Barenaked Ladies Understand WE>me.

Let’s start with a couple of seemingly easy questions... First, who built the Pyramids? Second, who build the Great Wall?

I know what you’re thinking, “too simple”. The obvious answers to those questions are the Egyptians and the Chinese, right??? Well what if I offered up a different answer? An answer that is just as correct if you're in the right frame of mind.

Well, let me tell you about a great song by the Barenaked Ladies called “The History of Everything”. If you’ve ever seen the CBS television show “The Big Bang Theory”, and heard the theme song, then you know what I'm talking about. I don’t want to talk about the merits of the show, the song or the theory. While the show and the song are very entertaining, this is not our focus here. Conversely, as the theory is very interesting, I don’t want to explain it, nor can I explain it...

I want to focus on a couple of lines in the song and point out that the Barenaked Ladies “get it”. They understand "WE>me". While explaining part of the theory, in verse, they use my favourite word, twice. The song starts like this:

“Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started, wait...
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids)...”

Whahhhh! WE built a wall, WE built the pyramids...

Ponder these two statements for a second and then take into consideration what is actually being said. When it comes right down to it, WE are one race... the Human Race. This is the way we need to think on a global scale, or at least locally to begin with.

I told a few of my friends about this point of view. The first couple of times I made that statement, “WE built a wall, WE built the pyramids”, I’ll have to admit, it didn’t really make sense in my head, however, the more times I said it, the more it became clear. How different would the world around us be if everyone thought of each other in the sense of WE? (WE is greater than me)

I guess the irony here would be the fact that the Barenaked Ladies have since broken up. The “WE” that once was Steven Page and Ed Robertson is no longer. I guess you can’t win them all, but, they sure got it right on this one...

 Does this concept seem way too foreign to say out loud?

I bet it seems a little strange when you hear it in your own voice.

Repeat it a few times and tell me what you think. What a great theory.