Where No Cat Has Gone Before

I stood on my balcony last night and gazed down over my little kingdom. No fewer than five cats stared back up at me, I felt a little like Mussolini on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. That is if Mussolini had ruled an empire of cats rather than the worlds most inept fascist dictatorship. I'm not ashamed to admit I made a small rabble rousing speech to the furry multitudes. I may even have thrust out my chin and made dramatic hand gestures a la Il Duce. The cats seemed singularly unimpressed and I've no idea what the neighbours thought. Still if you do hear of someone leading a horde of cats in a march on Rome you might want to give me a call and find out what I'm up to.

An empire based on cats would probably prove to be unviable. Cats are the original "does not play well with others". Humans are much more amenable to that sort of thing although we are rather schizophrenic about it. We build communities and institutions that operate like well oiled machines. We also build well oiled machines. On the other hand at any given moment a goodly proportion of us can't stand the sight of each other. I firmly believe that one of the main drivers of civilisation was the desire to more conveniently hate the neighbours.

This combined desire for community and frequent dislike of the people who comprise it is one of the things that makes our world such an interesting and often dangerous place to live. Our history is littered with civilisations that were toppled usually by their neighbours, who in turn succumbed to their neighbours. Still we go onward and upward bitching and snarling at each other all the way. We have even created an entire institution, the United Nations, solely so that people who normally would be unlikely to even meet will have an opportunity to dislike each other in a comfortable and well appointed setting.

The time will come when our desire for community finally wins out over our desire to beat up the neighbours and we will create a single unified human civilisation. On that day things will be harmonious, happy and, in all probability, incredibly dull. Unless we use our new found unity to travel between the stars; boldly going where no one has gone before in order to seek out new neighbours we can hate. We will probably be the galactic equivalent of those folk a couple of doors down who play loud music at 3am on a Tuesday, toss beer cans over the fence and have a spaceship up on bricks in the front yard. I can't help thinking that most alien races watch our internal bickering with a sense of relief and hope our current state of violent incoherence continues indefinitely.

Mind you, if cats ever learn unity of purpose, we're all screwed.