Conspiracies and Cock-ups

I am always intrigued by people who believe the world is controlled by a never-ending stream of conspiracies, some simple, others extremely intricate. The ability to see a hidden hand everywhere is something that fascinates and annoys me in equal measure; it is also something that my Greek compatriots have in abundance, always seeing someone's plan in everything. If we espouse that way of thinking, the world becomes a frightening place.

What truly terrifies me, however, is the cock-up, something I believe to be far more common and, indeed, far more dangerous than any conspiracy. The polite description of a cock-up is 'mistake', and we are all familiar with the sentiment that mistakes are only human, thus creating the illusion that they are harmless. Not so. Cock-ups are not only encountered more commonly than we think in every level and every corner of society, they often have devastating effects. None of us would feel kindly disposed, for example, to the pilot of the jumbo jet we were flying in saying something like 'oops, well folks we're about to run out of fuel because we forgot to fill her up properly, so we're all going to die...'. Cock-ups can - and have been - that serious, resulting often in death and destruction.

My impetus for writing about cock-ups came from one of my own in my last piece, where I mentioned the name of a young winemaker and praised him as a potential star of the future on the strength of the quality and style of his first ever wine. Which would have been fine if I hadn't given him the wrong first name, even though it appeared clearly on the label, luckily noticed and pointed out to me by an eagle-eyed friend so that I was able to correct this speedily. Imagine the catastrophe otherwise: the young man would have become famous under the wrong name, with my myriads of readers referring to him thus! He may even have had to change his name officially to the one my carelessness assigned to him in order to match his new-found fame, a cruel fate averted, thankfully, at the last minute.

As you can clearly see, even minor cock-ups can have devastating effects on people and their lives. Or, indeed, on their lack of life, as in hostile situations when one of the sides bombs the wrong target by mistake and, instead of the other side's arsenal they hit a suburban house, or instead of a weapons' convoy they bomb a wedding party. So a cock-up is not a teeny-weeny mistake, to be shrugged off after an apology; rather, it is bigger, a fuck-up (technical term, widely used, sorry!), something that could have been averted.

Do not think for a second that I am claiming there are no conspiracies, or attempts at conspiracies, happening the world over, only that in my opinion there are far fewer than we would like to imagine. Instead of dastardly plots we usually have bumbling incompetence or, as in my case previously mentioned, a momentary lapse of attention/judgement. My error involved a word - and no, they are not like weapons - so that the cock-up was easy to rectify even with an audience as vast as mine, but can you imagine if I had carelessly pressed the wrong button on a weapons control panel? Ooops, there goes Moscow/London/Athens or...

Human nature, it seems, compels us to complicate things and shift blame, to constantly see activity in the shadows, to look for puppet-masters and puppets. Fools and foolishness do not hold the same attraction.