Whenever a government-appointed “expert” or their minister decides to scare our pants off with a warning involving the climate, our health, or a forthcoming terrorist attack, any sensible person will have learned over the years to take a “best-case scenario” approach – i.e. the chances of what this highly-paid, scheming apparatchik is assuring us is about to happen actually happening are somewhere between minimal and non-existent.
They’re emphasizing their own role, or fighting for funds, or covering their plushly-suited backs, or simply enjoying the Alfred Hitchock-like thrill of making our flesh creep. (Alternatively, they could just be massively gullible, happy to believe and repeat anything scientists or pressure groups are pushing their way - but that doesn’t mean they’re not simultaneously calculating what’s in it for them.)
This is how we came to waste one billion pounds on preventing the 60,000 deaths that were supposed to result from that Noughties equivalent of bubonic plague, swine flu.
Conversely, many of us have also learned – from painful experience - to apply “worst-case scenario” thinking to any form of financial investment. However badly you think your nest egg is doing, it’s actually doing much, much worse – unlike the legalized crook who invested it for you, while at the same time employing the sort of levels of optimism and self-delusion normally associated with the heavy sampling of Colombia’s main export: he’s probably worrying about how to spend his latest £5 million bonus. (When Ed Miliband began his career as Labour leader by claiming to be more optimistic that David Cameron, it told you all you needed to know about the little twerp – since when has the mindless, baseless refusal to face facts been classified as a virtue?)
The other time to employ worst-case scenario thinking is when a government minister or one of their “experts” assures us that something we suspect will be very bad for this country won’t in reality affect us at all, and might actually prove beneficial.
This is always, without exception, a vast, smelly, whopping, humungous lie.
So, to recap, when you’re told that the Thames will boil and rise ten feet in the next two years, or that thousands of us are about to die in a hideous terrorist attack at any moment, or that a virus heading our way will probably kill us and most of the people we know, smile wryly, mutter “Yeah, yeah!” and carry on as before.
When some overpaid spiv working for a supposedly respectable financial institution tells you how well your investment will do over time, or someone from the government tells you that mass immigration is good for Britain (half of all Muslims are on unemployment benefit), or that the latest overhaul in the exam system will lead to even higher educational standards, or that the latest EU agreement will not lead to a further loss of sovereignty, or that cuts will be applied “fairly” – assume the opposite and run like hell!
Because, deep down, we know every disaster for this country is preceded by legions of the great and the good assuring us that everything will be just fine.
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