If nothing is done, everybody on the planet is going to die. Each year another 60 million of our fellow human beings are swept away by disease, old age, failure to look both ways before crossing the road and other affronts to our inalienable right to life.
In the face of this absolutely total holocaust, other issues fade into insignificance. Yet what is the government doing to abolish the evil of death? It wastes is efforts on mere palliatives, like banning smoking and creating cycle lanes, while ignoring the real issue.
Why isn't the opposition urging it to redouble its efforts? Or alternatively or perhaps simultaneously, to reverse its current approach in favour of a Plan B that would resolve the matter in a couple of shakes without any net addition to the public borrowing requirement.
Perhaps it's simply a matter of time until this issue gets the treatment it deserves. Or at least, the treatment meted out to almost any other of the unwelcome realities that confront us. That is, to be classified as a problem, to require therefore a solution and to be laid at the door of the authorities with a peremptory demand for its immediate rectification.
Once, if the plague struck or the harvest failed, we would shrug our peasant shoulders and accept the will of the gods. Then, somebody noticed that you could pre-empt adverse outcomes - sometimes. Eventually, sometimes translated itself into always. We lost the ability to distinguish between a problem that has a solution which is yet to be found, and a 'problem' which has no solution and should therefore be considered not a problem but an affliction.
We therefore find ourselves constantly demanding that circles must be squared. Spending must rise but taxes must fall. The poor must be succoured but not disincentivised. Crime must be deterred but prisons must be emptied. Emissions must be reduced but fuel poverty is a scandal. Palestinians and Israelis must abandon the differences that define them.
We are able to make such demands because we do not have to meet them ourselves. Democracy enables us to shuffle them onto our leaders. They must promise to kiss away our woes or we shall vote instead for rivals who say they will. When they fail as fail they must, we amuse ourselves by berating them for their betrayal.
It may sound like a perverse but perhaps harmless game. Nonetheless, our penchant for the problematisation of everything exacts a price. While we wait for make-believe solutions to dispel threatening phenomena, we neglect to prepare for their impact. When that impact comes, it is all the more devastating.
Some eurozone countries have gone bust. Sooner or later their governments will default and their banking systems will collapse. This will bring down other banks, which will cause other defaults. The world will plunge into depression.
This is regarded as a problem. There must therefore be a solution. Our leaders are supposed to be finding it. When they do, everything will apparently be OK. But is it a problem, or a harsh reality we should do better to acknowledge before further self-deception and delay compound it even further?
The supposed solution would require the rich to sacrifice their wealth and the poor their independence. If it nonetheless secures their consent, it will deepen the problem it is intended to address. But then the euro was itself the solution to something other than a problem.
A catastrophe looms, but this time let's not pretend that it's a problem. That way, we might for once find out how to endure it.