As Einstein quite rightly pointed out, “(Hu)Mankind invented the atomic bomb, but no mouse would ever construct a mousetrap.”

Still, we did; and only ever used it twice.

Both times, three days apart, and in just a few minutes, people going about the ordinary things in their ordinary lives were reduced to carbon marks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Thanks to J. Robert Oppenheimer, one Little Boy and one Fat Man, more than 200,000 Japanese people didn’t see past the morning of each of those days. Twice that number began their ever-altered version of their life, devastated by injury, and emotional trauma unimaginable.

And then came the leukaemia and birth defects.

In order to obtain individually absorbed doses of radiation, electron spin resonance (ESR) dosimetry was applied to the tooth enamel of victims of the Hiroshima bomb who lived in the ‘black rain’ area – the western and northwestern suburbs of Hiroshima city where precipitation fell within a few hours of the explosion.

The results were not clear, but congenital missing teeth are common in descendants of atomic bomb victims.

Bombing Hiroshima was to win the war when Japan was already on the verge of surrendering. Annihilating Nagasaki was to stick it up the Soviets in case they hadn’t heard about the first one.

You’d think that only two of those horrific bombs were dropped because we’d learned our lesson.

We didn’t.

Thirty-five years later there were 70,000 even more idiotic, manmade madnesses. Each and every one thousands of times more powerful than the bomb to which Einstein referred, and proof that we are monsters that cannot be trained to behave.

So we’re not only weird, we’re passive-aggressive. We like baring our teeth. Particularly if they’re frighteningly white. And perfectly straight: although according to Einstein, there’s no such thing.

Still, we pick something to perfect, and we persist. Body size. Hair colour and volume. Puppety painted eyebrows. We’d rather expand lips than our minds. It’s all about perception. It’s how we evaluate each other.

A flawless smile immediately represents good health, wealth, and success. Professionally and romantically, it invariably pays off to have impressive pearly whites; even though fewer than one-in-five have naturally straight teeth.

There’s a whole lotta evolution involved in that.

Fortunately, we have orthodontists. Whether metal, ceramic, lingual or invisible braces, their expertise is immeasurable when it comes to bringing order to dental disorder.

If only we had a similar professional to sort our other distortions.

We perceive ourselves to be pretty good and pat ourselves on the back now, because presently there are only 12,512 nuclear warheads in the world. (That’s the weaponry; not the people who want conflict to happen. That number’s anybody’s guess, really.)

According to the US, Russia has 5,889.

According to itself, the US has 5,224. The UK says it has 225; France 290, and says non to increasing that. Israel doesn’t admit or deny to having 90; India is estimated to have 164; Pakistan has been guesstimated at 170. As of October 2023, China has been assessed as having 500, and with a high degree of uncertainty, somebody somewhere said that North Korea has 30.

So ‘Yay’ for us, it seems if rolling your eyes doesn’t count in the counting.

With no transparency whatsoever and no discernible truth, we now happily accept that we can kill ourselves a little bit less than we could forty-five years ago. Apparently that’s progress: the word we like to use for things that don’t make a lot of sense.

If you really want to know what happened to the other 57,488 nuclear deadly bits that aren’t in one piece and above ground anymore, let’s just say that some of ’em ended up at what could be basically described as a Violent Vinnies, where only People of Huge Importance can shop with lots and lots and lots of other people’s money.

And then there are the expired ones, waiting to be dismantled. (Bombs that is; as well as people because lots and lots and lots of money is spent on ridiculous things instead of say, universal dental plans.)

Why we do this, has some hoary old excuse attached to it about destruction being an innate part of human nature. Like we can’t possibly evolve beyond it. But we can evolve to upload tack on TikTok, believe in cryptocurrency and make fake meat.

We do love fake. The more fake, the more enamoured we are by it.

When reality’s not really real, it’s bewitching. Magicians know that. We used to be able to tell the difference. Now it’s not so easy. And it’s getting exponentially harder. So we don’t try too much anymore.

Reality’s the cheese that’s slipped off our cracker.

Even the economic system we call ‘capitalism’ has gotten weird, in just two hundred years. (During which we did manage to fit in a lot of bomb-making. Busy! We used to like being busy making stuff. Then ‘influencer’ careers came along.)

No longer is capitalism a bunch of old, straight white guys swilling scotch in bespoke suits getting their teeth into extracting stuff like oil and coal, or making things like steel and railroads and cars. Then they’d collude to protect their magic mountains of mighty moolah.

Workers would rise up and fight exploitation, governments would step in with regulations and although it was never perfect, conditions would generally improve. Fundamentally, it’s the way capitalism worked.

Now we’re living under an economic system that’s run by massive tech companies, with a bazillion digital fingers poking a million payable pies. Social media platforms, online marketplaces, tv and film studios, AI, search engines, cloud computing, e-commerce, communications …

You name it, and there’s a tetchy tech finger in there. Surveilling us in ways that would make Juan Pujol Garcia humbly hand in his MBE, and Mata Hari to know for sure that everything is an illusion.

Like a kid with an endless bowl of Froot Loops this handful of B2B, B2C behemoths collect and crunch all of our personal data through complex algorithms that even they don’t understand.

These monopolistic, polymorphous, multi-billion dollar mega-entities don’t make anything tangible. At all. The only thing they do is feed us manipulative advertisements, and control our behaviour.

Because we are monsters that cannot be trained to behave. Apparently it takes a monster to do it.

They will have us believe that any disillusion, or detachment from joy is simply because we don’t have straight, white, celebrity teeth for instance.

Which for some, may be true.

There’s a loss of confidence and self-worth that often accompanies the loss of dental aesthetics. It’s well documented that poor oral health can lead to chronic disease, and there’s certainly no joy in that.

Visionary economist, author and ex-Finance Minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis calls this contorted capitalism ‘technofeudalism’; its networked machinery ‘cloud capital’.

Maybe it’s mushroom shaped.

The purpose of this new, uncuttable commerce is, he says, “.. for us to train it, to train us, to train it, to train us, to train it, to train us, to train it, to train us, to ad infinitum; to know us, to give us good advice. Win over our mind and heart through good advice, and then input desires into our bosom, which then the same algorithm satisfies directly by selling it to us, bypassing every market. And in the process collecting 40% of the price from the capitalist, the vassal capitalist who also dwells in this digital fiefdom called amazon.com.”

“Bezos doesn’t give a damn about what you buy. He doesn’t make anything. He simply controls the digital system. He’s a technofeudal Lord on which all transactions take place through matching buyers and sellers by his algorithm that prevent you from talking to anyone – including the person you’re buying from – and collecting a ground rent, which I call the cloud rent.”

We have gone from being consumers, to being consumed. With our head in the clouds and in the sand at exactly the same time.

We are the product. We don’t own it, nobody bought it from us – we just gave it away.

Our credit card details are whichever faceless, uncontactable bank we use vouching for who we are; because our digital identity doesn’t actually belong to us.

No wonder we want those fantastic smiles. They may be digitally designed straight white teeth but at least the buck stops with us and our positively altered buck teeth.

American author James Clear suggests there are ‘atomic habits’ to adopt in order to create a better lifestyle for ourselves; being small, repetitive actions that require little motivation, and demand minuscule effort to achieve.

If only we could know what Einstein would make of that.

Disclaimer: The material posted is for informational purposes only and is not intended to substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Results vary with each patient. Any dental procedure carries risks and benefits. If you have any specific questions about any dental and/or medical matter, you should consult your dentist, physician or other professional healthcare providers.

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