Way back in the days when I still blindly and thoughtlessly aped the opinions (apinions?) of my fellow self-perceived ‘humans’, I blithely perceived April 1 or ‘April Fool’s Day’ as simply an opportunity for us all to play amusing pranks or practical jokes on each other.

But growing political awareness eventually alerted me to the fact that, as I’ve mentioned many times before in Malaysiakini and elsewhere, most of us on Planet Earth are treated like April fools every day of every year by countless governments that, like China’s fake Communist Party, North Korea’s Kim dictatorship and Malaysia’s Umno/BN ‘kleptocracy’ and countless others, are nothing but jokes at their citizens’ expense.

Even more dire, however, as I have gradually come to realise, all of us humans, whether we’re playing the fool every April 1 or being played for fools every day of every year by bleeders posing as leaders, have been busily fooling both each other and ourselves for the past couple of million years.

Ever since, in fact, our emergence as a new species of chimpanzee evidently equipped with such superior manual, intellectual and linguistic abilities as to enable us to see, define and declare ourselves as superior to not only other chimps, but also the rest of creation.

‘Creation’ being the crucial word in this discussion, as, paradoxically, the superior intellectual powers that enabled us perform and perceive ourselves as champs failed to replace all our instincts to think, feel and act like chimps.

And the complex of confusions and conflicts that this intellectual/instinctive, human/animal duality produced has rendered us uniquely and incurably capable of thinking and behaving like not only champs or chimps, but chumps.

It would take several books to do even the slightest justice to a discussion of humankind’s seemingly limitless capacity for chumpery.

And in case you’re interested, several of the many books I’d recommend on the subject included Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns’, ‘Germs and Steel’ and ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee’; Philippe Gigantès’ ‘Power & Greed: A Short History of the World’; and Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’.

Not, I presume, that readers in Malaysia will be able to find the latter volume in bookstores, as its author hails from Israel, a country reviled by the seemingly anti-Semitic Umno/BN regime.

But that’s another story, in light of the issue I’d like to focus on in this mercifully brief column, Immanuel Kant’s concept of mankind’s promotion of satiable animal needs with insatiable human greeds...