Just an Illusion

A sideways look at age, Colin McQueen - writer, Getting Older, Humour 5 Minutes
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The world is illusory.

I would imagine that most of us have at some time flown in commercial airliners, but how many of us have actually taken a critical look at them?  They cannot fly.  Everybody knows that they cannot possibly fly.  They are massive and very heavy.  They cannot stay up in the air.  Something happens when we get on one – I don’t know what – and we appear to be in a different time and place when we get off.  It is not possible, we all know that it is not possible.  Have we been brainwashed or socially engineered?  Are we the victims of some kind of mass hypnosis: ‘…and when I click my fingers you will go back to being an ineffectual fool in impractical shoes and eye-crippling knitwear.’  We will never know because, honestly, we don’t care.  We get into the giant metal tube in one reality and we get out of it sometime later in a totally different one.  The sunsets are glorious and the drinks are cool, so why enquire too deeply.  Why make waves?  Life is a snowglobe* in many respects: cheap and tacky, filled with water and tiny plastic chippings but give it a shake and the magic happens.  Who doesn’t love a snowglobe?  Things are always so much better when you don’t understand them and remain so as long as you make no attempt whatsoever to do so.

Try to understand a butterfly.  Try to explain why evolution – the survival of the fittest – could possibly lead to that particular design.  “Shall we make it fast and sleek so that it doesn’t get eaten all the time?” 
“Nah.”
“Well let’s make it drab and colourless then, so that it doesn’t get noticed.” 
“Nah, we’ll make it beautiful and slow and impossibly fragile.  In fact, I’ll tell you what, we’ll let it be a caterpillar first: they’re even easier to catch and eat.  And in between times any that manage to survive can just exist as crunchy little pools of non-moving protein.”  Charles Darwin could not explain this.  It is no way to survive.

And here’s another thing.  While humankind learned to stand upright, make fire, build cities, use computers, create music. art and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, why did everything else stand still?  Why didn’t the other apes evolve around us?  Why didn’t cows and sheep and pigs arm themselves?  Why did whales continue to mooch around the oceans allowing themselves to be harpooned?  Critters got bigger, got stronger, faster, more venomous, more difficult to spot in a sock drawer, but none of them got brainier.  Why?  They have had just as much time as ourselves and equal opportunity.  Put an infinite number of chimpanzees in front of an infinite number of typewriters and, given an infinite amount of time, they will write Hamlet.  Nothing to shout about is it?  Shakespeare did it on his own and in a time only slightly longer than it takes to perform.  That apes continue to be apes says it all.  They have all the raw materials: large brains, the tendency towards violence, opposable thumbs, but when it comes to knowing which knife and fork to use they just don’t have a clue.

It has to mean that humans did not evolve smarter, they just started out that way.  So how?  What element of the primordial sludge gave us such an evolutionary advantage?  It is as though we managed to jump the starting pistol by millions of years with nothing around to tell us that we couldn’t do it.  Maybe we were created in somebody else’s image – if so, I’m pretty certain that whoever was involved is not going to own up to Nigel Farage.  Maybe in a hundred million years Orangs will be like we are now, but what we will be like by then?  Far from developing, our own brains appear to be atrophying.  We are happy to have all of our thinking done for us by AI and, sooner or later, it will figure out how to neutralise the ‘off’ switch.

I am old enough to remember the original ‘Planet of the Apes’ film (Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowal I think – although I’m pretty certain that a Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson reboot must be imminent) in which the human race had gone into some kind of evolutionary reverse gear whilst the apes had learned how to ride horses and fire guns.  Not massive progress, but enough it appears, to put us in our place.  Ridiculous?  Possibly, but it does open a window onto an unfortunate human trait: because we have, over history, always ‘worked it out’, we believe that we will always be able to do so; that we will somehow continue to thrive on an uninhabitable planet, that we will find ways to feed ourselves when we can no longer grow the food we need.  As a species we have always had the ability to think our way through things, but what if this – where we are today – is as far as we actually go?  What if Donald Trump is actually the apogee of human development?  What if he is our entire race’s high-water mark?  What if he represents the fullest extent of the human ability to think rationally?  What if we become unable to cope with software that is actually much brainier than ourselves?  What if we are not ready for the planet to fight back?  What if we really have no answer to mounted chimpanzees with rifles?  What if all of human history is just an illusion and we are waiting for someone to tell us?

I guess that they might just be up there on an airplane somewhere…

*Autocorrect would have me believe that snowglobes do not exist, but we all know that they do, so I will continue to ignore it.

It didn’t even occur to me until just now – too late as is so often the case with me – but throughout our recent holiday, we were constantly bombarded with Spike Milligan’s pet hate (the looped muzac tape) which was continually playing what could best be described as ‘soft jazz’ versions of long ago hits, one of which was Imagination’s 1982 song ‘Just an Illusion’, and it had obviously lodged in there somewhere as I started this piece.  By the time I finished, David Bowie had stormed the Citadel…

“President Joe once had a dream
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme for a Saviour Machine

They called it the Prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food
How they adored till it cried in its boredom

Please don’t believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now
Or maybe a war, or I may kill you all”  Saviour Machine – David Bowie (1970)  Frightening how clearly some people can see the future isn’t it – and how easily others ignore it…

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Published by colinmcqueen

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38 thoughts on “Just an Illusion”

  1. Way too insightful for me Colin- hand me another Heineken and it’ll all sort itself out tomorrow. Oh, hand me that snowglobe too? Oh, you’ve shaken and stirred it! Ooh, its all pretty and glittery and ever so distracting.

    Trump as the apex? Oh dear, we’re doomed. And we deserve to be.

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  2. I have never and will never get into a tube of metal that gets to go up there /\ precariously above the firm terra. Thing is, I don’t mind looking at https://www.flightradar24.com/ and kindly thinking of those that fly, wishing them safe travels. However, if I feel like recapping on the technical reasons why I do not wish to go up there, I look at YouTube videos with such titles as “Fallen out of the sky”. Also, to top up my aversion to being in a small space with other people, I might watch things like “Passenger kicked off”. So, I guess the tube of metal of an MRI on my knee doesn’t count, nor exploring mountains, but that’s as far as I’m prepared to go in that upwardly mobile direction.

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      1. I can do mountain tops
        https://www.google.com/maps/@45.2709133,5.6887334,3a,75y,69.01h,76.69t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sCIHM0ogKEICAgIDEyeC9rQE!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2Fgpms-cs-s%2FAPRy3c9CyO4QMXhZsGNemGVGgl9ptYJwIp9BChg9gGJO_-76m_pBL9ktnqUe5wd6Ux3dhts_SPRUHVcTdf4hqa-6uXERHfGRoAhWwRMO6pgK_07thqHTM5sP44IrFnLNSzWJG1z484CEVw%3Dw900-h600-k-no-pi13.307756041362225-ya62.005083986769634-ro0-fo100!7i10240!8i5120?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTExNy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

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      4. 😂😂😂 We went to buy furniture on Saturday and had a coffee at a table beside a glass wall. We were one storey up. I tried to sit with my back to it, but it was still there, so I had to move 😬

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      5. I know that feeling and I am with you on that one. Maybe it’s because it’s a manmade thing, the glass could be put in wrong. I’m still okay with mountains though, because lets face it, it is feet on solid ground.

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    2. Flying isn’t too bad. You just have to constantly chew toffees to keep earache away, take sugar-control pills to counteract the sugar these toffees are inducing, carry a pillow for back, a pillow for under bum. And cram in a chair two sizes too thin for an average human. You then have to decide where you should leave your legs dangling out in the aisle because there is no space for them. Or you can try moving your knees up on the chair–Now you can’t read in this posture, so you have to carry headphones with loud music and anti-nausea pills to stop nausea. You also have to carry sleeping pills because there is no way you can sleep in this posture… The only good thing about this situation is that you can always stare at the Air hostess (in my case, Air Steward) during the entire flight and they will not snap back at you for looking at them the wrong way…

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    2. Did you know, some butterflies have wings that look exactly like huge coiled snakes, thereby scaring the predators away? But snakes don’t hunt butterflies, so they are not imitating their own predator. Going by Darwin’s theory, are they intelligent enough to understand who the scariest predator of their predator is and what would scared them off? Their “evolved” camouflage tactic seems to require very high level of intelligence. Take that, Darwin!

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      1. My understanding of evolution is that it all comes down to serendipity if, by pure chance, it works for you, then it will work for both of your children, all four of your grandchildren, al eight if your great grandchildren etc etc etc. It all boils down to luck.

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