I would prefer — as I expect most of you would, too — that the course of human affairs runs smoothly and harmoniously.

OK, that’s a not. Not going to happen. Some wrongs have always been and always will be beyond our control. Built in to the human condition, as the English poet Algernon Swinburne wrote about so long ago in his famous poem, “Before The Beginning Of Years.”

“Before the beginning of years/There came to the making of man

Time, with a gift of tears;/Grief, with a glass that ran;

Pleasure, with pain for leaven/ Summer, with flowers that fell;

Remembrance, fallen from heaven/and madness risen from Hell.”

Yet, some things are in our hands to change. Like how we behave, what we say, how we treat other human beings.

So, for what it’s worth, here are a couple of dishonorable mentions of things that make the world a sadder place because we do them when we don’t have to. No doubt, you will have your own list.

Gaslighting. Officialdom and television’s talking heads trying to tell us that something that happened and we witnessed and heard with the eyes and ears our mothers gave us “did not happen, and we’ll tell you how it went down. You can trust us.” That’s the cue for the same guys to put out selectively-edited videos of an event — say, an extrajudicial killing or a riot — that condenses what may have occurred over hours, days or longer into the span of a minute, intentionally leaving out crucial details to support their narrative.

Trust them? Yes, like I would an adder fanged.

Worst of all is how the gaslighters get away with this over and over again, having convinced enough people not to trust the witness of their own senses, but to wait for the “official explanation” from them. From the very people who have a vested interest in covering up the truth to preserve their control, to save their butts, or to make loads of money. This is the arrogance of entrenched power.

Selfishness. Look, we’re all selfish to a greater or lesser degree. If I remember my Piaget, that’s how we start out. It’s the very nature of the organic cell to seek its own. Most, though apparently not all people, are capable of changing for the better as they make their way through the chapters of their lives.

At the extreme end of selfishness is the mind-boggling variety of, say, a Ted Bundy, who, for his momentary pleasure, snuffs out the lives of others.

Are such people incapable of considering the untold number of lives that might have sprung from their victims had they left them alone? Does it not occur to them that when they kill, they kill a world entire, not only what the other human being has been, but all they might have become or done?

Maybe they’ll get away with that sort of thing in this life, but I am convinced a final judgment awaits us all. I cannot conceive of a Ted Bundy, an Adolf Hitler, or a Pol Pot just getting away with their murders.

Consider the words of King Claudius in Act 3, Scene 3 of “Hamlet,” where the King of Denmark prays for forgiveness for killing his elder brother, the former king, to seize his crown, and queen, and power only to realize he cannot part from any of these things. The king knows that one day he will stand before the ultimate law giver with all of his sins on his head, “broad blown, as flush as May:”

“In the corrupted currents of this world

Offense’s gilded hand oft shoves by the law.

But ’tis not so above;

There is no shuffling, there the action lies

In its true nature; and we ourselves compell’d,

Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,

To give in evidence.”

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.