Witoubou Newmai
The binary of ‘evil and good’ has been the story of human society throughout. The problems of a society ‘are as many or as little as’ the society allows. Such situation prevails because the degree of challenge of a given society depends on how “people live as good as they know how already.”
In the book ‘I’m OK-You’re OK,’ Thomas A Harris answers with the matter comprehensively. In the opening chapter, Harris illustrated a case beautifully---“Once, an old farmer, tinkering with a rusty harrow on a country road, was approached by an earnest young man from the University Extension Service who was making farm-to-farm calls for the purpose of selling a new manual on soil conservation and new farming techniques.
“After a polite and polished speech the young man asked the farmer if he would like to buy this new book, to which the old man replied, ‘Son, I don’t farm half as good as I know how already’.”
In this way, the health of a given society reflects how much the people “farm” as good as they “know how already.”
An ailing society, unless it rises to the occasion to prise away the ‘evil’ in order to “farm” as good as it knows how already, the rediscovery of the ‘purpose’ together may not be possible in a time when the binary of the ‘authority’ and the ‘grass-root’ has become a big issue; a phenomenon aptly termed by noted journalist John Pilger as “theft of human space” by the ‘powers that be.’ Contextually, it can be asserted that ‘theft’ indulged by the ‘power centres’ has been the cause for the ailing society.
The word ‘theft’ is extrapolated by writer Khaled Hosseini as the “only sin, only one, and every other sin is a variation of theft.” In Hosseini’s ‘The Kite Runner,’ the father of Amir, the protagonist of the story, tells his son that there is only one sin, and that is ‘theft.’
His father elaborated his reasoning by saying, “When you kill a man, you steal a life…you steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father…when you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth… when you cheat, you steal the right to fairness...there is no act more wretched than stealing, Amir”.
Pilger’s “theft” and Hosseini’s “theft,” when further extrapolated, fit into the prevailing situation of our society which rip open the veneer of our hypocrisy.
Presently, every group in our society seems to have their respective ‘secretive’ agenda, akin to characters in Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.” To simply dismiss the state of affairs as driven by “universality of human motives and emotions” would be missing the big picture and erroneous diagnoses.
Political instability and fluid social situation created by the confrontation between the Revolutionaries and the French Aristocracy during the French Revolution gave birth to doubts and suspicions amongst the people as depicted by Charles Dickens in the book.
With this, our society needs to urgently recover the “human space” stolen by the ‘powers that be.’ As long as we give room to the culture of “theft,” then the scenario of our future goes without saying, or, we can never be able to "farm as we know how already.”
