Rage

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.
If only that were all we raged against.
Fear may be humanity’s oldest emotion.
But rage is its strongest.
Of all species ours seems unique in its capacity for rage.
Pure undiluted anger directed outwards.
No other animal seems consumed by it.
Our creation stories have the first of us succumbing to rage and committing fratricide.
The first recorded murder, a rage fuelled assault took place nearly half a million years ago,
Rage seems encoded in our DNA.
We asked, “What could possibly cause this unique behaviour, this aberrant adaptation away from altruism to animus?”
Too late now, we know the answer.
The source of human rage.
We are started young.
Playground scuffles.
Cliques where you are excluded.
We grow.
These conflicts mature.
Or perhaps become more subtle.
Less overt in nature.
A putdown at work.
A driver’s aggressive manoeuvre.
A phenomena so universal we have invented a term specifically to describe it.
Road rage.
We rage at societal level also.
We fight wars.
Each side convinced of its rightness.
Fuelled in conquest by
How else could you kill another like you?
Unless blinded by patriotic rage.
We other those who are different.
Pass laws against their existence.
Discrimination merely for being.
There is one commonality in all our rage.
Always there must be a loser.
Better to be self-righteous than defeated.
Where the seed of rage is sown.
We have created entire memetic ecosystems for this purpose.
Webs to ensnare billions of us in gossamer threads of anger.
The purpose, to take raw emotion.
Finessed to produce refined rage.
Triple distilled anger behind every comment.
We have been baited into rage.
And how we took that bait.
When our scientists split the atom.
Separating nuclei in an outburst of energy.
Breaking matter at a fundamental level.
Did we think that would not come with a cost?
We could, if not infected with rage, have built purely for benefit.
But instead we raged towards the creation of the light.
That man-made nuclear fury birthed in our laboratories.
The white-hot light that eats cities.
Where matter becomes light.
It was only a matter of time before one of us, drunk with rage, high with self-righteous fury unleashed our worst weapons against us.
The worst our science had devised, let slip from their leash in a moment of senselessness.
It was inevitable the other side, and its allies would respond.
Each launch begetting another and another.
The sky laden with every ounce of fissile material intended to kill.
Hungrily, the beings who had gifted humanity our rage watched their children’s work sail through Earth’s sky.
Eee Quals Emseek Wared.
The prayer of these beings.
A mantra we coded in mathematics.
Each missile carrying this prayer.
And when they struck.
When the terrible bombs dropped and split the atom.
They tore something else.
A scratch in reality.
Hardly anything, but more than enough.
For centuries we had been feeding and fuelling them.
Until eventually they grew strong enough.
To push against that tiny scar the weapons they had us make had created.
Before the gamma radiation had even reached space, they stepped across the breach.
Claiming their world.
Opening unfurling flowering.
Engulfing.