Other People

I think other people are overrated. I mean okay, so every now and then you'll have one of those moments when you're feeling insecure and you need to talk to someone to convince yourself that you're not THAT stupid. And it's always nice to be admired. And there's always sex. But even given all that, you have to think of the mind-blowing amounts of redundancy out there and think, couldn't God have done this more efficiently? Whatever happened to parsimony?

That, I think, is the biggest problem with this whole intelligent design thing. I mean, even counting just humans alone, we're talking six and half billion lines of genetic code to run one lousy program of a planet. And with more fixes, if the Bible is to be believed, than Windows. That's hardly state-of-the-art programming, is it?

Now a theory of unintelligent design, that I would buy. A theory that says: if there really were a ruthless and efficient process of evolution working to shape higher forms of life over millions of years, don't you think it would have come up with something better than Britney Spears or George W. Bush? It's obvious that there's some higher power up there that's systematically goofing up[1]. What was it Woody Allen said about God being an underachiever?

Meanwhile, of course, I'm stuck with other people. The trouble with these people is that they don't seem to understand that their only purpose is to slave away in mines and factories and call centres so that I can have a better life. They're not actually supposed to be sharing my daylight with me. Yet everywhere I look there they are - crowding up the parks, taking my seat on the bus or my table at the restaurant, slowing me down on the sidewalk or on the road. Worse, they BREED! The arrogance of it. Someone should take them aside and have a kindly word with them, explain to them how they're just ciphers in my existence. I would, except that I'm too modest and self-effacing. Besides, as Browning puts it:"Who'd stoop to blame / This sort of trifling?"

I blame the education system.

[1] To read more on this, see a story called The Janitor on Mars from Martin Amis' brilliant collection Heavy Water. He makes the point that humans have taken an insanely long time to evolve - our ape ancestors were still climbing down from trees when the Martians were already engaging in epic battles with distant star systems.