What Gives?

[blue rare]

Throughout the ages of mankind, there have been certain sagacious men and women who have made it their business to explore the fathomless depths of the most arcane and abstruse realms of knowledge. Necromancers, alchemists, the artists of the Renaissance, tantric healers, philosophers, astrophysicists, plumbers, and the guy who somehow keeps my car running, to name but a few.

It gives me a great sense of comfort that there are women and men out there—countless multitudes of them—who are vastly more intelligent, skilled, and disciplined than myself. People who are able to design buildings that won’t fall down, build airplanes that won’t tumble from the sky, decipher radioactive signals from the outer edges of the universe, conduct a symphony, execute a Black Swan pas de deux, or bake a perfect croissant.

There are so many things, after all, that I am both unable and unwilling to do for myself. I am not completely helpless, of course. I consider myself to be a competent driver, I can talk a bit about movies, music, books, and art, and can make a passable moussaka. But I will have nothing to do with baking or electrical wiring, amongst a myriad of other things. I would no more think of repairing my own hot water heater, for instance, than I would attempt to plumb the mysteries of the kabbalah or perform gallbladder surgery upon myself. I hire someone to do my taxes, because whenever somebody talks to me about anything to do with finances it always seems to me like they are recounting a long and boring story in some made-up and gibberish-y language.

It’s exhausting to even think about developing the seemingly supernatural skills that some people have. I begrudge the half hour or so it takes to follow the manufacturer’s instructions for assembling a propane barbecue, never mind devoting the ten thousand hours that it takes to master playing a French horn.

As a mere ordinary mortal—and a barely passable one at that—I tend to have an almost superstitious admiration for the sort of people who operate at the highest levels of human proficiency. I think of them as rarefied creatures, a breed apart from regular human beings like myself, who do everything in an okay but half-assed kind of way. Some illogical part of me wants to think that they are not merely good at one thing, they are superb at everything. I like to imagine, for instance, that any woman who can pilot a commercial airliner probably also learned to ride a bicycle by the time she was six months old, speaks seven languages, and could, if she chose, scale K2 or translate Finnegan’s Wake into Japanese.

I am always a little disconcerted, disappointed even, when I have some inkling that they might be just human beings after all. I want them to be perfect. I don’t like to overhear my doctor telling her receptionist that she locked herself out of her car that morning, or wore two different shoes to work.

Above all, I would like to think that the people who actually make decisions on behalf of our magnificent, ever-so-fragile planet are operating at a pretty high level of understanding. I am not naive; I know that politicians and captains of industry are often insatiably hungry for wealth and power. But I had always believed that anybody who got to a significant level of influence in a democratic nation must—surely?—have at least a few principles, a deep understanding of complex issues, and some respect for the institutions that prevent us from toppling into base and bloody savagery.

Well, colour me disillusioned. I mean, if we had fewer options to choose from, and less potential as a species, it might be more understandable. But to have such a wealth of brilliance all around us, in every corner of the world, and to willingly, knowingly, put the future of our planet in the hands of the very dregs of humanity seems bewildering. A thug/mobster/rapist over there; a smug, oil-mongering quisling over here. Neo-Nazis? Sociopathic media tycoons? Venal, emotionally stunted tech- and finance-bros? People I wouldn’t trust to manage a 7-11 are now grinding away at all the levers of power. What the fuck gives, homo sapiens?!

Like I say, I’m nobody’s idea of a genius. But it seems to me that we could—and must –do a whole lot better than that. I’m just hoping smarter people than me are thinking about a solution.