Is Democratic Imperialism The Answer (4)?

Where do The People want to see The Country in the foreseeable future, negative civilization or positive civilization? This is a question everyone avoids. What for? No one seems to know. Probably human weakness. Why The People cannot bring the raging fire of political corruption under control beats the human imagination, the immanent seat of human criminality. But the ending of every narrative has a beginning, so saith the elders, just as every strand of gray hair has ancestral links to the lanugos of primordial innocence. Let us state unequivocally that secular, religious glamorization of men and women who dabble in the muddy waters of materialism as a functional measure of high social status is partly to blame for the penetrating inferno of greed, crime, and general social decay coursing through The Country. Those who cannot employ the instruments of creative thinking in the material acquisition of personal wealth readily resort to Christological evangelism and politics.

The narrative does not just end there. Both politics and religion share one thing in common: Mind control. Mind control is big business, a multi-billion industry. Political propaganda and self-centered mis-exegesis of the Bible and the Koran require human creativity and the gift of demagoguery, both of whose acquisitions are possible in environments where the fears of men and women are apocalyptically tied to the mystery of life, extreme poverty, scientific and technological ignorance, developmental backwardness, gripping uncertainties about the ontology of afterlife, weak educational institutions, declining focus on critical thinking, man’s inordinate wickedness, and so on. This is not to say religious indoctrination does not take place in industrialized polities. It does. Certainly. Our emphasis is rather on a suite of secular variables aiding easy evangelical indoctrination of vulnerable individuals in society. The idea here is not to allow the raving monocracies of superstition and mythology to trump the relative supremacy of the human mind. But are superstition and mythology not direct outcomes of human intellection? This set of internal inconsistencies of human nature is what democratic imperialism or constitutional dictatorship is all about.

Clearly, we see visible expressions of democratic imperialism in the political character of The Country, in those who rule it, as well as in the electorate. The Country, it appears, has no more need of a strong, visionary, and eclectic leader after the political demise of Kwame Nkrumah. The moral revolution that catapulted Nkrumah, the greatest African, to international fame seems to have died and been buried with him. Such a ghastly state of affairs requires appropriate interventions of consensus, compromise, or reconciliation to help negotiate the twisty bends and corners of The Country’s seemingly endless internal contradictions. Likewise, the Orwellian phrase “democratic imperialism” also points to the confused oxymoronic mentality of the sick “scholar” and his gang of useful idiots who, it turns out, are, sadly, irreversibly habituated to the emotional honey of political ethnocentrism and ethnic nationalism.

Essentially, the sick “scholar” and his gang of useful idiots are shameless proponents of schadenfreude politics, among other things taking partisan delight in the misfortunes of a political party on the other side of the political divide when the centrality of national interests hangs in the balance. The concept of democratic imperialism or the constitutional dictatorship of multiparty politics has become a controlling tool of hostile partisan divisiveness, tearing families, communities, friends, etc., apart and undermining the upward motility of The Country’s growth and development. It is expressly clear, yet again, that constitutional dictatorship is strictly about the exercise of autocratic incumbency, partisan cabalization, not necessarily about forging national consensus on development economics, to the total exclusion of opposition voice. Technically, constitutional dictatorship assumes the incumbent voice of political Wahhabism, opposition voice a drooling tongue of nagging ghostliness. Under constitutional dictatorship opposition voice assumes a constituency of moral rightness, incumbent voice a skeptical, congenitally lying tongue of moral fire.

Yet these contrasting moral constituencies are not helping matters, only reinforcing the sinister hand of political immaturity. The spate of incumbent corruption is seen as morally right in certain quarters of the political right and the stiff yet disorganized opposition moral resistance to the spate of incumbent corruption as politically wasteful on the political left. It is therefore not surprising that some should call for the moral reinstatement of firing squad to deal ruthlessly with the rotten soul of the political animal. Unfortunately there is no hard corroborating scientific evidence establishing the ontology of the human soul. This proposition carries a lot of philosophical weight when viewed in comparative terms with man’s closest siblings, animals, a question otherwise exhaustively treated by Bertrand Russell, a philosopher and mathematician and pacifist. If man truly has a soul, then what has the animal? Can man truly have a soul while the animal is soulless? Granted that man does indeed possess a soul, in that case is that soul morally superior to that of an animal’s, goat, hyena, or bat, say?

It does appear there is no hard scientific affirmation of the soul! If the soul does not exist, how can it rot? What possibly can a non-existent soul eat, a spate of political corruption or J.B. Danquah’s subversive dalliances with the CIA or K.A. Busia’s gross political incompetence, we ask? What sort of foods did the souls of Idi Amin, Adolf Eichmann, Nikolai Yezhov, Apartheid, and Heinrich Himmler eat? It may, however, finally prove to be the case that the human soul is another figment of the imagination, like all the other harvests of human intellection. That day of spiritual reckoning is yet to arrive. That is notwithstanding the fact that a country, a nation-state, a polity, a multinational state has a “soul.” This “soul” represents personal as well as group convictions and the institutions upholding them. As already noted, these convictions exist in immanent simultaneity with human psychology. Consequently, it goes to the heart of our central thesis that “the mind” does in fact bear a lot of responsibilities on its hands, the former representing a people’s collective psychology and the latter group solidarity as it specifically relates to collective responsibility.

On the other hand, collective responsibility seems to be losing its social essence in The Country probably as a result of the widespread, continuous individuating of the extended family system, personal and group drive for material aggrandizement through illicit means, general loss of interest in the virtues of hard work, gullible social acceptance of corruption as a normal way of life, increasing public disregard for the sanctity of human life, and erosion of personal and group convictions for upholding social order. Another danger threatening the emotional honor of the national soul is public elevation of consequentialism over deontology! A society’s soul, alas, begins to rot as soon as its institutions correspondingly begin to show clinical signs of moral decomposition and, this, without conscious public recourse to the transforming power of moral corrective! There hangs the ugly face of the national dilemma shedding crocodile tears!

Nevertheless, the other touchy issue on the social landscape of public psychology should not be about the contrasting liabilities or the overlapping successes of capitalism and socialism. That is not the central issue for us as well as both have eloquently demonstrated their relative strengths and weaknesses across the running countenance of time. Indeed one is necessarily not morally superior to the other, with their verifiable interlocking claims of internal insecurities and philosophical contradictions. One thing is for certain, though, that socialism is close to moral economics as capitalism is closest to exploitation theory. But that is beside the point. Neither has served the world exclusively well. In fact, the central issue for us is to push public psychology to aim at moral circumvention of democratic imperialism, the bull’s eye of national oxymoronic divisiveness. Among other things, public focus should be directed at quality data collection. For instance, building a reliably efficient database of social statistics and utilizing the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance to gauge the temperature of national development and The Country’s human rights record are two methodologies to go by.

For one thing data collection, its interpretation and application, has been more of a partisan political exercise than of a scientific enterprise. It is also disheartening, however, when The Country’s leading think tank and other policy research institutions become more patronizingly partisan in their research publications and public pronouncements than the political parties themselves ever dream of becoming. Partisan politics, it seems, is on the verge of undermining national consensus on serious matters of development economics! These exercises, data collection and the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance, have any hope of veritable success exclusive of the intrusive conjugation of partisan political sentimentalism, political ethnocentrism, scientific cluelessness, intellectual pessimism, bourgeois elitism, ethnic jingoism, and institutional inaction. Now, going back to our earlier assertions correlating human intellection with its immanent artefactual ontology, we dare say those nonmaterial commodities of human derivation are not grocery store items the sentimental physicality of firing squad can handle at any time.

In effect, the institutional charisma of firing squad is not potent enough to penetrate the dense spiritual and moral dark hole of the human soul, if, once again, it exists at all, and, as it were, for the sake of argument. For instance, if the Country cannot cleanse its choked gutters of mosquito infestation to minimize malaria as well as to prevent cholera, what possibly can it hope to achieve if it tries using firing squad to contain the spreading corruptibility of a non-existent soul? In other words, the amoral and thieving propensity of the human soul requires a stronger response of spiritual, moral understanding of the human condition than public trivializations passing off as intellectualism on social-political panacea.

Unfortunately this is the kind of bogus scholarship the sick “scholar” and his gang of useful idiots push through The Ignoramus Cave. For this reason, Uncle Kweku Bonsam and Uncle Kweku Bonsam, the sick “scholar’s” derelict parents, have a lot to answer for. The People have waited long enough for this day of reckoning. When this day eventually arrives is anyone’s guess. But the quest for truth is inevitable, a matter of individual and national enterprise. And truth wears the facial certainty of death. The sick “scholar” and his gangs of useful idiots and The Country’s politicians, emotional experts of casuistry, are also morally allergic to the inviolability of truth, their problem made worse as truth itself slithers through the syndactyly of their aggregate psychologies as evasively as the human soul slips in and out of corporeality. As a matter of fact, the sick “scholar” is not to be confused with Akua Bonsam, who, it turns out, comes across as more discerning, analytical, and intellectually cosmopolitan. Admittedly the sick “scholar’s” mind is allergic to scientific method and rationalization!

In the sick “scholar’s” narrow, linear thinking Uncle Kweku Bonsam is the National Liberation Movement (NLM), Aunt Kweku Bonsam the Nation of Poisonous People (NPP). How can an organization be poisonously liberating? Yet that phrase “poisonously liberating” describes the sick “scholar’s” oxymoronic stupidity as the democratic imperialism of his Ebola virus literaryism spreads through the cranial emptiness of his gang of useful idiots. The Country’s manifold internal inconsistencies, not unlike democratic imperialism, captured in the sick “scholar’s” bogus intellectualism characterize the lumbering presence of operational cross-purposes so typical of the ideological characterology of the Nation of Poisonous People. Still, moral conscientization of the blind followers of The Country’s major political parties have not made headway by means of national unity by reason of the emotional entrenchment of ethnic sentimentalism, extreme political partisanship, and ideological dogmatism in the polity. It is also widely known that The Country’s institutions are not allowed to work efficiently, if at all, for the same aforesaid reasons.

And yet when the fundamental issue of the sick “scholar’s” tongue-splitting lies and falsehoods and egregious intellectual sins are finally exposed, he and his gang of useful idiots, again, resort to mutual recriminations with their widely acknowledged, respected critics following the public exemplar of the clueless leaderships of both the Nation of Poisonous People and the Nation of Decent Conmen, both noted for their tendency to resort to the emotional template of political, moral equalization when their nation-wrecking misdeeds are nationally exposed. Here is how it goes: Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the Serpent. The Serpent blames God. God blames them all. The Serpent in the form of the sick “scholar” admits no culpability or responsibility for the mess of The Country’s and his own moral, intellectual bankruptcy.

The others, the useful idiots variously called Adam or Eve, follow suit, refusing to acknowledge culpability in The Country’s developmental fall, the gruesome national fall of critical thinking, as well as a deepening fall in the rectitude of intellectual honesty. The Serpent even disguises himself as the God of literature or the God of political ethnocentrism in the claustrophobic pages of poor, nauseating scholarship, a sinful deed antagonistic to the moral sensibility of national growth and intellectual development.

Meanwhile, the Serpent, Max Romeo’s “Chase the Devil,” like mortal man, may not have a soul after all. The only carbon copy of a soul the Serpent appears to have had is the slippery forked tongue he bequeathed to the sick “scholar,” himself, and his divisive parents, Uncle Kweku Bonsam and Aunt Kweku Bonsam. Tongue bifurcation is the new body modification adopted by The Country’s callous politicians and by ghetto scholars such as the sick “scholar.” The country, it may argued, has great need of responsible public intellectuals as reliable and well-informed to provide public mentorship for The Country’s impressionable youth! No one wants to see The Country’s youth develop interest in intellectual or moral monila! We say the same of politicians. The foregoing, however, defines the moral danger and spiritual dilemma to which the sick “scholar’s” bogus intellectualism patterned after The Country’s constitutional dictatorship or democratic imperialism of multiparty politics are constantly exposed.

In the end, a vista of social constraints tethered to an Iroko tree of individual or communal preferences, a collection of variables such as ethnicity, moral stupidity, craving for material possession, intellectual egomania, spiritual vanity, religious dogmatism, sentimental ethnic essentialism, prideful hollowness, and blind ideological allegiance to political partisanship, may curtail the liberating potential of analytic freedoms and intellectual choices accruing from nature’s gift of cognitive individuation to man. In fine, a moral and intellectual revolution of the mind is urgently required for positive transformation of the nation, The Country. Assata Shakur writes thus:

“Every revolution in history has been accomplished by actions, although words are necessary. We must create shields that protect us and spears that penetrate our enemies. Black people must learn to struggle by struggling. We must learn by our mistakes…He who runs when the sun is sleeping will stumble many times…Dreams and realities are opposites. Action synthesizes them…You can’t win a race just by running…You have to talk to yourself when you are running and tell yourself you can win!”

“Is the African world struggling hard enough to stand on its webbed feet independent of external patronage?” Assata seems to ask. This question has never been sufficiently answered. The question does not even attract the sympathy of The People. Yet The Country’s and Africa’s future rests on a just response to this question. Ironically and as a serious point of historical and contemporary fact, the enemy is not always external to the political and social realities of The Country. There are internal enemies as well, many of them. And they are the ones who invite in the external enemies…The likes of the sick “scholar” and his gangs of useful idiots are probably The Country’s most dangerous internal enemies. A country achieves a lot by doing away with its internal enemies. When it finally succeeds in ridding itself of the hostile odor of internal agent provocateurs, that is when it can begin to show signs of political maturity. Until then…

We should not be deceived, however. Internal enemies come in different packages: Constitutional dictatorship. Democratic imperialism. Ethnocentrism. Political kleptomania. Gross mismanagement of national wealth. Intellectual dishonesty. Religious intolerance and indoctrination. Extreme political polarization. A pervasive problem of institutional desuetude. Falling educational standard. Poor public sanitation. Moral anarchy…the list goes on endlessly!

We shall return…