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| Before Western Thinking came along |
Many of what were lauded as man's greatest ideas and innovations in the past have produced more headaches down the line than what they were worth for.
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| Result of Western Thinking |
Accepting an idea as wise or beneficial and rejecting another as foolish on the sole basis of reasoning is the mother of all problems. This concept of judging the utility or value of something by abstraction and thinking rather than real outcomes has had no end in sinking mankind deeper and deeper into problems. Necessity and need used to be the only initiators and driving motives for man's innovation. Now man thinks for the sake of thinking and innovates for the sake of innovating.
And you can blame the Greeks for it. Not so much because presently they are on the verge of sinking the global economy back into recession (due to the lies they deviously concocted about their wobbly economy to join the Eurozone). Or because of the massive debt they took up with no clue of how, by what means and by whom it would be repaid.
Thus, even though the modern Greeks are blameworthy and are a thoroughbred scapegoat for the rest of the world's imprudence and greed, it is actually the ancient Greeks that we should focus on. They in comparison did far much worse, they gave the world the rotten gift of philosophy. The purest form of critical thinking, where abstraction and thinking is a virtue in itself.
These ancient Greeks am talking about flagrantly invented philosophy as a means of transcending the pertinence of a boring, drab reality. To be a good philosopher in the Greek and Western tradition, one has to unshackle himself from common sense. It is only in this way that then a true philosopher can come up with elegant, seminal and deeply profound nonsense.
No easy feat by any means, for the nonsense has to be so fascinating and counter-intuitive, that lesser beings would then have to spend eternity -- huddled together and desperately ruminating in trying to figure out what the heck was meant in the first place.
Great philosophers of that strain also have to care little for canons, societal conventions or political considerations and are always feisty opponents of dogma and such like ideological fixatives. They need people to care for new ideas no matter how silly or useless they really are. Otherwise without some abstraction or concept to negate, rubbish and undercut they would actually have to do something worthwhile, like plant carrots, and the modern artifice we like to call 'original thought' hence an 'original thinker', would not exist.
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| Socrates thoroughly enjoying the famous cup of hemlock; Although it was philosophy that got him the death sentence he continued blabbering anyway until his brain (and mouth) were finally paralyzed by the poison. |
Socrates (circa 469-399 BC), is the culprit who is considered to have catapulted the philosophy business to it's alarming prominence. This he did by means of what is reputed to have been his astounding powers in dialectics way back in the Athens of ancient Greece. He is such a revered character by Westernized thinkers that am obliged to digress -- and say horrible things about him.
The first thing people need to accept about Socrates was that he was actually not sane. At least not in the ordinary sense. Socrates who had been sentenced to death on trumped up charges for -- yes you guessed it -- misleading the youth with terrible ideas had the option of appeal. But he pompously rejected it on the grounds that he wanted "to uphold the verdict of the court and the law of the land".
In fact everyone, including his affluent accusers, expected that he would appeal and it is certain he would have been given a lighter sentence. This because the charges had simply been brought to dissuade him from his more radical philosophizing and to scare off the impressionable youth from the rich upper class families. Socrates knew this and he could have easily argued himself out of the noose, yet he didn't. To the contrary, he went a step further than his accusers -- and refused to defend himself in court or to appeal the death sentence. That is how he happily ended up being permanently cured of philosophy, by being sentenced to drink hemlock poison as depicted in the picture above.
Socrates is also one of the most widely quoted individuals in history -- presumably because he is pre-eminently sagacious and wise. But am of the opinion that his cynical words were simply a means to escape some of the failures in his personal life, particularly in old age. The following are some of the colourful things he is attributed to having said:
- I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing!
- Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
- By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
- As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, for either way he is sure to repent!
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| Socrates; |
Nonetheless amongst the tribe of philosophers Socrates more than most deserves the right to be so cynical.
One Greek writer described Socrates thus : "In appearance, Socrates was short and stout, with a flat nose, a rough beard, a wide mouth and protruding eyes which, according to Aristophanes, he rolled as he strutted about like a waterfowl".
With such a ludicrous composition it is hard to blame an embittered Socrates for becoming a philosopher and for masterminding the art of generating bad ideas; he was simply exacting his revenge on humanity -- arguably for jeering his duck-like walk and for ridiculing a face only a mother could love.
Having had enslaved hundreds of thousands to do all their work the ancient Greeks inevitably became rather idle and naturally they were impelled to create art and come up with contagious ideas. It is improbable that a society that is engrossed with the mundane necessities of life, such as digging, shovelling, gathering, hunting, fighting, stealing and searching every waking moment for food, could come up or conceive such an inane a concept as democracy -- and actually put it into practice!!
I hasten to add that for sub-Sahara Africa the above statement does not apply. Anthropologists are yet to discover a city that had been openly or secretly planned and designed by bushmen in Africa before the inopportune arrival of whitemen. Everyone knows we never built one. Not because of the lack of capacity, but due to a number of factors.
One all Africans innately knew man was born free an eon before Europeans coined the phrase, therefore it was abominable to enslave and work entire communities to death just to satisfy the egotistic ambitions of tyrants. Secondly, everyone knows Africans were supremely eco-conscious because of their susceptibility to epidemics making it unafrican to build wasteful, useless, disease prone cities. The Shona/Ndebele Kingdom of (Dzimba dza mabwe) Zimbabwe did not survive the violation of these precepts, neither did that of the Nyamwezi under Nyungu ya Mawe or the Kraal cities of the Zulu under Shaka.
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| Africans kept it simple; man in harmony with nature |
Like the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Africans had a tacit understanding that to survive and for the sake of our beautiful continent and the environment (scorching was a common method in clearing land for farming hence partial denudation of the soil) the ancients would not resort to building highly concentrated civilizations (which would put a severe strain and burden on their surroundings) merely to manifest power. Instead they would compete in raising indigenous cattle. The more the cattle the more powerful and prosperous the community was considered to be. Unfortunately some communities got stuck on the specifics rather than the spirit of cow-value, and their ardent cow worshipping has spawned cattle rustling across Africa.
Therefore I say, it is blatantly wicked for apologist scholars to now malign the antecedent Africans with such an idle a plot as the deliberate building of cities -- just to placate the envy of other races for their inherent lack of foresight. The lack of proof thereof adequately demonstrates that the African society's keen appreciation of the principles of necessity, hard work and the exigencies of bush perils (e.g. keeping off from the migratory paths and breeding grounds of marauding beasts and predators) -- is irreconcilable, incongruent and completely immiscible with the devices of idlers such as philosophizing, planning, designing, civilization and city building.
As a matter of fact, this generation of the African Renaissance which is proudly founded, wide awake and cognizant of the labours of our forebears should completely and wholly repudiate any responsibility for the horrors of civilization. In effect putting it to the West and industrialized Asia to stop being silly and pay up for the restitution of the Earth.
Now, this philosophy thing was simply one form of entertainment for the stiffly-bored Greek upper class. Intellectualism, erudition and elevated culture are as necessary to the upper class as tawdry behaviour is to pop-culture airheads such as Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. To be upper class one has to stand out in some way from the rest of the rabble -- and a tough business it is for all sort of spurious gimmickry have to be used to be 'upper' or 'supra-mundane', including dabbling in philosophy and keeping the rest of the world guessing about one's virginity.
Indeed, modern philosophy is only a kind of 'mess' that was spewed out from the indulgence and excesses created by cheap or free labour. Without cheap labour (thanks to serfs, slaves, bonded labour and migrant workers in modern China?) to do the 'real' work there wouldn't have been the Graeco-Roman civilization, the European Renaissance or the American agro-industrial miracle -- which was largely pegged to legal, scientific and economic innovation by rich, idle, slave owners like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (both former presidents of the US).
Remarkably, philosophers, thinkers etc also conjured up capitalism just to perpetuate the availability of cheap labour and more importantly to safeguard the privilege of the elites (and hence themselves). Padded with the fat and opulence siphoned off from the millions enslaved with a market economy, they could comfortably continue to think and to formulate more unnecessary and bad ideas. That is why none of those do-gooders who were advocating for the abolition of slavery saw it fit to stand against capitalism!
Only an eccentric German Jew called Karl Marx, saw that this capitalism business was a farce and that capitalists were up to no good. Being a profligate thinker himself rather than advocating for the deconstruction of civilization and endorsing African primitivism worldwide , he came up with a pithy quantification that expressed human society into economic terms. What we call Socialism and Communism.
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| Karl Marx; the man in whose name China is the 'Peoples' Republic |
Marx's work was based on the struggle between the members of the three western social classes or strata; i.e. the rulers, the bourgeois (middle class) and the proletariat (working class). This patent gospel of socialism (as contained in Das Kapital) was tweaked into communism and turned out to be the worst idea of them all. In all of social theory only Nazism outranks totalitarian communism as the worst political idea ever thought of.
It is not the lack of ideas that is the problem, it is that too many people pretend that they can think for others. In traditional African society, everyone had to think for himself -- while political power and responsibility lay heavily on each head of a family, there was simply no room for whimsical theorizing and social engineering.
Just imagine for a moment how the world would be without an idle minority permanently occupied with coming up with diabolically hare-brained theories and concepts -- there wouldn't be pollution, global warming, global cooling, low mortality rates, high birth rates, phone sex, Al Qaeda, miraa , the Hague based International Criminal Court, the holiday robbery by 'Santa Claus' and 'Easter Bunny'.
In fact incessant thinkers can also be blamed for creating Lady Gaga and Robert Mugabe. Am certain someone must have come up with the idea of a demented woman always gyrating in super sexy underwear and that of an eloquent, senile, highly educated but extremely silly African president just to see what in the world would come of it.
If it weren't for philosophers, whose ideas enabled technological advancement the dodo bird wouldn't be extinct and it would be available as fast food at the bush version of Kenchic (who wouldn't want roasted and marinated dodo?). The Aborigines of Australia would not have to be forcibly clothed, fed, educated and finally taken to rehab kicking and screaming to ostensibly rid them of alcohol addiction -- an addiction they acquire in the first place at mobile liquor stores on the back of trucks (which happen to be the only shops in the wilderness).
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| No Aborigine has been left unscathed by the scourge of alcoholism |
This rather sadistic cycle is one that the Caucasian invaders of Australia seem to inadvertently get better at with each passing decade -- predictably, due to the unrelenting flow of bad ideas from humanitarian think tanks. Left alone the Aborigines would have never managed to brew alcohol themselves, it would have taken Aborigine technology a couple of million years just to discover yeast, leave alone industrial distillation.
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| Aborigines have been shifted from spiritualism to spirits |
As it now turns out there was a good reason why nature denied the Aborigines access to alcohol technology -- but clever whitemen thought they knew better. They simply couldn't resist the idea of converting every Aborigine bushman into a potential customer, so they rounded them all up and as a gift from civilization, gave them a crash course on binge drinking!
Without ideologues and philosophers, the Chinese would be in China and the Tibetans would be in Tibet, thus enabling the rest of humanity to tell apart one from the other. All Jews would be together and free as
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| This is how happy Obama would be |
This article is a light read or an outright joke, right? Absolutely not. Actually, am deadly serious, humanity might need to go back to a more primitive existence to restore the natural balance -- and to be trully happy! Let me demonstrate.
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| The Happy Children of Vanuatu |
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| The Melanesian tribes-folk of Vanuatu |
Before all this, these tribesmen had access to banks, went to schools, the older members speak English fluently and most had even been Christianized. Yet they had the courage to reject the whiteman's illusion of happiness and went back to the tropical forests. Fortunately they had not forgotten what true freedom and happiness was. Now whitemen, very knowledgeable professors in fact, are going back to Vanuatu to find out where the heck modern civilization went wrong.
Is bush life sustainable in the modern world? Only time will tell, but it is definitely worth a try, technology has created increasingly bigger problems in the process of solving smaller ones. Better technology. More ideas. But only bigger and bigger problems. Why shouldn't we then go back to the smaller problems if we can?
Another Asian nation -- Bhutan -- also wisely abandoned the misleading Western standards, this is the famous country that uses the curios index called Gross National Happiness in place of Gross Domestic Product or the sister formulation Gross National Product.
It is a tiny Buddhist kingdom on the slopes of the Himalayas and it has maintained it's centuries old tradition of simplicity, primitivism and care for the environment. Indeed, Bhutan is ranked also as one of the most harmonious, safe and happiest of societies in the world. Before you laugh at and scorn the Maasai and the Turkana next time, perhaps you should reflect more deeply on who is actually the idiot.
But philosophy isn't all useless, it gave us structured thinking, what we call critical thinking. For instance through this skill most educated people in Uganda could fathom, yet wisely overlook, the fact that Idi Amin was actually a vicious brute, a reprehensible pagan who pretended to be a Muslim and that he was utterly unfit to be a driver, leave alone a president.
Ugandans, having learnt nothing, are now 'wisely overlooking' some glaring things about Yoweri Museveni, such as the fact that he has become a parasite and a tyrant. I say 'wisely overlook' because they would otherwise have been Idi Amin's lunch or in the case of Museveni they would suffer frequent 'accidental' fractures inflicted by the police and the army much like the opposition leader Kiza Besigye is suffering presently.
Evidently lacking this virtue of prudent circumspection and powers of critical thinking, someone in Saudi Arabia thought it funny to shelter Idi Amin after he was toppled until his demise . . . in all likelihood as an anthropological artefact of interest. Sultans it seems are not averse to zoolatry and bad ideas. Too much money adulterated by too much idle time never fails to generate sensational buffoonery and brazen imbeciles.
With all the above ideas which have been nominally thought out and irreverently presented, it would be prudent to reflect on one last thing . . . doesn't this article prove am an idler, a thinker and a dubious, dabbling philosopher myself? Well, African idlers don't write articles, they laze about by the roadside. And you yourself are as culpable of theorizing, philosophizing and being a flagrant thinker as I myself . . . why else would you read such a damnably difficult and convoluted thing?
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