Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Are we the baddies?

There's a Mitchell and Webb sketch in which one Nazi officer says to another, "Have you noticed that our caps actually have little pictures of skulls on them?" He is leading tentatively to a dark revelation, "Hans, are we the baddies?"



It seems that the Yangtze river dolphin was declared extinct today, to quote from the article in The Independent, "driven from this planet by human activity".

I wonder how long these skulls of extinction and destruction have to keep appearing around us before we begin, tentatively, to wonder, "Are we the baddies?"

If a single person acted always and only for his own personal gain, taking no account of the pain and injury he caused others, he would be considered sociopathic, or morally bankrupt. And yet, as a collective, that is how the human race acts - taking no account of anything but human gain, and, it has to be said, even doing this badly, on account of chronic myopia. If egoism is apparently scorned in individuals, it seems as if the collective ego of the species remains undimmed.

It takes a certain level of sophistication and self-awareness to step back from oneself and progress from seeing oneself as right by definition 'because I'm me', to considering things from the point of view of those on the receiving end of one's actions. For the moment, it seems, we continue to wear out skull-badged caps - a badge signifying the underlying morbidity of a locked arrogance that mistakes itself for righteousness.