The thing about human beings was this: human beings couldn’t agree. They couldn’t agree about anything. Right from the moment their ancestors first slimed out of the oceans, and one group of sludge thought it better to live in trees while the other thought it blatantly obvious that the ground was the place to live. And they’d disagreed about pretty much everything else ever since.
They disagreed about politics, religion, philosophy-every-thing.
And the reason was this: basically, all human beings believed all other human beings were insane, in varying degrees.
Small wonder, then that homo sapiens spent most of their short time on Earth waging war against each other.
For their first few thousand years on the planet they did little else, and they discovered two things that were very curious: the first was that when they were at war, they agreed more. Whole nations agreed that other nations were insane, and they agreed that the mutually beneficial solution was to band together to eliminate the loonies. The only time human beings lived happily side by side was when they were trying to kill each other.
Then in the middle of the twentieth century the human race hit a major problem.
It got so good at war it couldn’t have one anymore.
It had spent so much time practising and perfecting the art of genocide, developing more and more lethal devices for mass destruction, that conducting a war without totally obliterating the planet and everything on it became an impossibility.
This didn’t make human beings happy at all. They talked about how maybe it was still possible to have a small, contained war. A little war. If you like, a warette.
They spoke of conventional wars, limited wars, and this insane option might even have worked, if only people could have agreed on a new set of rules. But, people being people, they couldn’t.
War was out. War was a no-no.
And, like a small child suddenly deprived of it’s favorite toy, the human race mourned and sulked and twiddled it’s collective thumbs, wondering what to do next. Then in the twenty-first century a solution was found.
The solution was sport…….
Except from; Red Dwarf – Better than Life. By Grant Naylor.
