Welcome to So Sue Me, a podcast which attempts to put my thoughts about many subjects into words and subsequently into sound waves. This may or may not be a good idea, but having already tried to do an unscripted podcast about music, wherein I and a dear friend blundered about and scrambled for words as if we were a couple of tongue tied schoolboys, I concluded that a written show about subjects less intangible and more personal was called for. And so, here I am, inflicting a lifetime of unconventional opinions on a very few listeners who probably don’t give a shit.

And what better way to start the ball rolling than to answer the question that has probably welled up in the minds of every person who has viewed the title of my website, “Dude, why are you so negative? Do you really think mankind sucks?”

I have often been accused of being negative and pessimistic because of my critical views of our species and it’s practices, but I assure you, I am not. In order to solve a problem you must first identify it. You cannot expect a physician to improve your health, or a mechanic to fix your car without first identifying a disease or faulty engine part. Sometimes the diagnosis is bad news indeed: perhaps you have cancer or your car needs a new clutch. Neither are things you want to hear, but without hearing them, what are your options? To die a possibly painful death or have your car give out at an inopportune moment? Would you prefer this? I don’t think so.

The truth is not always good news, but it is, after all, the truth. With it you have an accurate starting point for any repair that needs to be done. If you gloss over the truth or ignore it altogether, what you have a lie as your starting point. And a lie, not being the truth, is a poor place to start diagnosing problems. In fact no cure for anything can ever be found if you start with a lie. A doctor will not mend your broken leg if he is mistakenly treating a pulled muscle. Nor will he do so if he ignores the problem altogether, focussing instead on “the positive things”, like how healthy your lungs are. Without acknowledging the truth, however unpleasant, one cannot move forward in a positive fashion. It is a misnomer to believe that by ignoring an unpleasant truth, we are being in any way positive.

If it is the nature of any problem that it must be recognised to be rectified, then denying the existence of said problem means it will never go away. Simply put, people who never admit to being wrong will never improve, while those who frequently admit to being in error will continue to grow and become better. And so it is with humanity as a whole and with social and political systems.

The human race is unfortunately very good at ignoring unpleasant truth and focussing instead on what is perceived as positive. This is why mankind does not move forward socially. Cinema and television science fiction properties have been selling humanity’s “virtues” to a myriad of alien races, bent on our destruction, for decades. Ironically, it is always man’s social virtues that are being sold, when in fact these aspects are our weakest characteristics. The whole concept is patently ridiculous. Any race advanced enough to have developed interstellar travel and come to Earth across light years, would see through us in an instant. It is our scientific accomplishments that define us. Our social practices demean us and brand us as little more than barbarians. But we lie to ourselves about this and, sadly, believe the lie, both in reality and fiction.

And believing lies as a matter of course in every day life is what humans do better than just about anything else. To most people the lie is prettier than the truth. And unfortunately, the biggest lie we believe is that of denying that we prefer lies to the truth and prefer to live in fantasy worlds instead of the real one.

Now before people flame me savagely, I am not saying that humanity has absolutely no redeeming social values. It’s just that any such value is rendered almost meaningless when stacked against the piles of shit we willingly heap in the way of real any progress for humanity. Extolling the virtues of Capitalism, for example, as we do so loudly and endlessly all over the 3rd world, is akin to a parent admiring the paint job on the car that ran over and killed her child.

A few more words on truth before I move on. There is only one. Let me repeat that again. There is only one truth. I, as an atheist, and the christian down the road do not have individual truths. There is only one truth and and it doesn’t care whether either of us believe in it or not. It is emphatic and uninterested in our opinions. The truth is the truth. Period. Full stop. Without acknowledging the truth we cannot move forward, and we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again until some consequence or other stops the process. If in doubt, ask the person who has been married six times if she was to blame for the failure of said marriages. Invariably she will say it was always the other person’s fault.

So, how does all of the above manifest itself in our crazy little world? Well, the answers to that question represent the underlying fabric of pretty much everything I believe, and will be the remit of most of the future installments of this podcast.

But there is one more thing I want to touch on before I leave you to knock back that last drink and put a gun to your head. This thing represents the other factor that is key to everything I believe, and as such will figure hugely into the content and reasoning behind future shows. And it is the concept of simplicity.

Problems, at their root, are simple. The answers aren’t always simple, but most of the time the problems are. They are, however, only simple at the bottom line. At every level above the bottom line problems get increasingly more complex. To illustrate this I like to visualise the workings of the mind as a broomstick standing on end, on a table. The table represents the bottom line where things are very simple. Above the bottom line everything gets gradually more complicated as you travel up the stick.

Our minds and how they work are very complex. In fact the human mind is so complex, and has to deal with so many processes, that it is constantly piling up multiple layers of residue in between the bottom line and the top of the stick. These layers tend to obscure any real problem at the bottom with layers of crap that are actually unrelated to it. Most of us live somewhere around the middle of the broomstick, immersed in these layers and unable to get to the real problems at the bottom because we don’t even know they are there.

In very simple terms, all of this means that we spend most of our time focussing on bullshit and missing the point. As I have already mentioned, addressing this aspect of humanity will figure largely in future episodes.

So, does mankind suck?. Well, yes. While our scientific and practical achievements are astounding, our social, political and economic practices are ridiculous and barbaric. We are paradoxical to the extreme. How can a single species achieve so much against incredible odds and yet miss so much that is glaringly obvious? Well, the answer is that it is human nature to do so, and that’s why we need to change human nature, if this is indeed possible.

Much more on all of this later.