Lawlessness Begets Lawlessness

Nov 23 , 2019
By Dawit Wondimagegn

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Once again, the idea of the law seems to occupy the central stage in Ethiopian life. The cry for law enforcement on one side and the primacy of lawlessness on the other are pulling an already fractured nation into an everlasting crisis. In between the two, some seem to have resigned to taking matters into their own hands. Emotions are high. We are witnessing all abstract forms of sentiments live and in action. Passions have never been this solid and real.

Anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, contempt and surprise are all that we call basic emotions. At a raw human level, we all have them but through our socialisation processes, we first learn to use them in combination and create more complex emotions. At later stages of our development, we of course gradually learn to control them. This is why it is indeed a strange time that we are living with "live emotions in action" in our present world.

It is customary among mental health professionals to categorize people based on personality styles and traits. We oftentimes question the merits and demerits of putting a person in a category, considering the arbitrariness of our criteria to do so. When I think about that now, at least those criteria are broader and try to cover all the emotional, social, psychological and developmental underpinnings that define a person.

Now that we see people with raw emotions, we can literally categorize individuals and groups based on a single emotional criterion. I may be exaggerating a bit, but as the old Amharic adage goes "even to cry, one has to be at ease first." In times like this, we just cannot be only objective. So breaking away from tradition, I will describe the people we all see and put a name to them.

The angry people. These days it is very hard not to be angry. There is an abundance of stimuli to make one angry, so it should not be a surprise that we see a lot of anger. Some are angry about time - the past, the present and the future. Some are angry about history. Some are angry about politics or the lack of it. All react differently. Some strike with anger, some burn with it and others burn others with it, but there is no getting over it.

The fearful people. We all are scared: scared of what we hear, terrified by what we see. We fear time, believing that the past has already taken away our future. We fear history, because facing it is facing our demons of the past. Every past has its demons. We fear politics, because we have seen that in politics there is no loyalty but only agendas. We all also spread fear by our excessive preoccupation with danger. Fearful leaders sow fear to protect their agenda, and fearful followers monger fear to protect their lives, unaware that they are on the menu as an agenda item.

The disgusted people. We see a lot of disgusting stories. Every story is becoming harder and harder to swallow. Time is disgusting. It does not seem to go away. We cannot even waste it. Every time we have felt that something is in the past, it comes back with more verve to irritate. Time has lost its sense of linearity. It feels like we are in a time morass.

We are disgusted by history, because it is not conforming to our wishes. It does not go away. It does not reveal itself to us. We can only know it as far as how it is interpreted to us. There is no consensus as to who has the authority to do so. We are disgusted by politics, because common sense has abandoned it. In our politics, common sense is neither common nor sensible anymore. The irrationality of our politicians is heading for a new low each day. This is all nauseating.

The happy people. Despite all that is going on, the harsh truth is that we know somehow, somewhere, somebody is happy. We do not know who. We do not know why. But somehow somebody is profiting from the spoils.

When we are happy, we love time. It gives us opportunities and prospects. That feeling of ownership of time and timelessness. It is that feeling of being born in the timeless world of the mother and infant where we felt omnipotent.

When we are happy, we love history, because it is the ultimate supply for all sorts of indulgences. You can pick and choose the truth from the profundity of history. One thing we undermine about the nature of history is that it is very difficult to be wrong about anything. The challenge is in isolating truth. That is why it is an exceptional profession that should be left to the professionals. When we are happy, we also enjoy politics, because it is where our power to do whatever we desire comes from. It is a veil from reality. It gives us that sense of invincibility.

The sad people. Sadness has become so pervasive. The sadness in the population is palpable. We are sad about time, because its aura of eternity is depriving us of hope. Why is this nation swimming in tragedy in perpetuity? Why is there no break from the sorrow that has engulfed it for years? Why is time so cruel to us? And what about history? Why does it keep us in a dire state of helplessness? And what of our politics? Why does it stay in perennial suspension disjointed from reality? When are we going to see a politics that at least pretends to care?

The way things are, it is shameless. Politics is happening around us with the absolute neglect that we, the people, are here too. We want to be at least noticed. A politics that treats the very people it claims to speak for as innocent bystanders does so at its own peril. When the people are sad about their politics, there is only one outcome, and we have been at it for decades now: perpetual revolution.

The contempt people. The  elite will fall mostly in this group. We disdain time, because we feel it has not given us a chance. Every time we thought it was ours, it was taken away by other groups, such as the uneducated. We disapprove of history, because it usually turns out not to our liking. We want history to be how we wish it. Instead of studying and interpreting history, we want to rewrite it. We look at politics with condescension. We want to dictate the dictator, educate the pacifier and ridicule the ignorant.

All in all, we keep wondering why other people are doing what we should be doing. We became contemptuous, triumphant with nothing to show for our triumphs.

The surprised people. This is the most fascinating group. About time, it feels like we just woke up and joined the party in full swing. We wonder where the generation has gone. We marvel at how fast the world changed or crumbled.

We look at history with bemusement, wondering why it has suddenly become important. We feel like we are trapped in a drama we do not want to be part of but are the major players or forced audience of the tragedy. We are mesmerized by the erratic and absurd nature of our politics. We wonder why something so nonsensical is so relevant for survival.

Our encounter is jam-packed with people with various combinations of the above raw emotions that define humanity at its core emotional level. Our cognitive development together with the process of civilization are supposed to curb their expression, and we are supposed to learn to keep them under reasonable control.

Learning to control and work with these emotions remains the fundamental prerequisite for the formation of a civilized society. In its absence life will be "nasty and brutish ending with violent death" as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes espoused.  

The application of reason is probably the first pathway for us to learn how we live with our emotions. The application of reason, however, requires culture: the culture of debate, dialogue, critique and bargaining. We as a group are not endowed with such a culture nor have we tried to build one. Everything about us is hierarchically modulated, all knowledge and power stems from the top and flows in a single direction. Every time this arrangement is challenged it leads to stricter and brutal forms. We have been made to be a culture where only the top functions and the rest are either paralyzed by fear or are frozen by indifference. Reason is severely stunted. Where reason is stifled, emotions will ripen and flourish. That is where we are.

When reason is neither present nor strong enough in a culture, the law comes in handy. I am no expert in law, but I know enough to say that the law comes from common sense and one of its natural purposes is to remind people that there are consequences for actions.

Just because you are angry, it does not mean you can strike at will. Just because you are disgusted, it does not mean you can throw your waste on somebody you do not like. Just because you are scared, it does not mean you have the right to scare others. Just because you are sad, it does not mean you have the right to burden others with your sorrow. Just because you are happy, you cannot run over people and take away their dignity. Just because you are contemptuous, it does not mean you can control; and just because you are surprised, it does not mean there is a shock.

The law is our cue that we are answerable to a higher figure. But when emotions are high, the law gets overwhelmed, and lawlessness becomes the order of the day. When lawlessness is tolerated, people lose their already fragile capacity to reason, and more lawlessness follows. This is how lawlessness begets lawlessness.

If we do not break the cycle of our emotional bravado, we have no hope but to remain slaves to our passions. While marching for democracy with the swagger of youth, the aplomb of the crowd, the sermon of activists and the obliviousness of politicians, we may get our democracy, but we will remain servants to our emotions. This is of course only if we happen to be among the group that survives lawlessness. That is a long wait.

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PUBLISHED ON Nov 23,2019 [ VOL 20 , NO 1021]

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