'Banana Leadership'? And What To Do In The Face of It..
Agreeing to the precept that humans are fallible, imperfect and prone to making mistakes, especially when it comes to power, it stands to reason that confiding in a system that is made up of humans wielding power is totally absurd. Common sense, right? Not so fast.
"Common sense ain't so common," Will Rogers once observed.
Even if it goes against common sense, the golden rule, and the non-aggression principle, people are unlikely to question a system they've been indoctrinated into adopting.
People are more prone to believe what they have been programmed to believe. Whether it's a political or religious belief, or a combination of the two. Overcoming this requires a special flavor of bravery that isn't readily available in the average person.
It's the kind of bravery that is birthed from a lot of psychological agony and suffering, usually at the cost of losing one's innocence. It must be nurtured and nourished on a daily basis, otherwise it will revert to apathy or to ineffective and obsolete styles of courage.
It requires a distinct and daring type of leadership: leadership that audaciously checks and balances power structures while also teaching others how to do it.
A leadership that begins with overcoming false truths. It is the responsibility of the maverick to question the beliefs that he has been taught: beliefs deemed invalid by respect to the Cosmic Law.
It is his unequivocal moral compass that will guide him into the proverbial Canaan: a Canaan built on the premise of discarding false truths ingrained in him by his teacher/leader. He must remember that at the end of the day, no matter how wise or enlightened these teachers/leaders seem to be, they are still swayed by the same irrational emotions deeply rooted in the average man.
Even the brightest and most educated among them are subject to power's intoxicating allure.
"Nearly all men can withstand adversity," observed Abraham Lincoln, "but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
By brutally questioning established authority, this leadership therefore, dismantles the shackles of established authority.
What emerges is a self-assured authority, defiant and questioning the entire concept of authority in order to get to the bottom of the problems at hand. It dares to dissect concepts like "taken for granted" and "it's just the way things are," exposing the stagnant and rotting guts that are deteriorating on the inside and pressing others to replace them with the proactive and daring guts of progressive evolution.
By exposing intellectual laziness and system apathy as unhealthy means to a corrupt aim, this leadership kick-starts the passive citizen. It discloses the soft slave's secret chains of the current society showing the deeply rooted false truths of it.
To establish a new kind of leadership, we must first dismantle the many assumptions that underpin our current democratic and non-democratic societies. We must extract the lessons from the pain and destruction and incorporate them into a new system based on a mindset that values life and prioritizes the planet and all of its people. Democracy is considered to be the most 'evolved' type of modern government. It was established with the goal of giving people a voice, defending their rights, and providing equality under the law. It arose in opposition to other kinds of government such as monarchy, dictatorships, and oligarchies, in which individuals or a small group of people have total authority.
But history has shown us , time and again, that the current form of leadership has become contaminated by the same dynamic of Abusive Power, oppressions, police brutality and worst of all, rampant corruption. This current type of leadership in the country was formed with the hopes of giving people a political voice and a chance to see how we use the power that comes with it. Being granted a voice and a vote, however, is not enough to ensure that we use them to make the world a more just and healthy place.
While democracy was created to correct many of the flaws of previous systems, it was still based on the same separatist and domineering worldview.
It is no wonder that lies have become ingrained in society's culture and a vital organizing element. To sell power and profit agendas, a sophisticated system of deception and information manipulation is used. The way "democratic values" are abused in the election campaign industry and the purchase of people's votes and legislators' allegiances are examples of deception at every level of democratic institutions.
Honesty has almost vanished from our common expectations, from false political pledges and corrupt dealings to an economy driven by cheap populist approaches.
We are sold the idea that using one's intelligence to manipulate a system founded on exploiting humans and the environment is not only legitimate, but also admirable and a sign of success.
Falsehood is so ubiquitous in today's society that many people have learnt not to perceive, anticipate, or tell the truth. Instead, citizens learn how to play the game of manipulating information in their own best interests from the system.
Just look at our current system. Under the cloak of "righteous multiparty" democracy, billions have been embezzled, countless lives lost, people have become enslaved to a ruthless economic system whose innocuity has been lost and an ongoing starvation of people, terror and disease plague the entire populace.
Despite this, we continue to be sold the impression that democracy, or more specifically, "our" guy at the top, is the "fairest" solution to the problems that plague us. And we're still convinced...! It's the ultimate ruse through which power-hungry individuals have seized control of our resources!
According to Larry Diamond, democracy consists of four key elements.
A political system for choosing and replacing government through free and fair elections;
Active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life;
Protection of the human rights of all citizens,
A rule of law, in which laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.
(Wikipedia)
When considering democracies in light of these factors, the disparity between what is declared as democracy and what actually occurs is apparent. This disparity is exacerbated by the voting system, which is a cornerstone of democracy.
Voting works accordingly to the principle of majority rule: the tyranny of the majority or as Mutahi Ngunyi quipped "the tyranny of numbers". It is founded on the naïve assumption that the magnitude of the vote will determine what is best for the entire or what is just. Rather than caring for the overall system, the win-lose method divides individuals and ignores important viewpoints held by the minority on behalf of the majority.
The majority rule notion is founded on a mindset of dominance, separation, and superiority, and it ignores the system's interdependence.
Privilege of one portion over another in a linked system is as absurd as privileging one part of the body over another. It's the same as assuming that the largest part of the human body has to be cared for the most, while the lesser parts may be safely ignored.
We've seen a wide spectrum of horrors that can be sanctioned by a majority vote. The pressure to win a majority vote in elections and pass bills in parliament to get one's way contributes to a manipulative and often ruthless corruption culture.
Not only will such a system breed perpetual discontent and strife, but the system's neglect and abuse of minorities will eventually lead to disease. Not only does this process perpetuate inequality, but it also stiffens the system, making it resistant to new, changing resources developed on society's outskirts.
The election campaign business as a whole is a well-oiled machine where candidates buy citizen votes. A significant amount of taxpayer money is spent on extravagant campaigns. This is nothing short of bribery. It's criminal, especially when we consider how this money could be put to better use for citizens. Politicians with vested interests frequently run on absurdly limited platforms. They have little knowledge of the wide variety of topics they deal with, and they have no accountability to the truth or the path of their future activities.
Election campaigns are designed to compress complex issues to emotionally charged catchphrases based on fear and optimism, and to elicit basic allegiances. Citizens voluntarily cede responsibility on practically every area of their life to decision makers with entrenched interests and little or no knowledge in the problems they lead, in what appears to be a mass media-driven hypnotic process.
It's nearly a foregone conclusion. The powerful win, the poor suffer the most, and the entire populace is afflicted by false promises, corruption, divisiveness, and imbalances. Let's take for instance, the populist approach that has been religiously advocated by one of the latter-day Baals. For the Records, I am neither against the ideology nor advocating for it but merely acting as an intellectual observer.
The approach perpetually advocates for the equal sharing, or at the very least, equitable sharing of the "national cake" as one of the politicians famously coined. On closer inspection, however, this technique has one crucial feature with all populist approaches: mastering the art of influencing political debates by instilling fear and worry in people through the use of efficient communication methods.
This can be seen on various parts of the world; From Hungary, where political antagonism toward international NGOs is developing, with the apparent goal of secretly influencing national agendas or worse, culminating in George Soros's Open Society Foundation being shut down.
In Poland, where school textbooks have been rewritten to represent minorities as a threat to the country based on nationalistic and anti-intellectualistic ideas, and in Italy, where the country is constantly depicted as a German colony.
The arguments of all populist techniques , from the ones purported by Hitler in Germany to the ones used by Attila the Hunt, are straightforward and generalizing in nature, invoking suspicions of unfairness and conspiracy with tangible, vivid imagery in order to motivate large numbers of citizens.
False narratives, such as, the "conspiracy of the dynasty" can readily feed these apprehensive sensations. It's worth noting that the effectiveness of these approaches, which are based on instilling fear, will eventually be exposed, while the real issue, the link between economic inequality and dissatisfaction with the current establishment, will continue to undermine our increasingly fragile 'democratic' institutions...
Was King Kaka right when he quipped in his controversial 'Wajinga Nyinyi' song , " si mnajua nyinyi citizens ndio washenzi" . I sadly wonder when we constantly clap and canonize these politicians. It's no surprise that this polarization perpetuates a culture of winners and losers in a deceitful theatrical game, shattering society's moral, emotional, intellectual, and physical fabric.
The reality is that the middle class is diminishing as a result of widening divides, and an increasing number of people are struggling to make ends meet. And, while the working class spends its time scraping together money to survive, the wealthy use their wealth, networks, and knowledge to widen the economic disparities.
But despair no more. People on both sides of the divide are growing more informed. The veil of secrecy that has veiled systematic misuse of power is beginning to lift. The entrenched system of dominance is under assault from information technology and alternative media. A growing number of brave whistleblowers and investigative journalists are exposing powerful leaders' massive and evil abuse of power and resources.
We should recognize that it is our moral as well as intellectual duty to set the record straight where we deem fit. The time has come to challenge the foundations of what we assumed to be true and right in the face of shifting consciousness. It's time to break free from the confining narrative that democracy, or more specifically, that the modern-day politician, is the solution to all of our issues and band together to create something better.
