A story

Once upon a time there was a planet called Earth, and on this planet lived a species called Man.

Now Man was fairly new to this whole "species" thing having only recently evolved from a group of animals called Primates. In fact there was very little difference between the two.

Yet something extraordinary had happened to Man, no-one knew exactly what it was, but for some reason Man behaved differently to all the other animals on the planet, in fact, if you asked a member of the species, they wouldn't even consider themselves animals at all....

The species was suffering from a rather large delusion of grandeur, they fed, fought, bred, killed, and ran about their day to day lives like any other animal, yet had the bizarre delusion that they were better than all the others.

This of course upset the natural balance of things in many ways as you can well imagine. They killed most of the other animals on the planet, because Man was more important obviously, destroyed the actual atmosphere of their own planet! (because Man knew best) they created bizarre rituals involving giant images of themselves that lived in the clouds, they killed each other, maimed, tortured, raped and massacred each other in fact.

And all the time they pretended not to be animals, and gave themselves reasons and justifications, which all fed back into the grand delusion.

Indeed, they did create some amazing things, although they failed to see how amazing the things were that had been created by the other creatures on the planet. They imagined their creative impulses unique to themselves, creating "art" that acted as another step towards their downfall, ignoring the countless examples of the creativity of the other species, not seeing the differences between those acts needed to survive and those acts created on impulse, the dances of dolphins, the music of whales, the sculptures of the termite.

Maybe if they had realised that they were no different from the others, that they were acting on impulse, that their "civil" behavior could never last, that the pretense of Man being more than just another animal was a futile one...

Maybe if they had embraced their animal instincts, not suppressed them...

Maybe if they had been honest about their innermost thoughts with each other, admited what they all knew deep inside...

Once upon a time their was a planet called Earth, it's still there, if you want you could probably find it, it's pretty much just a cinder now, burnt out, sun scorched...

We use it as a lesson to teach our children...

Don't try to walk before you can run.