Of human beings wrecking havoc on each other

Kenyans at Uhuru Park, Nairobi. After school, we pursue only such interests as can put individuals militantly against one another and against the whole society. PHOTO | FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • For, as all of us should know, havoc is the opposite of tranquillity.

  • Thus havoc ought to be the chief enemy of any society whose rulers claim that rapid progress towards more and better things is their goal.

  • That is the question for any information medium which publicly announces that its chief mission is to help the Government in that task.

One of a government’s fundamental missions is to “wreck havoc” in a country. Our own “information” media stress it again and again. As we read in one Nairobi daily on Wednesday, whenever something “wrecks havoc”, all citizens should be extraordinarily happy because what it means is that havoc, a horrible social disease, will never again raise its hideous head among us.

Havoc will have been “wrecked” for all eternity. Nevertheless, the question will remain stark. What do you gain by “wrecking” one disease only to wreak an even more hideous one? Do you achieve anything by “wrecking havoc” only to wreak it in the very same process in your newspaper? I pose that question especially to Nairobi’s English-language journalists.

SELF-EVIDENT

For, as all of us should know, havoc is the opposite of tranquillity. Thus havoc ought to be the chief enemy of any society whose rulers claim that rapid progress towards more and better things is their goal. That is the question for any information medium which publicly announces that its chief mission is to help the Government in that task.

The fact would thus appear self-evident. It is that truly viable social peace is possible only in a situation of widespread material and mental plenty and justice. It requires widespread satisfaction of the wants of all the individuals of every society. In such a society, therefore, viable peace  will have been achieved when members are producing material and mental plenty and sharing it out as rationally as is humanly possible.

UPBRINGING

Why, then, does humanity permanently fail to achieve it? That is a fundamental question to which all human beings connected with education and governance ought to give fundamental thought. Yet the answer seems self-evident. It lies in humanity’s own specific nature-given self-contradiction. It is that, as individuals, all members of such a brainy and social species are, by general upbringing and alleged education, trained to grow up in fundamental opposition to one another.

SOLID BLOCK

In other words, as individuals and as nations, all humanity is forced to grow up in families and social situations where learning is fundamentally anti-human. For, as Europe has imposed it on societies which it recently colonised, modern learning forces individual human beings to pursue only selfish interests. It is thus that schooling imposes a solid block between an individual and his or her whole society.

ASSOCIATION

After school, we pursue only such interests as can put individuals militantly against one another and against the whole society. Human “education” thus forces all individuals to grow up in opposition to the only interests that can ensure the human species a united front against its natural environment.

Quite anti-social, the classroom is among the reasons all human societies are heavily armed — both militarily and mentally — against one another. It is thus that the assignment that the human society so desperately needs to give itself is to formulate a new system of upbringing designed to bring all humankind back to cordial “sociation” (namely, association) with one another.