At first sight it seems that we might want to distance ourselves from failure altogether, as if it is bad luck or tempting fate to even think about it. As the very title of Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson's Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (2007) makes plain, denial is a common stance. Alternatively, it is easy to fall for platitudes about “learning from our mistakes”. Almost at the other end of the spectrum, when we seriously attempt to learn from catastrophes we have the call to “look the worst full in the face” (Clarke 2006: ix). The almost in the previous sentence points to the domain beyond learning, where failure is so terrifying or apocalyptic that some will envisage the end of the world in religious terms (the “end times”) or in such dark personal terms that suicide appears the only possible response.

In one sense, perhaps the grimmest scenarios are unavoidable and cannot properly be learned from so as to effect improvement or escape. Here I mean human biological entropy, resulting in everyone's inescapable individual death, the future demise of the entire biosphere itself, of the earth and the universe. Scientists are confident that all this is inevitable: everything ultimately must fail to endure. This is, of course, denied in some quarters. Many religions insist on the reality of a life after death in some viable form.