earth could come up with is the Homosapien. But wait! It gets worse; this creature has an unparalleled self-obsession that could only have come about after honing and fine tuning it over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. But I’m jumping ahead of myself. Let me explain: most present day Homosapiens have a very strange and simplistic understanding of their origins. It’s something about a single couple procreating incestuous children. But the fact is that these “things” – the first Homosapeins who had to have numbered at 16 couples to provide any hope of genetic diversity - at some point began surveying their environment and speculating on its use and functionality with themselves as the measure.

That is, they became significantly self aware like no other creature on insignificant Earth. They then migrated to the coast of what their present-day versions call “South Africa”. Here, these creatures deprived aqua-dwelling creatures from participating in The War and then devoured and ingested them in their intestinal tract. Fortunately for these aggressors, these aqua-dwelling creatures’ bodies contained significantly large amounts of Omega-3s, which was not part of their regular diet. This chemical mutated them, giving them the ability of abstract thought – which formed the basis of their egocentric perspective of reality.

This perspective became their natural mode of thinking and their progeny lost awareness of other modes that their ancestors favored – primitive, instinctual reactiveness in which the ability to conceptualize finite existence, tools and property was definitively absent. These led them to develop the fundamental concepts of ideology, technology, and economy. In other words, these creatures started saying things like “How do you like them apples!?” and “I have grown them!” and “They are my apples!”. These were the first true, complete and utter Homosapiens.

Out of ideology came philosophy, religion and other purely abstract but sophisticated conceptual constructs; out of technology came engineering and functional know-how; and out of economy came resource allocation and distribution systems. Everything Homosapiens have done ever since is based on these platforms. Culture, tradition, art, even humor, are hence all products of their biology because they give them a survival edge by creating (arbitrary) notions of self/group identity and relationships. Eg: being born within an invisible boundary means they are different from those born outside those boundaries! No one has ever seen these boundaries, but they believe they are there. All the Homosapiens within these boundaries shamelessly participate in this charade, in this grandiose lie, almost like a theater production. And what’s more, they celebrate the day they all decided to pretend these boundaries exist! Cats are merely territorial, but Homosapiens? They are “nationals”!

As for religions; these create social hierarchies, which either place its members as pivots in its power structure(s), or design rules and principles as pivots that define a system of power and authority. This social construct provides a basis for inter-personal interaction, giving each member substantial chances to establish cooperative relationships and some form of social mobility. This is the groundwork for the creation of Homosapien society which as we know gives them a survival edge over fish. They’re very proud of this.

Political-economic theories like their so-called Liberalism or even their laughably self-aggrandizing Marxism are no different. For example, aside from organizing economic and even interpersonal interaction, liberalism’s emphasis on cooperation is extremely advantageous (and this realistic advantage is ironically asserted by many modern liberals). In other words, all such theories provide a system of interaction, much the way religion functions. Granted that the objective and fundamental perspective of economic theories is different from religion’s, they both provide social structures that organize a cattle of Homosapiens in to a coherent “orderly” society.

Lions may call on their entire prides to help them fight others, but here again the Homosapien is far superior because using these political-economic theories, it is able to expand the numbers of its allies in to the millions! The Homosapien’s cognition of this devastating ability to threaten and destroy other life forms is strangely twisted; it interprets it as “noble loyalty” or “inspiring dedication to the cause” or some such ludicrous self-praising nonsense.

In fact this puzzling egocentrism is also displayed in other aspects of its lives; what belongs to who, what is the “virtue” of human beings – the answer to these is always sought in terms of its “responsibility” and “duty”, which carries the inherent assumption that “man” is in control of, is superior to and has authority over “his” environment. The true condition of the Homosapien mindset is contrary to its understanding of itself; most members of the species feel that they are highly introspective, self critical, rational and reasonable, when in fact their so-called “higher reasoning” skill, as expressed in “choosing” political ideologies is predisposed by their physiology. Literally. The problem is that the Homosapien’s continued survival has led it to accept its delusions of grandeur as inherently true – they have become its axioms. Socio-biological evolution has thus given these mobile bags of water a blinding pride that has married their self-image to a self absorbed and self obsessed state.

Not only is its intellect – which is a manifestation of its physiology – immature and architecturally arrogant, but it’s also detrimental to its chances of survival if faced with calamities that don’t normally figure in its limited perspective of existence, let alone in its discourse. For example; cosmic catastrophes, periodic ice ages, and other alien life forms that view cross-specie rape as just “surprise greetings”, etc. Like its university’s squirrels, the Homosapien has become lost in preponderance with its life and has taken for granted that its existence is relatively un-threatened.

Of course, there are exceptions every now and then: Douglas Adams, a homosapien writer, created a species in Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that never looked up. Their perspective was two dimensional in nature and they thus lived in a blissful utopia. Not a single one of them ever thought of using its neck muscles to look straight up. While many Homosapiens find this idiotic character trait a real knee-slapper, Douglas Adams was clearly giving them a message. In fact being unable to “see the forest for the wood” is a Homosapien trait.

In order to continue its dominance in The War, “Humanity” (as they call it, and have associated countless positives to this word with ill-advised confidence), needs to snatch itself away from the lazy, utopian bliss that comes with waiting for the next acorn to drop, and instead arm itself via whatever rational thought and reason it is capable of, however inadequate that capability may be. For example, it needs to start looking up now – towards space; how to escape the inevitable death of its precious Earth and what the implications are of space exploration and its limitless resources on its economy. Humanity must also create tools that it will need if it is to survive. And if not for survival, then I hope at least for our amusement that is sure to come when we watch it struggle to use its terrestrial based concepts in the hilarity of space.

Such a revolution will fundamentally change the Homosapien’s literature, art, social structure and politics. This will also change its discourse the way technological discoveries, the discovery of the New World did.  In fact probably more so, considering that its experience with abstract thought (which has been accumulating since prehistoric times) has been exclusively used to interact with its terrestrial environment and the problems associated with it. Such a revolution will be to its benefit, even though it will shake its arrogant confidence in its significance to the external universe, let alone its superiority to it.

Yes, humans believe they are superior, even to the universe; most of them believe no life other than themselves exists in it because they haven’t seen, touched, heard, smelled or “felt” that there is anything like them out there. They have not explored space nor even launched a serious effort to do so, yet this belief is a pervasive axiom across their specie. It is as if Homosapiens function on the fantastic assumption that if anything exists and is important, it’ll come present itself to them – the acorn will fall. This is evident in their movies about extraterrestial life forms – in almost all of them aliens visit Earth or if they visit aliens’ worlds, they are paid attention to! Douglas Adams, again, is an exception.

For these self centered things to take the next step in their primitive socio-evolution, they need to re-awaken themselves to the reality of how fragile and insignificant their place truly is in the “world” (which to them is their universe!). Until they do that, they will remain vulnerable, ignorant and proud of their dominance over their poultry and other terrestrial “resources”… and this story of ignorance will one day abruptly end the way a low budget kung-fu movie does… and has before for Earth’s past specie.

I call this story Silsila Jahilliya (an Urdu phrase meaning “the story of ignorance”)