How do we get rid of terrible ‘madness’ that has taken our society hostage?

What you need to know:

  • I heard a statistic that shocked me into alertness: that one in four people in this country are either mad now, have been mad in the past, or are likely to become mad before they die.
  • There is also the case of 22-year-old shy “good boy” Seifedinne Rezgui, who cold-bloodedly killed at least 30 British tourists on a Tunisian beach last week.
  • I hold the view that a child goes to school to learn, yes, but also to grow up, to learn to live with other people and, most important, to get help to discover their natural talent.

I recently saw a TV programme on madness or, as it is called in polite company, insanity. It is a subject that most people prefer to ignore, believing that they are insulated against it or that it only happens to other people.

I heard a statistic that shocked me into alertness: that one in four people in this country are either mad now, have been mad in the past, or are likely to become mad before they die.

That is 25 per cent of Kenya’s current population of 44 million, which translates to over 10 million mad people. Is this a credible statistic or is it the fertile imagination of an over-enthusiastic clinical psychiatrist?

I was about to dismiss it until I recalled certain things that have happened in the recent past. One is the brutal massacre of 148 people at Garissa University College on April 2. It might have been understandable if it had been done by your ordinary fanatical heretic.

In this case, however, the leader of the gang of murderers was a 27-year-old brilliant university law graduate called Abdirahim Abdullahi.

Then here is the case of the 25-year-old Briton, Thomas Evans, who was killed as he led an attempted attack on an army camp in Lamu.

There is also the case of 22-year-old shy “good boy” Seifedinne Rezgui, who cold-bloodedly killed at least 30 British tourists on a Tunisian beach last week.

Then there is 21-year-old Dylann Roof, the American who killed nine worshippers in a church. And many other such cases.

The tragedy of these “isolated” incidents and many others that are not as attention-grabbing is that they are committed by relatively young people.

Which raises a disturbing question: Are these psychotic youngsters the product of a misguided educational system, victims of inappropriate religious indoctrination, or, God forbid, an unacknowledged widespread medical condition called “madness”?

I have come to the conclusion that the first two possible explanations are largely to blame for exploiting an unfortunate human weakness, that is, a fundamentally insecure human mind.

On education, I think that we have over the years been giving our children the “wrong” type. By concentrating on the three traditional Rs — reading, (w)riting, and (a)rithmetic, we forget that a child is much more than the sum total of these components of normal education.

I hold the view that a child goes to school to learn, yes, but also to grow up, to learn to live with other people and, most important, to get help to discover their natural talent.

This could be art, music, football, athletics, mountain climbing — whatever else their creator programmed into their genetic bank. Do our teachers give these children a chance to discover these talents?

The second one is our religious training. I hold the view that too much emphasis has been placed on religious training or indoctrination.

While I have no quarrel with the inculcation of the values embedded in religion, I believe too much emphasis is placed on dogmatic acceptance of the tenets of religion without allowing the young mind to question the validity of some of the basic assumptions of their faith.

When, in later years, the youth ask themselves these questions and recognise the fallacy of what has been drilled into their minds as the truth, the results can be calamitous.   

It was Albert Einstein who made the famous statement on madness: “The true definition of madness is repeating the same action over and over, hoping for a different result.”

In essence, this means that if we keep repeating something in our head, we come to believe that it is true, even when our intellect tells us it is manifest nonsense.

The tragedy of mankind is that we usually learn to convert belief into irrefutable truth despite evidence to the contrary.

So, is there any hope for mankind? Unfortunately, we are in so deep that the only recourse left may be madness. Society must pay the terrible price and the worst part is that, with modernity, it is getting worse by the year. Just look at what is happening around you every day.

I hope that I am wrong, but what I know is that we have work to do.

 Prof Kimura is an accountant and educationist. [email protected]