March 09, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Series on Psychology 2006, #14 of 52: Our Addictions to Mood Altering Agents

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- Addiction is a human issue. Unfortunately, many Africans tend to see addiction as a Western issue. It is not only a Western issue, it is our African issue. Many of us, Africans, are addicted to mood altering substances but we just do not know it. I doubt that there is a human being out there who does not have some sort of addiction?

In this essay, I will review the nature of addictions and what is to be done about it. This review is introductory and basic and is not meant as detailed information on the subject. My goal is to make folks aware of the nature of addiction and if they believe that they have an addiction, they ought to go seek help from Professional Chemical Dependency Counselors.

One is addicted to any activity that one finds ones self doing compulsively, doing it as if one no longer has the freedom not to do it; and if one tried not to do it one felt anxious and to reduce that anxiety do it.

Given this definition, it follows that some addictions are positive and others negative. If you are a runner, as I am, you find that you must run. If you do not run every other day, as I do, for five miles, you feel unhappy, and go run. When you run you feel good about yourself. Running is a mood altering mechanism for you. You are addicted to running. This is positive addiction; it is good for you, although it might have some negative aspect: damage the cartilages of your knees etc.

The compulsion to do something and obedience to that compulsion, unfortunately, is not reserved for positive activities like exercising, hard working and reading books only. The individual tends to be addicted to activities that are positively correlated with harm to his life.

Human beings tend to be addicted to over eating food, over drinking alcohol, sex, doing drugs like Cigarettes, Coffee, Marijuana, Cocaine, Heroine, Amphetamines, LSD, Valium, Librium, Xanax, Morphine, Pocadan and many other drugs, legal and illegal.


PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL ADDICTIONS

There are essentially two types of addictions, psychological and physiological. In psychological addiction the individual has an over powering mental desire to do something and finds himself unable to resist doing so. A sex addict, for example, may experience an over powering desire to go to a whore house or pick up a street worker, and have sex with her. He finds himself unable to concentrate on doing any other thing unless he goes and has sex with a hooker. Once he does so, he feels relaxed and is now able to concentrate on other activities. His craving for indiscriminate sex with any woman is psychological; it is in his head, not in his body. (Homosexual men have similar cravings; some of them cruise city parks trying to have sex with other men, men they do not know; lesbians, daggers, generally go to bars and pick up total strangers, queens, and have sex with them. It is a strange, strange world we live in. If you are a therapist, like I was, you get to hear the amazing things that human beings do while pretending to be saints, like the pastor driving around city streets looking for a girl under age twelve to have sex with while talking rubbish about his god, Jesus Christ.)

In psychological addiction the desire is in the mind. In physiological addiction, on the other hand, the desire is not only in the mind but now also in the body. The person is not only mentally addicted but physically addicted.

Consider the alcoholic. He may have begun his drinking vocation through social drinking and becomes psychologically addicted to alcohol, and finally graduates to physiological addiction. When he is physiologically addicted his addiction is now not only in his mind but in his body; his body craves alcohol and he must have it or else he cannot function. He now needs his drug of choice to be able to functional normally.

The physiologically addicted alcoholic gets up in the morning and must have his beer or wine or gin or whisky (whichever is his drug of choice) or else he cannot function on the job. If he does not have alcohol in his body, his body shakes rather uncontrollably (DTs, Delirium Tremens it is called), his nerves are raw and he cannot concentrate on thinking; he feels anxious and restless. No kidding, this person cannot do anything unless he downs some alcohol.

There are many stages of alcoholism, from mild to high. We shall not concern ourselves with such detailed knowledge here. All that we need to know is that the physiologically addicted alcoholic now lives to drink. He must drink to seem alive, to function in society. Without his alcohol he is unable to do anything. Of course, that alcohol is taking a toll on him: destroying his liver (cirrhosis), his kidney, his brain. In late stage alcoholism these folks memories are gone, literally gone; their short term memories are kaput: “What did you do yesterday?”, “I do not know,” No kidding; this is the real world, man. Yet this man will spend his last penny on booze.


TOLERANCE AND WITHDRAWAL

Folks begin drugs gradually and their bodies build up tolerance. Consider smoking cigarettes. The first time a twelve year old child (twelve is the typical age kids begin to experiment with drugs) smokes a cigarette he probably chokes on it and coughs a lot. As he persists in smoking, however, he tolerates a cigarette and soon many cigarettes. He may get to a point where he smokes three packs of cigarettes a day. His body is building tolerance. The level of nicotine in his body that used to give him a feeling of stimulation, or whatever else he believes that he gets from smoking, no longer does so, and now he needs more and more cigarettes to get the same feeling.

The same goes for alcohol and other drugs. A beer may have given one the “rush” but in time one may need six or more beers to feel that rush. The cocaine taker may have felt high with a snort of cocaine but, in time, may need a noseful (and burns holes in his nose) to feel the same sense of high his first cocaine gave him. His body has built tolerance for that drug.

As ones body builds more and more tolerance one spends enormous time trying to acquire the high quantity of the drug one needs to have to feel some effect from it. One becomes hopelessly addicted to ones drug of choice.

One is addicted to a drug if when one tries to stop taking it one feels intense withdrawal symptoms. Those who are addicted to alcohol talk about having hallucinations, heart palpitations, shaking of their muscles, mental confusion, and preoccupation with the drug. When they finally get that drug into their system the withdrawal symptoms go away.

That is to say that one is now a slave to ones drug of choice; one must have it to avoid the painful feeling of withdrawal. The circle is closed and the addict is now totally in the hands of the demon, drugs, and his master. He is no longer a free person; he is a person in bondage to his master the drug.


If you are addicted to Valium, it has the same effects as alcohol addiction. If you try to quit it you may, in fact, experience visual hallucinations, heart palpitations etc just as alcoholics do. Alcohol and drugs that mimic it slow down the addicts heart beatings so that a sudden withdrawal from alcohol and or the Benzodiazepams could lead to heart attack.

The withdrawal symptoms are so bad that often an addict needs to be in a hospital for a month or so, so that physicians monitor changes in his heart and body to make sure that he does not go into cardiac arrest and die. (Alcoholics may be given Librium as transition drug, for sudden cessation of alcohol in their body could bring about a shock to their entire bodies and they die.)

Those who are hooked to street drugs like heroine often have to be given replacement drugs like methadone otherwise they seem unable to cope with the powerful withdrawal symptoms of their drug of choice (muscle itching and twitching, restlessness, mental confusion, agitation etc.).

Drug addicts so fear withdrawal symptoms that some of them can turn tricks (prostitution) to get money to buy their drugs; some of them steal from stores and resale the goods for the price of their fix…say, steal a leather jacket that costs three hundred dollars and give it to the drug pusher for a fix that costs twenty five dollars.

Some drug addicted fellows, in fact, abandon their children and devote their lives to the career of seeking and getting drugs into their bodies.

Some intravenous addicts, like Heroine addicts, literally inject every part of their bodies with needles and have ugly scare marks all over their bodies and yet must do it to feel good from their drugs.

Folks who are addicted to cocaine and amphetamine sometimes experience all the classic symptoms of paranoia; in cocaine high, they believe that some one, say the police, is after them, is trying to get them and they run from him; some of them may hear a knock on their doors and erroneously think that it is the police knocking and jump out of the upstairs window and hurt themselves, even kill themselves.

A fellow on cocaine run for days is often not different from a certified delusionally disordered person. (This would seem to suggest that there is biochemical causation of mental disorders…that too much dopamine may cause schizophrenia… cocaine initially leads to out pouring of dopamine, a neurotransmitter, which makes the drug addict feel fine for a while; but in time he builds tolerance and needs more and more drugs to feel fine. His paranoid reactions tend to be part of his late stage reaction to drug addiction. These days, schizophrenics say that they have brain chemical imbalance disease, but that is not yet demonstrated as a fact.)

LSD has hallucinogenic effects: seeing what is not there as there. It also produces flashbacks, that is, re-experiencing the effect of the drug years later. Marijuana has some hallucinogenic effect.

My goal here is not to provide technical information on drugs and their effects, but to talk about them at a basic level.

Let me talk a bit about caffeine addiction and addiction to nicotine, popular addictions that many people can identify with.


Hi, my name is Thomas, I am an addict. I am addicted to caffeine. (I tried cigarettes when I was in college and gave it up; I sometimes, say, every few months, drink a beer or two, but no hard liquor.)

I am a heavy coffee drinker. I have been drinking coffee since I was 12 years old. So here we are at an AA (Alcohol Anonymous) meeting and I get up and tell the room full of addicts that my name is Thomas and that I am a caffeine addict.

I am serious; I am seriously addicted to caffeine, both psychologically and physiologically. I have read many books on caffeine and know that it is correlated with heart diseases and pancreatic cancer etc. I would like to quit but somehow I always come right back to drinking my java.

I guess that is why I live in Seattle, Java city. Starbucks, you owe me one, for if I calculate the $4 dollars a pop, that I spend every day at your joint, you have taken thousands from me…just as alcohol joints take money from alcohol addicts.


Caffeine has psychological and physiological addiction. If you try to quit it you feel serious withdrawal symptoms, such as agitation, muscle itching, dizziness in your head, even heart arrhythmia. Folks, this is serious addiction, do not minimize it. I know folks whose teeth have fallen off and their gums receded all from drinking coffee and they still drink it.

Didn’t I tell you that we are all addicts? No shame, man, I own up, I am a coffee addict.

What is your own addiction? Cigarette? Do you smoke a pack or two a day? Do you know what you are doing to yourself? You are courting lung cancer, heart attack, and all sorts of somatic disorders. Are you still in denial?

If you are a Nigerian, do you have that peculiar Nigerian pattern of denial, of believing that you do not have mental issues and that only white folks do?

(Just about every Nigerian I see has emotional and or mental health issues, but he does not always know it; he thinks that he is okay. Poor guy. If only he knows that I am taking the time to write this stuff and give it away, for free, because I see his issues and want to help him.)


So you do not have drug addiction, eh? How about addiction to food? Have you seen some Nigerian big men lately? Their tummies are so fat that they look like pregnant women. Actually, they are heart attack waiting to happen…and in their primitive superstitions they would attribute it to juju and other such rubbish.

How tall are you? The typical Nigeria is about five feet eight inches tall. That means that he should not weigh more than one hundred and sixty pounds. So what is your weight, wise guy? Two hundred and fifty pounds? Are you pregnant? “Big man afo shi” we used to say when we were kids.

Loose that ugly weight and loose it now. Find out your natural weight, as delineated by medical science and do not weigh more than that.

To not be over weighted you must eat right. I will not tell you what to eat. There are good nutritionists out there that can tell you what to eat.

Are you a food addict? Are you using food to deal with your frustrations in life? Did you not get that girl you want, that job you want etc and feel disappointed and sad and eat to make you feel good? Food is used to make us feel good when our lives are going to the pots.

Clearly many Nigerians are addicted to food and alcohol. Just look at their sizes, the women with fat tummies and thunder thighs, the men with grossly fat bellies that they hide in folds of agbada.

I do not think that these folks need any one to tell them that they are in a bad shape. Get up and go exercise; run, swim, buy a bicycle and ride it to work rather than drive to work, play tennis, play golf, do weight training etc, do everything to make you sweat and loose that ugly fat.

(There are three types of exercises: cardiovascular, like running; strength, like weight training; flexibility like calisthenics, yoga…you already know all these, now practice them.)

I would like to spend some time on addiction to sex. Nigerians, indeed Africans are unaware that there is such a thing as addiction to sex. Yet sex is the most addicting activity known to man. How so?

When folks have sex, the men ejaculate and the women have orgasm. This gives them a sense of wellbeing. It momentarily alters their mood, their brain chemical balance and makes them forget about their troubles.

Why do you think that folks take drugs? They do so to alter their chemical balance so as to feel good, albeit momentarily. You achieve the same end through sex.

So you are tense and all stressed out and have a little sex, eh? You feel relieved. You associate physical release with sex. So you desire sex and repeat the behavior until it becomes a habit, an addiction.

In Nigeria, there are whorehouses just about everywhere you look. As kids growing up at Lagos we knew where the whores lived.
The whore houses usually contain the bottom of the barrel in the profession of harlotry. Those prostitutes who consider themselves a bit more sophisticated tend to walk the streets or hang around hotel lounges. I once lived at Victoria Island, right opposite Federal Palace Hotel. In the evenings, the hookers lined up the street leading to the Hotel. My friends and I used to go talk to these street women, most of them our age. There were fourteen year olds among them. When the police came, they scampered everywhere, vanished. These types of hookers considered themselves high class and preferred expatriates, whites. They used to tell us about their sexual exploits with white men. It was fascinating hearing the sisters talk about what they do. Interestingly, it never occurred to me to actually find out what they did.

Look, prostitution is everywhere in Nigeria and we do not need to play coy and pretend that reality is not reality. Indeed, some well to do Nigerians practically turn their junior staff and or students to sex slave status. Rich folks have arrangements for their mistresses, concubines and what not.

The Nigerian big man seems to believe that it is his right to have sex with as many women as he pleases. As a matter of fact, he does not even think that it is wrong to do so. If you ask him why he does what he does, he is likely to tell you that his fathers used to have many wives and that since the white man and his religion now limits him to one wife that he is somehow gratifying his polygamous tradition by having mistresses.

Is it really true that in traditional African society polygamy was the norm? Where is the evidence? Let me speak about my family. My father, my grandfather and my great grandfather…those that I knew…were all married, each to a woman. I have done a retrospective analysis of my ancestors to as far back as is possible, they were all in monogamous marriages. And least you think that they were monogamous because they could not afford many wives, let me quickly tell you that in our village, we are the first family, the Opara, and Ndi Ishi Muo.

So what is the point? People in my town, particularly, the well to do ones were monogamous. It is therefore a crock to say that polygamy was the norm in traditional Africa. In so far that there was some polygamy in my town it was always the riff raffs, the nothing trying to seem like they are something big by having many wives.

Generally, those fellows who married many wives were burned, quick, and returned to their senses and accepted that one wife is more than enough for a man to handle. In fact, the average man cannot even deal with the Wahalla of one woman how much more many women!

I am saying that it is not true that we should justify modern Africans polymorphous perverse sexuality with so-called African tradition of polygamy. Our traditions were very strict. In my area if you committed incest you were killed; if you engaged in adultery you were ran out of town. No sir, our African past was not morally loose, as decadent liberal cultural relativists would like to tell us.

Those Nigerians who have sex with many women have sex addiction, period. They must accept their addiction and deal with it and stop being in denial.

A human being is at his best if he limited his sexuality to one woman (and in his late fifties, avoided sex altogether and concentrated on spiritual matters).

Sex is best limited to monogamy, in marriage between a man and a woman. Within this context, sex is best if it is done out of love.
Do you love your partner? Do you care for her welfare? Do you see her as a total person, or do you see her only as a sex object? Is she a sex toy for you, a parlor trophy with which you decorate your house or do you see her as a life long partner with whom you go through the journey called life on earth?

Sex done in the context of marital love is proper sex. Sex with different women, persons one does not love, persons that one uses to obtain physical tension release is sex addiction.

If you pursue sex just to alter your mood, to feel good, you are not different from the chap addicted to heroine, you are an addict, a sex addict. Do you get it or do I need to stand on my head and say the obvious? Those Nigerians with several mistresses are sex addicts. They need to be healed of their addiction to a mood altering drug, the sex drug.

Like most addicts, however, these folks are probably in denial and need to accept their disease.

If you do have sex with more than one woman, please go to a sex addicts meeting and publicly declare yourself an addict. You must tell the world: Hello, I am James, I am a sex addict.

Accept your disease, for there is no healing until the addict stops being in denial and accept his disease in a public forum.

Just look at the price of sex addiction in Africa: folks contracting sexually transmitted diseases like gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, chlamydia, and now the killer HIV AIDS. Africans are exposing themselves to unnecessary diseases and are dying from them and giving their children all sorts of deformities from these diseases.

I remember when I was in secondary school and some of my friends would go to the various whore houses and a few days latter say that they are having difficulty urinating. Some one says: he has Clap. Some one would direct him to street vendors selling antibacterial and other snake oil remedies for clap. He bought them. I hate to tell you this fact; many of those boys are now dead. They would have been fifty one this year, but their reckless lifestyles shortened their lives.

Look, there is always a price to be paid for every behavior we engage in. We must restrict our sexuality to monogamous marriages if we want to live healthy lives.


ADDICTIONS AFFECT THE FAMILY

Addiction to drugs adversely affects the family. In fact, all members of the family are affected if one member is a drug addict. Whereas we are not talking about family counseling here, let me briefly observe that family therapist operate under what they call family system’s theory (See the writings of Healy and Virginia Satir). As they see it, the family is a system and whatever happens to disrupt any part of the system disturbs all parts of the system. All persons in a general system adjust to disturbances in any part of it.

If a father is an alcoholic the chances are that it would negatively affect his role as the primary bread winner of the family. Booz is expensive, you know. A pack of cigarette is half the minimum wage, you know. A cup of java is half the minimum wage. Simply stated, drug addiction affects family finances.

Moreover, drug addiction affects the psychological role of the addict. Have you seen a real alcoholic? Alcohol becomes the only important thing in his life, sometimes more important than his wife and children. As a matter of fact alcohol becomes more important than life itself, for now he lives to drink, not drink to live. He is hopelessly in the grip of alcohol addiction; he is now in the demon’s fangs.

The alcoholic and or the drug addict would rather spend his time at the bar or cruise the streets looking for drugs rather than go home and help his children do their home works. He may stay out till late at night and then stagger home and stagger to bed. In the morning he starts drinking, again, for now he needs his alcohol to steady his shaking hands. This man is lost to the human race; the devil has won him over, he is gone insane and now lives in the stupor of alcohol.

The alcoholic father or mother is unable to perform his or her family role. Some one else has to perform that role. If the man is the alcoholic or drug addict and is hopelessly dysfunctional all the other family members become dysfunctional too. The wife plays the role of the enabler, telling lies to cover up for his mistakes and thereby perpetuating his insanity. The children adopt certain roles: one the hero, or the rescuer, or the scapegoat, or the family rebel.

We covered these roles when we talked about children’s mental health issues. Find out about them. It might also help you if you know what role you tend to play in your social life, for it may be a carryover from your role in a dysfunctional family.

For example, my parents worked around the clock. Both father and mother got up at 5AM and by 6AM were out of the door, to work. They did not come home before 6PM for mother and 8PM for father. The five boys in the family were given material things but other than that were essentially left alone to fend for themselves.

I grew up with more material goods than the children of rich folks (my mother actually bought her first son a car, a motor cycle etc).

The children learned to take care of business for themselves. I developed the role of a family rescuer, helping the younger ones, rescuing them.

What do you think that I have been doing with my life? I went into the mental health field to save the mentally ill and learned that I could not. I went into teaching trying to make folks learn.

What am I doing here? I am compulsively giving out information to those I feel need it. I do not have to do any of these things, you know. I could be a typical Nigerian and parade around and be called Dr Osuji and find a sinecure job and leave it at that. But, instead, I am spending my Saturday afternoon in front of my computer typing this material for you.

And what do I get from you? Perhaps, headache from Igbos; they must find something to criticize in one, if only to show the world that they are better than one; they cannot stand any one else seeming good. Yet I must play my role, for I over learned it in my dysfunctional family.

All families have their own issues. All families are dysfunctional. Find out about your own family dysfunctions. Then try to heal it. These dysfunctions are multi-generational; that is, they are passed from one generation to another.

Nobody in my family drinks alcohol more than the occasional beer; no one that I know of in the kindred do drugs. But you know what? Everybody in my family tends to be a workaholic. My junior brother, Geoffrey, works eight hours for the government and does another eight hours private work, six days a week. That is who we are. I get up in the morning and work until I am tired and go to sleep at 11 PM. This type of lifestyle obviously affects our children. We must, therefore, be mindful of it and make time to take our children to the Zoo, Library, Museum, and Gym etc.

I know what my problem is and I am doing something about it. How about you? Do you even know that you have a problem? And if you do, are you doing something about it? I hope to God that you are dealing with your family dysfunction issues. You see, the Nigerian middle class, essentially abandon their children and they grow up with myriad of problems. Only God knows what kinds of problems our future children will have. I guarantee you that it will not be rosy.

We have the poor who cannot feed their children and these, like children from broken homes, all over the world, feel not cared for and do not care for any one. Some of them are so angry at society that they gravitate to street gangs and eventually make antisocial, criminal activity their lives career.

So will you do your part to make sure that our children are loved and nurtured so that they would grow up not messed up?
You will not say that nobody has told you about these problems. I am telling you about them. The ball is now in your court, so go do something about it and stop drowning your existential sorrows with alcohol, food, cigarette, coffee, sex and even the harder stuff like street drugs.

Go get help for your addiction issues. Do not be afraid to acknowledge that you have an addiction issue; I have not seen a human being who does not have one, negative or positive, but one nevertheless.

What is your own addiction? Identify it and treat it, for it is a serious problem, do not deny it, do not minimize it, do not blame other people for it, just accept it as your issue and deal with it. It really does not matter how you come about the problem; there is no use blaming others, accept responsibility and deal with it, now, not tomorrow.

But be warned that if you have a serious addiction issue, it might take several trials before you succeed. They say that the typical smoker of cigarettes often takes ten quitting episodes before he finally sticks to it. Alcoholics often under go ten treatments before they finally quit (or die).


POSITIVE ADDICTIONS

Addictions have always been part of the human condition. I doubt that we can ever eliminate all addictions. To be human is to be prone to addictions.

Some claim that we are on earth because we are addicted to the ego; that the allure of the separated, individuated self, the special, superior self created self, the ego is why we are here and that we are addicted to it. They claim that we must let go of our wish for separated self and return to the acceptance of our true self, unified self, before we can overcome all addiction. Indeed, there are those who claim that all addiction is a spiritual disease. The Founders of AA certainly believed that addiction is a spiritual disease. As the AA Big Book sees it, our primary problem is our swollen ego. We are addictable because we have big egos. To overcome addiction, the AA book says that we must let go of the ego and let in God.

Let go and let God. (As a matter of fact, that is the first of the twelve’s steps that addicts must go through to heal.)

I am in agreement with the AA movement that addiction is a spiritual disease; nevertheless, I want to focus on the here and now world.

If you are addicted to something please accept your addiction. Do not deny it. I urge you to try to replace your negative addiction with a positive addiction.

Reading books is addictive, working very hard is addictive, exercising is addictive, and serving other people is addictive. If you start doing any of those things you will find it difficult to quit doing it; that is, you are addicted to it. They are positive addictions. Your wife may not like it if you are an exercise addict, a reading addict, a workaholic who lives for work, but at least you are not killing your self with drugs.

Positive addictions have their draw backs but they are superior to negative addictions.

In the long run, however, you must find some sort of meaning and purpose for living here on earth. Here spirituality comes in. I do not believe that one can heal ones addiction if one has not solved the existential question: what the hell are we doing here on earth?

I have friends who are vegetarians, do not drink any kind of alcohol, no coffee, no cigarette, no drugs, folks who live clean wholesome life. If I examine their lives, I see folks who are less egotistical, folks who have surrendered to a higher power, whom they call God.

As for yours truly, I hover between heaven and earth, unable to give up my ego. I am still egotistical hence I drink coffee and it is killing me. When I finally let go of my belief in my own powers, my ego, and totally accept God as my only source and rely on him, I am sure that I will lick my coffee drinking habit.

If you have an addiction, please understand it and seek treatment, do not deny it. There are many chemical dependency counselors out there who are willing and are able to help you.


CONCLUSION
In this essay, I merely called your attention to the issue of addictions. I did not aim at a complete explication of the nature of addictions. I am not a Chemical Dependency counselor, I am a mental health professional (Psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers).
If addiction is your issue, please go seek the help that you deserve and stop making a mess of your life, and the lives of those around you.

[email protected]

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March 07, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Series on Psychology 2006, #13 of 52: The Correlation of Idealism and Paranoid Thinking

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- Idealistic thinking is wishing that things be different from the way they are. The idealist sees reality as it is, but wishes that it were different from what it is. In paranoid thinking the individual sees himself as he is, imperfect, and wishes that he were different, perfect. No amount of wishing makes the earthly self perfect.

The paranoid person uses his imagination to invent an ideal and perfect self for himself and identifies with it, defends and protects it. He wants other people to acknowledge his imaginary perfect self as who he is, in fact, and resents those who do not acknowledge his false fictional superior and perfect self. He feels demeaned when other people do not respect his false superior self. As it were, he wants to con the world to accept his imaginary ideal self as who he is. If he is self deceived and believes that he is his imaginary ideal self he is now totally in the world of delusion; he is no longer not just a paranoid personality but delusional disordered.

He knows that his real imperfect self, the bodily ego self will die and so he wishes that his imaginary ideal perfect self would survive his physical death. He works to make his imaginary perfect self survive and in doing so gives his life on earth false meaning and purpose.

The reality is that the false perfect self is not going to come into being and the world is not going to be ideal.

The earthly self, real or imaginary, has no worth and is valueless. What survives is the dreamer, the conceptualizer, the thinker, the wisher of separation, the ever lasting spirit in us, not his wished for separated self and not the world of that wished for self.

Delusional disorder is trying to make the ego separated self ideal and important and has other people acknowledge the importance of the fictional self. The deluded person wants to make his imaginary ideal self important and make the world of that imaginary self important, that is, make human civilization important and ever lasting, all these are futile efforts.
LAUGHTER, PLAYFULNESS, PEACE, HAPPINESS

If one recognizes that the false self, the ego, cannot be important and that its civilization cannot be important now what should one do?

One should love the dreamer, the Spirit in us, not his dream self and dream world. One should play with the dream self and dream world, play with other dream selves, egos and their activities without taking them as important, for they are not and will never be important. This world you are looking at will eventually be blown up in nuclear evisceration; the world is a smoke and will disappear from sight.


FLEXIBLE VERRSUS INFLEXIBLE PURSUIT OF THE FICTIONAL SELF AND ITS WORLD

When one is inflexibly pursuing the rigid important self, ones body reflects ones thinking, mind, and are inflexible and rigid in its quest for importance. Ones body is tort and uptight.
One should go exercise and become flexible and enjoy the dream but not take it seriously.

Ego mind thinking is reflected in body but body itself is neutral; body represents what the mind wants to think and experience, ego importance or experience ego play.

The idealist and the paranoid rejected the empirical world; both saw that world, the world of science, as not good enough and used their minds to invent and construct an ideal alternative to it.

This process began in childhood, and by age six, at least, is perceivable in the individual.

All human beings, up to a point, engage in this process, that is, posit an ideal self and ideal world and seek to bring them into being.

The pursuit of self ideal and ideal world, a self and world to replace the self and world created by God, is what life on earth is all about, making our dream selves and dream worlds seem real.

God created a formless, spirit self, a unified self, a self that is the same and equal; we invented separated special selves housed in bodies and that live in the world of space, time and matter and want to realize our imaginary self and its world.

This process is accentuated in the so-called paranoid personality and even more so in the psychotic person. In the insane person, the insanity of the world is apparent. In the paranoid person you see defense of a non-existent self and its non-existent world done with vigor. The defenses are also taking place in the so-called normal person but in a flexible manner.

GIVE UP IDEAL SELF AND IDEAL WORLD AND ACCEPT FORMLESS UNIFIED WORLD

This rejection of empiricism, rejection of phenomena, rejection of matter and the human body, rejection of the imperfect self and invention of an ideal self and defense of that ideal self and its ideal world is chimera, it is recipe for despair since what is wished for is not going to come into being no matter how much one wishes for it.

Meaning and purpose given by illusions are not real meaning and purpose. The only real meaning and purpose are found in God.

On earth the only realistic thing to do is to embrace empiricism and study science and psychology and deal with people as they are, dream persons and dream things, not real selves , not valuable selves and things. Love the dreamer but not his dream.

One should never take the dream self and the dream world seriously. One should be flexible and enjoy the dream and then leave it upon death.

SUICIDE IS NOT A REALISTIC OPTION

One should never kill ones self, out rightly as in suicide or slowly with drugs like cigarette, coffee, over eating, alcohol, cocaine, heroine, amphetamine, over sexing. If you commit suicide you will return to this world and live again, until you get it right and then leave the world, never to return to it.

The only way to leave the world permanently is to understand that the ego and the world is a dream. As dreams one should not defend them and have a happy dream before one leaves them. If one forgives the world, loves the dreamer, not his dreams, one has overcome the world. One no longer has a wish to be an ego, to dream a separated, special self and wish for a world to make that dream seem possible. One will not return to the dream, the world. One stays near heaven, heaven’s gate, has a happy dream and works with those still in the world, helping them to realize that the world is a dream. When all people have had this realization and come to the gate of heaven, the gate opens and all the separated children of God enter and return from the journey without a distance and resume the awareness that they are forever and ever one with their father and all their brothers.

CHANGED PATTERN OF THINKING AND BEHAVING

If a person accepts the philosophy of this essay, that is, accepts that our true state is formless unified spirit and that our present state, separated forms, is false, he must necessarily be a different person; he must think and behave differently.


FEARLESSNESS

If one is formless and eternal spirit it follows that one would no longer be afraid of death. One would understand that though ones body could be harmed, even destroyed, that such happenstance does not affect ones true self. Ones real self is eternal spirit and no human being can harm or destroy it. Thus, one would no longer give in to fear, when it rears its ugly face, as it must to all those who mistakenly see themselves as separated selves living in bodies.

ANGERLESSNESS

One would be less prone to anger. Anger is a response to perceived attack on ones body and ego self. Anger is an attempt to defend ones body and psychological self, the separated self concept living in body, space and time. Anger defends the separated self and its body. If one is not a separated self in body, it follows that when one perceives attack on ones body and separated self, one ignores it, overlooks it with the understanding that only the dream, false self is being attacked, not the real self.

One is in a dream and projects out other dream selves and bid them to attack ones dream self. One attacked ones self through other people. One takes responsibility for such attack and does not feel angry. One forgives those who attack one, and since they are part of one, in forgiving them one forgives ones self ones attack on ones self and on other selves. Other selves who are one with one.

NO DEPRESSION

One will no longer be prone to sadness and depression for if one is an eternal spirit self what cause is there for sadness and depression? All depression is rooted in our belief that we are bodies that will die. But if body is mere instrument for dreaming in the world of dreams and ones true self is eternal then there is no point in being depressed.


NO PARANOIA

If one is eternal spirit and no one can harm one, one cannot be paranoid. Paranoia is a product of ones awareness of the worthlessness, valuelessness and inadequacy of ones separated self housed in body, the ego, personality and ones invention of an imaginary ideal self and identification with that fictional self and defense of it. The ideal self is a magical self and is meant to enable one adapt to the physical and social exigencies of ones world; but it does not enable one adapt for it is an illusion and an illusion does not affect reality. One must, therefore, not defend it for it is in defending it that it seems real to one when it is not real. The fictional ideal perfect self, the paranoid self must be let go into the nothingness whence when one conjured out from; it does not exist and it does not help one adjust to this world or to any other world for that matter. If one accepts that one is part of unified spirit one lets go of the false ideal ego self and, therefore, is no longer paranoid.


NO MANIA

If one accepts the unified spirit self and is no longer seeking to become the ideal perfect self one would no longer use ones thinking to speed up ones quest for the ideal self. One would no longer be manic. In mania, the individual uses his thinking to think rapidly so as to convince himself that he is the grandiose self he wished he were. He is now god, the most powerful man on earth, the richest man on earth and other such nonsense. If the unified self is accepted and the ego is given up, the individual would no longer be prone to mania and its delusions.

NO HALLUCINATIONS

Insane persons hallucinate in pursuit of false ideal goals. The mad man hears voices telling him that he is god, a very important person. If he did not wish to be an important ego self he would not hear voices (and or the other hallucinations: auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile, and feeling). If there is no wish for special separated self there would be no psychosis, no insanity, no madness, and no lunacy. Human beings are nuts because they desire to become ideal, perfect selves.


NO JUDGEMENT

If one knows that ones real self is spirit and that other people’s real selves is spirit and that the apparent selves we see on earth, the separated selves housed in bodies are dream and false selves, one would no longer judge the dream selves with the standards of the ideal false self.

All judgment is rooted in using the standards of the fictional ideal self to judge separated selves housed in bodies, perceiving their imperfections vis a vis the imaginary perfect ego self and wishing that they were as perfect as the imaginary ideal selves.

People are not ideal selves and cannot become ideal selves. It makes no difference whether one illusion is better than others; they are all illusory selves and, at any rate, each individual formulates his ideal self and you cannot do so for him.

Each person used his inherited dream body and dream experiences to invent a self concept, a personality for him. You did not form his self concept for him and he did not form yours, though each of you has perceptions of each other.

Because the self concept is individualistically formed it is not up to you to change others self concepts, you cannot succeed no matter how hard you tried. So you might as well stop trying to change other people, changing dream selves.

The only person that you can change is you. However, you cannot change you to become an ideal dream self; you can change you by giving up all efforts to formulate ideal dream self concepts for you and just accept the real self that God created you, the self that is always already there, but hidden, masked by you, clouded and veiled by your ego self concepts.

Stop constructing ideal selves and see the unified light self that the Holy Spirit has already reinvented for you and then eventually experience the non-physical self, that is, your real self.

PLAY AND LAUGHTER

When you accomplish this goal, your life becomes one of joy and peace. You see this world as a play thing and play with other persons, your fellow dreamers. You laugh at your and other peoples efforts to invent replacement selves for you all. Life on earth becomes a thing of mirth, a joyful play.

The life of an enlightened and illuminated son of God is fun; he is always smiling, laughing and in peace and happiness. His presence, even the mere remembrance of his name, Christ, gives all people peace and happiness.

If you have a job in this world you do it playfully. For example, if you are a medical doctor, you still heal people’s bodies, for as long as people see themselves as bodies and get sick they need the services of medical doctors.

If you are one of the exclusive ones that cannot operate in the world of ego and body and can only teach about spiritual things, a teacher of God, a minister of God, a servant of God and people, then you find peace and joy in talking about spiritual matters, provided that you love and forgive all people, for all your teaching amounts to nothing if you lack charity. Charity is giving without asking for anything in return, for you know that in giving to other people, in loving other people, you only give, love you. The so-called other person is you.

In forgiving the brother that attacked you, you forgive you; in loving him you love you, for he is you projected out to do what he did, so that you see it and correct it, first in you and later show him an example of how to correct it in him.

A part of your spirit is in him…he must learn to love and accept his real self and stop thinking that he has to become a rich, important, ideal person before he accepts himself; he must stop being paranoid and in doing so become peaceful and happy.

You first give your self peace and extend that peace to all our brothers.

Giving is receiving; all people are part of ones self and in giving them love and forgiveness one gives that to one; in giving them peace and happiness one gives that to one.

On the other hand, in giving other people hate and anger one gives ones self hate and anger. Giving to others is giving to ones self.

Love knows that it is one, that all people are parts of its self, that as one does to ones self one does to others and as one does to others one does to ones self.

In this knowledge lies peace of mind for it is the truth.
The brother who in his paranoia misinterpreted your motives as attack on him and attacked you shows you how in your own paranoia you misinterpret other people’s motives and attack them. Learn to forgive him and love him and in so doing correct your own thinking and know peace and happiness. When you have peace and happiness you give it to the rest of the world.

The world, other people, are yearning for peace and happiness, are calling on you, teacher of God, to learn love and thereafter teach them love.

This is your true function, your true role and your true vocation. For this you came to this world.
It is also other people’s true vocation but that may not yet be their exclusive function, they may still find some satisfaction in performing ego roles, such as medicine, but in time they, too, will get there.

In the meantime, it is your exclusive function, perform it and it is on your performing it that all children of God, you, are saved. The saving of the children of God, you, rests on you. Perform your savior role, forgive and love all. See what others do to you as what you do to you. Study people’s attacks from secular psychologically perspective, that is, see it as paranoia at work, and then transcend secular psychology with spiritual psychology. This means understanding that all attacks is a call for help, for love and loving the attacker via forgiveness. Overcome your own paranoia and teach others how to overcome their paranoia, for all human beings, in degrees live in paranoia.

To live in paranoia is to live in fear; to live in fear is to live in hell. Show our brothers who live in hell how to live in heaven via forgiveness and love. This is the function of the teacher of God, teacher of love, teacher of union.

THE SECRET OF SALVATION

The secret of salvation is the realization that one and all of us did this thing to ourselves; we brought our suffering to us. No one else did this to us, we did it to us. On the individual level one did it to one, one brought about ones own suffering; one is not a victim, no other person did this to one; God or Satan did not do this to one, one did it to ones self. How so?

In eternity all is one; all is formless unified spirit; all are the same and equal (for only the same, equal and spirit can unify). Somehow, out of nowhere the idea of the opposite of eternity entered our minds and we pursued it.

Eternity is unified and the idea of separation entered our minds; eternity is the same and equal and the idea of differences and inequality entered our minds; God created us and the idea of self creation entered our minds; we desired to create ourselves, create each other and create God.

These set of ideas are impossible of gratification in eternity and its reality. What we could not satisfy in reality we dreamed. We formed a world of illusion, Maya, to go seem to satisfy our desires for there to be a will that opposes God’s will. Thus, as it were, we cast a magical spell on ourselves and went to sleep and seem to dream a world that is the opposite of God’s world. We find ourselves in the world of space, time and matter, a world that opposes the unified world of God.

Our world of space, time and matter requires that we take time to travel from one point to another; our world of bodies ( we used bodies to make separated selves seem real) require that bodies be hurt and pained so as to seem real to us, so we do feel pain and fear pain.

Simply stated, we do suffer in our world. But suffering is built into the world of space, time and matter and in as much as we desire that world we brought our suffering unto us. Indeed, we can stop our suffering by giving up the desire that brought it about, the desire for specialness and separation.

When we stop desiring special self and separation we exit this world of separation and return to the consciousness of oneness, union with all being, a world of no you and I, no space and gap between people, a world of no seer and seen, a world of no subject and object, a world where each of us is in each of us; God is in us and we are in him, the whole is in the part and the part in the whole; a world of peace and joy, a blissful world.

We attain that peaceful and happy world via forgiveness and love.


CHANGING AND EVENTUALLY GIVING UP ALL CONCEPTUAL SELVES


We came to this world to seem special and separated from God and from one another. The first order of business we engage in upon birth in this world is to invent a separated self concept for our selves. Each of us builds on his inherited body and social experiences and constructs a self concept. He also constructs self concepts for other people (for we do not relate to other people as they are, but as we think that they are).

We transform our self concepts into self images in bodies and see ourselves in bodies. On earth, we think in concepts and images. The external world is in fact the out picturing of our individual and collective thinking.

All self concepts and self images are false. For one thing, each of us has limited information available to him at any point in time, particularly when we were children, during which time we invented our self concepts aka personalities and egos.

However, the main reason why self concepts are false is because it is not up to each of us and all of us to invent self concepts for us. God has already created us unified self and our efforts to invent separated selves are disobedience of God’s will.

We disobey God’s will by having self concepts (egos and human personalities). This world is a conceptual self, hence is a world where we disobey the will of God.

No one can disobey the will of God. All we do is have wishes and dream that we have accomplished our wishes but, in fact, we have not done so. We dream and in our dreams see our wishes seem realized.

Dream self concepts and dream world is not the real world. In reality, we remain as God created us, unified with him and with each other, while dreaming that we have separated from God and invented replacement and substitute separated self concepts. Our human personalities are dream selves and not real at all.

In as much as we want to seem separated and dream that we have separated selves, we have to change our separated self concepts and make them congruent with the unified self God created us as.

ON EARTH ORGIVENESS IS THE TRUE MEANING OF LOVE

We have to transform our self concepts and make them approximate the real self God created. We do so by using our separated selves housed in bodies to forgive and love other seeming separated selves housed in bodies. When we use our self concepts and our bodies to forgive and love other people, we purify them, and we approximate heaven’s self.

Forgiveness does not take us into heaven; it brings us to the metaphoric gate of heaven. We are still not in heaven for heaven is unified self, whereas in forgiveness we still live in separated selves, but now we are at the gate of heaven. Heaven is perfect peace and happiness, bliss; those who are at heaven’s gate experience some peace and joy in their lives.

Ultimately, we have to relinquish all separated self concepts, give up all efforts to define ourselves by ourselves and stay quiet (as in meditation) and God would reveal to us our real self: formless unified equal selves that are infinite in numbers yet are one self. This spirit self cannot be explained by separated self categories.

NO SEPARATED SELF DECISION MAKING

In the illusion that we have separated selves we make separated decisions. Making decisions is part of the delusion that separation is possible. Each of us makes decisions regarding what to do with his life on a day, to day, and minute to minute bases.

One must give up the illusion that one can make decisions for ones self. The fact is that by ones ego self one does not know what is good for one. Only God knows what is good for his son and can decide for one.

God, in fact, has already decided that his son is best served staying in him and with him in unified spirit.

In as much as God’s son wished to be separated from him and seem to be on earth, he must now ask God, the Holy Spirit, to guide him.
Before one makes a decision one must ask God to decide for one. Do not make a decision by yourself, always ask the immanent God in the temporal universe, the Holy Spirit, to decide for you.

When the children of God seemed to separate from their father and came to this world of separation, God entered their minds, their thinking, their separated world as the Holy Spirit. The function of the Holy Spirit is to remind the children of God that their true identity is unified self, and that their true home is unified state, aka heaven. He does this teaching through interpreting love as forgiveness. Whereas in heaven love is union, on earth love is forgiveness, for forgiveness unifies warring people.

The Holy Spirit is ones right mind; he is the agent of God and his true son, Christ, in our sleeping ego minds. Ask him what he would have you do before you do anything.

The Holy Spirit would always ask you to love and where there is attack to forgive it. He would teach you that attack is a call for love where love is perceived as missing. The Holy Spirit’s gospel is that forgiveness is the meaning of love. Jesus listened to this gospel and taught us forgiveness as love and forgave those who seemed to destroy his earthly body and ego. The entire gospel of Jesus Christ is love is forgiveness; he taught his followers to forgive one another so as to return to God, to unified state.

Listening to the Holy Spirit means that before you do anything, you ask yourself why you are doing it: Love or hate, for the good of all humanity or for the good of your selfish ego.

If love for all human beings motivates your action, go ahead and do it. If you made a mistake and behaved on behalf of selfish interest hence attacked other people and they attack you in self defense, then forgive them and forgive yourself. Always love and forgive yourself and all people.

But do recognize that what your selfish ego would want you to do is not what the Holy Spirit, love and forgiveness, would want you to do. Your ego may want you to work to seem important, wealthy and important. The Holy Spirit wants you to do work that gives you peace and happiness and gives all people peace and happiness. That is to say what your ego wishes is not what the Holy Spirit wants for you. What your ego thinks is good for you, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God in us, knows is not good for you.

The ego perpetuates your stay in hell, on earth; the Holy Spirit wants to liberate you from hell and take you to heaven. The ego asks you to do what adapts to this world and the Holy Spirit asks you to do what overcomes this world and takes you back home. The ego is your guide to staying in this world; the Holy Spirit is your guide on the homewards journey to God and his heaven.

Therefore, make sure that you are listening to the Holy Spirit, not to your ego. How do you know who you are listening to?
If you listen to the ego you are in conflict; if you listen to the Holy Spirit you are in peace and happiness.

Are you at war or in peace? That would tell you whose voice you are listening to: the voice for the ego or the voice for God; the voice for love or hate; the voice for union or separation; the voice for Christ or ego; the counselor for this world or for heaven?


You, as the ego, do not know what is good for you. What you think is good for you, ego power, wealth and fame, from the Holy Spirit’s perspective, is bad for you, for it generates conflict whereas love and forgiveness generates peace for you and for all people. What you and other people consider failure, such as not making it in the world’s work world, the Holy Spirit knows as success, for it is in failing in the egos world that you have the time to think about the things of God; seldom do people who succeed in the world have time to think about the things of God.


INTELLIGENCE AND INDIVIDUATION



There is one source of intelligence in the universe, God. God is intelligence. In eternity, that one intelligence expanded into each of us and on earth manifests in all of us. One God extends to each of us. In that sense, each of us is as intelligent as other persons; no one is more intelligent than other people. In eternity, heaven we are equally intelligent.

In the world of space, time and matter; in the material universe it is obvious that not all people are equally intelligent. Not all of us are Galileo Galilee, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Dalton, Albert Einstein, and Max Planck, Schrodinger, Pauli, Heisenberg, Bohr and the other outstanding brains of the past centuries.

In the world each of us inherited a set of genes, a body. Body is a mask through which universal intelligence manifests. Each individual’s body is a filter and allows only so much intelligence to shine through it. Our bodies and egos distort how universal intelligence operates through them.

If the individual wants to change his level of intelligence on earth he must begin by changing his genes and body, for body and genes determine how and what type of intelligence he manifests on earth. Since it is not yet possible to alter our genes it follows that each of us has certain intelligence level for the duration of his life on earth. But in the future, genetic science and engineering would be able to tinker with children’s genes and make the currently dull ones smart.


IGBO PARANOID INTELLIGENCE

I have pointed out at several places that Igbos tend to have a higher incidence of paranoia. In my twenty something years of working in the mental health field, I have seen Igbo paranoid personalities than other groups (Hausa, Yoruba etc). The few delusional disordered persons I have seen included two Igbo women. This is a fact, not conjecture. On Naija politics there is a certified Igbo paranoid personality on it. You could see his dance of intelligence. He is pure reason at work but he is foolish intelligence. He says things that are essentially true but things said without love and forgiveness hence things that could generate war at any moment. No leader and manager would make him a supervisor or manager (and I know what I am talking about for I have run organizations). This man is very bright but has warped social intelligence, every time he says something he alienates people yet he believes that he is doing so in the service of truth. Truth does not bring war but peace and reconciliation.

What I would like to do is talk a little bit about paranoid intelligence. I hope that my paranoid Igbo brothers would discard their tendency to see me as their enemy and learn a thing or two from what I am about to say.

Paranoids are persons who are individuated and rational persons. Igbos worship individualism and are rational persons.

Paranoid intelligence, Igbo intelligence, is devoted to individualistic and idealistic goals.

The paranoid rejected his real self and seeks to become an ideal self. He also rejected other people’s real selves and wants them to become ideal persons; he also wants society to become ideal. He pursues ideal social institutions. This is what Igbos do.

The pursuit of ideal self in the service of the separated ego self is what paranoia is all about. The individual rejected the real separated self in body and wants an ideal separated self, also in body, but this time primarily disembodied since his ideal self is mentally derived and is a mental construct.

As a mental self, the ideal self does not take into consideration the realities of body, matter, space and time hence is not going to come into being, it is a wish of the wisp.
The Igbo ideal self, in the final analysis, like the paranoid ideal self, serves only the individual Igbo’s ego self interests. It does not serve social interests; it does not serve the good of other people. Igbos served only their individual interests and sometimes their family’s interests. Their level of social interest is almost zero.

(The typical Igbo are motivated to be an individual superstar and seldom care for other people’s interests. If you want to do things collectively you do not go to Igbos for help, for each of them wants to be a chief, the narcissistic person who makes it to the top and gets all the attention, admiration and glory. Igbos do not work together; working together requires shrinking ones ego and devoting it to common good. You must be the greatest idiot on planet earth to think that an Igbo man could work with you to attain organizational goals that transcend his ego; he is in the organization to serve his personal interests. This is sad but it is the reality of the Igbo ego state and you ought to be realistic when you are dealing with these people. It will probably take several hundred years before these people’s egos are shrunk and civilized and made to serve social interests. As they currently are, they seem incapable of serving larger organizational interests. They are poor leadership and management materials. Igbos are suited for technical positions where they shine as individuals, but seldom suitable for leadership positions where they are supposed to lead other people in pursuit of organizational, collective goals, for goals that transcend their individual interests.)

Igbos must learn to redirect their goals and serve social and collective interests rather than their selfish ego interests. They must stop seeking what is good for only the individual and seek what is good for all humanity. If they do so they would become truly intelligent. In fact, if they do so they would be second to none in the world. They would permit universal intelligence to shine through them and bless the world through them.

I believe that when paranoia is healed in the individual he becomes a truly productive intelligence serving the collective good. When Igbos heal their paranoia they would start producing scientists like no other group on earth. Why so? They are a gifted people; their gift is currently warped by their collective paranoia.

My goal is to help heal the Igbo paranoids I see all around me.
I know that my considering Igbos prone to paranoia could be construed as making negative statements about Igbos. Some infantile Igbos, in fact, circulated the notion that I hate Igbos. If only the fools realize that I am a true Igbo and am working for our social interests, but in a manner that they may not yet understand.

I am a brother that came to heal (change people’s pattern of thinking, change minds, from self interest to social interest hence sane, peaceful and happy), not to crucify my brothers. At any rate, nothing is new under the sun: the helpers of the world are generally misunderstood. But we cannot stop trying to help a world that needs help.


CONCLUSION

In this essay, I pointed out that the human condition disposes people to hate and reject their earthly real selves, their bodies and egos. They use their imaginations to construe imaginary ideal selves. They then work to become the wished for ideal, perfect self. Pursuit of this imaginary, fictional self is what paranoid persons do in the extreme.

Human beings must reconceptualize their self concepts, change them, and make them forgiving and loving selves. If they do so they experience some peace and happiness in their lives, not the total peace and joy, bliss of heaven, but an attenuated form of it. Ultimately, they must give up all conceptual selves, transcend the ego separated self concept and the body that houses it to experience their real selves, the unified self, the Holy Son of God who is one with his father.

God and his Son, Christ, can be experienced but cannot be explained with our current ego categories. I cannot explain God and Christ, the unified self. Oneness can be experienced when the separated self is dropped but it cannot be explained by the categories of manyness.

I give you my peace and happiness. But to receive my gift, you must jettison your separated, individuated ego and become aware of the Christ in you, your unified self.




* People are at different places in space and time; at different levels of spiritual evolution. Those that are meant to read and benefit from this essay will do so and those that are not yet able to benefit from it, will not read it and if they read it would not understand what it is trying to teach them and would respond to it with off the mark comments.


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March 05, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Lectures on African Countries #7 of 54: Cameroon

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- 7. CAMEROON

Formal Name: United Republic of Cameroon.

Term for Citizens: Cameroonians.

Capital: Yaounde. Population: 1, 480. 000.

Independence Achieved: January 1, 1960, from France.

Major Cities: Douala, Yaounde.

Geography:

Cameroon is in West Africa. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, Nigeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic and Chad. Cameroon encompasses 183, 568 square miles. The topography has four natural regions: northern plains, central and southern plateaus, western highlands and mountains, and coastal plains on the Gulf of Guinea. The climate is tropical with two distinct seasons, wet (April to October) and dry (November to March). Heavy rainfall at the coastal regions, tapering off inland and sub-arid north.

Society:

The population of Cameroon is estimated at 16, 018,000. The heaviest concentration is in the southwest. 40% urbanization.

Ethnic Groups: There is an estimated 200 ethnic groups.

Languages: French and English are the official languages.

Religion: Muslim North and Christian South and the rest of the population profess indigenous beliefs.

Education: Free primary education. Literacy rate estimated at 79%.

Economy: Small-scale crop production is rampant, especially cocoa, coffee, logs, cotton, rubber, palm products, and peanuts. Some light manufacturing activities exist. The economy is heavily dependent on France as destination of its exports. GDP estimate: $27 billion; Per Capita GDP: $800 US. Monetary Unit: CFA Franc BEAC (XAF).

History and Government:

Cameroon was colonized by Germany in the late 19th century. After the defeat of Germany in world-war I, the territory was taken away from Germany and divided between France and Britain; and ruled as trustee territories. In January 1, 1960 French Cameroon gained independence and a part of British Cameroon opted to join French Cameroon and another to join Nigeria. Cameroon established a unitary national government with highly centralized administration. A unicameral legislature dominated by the ruling party. The president is very powerful; he appoints the leaders of the various districts (departements). The country is divided into 10 provinces for administrative purposes.


CONTEMPORARY POLITICS
In the 16th century the Portuguese came to the area now known as Cameroon. In fact, it was the Portuguese that named the country, Camarao, a place where prawns are found. Subsequently, nothing much was heard of the area until the 1870s when the newly unified Germany took interest in it.

Germany colonized Camarao but when Germany was defeated during the First World War her African colonies, including Camarao was given to the victorious countries. In 1919 Camarao was divided into two and one section was given to the British and the other to the French as League of Nation’s mandated territories.

At the end of the Second World War, The United Nations replaced the lackluster League of Nations and in 1946 took over Cameroon as a United Nations Trusteeship.

In 1960 France gave independence to its portion of Camarao. That same year the English section of Camarao held a plebiscite and the Southern part chose to join the French Cameroonians and the Northern part chose to join Nigeria. In 1961 Southern Cameroon merged with French Cameroon to form the Republic of Cameroon.

Ahmadou Ahidjo, a Muslim man from Northern Cameroon, became the president of Cameroon and was in power for over twenty years, until 1982 when he resigned and his prime minister, Paul Biya, became the president. Mr. Biya is still in power 24 years later.

Mr. Biya is from Southern Cameroon and is nominally a Christian. His first order of business was to clean house and replace the Northern oligarchy that was in places of authority with his Southern Christian henchmen. This house cleaning led to resentment and Ahidjo was said to have threatened the government and fled the country before he was apprehended by Mr. Biya’s police authorities. Thereafter, Mr. Biya consolidated power and since then has essentially established a one man rule in Cameroon.

In the early 1990s there was said to be a wave of democracy going through Africa. Mr. Biya, apparently, joined the wave and allowed a multiparty election in 1992. Mr. Biya won the election and has won every other election since then. These elections fairness has been a subject of contention.

Mr. Biya, the president, has executive powers and pretty much is the government. He calls the 180 members Parliament, the National Assembly, into session, three times a year, and determines what agenda the Parliament legislates into law.

The National Assembly essentially exists to enact into laws the president’s legislative desires and can hardly be said to have independent will of its own.

Indeed, the president, through his ministry of Justice, also controls the judiciary. On paper the Supreme Court has the powers of judicial review but may only review the constitutionality of a law with the approval of the president.

Cameroon is divided into ten provinces and these are directly and indirectly controlled by the president.

Regardless of how he won his elections, Mr. Paul Biya has managed to make Cameroon one of the well governed African countries. He has paid attention to economic activities particularly to the agricultural sector. Cameroon has one of the best managed agricultural economies in Africa.

Cameroon has free and compulsory elementary school for all its children. Just about every Cameroonian child goes to elementary school. Cameroon has one of the highest literacy rates in Africa, 79%.

The political cleavages in Cameroon are between the North and South and the English South and the French South. The North is Muslim and during the rule of Ahidjo dominated Cameroonian government. Under Mr. Biya, the Christian South dominates Cameroonian government. This has led to resentment in the North.

In the South itself the English speaking part formed Southern Cameroon National Council, SCNC, to work towards seceding from what it perceives as French speaking dominated Cameroon. This secessionist movement is still active despite clamp downs by the central government.

With the discovery of oil in Bakassi peninsula, a section of Nigeria claimed by Cameroon, conflict has raged between Nigeria and Cameroon. In 1994 and 1996 there were brief military skirmishes between the two countries. Cameroon was no match for the Nigerian army and took its claims to the world court. The Court appeared to have awarded Cameroon the oil rich peninsular but Nigeria has not relinquished its claims to the area.

Considering that Bakassi is part of the English speaking Cameroon that wants to separate from French dominated Cameroon, it would seem that the indigenes of Bakassi are not exactly too eager to rejoin French speaking dominated Cameroon.

Mr. Paul Biya appears to have his hands already full trying to keep Cameroon together, working against the Northern Muslims and English speaking Southern agitators for separation to effectively take on its next door colossus, Nigeria.

To keep his country from fragmenting, Mr. Biya resorted to suppression of freedom of the press. Newspapers are closely monitored by the government and journalists that print material that seem to oppose the government often go missing or jailed by the government. The government owns the only national television, CRTV in the country and essentially controls what is broadcast by the TV and radio networks.

(There are now an independent TV, TV Max and some independent radio stations but these are closely monitored by the government and reporters are harassed should they say anything Mr. Biya does not find to his taste; at least, so said Reporters Without Borders, an international Media rights group.

There are no two ways of saying it: Cameroon appears to have a one man rule with all the attendant dictatorial tendencies. Every now and then, shows of democracy are made but those are exactly that: shows, not substance.

The good news is that despite his high handed rule, Mr. Biya seems to have managed to contribute to economic development in Cameroon. By African standards, Cameroon can be considered to be doing well even though its income par capita is only $800 US. And because of the poor standard of living and other factors, professional Cameroonians are increasingly fleeing to the West. This brain drain impoverishes the country further.

On the whole, Cameroon appears a fairly stable African country, it is yet to be seen whether power can be successfully transferred in a democratic manner? Like most African countries, given its multiethnic make up and consequent conflicts, breakup of the country seems a possibility for Cameroon. Perhaps, it is as well that a strong hand maintains the country’s fragile unity?

AIS African Countries
Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD
[email protected]

Posted by Administrator at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Series on Psychology 2006, #12 of 52: Nigerians and Domestic Violence

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- I will begin this essay by making the following assertion: there is absolutely no difference between men and women except the obvious anatomical ones. Men and women are the same and are equal. In fact, in standardized tests, such as IQ tests, on the average, women tend to do better than men. Any college professor knows that, on the average, women tend to do better than men in his course works.

I found it necessary to begin this essay with the above obvious assertions because I am addressing this essay to Nigerians, a group of people whose cultural heritage somehow gave the false impression that men are better than women. If any one of them has that baggage he must drop it and drop it now.

Culture is organic; it is always growing and changing. Any culture that does not change with the times, like any people that refuse to change with changing times, dies out. Culture must be dynamic and not static.

The times we live in accept equality of men and women, black and white, adults and children and if you have any problem with that reality, you had better go heal your problem. That is all there is to it. One must deal with reality and not take refuge in the past, as scoundrels do.

In some parts of the third world, Nigeria included, it was not unusual for men to beat their wives and children.

Some Nigerian men in the USA do beat their wives and children. They do so physically and or verbally or emotionally or sexually. Physical, verbal, emotional and sexual abuse is a criminal activity and is punishable by American law.

In the part of the USA that I am fairly knowledgeable about, California to Alaska, the law is that if the police is called to a scene where a spouse had abused a spouse (physically, verbally, emotionally and sexually) the police is required to arrest him and take him to jail and book him and jail him. He must, at least, spend a night in jail before he is bailed out. He then goes before a judge to defend himself. The least punishment he can get is one year of domestic violence treatment, also called barterers treatment. This entails that he would be required to go to group therapy, once a week, usually for about ninety minutes. He pays for the treatment out of pocket, usually about fifty dollars a week.

The therapist submits quarterly reports to the court on how the individual is doing. If, in his opinion, the individual has not learned how to cope with anger, he may ask the judge to extend the period he is in treatment. Some brothers have been in such treatments for years on end. Since many of the therapists providing these treatments are white women, they may see hostility in the brother’s relationship with them and judge them as still not respecting women hence keep them in treatment.

Anger management is the least punishment a guy can receive for beating his wife and or children. Not long ago, I went to Los Angeles, California to plead with a judge to release a man who had beaten his wife in the public and was arrested by the police. The judge refused to do so and sentenced him to two years in prison, to, of all places, San Quinton prison, and the worst prison in the State of California. (Since he is a naive country rustic, he is probably being raped by the hardened criminals in that prison.)

The relevant point is that folks do get sentenced to prison for abusing their spouses. No one has a right to abuse another human being, be it physically, verbally, emotionally or sexually. You may not know this fact: every time you touch someone against his or her will you have actually committed a crime. Many high school kids are sent to juvenile detention centers for merely touching a girl’s buttocks against her wishes. Do not touch any one unless they gave you permission to do so. Do not even come close to someone unless they ask you to; three feet or a yard is considered personal space in the American culture, and if you invade people’s personal space they can sue you.

Do not verbally abuse any one unless they are masochists and see you as a sadist and ask you to abuse them.

WHY DO MEN ABUSE WOMEN?


Some men say that they were given the right to beat their wives by their cultures. As far as I know, this is a crock. No culture on earth gives men the right to beat their spouses. Every culture actually seeks extra ways to protect women and children for they are usually the most valued members of society. Without women the species would not reproduce.

POWER AND CONTROL ISSUES

Those who abuse women do so not for cultural reasons but for personal reasons. The currently accepted view is that abusers do so for power and control reasons. Such persons, apparently, want to exercise power and control over those they abuse. As it were, some men have a need to be powerful and exercise total power over their wives and children. They want to dominate their spouses and children.

Apparently, such men see their wives and children as their personal properties and want to control them. Well, no human being is another human being’s personal property. A husband and wife are two friends, two partners who voluntarily agreed to go through the journey of life on earth together, sharing their lives. One does not own the other and if the man somehow sees the wife as his property he is deluded, period. He does not own his wife and children. His children are placed in his temporary stewardship until they grow up and leave him and if for any reason he thinks that he owns them he is smoking something and needs to be disabused of that drug. No human being owns another human being, be it his wife or children.

DELUSIONAL JEALOUSY

Men do not abuse women and children because they are reasonable; no, they abuse them because they are unreasonable, because they are delusional.

Delusional disorder is belief in what is not true as true and acting on the basis of that false belief. There are five types of delusional disorder: grandiose, persecutory, jealous, erotomanic, and somatic.

Briefly, the grandiose type means that the individual believes his self to be too important when, in fact, he is like you and I, ordinary. Believing himself godlike, he may expect his wife to collude with this insanity and beat her up if he thinks that she did not respect his deluded self concept. Thus, he beats his wife and children because they did not respect him.

In persecutory delusion, the individual believes that other people are out to get him, even kill him, when they had no such intentions. Deluded husbands often believe that their wives are planning to do bad things to them and abuse them on that account. Some would believe that the wife is out to poison them and take their money and stop eating her food (and or go marry another wife, only to repeat the same delusional pattern).

Erotomania does not seem to apply to domestic violence. (Here some one, usually a woman, believes that a very important person is in love with her or is her husband.)

Somatic delusional disorder also does not seem to apply to domestic violence. (Here the individual believes that he has a physical sickness and goes from doctor to another seeking treatment when he does not have a sickness, or exaggerates a minor sickness.)

The aspect of delusional disorder that applies most to domestic violence is jealousy. Just about all abusive men have delusional jealousy. These people feel that their wives or girl friends are always cheating on them. The jealous man watches his woman closely to see if she is cheating on him. He would examine her clothing to see if she had sex with other men. Some follow their women around trying to catch them in the act of cheating on him.

The Los Angeles case that I mentioned above had to do with a young Owerri man who believed that his wife was cheating on him. She was not. He would drive around spying on her. One day, he saw her talking to a fellow class mate, both attended Los Angeles City College, and jumped to the false conclusion that they were having an affair and started hitting her, right there in the public. He beat her so badly that she was hospitalized. Since the beating took place in the public domain, apparently a passers by called the police and he was arrested and jailed.

I was called upon to do what I could to help him. The district attorney, a female, did not buy our argument for him to be released to the kindred group for help. He was sentenced to two years at San Quentin.

Many abusers have delusional disorder, jealous type. These people are insane, period. In delusional disorder, the individual has an area of his thinking where he has systematized belief in what is not true as true and otherwise the rest of his intellectual functioning seem rational. Thus, he may believe that his wife is cheating on him, which is not true, and beat her up; while still working as an engineer, that is, being rational in other areas of his life.

GET AWAY FROM THE ABUSER

If you are living with an abuser, a physically, verbally, emotionally, sexually abusive person, you are living with an insane man. You must get out, and get out now. Deluded people can kill, for they do believe their delusions, even though to you what they believe in is not true. Do not minimize the danger you are exposed to, for the insane man can hurt and or kill you, leave him now.

You should leave him and then insist that he go obtain treatment before he sees you and your children. He should not be near the children unless he is obtaining treatment for his mental disorder.

Psychosis is characterized by the presence of delusions and hallucinations. In schizophrenia there is both hallucinations (hearing voices, seeing what is not there as there etc) but in delusional disorder there is no hallucinations. Because the deluded person does not hear voices or see what he is not there, his mind seems intact and he can go to school and be a professional etc. But he is insane, nevertheless. He is insane because he believes in what is not true as true. He does act on the basis of his insane beliefs and could harm or even kill on their account. Therefore, you are risking your life and your children’s lives if you keep staying with a deluded person.

In major US cities, there are safe houses where abused persons can run to. These houses are usually not publicized to prevent the abusive husband from following the spouse to them. If you call a mental health Crisis line they would direct you to such safe houses.


Usually deluded persons do not see themselves as sick. In fact, they have no respect for therapists.

Deluded persons tend to seem rational and engage in facile rationalism. When forced into therapy by the law, they do their best to convince the therapist that he is the sick one, not them.

They are usually very argumentative and will argue forever about how they are right and other people are wrong. They never accept defeat and will never see themselves as wrong.

They do not voluntarily go to therapy; indeed, they consider themselves smarter than therapists and do not believe that they should do what therapists ask them to do.

Most therapists tend to give up on the paranoid character, for on the surface he seems normal but when you get close you see a sick human being who nevertheless does not know that he is sick.


ANGER AND THE PARANOID PERSONALITY

Paranoid persons are usually very prone to anger. Their anger is generally rooted in their grandiosity. They constructed grandiose, that is, big but false, self concepts. They fancy themselves very important persons. They pretend to be very important persons. They present their imaginary very important persons to other people to relate to. If you allow them to fool you and see them as important they feel okay, but if you treat them as if they are not important they feel angry at you.

Their anger is mostly from injured vanity. It is called narcissistic rage, when their pride is affronted they become angry and can kill in that moment of anger. Merely joking around with the paranoid personality, saying something that he feels demeaned him, belittled him, degraded him, humiliated him, insulted him etc could arouse his anger and he acts out violently towards you.

When they feel belittled, and depowered they act out to try to make them selves seem powerful, grandiose power, that is, not real power. These brothers are sick; do not fool around with them.

Please remember that we are not talking about reality here but delusion. What you did may be perfectly rational but the paranoid person misinterprets what you did and feels demeaned by you when you had no intention of insulting him and he acts out against you.

ANGER MANAGEMENT

As noted, the least treatment required by the law for domestic violence perpetrators is anger management/barterers treatment. Let me briefly review this treatment modality. First, let me try to explicate the nature of anger.

Anger is a natural phenomenon. All human beings are prone to anger. In fact, anger has survival aspect to it. Anger and fear are useful for human survival.

When an animal organism feels that his life is threatened, his body unleashes certain neurochemicals that forces his bodily processes to work faster so as to enable him to either run or fight whatever is threatening him.

The flight aspect of this response is called fear; the fight aspect of it is called anger. Fear and anger (the same physiological responses are involved in the two) are used to remove the threat to ones life. These responses are engaged involuntarily.

In fear and anger, the thinking part of the brain, the cortex, shuts down and the individual behaves strictly from the part of the brain we share with other animals. He pours out adrenalin which excites his heart, lungs, nerves etc. His entire body works faster enabling him to fight or run from the danger he perceives to his life. (I will not bother you with the intricacies of this physiological aspect of fear and anger response.)

The individual in fear and anger response is fighting for his life. If, in fact, his life is threatened his fight is realistic. But since his life may not be threatened and only his psychological self is threatened he may not be fighting a realistic fight.

If an individual has a grandiose self concept, that is, sees himself as very important, which he is not, in fact, and that false grandiose self feels that you did not respect it, it feels threatened and reacts with anger. It does not matter that you did not aim not to respect him, what is at work is his misperception of your intention, motive and behavior. The paranoid angry person almost always misinterprets other people’s intentions.

It is the false grandiose self that feels angry in the paranoid character. Thus, he feels that his wife or children did not respect his imaginary important self and feels angry at them and hits them. In effect, he is insane; his anger is a product of his insane thinking processes. His anger is not realistic. But realistic or not, he can still hurt or kill you, the object of his anger.

WALK AWAY, DO NOT ARGUE WITH AN ANGRY PERSON

When the individual feels his life threatened, real or imaginary, he goes into anger mode. He is now a pure animal and is acting from the hypothalamus, not from his reasoning faculty, cortex part of the brain. You, therefore, cannot reason with him. In fact, if you tried to reason with him, you would only succeed in enraging him more.

Paranoids always blame other people, particularly when things go wrong in their lives; nothing is ever their fault, it is always other people’s fault; it is always their wives fault, their children’s fault, their coworkers fault, any body but themselves is at fault. They must see you as faulty and themselves as the perfect ones.

Paranoids want to seem perfect, to be godlike and therefore cannot afford to seem blameworthy so they must project blame to other people even if there is no one to be blamed. They want to be perfect and you imperfect; they want to win and you to lose. So when they are angry and you try to reason with them they see you as trying to make them lose and that redoubles their desire to win hence they would not listen to you.

Therefore, never argue with an angry man. If your husband gets angry, just walk away from him. That is the best thing that you can do.

When you leave the immediate vicinity of the angry person, you remove the stimulus (you) making him angry. He is then able to calm down…his body reverses the hormones it poured out or destroys them via complex enzyme activity.

As long as you are in front of the angry person, he would continue to be angry. So leave. Do not say one word; just leave him.

Even if you are right, which probably is the case, let him believe that he is right, gratify his delusion of always being correct and others wrong. Humor him please. It is necessary that you do so, for your safety may depend on your not saying anything.

If the angry person blocks your way, as irate husbands often do, stay calm and say nothing. If you are calm and do not show fear and weakness, he would not feel that you are about to attack him. If you are flustered and angry, he may believe that you are about to attack him and attack you some more, this time, with the delusional belief that he is protecting himself. Moreover, the angry person acts like a terrorist and uses intimidation to arouse fear in you and in doing so control you. Ultimately, do whatever you can to get out of his sight.

WALKING AWAY

In case you are the one with anger reaction, and want to manage your anger, anger management consists in understanding the PHYSIOLOGY OF ANGER RESPONSE. Watch when your body starts to become excited.

Let us say that you are talking to some one and he called you a nasty name. You feel insulted and start feeling angry. You notice physiological changes in your body. Your heart pounds faster, your lungs bit faster, your body releases sugar and your blood carries it to the muscles preparing them to fight the person who put you down. When you try to talk you TALK RAPIDLY, for your nervous system is working faster, sending and retrieving information from your brain. Your FIST CLINCHES, preparing you to hit that person. Your face turns RED (FACE) as blood is rushed to it and to your muscles and they TENSE UP, PREPARING YOU TO FIGHT.

The first thing to do in anger management is to notice physiological changes in your body. If you notice them, do one thing and one thing only: WALK AWAY FROM THE STIMULUS.

Leave the presence of the person that makes you angry. Just leave him, for if you stay you might hit him and both of you might get into a fight. Leave the stimulus. When you leave him your body calms down.

If you cannot leave, say your boss is saying what makes you feel angry and you can not just get up and leave, then COUNT TO TWENTY. Do so quietly. Preferably, count backwards: twenty, nineteen, eighteen etc. The idea is to give your brain an abstract mathematical function to perform and that way trick it to ignore the threat in front of you. Try counting, it works.

Try to BREATHE SLOWLY. Inhale slowly and hold your breathe for a while, and then let it out slowly. When you breathe in oxygen it helps to calm your over excited cells and neutralize the carbon dioxide that builds in your body as it becomes heated during anger response.

When angry your skin feels hot, for through the pores on your skin your overheated body is trying to reduce the heat in your body. The air you exhale from your nose is also hot, for you are getting rid of heated energy from inside your body. The various chemical reactions taking place inside your body when you are angry or fearful produce heat that your body must get rid of.

If slow breathing does not work for you try VISUALIZING BEAUTIFUL SCENES. Imagine yourself walking on a beach, walking in a rose garden, or doing anything thing that you find relaxing.

Ultimately, the best way to manage your anger is to get away from the situation that is making you angry. Take a walk. A thirty to sixty minutes walk is the best thing that you can do when you are angry. (If you have a gym go work out for that amount of time; or go run, swim, ride your bicycle, or engage in any VIGOROUS EXERCISE that would help you burn off the excitatory neurochemicals your body poured out during anger response.

PROCESSING THE ANGER

When you have taken your time out and calmed down and feel that you are now rational, again, you can then process the anger. Talk about it as calm as is possibly. But as longer as you are still angry, please do not talk about it. If it takes you a month, even a year to calm down take that amount of time before you talk about it to the person who made you angry.

In anger your brain has shut down the rational part of it and is now in the irrational animal attack mode. Take your time and feel calm before you talk to the person who made you angry.
In the meantime, you can process your anger on paper. Write in your journal. Type your feelings but do not show it to the person who made you angry, remember he thinks that he is right and you are wrong, particularly if he is the paranoid type.

If you have a mature friend that you trust go and talk to him about the incident that made you angry, this helps to get it off your chest, to vent.

TAKING OWNERSHIP FOR ANGER RESPONSE

In barterers groups, the first goal is to convince the barterer who beats up on his spouse and children that he is not right, as he generally believes that he is. The Owerri man who beat his wife senseless and was sent to jail still believes that he is right and her wrong. As he sees it, why was she talking to that man? Never mind that the man was a fellow class mate and that both of them had assignments to do together. It never even crossed her mind to cheat on him. We are not talking reason here, we are talking insanity. The brother is insane and in his insanity believes himself right and his wife wrong. That is where he is at. The goal of therapy is to show him that he is not always right.

Epictetus, a Roman philosopher, says that though you do not have control over environmental stimuli you have control over how you interpret and respond to it. You do not have control over another person calling you a bad name but you can choose to see the event differently.

So he called you a nigger, eh? That makes you angry? If another person makes you angry you have given your power to him. You can keep your power and not feel angry and instead see him as an idiot, for if he were reasonable he would not be trying to put you or any one down.

A healthy human being appreciates the human condition, understands that living on earth is already a depressing business, and tries his best to make all the people to feel happy; he does not depress folks.

You can choose to respond with anger, fear, sadness, shame, anger etc to others behavior; it is all up to you. How you respond to others behaviors is up to you.

The only power we have is the power of choice. We choose how we respond to environmental events. We have the free will to choose, to decide how we respond to others behaviors. (As I pointed out lest week, we can choose to see others attack on us as a call for us to forgive and love them.)

CONGNITIVE BEHAVIOR THERAPY


Most anger management therapists, in some form or other, employ Albert Ellis Rational Emotive Therapy, the ABC method. I have essentially reviewed it in the above statements. It entails your choosing how you respond to others behaviors. You do not have to simply respond with fear or anger; you can reorient yourself to respond differently to the same situation.

Cognitive reorientation and reconstruction is the goal of cognitive behavior therapy. You can see the same world differently and behave differently. The choice is yours to make.

NIGERIANS TENDENCY TO RATIONALIZE THE IRRATIONAL, ANGER

Over the years, I observed how Nigerians behave towards their wives and children. Whereas some of them tend to respect their wives and children, many of them tend to abuse them. They are very disrespectful of their spouses.

Many of them rationalize this uncivilized behavior. They look you straight in the face and tell you that their culture permits them to insult their family members. It never occurs to them that if they disrespect their wives and children that they are giving them low self esteem and that those with low self esteem tend not to do well in the outer world. If you make your wife to feel bad about herself she will raise children who do not feel good about themselves. That way you produce progeny who are not going to do well in the world of work. Common sense tells one to respect ones wife and children, to make them feel like the best persons in life, and they are, actually.

Children go to school and if their teachers see them as unhappy and ask them what happened and they tell the teachers that their fathers yelled at them, there is trouble for the fathers. The teacher tells the school counselor who reports it to the State’s Children’s Protective Services. A social worker visits the child’s home and before you know it, he or she is removed from the home and placed in a foster home. The father is deemed abusive and told to go seek anger management before he can see his child again.


CHANGE OF SELF CONCEPT/SSELF IMAGE

If you have an anger problem the chances are that you have a self concept, self image problem.

Each of us constructs a self concept, who you think that you are, during his childhood. The self concept is then translated into a pictorial form, a self image. Thus, each of us has a self concept and self image.

The self concept is constructed with building blocks like our inherited genes and our social experiences. Building on those and the information available to us, each of us constructs a self concept for himself.

By and large, the majority of the people tend to have realistic self concepts. That is, they see themselves as the same and equal to other people.

Unfortunately, some persons construct unrealistic self concepts and self images. Somehow they see themselves as superior to other people or want to seem superior to other people.

Those who want to seem better than other people generally have personality disorders, including narcissistic and paranoid personality disorders. Those who actually believe that they are better than other people are deluded, that is psychotic, they are no longer operating in the world of reality since in reality we are all the same and equal.

We are the children of one family; we are members of God’s one family. Whether you like it or not, all human beings, black and white, man and woman, adult and child, are the same and are equal.

God created us equal and it is not up to you to decide who is better than other persons. You are not the creator of human beings and have no business imagining yourself as better than other people.

Those who desire to be better than other people tend to be the ones who engage in unnecessary anger tantrums. When they feel that other people did not recognize their imaginary big selves they act out. They may act out verbally or physically. Their narcissistic rage is designed to make them seem powerful; to rehabilitate their felt diminished self worth.

These people need to deconstruct their false self constructs. They have to deconstruct the self they made during their childhood. Now, as adults, they have to accept reality, as it is, and construct a realistic self construct, one that sees them as the same and coequal with all people, men and women, adult and children.

If you have an anger problem, you have a self concept problem. Therefore, deconstruct your self construct and reconstruct it on a rational footing. Give up the wish to be superior. It is will of the wisp. You cannot be superior to any human being, no matter how much you try. Indeed, if you believe that you are better than others you have left neurosis and are now psychotic.

The anger prone person has a faulty self concept and self image and needs to work on it, to change it so that he comes to see himself as the same and equal with all persons. In as much as he tended to see himself as superior to his wife and children he must now come to see them as his equals. You must see yourself as equal with your wife and children.

A sense of sameness and equality is the indicator of sanity. At any moment you wish to be better than other people you are neurotic and if you believe that wish you are psychotic.

SOME METAPHYSICS

Some observers point out that it is the wish for superiority that led to the formation of our empirical world. In their view, in eternity, in God, in spirit, in heaven we are perfectly the same and are equal and know that God created us. But we resented that God created us and want to create ourselves and create each other. That is, we wanted to seem better than God and each other. That desire for specialness led to the formation of this world, the dream of the opposite of God, opposite of love, opposite of sameness, opposite of equality, opposite of union, a world of separation and differences.

Each of us must reverse the wish that led to the invention of this world, the desire for personal superiority. Each of us must reconstruct his self concept to one of perfect equality and oneness with all people.

When this is accomplished, one is now only capable of loving all people. One no longer resorts anger in a foolish effort to solve interpersonal conflicts through violence. One practices forgiveness and love, for they make for peace on earth.


In the here and now, if you have anger management issues, please go seek professional help for it. You do not have a right to hit your wife and children; you do not have a right to verbally abuse any one. You should love members of your family and all people. Read as many books as is possible on the subject of anger.


CONCLUSION
My goal in this essay is to call the attention of my fellow Nigerians to the problem of anger and domestic violence that is apparently rampant in our community. We must stop sweeping this problem under the rug. We must bring it out of the closet and into the open and deal with it.
If you have ever hit your spouse or child and or have anger issues, do not deny that you have anger issues; please go seek professional help for your anger problem.

[email protected]

Posted by Administrator at 08:20 AM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Series on Psychology 2006, #11 of 52: Children's Mental Health Issues

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- Some time ago, I visited a Nigerian in a different state from the one that I live at. This man and his wife are rich; I mean rich. They are probably millionaires? They have several houses in the city they live at and have at least six luxurious cars. They live in a six bedroom mansion. By all accounts this couple has made it, they have arrived.

The couple has four children ranging from four to twelve years. They brought their mother from Nigeria to take care of their children while they are out making money. They left house before seven in the morning and seldom came back before nine in the evening.
What is the problem with this picture, you ask? Don’t you like the smell of money? Are you jealous or something? Get out of here.
The problem is the couple’s children. The three of them at a nearby elementary school were all in special education classes, that is, classes for children judged mentally deficient.
Here is the picture. In the morning, the children walked to the school, only a few blocks from their house. School is over at 3PM and they walked home. Grandma was there and stayed with them. They watched TV and did whatever they could to entertain themselves. Grandma does not speak English (she speaks Pidgin English) so the kids really could not relate to her and generally amused themselves the best way they know how. Essentially, there is no one around to help them do their homework. By the time their parents are back from their work the children are in bed. The parents are generally out of the house in the morning before the children get up from bed so it is up to grandma to get them up and get them ready for school.
When I stayed with this very generous couple, I had nothing to do in the evenings, so I decided to help the children with their homework. We would sit by the humongous kitchen table and do their arithmetic, English, science and social science assignments.
On weekends, I took the children to the gym and had them swim; I played basketball with them; I worked out with weights; we played table tennis and tennis. In fact, the oldest boy began running with me (I run every other morning, five miles, at last). On the whole the children had an adult play with them, a new experience for them. Their parents are busy working hard to have the time to go do fun things with them. As you can imagine, the children developed strong attachment to me. The bonding was so strong that some wanted to go home with me. Nigerians, generally, do not play with their children. Some of them think that they are too important to go play soccer with their children. This is very unfortunate, for there is nothing more joyous than playing with ones children. I used to run with my son, Obi, and no wonder he runs for his university.
One day, I walked the children to their school and out of curiosity decided to talk to their teachers. I talked to all three teachers, primarily to find out why the children were judged special education material…they seemed to me like normal, averagely intelligent children and I expected them to be in regular classes. After talking to the teachers, I went to talk to the school psychologist. I asked her why the children were placed in classes for the mentally challenged, whether she tested them and found them deficient. She told me that she received information from teachers that the children were not doing well in school and requested permission from their parents to test them but that they refused. Since they were nevertheless not doing well she sent them to special education classes. I told her that I thought that the children were normal average kids and that with special effort that they would return to regular classes.
In the couple of weeks that I stayed with this fine couple, I taught the children the basics of arithmetic’s: addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, fractions, decimals, ratios etc. In fact, I began teaching the twelve year old algebra, geometry and trigonometry. I brought them up to snuff with the basics of English grammar, science and social science. Before I left town, I went back to the school and insisted that the children be returned to regular classes; one was.
My encounter with these children got me thinking about the plight of Nigerian children.
Nigerian children, like children everywhere in the world, have psychological issues but seldom do their parents have an inkling of what is going on with them. Many Nigerian parents just assume that their children are okay and that that is all there is to it. Poor fellows.
Nigerian children, like children everywhere, suffer from the whole array of psychological problems found in children. In this essay, I will briefly review the major psychological issues found in children. My goal is for parents to be aware of them and observe their children to see if they show signs of them and if so take them to mental health professionals who are equipped to handle such problems.
What is my qualification regarding children’s mental health? Long ago, I was a licensed therapist and worked as children’s therapist, then supervised a bunch of children’s therapists in a children’s psychiatric hospital. I have done just about every job there is to do in the mental health field. At any rate, it is up to you to listen or not. My self assigned task is to share information with you; what you do with it is your issue, not mine.
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is divided into to several sections: one section is devoted to children’s mental health issues, another to organic mental disorder issues, a third is devoted to drug and alcohol issues and another section is devoted to adult functional, as opposed to organic, mental health issues. If you are interested in today’s subject, please peruse the relevant section of the DSM. You can also write to me and request a list of books on Developmental Psychology, that is, children’s psychology.


There are many psychological issues first encountered in childhood. I cannot possibly cover all of them. What I will do is briefly define the major ones that you are likely to encounter. They are separation anxiety, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, reactive attachment disorder, Asperger’s disorder, Down ’s syndrome, mental retardation etc.
Separation anxiety is seen in children during their first days of school. The child’s mother takes him or her to school and he does not want to be left at school and cries and wants to go home with the mother. He does not want to be left at school to be with strangers. I can speak from personal experience here, for I had terrible separation anxiety. At age five, my mother took me to school and I would not let her go. I simply clung to her legs and did not want to let her go. I cried my little heart out. Go she had to go and after a few weeks of this scenario I got somewhat adjusted to the school environment.
What is going on here is that the child has anxiety issues. Anxiety is exaggerated fear. All people have felt fear and therefore know what anxiety is. Anxiety is feeling of fear in a situation that should not arouse fear in people. In fear the individual’s heart pounds fast, he breathes fast, his nervous system works rapidly, he experiences a powerful urge to run (flight or fight response). These physiological responses are mediated by neurotransmitters. I am not going to get into the science of anxiety disorder, let me just say that neuroscience has shown that anxious children are born that way and inherited quick danger alerting system in their bodies.
(If you are interested in this research, please see Jerome Kegan’s efforts at Harvard University; also see Isaac Marks writing on anxiety.)
The anxious child feels fearful when there is no threat to his life and experiences an urge to run, hence he clings to his mother’s legs for protection. This problem is generalized: such children tend to be anxious across board. In fact, they tend to develop social anxiety (sociophobia) and or avoidant personality (fear of others rejection and avoiding people to avoid rejection). Some such children may develop obsessesive compulsive disorder and any of the anxiety related personality disorders.
Some children tend to have opposition defiance disorder, ODD. Where this problem exists, you can see it in nine year old children. Such children do not want any adult to tell them what to do. They resent their parents and teachers telling them what to do. They are constantly in power struggle with adults, resenting being told what to do. While resenting adult authority they gladly conform to their peer groups demands on them. Indeed, they may even accept leadership from the leader of their cohort.
If not handled properly, ODD children tend to drop out of school and go do their own things. As adults, they tend to be oppositional to authority figures and do not listen to their bosses and tend to be fired by bosses or simply quit their jobs because they do not want to be pushed around “by the freaking, god damned son of a bitch of a boss”.
These children simply do not want any one to tell them what to do with their “freaking lives”.
I have written extensively on this subject and do not plan to repeat myself here. Why some children do not want adults to tell them what to do has always intrigued me, since I am somewhat of a rebel myself. This resentment of adult authority is probably rooted in the child’s desire for autonomy and separation from the whole, God and man.
Some children have conduct disorder. In addition to not listening to adults, as ODD children do, they engage in anti social behaviors; they steal, tell lies and beat up other children etc. If not helped, such children tend to progress to adult antisocial personality disordered persons.
By elementary school age, you can already make out children with conduct disorder; they usually start smoking early, drink alcohol early, and do drugs early. (Visualize the twelve year old boy in your secondary school who tells lies, smokes cigarettes, drinks alcohol, gets into fights with other boys, and generally does not bother with other people’s well being.)
Conduct disordered children tend to be self centered and do not care for other people and do not feel guilty or remorseful for their hurtful behaviors. These children are heading towards criminal behavior and eventually to jail, their adult home. Their encounter with the law generally starts around age fourteen when they are arrested for law breaking and sent to juvenile detention centers. Thereafter, it is in and out of correctional facilities until they are burned out in their forties.
Some children have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD. These children are hyper active and cannot sit still for twenty minutes without fidgeting. Their minds tend to wander all over the place and they are unable to concentrate on their class work. They are every teacher’s nightmare; they are disruptive of the class process.
These days’ teachers generally refer them to school psychologists who test them and refer them to physicians for medications. The various psychoactive stimulants (Ritalin, Adderol etc) seem to have paradoxical effect on these children: calm them down. That which stimulates adults calms them down. Coffee also calms them down. This problem is very pervasive in American schools and no one quite understands why the sudden increase in ADHD.
There are all kinds of speculations as to what causes ADHD and its milder form ADD. Some attribute causal factors to dysfunctions in the brain; others see it as a result of ingesting too much sugar, yet others see it as a product of the break down of parental authority in society. (These days if you raised your voice at your children and or punished them corporally you could be arrested and jailed for child abuse.)
Suffice it to say that we do not yet know what caused this problem. At any rate, in this essay, I am not interested in a causal analysis; I am just pointing out some childhood issues that you may want to know about.
Some children have autism. Here the child looks normal but does not care to socialize with other children. He keeps to himself and occasionally self stimulates (strikes his head on the wall etc).
Some children have a milder form of autism called reactive attachment disorder or Asperger’s disease. They do not know how to get alone with their peers and just want to be left alone. They develop poor social skills as result.
I have written extensively on this disorder. I think that it has to do with not loving and caring for children. If a child is not loved and is emotionally abandoned he tends to learn to build a psychological wall around himself and not want anything to do with other people. As it were, he says: if you relate to people, they will hurt and or abandon you, so don’t even bother relating to them; keep to yourself.
Children who were raised in orphanages and or placed in numerous foster homes where they were either abused or ignored tend to develop reactive attachment disorder.
Since many Nigerians really do not pay attention to their children their children tend to feel emotionally abandoned and develop some forms of reactive attachment disorder.
Some children have Downs’ syndrome. These children inherited serious Chromosomal deficits which are generally severe enough to make them less educable; they tend to think concretely, not the abstract thinking required for education. In the past this disorder used to be called Mongolism, for such children look oriental even if they are born in Africa. Women over age 35 are more likely to have children with Downs’s syndrome than younger women.
Some children have mental retardation. Every parent has the illusion that his or her child is a genius but the fact is that children have different levels of intelligence.
IQ testing breaks down as follows: IQ under 70 is mental retardation. IQ 85-115 is average intelligence. IQ of 118-128 is above average intelligence. IQ over 132 is superior.
Generally, about 2% of the population has mental retardation, 2% has superior intelligence, 90% has normal intelligence and about 6% has above average intelligence.
The most used IQ test instruments are WAIS for adults, WISC and Stanford Binnet for children.
If a child tests out below 70, he is generally unable to learn in regular classrooms and cannot really graduate from elementary school. It takes average intelligence to do school work and certainly to complete secondary school.
If you want to know how smart you are, hence how smart your children are, take IQ tests. But you pretty much already know your intelligence level. If you were mostly a C student, you are average. If you were mostly a B student you are above average. If you consistently were an A student you are gifted. Of course, it all depends on the type of school that you attended, for an A in a yucky school is a C in an outstanding school.
For our present purposes, some children have mental retardation and are usually sent to special education classes until they turn eighteen and are seldom able to read or write beyond the first few grade levels.
High intelligence is not correlated with success in adult life; what it is correlated with is ability to do well at school.
If your child has high IQ you had better send him to a school for the mentally gifted if you do not want him to be bored by the drivel taught at public schools. Every school district in the USA has a school for exceptional children. These children tend to learn quickly and tend to feel bored and may get into mischief unless you give them more difficult tasks to perform. They thrive on solving difficult intellectual problems.

Most children, like most adults, are normal, psychologically and mentally. That is to say that at least 90% of the children at a typical school are normal children and do not give teachers a hard time. Schools are geared towards the normal-average child. As in adult life, some children are not normal.
The seriously intelligent child, the child prodigy, is not a normal child; in fact, he finds other children too silly to play with. As a matter of fact, he finds most adults too idiotic to worth his time. I had such a child in my Sunday school class at my church. He was only ten years old and knew more physics, chemistry and biology than university students. He graduated from Harvard before his peers entered university.
Then there is the reality of the mentally deficient; there are the children with anxiety issues; and finally there are children with conduct issues.
This is the real world. The real world exists in Nigeria, as it exists every where else. Nigerians tend to think that just because they do not think about these psychological issues that they do not exist.
Nigerians are human beings and suffer from the whole array of psychological problems human beings are prone to. If you randomly select one hundred Nigerians, you will see that two of them are psychotic, six of them have personality disorders, two of them are mentally gifted, two of them are mentally retarded and ninety of them are average and normal. This is reality. It is as simple as that. You can wish all you want to, facts are facts.
If you are trained in psychology and you relate to people you can see the whole array of mental health issues in the people before you. There is nothing you can do about it for such is life, cest la vie. You cannot make a dull chap brilliant just by wishing for it. Nor can you make a normal person a neurotic by wishing for it.
Most people are the way they are because of a combination of inherited biological constitution and social experiences. You cannot change them. All that you can do is work with them as they are, without illusions that you can change them. You are not God and cannot change people. However, if these problems are found in children there is a lot that we can do to help them before they become rigid and inflexible in their dysfunctionality.

My recommendation is for you to observe your children. The chances are that they are pretty much normal and do normally at school and society. But if you see some of the problems that I briefly mentioned above, please take the child to mental health professionals for help. Put away your pride and go get your children help. If you have the resources, it might be useful to have your children tested for intelligence and personality. These tests are very expensive and will probably set you back a thousand dollars.
Nigerian children have the issues children all over the world have and there is no use pretending that they are different. They are not.
In American schools Nigerian children are increasingly relegated to special education classes. Get involved with your children’s education, help them do their homework; that way you will prevent your children from being sent to classes for dumb kids.
Many white persons assume that just being black makes one unintelligent, thus if your child shows the least sign of not following what the teacher is doing, it is off he goes to Special Ed. His issue may not be intelligence but poor language skills, poor culture skills etc. As a matter of fact, if your child is brainy and was tested and scored very high the chances are that the white psychologist may doubt it. I remember taking the IQ test and the white psychologist not believing that an African can be smart and had several others test me, all with similar results.
Please pay attention to your children’s education. The world out there makes wrong assumptions about Africans and it is up to us to correct those assumptions.


COUNSELING

If your child has any of the identified issues mentioned above get him into therapy. Whereas I am not proposing to do therapy here, I will briefly mention some of the therapeutic modalities available for children. They are individual, family, group and play therapy, and these days, medications or, as it is also called, pharmacotherapy.
Therapists make the assumption that a child is a member of a family. He is intricately connected into the web of family: father, mother and siblings. This family triangle (triangulation) is the child’s world.
The family is a system where member’s behaviors affect other members. What one member does is reacted to by other members and adjusted to and that reaction sets in motion responses from other members. The child cannot be outside his family system and wily nily must adjust to it. His personality is, in fact, largely influenced by his manner of adjusting to his family system. Personality is shaped by biological factors, the family climate and peer relationships. The family web is crucial in forming the child’s future patterns of behaving in the larger society.
Most children have normal families and adapt to them. Some families are abnormal…dysfunctional families. Children exposed to dysfunctional families form dysfunctional patterns of relationships.
Consider a family where the father is an alcoholic. The mother probably copes by playing the role of the enabler, making excuses for his behavior. She learns to tell lies for him. When he is too drunk to be able to go to work she calls his work place and tells them lies, such as say that he is sick. By and large, she does things that prevent him from taking the consequences of his problematic behavior, such as get fired from his job.
The alcoholic father creates a whole lot of problems for all members of the family and the children adjust to the dysfunctional home individually. In this pathological family, one child may play the role of the hero, another rescuer, another scapegoat, another rebel and yet another mascot etc.
The hero intervenes and does what the emotionally absent father is supposed to do and essentially becomes the man of the house. The rescuer does what helps every person in the hurting family. The scapegoat does things to get into trouble with the law and society. The mascot or family clown tries to become a comedian so as to reduce the tension he sees in the family.
Each child develops a pattern of behavior and takes it to the larger world. The clown tries to make his classmates and later all people happy, the rescuer devotes his life to helping other people (as I am doing here), the hero saves every body around him, the scapegoat or family rebel is always getting into trouble so that other people would rescue him, or talk about his issues. The scapegoat, in time, get into so much trouble that eventually he brings the family to the attention of authorities who then require them to be in therapy. The identified patient actually helps all members of the family to receive the help they desperately need.
The salient point is that people develop behavior patterns in their families, patterns of behavior that they take to other arenas in their lives and act them out there.
To help a child, therapists, therefore, want to do family therapy with him. They invite the entire family to sessions, usually for an hour or more a week. They observe the family’s interaction patterns, family dynamics, and note dysfunctional pasterns, if any, and try to intervene and get everybody to behave differently.
Consider a very common family pattern in Nigeria: husbands as terrorists. Many Nigerian husbands are psychological terrorists; they use fear to intimidate their wives and children to obey them. As a result, they produce members who are essentially fearful persons, persons who are afraid to use their God given minds to think for themselves. Children who come from family milieu where they were not encouraged to think tend not to be creative, whereas children who were encouraged to think and their opinions were respected tend to think and contribute to social discourse in a meaningful manner.
We have some psychological terrorists on Naijapolitics; they try to intimidate folks to think as they want them to think and if you dare think freely they go on a campaign of intimidation. I have in mind two Igbo engineers on the forum; both are terrorists and need serious psychotherapy. One has to dismiss them as psychologically stunted and warped fellows and delete their silly posts, all efforts to intimate folks into conforming to their half baked positions on social issues.
For our present purposes, some families terrorize their children and make them fearful persons. Family therapy enables them to learn to love and respect each other.
No therapist can work with a child without doing some family therapy, for the child is an intricate member of a family system and is affected by members of the family. You cannot heal him and have him go back and adjust to a dysfunctional family. You have to heal the entire family if you want to heal the child.
Therapists do individual sessions with children. They use whatever methodology they have to try to deal with the child’s issues. Question: how would you help a child with oppositional defiant disorder? How about if I gave you an assignment to read three books on that subject? Do so.
Your child may not be listening to you and you may be in constant power struggle with him. Each of you digs in your heel, trying to win and the other to loose. You see yourself as right and your child as wrong; he does the same. So who is going to win this battle of wills?
Find out a better way to handle your child’s need for autonomy and share power with him while still guiding him, setting boundaries and limits for him. There are many good books on how to raise children. I can think of the one I used to use called 1-2-3 Magic (it is also in videos). It teaches parents how to ask for time-outs and discipline their children without resorting to physical violence.
(All adolescents go through a rebellious phase where they do not like to listen to their parents. This is a natural development and is not the same thing as opposition defiance. Each adolescent must reject his parents and their values so as to go out there and find out who he is and define himself. You must therefore distinguish between normal teenage rebellions from ODD. The ODD teenager will stay out all night long if you ask him to come home at a certain time, will quit going to school if you insist on him doing so etc. The ODD child is a rebel without a course.)

Each therapist gravitates to particular methodology in his psychotherapy. There are tons of psychotherapies out there. I used to practice Adlerian and Cognitive Behavior Therapy.
Alfred Adler teaches that children feel inferior and want to feel superior and that most of their acting out behavior is rooted in their efforts to seem powerful; as Adler sees it, children want to have control and mastery over their world. He teaches parents how to handle this power issue in children.
Cognitive behavior therapists like Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck teach how to use reasoning to correct folks distorted thinking patterns. Change cognitions and change behavior and teach new patterns of thinking and behaving.
As the Roman philosopher, Epictetus said: it is not what is happening out there that makes you anxious, sad, or angry but how you interpret and respond to it. You can interpret stimuli differently and respond to them differently.
Suppose a white racist calls you put down names. You can respond to him with anger or with compassion. He is a stimulus but the type of response you exhibit is up to you. For example, the two Nigerian bullies on naija politics are so out of control that instead of being angry at them one can learn to pity them. They do not need to make you angry. You can choose how you respond to them.

You can teach children how to think in a rational manner and behavior in socially appropriate manners.

Many therapists employ group therapy in working with children. Here a number of kids are in a group and process their issues within the group. Group therapy is useful for it teaches interpersonal skills. We are social animals and must live together; groups help us learn how to get along with other members of our society. In group sessions, problems are solved through every members input. Members not only receive feedback from other members but learn that their problems are not unique to them, that other people have similar problems. This makes them feel not alone in the world.
Consider the anxious child. He is afraid of other people. He is afraid of speaking up in the group. He often experiences stage freight in classrooms particularly when teachers call upon him to come to the front of the classroom and speak, such as answer questions. He feels that if he spoke up that other people would think that he is no good, is unintelligent and as a result reject him. He does not want to be rejected by other people, so he keeps quiet in the group, classroom etc.
One can use group’s sessions to teach the shy, socially avoidant child to overcome his timidity and become assertive rather than passive or aggressive. He can learn that he can speak up in groups and that even if he is rejected by a few members that it is not the end of the world. He can be taught assertiveness skills.
In assertiveness one says ones bit and protects ones rights without putting other people down, without disrespecting other people. In aggressive communication one disrespects other people in pursuit of ones rights. In passive communication style one allows other people to walk all over one; one is a door mat. Obviously the aggressive person does not get what he wants for he alienates people and they oppose him; the passive person is ignored by other people. It is the assertive person who mostly gets what he wants out of life

Very young children are mostly treated with play therapy. Children learn mostly through playing, so the therapist can play with the child and through doing so help to identify his issues, solve them and teach him new social skills. There are many good books on play therapy, browse through some of them.

These days’ psychiatrists are increasingly resorting to using medications in treating children. I know six year old children who are already on anti depressants such as Paxil, Zoloft and Prozac. I know ten year old children who are on the various neuroleptic medications, such as Risperdal, Seraquel, Geodom, Zyprexa etc. I know six year old children already on Lithium, Tegretol and Depakote. I know children on psychostimulants.
Obviously, sometimes medications are called for but to subject six year old children to these psychotropic medications, medications with serious side effects? I will let you decide that one for your child. All that I can say is that if I had a child who had, say, ADHD, I would use behavior management to deal with his issues rather than medications.
(The psychological issues that your children have probably run in your family and you ought to know how to solve them through observing your family tradition. For example, if you are shy and anxious the chances are that one of your parents is shy and anxious. Indeed, if you have a certain type of personality the chances are that other members of your family have it. Family genes and culture determines similar behaviors in members. If you have successfully learned how to cope with your own issues the chances are that you can help your children cope with their issues.)
I am not in the business of giving medical advice. I am only trying to explain the various psychological problems found in children. If you see these problems in your children, it is up to you and your doctor what you do about them. What you should not do is ignore them and think that they would go away. They do not go away and need to be dealt with.
You see what is going on in Nigeria. Parents see their children developing conduct disorder and ignore it. The children grow up to become antisocial personalities and go into politics and transform their office into avenue from which they rob the country down. If we are going to change Nigeria we have to start by paying attention to our children, making sure that they are taught prosocial behaviors and that they internalize appropriate social norms. The climate of every behavior goes that exists in Nigeria is obviously not sustainable. Civilization cannot exist in the chaotic, anarchic milieu that is contemporary Nigeria.
Civilization, as Sigmund pointed out in Civilization and its Discontents, requires repressing Id instincts (sex, aggression) in children and sublimating them to prosocial behaviors. The price of civilization is suppressing our putative anti social proclivities.
If you give free rein to all desires and wishes then you live in a jungle. The jungle is not the best place to live, for as Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) reminds us, in it the strong eat the weak and consequently life is perpetually nasty, brutish and short. We need to discipline the little savages called children, and make them respect the laws of society.

CONCLUSION

My goal in this essay is to point out the psychological issues seen in children. I am not aiming at showing how to heal them. If the reader believes that his children have some of these issues, he should take them to mental health professionals (psychiatrists, psychologists and clinical social workers) for help. Do me a favor, will you, do not ignore your children’s issues for they do not go away, they get worse. If you need evidence, look at Nigeria and see what ignoring children’s needs have done? If we want a better tomorrow, we must take good care of our children today.

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March 01, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Series on Psychology 2006, #10 of 52: Igbo Culture and Paranoia

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- SYNOPSIS OF IGBO CULTURE: Igbo culture is characterized by individualism and competition. The culture is not ascriptive and does not recognize status as inherent in persons. It is achievement oriented; it encourages people to do their best. People are socially rewarded on the bases of their individual achievements.

There is an Igbo saying that “if a child washes his hands well he eats with elders”. This means that if an individual does what the culture expects of him, is outstanding in lines of work approved by society; he is rewarded with high social status. No matter where the child began in life, if he attains valued social variables he is rewarded with social acceptance. Social importance is predicated on achievement; it is not inherent in the individual’s birth.

(See Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, for description of traditional Igbo society. The chief character of the book, Okonkwo, was born by a poor man and “washed his hands well”, did what his society rewarded and despite his impoverished background achieved high social status. Along the line, he developed paranoid personality disorder.)

Igbo society is very conditional in accepting its children. It encourages children to do what society expects of them and accepts them to the extent that they do so. If a child is good at sports, school, and work and generally succeeds he is seen as an important person, but if he is not good at doing those valued social activities, he is generally regarded as a social nobody, a fool and is either ignored or out rightly rejected.

A failure in Alaigbo is called all sorts of names, including Anuoha (bush animal), Okpokoro manu (useless person). Often times, he is not permitted to speak in Umuna (kindred) meetings. When he tries to speak up at such meetings, the successful members of the group shout him down by saying: “do not listen to that okpokoro manu”.

Igbo culture is very competitive; it allocates social honors on the basis of competition. It is democratic and republican. It rewards entrepreneurship. (I doubt that socialism and communism can take hold in this capitalistic society.)

Many psychologists recognize that conditional acceptance of people, particularly children, is tailor made to produce neurotics.

A neurotic (see Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth) is a person who constructs an ideal self-concept and its image form, ideal self image for himself and wants to become that person. Generally, he presents his ideal self concept to society to approve and relate to. He is afraid of being his real self, particularly if it is not good enough, as defined by society, lest it is rejected by society. Afraid of social rejection, he pretends to be the ideal self he invented for himself, a self that seems to meet the acceptance criteria of his society.

Since that ideal self is not who he is, in fact, he is afraid of not seeming it. Thus, he lives with tremendous anxiety from fear of not being his idealized self concept and self image. (See Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution; Carl Rogers, Client Centered Therapy.)

Generally, the cure for neurosis is for the individual to desist from trying to be his wished for superior, ideal and perfect self and simply be who he is, in fact, his real self (whatever that is). When the individual stops aspiring after an ego ideal and accepts his actual self he tends to relax, feel less tense and lives in peace and happiness.

THE NEGATIVE EFFECT OF CONDITIONAL SOCIAL-SELF ACCEPTANCE

As long as the individual tries to approximate his wished for ideal self, he tends to live in tension, stress and anxiety. When he stops doing so, he feels like a great deal of weight has been lifted off his shoulders; he breathes easier.

A human being is psychologically healthy to the extent that he is not pretending to be ideal self. A healthy person is a person who accepts himself as he is and presents that real self, imperfect as it may be, to other people and tells them, in effect, accept me as I am or leave me alone but I am not going to pretend to be who I am not for you to accept me. I am not going to be a neurotic, a false ideal person, for you to accept me. If I must be phony, a sham self for you to accept me, the price of your acceptance is too great and I am not willing to pay it. I will not seek your conditional acceptance.

The price of seeking to become ideal self, the self that other people would accept is perpetual anxiety and tension (and cardiovascular diseases). Those who insist that their fellow human beings approximate ideal selves before they accept them are actually killing them with tension. Igbos kill other Igbos by making them neurotic and giving them tension and heart attacks.

(Of course, Igbos do not necessarily understand that this is what they are, in fact, doing by accepting each other conditionally. They are ignorant of their murderous behaviors. The purpose of science, in this case, psychological science, is to describe phenomenon, as it is, and show people what they are, in fact, doing and, hopefully, they would change their untoward behaviors, if they want to produce different effects.)

THE SEEMING POSITIVE EFFECT OF CONDITIONAL SOCIAL ACCEPTANCE

Igbo conditional acceptance of Igbos seems to have some positive aspects. Western civilization came to Igbo land in the early twentieth century. Although the Anglican Church, under Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, had established a missionary outpost at Onitsha in 1851, Christian missionary penetration of the Igbo heartland, Owerri, did not occur until 1902. For all practical purposes, Igbos were exposed to Christianity and accompanying Western civilization in the twentieth century.

Late as was their exposure to Western civilization, Igbos are probably the most Western educated Africans? They embraced Western civilization with enthusiasm and went for it with total dedication. These days, most Igbo children take it for granted that they are to attend elementary, secondary and university schools. In only one hundred years of exposure to the West, Igbos have accomplished what even has not been accomplished in the West: attendance of college by just about all young men. This is an amazing accomplishment by anybody’s standards.

Igbos accomplished this seeming impossibility because of their competitive and individualistic culture. The culture does not accept failures. One must achieve something significant to be accepted in Alaigbo. To fail and be a nobody is not an option, for failures are socially rejected and laughed at.

Igbo young persons engage in what is called Imanjakiri. Here, they verbally and emotionally abuse each other, putting each other down to the extent that they did not do well in what society wanted done well.

Igbo school children are placed under tremendous pressure to succeed; the price of failure is to be socially disgraced. To fail at examinations is to become a social nobody, to be an anuohia.

During my secondary school days, ones greatest fear was to not be first in class. Second? You were given a lecture by your elders as to how you are useless. When I took the West African School Certificate Examination many of my classmates literally experienced what I now know as anxiety disorder. They were inordinately afraid of failing the examination, for they realized the consequences of doing so. Those boys studied like they were driven. (No society should put such pressure on teenagers.)

The day the result came out was the most dreaded day in our lives. The first question was: did you pass? If you did, the next question was: what kind of grade did you have, division one, two or three? If not division one, you are no good. If division one, was it less than aggregate ten (each subject was graded 1-4, I believe, with 1 being the best; one had to pass eight subjects to pass the School Cert, so if you had 1s in all eight subjects that would give you an aggregate of eight; ordinary pass required an aggregate of less than twenty four).

Some of my dormitory mates, in fact, collapsed when they learned that they did not make division one.

Thereafter, it was on to high school. At the end of those two grueling years, students took their examinations. They go through another round of tension. Did one make mostly As in the required four subjects or not?

Thereafter, it was unto university. Again, the question was: how well did you do, all As, Bs or Cs? God forgive you if you are mediocre and worse if you failed.

Finally, it was unto graduate school and eventually the much desired doctorate degree. The Igbo likes to achieve the PhD and be called Doctor; apparently, to be so-called is a symbol of achievement (not for what it is supposed to be: a person dedicated to the search of knowledge).

Then the next question was attaining high social status, via success on the job. Failure is not an option for Igbos. Failure meant being considered okpokoro manu and anuohia.

By my mid thirties, I recognized that I was dancing a neurotic dance and dropped out of the rat race. I accepted that which I was afraid of, that which my neurotic Igbo culture told me to be afraid of, failure. I accepted being a failure. I simply quit trying to succeed in any external endeavor. I looked myself in the mirror and accepted what I saw and did not want to meet any society’s criteria before I accepted myself. In doing so, for the first time in my young life, I obtained somatic and mental peace. Psychologically speaking, I healed my neurosis and became mentally healthy.
From my new stand point, I became aware that most of my Igbo brothers are engaged in the rat race for success and have attendant mental upsets.

A PATHOLOGICAL CULTURE

The Igbo culture is the most tension making culture there is on planet earth; it is the most neurosis making culture there is in the world; and for our present purposes, it is the most paranoia making culture in the world.

I am afraid to say it, but the truth must be said for truth is what heals people. I have not seen an Igbo man who is not a bit paranoid in personality structure. In fact, the incidence of the more serious forms of paranoia, delusional disorder and schizophrenia, paranoid type, is high in Igbo land. I have worked in the mental health field for over twenty years, the few delusional disordered persons, a very rare mental disorder that I have seen, included Igbos. Only last week, I witnessed paranoia at work in an Igbo brother.

PARANOIA DEFINED

The term paranoia derives from Greek. It means to seek to become who one, in fact, is not. The paranoid person is trying to become who, in fact, he is not. In fact, he is like all human beings. In truth, he is weak, powerless, inadequate and imperfect. This is the human condition.

The paranoid person does not want to accept the reality of the human condition. Instead, he uses his imagination and thinking to construct an ideal alternative self, a self that is everything that his real self is not in fact. (Personality is a self construct. See George Kelly, The Psychology of Personal Constructs.)

The ideal self is made to seem superior (where the real self feels inferior), made to seem powerful (where the real self feels weak), made to seem wealthy (where the real self feels poor), made to seem intelligence itself (where the real self feels ignorant), made to seem all handsome (where the real self is ordinary looking); in short, the ideal self is the polar opposite of the real self.

The paranoid person hates and rejects his imperfect self and attempts to replace it with an imaginary ideal and perfect self.

He does so obsessively and compulsively. That is, he wishes to become an ideal self, as if he is driven to be so by an inner pressure he cannot resist. It is as if he is obeying an inner force that he must obey or else he feels anxious. As it were, he is now a slave to the desire to become an ideal self. He must pretend to be an ideal self or he feels anxious, like he is nothing worthwhile.

BIOSOCIAL-EXISTENTIAL CAUSATION OF PARANOIA

What is the origin of the inner pressure to become an ideal self? Psychological theorists have had a field day speculating on the origin of this pressure. Since this is not a paper for professionals but for the general public, I will not explore the biochemistry of personality. I will simply state that the pressure to become ideal results from a combination of biological, sociological and existential factors.

The paranoid person generally inherited a problematic body. He tends to be prone to anxiety disorder and anxiety disorders appears rooted in inherited somatic constitution. Certain neurotransmitters are involved in anxiety disorder.

I will not dwell on the role of such neuro transmitters as excess norepinephrine and deficient GABA in the etiology of paranoia. I will instead simply acknowledge that biology plays a role in the origin of paranoia and leave it at that. This essay will concentrate on the role of social factors in the causation of the phenomenon of self rejection and desire to become an ideal self.

Igbo culture is not unconditionally positively accepting of its children. Igbo culture is conditional in accepting its people. It accepts successful people and rejects failures. As a result of being brought up in this culture, most Igbos fear failure and aspire towards success. They tend to accept themselves mostly only when they seem successful.

Igbos tend to fear failure more than other human beings. In their hope for success and fear of failure, they live with tremendous anxiety disorder.

(Achebe probably intended showing how achievement oriented his Igbo society was by using Okonkwo as the exemplary Igbo character. Unwittingly, he ended up telling the world that his people are, in fact, paranoid, since the chief dramatic personae of the novel, is diagnostically paranoid personality disordered. Okonkwo, like paranoids, was filled with fear of failure, acted out violently when his young wife demeaned his desired high self esteem and found it easy to kill a person, Ikemefuna, so as to obtain social prestige.)

The anxious Igbo person does what anxious persons everywhere do: he masks it with alcohol and sex. He does not know that drinking too much alcohol and or seeking frequent sexual outlets is an attempt to relax his over tense body.

THE PERVASSIVENESS OF PARANOIA

Every human being is a bit paranoid. In normal persons, paranoia is masked. In neurotic paranoia, the disease is overt in the individuals’ personality structures. In psychotic paranoia the disease becomes a way of living.

The most normal person exhibits paranoid symptoms during periods of social tension and uncertainty. When Moslem Arab terrorists attacked America on September 11, 2001, just about every American felt paranoid. Folks felt attacked, felt insecure and felt anxious. The month subsequent to that attack saw many normal Americans trooping to their doctors for medications to help them relax. Naturally, they were given the various anti anxiety (anxiolytic) medications. The amount of Valium, Librium, Xanax, Ativan etc popped by Americans in September of 2001 was incredible.

The relevant point is that all human beings, normal or not, have some paranoia and that this tends to be masked in normal persons. (Similarly all human beings have depression and anxiety, in masked forms in normal persons, waiting to come out when the situation stimulates them.)

SOME SYMPTOMS OF PARANOIA

(I will stay away from technical jargon and stick to pedestrian language; I do not think that it is going to help the reader for me to talk about ideas of reference, ideas of centrality, religious ideation, thought insertion, thought broadcasting etc.)

The paranoid person feels that the world he is living in is a dangerous place. He feels that other people could harm, even kill him. He, therefore, resolves to defend himself, to protect himself from the HOSTILE universe he believes that he is living in. (Is it true or not that we live in a hostile world? There is always some truth, albeit exaggerated truth in paranoia.)

Believing that he lives in a hostile world, the paranoid is GUARDED and DEFENSIVE. He SCANS his world trying to see if there are hidden DANGER AND THREATS that might sprint on him. If he believes that he has been ATTACKED, he goes into action defending himself. Generally, he MISINTERPRETS other people’s innocent actions as attacks on his GRANDIOSE, important self and defends himself.

He is always accusing other people of DEMEANING him, belittling him, putting him down, degrading him, humiliating him, criticizing him. Since, by and large, other people do not think that they are insulting him; they take offense at his constant ACCUSATIONS. Thus, they feel angry at him. Now that they seem hostile at him, they seem to have justified his earlier presupposition that people are hostile towards him. This is called the SELF FULFILLING PROPHECY of paranoia.

The individual has a false premise: he believes, wrongly that people are out to get him and stimulates attack on him and is attacked and uses that to justify his earlier preconception of what people would do to him. What he does not seem to realize is that he is the one stimulating other people’s hostility towards him by accusing them of being hostile towards him?

What is really going on in paranoia is that the individual feels inordinately INADEQUATE, POWERLESS and SMALL. He then tries to hide this sense of LITTLEMENT with false sense of grandeur. He uses his imagination, thinking, to construct a self concept and self image that he is a very important person, a powerful person, a wealthy person, a handsome person, the most intelligent person in the world etc.
Having constructed a fictional ideal self, he identifies with that imaginary self and comes to think that it is who he is.

If he merely wishes to be that IMAGINARY IMPORTANT person but knows that he is not that person, he is a neurotic PARANOID PERSONALITY. He is still able to test reality, he is not completely deluded.

If, in fact, he believes himself to be the perfect ideal self he wants to be, he believes in what is not true as true, hence he has DELUSIONAL DISORDER. This is a very rare form of paranoia.

Finally, if in addition to being delusional he also HALLUCINATES (hallucination could occur in any of the five senses: AUDITORY, VISUAL, TACTILE, OLFACTORY, FEELING), he is SCHIZOPHRENIC, paranoid type. (Schizophrenia has many types, including paranoid, disorganized, catatonic, organic, undifferentiated, residual, simple etc.)

World wide, less than one percent of the population is schizophrenic. (Another one percent has Bipolar Affective Disordered, manic-depression, to make up the two percent of people with severe, chronic mental disorders.). As noted, delusional disorder is even rarer than schizophrenia. What is quite common is paranoid personality disorder.

Many Igbos have paranoid personality disorder and anxiety disorders. (There are many types of anxiety disorders, including PANIC ATTACK, AGORAPHOBIA, SOCIOPHOBIA, GENERALIZED ANXIETY, OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE ANXIETY etc.)

(In this essay, I am not focusing on the serious aspects of paranoia. But for the sake of reference, let me briefly note that delusional disorder has five types: GRANDIOSE, PERSECUTORY, EROTOMANIC, JEALOUS, AND SOMATIC.

Briefly, in the grandiose type, the individual feels very important and may see himself as god; in persecutory type, the individual feels that other people, his ancestors, police etc are out to get him and hides from them; in jealous type, the individual feels that his spouse cheats on him, does not trust her, watches her movements and misinterprets her innocent behavior as evidence of her cheating and beats her up, domestic violence is rampant here; in erotomanic type, the individual feels that a very important person, say, Jesus, is in love with her or is her husband; in somatic type, the individual feels that he has a somatic, physical disease that is not real and goes from doctor to doctor seeking help.

All delusions are rooted in the individual’s desire for existential importance when he feels excruciatingly unimportant and does not want to accept that unimportance.

In schizophrenia, in addition to delusion is the presence of hallucination. The schizophrenic may hear a voice telling him that he is god and or Napoleon or Bill Gates. Conversely, she may hear voices telling her that she is a whore etc. The voice generally tells him that he is important thus gratifying his desire for importance; hallucinations are wish fulfillment.

Some schizophrenics will look you straight in the eye and tell you that they are god, Jesus, Zeus…whatever makes them seem special and important…and tell you that you ought to be worshipping them, that is, they are expressing their desire to be superior to you.

In MANIA/BIPOLAR AFFECTIVE DISORDER, there is excitement, euphoria, poor judgment and some times hallucination. The manic may say that he is Elvis, to compensate for his wish that he was a famous musician etc; he may write checks for money that he does not have, to compensate for his wish to be rich; he may claim to be Cleopatra, that is, the most beautiful woman on earth, to compensate for her sense of being homely and or ugly. There is always delusion in mania.)

In demeanor, the paranoid person, be it of the personality or delusional or schizophrenic variety generally looks serious and guarded; he lacks genuine sense of humor; he is uptight, stressed and anxious; he wants to be seen as a very important person and fears being seen as a small, insignificant person.

At all times, he defends what he believes is his dignity. He is stiff and inflexible in body, is not relaxed and happy.
He is generally very rational and argumentative. (Two Igbo brothers on naira politics exhibit these argumentative and pseudo rational aspect of paranoid personality disorder.) Such persons want to win and have other people loose; they want to be right at all costs and have others wrong. They will argue insignificant subjects that most people would take in stride. Their goal is to win and you, the person they are arguing with, to lose. They must be right and you wrong.

Why do they have this desire to be right and have others wrong, to win and have others loose? Think about it. If I am right and you are wrong; I am the winner and you are the loser, what does that make me? It makes me better than you. The desire to win and have others loose, to be right and others wrong is part of paranoid grandiosity.

Deep down, paranoia is rooted in desire to be godlike. The paranoid person feels small and sees god as all powerful. He wants to be godlike in his powerfulness.

(Although I want to devote this essay to strictly secular psychology, so that every mental health professional, that is, psychiatrists and psychologists, would accept it, I must digress and point out that there is such a thing as SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY.

Spiritual psychology points out that we, as manifested in the paranoia person, want to displace GOD and become God. The Son of God, as it were, wants to kill his father and replace him as God; he wants to become the creator of God, the creator of himself and the creator of other people; he wants to be the author of the universe. God created us and, apparently, we resent that fact and want to create our self. Paranoia, in this spiritual sense, is an effort to be God and create ones self, create other people and be the lord of other people. Enough Metaphysics, already. Let us dwell on secular, that is, scientific psychology.)

The paranoid personality likes to seem PERFECT. He generally cannot stand himself as imperfect. When he makes a mistake he seeks a SCAPEGOAT to BLAME for it. Whenever anything goes wrong, he blames those around him. He is forever blaming his spouse, children, friends and colleagues in any and all organizations he is a member of. It is always OTHER PEOPLE’S FAULT, not his, that they did not achieve their organizational goals.

This OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE blaming of others is obviously an infantile attempt to make himself seem perfect and others seem imperfect. It is an attempt to seem better than other people, when it is obvious that he is not better than any other person. SANITY, mental health lies in seeing ones self as the SAME AND COEQUAL with all HUMAN BEINGS, men and women adult and children, black and white.
At any moment you feel inferior and or superior to other people, you are insane; you are neurotic and or psychotic.

PARANOIA AND SEX

Paranoid people’s attitudes towards SEX are very interesting. The sexual act is obviously an animal act. Sex and defecation are probably the two most animalistic acts human beings engage in.

In their thinking, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet observed, human beings are often like the gods. In sex, the presumed gods behave like anything but godly. Lord Chesterfield observed that in sexual act people look ridiculous. Visualize whomever you construe as a very important person…since I am a Catholic, I visualize the Pope…engaged in sexual intercourse. What do you see? Not only is that person suddenly no longer important in your estimation, he looks ridiculous and absurd.

The paranoid person wants to be god like. He elevated himself to the level of the gods. To engage in sexual act makes him feel insignificant and animal like. Since he wants to retain the illusion of being dignified, he tends to feel tremendous shame from sex.

The paranoid is generally a very proud person and easily feels shamed from whatever seems not deifying; sex is one such activity. Generally, the paranoid engages in sex in a hush-hush, hidden manner but does not talk about it. (See David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles; also see his Autonomy and the Rigid Character.)

Clearly, the sex act seems ridiculous. But, then again, such is human life on earth. If one puts on ones philosophical hat and engages in pure reasoning, one would see no meaning and purpose to our lives on earth. What folks call meaning and purpose are mainly make belief.

Nevertheless, health persons accept the absurdity of being human and that includes sex. If you are going to have sex, then have it and that is all there is o it. For Christ’s sake do not be ashamed of it. Do not pretend that you are above sex. Just do it. What is worth doing is worth doing well? You might as well have fun while at it. Sex is part of the human bodily condition. People came here to be egos housed in bodies and might as well enjoy their bodies. There is no use for ambivalence towards sex, as neurotics tend to be. Do it whole heartedly or do not do it at all.

Mystics reject the human ego and the body that houses it and give up all pursuit of sensual enjoyment. They concentrate on the things of God, only. Thus, folks like Buddha, Jesus etc overcame the attraction of flesh and live in the world of spirit.

The average person is not an enlightened, illuminated and real self realized person. As long as the individual has a pull to have sex, he or she ought to do so but do so as St Paul said: within marital situations, only.

I must confess that I accept the Catholic Church’s morality on sexual matters. I want sex restricted to the marital situation. This gut level position, however, is not as emotional as it seems, for if folks limited their sexual activity to their married partners only, they would spare themselves the prospect of contracting gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, HIV-AIDS, and other diseases that could kill them.

IGBO BOASTFULNESS

Have you been around Igbos? They are always trying to seem better than other people. They are extremely jealous of each others achievements. In fact, they do not like any one to do better than them and should they perceive you to be doing better than them their competitive spirit kicks in and they do all in their powers to bring you down. These people prefer to be lone stars and cannot work in groups for to work in groups is to subordinate ones ego to other egos, to accept others leadership. They detest others leadership. No wonder in their traditional society they did not develop political superstructures beyond the town level to rule them. Igbos do not accept chiefs. “Igbo ama eze”. Each of them wants to be the chief, the boss and does not tolerate other people’s leadership.

(Igbos, so far, do well in sole proprietorships but tend to fail in forming partnerships and corporations. Corporations have advantages that other forms of business organizations do not have. Igbos tend not to have big businesses; they tend to end up with mom and pop shows. Apparently, Igbo unbridled egotism militates against their success in collective business ventures.)

Igbos are always boasting about their accomplishments, trying to make themselves seem better than others. They fancy themselves better than other Nigerian ethnic groups when it is self evident that all human beings are the same and equal. This desire to be superior to other people is paranoid behavior, but Igbos do not know it. They are trying to seem perfect and have you seem imperfect; they are unaware that such behaviors are the mark of madness.

Let me illustrate the sad aspect of this phenomenon from the events that happened around me only last week.

We were at a meeting. My wife insisted on our need to abide by the LAW and limit our behavior to what the law permits us to do. She said this in obvious reference to an Igbo brother who has a tendency to take chances with the law. He tends to want to do whatever he wants to do without regards to the law. My wife, being a typical well socialized North American, understands the need to live by the laws of the land. North America is a land of laws. She said what she said because she wanted to protect all of us, to prevent us from running afoul of the law. She had no animosity towards any one.

The Igbo brother in question became angry, I mean angry. He was totally enraged. He looked menacing, ranting and raving about how a woman cannot tell him what to do, how he is tired of her bossing him around, how she bosses me around and now wants to boss him. He went on and on jabbering all sorts of meaningless rubbish for about ten minutes.

I had enough of his freak show and made the mistake of trying to redirect him to the issue at hand, and he let loose on me. (When a man is in anger, he is temporarily insane; one should never try to reason with him; I should have just walked out of the house and said nothing.) He called me every name under the sun. I have never before been subjected to as much verbal and emotional abuse in my life. He asked us to leave and as we were doing so he got up and started pushing us. He was totally insane.

The following day, he wrote me a series of email letters. He went on and on boasting about how he is rich and powerful and would do this or that to me if he liked. He wrote about ten pages of nonsense. (I showed his letters to two psychiatrists and both agreed that he was delusional and experienced transient psychosis and could be committed to a psychiatric hospital against his will, if he continued in his threatening behaviors.)

What is going on here is that the brother has paranoid personality disorder. He feels inadequate and compensates with fictional adequacy. He presents that imaginary important self to other people to relate to. When they affirm it, he feels okay and when he feels that they did not validate his superior self he feels demeaned, belittled and angry. Apparently, he felt that my wife did not recognize his grandiose self image and wanted to put her in her place.

In his paranoid grandiosity, he believed that women are inferior to him, men and ought to obey men.

Men and women are equal and any sexist views are insane. (In IQ tests, on the average, women tend to score higher than men so, in effect, women could be construed as smarter than men.)

Obviously, the brother’s reaction was based on injured pride; it was showing paranoid cum narcissistic rage. In that rage he was temporarily insane and could kill. That is correct, he so over identified with a false important self that he could kill any one who did not collude with his insanity and tell him that he is the fictional important person he imagines himself to be.

Paranoid persons often kill those they believe do not respect them, those they believe do not accept them as very important. (In delusion, they attack those they believe are out to kill them…folks that are not out to kill them.)

This brother’s obvious psychotic decompensation and paranoid behavior got me thinking about my relationship with my fellow Igbos. I recall many of them exhibiting similar paranoid boastings as this brother.

It became apparent to me that many Igbos tend to have grandiose self concepts and when they feel that you did not acknowledge their imaginary important selves they boast about how important they are and try to make themselves seem better than you. They are always boasting and talking nonsense about how their fathers are governors, ambassadors, chiefs, millionaires and whatever else they think would make them seem important. They tend to feel outraged when you do not humor them and go along with their infantile efforts to seem better than you.

The angry brother that tried mightily to convince me that he is better than me is mediocre. But here he was boasting of how he is the smartest man on earth, the richest man on earth, the most powerful man on earth and writing me about how I am a failure and nothing compared to him.

The relevant point is not what a temporarily insane man said but why he said it. He felt totally inferior and everything he said was in an attempt to seem superior and powerful.


As a known fact, all human children are weak. I am weak. I am powerless. I am poor. I am not the most intelligent man on earth. I am a human being, which means that I am imperfect. If am truthful to myself, I would accept all that I know myself to be: imperfect. If I do so, I am relaxed, peaceful and happy; I am not a phony, sham hypocrite who pretends to be who he is not in fact.

Igbo culture insists that I should not accept myself as I know myself to be but must strive to be successful, powerful etc before it accepts me. Igbo culture encourages me to deny my real self and pretend to be whom I am not; Igbo culture asks Igbos to be phonies. The average Igbo I see is a pretentious phony who presents himself as he is not in fact, big.

I had to drop out of Igbo culture, so as to be able to accept myself as I know myself to be: a worthless, valueless nothing, as the paranoid Igbo brother called me.

This Igbo brother is in his Igbo culture. Within that culture, he knows that people do not accept him as he is: a mediocre person. He is currently unemployed and he knows that his Igbo culture sees him as a failure (and projects his sense of being a failure to me.)

He thinks that other Igbos would accept him if he seemed perfect. Thus, he invented a perfect self-concept and self-image and latched unto that imaginary self and uses it to relate to other people.

He relates to other people from his fictional all important self. He tells lies about himself if in doing so he seems his important self. In the processes he became a pathological liar, a man who tells lies compulsively, even when telling lies is not called for.

I have eyes to see. I could see him and evaluate him as accurately as is possible. A man who is not working, at this time, but calls himself a professor is not persuasive. A man whose wife, a nurse, works double shifts to support them is not exactly rich. A man who often does not have the money to buy gas for his car is not exactly a rich man.

Simply stated, this brother ought to accept himself as he is without shame. But his Igbo culture disposed him to think, erroneously, that he needed to be important before society accepts him. He is forced by the pressure of paranoia to pretend to be who he, in fact, is not, a powerful self. In doing so, he lives in tension, stress and anxiety, and every once in a while acts out in narcissistic rage.

He is a psychologically sick man. He needs to be healed of his paranoid ideations. Unless he is healed, he is a danger to those around him, for since he consistently misinterprets their motives and behaviors and sees insults where non-exists, he is likely to attack people (as he did to me). He probably physically, verbally and emotionally abuses his wife and children; he is most likely to do so when his paranoid grandiosity feels that they did not respect it.


NORMALCY, NEUROSIS AND PSYCHOSIS

Essentially, there are three types of people in the world: normal people, neurotic people and psychotic people.

Normal people are the majority of the people, say 90% or more of the people in any given society. Psychotics are generally less than two percent of the population. Neurotics make up the balance.

In normalcy, the individual internalized the norms of his society and, more or less, is like any other person in that group. He is at home in his group’s world and in his own skin.

In neurosis, the individual is not at home in his group (and not even at home in his own body). Like the normal person, he, too, internalized his group’s norms. But for any number of reasons, he feels like an outsider in his group (and in his own body). He desires to be different from the group but at the same time wants to conform to the group. He is alienated from human beings but want to be part of human beings. Somehow, he is unable to do what the group requires of him to become an accepted member and feels like an outsider to it.

If the neurotic accepts his outsider-ness and gives up trying to become a member of the group, an outstanding intellect or artist is born to the world.

The normal person operates within the box; his group’s present parameters and is seldom able to make seminal contribution to art and science. It takes a bit of alienation from the group, neurosis, to see the group, the world a bit clearly.

Whereas, in aggregate intelligence neurotics are not smarter than normal persons, but because they are operating outside their group’s frame of reference they may use their intelligence more effectively. Consider the paranoid neurotic. He insists on rationalism. He attempts to seem rational. Of course, he is not more intelligent than normal persons but, by and large, he tends to make a few rational contributions to social discourse.

A particularly ultra rational Igbo brother in Naija politics insists on pure rationality. Every once in a while he actually says something that is worth paying attention to. Unfortunately, in the main, because his rationality is devoid of love for himself, love for his people and love for all human beings, it tends to be critical without understanding. He lacks wisdom. Most paranoids may have intelligence but they lack wisdom. Wisdom only comes from love and forgiveness of human foibles.

(The paranoid is the quintessential egotist; he bears grudges and grievances and seeks revenge and is vengeful; he wants to punish those who wronged him. The wise person wants to forgive those who wronged him for he knows that human beings make mistakes and need correction not hatred or punishment. The paranoid is litigious, he sues those he believes insulted him, to punish them and prove his social importance.)

Paranoia, among other things, emanates from the individual’s efforts to UNDERSTAND HIMSELF, OTHER PEOPLE AND, WHY THINGS HAPPEN THE WAY THEY HAPPEN; IT IS AN ATTEMPT TO PREDICT THE FUTURE. Particularly, the PARANOID WANTS to understand why the things that happen to him happen to him.

He does not have objective answers to his questions, so he speculates. In the process, he attributes false motives to other people. The fact is that we do not know what other are thinking about, and we do not know why things happen the way they do. We have to accept that uncertainty and live with it.

We must live with ambiguity and not pretend to know many things. The paranoid person is unable to live with not knowing, so he speculates and believes that his speculations are true and act on their basis.

Thus the paranoid brother speculated on my motives, reached false conclusions as to why he thinks that I do what I do…boss him around and demean him…all false ideations and to rehabilitate his injured vanity attacked me, to show me that he is powerful and is my boss.

For our present purposes, whereas it would seem that neurotics are more insane than normal persons, they are not. Normal persons are masked insane persons. A normal person could exhibit the symptoms of most of the mental disorders if subjected to stress: he could show paranoia, depression, mania, delusion even hallucination.

A normal person is an insane person who is sheltered by his group. As Eric Fromm (see Escape from Freedom) sees it, the adjusted normal person is not yet given birth to full individuation.
The neurotic is struggling to become truly individuated: separation from God and the human group.

Alas, separation and individuation is a problem. The world is a place where we live in the fantasy that separation and individuation is possible.

The psychotic optimizes the fantasy of individuation and lives in his own world without reference to other people.
Mystics point out that our spiritual reality is union, not separation. (See Meister Eckhart, St John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila; Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism; Helen Schucman, A Course in Miracles.)


PARANOIA AS DESIRE FOR AUTONOMY

In his book, Autonomy and the Rigid Character, David Shapiro wrote that the paranoid neurotic (what we now call the paranoid personality) desires autonomy. As Shapiro sees it, the paranoid is a person who desires excessive independence from the group. He desires extreme individuation (Carl Jung wrote extensively about individuation.)

This person sees the group as squelching his individuality and does not want to be swallowed by the group. He strives to seem individuated.

The paranoid character is seeking autonomy from the whole (God and human society). He does not want any one, God or man, to tell him what to do. He wants to do his own thing. In social and work organizations, he resents authority figures telling him what to do.
To tell him what to do makes him feel powerless. He wants to be the boss or else he is not a member of the group. If he stays in the group, he finds ways to do things his own way.

In work organizations, he is generally perceived as loose cannon, for he does not accept authority readily. Experienced managers understand this aspect of the paranoid employee and tolerate it. They cannot change him; they can, however, delegate to him those things that require individual efforts, such as technical jobs; it is a mistake to make a paranoid character a leader, supervisor, manager etc; this is because he does not know how to smoothly relate to people; to relate to people requires subordinating ones own ego to group needs.

You must leave the paranoid alone to live in his world of individual power. If you do not respect his need for autonomy and do things that make him feel imposed on, he may indulge in passive aggressive efforts to destroy the organization’s goals or engage in overt aggression.

Like all egotists, the paranoid believes in power and violence. He believes that problems can be solved by attacking, even killing people. He sees violence and attack on people as making him seem powerful. In fact, he sees killing other people as making him seem powerful. He is the quintessential egotists, a confused human being.

He has not evolved to a level where he understands that peace, love and forgiveness are the true signs of power. Jesus was a peaceful, loving man and never resorted to anger and violence to solve problems, as such, he was the most powerful human being that lived on earth.

Hitler used violence to solve conflicts, he killed people to seem powerful; in reality he was the most powerless man to live on earth.

Do not bother trying to change the paranoid. He is who he is in evolution. He is who he is from about age six on wards. At best, you can understand him and learn to handle him with care but you cannot change him. Only he can change him self, if he so desires, when he learns to give up his pursuit of imaginary egotism and accept his real self, a weak self, and, ultimately, accept our shared unified spirit self.

I must emphasize that one should never aim at changing the paranoid personality. If one tried, he is most likely to see himself as the healthy one and one as the sick one. Paranoids do not go to therapy because in their pseudo rationality they fancy therapists useless and see themselves as more informed than therapists. They usually believe in their supercilious knowledge.

Paranoids are mentally disturbed persons. They have been so from their childhood. You cannot ask persons who have been sick most of their lives to suddenly change and become healthy. It would take a lot of work for them to change (to change ones pattern of thinking, from egoistic to loving and forgiving is to heal). All that one should do is learn how to get along with these sick brothers. They are not going to become healthy overnight.

Let me dispel the notion that just because paranoids are sick that they cannot hold down jobs. Paranoia is an interesting mental illness; it affects only a part of the intellect, not all of it. The paranoid has systematic delusion in certain areas, not all areas of his thinking. He can be as paranoid as a mad dog and see the entire world as out to kill him and is defensive and yet can be a successful medical doctor, engineer and lawyer. Indeed, he can be the president of his country. Richard Nixon, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin and many African heads of States were and are paranoid personalities. In fact, your colleague at work, a successful professional, for all you know, may be a paranoid personality. You might even be one! Paranoia is an interesting human psychological disorder; we all have to understand it and work to heal it, as much as it is possible to heal it.

In as much as all human beings have a bit of paranoia, we should never make fun of those people that have the problem in exaggerated forms. We should understand and help them, as much as we could. I am trying to help my paranoid brothers in my own way, by sharing information on the phenomenon.


Whereas the paranoid person seeks autonomy, on the other hand, he has not developed the courage to accept his individuation without social reference. He still wants other people to like and accept him. He does everything he does to get other people to like and approve him. Therein lays his problem. He wants to be individuated and at the same time wants to be part of the group. You cannot have it both ways. To be part of the group one must reduce ones indivualism and conform to the group’s conception of reality.
The paranoid person lives in perpetual psychological conflict: to be truly independent and or to be part of the group? He is unable to make up his mind on this critical existential question.

The paranoid wears the mask of social and existential importance because he thinks that that is the person that society would accept. Igbos accept successful persons, so the Igbo paranoid tries to seem successful and important, so as to be accepted by the Igbos. On the other hand, he wants to be individuated. Obviously, he has to resolve the conflict by resolving to be his true self. If he does so, he becomes free, freed from the shackles of the group. He becomes relaxed, peaceful, happy and mentally healthy.

PERSONALITY DISORDERS

For the sake of fuller understanding, I will briefly mention the other accepted personality disorders.

Personality is the individual’s habitual pattern of relating to other people and to his world. It is usually formed before age twelve and once formed is very difficult to change except if the individual has organic brain injuries or underwent religious conversion (like Paul did on his way to Damascus).

Most human beings have normal personalities, that is, they successfully adapted to the mode people in their cultural group adapt to their world. I would say that more than ninety percent of the people have normal personality structures and that about six percent has serious personality disorders, that two percent has serious mental disorders and two percent has mental retardation (IQ under 70).

The mental health field’s nomenclature accepts ten or eleven personality disorders: paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial, borderline, avoidant, and dependent, obsessive compulsive and passive aggressive. Most human beings have traits of all these personalities but some have more of each hence have such personality disorder.

Briefly, the paranoid personality wants to seem very important and fears not being important; he is sensitive to being demeaned. The schizoid personality does not care whether other people like him or not, he just lives his life regardless of what other people say about him. The schizotypal personality tends to be interested in pseudo spiritual matters and may believe that she has supernatural powers and claim psychic abilities and is odd and eccentric. The narcissistic personality fancies himself superior to other people, thinks that he is special and that other people ought to admire him; he tends to exploit other people, use them for his goals and discard them when they are no longer useful to him; he does so because he believes that other people are inferior to him. The histrionic personality tends to seek attention through drama, the drama queen and tends to gravitate to men who pay her attention but seems not to pay them attention; she has shallow affect. The borderline personality has many dysfunctional areas in her life; she is confused in many areas and wants other people to take care of her and may cut on herself if others ignore her; she does not seem capable of giving love and attention to other people but craves it from them. The antisocial personality steals and kills and does not feel remorse or guilty; he has a sense of entitlement; he is the typical Nigerian politician, a criminal. The avoidant personality feels inferior and believes that if other people come close to him that they would reject him, so he keeps away from people, while hoping that they take the initiative to accept him. The dependent personality wants other people to take care of him and is a follower and lacks initiative. The obsessive compulsive personality thinks obsessively and acts compulsively and wants to seem perfect. The passive-aggressive personality pleases every body, goes along with all people’s demands on him but resents being imposed on and often finds indirect means to get back at those he feels are imposing their will on him.
I am not going to elaborate on theses personality disorders. You can read up on them. Each of them is an area of specialization in itself.

DISCUSSION

In his analysis of Judge Shreber’s autobiography, Sigmund Freud hypothesized that there is latent homosexuality in paranoia. Generally, paranoid persons feel weak and restitute with desire to seem tough. Any thing that reminds them of their weakness tends to make them angry.

In our society, homosexuality is equated with weakness. Paranoid persons, therefore, tend to resent homosexuals. If you called a paranoid person a fag, he could kill you. Let me illustrate how this works from a situation I was involved in.

During my first year at the University of Oregon, there was another Igbo chap there. On weekends, both of us went around looking for girls. One Saturday evening, we were in downtown Eugene and heard music coming out of a joint and went in to check it out. We did not know that the joint was a gay bar. We sat down and immediately this middle aged white man sauntered towards us and sat down with us. He said: “boys, (both of us were under twenty) can I buy you drinks”. We said yes. He ordered us two beers. We talked. Then he said: “boys, do you want to have a little fun tonight?’ We asked him how. He said, and I quote: “How about coming to my house for a little sex?” My friend asked him: “Do you have some chicks in your shack?”

The man said: “Don’t be silly, I mean with me”. Before he was done with saying what he said, my friend had slapped him.

Apparently, my friend felt demeaned that this old gizzard saw him as his sex object and hit him real hard. I literally had to drag him out of the gay establishment.

Being approached by a queer for sex made my friend feel small and he tried to restitute, to feel big, with anger and physical violence. If you sexualize a paranoid personality, you make him feel belittled and he could attack you. Paranoid persons can, and do, in fact, kill gay men who approach them for sex.

Freud said that paranoid persons do what they do because, deep down, they are latent homosexuals who repressed their attraction to same gender persons. In the case of the judge he was analyzing, he said that the man, who liked to cross dress, dress as a woman, was a homosexual.

I am not a Freudian and do not accept Freud’s often tortured explanations of human behavior. I think that the more likely explanation is that paranoids feel weak and being seen as homosexual makes them feel weaker and to restitute they attack who ever saw them as homosexual.

My friend attacked the idiot who asked us for a little sex not because he had latent homosexuality, but because, like most overachieving Igbos, he feels inadequate and restitute with desire for superiority and the gay man sexualizing him made him feel like he was weak.

It is interesting how I responded to this incident. It was my first encounter with real life gays and did not know what homosexual people actually do. I went to the library and read up on what the phenomenon is all about. I could not believe what I read, that gay men place their penises into other men’s anuses and that lesbians placed their tongues into other women’s vagina! This is sexual activity? This is absurd.

My attitude towards gay and lesbians is that there is something wrong with them, what it is I do not pretend to know. It is wide world and I do not have to understand everything. I can live with differences provided if you want to practice this form of human depravity you are not around me. I would vomit if I actually see folks doing this sort of thing.

I am an Igbo African; Freud was a German Jew; he probably had different experiences and his experiences led him to his conclusions.

I do not have to accept any idea that does not make sense to me. I do not accept the whole psychoanalytic concept of id, ego and superego, the deal on the unconscious and oedipal complex. Freud hypothesized that we are born with Id instincts (for sex and aggression), that those motivate all our behaviors and that the superego, that is, internalized social norms, tries to restrict the id; that the ego, a sort of referee, mediates between our id (animal nature) and our superego (socialized nature).

Freud further hypothesized that boy children want to have sex with their mothers and that girl children want to have sex with their fathers (oedipal complex). He believed that these desires are not approved by society and are punished should they be given rein to; hence people repress them into their unconscious mind. From the unconscious they still exercise pull on people hence people behave irrationally no matter how rational they hope to behave. Freud would all people came to him and his apostles for psychoanalysis, come lay on his couch and free associate, say whatever comes to their minds without blocking them with reason and that way cathected, bring what is buried deeply in their unconscious to the conscious for him to analyze. Freud believed that it is only after such analysis that people become somewhat normal, otherwise they are hopelessly confused.

On the whole, I do not care much for Freudian speculations. I am an Adlerian, better still; I am me, an Osujian. So, let us move on.

William Meissner (The Paranoid Process) believes that the paranoid person is really a depressed person. He sees paranoid bravados, boastings and quest for power as mask over the individual’s sense of inferiority and personal worthlessness.

Moreover, since the paranoid insists on pure rationality, he appreciates the meaninglessness and purposelessness of being and experiences existential depression. But instead of accepting his depressed view of himself and the world, he uses several ego defense mechanisms (See Anna Freud, The Ego and its Defense Mechanisms) to deal with them. He DENIES what he knows to be true; he DISSOCIATES from his weak real self; he RATIONALIZES his weaknesses, he PROJECTS what he sees in himself that he does not like to other people; he BLAMES other people for his faults; he INTELLECTUALIZES instead of deal with his issues, and engages in REACTION FORMATION, SUBLIMATION, FANTASY, REPRESSION, ACTING OUT, and so on.

My experience with paranoid persons teaches me that they are existentially depressed but deny it and mask that depression with their paranoid efforts to seem powerful. When finally they face their existential reality they must deal with their underlying depression.
(Depression is characterized by loss of interests in activities of daily living, lack of interest in food, sex, sports, interpersonal relationships, work, a feeling of tiredness and lethargy and lack of personal grooming and eventually a wish to kill ones self, and if untreated suicide. Depressed persons, these days, are treated with the various anti depressant medications. I am interested in existential depression, not clinical depression; this aspect of it requires cognitive restructuring and reorientation so that the individual accepts his reality as it and stops seeing him as no good or seeing him as all good. COGNITIVE BEHAVIOR THERAPY ala Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck helps depressed persons to accept their real selves as is and not put on masks of being who they are not.)

CONCLUSION

As I see it, the paranoid person wants to seem powerful and independent of others control. He seeks autonomy. Unfortunately, we live in social groups where society controls us. (See Swanson et al, The Paranoid, also see American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, latest edition, sections on paranoia).

The paranoid person is a human being who feels powerless and wants to seem powerful. I think that his inherited biological weaknesses and existential realities make him feel little.

We are born and we shall die. We are mere food for worms. This reality makes us feel vulnerable and powerless.

If we think about it, we are really nothing special. We are nothing. We are valueless and worthless.

But we do not like these existential facts and compensate with imaginary pursuit of importance and worth.

I see human beings trying to seem very important. I know that they are not important; after all, any one of us can kill any one of us. If you want to, you can kill me and if I want to, I can kill you. That is how unimportant our lives are. (Some people use religion to find worth. As Freud pointed out in the Future of an Illusion, some people postulate a father figure who seems to protect them from the precarious world they live in; more importantly, they believe that when they die that they would go to that father figure’s house, heaven, and live there forever and ever and that gives their apparent meaningless existence seeming meaning.)

If I am important how come any human being can kill me? My life is in every human being’s hands. I am very vulnerable, so are you.
I accept my impotence and vulnerability and am at peace with that reality.

My Igbo brothers, like human begins everywhere, refuse to accept their existential reality. Instead, they juxtapose an imaginary important self and want to become it. In pursuit of their various fictional ideal selves, they develop the various mental and personality disorders.

To not have a personality, mental and anxiety disorder, the individual must desist from seeking to be an ideal self that he is not. Unfortunately, people think that they must approximate the ideal selves their cultures bid them to be otherwise they would be nothing.

My Igbo brother called me a failure because I voluntarily took myself out of the social rat race to become somebody important and he is still in that race. He fancies himself struggling to become somebody important and indeed fancies himself already important. He lives in tremendous anxiety and paranoia. He is a miserable man but does not know it.

The paranoid does not know what happiness means; happiness is just being who you are, without pretending to be somebody else.

My goal in this paper is to help my paranoid brothers, those who hate their real selves, reject their existential and biological reality and attempt to become the imaginary ideal selves that their minds constructed to give up their pursuit of chimera. The ideal self is a mental construct, a product of imagination, ideation and cognition. It does not exist in the real world and it isn’t going to exist in the empirical world.

The self concept, real or imaginary, exists only in wishful thinking, in the mind. Ideas leave not their source. The ideal self concept is an idea and is always in the mind that thinks it real. It is not real.

Use your thinking to deconstruct your already constructed self concept and reconstruct it on a better footing. Now construct a healthy self, one that sees you as the same and equal with all people. Use your thinking, mind, to construct a self concept that sees you as unified with all human beings. Go further and see all creation as one.

Oneness can only exist in non-physical form, for the physical must be separated. Matter, space and time are means of separation. We can only unify in formlessness; we can only be in unified state where there is no matter, space and time. Folks call that world the world of God, the polar opposite of our world.

I am not going to allow myself to escape into wooly metaphysics. I just want to describe paranoia and point out the contribution of conditional social acceptance to its genesis.

Of course, other factors, such as inherited individual biology and existential matters play a role in the etiology of paranoia, as they play in most mental, that is, thinking disorders.

In as much as mental disorders are thinking disorders, we can change our thinking so that they are now ordered. When the individual stops desiring unrealistic importance and sees himself as the same with all people and works for our common social interests, he tends to be in peace and is happy. What else can you ask for beside peace and joy?

Peace and happiness is good enough for me. As for material wealth, if it can be obtained while one is at peace, I want it, too, but it is not worth the disturbance of my mind and body.

Igbo society must change and accept all its citizens and all human beings in a non- conditional, positive manner. It must do so if it intends to stop producing paranoids, albeit functional ones. If people are accepted as they are, they become peaceful and happy.

A healthy society gives people peace and happiness. Igbo society must become healthy and give its people peace and happiness.

I dedicate myself to healing the social pathology I see in Alaigbo, Nigeria, Africa and the world.

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February 27, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Lectures on African Countries #6 of 54: Burundi

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- 6. BURUNDI

Formal Name: Republic of Burundi

Term for Citizens: Burundians.

Capital: Bujumbura. Population: 346,000.

Independence Achieved: July 1, 1962, from France.

Major Cities: Bujumbura, Gitega, Muyinga, Ngozi and Ruyigi

Geography:

Burundi is in Central Africa. Congo-Kinshasa, Rwanda, and Tanzania border Burundi. Burundi is 10, 745 square miles in area. Burundi is landlocked. Most of the country consists of highlands and plateaus of the Congo-Nile Divide. Average elevation is 5,300 feet; the highest peaks exceed 8500 feet. Because of its high elevation, Burundi tends to have less hot temperature. Average annual temperature is 73.F in the Rift valley region and 65.F in the central plateau region. Rainfall averages 40-60 inches per year. June through August is the driest months and March and April are the rainiest months.

Society:

Burundi has an estimated population of 6, 825, 000.

Ethnic Groups: There are three main ethnic groups: Hutu 85%, Tutsi 16% and Twa less than 1%.

Languages: Both Hutu and Tutsi speak Kirundi. French is the official language. Swahili is used as commercial language.

Religion: 90% are Christian, mostly Roman Catholic, 1% Muslin and the rest indigenous believers.

Education: Primary education is available to most children but few attend and even fewer attend secondary school. Literacy rate is estimated at 51.6%.

Economy: The economy is mainly subsistence agriculture. Coffee and cotton are the most important commercial agricultural products and main source of foreign exchange. GDP estimate: $700 million; Per Capita: $106. Monetary Unit: Franc (BIF).

History and Government:

The original dwellers in Burundi were the Twa pygmies. Bantu Hutus reportedly migrated to the area in the 1200s. In the 14th century, Tutsis, another Bantu group, probably from Ethiopia, conquered the Hutus and ruled them until the Germans came in the late 19th century. With the defeat of Germany during the first world war, Belgium took over. Burundi was traditionally a monarchy ruled by Tutsi kings. In 1966, the monarchy was abolished. Burundi is characterized by the struggles for leadership by the two groups, Tutsi and Hutu. Burundi is a very unstable polity. Burundi is divided into 15 provinces.


CONTEMPORARY POLITICS


To understand contemporary Burundi’s conflict ridden politics her past history and demographics must be grasped.

It is reported that the original people who lived in what is now called Burundi were the Twa Pygmies.

Beginning in the thirteenth century, Bantu tribes began to move into the area. The first Bantu group was the Hutu. In the fourteenth century, another Bantu group, the Tutsi, moved into the area. Both Bantu groups speak the same language, Kirundi; the only distinguishing feature between them is that the Hutu tends to be stout and average in height whereas the Tutsi tends to be lanky and tall.

At present Burundi’s population is estimated to be about seven million people. Eighty five, 85% of them are Hutu, the other mainly Tutsi. The Twa pygmies are a few thousands and are negligible in Burundi politics. There are a few thousand Europeans and Asians.
The major languages of Burundi are Kirundi, French and Swahili. French is the official language.

Burundi is about 90% Christians with Muslims and believers in indigenous religions making up the balance.

Whereas the Hutus are the majority population, the Tutsi, beginning in the sixteenth century, dominated Burundi politics. A Tutsi established himself as the King of Burundi in the early 17th century and his linage pretty much ruled the kingdom until the arrival of Europeans in the early twentieth century. In effect, Burundi, like Rwanda, has the political anomaly whereby a minority group, Tutsis, rule a majority group, Hutus. This scenario is tailor made for conflict and conflict the country has had aplenty.

In 1903, Germany declared the area a German colony. With the defeat of Germany during the First World War, German colonies in Africa were allotted to the victorious European powers. Burundi was given to Belgium in 1923 and thus became a Belgium ruled country under the League of Nations. With the replacement of the League by the United Nations in 1945, Burundi became a UN trust territory under Belgium rule.

In 1962, Burundi obtained independence from Belgium. Thereafter, a series of military coups ensued, with military strong men ruling the country until 1993 when there was a democratic election.

The Tutsi dominated the military and military rule essentially meant Tutsi rule. In effect, the minority population continued ruling the majority population under the aegis of military rule. The majority Hutu, of course, resented this situation and formed several militia groups to try to fight the military and take over power.

The Front for Democracy in Burundi, FRODEBU, a Hutu dominated group, mounted an effective struggle with the Tutsi dominated military government. The country was in chaos from these struggles and in 1993 the Tutsi led government agreed to a democratic election, an election whose outcome was guaranteed to be Hutu since they constitute 85% of the population.

The Hutu won and their leader, Melchior Ndadaye became Burundi’s first Hutu president in early 1994. A few months later, the Tutsi dominated military killed him and it was back to square one, civil war between the two competing groups.

Hutu extremists embarked on killing Tutsis and the Tutsi dominated army retaliated by killing Hutus. In 1994 over 300, 000 Burundians were massacred in cold blood and many fled to neighboring countries as refugees.

The latest Tutsi military strong man, President Pierre Buyoya maintained some sort of grip on power but in 2000 was forced to enter into negotiations for a new formula for ruling the country. A cease fire agreement was signed by all parties and in 2003 FRODEBU, under its leader, Domiten Ndayizeye, took power.

The new power arrangement with a Hutu as the nominal president did not change things much, for the Tutsi continued to dominate Burundi politics. Therefore, some Hutu groups refused to recognize the government and continued with the struggle for eventual Hutu rule.

In 2004 these Hutu extremists again massacred some Tutsis (in a refugee camp at Gatumba, in the Congo) and that sparked Tutsi retaliation.

In May of 2005 all parties to the conflict agreed on a South African brokered cease fire and an election was held, with predictable result. A former Hutu rebel group, National Council for the Defense of Democracy-Forces for the Defense of Democracy, CNDD-FDD won the majority in the new Parliament. The new Hutu dominated Parliament elected a Hutu, Pierre Nkurunziza the country’s new president.

So far, Mr. Nkurunziza seems to be sustaining the peace in Burundi, a much needed peace if economic development is to take place in the country.

Civil war has devastated the economy of Burundi, so much so that it is the poorest country in the world, with a per capita income of $106 dollars and a GDP of $700 million. The country is essentially sustained by foreign aid.

The politics of Burundi is characterized by the struggle of the two ethnic groups, Hutu and Tutsi. Not much else can be said about politics in Burundi. As already observed, so far, the Nkurunziza Hutu government elected in August of 2005 is holding unto power. But given Burundi’s history, no one knows what might happen tomorrow. The young president (born in 1964) appears to be politically savvy and let us hope that he can keep the warring groups in check, so that some sort of economic development would finally start in this poorest of nations.

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February 24, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Series on Psychology 2006, #9 of 52: What is one's Vocation?

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- The greatest challenge facing any human being is making a decision regarding what to do with his life. Until a person discovers a vocation that he is really interested in, a vocation that suits his nature and whole-heartedly throws himself into it, he is seldom peaceful, happy and contented.

Further more, material abundance often requires a person to be doing something that he truly enjoys doing, what he has an aptitude in doing and what there is a market for (that is, what is found useful by other people and they are willing to buy it).
It would seem that the individual has several career options to choose from. Actually, this is not quite so. The individual has only one vocation that suits his unique nature, a vocation chosen for him by his particular temperament and aptitude. The only choice the individual really has in the matter is to discover his real vocation, what he came to this world to do and embrace it with his whole heart; he cannot do other things just because other people do them and make a living from doing them.
The time at which the individual discovers and embraces his vocation may not be as random as appearances would make it seem. If he has to try many other professions, and by process of elimination discover what is for him, such is his game plan. Indeed, he may go through his life time on earth without discovering his true vocation.

I have had a difficult time making up my mind what to do with myself. I have been a dilettante all my life. In school, I found many subjects intriguing and found it rather difficult to limit myself to one discipline. I gravitated from one discipline to another and acquired several degrees. Generally, a field would fascinate me but when I come to understand it, as it is, I found it no longer fascinating. The same goes for my work life. I would go into a line of work, feel fascinated and, in fact, work hard but soon find it boring. I would start looking for something else to do with my life.
As I look back on my schooling and work history, indeed, on my entire life, what is self-evident is that I am an idealist in search of an idealistic profession.


THE ETIOLOGY AND NATURE OF IDEALISM

What is idealism, how did it originate and how is it that it predominates in certain individuals’ lives? Clearly, every human being is a bit idealistic, but some are overly so. The majority of mankind is realistic, perhaps, with a little idealism, but a small fraction of people are overly idealistic, so much so that nothing in the extant world satisfies them.
Idealism appears to originate in hatred and rejection of what is real. The idealist hates and rejects what is and yearns for what could become; he aspires for what, in his imagination, is better than what is existent in the real world. His whole life seems motivated by desire to transform what is into what could become ideal.

Karen Horney, in my opinion, is, perhaps, the psychologist that best captures the nature of idealism. Unfortunately, she gave it a psychopathological term, neurosis, hence alienates folks from embracing her wonderful hypothesis. Her most seminal book, Neurosis and Human Growth, gave me the greatest insight into me and I recommend it to all idealistic persons.
As Horney sees it, the idealistic child, in her Psychoanalytic terminology, the neurotic child hates and rejects his real self and uses his thinking and imagination to construct what seems to him an ideal self and strives to become that ideal self. What is ideal is not stable; it is always changing; as soon as one goal post is attained, another picture of what is ideal emerges hence the child, as it were, is on a perpetual trade mill, always striving to attain an ideal state that forever recede and eludes him. He is forever disappointed by his inability to attain the ideal self and is a frustrated person.
At all times, the neurotic child strives to become the idealized self and does not want to be his real self. Since the idealized self is an imaginary self, a mental construct, not a factual self, it is not ever going to be realized in the real world. In the real world, what human beings can be and or do is circumscribed by the limitations of space, time and matter. As long as the restrictions of the external environment are in place, human beings cannot possible do every thing; for example, they cannot fly, unless, of course, they grow wings. Nevertheless, the neurotic child and the neurotic adult are characterized by wish to realize his imaginary ideal self.
The normal pattern of growth, as Horney sees it, is characterized by a drive to realize the real self (what Abraham Maslow calls self actualization).
The neurotic pattern of growth, on the other hand, is characterized by desire to realize the ideal, but not real self.
As such, neurosis is a futile pattern of living; its idealistic goal is never going to be satisfied, yet the neurotic pursues it in an obsessive-compulsive manner, as if an inner pressure that must be obeyed, as primitive man obeyed his imaginary gods, a force that transcends reason compels him to pursue it. (See Eric Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.)
Neurosis is filled with anxiety, for the neurotic child and adult are afraid of not becoming their idealized selves. The neurotic has what Horney called basic anxiety: fear of not becoming the ideal self he wants to become. The neurotic, according to Horney, lives with constant free-floating anxiety (neurotic anxiety).
Horney provided a sociological and psychological etiology of neurosis. As she sees it, neurosis is caused by unreasonable parental expectations from the child that he become perfect. In her view, all children are aware that they need the adults in their lives to survive and, therefore, are motivated to do those things that the adults around them, particularly those that Harry Stack Sullivan called their significant others: parents, siblings, peers, authority figures like teachers and pastors etc ask of them.
If those on whom the child depends on to survive expect a high standard of behavior before they accept him, he strives to accomplish them least they reject him. As Horney sees it, this conditional acceptance of children disposes them to reject their real selves and use their imagination and thinking to construct alternative selves that they believe that the important persons in their lives would accept. Thus, at all times, such children strive to become the idealized selves that they think that if they become that their society would accept. In doing so, according to Horney, such children become neurotic in personality structure.
As Horney sees it, a neurotic is a person who hates and rejects his real self and strives to become an alternative self, perceived as ideal and acceptable to society, and experiences anxiety when he does not seem like the imaginary ideal self. Not being like the ideal self arouses fear of social rejection and abandonment, which amounts to fear of death, since the child needs other people to provide for him if he is to physically survive.

Carl Rogers (Client Centered Therapy) built on Horney to urge parents to accept their children in an unconditionally positive manner, if they want their children to accept their real selves and not pursue idealized neurotic selves that could never be attained but in the meantime produces anxiety for the neurotic child.

Whereas Horney’s causal hypothesis is strictly social psychological, Alfred Adler (Neurotic Constitution) believes that biology plays a role in the etiology of neurosis. Without denying the powerful role of society in the formation of the human personality, Adler believes that those children who inherited what he called inferior organs tend to find it extremely difficult to do what the exigencies of this world call for human beings to adapt to them. As he sees it, children who inherited organ inferiorities are likely to feel that the physical and social environment is very tough on them, feel their lives threatened and develop a feeling of personal inferiority.
To Adler, no child could ever accept a sense of inferiority. Why? To survive the impersonal exigencies of this world, the child must overcome them.
Adaptation to the realities of this world require that the child become strong and powerful. Since the child is, in fact, not powerful, he uses pure mentation to imagine himself powerful. The human child, and more so, the neurotic child feels inferior and powerless Vis a Vis the exigencies of this world and uses his thinking and imagination to come up with a self-concept and its pictorial form, self-image that seems to successfully cope with the intractable exigencies of this world. He construes a fictional self, a self that is all-powerful, intelligent, handsome, wealthy etc, a self that is everything that his real self is not.
To Adler, neurosis is characterized by rejection of the real self and pursuit of a compensatory imaginary, fictional, all powerful and superior self.
The neurotic child has an all or nothing approach to his imaginary ideal self; he must become it or he feels that he is nothing. As it were, his whole reason for existing is to become his idealized, imaginary self. Neurosis thus gives the individual purpose for existence. The neurotic exists to become his fictional superior, powerful, ideal and perfect self. If he did not have that ideal self to pursue, his life would suddenly seem purposeless and meaningless. Existing to attain insane goals is, apparently, a possible reason to live on earth. (If so, could all existence on earth be motivated by desire to attain insane purpose? Helen Schucman, in A Course in Miracles, says yes.)
The neurotic often behaves as if he is the idealized imaginary, all-powerful and superior self. He presents that superior self to other people to relate to and accept as who he is.
If other people collude with him and accept his idealized self concept and self image (personality is a mental construct, George Kelly says) he feels fine, but if they do not validate his fictional self, he feels threatened and unsafe.
The neurotic child is happy (false happiness) when his ideal self is affirmed by society and angry with those who do not tell him that he is his imaginary all-powerful self.
At school and play, the neurotic child wants to be treated as if he is the ideal and all-powerful self. He wants his peers and teachers to treat him as the important self he wishes that he were, but is not, in fact.
Of course, other people know that the neurotic child is not the all-important self he wants to become and pretends as. They treat him as an ordinary self and he resents realistic such treatment.

NEUROTIC SOCIAL AVOIDANCE AND THE GOAL OF SUPERIORITY
Since the neurotic does not want to be treated as an ordinary self, he often withdraws from play and school and other arenas where he may be evaluated as ordinary. Such children would develop what we now call avoidant personality disorder, and or obsessive compulsive personality disorder, dependent personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder.
These neuroses, now called personality disorders, are characterized by wish to be an ideal self and avoidance of society in an effort to protect the imaginary ideal, perfect self.
The shy child, aka avoidant personality, keeps to himself and in his social withdrawal, uses his imagination to see himself as perfect and ideal. He feels that if he comes close to other people that they would look through his sham ideal self and reject it. To avoid rejection of his phony ideal self, he avoids other people. In effect, his social avoidance is a maneuver to help him preserve and protect his wished for ideal, perfect self.
If the neurotic, shy person did not have a false ideal self to defend, he would not fear social rejection and would readily relate to other people.
Psychotherapy for the neurotic avoidant personality, shy person, is for him to give up his quest for an idealized self and accept his real self and become comfortable with it and present it to other people to relate to. He does not have to pretend to be who he is not, ideal; he has to accept his real self, imperfect as it may be, and leave it at that.
When the imperfect real self is accepted, as it is, and when one stops desiring the impossible ideal, perfect self, one no longer has fear of not becoming the imaginary ideal self. One no longer has anxiety neurosis.
Mental health is characterized by absence of neurotic anxiety, whereas neurosis is characterized by the presence of anxiety (excessive fear).
The normal person has realistic fear, not anxiety. He fears what could harm his body and avoids it and or seeks ways to protect his real, bodily self, but does not fear what could harm an imaginary perfect self. The normal person has a realistic self and realistic fears; he does not have neurotic anxiety (disorder).

Adler, Horney, Sullivan, Rogers, Kelly, Maslow and other ego-psychologists have useful points and need to be studied and understood. However, they did not completely explain the etiology of neurosis.
Neurosis is not only a social-psychological phenomenon; it has a biological component to it. Isaac Marks and other neuro-psychologists are elucidating the biological nature of anxiety disorder.
According to neuro psychologists, those who tend to be neurotic, who have anxiety disorder, tend to have inherited bodies that are prone to excessive nerve excitation. Their bodies have a tendency to readily elicit those stimulations found in anxiety, with or without social causal factors. They seem to have inherited rapid somatic excitability. The fear and anger alerting system in their bodies tend to be over developed. They quickly perceive danger and threat to their bodies and their danger signaling system goes to work and urges their bodies to fight or flee from the perceived danger.
How this system works is not yet fully understood. Some claim that it has to do with neurochemical balance, or lack of it, in nerve cells. Perhaps, such persons have a tendency to produce excessive neuroadrenalin (neuropiniphrine…an excitatory neurotransmitter) and less GABA (an inhibitory neurotransmitter)?
The jury is still out on the cause of anxiety; no one has fully explicated the biological origin of anxiety disorder. On the subject, lots of causal speculations abound, however, interesting that conjectures may be, they are not science. Science deals with facts, as they are, not mere speculation.

What is self-evident is that anxiety disorder is a biosocial, existential phenomenon. It has its origin in biological, sociological, psychological and existential causal factors. Clearly, Adler, Horney etc explained aspects of the causal factors implicated in the etiology of anxiety neurosis, but the biological aspect of it still needs to be fully understood.
In the meantime, we can best approach anxiety disorder, aka neurosis on individual-by-individual case.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

When I was a child (and now) my body was (is) prone to quick excitation. I was almost always aroused. Heat, cold, smell, paint, food etc aroused my body. I had physical and chemical allergies.
Being close to a woman who over perfumed her body and reeks of fragrances made me faint. Being in a house where certain types of food are cooked, the smell made me dizzy.
Hot summer days made my body feel irritated and uncomfortable. Cold days made my body itchy.
Running and other vigorous exercises made my muscles cramp up (perhaps due to lack of oxygen, a product of lactic acid metabolism in the muscles). Simply stated, I inherited a hypersensitive body. That over excitable body was not comfortable to live in.

I remembered always wanting to get out of my body and live outside it. That is correct: my body was so intolerable that I did not want to live in it. I wanted to jump out of my body and be bodiless. On hot summer days, my body felt so irritated that I had to douse it with cold water to feel tolerably comfortable.
By age six, when I started formal schooling, I was aware that I did not like my body. I admired those other boys who seemed at ease with their bodies.
I loathed my body and used my imagination to wish for a better body. I fantasized for an ideal body. By age nine, I was aware that I was not only wishing for a better body but a better self. I wished for a perfect psychological self, a self that is different from my imperfect self.
That is to say that I developed what Horney called neurosis: hatred and rejection of the real self and wishing for an ideal alternative, mentally constructed self.
However, Horney’s etiological analysis is only partially applicable to me for, clearly, my inherited problematic body had a lot to do with my self-rejection.
Obviously, my society is conditional in accepting children but that by itself is not the sole cause of my self-rejection. My self-rejection was caused by a combination of biological and social psychological factors: my inherited problematic body and my conditionally accepting society placed a role in my self hatred. Biosocial psychology, I believe, is a fuller explanatory psychology.

Biological psychology is still in its infancy; the various biochemical causal explanations of mental disorders (excess dopamine in schizophrenia, excess neurpiniphrine in mania, low serotonin in depression, excess neuro-adrenaline in anxiety etc) are not persuasive; they explain nothing. Let us just say that we have not yet explained the etiology of mental states; we may do so in the future.

This paper is not really devoted to causal analysis of neurosis, I made foray into some causal analyses to set the stage for the theme at hand: idealism and choosing a vocation.
I did not choose a vocation because I was seeking for an ideal body, ideal self, ideal other people, ideal society, ideal social institutions, ideal work situations and ideal everything. Nothing in the real world seemed good enough for me.
Just as I was seeking an ideal self, I was seeking an ideal vocation. As noted, I would go into a profession, like it for a while, and then find it not satisfactory, because it is not ideal. After obtaining my doctorate degree, I taught at a university for a while, and found what I was doing not ideal and quit. I went in search of ideal work. I worked in the mental health field. For a while, I enjoyed it and was rewarded with running a couple agencies. Many folks would be satisfied running a multimillion dollar agency, but that was not good enough for me. I left and went searching for an ideal vocation.
Over time, I learned that there is no such thing as an ideal vocation. Jobs are not the issue; the issue is I, my basic self-rejection and desire for an ideal self.
To find an ideal vocation, I must accept me. But the question is: what me am I to accept?
Accepting my real body is difficult to do; nobody in his right mind would accept my body. The best that can be done with my body is to subject it to rigorous scientific analysis, understand it and device a technology, (genetic engineering and or medications) to improve it.

NEUROTIC IDEALISM

In childhood, I escaped into neurotic idealism, and in my thirties I escaped into religious idealism. These two are fantasy and, as such, useless.
In maturity, I embrace the only methodological approach to phenomena that is realistic: the scientific method.
The scientific method studies phenomena as it is, and does not waste time and energy indulging in mentally constructed ideal versions of phenomena.
The science of psychology studies human beings as they are, not as they would like to become. Psychology is not idealistic philosophy where neurotics use their minds, thinking, to construe ideal selves, ideal social institutions and ideal world. The world is not what such idealistic philosophers as Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche etc made it out to be in their philosophical systems; the world is empirical and objective and independent of our imaginations.
There are essentially two types of idealism, secular and religious (aka spiritual) idealism. In secular idealism, the individual uses his thinking and imagination to wish how he, other people, social institutions and the world ought to become; in religious idealism, although it is still the individual that is doing the wishing, the individual attributes his ideal wishes to what he calls God, Spirit etc.
The secular idealist may wish for socialism as an ideal society; the religious idealist says that God intends for humanity to be in a certain manner, the manner his idealism tells him is what God would wish man and society to be.
Both secular and religious idealism are the products of human thinking and imagination; they are wishes of how the self and the world should be ideal and perfect.
The fact is that all the wishes in this word would not change a leaf from being a leaf. Perhaps, millions of years of evolution may alter the nature of leafs. In the here and now, one can wish all one wants, the fact is that human beings are the way they are and are not going to change and become ideal.
You cannot change yourself and other people by merely wishing that you and they became ideal. Conceptualizing ideals, although understandable, are really a waste of mental energy and time.

Instead of wasting ones mental energy and time imagining how human beings should be, at the individual and societal level, the individual is best served if he studied himself and human beings in scientific, that is, objective manner. He should study things as they are, and understand them as they are and stop wishing for them to be different.
You first have to understand phenomena as it is before you can change it; if at all change is possible.
You cannot change you; you cannot change other people and you cannot change the social institutions that responded to the way people are.
People are in varying degrees of normalcy, neurosis and psychosis and these states are due to their inherited bodies and social experiences. You cannot wish that people be angels.
For example, if you see a man who is, say, paranoid in personality structure, and you wish that he were not so, you are wasting your time. What you need to do is understand the nature of paranoia at both the psychological and biological level.
The paranoid person before you probably will always feel that he is a victim of others persecution and that other people are out to harm and or kill him. He actually wants to be attacked by other people and attack people to generate their counter attack on him. He then fears that those he attacked would counter attack him and hides from them to go protect himself. From his hidden corner, he feels justified in attacking other people, verbally or physically. Moreover, he wants to be very important, grandiose, in his and other people’s eyes. He over evaluates his worth (he feels inadequate and worthless and compensates with imaginary power and worth).
The paranoid person feels grandiose and persecuted. You cannot change him, for to change is for him to accept his underlying depressed self view, his self hatred and self rejection…what led to his compensatory latching unto imaginary superior self. If he gave up his deluded (grandiose, persecuted) self, he would become depressed, and develop low self-esteem and may even become suicidal.
To avert his underlying existential depression, his self evaluated valuelessness, and anxiety, he masks them with a fictional, all powerful self. His paranoid ideations serve a function for him: they make life tolerable for him. Paranoia gives the paranoid person purpose for being; he lives to become a grandiose self and to protect that self from imaginary persecutors.
What you can do is study him and understand the biological, sociological, psychological, and existential factors in the etiology of his mental disorder. If he is amenable to understanding facts, you can tell him about the factors implicated in the genesis of his paranoia, but the chances are that he may not listen to you.
It is not your function to change other people. It is not your job to change society. The individual’s only function is to study phenomena as it is, scientifically, struggle to understand it and struggle to come up with a technology to adapt to it. He then markets his understanding of reality, as it is, and if his understanding is realistic and useful to other people, they would buy it hence gives him money to meet his material needs.

GOD

Many human beings are preoccupied with the idea of God. They want to prove to themselves that God exists, that he created this world and that if they did the right thing by him, please him, that when they die that they would be welcomed into his heaven. They fear displeasing God, so as not to be relegated to his hell.

The human mind, ego intellectual processes, cannot prove the existence of God. The ego, the human thinking pattern, is individuated, and is a separated self.
If God exists, and I think that there is something that people call God, I call it life; he is all of us acting in tandem.
God is the whole of life as one life; one life that is simultaneously all of us. Because he is all selves in one self, the separated and individuated self, the human ego, our earthly thinking, cannot understand God. No amount of earthly intellectual thinking can explain God. This is because the part, human beings, is smaller than the whole, God, and cannot understand the whole.
It seems, therefore, a waste of time trying to understand and or explicate the nature of God.
On the matter of God, one should just keep quiet. Be quiet; in your silence you feel peaceful and happy.
Do not disturb your mind trying to explain God; you cannot do so. God exists all right; he is life, one life that manifests in all forms of life: us, animals, trees etc. The real God is not the God explained by the various religions of this world.
The God of the various religions of the world is nothing but the human ego projected out and attributed to what human beings call God.
Whereas the individual should gravitate to an idea of God that makes sense to him, mine is Gnostic Christianity, he should not have the illusion that he has explained God; he has not; no religion can explain God.


REALISTIC VOCATIONS MAINTAIN THIS WORLD

In seeking a realistic profession, ask yourself this question: does the vocation that you contemplate entering enable human beings to adapt to the exigencies of this world? Every realistic profession maintains this world, as it is, not transcend it.
We live in the world of space, time and matter. We are separated selves, egos and could, and do harm each other. We want to live in safety. Therefore, we seek protection from those who can harm us. We must apprehend, try and punish those who harm us. The profession of law enforcement: lawyers, judges, courts, prisons, prison guards, police etc is a realistic profession, for it exists to catch and punish criminals. The individuated self needs protection and must demand the services of law and order professionals.
Scientists study the world in an objective manner and understand it. Technologists devise techniques to adapt to the objective world, as it is. Thus, science and technology are realistic professions, for they give to men what they need to adapt to this world.
Businessmen produce goods and services and market them to people who need them to survive. Business is a realistic vocation, for it enables people to adapt to their world and survive.
Psychologists, provided they are realistic, that is, embrace biosocial existential methodological approach to understanding man, are useful to people. People have varying degrees of neurosis and psychosis and need psychologists to explain to them their mental states and help them cope with their world without excessive anxiety, paranoia, depression etc. However, since not too many folks buy the services of mental health professionals, they are not likely to become rich from their profession.

The relevant thing is for the individual to seek out a vocation that produces goods and or services that enable people to survive in this world.
If the individual goes into an idealistic but useless vocation, he will not sell his goods and services and will be poor. Consider professional socialists and communists. Who wants to buy their idealistic conceptions of how people and social institutions ought to be? Very few persons want to buy the services of socialists, so socialists tend to be unemployed. Some of them become professional revolutionaries and get other people to go work and earn a living and support them; Karl Marx fooled around in the Libraries writing idealistic materials, whereas his friend, Frederick Engels’ workers worked to support him. Socialists cannot make a living from their idealistic thinking and writing.
Religious idealists can make a living if they become ministers and, as clerical parasites manage to play on people’s guilt and fears and get them to support them.
If they are merely intellectual about religious idealism, as are many new age gurus, they starve.
However, religion has some utility. Human beings will always have fear of the unknown. Any religion that reduces their fears and enables them to develop peace of mind and have some happiness, even if ultimately it is a false religion, is useful and should be tolerated.

FORGIVENESS AND NIHILISM

Any philosophy or religion that teaches that people should negate this world and escape into its conception of heaven, oneness, peace and joy, as new age religions do, will not enable people to adapt to this world and, therefore, will not be bought by reasonable people who want to live in this world.
If you tell folks to forgive those who wronged them, to permit themselves to be killed without defending themselves, you are not going to enable them to cope with the real world and will not be listened to. People will listen to those who talk of crime and punishment, to lawyers and judges, for they enable them to adapt to this world.
Jesus talked about forgiveness and defenselessness. His gospel would lead to death and those who want to live in this world did not listen to him and will not do so in the future, for as long as they want to live on earth, in the realm of separated self.
Those who want to die and extinguish their separated self will listen to the philosophy of forgiveness and defenseless, a world negating religion.
The individual should have clarity about his wish to escape from this world and do it if that is what he wants to do and leave other people to adapt to the exigencies of a separated world.


REAL SELF-FELLOWSHIP


Real self-psychology teaches people to accept their real selves, which include their bodily selves and spiritual selves. It does not encourage people to negate their bodies and escape into idealistic, imaginary selves. It urges people to accept their bodies and study them scientifically and use medical technology to cope with their illnesses. It validates and affirms the human body.
It teaches that there is another self, the spirit self, a unified spirit self. That unified spirit self is not amenable to ego intellectual understanding and should be assumed while attention is paid to the physical real self. The reason the spirit self has to be recognized is so that people affirm an aspect of themselves that is also real, recognition of which tends to enable them to feel peaceful and happy.
In the here and now world, the neurotic ideal self, secular or spiritual, must be given up and not defended, for the individual to not feel neurotic anxiety, depression, paranoia and schizophrenia. All mental disorders are rooted in a misguided effort to become the ideal self, an imaginary self that could never be attained in reality.

My vocation is to teach people about their real self: the two sides of that real self, the physical, bodily self and spiritual non-bodily self. I am here to teach people to jettison their ideal self, secular and religious.
All mental illness arises from people’s desire to invent idealized selves and defend those false selves. Be they personality disorders, neurosis and psychosis, all mental disorders have something to do with efforts to become an imaginary idealized self. The mentally ill person thinks and acts from the perspective of his imaginary ideal self. The mentally ill person struggles to defend and protect his imaginary ideal self.
People become upset because their ideal selves are not validated and affirmed by other people.
Shyness, a seeming minor disorder, is an attempt to be ones ideal self, consciousness of it, and fear of not becoming it.
Stop trying to be an ideal self and simply be quiet and you would be peaceful and happy.
Do not expect other people to be ideal selves and just accept them as they are, even if they are crazy. In accepting people unconditionally, as they are, you give them your peace; you become a bringer of peace to their conflict ridden world.

All mental illness is healed when the ideal self is given up and not defended. In mental health, one no longer has emotional upsets: no fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, paranoia, mania, schizophrenia etc; one is peaceful and happy at all times.
Do not think and behave from the imaginary ideal self; do not judge from the imaginary ideal self. Do not see the world from the imaginary ideal self. Just tell yourself that you do not know who you are, who other people are and what the world is and means, and stay calm.
You are already seeing the world from the separated self, a self that is not real, but as long as you use that self to accept the world, as it is, not as you want it to become, approach the world scientifically and technologically, you will be calm.
Science and technology is the ego at its best, so become a scientist and or technologist. Nevertheless, the world of science and technology is the world of illusion, a dream world, for the real world is spirit, not matter.
The spirit world, however, should not be our concern, for if we seek it we color it with our ego wishes and distort it. It is enough to attempt to see this ego’s world objectively.

NO JUDGMENT

Every time one judges ones self, judges other people, as good or bad, one has wished that one and other people approximate ones ego ideal; one has attempted to be the author of ones self, and author of other people; one has disturbed ones peace and disturbed other peoples peace, for what one gives to ones self one gives to other people.
Do not judge you and other people; in doing so, you give your self inner peace and happiness.
By not judging you and others you are not playing God; you are not expecting the world to be according to your idea of good or bad; you are not disturbing your/other people’s peace; you are a bringer of peace to you and to other people.
What is my vocation? To teach folks how to attain peace and happiness through corrected thinking and behaving; to teach folks how to live through their real self, bodily and spiritual self. I do so from my understanding of what negation of this world and escapism means. I had negated this world and sought escape in idealistic thinking, philosophies and religion. I did nothing to effectively adapt to the realities of this world. I was out of this world; I was gone from it, mentally.
I got out of graduate school and worked hard for five years. I am a very hard worker for within five years of leaving graduate school I was the executive director of a very large mental health agency. If this world had made sense to me, there is no doubt that I would have worked my way to the top of things. But the problem was that the world made no sense to me. I could not take the world, as it is, seriously. I did not embrace the world’s philosophy and left the world in search of a better philosophy to live by.
Yet what I did was in my nature to do so; as it were, I was programmed to dream for a better world, and could not have not engaged in the long, arduous search for meaning and purpose in a meaningless and purposeless world.
But out of that futile searching for idealistic state, I learnt that if one wants to live in this world that one must embrace what makes for survival in it: holding grievances and punishing offenders, for it is in doing so that the ego’s separated world survives.
If you forgive the ego and do not punish it, when it offends you, it would keep doing so, even kill you. Forgiveness and lack of punitive behavior, as was my approach to people, leads to the end of the egos world and is an escape from what maintains this world.
(I once did group therapy for domestic violence convicts and did not want to punish them; I tried to reorient their thinking via cognitive behavior therapy but not through punishment; I was perceived as soft on criminals and was actually told to go. The psychologists running the show believed in punishing people; they are egotists who believe in punishment and were gratifying their desire to punish others by running those latest ego outfits for holding grievances, feeling guilty and being punitive. The normal psychologist and psychiatrist must believe in guilt and punishment, for guilt and punishment maintains the egoistic world he lives in. And since he believes in guilt and punishment, he must be found guilty and punished, for what one believes in happens to one. Abused persons who believe in guilt and punishment and punish their abusers will eventually be found guilty of a crime and punished, for what people believe in happens to them. The normal person is an egotist and believes in guilt and punishment, punishes other people and is himself punished.)

REAL VERSUS SHAM CHRISTIANITY

It should be noted that Jesus Christ actually negated this world and escaped from it. He taught a philosophy, Gnosticism that saw this world as valueless and negated it. He did not want to be part of this world. He wanted to negate his separated ego self. He overcame this world and was not fascinated by its attractions. He allowed himself to be murdered and did not fight to stay in this world. He had the common sense not to have children hence perpetuate this world.
The early apostles, those who knew Jesus first hand, knew that he taught an escapist philosophy. They sold their worldly goods and lived for the present moment, expecting the world to come to an end at any time. Of course, the world did not come to an end, for the world will be around for several more billion years. As long as the sun shines and it will shine for at least four more billion years, the world will continue to exist.
Disappointed that Jesus did not return to come get them out of what they saw as a corrupt world, Christians distorted the teaching of Jesus to make them adaptive to the exigencies of this world. They discarded Christian Gnosticism and what we now call traditional Christianity emerged.
What folks now call Christianity is really far from what the escapist, idealistic Jewish rabbi, Jesus taught his followers. Extant Christianity, like other religions, is now a mechanism for adapting to this world. True religion is almost always eventually distorted to make it maintain the separated, ego and its world. The religion of the founders of religion, like Jesus, is not always the religion practiced by those who call them their followers. That is the only way these religions can exist, for the alternative is idealism that does not cope with the realities of this world.
The Jews did not embrace the philosophy of forgiveness that their brother, Jesus taught. Instead, they preferred to retain their Mosaic view of guilt and punishment. As we choose is done to us. They chose what maintains this world, guilt and punishment, saw their fellow human beings as guilty and punished the; and their fellow human beings saw them as guilty and punished them hence all over the world they are usually punished, killed.

CONCLUSION

I have learned about the self defeating nature of idealism, secular and religious, and gave it up. What needs done in this world is to be realistic, to study science and technology and use it to adapt to this world while at the same time acknowledging the reality of formless spirit, without getting overboard about spirituality.
Spirituality does not enable any one adapt to this world, in fact, if taken seriously, it leads to escape from this world. Those who want to live in this world must do what living in this world requires, be realistic and operate according to the egos theology of crime and punishment.
Each human being is unique, and knows it. There is no other person like the individual; he is one in all time and in infinity. The specific combination of particles, atoms and elements in his body and his social experience disposes him to be who he is and to do ascertain type of work better than most other people. The individual is suited for a type of vocation; his first job is to ascertain his vocation on earth and subsequently to channel his energy into it, to the best of his ability. He cannot do well what others do well.
The idealist is readily able to perceive the imperfections in himself and in other people and feel motivated to change them, make himself and other people perfect. He cannot make himself and other people perfect. It is futile trying to change ones self and other human beings. The realistic thing to do is to accept ones self and other people as they are, not as they should become. One must accept all people despite their imperfections and insanities and not hope to make them sane and perfect, for one cannot succeed in that idealistic endeavor.
Yet there is hope for mankind. That hope is the scientific method: it studies people as they are, not as they should become; it does not moralize about how people should be and behave but embraces them as they are and behave. The scientific method studies people’s biology, chemistry, physics and psychology, and where changes are possible do so, but where not, accept them for being who they are. People are part of the natural universe of space, time and matter; they are imperfect creatures with an unknown perfect spiritual aspect. We must love all human beings and help them be the best that they can be.

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The ego and its world are very complex and complicated; their language must address the world of differences and multiplicity. Those who write in the egos frame of reference tend to write in complicated, sophisticated language. The language of metaphysics, on the other hand, tends to be very simple. This is because metaphysics deals with simplicity itself: how people came to this world and can escape from it. When I write on secular subjects, my language is sophisticated, but when I write about spiritual matters, my language is very simple, as in this essay.
Africans and African Americans are not a psychological people. They seldom bother trying to understand themselves. In the meantime, they present with varying degrees of psychopathologies; and the sad part is that they don’t even know it. In over twenty years work in the mental health field, I have not had an African as a patient; it is almost always white patients. Black folks mostly come in contact with the mental health system when they experience psychotic decompensation and have to be hospitalized and treated against their will, or, as in Nigeria, when their underlying untreated mental health issues dispose them to over eat and drink themselves to untimely death. I hope that I am doing my bit to alert the brothers and sisters to their mental health issues; that is my goal, any way.

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February 23, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Series on Psychology 2006, #8 of 52: A Brother's Call for Help is Ones own Call for Love

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- All human beings want to be loved. Why so? They are love and only feel at home in love. In their original home, heaven, they live in love. Heaven is love; love is union.

They are perpetually connected to one another and to their creator, God. God is love and his children are love.

God’s children only feel happy when they are in love with one another and with their father. When they are outside love, union, they are unhappy.

Heaven is love and the earth seems the opposite of love. But because their true nature is love and they are happiest when they are in love, they are hurting when they are in a loveless place. The earth is a loveless place and the children of God are hurting, they live in pain and are crying out for love, for union with one another and with their father.

We are all calling on each other to love each other. We engage in this call in different ways. The best way to seek love is to love. If I love you and you love me that is the way it should be. Unfortunately, the world is not an ideal place. In this world, we seek love in different ways.

One of the ways we seek love is to attack people. All attack on other people is a call on them to love one, to love the attacker. All attack is a call for help.

The attacker believes that the person he attacks does not love him and he attacks him to offer him an opportunity to do one of two things: to respond as an ego and counter attack him and both separate from each other and go defend their individuated egos.
The alternative response to attack is to choose love. Our true self is Christ, the son of God who is as God created him, loving. When we live out of our Christ self, we can only love. In Christ consciousness, if other people attack us, we see their attack as a call for love, because they perceived us as, hitherto, not loving towards them (as having separated from them). Their attack on us is their call for us to forgive them, which means to love them. Their attack is a call for loves, which means to overlooking their attack and in doing so seeing their true self, the loving Son of God, the Christ, and loves them.
When we choose to overlook attack, to forgive and love attackers, we have behaved defenselessly, that is, we chose not to defend our ego.
Our ego and the body that houses it feel hurt and pained when attacked and respond with anger and counter attacks to defend it.
The ego feels hurt and seeks revenge; the ego bears grievances and wants to punish those who attacked it. The ego, the self that we are currently aware of as our self is always defensive, feeling attacked and defending itself, bearing grievances and seeking punishment.
Unfortunately, if the ego defends itself by attacking the person who attacked it, now that person feels attacked by him and counter attacks the person to defend himself and that way the world of mutual attacks continues. Thus, we continually attack, defend and attack each other. The consequence is living in a world of conflict and war, a world lacking in peace and happiness.
The egos pattern of response to attack is guaranteed to perpetuate a world of attack. The world of Christ, the world of forgiveness and love, on the other hand, is guaranteed to bring about peace, happiness and joy.
If a person attacks you and you forgive him instead of counter attacking him, that is, overlook his attack, you have ignored the reality of the ego and overcome the ego and its world and operated from the world of the Holy Spirit, the world of love and forgiveness.
The reward of forgiveness and love is peace and happiness for you (the forgiver). Your peace and joy you give to the person you forgive. (If that person is not a forgiving person hence not a loving person, he would not receive the peace and joy that you gave to him; but do not despair for the Holy Spirit receives it on his behalf and holds it for him until he does what would release it: forgive and love all children of God.)
The forgiving hence loving person is a bringer of peace and joy to a world at war with itself.

Any brother’s attack on you is his call on you to forgive and love him; his attack is a call for help from the person, you, that he feels is capable of helping him, teaching him the true meaning of love as forgiveness. It also means that the attacker is ready to learn the true meaning of love.
When a student is ready the teacher will appear; the attacker is a student of love, the attacked is the teacher of love
One must, therefore, forgive the attacker, that is, love him; in so doing, one gives him peace and joy; commodities lacking in his egoistic life.
What one gives to a brother is what one gives to ones self. One too is an ego and lacks peace and joy, so if one gives another brother peace and joy, one gives ones self peace and joy.
If I give a brother love and forgiveness, I give myself love and forgiveness; conversely, if I give a brother attack and pain, I give myself attack and pain.
The person you attack is likely to attack you and the person you love is likely to love you.
The other person is an extension or projection of ones self. What one does to him, one does to ones self. Love that person means love you; forgive that person means forgive you; attack that person means attack you. What you do to others you do to you. Giving is receiving; as you give you receive.

If you choose to respond to others attack from your separated, individuated self, your ego, you will feel hurt by their attack and feel angry and defensive. The ego responds with fear, anger, sadness, depression, paranoia, mania etc when it perceives itself attacked.
On the other hand, if you respond to attack from your Christ self, from forgiveness and love, you do not feel fearful, angry, sad, paranoid, manic etc; you feel at peace and are happy.
The choice is up to us how we respond to others seeming senseless attacks on us, to respond from ego frame of reference or from Christ frame of reference. Whatever frames of reference we choose to respond from we take the consequences.
If when attacked we respond with fear, anger and counter attack we experience lack of peace; if we respond with forgiveness and love we experience peace.
What do you want, peace or war? Others attack on you offers you the opportunity to decide how you respond and what consequence you receive, peace or war.

Other people are external pictures of us. Other people and the world mirror our thinking. The world is the out picturing of our individual and collective thinking.
We think in images and project those images out and see them as if they are external to us. The world is like a dream and whatever we see in it is a mirror of our thinking.
Because the world is our out pictured thoughts, the individual should not go about trying to change other people, the external world but, instead, should change his thinking. If you change your thinking, from attack and war to forgiveness and love, you see a world that mirrors peace and joy for you.
If at the present time you see a world where other people attack you, and attack each other, it means that they mirror your attack thoughts.
If you do not like the world you see, you should change your thinking rather than try to change other people’s behaviors.

A BROTHER’S CALL FOR HELP


Last night, I was at a meeting with some Nigerian brothers. One of them, for any number of reasons, became enraged at my wife and berated her. For a while, I sat quietly and observed the show he was putting out for us to see. Here is a middle aged man behaving like a five year old in his temper tantrums.
At a certain point, I made the mistake of trying to bring reason to bear on the situation. The first lesson we teach folks in anger management classes is never to argue with an angry person.

ANGER MANAGEMENT

If a person is angry he is semi insane. The thinking part of his brain, the cortex, has shut down and he is mostly operating from the hypothalamus, the animal part of the brain. He is now in attack-defend mood. He feels threatened and is defending himself, physically and or psychologically. He is like an attacked animal and is motivated to counter attack his attacker so as to survive. He is not amenable to reason. Therefore, you should not try to reason with him.
If you see an angry person, you should just walk away, or if you cannot walk away, you should try to keep quiet, as much as you could. You can aid your effort to remain calm by counting to ten, taking a deep breathe and holding your breath and then let it out slowly. You may visualize beautiful scenes, like walking on a beech, in a bed of roses, or whatever makes you feel good.
Whatever you do, do not respond with anger to the angry person’s outburst. Anger management inheres in keeping cool when others are loosing their tempers.
I should have said nothing when this brother was verbally and emotionally abusing my wife, asking her who the hell she thinks that she is insisting that he follow set procedures etc. I piped in with what seemed a redirect and he shifted his anger to me and actually got physical. He was, more or less, like a menacing gorilla, beating his chest in an effort to seem powerful and scare other predators away from his territory.
When he became enraged, I remained calm so as not to provoke him further. Apparently, my demeanor irritated him further and he asked me to leave his house (the meeting was at his house). I got up to leave and he followed me, literally pushing me. It was a mess. But I managed to keep my head cool and left.
I could not believe what happened. I have run many groups for domestic violence batterers and know enough about anger management to know that a man who behaved as this brother did is probably a danger to those around him. Obviously, the brother has anger problem. The chances are that he abuses his wife and children and probably needs to receive anger management training. (His anger is probably rooted in paranoid grandiosity, sense of persecution and jealousy.)

THE PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CAUSES OF ANGER

People feel angry for a number of reasons, including a feeling that they are physically attacked. Anger is a response to perceived attack, real or imagined, on ones integrity. The angry person feels attacked, threatened and his body pours out adrenaline, a neuro exciter which speeds all the organs of his body urging him to fight back. In anger response, the individual perceives an obstacle and is trying to remove it; he feels frustrated in his drive to realize a goal and anger is a mechanism for removing that obstacle on his path to goal attainment. People can kill those they perceive as obstacles to their doing what they want to do.
In our modern world, seldom are people physically attacked to make them angry, so as to defend their lives. The most common source of anger is feeling of psychological attack. It goes like this. The individual has a certain haughty self concept. He imagines himself very important and powerful. Of course, he is not. It is fictional superiority, power and importance, not real power and impotence.
The personality disordered individual presents his desired ego ideal, the important self, to other people to relate to.
When he feels that they did not validate his fictional important self, he feels denigrated and made unimportant. He experiences narcissistic rage. His anger is really from hurt pride.
He uses anger to restitute his injured vanity. His intention is to seem powerful and in anger he is powerful.
The angry person is motivated by power and control. He is what psychoanalysts used to call a neurotic, a man chasing a false important self concept, self image. In today’s psychiatric terms, he has personality disorders, most probably narcissistic and paranoid personality disorders.
(The angry brother has all the indices of paranoid personality, I could see his quest for grandeur, persecutory feelings and inordinate jealousy, all features of paranoid personality. He probably beats up his wife when he feels that she is fooling around with other men and or accuses her of fooling around. He probably intimidates his wife and children with his terrorist behaviors; his anger is psychological terrorism at work; he wants to use it to get folks to feel fear and out of fear do as he wants them to do.)
To heal neurotic anger, one thing is required: the anger prone person must change his self concept and desist from questing after fictional superiority and importance.
The individual must have a realistic self esteem that sees ones self as the same and equal with other people, but not as inferior or superior to them. If he corrects his neurotic self concept and self image he would no longer be misinterpreting other people’s innocent behaviors as attacks on his imaginary important self-concept.
This brother has a false important self concept, self image, and a deluded, grandiose self concept and believed, falsely, that other people insulted his imaginary important self and his anger was a futile effort to seem important.
Alas, acting angrily made him seem like a five you old boy; he seemed pathetic in his flailing around in anger.

When I got home I wrote a memo to those present at the meeting stating my surprise at what transpired.
In the morning, I woke up to see more than five emails from the brother. He wrote at length about his understanding of what transpired.
He boasted how he is a rich man, a successful man and how I am a poor man, a failure in life etc. He bragged and praised himself in every which way his infantile thinking could imagine. At some point he began to read mind and said that I had asked my wife to insult him so as to provoke his outrage and that we had planned it to sue him to get his money! Now we are talking about transient psychosis, delusional disorder with aspects of mania. Clearly, the brother has an underlying sense of inferiority and inadequacy and felt a compulsive need to mask it with his desire for superiority; he pursues the fiction of superiority; he is a pathological liar; he is always hatching tales of how important he is; how his father is an ambassador, how his family are millionaire; how he was a professor at a university…he had at one time taught at a community college and that is the only truth in his fanciful yearns.

For a while, my ego kicked in and felt insulted by this man. My insulted ego asked me to respond in kind to the brother’s verbal onslaught. My responses would be in the nature of defenses, trying to present me as right and him as wrong.
Luckily, I remembered A Course in Miracles famous quote: would you rather be right or happy? If you insist on being right and in seeing others as wrong, and your rightness pours patrol unto fire and you experience conflagration all around you, is that what you want?
Even if you are right, why don’t you allow the other guy to feel right and let go of your own ego’s desire to be right? So, I decided not to defend myself. I went to Church and came back from church and wrote this essay. (This essay is based on Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles philosophy; a philosophy that I independently arrived at.)

At Church, the minister talked about how people have pain in their lives and are carrying that pain to wherever they go to. We tend to engage in geographic therapy, thinking that if we go elsewhere that our issues would be resolved. But the fact is that we take our psychological pains with us to wherever we go to. We must, therefore, stop and look into our minds and understand our issues and try to solve them rather than run from them.
Most human beings are walking wounded persons. They experienced psychological injuries and are living in psychological pain. At best, they are worried well neurotics.
What needs to be done is to pause and understand ones issues and deal with them rather than deny them.
This boastful brother obviously feels inordinately inferior and has a need to seem very superior and important. His life is geared towards seeming like he is a very rich, powerful and important person. He goes about calling himself professor when he is at the moment unemployed. Apparently, being called professor makes him seem very important.
Long term psychotherapy and anger management would probably help him deal with his unresolved issues. For one thing, he would learn to accept himself as he is and no longer have to put on airs, wear the mask of being an important person. He is suffocating in that mask of importance he wears. He lives in psychological pain, anxiety and anger, and paranoia. He would develop unconditional positive self acceptance. He would see his real self as good enough and no longer have an inner compulsion to tell lies about his non-existent accomplishments.
The brother’s issues are not the essence of this essay but my reaction to them. His behavior is an opportunity for me to choose once again, to choose differently. Hitherto, I had chosen the ego (separated self) and behaved like the ego. In ego state, I am motivated to counter attack, to punish my attackers etc. That path only leads to defense and more defenses, hence the world’s conflict.
This brother’s attack offers me an opportunity to choose differently, this time, to choose to respond to him from my Christ self.
Christ is the son of God as God created him. Christ is our true self. Christ is love. When Christ perceives attack on himself, he forgives the attacker and loves him.
Christ does not defend himself; Christ does not bear grievances and grudges, Christ does no seek punishment for the wrongs done to him; Christ knows that this world is a dream of the opposite of heaven. Heaven is unified and this world is a dream of separated self.
In heaven, we share one self, the unified self, Christ, the Holy Son of God. Christ, the son of God is in his father, as his father is in him and he is in his brothers. There is no space or gap between one son of God and another and the son of God and his father. God is in his son and his son is in him; the two share one self. God is one side of a coin and the Son of God is the other side of it. God and his sons share one self and one mind.
Christ is always forgiving and loving. He sees others attack on him as a call for love when love is missing. In that light, this brother has attacked me. Why did he do so? He probably felt that I did not love him. How so? He probably felt that I did not respect his desired power and prestige.
He goes about calling himself a professor and I call him by his first name. That probably makes him feel disrespected. All told he probably sees me as not validating his assumed important self. Obviously, he wants to seem important and powerful and wants those around him to collude with him and see him as such. If he is affirmed as an important person, his ego feels good but if not his ego feels humiliated.
Moreover, in the said organization he was bucking to become the president. He tried his best to make alliances with other members so that they would vote for him as the president. Unfortunately for him, he does not have leadership and managerial skills. He is not a doer, he is a mere talker, a man who wants the world to see him as a boss but does not understand what bosses do; bosses work harder than the average worker. Where the average worker puts in eight hours of work a day and goes home, managers often work double that time.
Apparently, he saw me as a rival, as an opponent for leadership position. I did not see him as a rival. I did not see myself as in competition with him. What is there to compete for? I am not interested in false power and wealth.
So how do I respond to him? I was tempted to respond to him from my ego. But the ego is a false self, not my true identity.
My true identity is Christ and that means that I must forgive and love him; his attack on me is a call on me to love him, for he perceived me as not loving towards him.
I choose forgiveness and love. In forgiving and loving him I give peace and joy to me; so I am not doing him a favor by forgiving him, I am doing me a favor.

MY ALLEGED HATRED OF IGBOS


In one of this man’s letters to me, he talked on and on about how I hated Igbos.
Translation? He believed that I hated him, an Igbo. Do I hate Igbos? Do I hate him? Nothing could be further from the truth.
Somewhere, I pointed out that Igbo culture is very conditional in accepting its people; people tend to be accepted when they succeed and ignored when they did not. This produces fear of rejection in Igbos. Many of them strive to succeed and, in fact, as the world considers these things, but not as God knows them, succeed. However, they tend to pay a heavy price for living in a conditionally accepting culture.
Karen Horney, Carl Rogers and other psychologists have taught us that a conditionally accepting culture tends to breed people who hate their real selves and identify with false ideal false selves. They invent a composite picture of a successful person and want to be like him and hate themselves to the extent that they do not approximate that ideal social self-concept and self-image. They have an obsessive compulsive desire to measure up to the picture of success and fear being a failure; Igbos, in general, fear not being like the person their society would not accept.
Where this fear of failure is intense, some Igbos use creative imagination to invent fictional successful selves for themselves and identify with them. In doing so, they develop neurosis, personality disorders, even psychosis, such as delusional disorder and mania.
(In mania there is excited thinking and behaving, a feeling of euphoria, a belief that one has enormous powers, powers that one dos not have, poor judgment and some delusional beliefs, such as seeing ones self as wealthy and all powerful, when one is not. In delusion one believes what is not true as true, such as the brother believing the make belief world where he is very rich and all powerful and others are poor and weak. There is grandiosity, persecution, jealousy etc in delusional disorder. Such persons tend to be very fearful and angry. The brother is obviously a fearful and angry person. He does not even know what true courage is: to forgive and love all God’s children despite their different conditions on earth.)
Conditionally accepting Igbo culture produces people who feel inadequate and seek adequacy and that often lead some to denigrate other persons so as to obtain compensatory sense of superiority to them.
Who does not know that Igbos would like to feel superior to Yorubas and Hausas and other Nigerians?
No human being is superior to others. The very desire for superiority is neurotic; if that desire is believed it is psychotic.
An insane person is a person who believes that he is superior to other persons. A sane person is a person who knows that he is the same and equal with all human beings. The president of a republic is exactly the same as the beggar on the street.


The brother’s mail to me tried to convince me that he is a successful person and that I am a failure in life. He struggled mightily to present himself as powerful and me as powerless. (Clinically, these are classic paranoid symptoms. See David Swanson et al, The Paranoid; William Meissner, Paranoid Process; Psychotherapy for the Paranoid Process; David Shapiro, Autonomy and the Rigid Character and, of course, DSM IV sections on the various types of paranoia: schizophrenia, delusional disorder and personality disorder.)
This man’s claims about how rich and powerful he is, his boasting about power he does not have made the point that I was trying to make that Igbo conditional acceptance of people produces neurotics and psychotics.
Now, suppose that it is, in fact, true that he is richer than Bill Gates should not that make him humble?
He is rich? The man’s credit rating is so abysmal that when we sought certain securities and asked him to secure them he said that no financial institution would look at his request. He is so rich that I essentially foot the bill of the organization.
I have seen mentally ill folks who were eating out of garbage dumps but still claimed to be billionaires, or if they have religious ideation, Jesus Christ or whoever their paranoid grandiosity could latch unto. These people feel inferior and want to seem superior and tell tall tales of how powerful and rich they are.
If, in fact, a human being is rich and powerful common sense ought to teach him to be grateful to God for blessing him. But this deluded brother feels a need to tell the world that he is rich even though he is demonstrably dependent on his wife for supporting him. The poor woman works double shifts to help support him while he presents an image of a successful rich man to the world.
The real issue is that somehow I had given him the impression that I hate him and hate Igbos. I have heard that some other Igbos apparently read my constructive criticism of their culture as hatred of them.
It is sad that in my effort to understand people, as they are, I had given some persons the impression that I do not like them. This is a mistake. I apologize. I love Igbos and all human beings.


IGBO SENSE OF PERSECUTION

It is necessary to understand that this brother’s boastfulness and anger is partly rooted in his Igbo sense of persecution. Many Igbos, apparently, believe that other Nigerians persecute them.
(Anger is biosocial in origin; in this essay, I stress the social aspect of it; I am, however, mindful that there is a biological aspect to it; angry persons tend to be excitable persons; they probably inherited a tendency to have quick somatic arousal; a situation that suggests over active adrenaline and other neuro exciters and or low neuro inhibitors like GABA. This paper will not address the biochemistry and biophysics of human thinking and behavior.)
This sense of persecution is partly empirical and partly rooted in their personal psychologies. It is true that some Nigerians do not like Igbos and in the past had killed them. Yet we must observe that the psychology of Igbos contribute to their unfortunate fate. Generally, they present a fictional important self to other people and bid them to acknowledge that grandiose self concept and self image. When their false self is not acknowledged by other people, they feel paranoid sense of persecution.
The solution to this insanity is for them to deconstruct their self concepts, give up desiring ideal perfect, all powerful self concepts, reconstruct their self concepts and accept their real selves, a self that is the same and equal with all persons. Each of us is the same and equal with all persons. As long as the individual pursues superiority and power he would be prone to paranoid fear, anger, sadness and hypomania.



SOME METAPHYSICS


It is doubtful that human beings can live without religion (metaphysics). A true metaphysics enables folks to develop inner peace and happiness; it enables them to have equanimity and not be disturbed by the exigencies of this world.
Here is a metaphysics that might help folks with anger problems. Anger is never justified just, as fear is never justified. Where there is anger and fear there is no love. Fear is the absence of love; anger is the absence of love. Love is union; only separated persons, egos, feel fear, anger, depression and paranoia, mania and other mental upsets.
God created us; he created us by extending his one self into each of us. Each of us is an extension of God, a part of God, a son of God.
God is union. We are eternally unified with God and with each other.
God has one self and one mind. We all share the one self, one spirit and one mind of God. In eternity (which is forever, including the present) all are unified.
At some point, a point that has never occurred, we desired separation from God and from each other. We sought to go seem special, to go seem to have created ourselves. Apparently, we resented the fact that God created us and wanted to create God, create ourselves and create each other.
Our wishes for self creation and separation are impossible of gratification, for God created us and we cannot create God or create ourselves.
What we cannot satisfy in heavenly reality we dreamed.
This world is our dream of separation. On earth, each of us dreams that he has a separated self, a self housed in body, a self living in space, time and matter. He sees gap between him and other people; it takes time for him to reach other people. His body is wired in such a manner that he feels pain when it is hurt hence feels fear of being hurt.

THE EGO

On earth, each of us invents a separated self concept and translates it into a pictorial self image for him to see. Each of us also invents self concepts and images for other people and for whatever he sees. The world is a place where self concepts, that is, separated selves, seem to interact.

THE HOLY SPIRIT

When the Son of God, all of us, seemed to separate from his father, God, and from each other, God the father entered our world as God the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the correction principle. He is here in the temporal universe to teach us that our real home is unified, not separated.
Now there seem three Gods: God the father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. This phenomenon is also called the Holy Trinity or Triune.
God the father is the transcendent God; God the Holy Spirit is the immanent God in the temporary universe; God the son is us, the collective us, all creation.

Our ego is our earthly personality; it is the separated self that believes that it created itself and created God. We navigate the world with our ego, our earthly personalities.
In our earthly mind are three parts: the right mind (where the Holy Spirit and Christ are), the left, wrong mind, where the ego is and the unified one mind of God and his Son.

On earth, each of us thinks and behaves from his left mind, the ego mind. The Holy Spirit, the right mind, urges him to try to think and behave from the right mind.
The right mind, the Holy Spirit, Christ mind, is the mind that forgives and loves all people. It sees the past, present and future and overlooks them and knows that there is only one time, the eternal present of God.
The ego mind is the mind that bears grudges and grievances and does not forgive those who attacked him. The ego mind sees the attacker as guilty and wants to punish him. The ego mind maintains this world.

The mission of the Holy Spirit is to teach us to remember our real self, the Christ self, which is represented by the Holy Spirit, in the right mind, and respond to others attacks on us from that perspective, that is, to forgive and love the attacker.
If the individual responds from the right mind, forgives and loves all people, he is rewarded with peace and happiness.
Peace and joy are the gifts of God, the gifts of behaving as God wants us to behave, forgive and love one another.
If you forgive others their attacks on you, you are doing yourself a favor, you are giving yourself peace and joy, and extending that peace and joy to the person you forgive. However, if the person you forgave is not yet a forgiving person, he will not receive the peace and joy you gave him; the Holy Spirit will receive it for him, waiting for him to learn to forgive and love and then receive those gifts of God.

REAL SELF, HAPPY DREAM, GATE OF HEAVEN AND HOLY INSTANT

When an individual consistently forgives and loves all people, he lives in peace and joy. He is metaphorically living at the gate of heaven (though separated, he is near union). He is not in heaven for heaven is a place of formlessness and perfect union.
(Only the formless, the same and equal can unify; heaven is the abode of the formless, same and equal persons. The earth, on the other hand, is the abode of form, differences and inequality; the different and unequal cannot unify, they must be separated. If you desire heaven’s union you must accept our sameness and equality and stop defending ego differences and inequality. The brother sees himself as better than me, that is, he is defending his ego, and that is, he is insane for sanity lies in accepting all people as equal.)
On earth we live in forms, in bodies and therefore are not in heaven. But if we approximate heaven’s condition, love, via forgiveness, we are at the gate of heaven. We are still living in the world of illusion, still dreaming that separation is possible but now we are having a happy dream. We are now living in the real world, a world that though still separated approximates the world created by God: is peaceful and happy, what Bahaullah called the lesser peace; heaven is the greater peace. The happy dream, heaven’s gate, the real world, purgatory, call it what you like, is our world reinterpreted by the Holy Spirit and made a bit loving, a bit unified.

The forgiving and loving person, though still in the world of space, time and matter, occasionally experiences union with God, heaven; he occasionally perceives the empirical world disappear and he enters the spiritual world, the abode of oneness, a place where there is no you and I, no subject and object, no seer and seen, a place of perfect oneness, hence perfect peace and happiness.
Heaven cannot be described in words, so we cannot describe it. It is, nevertheless, real; in fact, it is the only reality there is. Our world is a dream, a fictional place with fictional selves, ego personalities, and dream figments going about thinking that they are real and are important. Important, indeed, their bodies are food for worms and worms are food for other organisms.

SALVATION, REEMPTION, DELIVERANCE, CHRIST’S SECOND COMING, LAST JUDGMENT

Each of us meets heaven’s conditions at his own time. He does so when he learns to forgive and love all people. Salvation, redemption and deliverance means that one is now totally forgiving and loving; they mean emancipation from the clutches of the ego and its pain, fear, anger, sadness, paranoia etc. To live in ego state, on earth, in the world of separation is to live in fear and anger; to feel fear and anger is to live in hell. (Our temper tantrum throwing brother lives in ego state, in fear and anger, in hell. Have pity on him and forgive him; but know who you are having pity for; you. You are having pity for you, for the collective son of God. The son of God sentenced himself to pain and suffering by seeking separation.)


When a person consistently forgives other people, overlooks the attacks on him, he has passed the last judgment on the ego and its world; he has renounced the ego and returned to his true identity, Christ, the unified self, the Holy Son of God who is as his father created him, unified with his father and all his brothers. He now lives in peace and happiness (the lesser peace).
The forgiving and loving person joins the saviors of the world (a savior is a person who forgives and loves all people) and works with them in trying to save those who still live in the ego, in fear, in anger (he teaches them how to overcome anger, via forgiving attack).
When all of us have learned to live from our Christ self, the self directed by the Holy Spirit, are forgiving and loving, the world disappears and we all experience formless oneness, heaven; as it were, we the sons of God disappear into God and he into us and the dream of separation ends. We résumé our eternal mode of existing, in unified spirit.

The end of this empirical world may take millions of years before it is accomplished. In the meantime, each of us must seek salvation, that is, learn to forgive and love all persons at all times. To the extent that each of us learns to forgive and love he is saved and lives in peace and happiness and experiences occasional Holy Instant, union with all.

GOD, LOVE, UNION, PEACE, JOY, BLISS

In reality, we always live in love while imagining ourselves in a loveless place; we are always in union while dreaming that we are in the world of separation; we are always in God while thinking ourselves in ego states.
To know this fact, one must forgive and love at all times. Forgive others attack on you, which forgives your own attacks on other people, and experience oneness, unified spirit, heaven.



SUMMARY

Last night, a brother verbally abused my wife and me. My ego perceived his behavior as a psychological attack on it and urged me to counter attack him. If I do so, he would defend himself and counter attack me. The result is that we would separate from each other and perpetuate the world of separation.
We came to this world by attacking each other and the world is maintained by our attacks on each other.
Our mutual attacks push each other away, thus enabling us to experience the separation we wish to experience. This brother attacked me thus urging me to separate from him and if I fall into his trap, I would separate from him and in so doing continue living in my ego state, in separation hence feeling the gifts of the ego: fear, anger, sadness, depression, paranoia, mania and other mental upsets egos experience.
This brother’s seeming uncalled for attack (at an unconscious level, I asked him to attack me, for there are no accidents in God’s universe; we experience what we desire to experience, what we want to learn from; I wanted to learn about his angry nature and, perhaps, help him heal it) offers me an opportunity to choose again, to choose differently, this time to love rather than hate, to forgive rather than bear grievances.
Actually, to forgive him is very simple. Everything he said about me is false. Not one word he said about me is correct. His perception of me is delusional, paranoid, period. He is not processing reality accurately, not even in ego terms. He is operating from an excited nervous system and is actually in a minor manic episode (hypomania…he said all sorts of rubbish about me that any one with the slightest knowledge of me would know that he was not talking about me; he was projecting his paranoid thinking to me). Because I realize that he is experiencing transient psychosis hence had thought disorder with characteristic word salad, confabulation and illogical association I do not have to be angry at him. I must overlook everything he said.
To overlook others verbal and or physical attacks is to forgive them. To forgive is to love, for in a world of mutual attacks forgiveness is the true meaning of love. (On earth to forgive is to love; in eternity there is no attack, only pure love, that is, union and its peace and joy.)

I choose the gospel of the Holy Spirit rather than the gospel of the ego, forgiveness rather than grievance and attack. I totally forgive this brother. I totally love this brother. In doing so, I give me peace and happiness; in giving me peace and joy, I give him peace and joy…though he may not yet receive it, given his confused emotional state, the Holy Spirit has received my gift to my brother for him. He will receive my gift when he heals his psychological disorders.
The brother obviously has personality disorders and anger management issues that he needs to go address in psychotherapy. He needs to deal with these issues at the secular psychological level and finally seek some spiritual understanding as to why we live on earth. He will find his God and his real self, Christ, in his own way, not my way, for each of us came here alone and must find a solution that fits his issues. We, however, must return home in the company of each other, when we forgive and love one another.
Brother you did not attack me. You did not do anything to my real self. You abused my false separated self.
That which can be abused and eventually destroyed has no worth. The ego and its body are valueless.
The part of us that has worth, our spirit cannot be attacked and or harmed by any one; he is safe in his father’s mind, for our minds leave not their creator’s mind.
Brother I forgive you but go seek help for your anger and psychological issues. However, it is not for me to worry about your issues. The sole function of an atonement worker is to atone for his own sins, to heal himself by forgiving all people. I have healed myself by forgiving you and all of us. And in doing so find the peace of God. Peace and joy is preferable to the transitory wealth that tickles your fancy.
The reader of this piece may think that I made this brother out as the guilty one and myself out as the innocent one; him as the sick one and I as the healthy one. Nothing could be further from the truth than that. The brother is obviously sick. His sickness, however, is my sickness projected out for me to see and heal. He is me mirrored for me to see. His Igbo culture based issues are mine, too. His temper tantrums were the way I used to react many years ago. When I was eighteen years old, I remember reacting exactly as I saw this man react to attack, real or imagined. I acted out at others, was angry at those that I thought had done something bad to me, when, in fact, they had not. This man thought that I did something bad to him when in fact I did not. He is me writ large. He presented my issues for me to see them clearly and heal them. (He is also you, for his apparent paranoid reaction is the way human beings react when they feel attacked, real or imagined.)
As for guilt and innocence, he is innocent, for all children of God are eternally innocent. They have not separated from God and have not done what we see them do on earth. They do what they do only as in dreams, and what is done in dreams is not real.
We all remain as our creator created us: innocent, guiltless and sinless. But in time, on earth, we seem guilty. We do bad things to each other. What we need to do is to correct our errors and mistakes, not to crucify each other. (The Holy Spirit’s mission is to correct our errors.)
The brother has to correct his ego based mistakes and learn to love people. In the meantime, it is not my job to worry whether he forgives; my one task is to be the one who forgives all God’s children. In forgiving all of us, I become an example for other people to imitate.
The ego is a tricky thing and those who trust and ask it to guide them always lose. We worked hard to achieve an objective and just as we achieved it our egos clashed and self destruct.
Those who redirect their ego goals and make them in alignment with the purpose of the Holy Spirit, God, that is, make them forgiving and loving, ultimately, achieve their goals.

Peace and joy to all my brothers in Christ, the one holy Son of God.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji
[email protected]

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February 02, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Series on Psychology 2006, #7 of 52: African-Americans, as I see them

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- PREAMBLE Like all people, African Americans are individually unique and no two of them are the same. It, therefore, seems a mistake to talk about them as if they are all the same. Be that as it may, the fact is that there is such a thing as group character. For example, I am an Igbo African. There is such a thing as an Igbo character type, within which are individual Igbos who are unique in their personality types.

I understand why folks are leery of talking about national character types; it tends to lead to treating people as members of groups but not as individuals hence stereotyping them. This is a noble intention. All human beings ought to be treated as individuals, not as members of any given groups. Nevertheless, it is silly denying the obvious, that there are national character types.

There is the generalized English, French, Italian, German and American personality type. If you do not accept this fact then randomly select a German and a Russian and give them work to do and see how they do it. The German is more likely to be methodical, thorough and efficient and produce high quality product, whereas the Russian is more likely to be lackadaisical, carefree and inefficient and produce a shoddy product. All said there is such a thing as group personality type, within which there are individual differences.

African Americans have a group based personality type, within which is individuation. Making stereotypical statements about them may be unfair to those who do not fit the group stereotype; nevertheless, we must attempt to understand the generalized picture of the African American. We must do so with the understanding that every general rule has exceptions to it.

I have lived in North America from the time that I left secondary school in Africa. During that time, I have had occasion to interact with most of the ethnic groups that constitute the great mosaic called North America: whites, Asians and African Americans. As a result of my relationships with these various people I come to certain conclusions about them. This essay is not going to dwell on the other ethnic groups that constitute North America but on African Americans.

The individual is seldom objective in his perception of other people, and perception of anything for that matter. He looks at whatever he sees with his past learning, and his internalized presuppositions and preconceptions of what is good or bad. We all seem to wear lenses through which we look at the external world. These myopic lenses probably mean that none of us ever sees anything as it is. In that light, I probably do not see African Americans as they are? My past colors how I see the present.

Having admitted the probable prejudiced nature of my perception, yet my perception is my perception. I am entitled to sharing that perception with those who care to know about it. They can do with it, though admittedly biased, whatever they want to do with it. My obligation to myself is to be honest and describe things as I see them. If my perception is not correct, which is probably the case, I stand to be corrected. You, the reader, please feel free to correct my misperceptions; and while you are at it, please do remember to do so, on rational grounds, not by begging the issue, or merely telling me to share your perception just because it is yours.

There is a common adage that admiration is the highest form of compliment. You want to be like those you admire.

I do not want to be like African Americans. That just about says it all, does it not?

If I were an idealist, I would set about trying to change African Americans. But I am a social realist and know how difficult it is to change people.

My goal in this essay is merely to describe African Americans, as I see them, and leave it to them to ponder how this African sees them. If they think that there is some merit in my perception, they could decide to change what is changeable in them and live with what is not changeable in them. My function as a social observer is to describe phenomena, as I see it, and, hopefully, that description enables individuals to better understand it than they did before.

I should say that the sword cuts both ways. Just as I have my perception of African Americans, they have their perception of me and other Africans. Their perception of us may not be positive? That is their prerogative; they are entitled to their perception.

Each of us behaves in light of his perception of phenomena; his only obligation is to ascertain what that perception is and strive to make it as synonymous with the truth as is possible.

(What is the truth, Pontus Pilate asked Jesus? I, a mere man, certainly do not know what the truth is. May be the alleged only son of God, a Jew, Jesus, knows what the truth is. Those of us who are not sons of God, are perhaps sons of an unknown God, do not know what the truth is. But please do not tell us what the truth is until our unknown God tells us.)

Every human being operates within a context; he operates with a frame of reference that his context gave him, a world view that he internalized while growing up. It is, therefore, necessary to know something about the individual’s context and frame of reference before we can understand him and his perceptions.

I am an Igbo Diala. I was socialized into Igbo Omenala. I internalized Igbo culture and operate from its parameters.

Igbo culture is very republican and democratic. Igbo culture is individualistic, achievement oriented and realistic. Igbos are not a sentimental people, they accept life as it is without unnecessary adornments. Their language is overly realistic. Consider: Owu manu ji ara edebere otu? (I will not interpret it for you, you try to figure it our for yourself, after all, if I have taken the trouble to understand your language, English, the least that you could do is take the trouble to understand my own language, a language, we believe is the best in the world. The Igbos say: Speak Igbo and then die, indicating how proud they are of their language.)

My grandfather grew up in the early 1900s Alaigbo (Igboland), a world that the British had recently conquered. What did him and his contemporary Igbos do? They would tell their children: Look, children, the British defeated us, not because they are better men than we are but because they have advanced science and technology. We must acquire science and technology, if we ever want to compete with them. Therefore, we must all go to school and study science and technology. We must work hard. With science and technology and hard work, in a few generations, we shall be able to do what the British do. We might even surpass them. Thus, these hardy men and women resolved to send their children to school. Going to school and working hard became their mantra. Today, many of these amazing people’s children are university graduates and are found in the best universities of the world.

The Igbo does not countenance laziness. He does not listen to excuses as to why one is poor. He says: if you say yes, your Chi (personal God, your real self) will say yes. (See Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart.) He does not accept the thesis that he is a victim of circumstances. He sees himself as in charge of his life. He has internal locus of control and believes that no matter what the external environment is like that it is up to him to do what he could to extract a decent living for himself and his family. However, he is not naïve as to the powerful effect of the external environment on the individual; he recognizes the reality of the external world but does not resign himself to it.

My grandfather’s generation recognized that, for the time being, the British were in charge of their affairs. But that was a temporary situation. With hard work, they believed that sooner or later they would be able to compete with the British on their on terms.

The Igbo does not want you to pity him, see him as a victim and give him anything out of pity.

(When the Igbo comes to North America and beholds such policies as Affirmative Action, he is annoyed by it; he says: if you cannot get into the school you want to attend on merit, and then do not go to that school. When I was in secondary school, my father would say to me, Tom, I want you go to Oxford or Cambridge University. To do so, you must have excellent grades in your studies, including your GCE Advance Level. He could not tolerate mediocre grades. I had the requisite grades to attend those top colleges, not because I was particularly smart but because father could not let go of my case until I behaved realistically, studied hard.)

The Igbo context from which I came from is one where individuals are expected to compete and receive from their world whatever their abilities could give them in the competitive world they live in.

I am an Igbo and carry the Igbo culture in me to wherever I go. I brought that culture with me to North America. I view the social phenomenon of North America through the lenses of my Igbo worldview. My perception is biased by my individual personality and by my cultural upbringing.

LACK OF INITIATVE

In my perception, African Americans, on the whole, seem to lack initiative; they seem to lack entrepreneurial and business skills. Generally, I see a people who do not start their own businesses; I see a people who wait for others, whites and Asians, to start business ventures and then come around and employ them.

(My parents were small business persons; my father started trading from age fifteen and by the time he was twenty, had gone to most West African countries, buying goods from them and reselling them at a small profit in Alaigbo; my mother ran a restaurant at an army barracks).

The African American that I see does not seem to realize that he can start his own business and employ himself and employ his own people. He stays around waiting for other persons to employ him. And when they do not employ him, he complains, bitching about discrimination against him.

Of course, in North America, discrimination is real. What do you expect? Human beings seem self-centered. (See Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.) Human beings seem motivated to first help themselves and later help those like them.
Whites start business to help themselves and help their brothers and sisters; Asians do the same.

Human beings seldom identify with those who do not look like them. White Americans generally feel comfortable among whites and generally will employ fellow whites before they employ those who do not look them, those they do not feel comfortable around.

In North America, African Americans are generally the last hired and first fired in the workplace.

As soon as he obtains the token jobs white Americas give him, he feels very important. As it were, he says: see, I am now somebody important because I work at a prestigious white outfit.

The African American seems to derive false social importance from his proximity to white folk, folks he, apparently, assumes are superior to him.

The few African Americans that attended Ivy League colleges, such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, even Stanford, tend to think that they are very special persons. They tend to carry themselves like they are godlike. Apparently, it never occurs to these folks that they attended schools that were started by individual white men and that they, themselves, can start their own schools and build them into top ranked schools.

(The so-called Negro colleges, such as Howard, Lincoln, Fisk etc were actually started by white men of good will, those invested in training Negroes during the era of Jim Crow and racial segregation).

On their own, African Americans have not really started great universities and large business corporations and made them outstanding. African Americans, apparently, wait for whites to achieve excellence and they come to bask in reflected glory of white achievement.

Generally, African Americans work for governments (city, county, state and federal) and major American corporations. They seldom start their own business and work for themselves.

Those of them who mange to be in positions of authority in white started employment places seldom employ other blacks, certainly, not in positions that they believe that those fellow blacks would compete for their positions. When they see a talented black person, they become afraid of him and do everything in their power to get rid of him. They surround themselves with mediocre persons and or with white women who would not threaten their positions.

The African American manager is perhaps, the most insecure human being on earth; he feels so insecure and protective of his sinecure position that he spends most of his energy keeping other blacks out. At the various universities, if a token black man is hired, usually to satisfy affirmative action requirement and have one Negro around, he proceeds to do whatever he could to keep other blacks out, certainly to keep out those blacks he believes are more talented than him. But when his unproductive position is challenged, when he does not secure tenure on the basis of his scholastic work, he suddenly seeks other blacks help and starts talking about discrimination against him. But when he has used black support to secure tenure in his school, he could care less about other black folks. In fact, he seldom mentors and nurtures other blacks to become scholars.

The African American is very jealous and perceives any talented black competitor as his enemy, a person to be kept out of his work environment.

African-Americans do not encourage each other to become the best that they could be.

EXPLOITATION OF AFRICANS

Africans who have had extensive contact with African Americans generally report that the brothers are generally intent on using them rather than helping them. They say that African Americans would like to use Africans’ labor for free and not pay for it. A young unemployed African PhD told me that a head of a black studies department had asked him to come teach a couple of courses at his school and that he did so but found out that the man had no intention of paying him for his services. He wondered how the Negro expected him to pay his bills. He concluded that African Americans, no matter how educated they seem to be, are pimps and hustlers, and that if you do not protect your interest that they would use you for their own good and dump you, just as they use defenseless women as prostitutes to make a living for themselves.

(Actually, to make money to buy drugs, for a pimp could never respect himself; how could a person who exploits another human beings suffering respect himself? No, the pimp must be self a self loathing and destructive person and be addicted to cocaine, crack cocaine, amphetamine, heroine, and the other staple drugs these living dead persons are prone to).

SELF DEVALUATION

African Americans seem to not value their lives. In their great ghettos, black on black crime is very high. For the slightest excuse, they kill each other. One would think that they would reserve their anger for the group that oppressed them, white folks. Instead, they seem to tolerate white abuse and seem to displace their repressed rage at whites towards fellow blacks. If their brothers, sisters and wives do anything to them that they consider disrespectful, what is left of their pride and vanity is pricked and they strive to rehabilitate their injured vanity by killing them.

These people seem to have no respect for each other’s life. Apparently, their experience of slavery and discrimination so devalued their lives that they do not place much value on black person’s lives.

Not valuing other blacks, not seeing them as important enough to be respected, they find it easy to kill other blacks.

Moreover, the white controlled environment made white life seem very important and blacks accept that feedback and seldom harm whites. At any rate, given the racist nature of American jurisprudence, if a black man committed a crime against a white person, he is most likely to be quickly apprehended and put away in prison than if his victim is another black person.

White judges seem to relish putting black Americans into jail; apparently, they define their role as protecting white society. In America, a minor crime would get a black person prison term and a slap on the wrist for a white person.

Institutional racism is a reality in American jurisprudence; we do not need to deny reality.

(As an Igbo, I am extremely realistic and accept things as they are without illusions that they could be ideal. I expect discrimination from whites, receive what I expect, and am not bothered by it, for, I assume that whites do not owe me anything in life. As I see it, by and by, we, Africans will come to our own and do unto whites as they have done to us. There seem a principle of cause and effect operative in the world; as we sow we reap; by discriminating against other people, whites have sown hatred for them and will so reap. For now, we, Africans, have to take it on the chin, and still keep our heads up and work hard. We must file away all grievances we may have, since you do not have the technological means to retaliate in kind for the injustices we currently experience in the world. We must work towards a future where Africa would have science and technology, nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and thereafter we must insist that we be respected. No body respects weak persons and since extant Africans are too weak, no one respects them. So be it. Such is life, cest la vie. I do not cry over reality, I accept it as it is, stoically. But make no mistake about it, every insult Africans have experienced is filed away in our memory banks and in time some one must pay a heavy price for our degradation. Mark that point in your memory bank. Africans are not a forgiving people. All though many Africans are learning the Christian theology that folks forgive those who abused them, however, forgiveness does mean condoning of abuse. Abuse must stop, period; if the imported Jewish God tolerates abuse, he must be given back to masochistic. Our African God, Chukwu, Olorun, Obasi, will do, thank you).

AFRICAN AMERICAN PERSONALITY

In the past, social scientists tried to describe what they called the Negro personality. See W.E.B. Dubois, Souls of Negro Folk; Kardinar and Oversay, the Mark of Oppression; Karon, Negro Personality; Franz Fanon, Black Skin-White Mask; Thomas Pettigrew, A Profile of the Black American; Franklin Frazier, The Negro Middle Class; Kenneth Clark’s studies on Negro children choosing white dolls over black ones; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Omanini, Prospero and Caliban, The Psychology of the Colonized persons; Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized.

These largely psychoanalytically oriented observers essentially concluded that the Negro is infantile in personality structure and that he is terrified of harm from his white oppressor and does whatever he does to obtain approval and attention from his white master.

Apparently, the person who is oppressed internalizes his oppression and comes to see his oppressor as superior to him, fears him and tries to emulate him, albeit in a childish manner.

In the Negro Middle Class, Franklin Frazier describes that annoying behavior still seen in many so-called Negro Middle Class (such as the petty clerks who work at the post office, licensed nurse’s aids, teacher’s aids etc). These marginal middle class Negroes seem to devote their entire lives to efforts to seem like they are very important persons. A Negro who is merely a clerk at a post office would buy a Cadillac and other expensive cars and dress in expensive attire, doing every thing in his power to impress other Negroes into thinking that he is a very important person.

A person who in the larger white controlled world is a no-body, in the ghetto, pretends to be a very important person. In the meantime, he does not do what real middle class white folks…medical doctors, lawyers, engineers, college professors etc…. do, work hard and compete for promotion on the basis of merit and train their children.

You seldom see Negroes sacrificing for their children, saving most of their monies to train their children in colleges; no, they would rather drive a Mercedes Benz, or whatever car they associate with high status symbol than pay the school fees of their children. In fact, if elementary and secondary school education were not free in North America, Negroes probably would not even have that marginal education.

These people often seem pathetic in their infantile efforts to seem important. They ape appearances of importance when clearly they are not important. It is not ones appearance that makes one important, it is what one does that is useful to other people that make one important in their eyes.

Are you the best medical doctor, or lawyer, or engineer or professor in town? If you have demonstrable work that makes you stand out from the crowd, you are important, if not, you are not.
(Do what those of us who have failed in the world’s rat race do: accept our failure; we do not attempt to seem what we are not, somebody important. What is important, high social position or peace of mind and happiness? Some of us accept our real self and leave it at that. What is the real self? Is it body or spirit? That is a topic for another essay).

RESIDUAL SLAVE BEHAVIOR

I believe that though the African American has been theoretically emancipated from slavery that he is still a slave, psychologically. He is not psychologically independent, yet. He lacks internal locus of authority. He sees himself as a victim whom whites control.

He may talk volubly about victim-hood and seem to give the impression that he resents it, but, in fact, he seems to relish his sense of victim-hood. He likes the complaining rights being a victim gives him.

In fact, the African American seems to like whites to tell him what to do. Though he complains when his white masters call him boy, he is still a boy, psychologically and seems to like to take marching orders from those he perceives as adults, white men.

SELF CENTEREDNESS

My belief is that to be healthy a person must work for what Alfred Adler called social interest, that is, for the common good of the human community. Those who are pro-social in their behaviors tend to be healthy persons.

On the contrary, as I look at African Americans, in the main, they seem self-centered in the extreme. Those of them that seem to have attained so-called middle class status, generally run from their fellow brothers and sisters and disappear into the white world, where they are nonentity and are invisible men.

These people do not reach out to help their fellow black persons. Black children grow up in inner city ghettoes without black adults caring for them. Black men get black women pregnant and disappear. They do not seem to have a sense of responsibility for raising their children. (Of course, I am exaggerating the situation; I am employing the literary device of hyperbole to make a point that needs to be made).

Over seventy percent of black children are raised by single teenage, and virtually illiterate black mothers. These children feel abandoned by the male folk. They grow up feeling angry with the men who did not care for them. They resort to taking drugs in an effort to salve their pain. They engage in petty crimes to obtain money for their drug habits and, of course, are picked up by white police officers and put through the kangaroo criminal court system that seems to exist with one thing in mind: jail young black males.

It is reported that one out of every four young male African Americans between ages 14-24 is either in jail or is being supervised by parole and probation officers. Society spends over $35, 000 a year to keep these folks in jail and spends less than $6,000 a year to train each child at school.

I believe that the intolerable state of black children in North America is largely produced by the self-centeredness of adult African Americans. In my encounter with these people, I often wonder whether they are animals. To me, a human being is a person who struggles to transcend his own self-interests, which is admittedly difficult to accomplish, and helps other people. But here are African Americans and their fancy cars and fancy Super fly clothing not bothering to care for their own children who are starving and craving for adult attention.

I must confess that I tend to not have positive regard for those who abandon their children. If truth must be told, I see them as the dreg of humanity. How can a human being abandon his children? If my poor mother and father could send all their children to university level by working two jobs, I see no reason why African American adults should not help their own people. I resent their tendency to ignore their people’s suffering and not intervene to help.

Consider Michael Jackson, the absurd one who turned his beautiful black skin into hideous looking pseudo white skin. The man has probably cut every bone on his face in his misguided effort to transform his face into Caucasian futures. This is clearly self-hatred at work. The man obviously hates and rejects his black self and thinks, erroneously, that white skin is better than black skin.

One assumes that there are some black psychologists and psychiatrists? How come they did not counsel this confused young man on the need to accept his real self, which includes his skin color?
Generally, a person is living dead and unproductive if he rejects his true self. See, when Michael Jackson lived comfortably in his skin color, he made beautiful music, but now that he is a pseudo white man, his creativity has gone to pot.

From where I stand, African American mental health professionals ought to have intervened and helped the confused soul called Michael Jackson. I think that these self centered folks should quit their annoying tendency of not caring for one another. There self-centered and social disinterested behavior reduces them to animal status.
As I see it, a human being should live to serve other human beings and not just exist for the sake of his own self.

Without other people, there is no such thing as the individual self; over emphasizing the separated self is a waste of time. For example, one cannot talk, for speech presupposes the existence of other people. We are social creatures and are fully alive when we are socially engaged, helping one another.

HOMOSEXUALITY

And here is the saddest part of it all. African American men and women are increasingly embracing the absurd life style of homosexuality. This phenomenon is seldom talked about but when you get to know these people well, you will be surprised at the large number of them that are gay and lesbian.

Actually, it is understandable why African Americans are turning to this absurd life style. The homosexual person is a person who society has thoroughly emasculated. All power has been taken from him. Civilization makes him feel like he or she is powerless. His government has so oppressed and reduced him to powerlessness that he feels lower than animals in worth. Now, he is below animals and does what no self-respecting animal would do, place his penis into other men’s anuses and mouths and call such nonsense sexual activity.

As Alfred Adler pointed out, these people feel so powerless that they can only derive vicarious power by engaging in absurd acts. Defying the obvious natural sexual processes apparently makes these pathetic folks seem powerful, when, in fact, they are as powerless as powerless can be.

Consider the American lesbian feminist woman who raves and rants about power. This woman is so powerless that she cannot even get her oppressive government to give to her what governments in Western Europe have given women: paid for childcare centers and medical insurance. The raging campus dictator called lesbian feminist who gets cowardly liberal professors to teach that her insane behavior is a legitimate alternative life style lacks real power to get her abusive government to do the right thing: give all children day care centers and health insurance.

No, the American is controlled by his oppressive government, so much so, that the only way he seems to derive some sort of existential efficacy is to do the absurd, such as engage in the bestial behavior called homosexually. (Very soon they will be having sex with animals, why not? Who should tell them not to do anything? Tell them to not do something and they defy you, for the sake of being defiant. One expects these folks to soon embrace bestiality and pedophilia. When society begins to go down, it does so rapidly. Rome embraced homosexuality and declined and America is doing the same).

African-Americans, the most emasculated and powerless group of Americans, are sadly embracing the absurdity of homosexuality. And since whites could care less whether they lived or died and since every homosexual act places the individual at risk of contracting diseases born by virus, bacteria, fungus etc these African American homosexuals will probably die out. Who cares if niggers die, and homosexual niggers at that?

AFRICANS AVOIDANCE OF AFRICAN AMERICANS

I know many Africans who would not permit their children to play or befriend African American children. Apparently, they believe that their children would incorporate what seems to them the unacceptable culture of the African American. In fact, when I was in college and associated with African American students, other Igbos used to pull me aside and tell me to avoid those people, Ndi Akata, they called them. They saw them as hot headed and imprudent persons who are more likely to resort to violence at any time and might use a gun to settle a minor dispute rather than reason it out. An elderly Igbo man once told me:

If those African American friends of yours ever have a dispute with you, you are dead meat; they would shoot you. They do not believe that black life has worth and upon killing you would not feel guilty or remorseful. If you value your life, avoid them.

It should also be noted that Africans tend to consider African Americans as not particularly intelligent. I do not know where they got this information from, from white stereotype that blacks are not intelligent?

If African Americans are not intelligent and since they are Africans, Africans, too, are not intelligent?

I do not believe that there is any truth to the belief that African Americans are not intelligent. The so-called fifteen points’ difference between average African Americans and white-Americans score on IQ tests (85:100:115….blacks, whites and Asian average scores) can be fully accounted for by cultural differences. There are African Americans who score at the superior range (IQ over 132). Logically speaking, if one black person scores very high on these tests, you cannot make a categorical statement to the effect that all African Americans are unintelligent.

Intelligence is a product of biology and social experience. The experience of being black in America, being an ex-slave and a second-class person can fully explain whatever differences exist in-group scores on intelligence tests.

FEAR BASED PERSONALITY

African Americans were slaves. This means that they permitted other people to oppress them and use their labor for free, rather than fight and, if necessary, die fighting than tolerate others abuse. To tolerate others abuse, they must have been afraid of harm and death.

African Americans, of course, were not the first human beings to tolerate others abuse. Slavery existed in Africa and, indeed, still exists in Sudan and Mauritania where Arabs enslave Africans. In Alaigbo some dialas enslaved other Igbos, called Osus. The Osus still live as second class persons in Alaigbo.

Whites did enslave other whites. Indeed, until recently most whites were serfs. In Western Europe, the aristocratic element, who were equivalent to today’s criminal gangs, prevailed on the masses to kowtow to their criminal will. It was only in 1862 that the criminal elements that ruled Russia, the so-called nobility, freed the Russian masses from serfdom.

The point is that all human groups had history of slavery and, as such, contain folks who so feared death that they permitted the sadistic psychopath called slave masters to oppress and abuse them.

Nevertheless, I believe that African-Americans developed fearful personality structures from their recent history of slavery and second class social status in America. They seem like cowards who are fearful of harm and death and will obey white men rather than fight for their freedom.

I believe that it will take a couple more generations, say two hundred years, before African Americans are fully emancipated from their slave psychology and begin to live like free men.

I do not think that we can readily change the personality of the African American. I certainly do not expect him to immediately change the character traits that I delineated above. What I hope is for him to become aware of how other people see him and, if that perception makes sense to him, for him to start working on changing himself.

It is not for me or other people to change African Americans. Only a people, in fact, only the individual, can change themselves. I do not have the delusion that I can change any other human being, both at the individual and group level. As it is, I have a difficult time changing my own negative traits. It is enough for me to struggle to improve me. My sole task, as I see it, is to improve me and in so far that all human beings help each other to become improved, to tell African Americans how I see them and in so doing, perhaps, motivate them to change themselves.



MASOCHISTIC PERSONALITY

As I pointed out in another essay, African Americans seem to have developed a masochistic personality structure that allows sadistic white persons to oppress and abuse them. They formed a sadomasochistic relationship with whites, whereby whites act as sadists, abuser, and African Americans act as the masochists, the abused. Both parties in this pathological relationship tolerate their unnatural situation. (See Eric Fromm, Escape from Freedom for elaboration of sadomasochistic, symbiotic relationships).

I believe that both whites and blacks in North America need to emancipate themselves from their pathological relationship.

A healthy human being does his best to help other human beings, not abuse them. It is obvious that abusive white Americans are psychologically sick creatures and if they have not learned this fact by now, the rest of the world will soon teach them that lesson. As they go to the rest of the world and try to relate to them as they relate to their Negroes, abusively, they will learn that to others they are no more than sick persons whose warped and stunted approaches to people would not be tolerated. Americans are about to be disabused of their neurotic sense of superiority by the rest of the world; they are about to learn the truth of all human beings equality and sameness.

I am not here to advise white Americans. I am here to focus on black Americans. I have done so and if African Americans see any credence in my obviously negative perception of them, they could work to change it. If they do not want to change, that is their choice. My existential function is to tell folks how I see them, and for them to tell me how they see me, even if all our perceptions are biased.

CONCLUSION

In this essay, I chose not to wear the blinders of a particular profession, from whose parameters I see the African American. I did so for a purpose. I just wanted to describe the typical African American that is before me. I did not want to do a study of him or try to understand why he is the way he is.

The African American is probably the most studied human being on earth. White scholars have studied him to death. The conservative ones like Arthur Jensen see his faults as either in his genes or weaknesses of character; the liberal ones have offered every possible excuse for him that the human mind can come up with. Why is he not doing the right thing? Why does he abandon his children, why is he unable to do well at America’s schools’ and job places? Tons of liberal environmental explanations have been offered. These studies, by and large, see him as a victim of his external environment, as determined by the racist milieu he lives in. In effect, they make excuses for him. It is not his fault that he is the thing he has become, it is other folks faults, so, do not blame him, blame white Americans.

(In the real world, only a child is made excuses for; adults are blamed for their poor behaviors; thus, liberal scholars actually treat African Americans like children by making excuses for them. In my part of the world, we say: do not make understanding excuses for the individual, just provide him with equal opportunity to work his butt off and take the consequences of his performance, no rationalizations for his failure, please. White liberals have killed African Americans with their pseudo understanding of why they do what they do).

In the 1960s, a northern liberal, Daniel Moynihan, provided one of the first in dept study of the African American family. He alerted folks to the fact that over 25% of black children are raised by single parents, specifically female headed families. Psychoanalysts alerted us to the danger of raising boy children without the presence of men to exercise authority over them, the danger of their not internalizing law and order and behaving lawlessly and winding up in jails. Boy children are naturally aggressive and wild and it takes a lot to tame them, to make them obey the laws of society. Sigmund Freud and his disciples tell us that we are born with the instinct of Id and need the Superego (introjected and interiorized social norms) to tame it and a strong ego to balance our nature and society’s needs for law and order.

Today, over 70% of African American children are raised in single parents home, not the 25% that alarmed Daniel Moynihan. Today, America’s jails and prisons are practically the second home of African American young men. That is, despite all those social science studies, or, as I call them, rationalizations for the shiftlessness of African Americans, the problem has worsened.

I am not motivated to make excuses for any one. Of course, I do try to understand why people do what they do. I am a social scientist and if I choose to I can don the academic hat and provide us with a study of why African Americans are who they are.

In the light of social science, if I see African Americans not helping one another, I would approach the problem from a historical and sociological perspective: they were slaves and a salve’s humanity was systematically destroyed by the slave master; they were transformed into things and made not to care for other people; they were socialized to not care for their children and fellow slaves; they were made not to care for the future but to live for present, for immediate gratification..

In this essay, I am not interested in providing external environmental excuses for African Americans seeming shiftlessness. I just wanted to describe them, as I see them. As to why they are the way they are, I leave it to you to use your methodological approach to phenomena to explain it to your heart’s content.

I have honestly described the African American I see with my two eyes. I do not like the character of the African American that I see. I would like these people to change and become “better” persons. (I do not want to engage in a philosophical discourse as to what are better persons).

I really do not want to hear why African Americans are not doing well at ridiculously easy American schools; all I want to hear is that they are doing well. I want them to do as well as Asian students, to come to classes and make excellent grades. I want them to become diligent workers and responsible parents who stand by their children and do whatever it takes to provide for them. I want them to stop stealing so much so as to stop winding up in jail.

Of course, I understand the inherent institutional racism in America. I understand that many white racist judges seem to gratify their sadistic nature by looking for every opportunity to put blacks behind bars. Be that as it may, in this essay I am not interested in the behavior of white America.

I do read history and appreciate that whatever goes up must come down. America is an empire. We have had empires before. Just as soldiers come and go, empires come and go. The American empire is, in fact, rapidly burning itself out. China is already knocking on the door. Soon, a resurrected Europe would start making noises, asking to share power with America.

Within two hundred years, Africans would have gotten their structural issues settled and undertaken industrial revolution and begin to ask to be taken seriously. Africans will acquire nuclear weapons and there is nothing any one can do to prevent that from happening. The genii are out of the bottle.

America, for a while, out to protect its self interest and prevent its enemies from using such weapons on her, may retard the spread of weapons of mass destruction, but history shows that once a weapon is developed it is only a matter of time before most people have it.

Physics increasingly understands phenomena and soon what we consider today’s advanced physics would become child’s play. So, in time, all people will have advanced science and technology and will challenge their present oppressor, Americans. That is guaranteed. Therefore, I do not loose sleep thinking about white Americans’ current hegemonic control of the world. The sole superpower has her rendezvous with destiny and when she has performed her historical tasks would wither away and be replaced by other equally temporary powers.

I am not motivated to offer excuses for why African Americans are who they are; I am interested in providing a gut level picture of how they come across to me. In this essay, not study, I described how I see them. I relate to them as I see them.

Generally, I do not take African Americans seriously; I tend to assume that they are irresponsible folks who cannot be counted on to stand up for commitment to issues outside their immediate self interests. I tend to see them as folks who when the going gets tough run and make excuses for their cowardice.

If I need things done and done well, I tend not to go to African Americans, I go to white folks. White folks understand the need for working hard, and for volunteering and doing something because it is worth doing.

I expect African Americans to be lazy and uncommitted workers and to exploit folks if they could get away with doing so. Simply stated, I do not have a positive perception of these people.

Of course, I would like African Americans to be different. What I would like and what is, however, are two different things.


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January 31, 2006.

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January 31, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Lectures on African Countries #5 of 54: Burkina Faso

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- 5. BURKINA FASO

Formal Name: Republic of Burkina Faso.

Term for Citizens: Burkinabes.

Capital: Ouagadougou. Population: 862,000.

Independence Achieved: August 5, 1960, from France.

Major Cities: Ouagadougou, Bobo Dioulasso.

Geography:

Burkina Faso is in West Africa. It is bordered by Ivory Coast, Ghana, Mali, and Togo. The area of the country is 105, 869 square miles. The country is a plateau, drained mostly in the south by the River Volta. The country has two seasons, wet and dry, with the dry being more pronounced.

Society:

The population is estimated to be 13,002,000.

Ethnic Groups: There are many ethnic groups: Senufo, Habe, Lobi, and Mande in the western part of the country; Mossi and Gourounsi, Nininsi peoples in the center. The Fulani, Taureg, and Songhai in the northeast. Hausa, Yarse, and Dioula traders are found everywhere. Zerma slave raiders that devastated whole villages before the French came live in the country.

Languages: each of these ethnic groups speaks its own language; Mossi and Dogon are the major ethnic groups and languages. French is the official language.

Religion: Most people in the country identify themselves as Muslims, with a pocket of Christians.

Education: There is free primary education. Literacy rate is estimated at 26.6%.

Economy: The economy is largely subsistence based on agriculture and livestock herding. The soil is mostly sterile laterite, and drought is a constant fact of life. Corn, cassava, sweet potatoes, millet, sorghum, peas, beans, fonio, rice, and yams are basic foodstuff. Cotton, groundnuts, and sesame seeds are exported. GDP estimate: $13.6 billion; Per Capita GDP: $360. Monetary Unit: CFA Franc BCEAO (XOF).

History and Government:

What used to be called Upper Volta was a French West African colony. Upon independence from France, the country inherited French type presidential government. However, a series of military governments soon ensued. A strong military man, President Blaise Campaore, currently rules the country. He governs through a prime minister who is in charge of the day-to-day affairs of the government. The country is divided into 13 regions and 45 provinces.


CONTEMPORARY POLITICS

Burkina Faso, formally known as Upper Volta, is one of those African countries with virtual one man rule and sham façade of democracy.

Upper Volta was part of the 16th century Songhai Empire. In 1886, the French conquered the Mossi Kingdom of Ouagadougou and made it a French Protectorate. Two years later, 1898, the surrounding regions were added to the Protectorate. In 1904, this enlarged region was integrated into French West Africa. French West Africa included what are now Mali, Senegal, and Niger, Chad, Dahomey, etc. In 1919, Upper Volta was separated from French West Africa and made a separate colony, a colony that nevertheless included Ivory Coast, Mali and Niger. In 1932, Upper Volta became a separate colony, essentially what it is today.

The country obtained its independence from France on August 5, 1960. Subsequently, there were a series of military coups, the first in 1966. The military returned power to civilians in 1978, but in 1980 there was another military coup. In 1983, there was a counter coup by Captain Thomas Sankara. Sankara changed the name of the country to Burkina Faso in 1984, meaning “the land of honest men”.

In 1987, Sankara’s assistant, Blaise Compaore, masterminded a palace coup and killed him and took over power. Mr. Campaore and his family are still in power in 2006.

In June 1991, Mr. Campaore wrote a constitution that established a semblance of democracy. He established two houses of legislature (National Assemble and House of Representatives). The President was to be elected for a 7 year term, as in France. Of course, Mr. Campaore managed to be elected unopposed. In 2000, Campaore changed the constitution and reduced the term of the presidency to five years. In 2005, he managed to be reelected in a landslide.

Mr. Campaore is an executive president. He selects the prime minister who, in theory, selects the ministers that work with him. The president can sack the Cabinet at any time he wishes. Indeed, he can dissolve the National Assembly. Essentially, Burkina Faso is a one man ruled country with external appearances of democratic institutions in place.

The country is divided into 13 regions and 45 provinces. The leaders of these units of governance are kept in leash by the president.

There seems some sort of freedom of speech in the country, as exhibited by the presence of private media outlets. However, it is reported that journalists who speak out against the president often go missing and, therefore, that the media self censors to be alive.

Burkina Faso is one of the poorest African countries. It relies mostly on agricultural produce for its revenue (Sorghum, millet, corn, groundnuts and cotton). The income per capita of the country is estimated at around $360, or about a dollar a day.

There are very few opportunities to be employed in the country; thus, many Burkinabes emigrate to other countries in search of employment. It is reported that over three million Burkinabes are in the Ivory Coast, alone. This massive presence of Burkinabes in the Ivory Coast, apparently, is creating tension between the two countries. It is reported that the current military rebellion going on in Northern Ivory Coast is supported by persons from Burkina Faso.

Ghana was at one time inundated by Burkinabes until it asked them to leave the country in 1967.

On paper, education is free in Burkina Faso and children are supposed to be in school until age 16. But only about 29% of elementary school age children actually go to school. There is one university, the University of Ouagadougou and one technical University, the Polytechnic University of Bobo-Dioulasso. Literacy rate is 27%. Burkina Faso is the most illiterate country in all of Africa.

Burkina Faso seems to have a beak future both economically and politically. Mr. Blaise Campaore, so far, has managed to keep the Mossi, the Dogon and other ethnic groups in a precarious peace, but given the personal rule of his government, no one can quiet predict what could happen in the future.

Democratic institutions have not taken hold in Burkina Faso; there is no political culture of successful transfer of power to other leaders. As long as the current strong man keeps opposition in check peace reigns, but if another strong man comes to the scene, who knows what could happen in Burkina Faso tomorrow?

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January 30, 2006

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January 29, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Series on Psychology 2006, #6 of 52: The Benefits of Forgiveness

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- There is no doubt whatsoever that the teachings of Jesus Christ can be summarized as forgiveness for the wrongs done to one. Everything that the man taught had to do with forgiveness. His gospel is the gospel of forgiveness.

This is in contradistinction to the Old Testament teaching, which can be characterized as the Gospel of Punishment. Moses, the Old Testament, taught an eye for an eye, punishment for the wrongs done to one.

Jesus Christ taught forgiveness for all wrongs done to one. Thus, the Old and New Testaments are diametrically different from each other; the two cannot, therefore, mix. They should not even be contained in the same book, Bible, except in so far that the Old Testament gave some sort of historical perspective to the teachings of the New Testament; that is, the Old Testament describes the world and its laws that the New Testament came to replace, supercedes.

Let us briefly recapitulate what Jesus Christ taught his followers. He said that all the teachings of past teachers of God, prophets, could be summarized as: “Do unto others as one wants them to do to one”. How does one want others to do to one? One wants other people to love one. Therefore, one must do unto others how one wants them to do to one: love them. Jesus taught love for all people.

Loving other people, he said, includes forgiving them the wrongs they do to one. Whereas the world does not forgive those who wrong it, those who follow his teaching, Jesus said, are different from the rest of the world because they forgive those who wronged them.

In the only prayer Jesus taught his disciples, the “Our Lord’s Prayer”, he taught them to pray thus: “Our father, who is in heaven, forgive us our sins because we have first forgiven those who sinned against us”. That is to say that, as it were, we have a covenant, a contract with our father in heaven, God, to forgive us our sins only when we forgive each other our sins against each other.

In the story of a man going to worship God and remembered that his neighbor wronged him, Jesus said that the man must first go home and forgive his neighbor before he prays to, worships, God.

How many times should we forgive our neighbors wrongs, someone asked him? He said: seventy seven times seventy seven times; that is, infinitely.

Elsewhere, Jesus said that God does hear all our prayers to him. Indeed, that he has already answered all our prayers and granted all our requests before we ask for them, for he knows what our needs are before we ask for them. However, to receive the answers to our requests, prayers, that God has already given us, we must forgive one another.

He made it crystal clear that it is on forgiveness that hinges receiving the gifts of God: peace, happiness and abundance.
And to test him, to see if he really teaches a different gospel from the one taught by Moses, the Old Testament, hence violates the Mosaic Law that prevailed in the land, they brought a woman who had committed adultery and was caught red handed in the act.

Jesus was going about teaching forgiveness for sins, so here is a test case to see whether he would forgive the sinner, thereby publicly violating the laws of Moses. If he did, he would have become a lawbreaker, hence is arrested, tried and punished according to the laws of Moses.

Jesus knew why they brought the test case to him. The case was chosen to give him a public opportunity to declare his teaching, to point out the distinctions between his from Moses teaching. (Please do not see Jesus as a victim. He knew that he chose everything that happened to him. He knew that our lives on earth are like a script that he and all of us collectively wrote. Each of us is merely enacting out what is in our collective script, the play, the drama of the world. As such none of us is a victim. Jesus knew exactly what was going to happen before it happened. He knew that the Jews would test him, would bring the adulterous woman to test him. He knew what his response would be. He knew that it was necessary for him to use that episode to clarify his teachings.

Because he knew that he was going through a script all of us wrote he had no fear or anger at the consequences of the action he took. He knew that his teachings that superseded the Mosaic teaching would be rejected by the people and as a result that they would reject and kill him. He also knew that he would resurrect from death. That was part of his script, our collective script. The rest of us chose to forget that we collectively wrote the script. We forget it and then see ourselves as victims unto whom bad things are happening. We then feel fear and anger. It is part of our own script to choose and forget our role in so choosing so as to justify seeing the external environment as harming us to justify anger and fear, hatred of God and each other etc.)

For a while, he seemed to ignore the wily foxes of this world, but eventually outfoxed them. He said: let him who has not sinned cast the first stone at the sinful woman.

Since we are all sinners, we have no right to judge other people as sinners and should not punish sinners.

Thus the accusers left and did not punish the woman.
Jesus said to the woman: where are they that accused you of sin? She said that they are gone. He said that he, Jesus, did not accuse her of sin, either, but that she should go and sin no more. Sin is not to be encouraged but to be eliminated, yet that is no reason to judge and punish sinners.

Jesus walked his talk. He was arrested and his irascible apostle, Peter, tried to defend him by drawing his sward and attacking one of those who came to arrest him; that is, Peter tried to defend Jesus.

Jesus said to Peter: put away your swords for those who live by the sword, war, die by his sword, and die in war.
He said that if he had wanted to defend himself that he could have marshaled legions to defend him but that he came to show the world a different mode for dealing with conflict/attack:

defenselessness, which is forgiveness. He said that defenselessness/ forgiveness gives peace and joy, whereas defensiveness and attack results in conflict and war.

Finally, they subjected Jesus to a kangaroo court, accused him of doing what he did not do; he brought peace but they accused him of bringing war against the Roman overlords, tried him and found him guilty.

While being tried, Jesus did not defend himself. They sentenced him to death. Before he died on the Cross-he asked God to forgive those who were murdering, him for they do not know what they are doing.

There is no two ways of looking at it. Jesus taught the gospel of forgiveness. He told those slapped on one cheek to turn the other cheek to be slapped, rather than defend them selves; those whose clothes were stolen to give the rest of their properties to the thief, rather than fight and punish him.

Simply stated, Jesus taught forgiveness as the true meaning of love. To him, forgiveness gives peace and joy and is the only path to salvation.

You either accept what Jesus taught: forgiveness and love, or you do not; but you cannot make any mistake as to what he taught you.

That does not mean that what the man taught makes sense. Clearly, it does not make sense to our rational egos. Our rational egos tell us that if we permit those who attack us to do so, that they could harm and even kill us. The ego tells us that if we want to survive in the physical plane that we must not forgive our attackers, that we must defend ourselves and, if necessary, kill our attackers before they kill us.

The gospel of self-defense and punishment, the gospel of Moses, makes for adaptation to the exigencies of this world. If we did not defend ourselves, we could be killed, hence the gospel of forgiveness taught by Jesus, our earthly ego based reason tells us is the gospel of death, and escape from this world.

Nietzsche said it all: Jesus, the rational philosopher tells us, teaches a gospel of death, for if you do not defend yourself, if you forgive those bent on attacking and killing you, you will be killed and die. To Nietzsche, Jesus’ teaching is nihilistic, that is, it negates this world, negates the individual’s life, the ego, and is an escape from the realities of this world. Christianity, Nietzsche says, is a gospel of weak women cringing for life and he wants us to throw it away and embrace the gospel of power, attack and defense, the gospel of the pure human being, the ego, Zarathustra, the human animal, the blond beast. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra.)

In light of the empirical fact that forgiveness may lead to death and exit from this world, why should a rational person take Jesus and his gospel of forgiveness seriously? This really is the only question one must ask. The question is not what Jesus taught, for he taught love and forgiveness, but whether we should accept it, and why should we do so?

If we follow the logic of this world, which is to do whatever we could to survive as physical beings, we cannot accept the doctrine of forgiveness, we cannot accept Jesus’ teaching, and we cannot be Christians. For us to accept the teaching of forgiveness, defenselessness and love we must have a different frame of reference, one that transcends the frame of reference of this world.


The premise on which the concept of forgiveness is predicated is that the external world we see is not real is like a dream and that what is done in it is like activities in a dream.

What is done in a dream has not happened. The person you see attack, harm, even destroy your body did what he or she did to you in a dream; he did so in your and his mutual dream. In reality, what he did, and what you did, has not happened except as in a dream. (This is solipsism, idealism, as in George Berkeley’s Dialogues and Arthur Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea.)

In a dream, it is the dreamers that are responsible for projecting out their dream world. One projected out the person who hurt one.

The world is a mutual dream, therefore, the person who hurt one projected out the person he hurt in his own dream.

In effect, you, the dreamer, made the person who hurt you to do so; he made himself to do what he did, to hurt you. Both of you agreed to do to what you did to each other and for each other.

In reality, both of you did not, in fact, do anything hurtful to one another, for what is done in a dream has not been done in fact.

Therefore, you must forgive what you see other people do to you on earth, in the dream, and must forgive yourself what you did to you and to other people. (Whether other people, those you forgive, forgive you or not is for them to decide and is not your concern, what should concern you is whether you forgive other people.)

Forgiveness is for all things done on this earth, including what ordinarily we call heinous crimes, such as murder, discrimination, rape, slavery etc. Do you need example? What did Jesus do? He forgave those who murdered him, implying that if you accept his gospel that you, too, must forgive those who murder you.

It is only a dream. The person who seems to have killed you in the dream has not, in fact, killed you; the person you seem to have killed in a dream has not been killed. Neither of you did anything other than dream that killing each other is possible. This world is a dream where we dream that it is possible to hurt each other, and eventually kill each other.

Life extended its permanent self to us; God created us eternal; but we dream the opposite of how God created us, joyous and eternal, and dream that harm and death is possible.

Despite our dreams, we remain as God created us, formless spirit, unified with God and with one another, eternal and immortal and nothing can harm us. We are eternally safe in God. We are protected in God while dreaming that we can be hurt on earth.

In practical terms, this means that a sociopath who hurts other people should not feel guilty or remorseful. A sociopath does not feel remorseful, anyway. That is to say that the sociopath is actually more realistic, for he knows that he, in fact, did nothing to the persons he seems to have hurt. The seeming amoral criminal does not feel guilty for he knows that no matter what he does to other people that he did not do wrong. (And by the same token, if you shoot and kill criminals, you should not feel guilty, for you did not do anything wrong. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.)

To feel guilty and remorseful is to assume that what one does on earth is real and is not done in dream. But if what is done on earth is like actions in a dream, one should never feel guilty for anything one did wrong to other people. By the same token, other people should not feel guilty for anything wrong that you believe that they did to one.
You should not forgive any one for what he did to you or ask people to forgive you for what you think that you did wrong to them. Neither you nor they have done any wrong to each other (or good either, for what is done in a dream is neither good nor bad).

Do not ask other people to forgive you, for what you did to them; you did nothing to them. Do not ask those you murder to forgive you, for you did not murder any one. By the same token, do not expect other people to ask you for forgiveness even if they killed you, for they did nothing of that sort, they did not kill you, for in real life no one can kill you, you are always free and eternal; you are always as God created you.

THE ILLUSION OF FORGIVENESS

It is because you believe that you did wrong by hurting other people, and other people believe that they did wrong by hurting you, that forgiveness seems required.

In as much as you believe in wrong doing, then forgive it, that is, overlook it, and come to accept that no wrong and no good was done to you or by you to other people, for it was all a dream wrong and right, not real.

Overlook the dream, the world and what is done in it and you feel free, happy and peaceful.

INVITATION TO MUTUAL ATTACKS

If a person did something wrong to you, say, discriminated against you, you invited him to do so, and by the same token, he invited himself to do so, hence invited you to, if you choose, do something wrong to him. If you killed him, he invited it; he asked for it, he killed himself. (Ultimately, nothing was done.)

The oppressor wants to be oppressed. If you choose, you can go-ahead and oppress him in return, even kill him, for that is what he invited you to do.

If you killed the oppressor, you should not feel guilty from doing so, for you only did so in a dream and nothing was done. You just dreamed that you killed an oppressor; that is all there is to it.

By the same token, if the person you harmed decided to harm or even kill you, you invited him to do so by harming him and must accept what he does to you. Ultimately, he did nothing to you and you did nothing to him, both of you just had a not particularly pleasant dream in which you seem to harm, even kill each other.

(In reality both of you cannot be harmed and cannot die, so it was a mere dream of harm and death, not a factual one).

AMORAL PHILOSOPHY?

The philosophy propounded above would seem to make the world an amoral place. It would seem to suggest that folks should go ahead and do whatever they want to do, including stealing and killing people, and should not feel guilty or remorseful from their behaviors?

If that philosophy makes you feel self-righteous; may I ask you what type of world do you think that you already live in? We already live in an amoral world, don’t we? Is there morality in this world? Is there morality in a world where white Americans killed Indians and took their land and enslaved Africans? Is there morality in Nigeria where a band of thieves took over the government and do with the public treasury as they please, while the masses suffer?

Morality is make belief; morality is man made. Nature destroys people as it destroys rats and plants. Germs, virus, bacteria, fungi, diseases kill us as if we are nothing worthwhile. Earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, hurricanes, draughts etc destroy people as they destroy rats.

Human beings’ egos and bodies are completely worthless and valueless. They are dream selves and dream bodies and have no value whatsoever that pure reason can ascertain.

TAKING ONES SELF SERIOUSLY

Some human beings like to take themselves too seriously. Taking ones self seriously is an egoistic behavior. Taking ones self seriously is actually an effort to convince ones self that ones ego and the body that houses it has worth and is important.

The ego, that is, the separated self-concept, and the body that houses it, do not have worth and value. Therefore, let go of the nonsense of personal worth and value; do not take yourself seriously.

If you stop taking your ego and body seriously you feel light, and life becomes light and mirthful. You smile and laugh a lot; you appreciate that people are nothingness trying to seem like they are something important.


FEAR, ANGER, PRIDE, VANITY, NARCISSISM, DEPRESSION, PARANOIA ARE ALL PRODUCTS OF IDENTIFYING WITH FALSE SEPARATED SELF, THE EGO

No pride, vanity and narcissism mean total peace and happiness. To the extent that you retain your ego, pride and narcissism you disturb your peace.

Fear and anger are means of defending the separated self and feeling emotional upset. If you did not have an ego and did not defend it, you would not feel fear, anger, pride, shame, depression, paranoia and other emotional upsets; you would be perpetually calm, peaceful and happy.

As long as you identify with the ego, you must feel emotional upsets, and must be in this world. When you let go of the ego and no longer desire or defend it, you would no longer feel fear, anger, pride, shame, depression, and paranoia and other mental disorders.
The gift of peace and joy, bliss comes from not having a separated self, ego, self-concept, self-image, and no body to identify and defend.

DISCUSSION


Are there benefits, positive payoff from relinquishing the false separated self, and the ego? I think so. Peace and joy. The problem is that that gift requires one to exit this world.

Is this world so beautiful that one wants to stay in it?
Give up the ego now and exit the world now and return to the abode of undifferentiated self, which is the condition for peace and joy, bliss.

Or stay in this world, that is, retain a separated self, the ego, live in hell and mitigate it by mostly overlooking what is done in the world, forgiving your and other people’s mistakes. To the extent that you learn to love and forgive all people, you give yourself peace and give those you forgive some of your peace. Peace is not a shabby thing, wouldn’t you say?

I recommend that one stays in this world and live to however long ones body can last. I recommend forgiving most of the wrongs people do to one, loving people, realizing that total forgiveness entails permitting other people to harm one and even kill one while one does not defend ones self. If one chooses total forgiveness and defenselessness, as Jesus did, one could die, exit this world and return to undifferentiated oneness, spirit, eternal peace and happiness. I do not ask any one to hasten to bliss. I myself will defend myself if attacked, will attack and in fact kill the person who attacks me, for I still want to live in this world. I am not in a hurry to get out of this world. I want to be here and study the world scientifically and use technology to adapt to it.

Nevertheless, as a thinker, I am motivated to provide thinking on the implication of the gospel of forgiveness and love that brother Jesus taught to the world. That gospel leads to death and exit from this world and that is why it is mostly practiced in the breach, for very few want to leave this world yet. If you want to practice it, that is your choice. You know the consequences of your choice. It is true that you will experience peace and joy if you practice forgiveness but is that what you want? Do you want peace and joy badly enough to sacrifice your physical life for it? Just know what you are doing. I know what I am doing. I agree with Nietzsche that forgiveness is nihilistic but on the other hand, I also know that there is eternal life of peace after this world. I choose to be in this world and that requires defensiveness and me to be sometimes unforgiving.

Those who call themselves Christians talk about the gospel of love and forgiveness that their savior, Jesus Christ, brought to the world. Good. But very few of them practice that gospel. Thus, you conclude that they are hypocrites, those who say one thing and do another. In fact, you might even see them as dangerous since they urge naïve persons to forgive those who wronged them while they themselves do not forgive any one.

Christian Europe talked about love and forgiveness and killed Indians and enslaved Africans. How hypocritical can human beings be? In college, I told myself not to listen to these European criminals.

In this paper, I have taken the trouble to show you that Jesus Christ did, in fact, teach love and forgiveness and that those variables are necessary for peace and happiness. I have also taken the trouble to show you how unmitigated forgiveness and love would lead to exposing yourself to harm and death, to exiting from this world.

There is another world all right. I know that for a fact. God, unified spirit, is real. In fact, God is the only reality there is.

The choice is yours whether you want to return to your creator, God, by being totally loving and forgiving. But if you are not ready to return to your maker, please do not always forgive those who trespass against you, fight back. The decision is yours to make, I cannot make it for you, and no one else can make it for you.

The individual can only choose for himself, he cannot choose for other persons, though his choice affects all others. If he chooses defense (to attacks on him) he gives conflict to himself and to those around him; if he chooses defenselessness, forgiveness, he gives peace to himself and to those around him.

I have chosen peace and joy, which means love and forgiveness; but, then, again, I have chosen conflict and war, which is not to love and forgive at all times.

Please do not try to understand my and other people’s choices. You cannot understand them, even if you tried. Never mind my choice. I do not worry about your choices. Worry about your own choices. It is for you to save you, not other people. It is for other people to save themselves, not save you. Your primary function is to save you, not to save other people.

The secret of salvation is the realization that you, the individual, chose whatever happens to you/him while he is on earth. Jesus was saved because derecognized and accepted that he chose everything that happened to him while he was on earth. He chose to be killed, so that he would resurrect and teach himself and the rest of us that death is not real. He chose those who killed him and those who did any other thing to him for they had to do so for him to accomplish his mission. Because he knew that he chose everything that he experienced, he could not feel fear and anger at any one that did to him what he wanted to experience. He chose his accusers, he chose his murderers, he chose his disciples, (and the people he chose, chose him, for the world is a play we all coauthored).

Whereas Jesus knew that he chose everything that happened to him, hence not angry at the world that seemed to harm him, those who played roles in his drama did not know that they, too, chose to play roles in his play. They chose and forget that they so chose. Thus, they felt guilty for murdering him.(People today are still feeling guilty for killing the son of God, Jesus and all of us, for taking on a different identity, ego, and denying their true identity, Christ.)

Feeling guilty make people run from Christ and from his father, God, whose son they believe that they killed and that God is, therefore, out to punish them. This is a strategy to avoid God, to separate from God.

No human being could kill God’s son for he is immortal. We have done nothing; all we do is dream that we did anything.

We choose collectively; you and your parents choose each other; you and your immediate group, kindred, tribe, race etc, choose each other; and ultimately, you and the rest of the world choose each other.

There are no accidents in the world. You choose exactly whatever is happening to you at any moment, as those doing things to you choose to-do so in your and their drama of separation; both of you forget what you choose, so to justify anger and fear. You and they are not victims, although in your separated identity, ego, you believe that you are victims, for you see things happening to you and forget that you chose to have those things happen to you.

Because we choose to experience certain things and choose to forget that we chose them, we choose the Holy Spirit, the Wholly Spirit part of us, our higher selves, to remember for us what we choose to forget.

The Holy Spirit knows that we choose our script and enact it out and that, as such, we are not victims. He knows our past, present and future. He does not pity us for experiencing what we experience, for we want to do so. He merely wants us to remember that we choose what we experience and do so without fear and anger, do so with forgiveness and love. Jesus listened to the Holy Spirit and remembered that he chose his world’s experience hence went through this world without fear and anger at any one playing roles in his script. The Holy Spirit’s mission is to enable all of us do what Jesus did, remember that we chose our life and experiences on earth, hence go through our sojourn on earth peacefully and happily, have a happy dream while at it dreaming.

I chose to have everything that happens to me to happen to me. I chose to live in America so as to experience racism first hand. Initially, I forgot that I so chose and felt angry at whites. Then I realized that I chose to experience racism and chose the whites that discriminated against me. As such, my discriminators were merely playing a role I desired for them to play for me, a role they wanted to play for me. Thus, I stopped being angry at whites. I forgave them; I overlooked their role in my dance of victim hood, and death.

I know where the dance is leading. The goal is for me to play my chosen role of rearticulating the perennial wisdom of mankind in my own language, as I am doing here. I am not doing anything new. Other folks have articulated that wisdom in their own language; Buddha and Jesus did. But I must do it in my own voice, so that those who can learn it from the way I put it can learn it; those who chose to learn it from me can do so; those whose script calls for me to be the one who wrote it in a manner they want to learn it to learn it from me, from themselves, since they are part of me as I am part of them.

When a person knows that the world is a script that he helped write and enact his part in it without fear and anger he gets out of the play, he does not return to this world upon death. He is now a world teacher of God, teaching us all that we are not victims unto whom bad things are happening; he teaches us that we mutually choose what is happening to us. Such a person has overcome the dream of forgetfulness and is now fully awake.

If you are wake and not sleeping and dreaming, why return to the abode of forgetfulness and dreaming, our world? You are out of here. You do not come back to the world; you have broken the wheel of rebirth; you no longer reincarnate in the world, you are no longer dreaming.

But until you accept responsibility for your dreaming, for the script you enact out in this world, for whatever you experience in this world, as long as you see yourself as a victim unto whom what you do not wish happens to, you must keep coming back to this world until you accept responsibility for separation and the dance of the opposite of heaven, opposite of oneness.

I have accepted responsibility for my role in the fragmentation of God’s unified son; I have also accepted return to union, I am saved. Therefore, do not worry about me, worry about your own salvation.

The individual, you, cannot change the world’s script, play. But you can remember that it is only a play and play your part in it calmly. You chose to play your part and all of us, the entire world, chose that part for you, as you helped choose other people’s parts.
Each person must play his part in the show, for it is in each playing his part that the whole show is completed.

Future generations will come to play their part and it is on your playing your part that they will play their parts. Every part is necessary for the salvation of God’s unified son, just as we all played parts in his condemnation, in separation.

There is no meaning to the play we are involved in, for the world is a meaningless, purposeless show; yet each of us must do his part in.

The ultimate goal is for all of us to remember that the world is meaningless and stop trying to play a role in it. When the individual recognizes the silliness of the show, plays his part in it, he, as the world judges it, dies and is seen no more by those still in the show, those still in the world. He exits the play and henceforth lives in formless unified spirit.

From there, he helps those on earth who choose to consult him, to learn that the world’s drama is meaningless and purposeless and that the only meaning to it is to awaken from it, and become enlightened to the unified light we are, and be illuminated to our light which is life.

No one can change the show or stop it, but every one must return to the show over and over and play his part until he gets it right, until he understands that it is he who chose it and that no body chose it for him. When that recognition is made, one smiles at those children of God who still believe that the impossible, separation, is possible. He laughs at a silly world, as I am laughing, yet does his part in its salvation.

Cheers.

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Ozodi Osuji Weekly Series on Psychology 2006, #5 of 52: People Generally Receive what they Ask for

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- A man generally receives from life what his mind constantly asks for and he works for. However, the manner in which what is asked for is received may not be satisfying.

If a person is realistic and accepts the empirical self and the empirical universe, body and matter, and works within their parameters, that is, science and technology, he generally gets what he wants in the empirical world. If you ask for material wealth and work for it, that is, your behavior is objective and within the parameters of science, you tend to become materially wealthy.

The majority of mankind is objective and realistic and think thoughts that are congruent with empirical reality, work hard and receive what they ask for, material wealth.

There are a small percentage of people, perhaps no more than five percent of the population, who are dreamers and idealists. They hate and reject the real world, as it is, and yearn for an idealized version of it. They hate and reject their bodies, hate and reject other people’s bodies, hate and reject everything related to matter and social institutions and desire an idealized version of them. They hate governments and other social institutions and use their minds to figure out how they could be different and better and make people and the world become like them. They use their minds to construct ideal selves and ideal everything and find it difficult to operate in the world as it is.

These idealists do not want to accept the imperfect real world. Thus, they avoid the real world, avoid real world people, avoid real world work situations, avoid real world social institutions, and escape into the world of dreams. In their imaginary dreams, they visualize an ideal everything. They live in that perfect world of dreams.

Avoidance of the real self and real world is a means for inventing an imaginary ideal self and ideal world and living in that fantasy world, a neurotic world. The neurotic thinks that he could become the ideal perfect self and world he imagines and wants to become and feels angry when other people do not treat him as if he is that ideal, godlike fantasy person; he also feels angry at other people for not becoming the imagined ideal selves he made for them.

Neurotic fantasy self and world, imagination, is an attempt to make the self, other selves and the world, as perfect as the real self is in spirit; to make earth heaven like, to make an imperfect earth as perfect as heaven is. But the earthly self, the separated self, the ego housed in body cannot be made perfect, so it is futile trying to make the earthly self and world as perfect as the heavenly spirit self. The neurotic and or psychotic is trying very hard to make the separated self he invented to replace the unified self God created him as, the separated world he invented to replace the unified world God gave him, perfect.

The ego is trying to make its separated kingdom on earth as perfect as the unified kingdom of God. Its efforts are understandable, for we love what we made, they are our idols, and want to perfect them (ego selves, social institutions), except that we cannot succeed in doing so for if our succeeded our new world would permanently replace the world of God; separated self would replace unified self, an impossibility since only unified self can be permanent.


The earthly self and the earth must be forgotten, overlooked and ignored, that is, forgiven, for one to experience the already existing perfect self and perfect world created by God.

The ideal world is a pure mental construct and is unlimited by the external realities of space, time and matter. Therefore, the ideal self and ideal world is not going to come into being, for they are mere products of imagination. Imagination is not reality.

The person who dwells on fantasy and idealism gets what he wants, ideal mental constructs but nothing real in the world of reality. He generally is poor and dies poor. He dies poor still wishing for an ideal, perfect self and perfect world and rich life.

Yet the idealist must be an idealist, for, as it were, he was destined to be so and consequently to be poor and a loser. His unacceptable sensitive body makes him hate and reject it and seek an alternative ideal form of it and he generalizes that to seeking ideals for everything else in life. He is a neurotic ala Karen Horney (Neurosis and Human Growth).

CHANGED THINKING: FROM IDEALISTIC TO REALISTIC THINKING, HEALING OF NEUROSIS

So what to do? What to do is to transform idealism to realism, fantasy to reality. Much as one hates the real and yearns for ideals, ideals are not going to come into being; fantasy is not going to replace reality. So, one must use ones thinking to deal with the real world.

The real world that pays off is the world of science and technology. Escaping into ego idealism, or religious idealism, both of which are mentally constructed, not real in the empirical world, is neurosis. There is secular neurosis and religious neurosis. In neurosis, secular or religious, the ego deceives one into thinking that ideal selves and world can be invented to replace spirit’s perfect self and world.

Both secular and religious neuroses lead to poverty, of spirit and material things. There is God all right, but he is not the idealistic fantasies found in the religions of this world, be it in Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christian Science, Unity, Religious Science etc. Religions are social institutions constructed by the human mind, by ego based thinking. They are models of reality, mental constructs hence not real.

Yes, you can change your thinking pattern, change your mind, and go from idealistic to realistic thinking and make it in this world. You can then become an existentialist and accept the world, as it is, even though it is purposeless and meaningless and make the most of it via science and technology, without fleeing into religious fantasies.

We are part of undifferentiated life and continue to live in it forever and ever. From undifferentiated life we become differentiated and live in separated ego self and in matter. Matter is composed of particles of atoms and must decompose; in body we must die. As long as we still wish to experience separation, body, we re-manifest in matter again and again until we give up the wish for separation and return to union.

This is an impersonal process. What matters is how we live in matter, the here and now, realistically or not.

If you want to be successful in this world, accept yourself as you are and make the most of it. If you have a sensitive body hence hates and rejects it and seeks an alternative ideal body and self, learn that you cannot escape that body. Accept it, study it on scientific terms and adapt to it.

Study science and technology and stop yearning for ideal states that would never come into being.

In terms of making a living in this world, seek a realistic profession that produces what people actually desire and sell it to them. You should not seek a profession to make you become an ideal, perfect, all important, all powerful, grandiose self, but one through which you understand an aspect of phenomena and use that knowledge to sell to people what they desire and make a living from doing so.

Understanding the differences between idealistic and realistic thinking (real psychology), for example, is useful. People need to understand their real selves and their false selves. People demand such knowledge. If one markets that knowledge, people will buy it. They buy it for it helps them change their patterns of thinking and heal their neurosis and psychosis. One can make decent living selling information on the different types of self: empirical real self (body based self and its world); Ideal self (as in neurotic yearning for ideal self) and ultimate real self, unified spirit self).

Neurotic escape from reality and its extreme form, psychotic negation of reality and escape into fantasy is unproductive. We can understand why folks have a desire to negate empirical reality and escape from it into unrealistic mental constructs, it is rooted in their bodies over sensitivity, and helps them to accept their bodies without using their minds to negate them and escape into fantasy land.

RELIGIOUS IDEALISM, NEW AGE RELIGIONS, NEUROSIS

Nineteenth century RELIGIOUS idealists rejected their bodies and used their minds to construct ideal selves. They centered their ideal selves on their religion and its chief dramatic personae, Jesus Christ. They called their new religion New Thought (today, it is called New Age) religion.

These religious idealists emphasized changing their thinking and believed that positive thinking led to healing their minds and bodies. They believed that if somehow they got rid of negative thinking that their physical diseases would dissipate.

They called their practices mental healing, mental science, metaphysics etc. It is true that thinking in a realistic manner produces peace and happiness in the individual’s mind. But it is not the case that one does not need medications or that one can use thinking alone to heal one’s sick body. One needs nutrition and medication to make ones body healthy.

You cannot use your thinking, prayer, to regenerate your body’s cells, as the apparently racist founders of Unity Church believed. (See Neal Vahle, The Unity Movement, particularly chapter 13.)

On earth, human beings are scheduled to live and die. Perhaps, they can live to be 120 years before they die. They are not going to keep their bodies alive forever.


(Actually human beings already have other bodies, ones constructed of pure light photons, the bodies we see in dreams. That body, too, would dissolve and die. Ultimately, people live in formless, spirit self, the real self God created them as.)

Much of our human ego fantasies, religious idealism or secular idealism, are really an attempt to recapture the real self, formless, spirit, in form, in matter.

It is impossible to make spirit become matter and matter become spirit. Only spirit can be perfect; matter cannot be perfect. The ego and its material world cannot be made perfect, as spirit is.
The idealist wants to make his empirical self, body and ego, as perfect as his real self, his spirit, and cannot succeed, for matter corrupts whatever it is made of.

Matter was formed in the spirit of opposition, in rebellion against ones reality, unified spirit and desire to be its opposite. Matter is used to make separation seem real in our awareness. That which came into being in opposition to unified reality cannot replace reality; body cannot be made perfect, for if it becomes perfect, it would then replace the reality of spirit.


AVOIDANCE OF THE REAL SELF/AVOIDANCE OF UNIFIED SELF

The neurotic person avoids being his real self, avoids other people’s real selves and avoids real social institutions. In close quarters with his real self, other peoples real selves and real social institutions, he appreciates their imperfections and avoids them, and attempts to construct ideal selves, ideal social institutions, all in his mind.

Avoidant personality and its avoidance behavior is a means of separation; it is rooted in the desire to go construct ideal, perfect self and perfect everything on ones own terms. We desired special selves, a self of our making and avoided heaven’s union.
In the world we made, we inevitably see imperfections and seek to perfect them hence the ongoing avoidance of our empirical world, a world that came into being in opposition to unified reality must be in opposition to whatever it made. We live in a world of opposition and must oppose whatever we made as we opposed what God made. We must oppose our own constructed ego self concept and social institutions and attempt to make them perfect.

This is a forever struggle until opposition is given up and one returns to the world of union, the formless, spirit self where real perfection exist, not in this world of separation, space, time and matter.

Our reality is perfect union. Union is love. Union, love, peace, joy, happiness, sameness, equality, oneness, God are synonyms. Love, Union is all there is. God is love, God is peace, God is happiness, God is sameness, God is equality, and God is oneness, that God is unified self and unified state. Nothing real exists outside from union, God, love.

What seems to exist outside union, love, God, that is, separation, is not real, is fantasy, a dream, an illusion. We desired to create ourselves, create each other and create God and could not accomplish that fantasy in eternity and seem to have separated and come into a dream world, earth, where we dream that we have accomplished our wishes.

Forgiveness, that is, overlooking the separated world we invented, ignoring it, not defending it, being defenseless to attack…attack brought the world into being and the world is maintained by attacks and defenses and when it is not defend, when it is forgive, disappears from existing in the forgiving person’s awareness.

All that exists is love, union. Separation, attack, makes us not experience that love. Forgiveness is a means of over looking the world of separation we made to replace the world of Love that God created. Forgiveness is not love but is a path to recovery of the awareness of love that is always there but we do not see it.

Forgiveness is salvation in the sense that it brings us to the gate of oneness but does not make us one for in forgiveness we are still on earth, are still in forms, albeit light forms.

Forgiveness gives us some of the peace and joy and union of heaven in a lesser form. Forgiveness is a precondition for re entering heaven, for it removes the veil with which we hide the face of Christ, love in us. Forgiveness banishes the darkness that is this world and brings us to light, union, and heaven. When we are tired of living in separation, we all join hands and reenter heaven as one self, the unified son of God who is one with his father.
God is one side of the coin and we, his son are the other side. Both sides, God and his one Son, who are infinite sons, exist forever and ever.

THE POWER OF THE EGO MIND

Just because the empirical world is an illusion does not mean that in the here and now it does not seem real. Dreams seem real to dreamers.

The son of God is all power. He used his all powerful thinking, mind, to invent the world we seem to live in. A mind that dreams an unreal world and makes it seem real is indeed powerful.

Though the world is a dream, a non-reality produced by magical thinking, it is still a powerful world. It is not easily gotten rid of.

In dreams, we see mountains and those mountains prevent our movement. The mountains, though not real, seem real in our dreams. It is only when we awaken from dreams and realize that there were no mountains where we thought that we had seen mountains that those mountains no longer constitute barriers to our freedom of movement. On earth, space, time and matter are real barriers to our movements. But when we awaken from the earth’s dream of separation and enter the unified world where there are no space, time and matter, we no longer have the barriers of the world limiting us.

Enlightened persons like Jesus Christ, while still on earth, knew that the earth is a dream hence did not believe it as an obstacle to their movements. Jesus knew that the mountain he saw on earth is a dream mountain and that the water he saw was dream water. Hence he could walk on water, for he knew that there was no water where he was walking on, so could not sink. But you who believe that the dream, the earth, is real, that there are waters and mountains, you would sink into the water if you tried to walk on it and would bang your head and get hurt on a wall if you tried to walk through it. Jesus knew that there are no walls and could walk through seeming walls.

Do not minimize the power of your thinking, mind, for it produced your world and whatever you see in it and whatever happens to you. The world is an out picturing of your and our collective thinking. You are very powerful.

Think only forgiving and loving thoughts, for those bring peace and joy to all people. If you decide to misuse your thinking, mind, and think destructive thoughts, you will produce destructive effects in your world, for your thought is very powerful. Do this: tell a person that you are going to punish him, even kill him and see what happens. His ego knows that you can harm or even kill it. He therefore engages the affect the ego made, fears, and becomes fearful. He may panic and run away from you.

The ego is an illusion but in its illusory world it is powerful. You, the ego, can hire or fire some one from his job; you can harm or destroy human bodies, as in wars. You can kill those who believe that they live in bodies. In a word, the ego, your present self concept is very powerful, and along with other people’s egos produces the effects you see in our world. Therefore, do not misuse your ego’s power; use it constructively, to love all people.

I once told a man who was boasting about what he was going to do to me that I would get him jailed, for I knew that he engages in shady activities. This bragging egotist fled town. I aroused tremendous fear in him and he panicked and fled to go seek safety. My ego, your ego, our egos are very powerful in the world of illusions we live in, so do not threaten any one, so as not to generate anxiety in him.

If you make others feel anxious, you must feel anxious, for what produces that effect on others must also produce that effect in you; you must believe that others can harm you in other to believe that you can harm others. Hence you must feel anxious when other persons threaten you. If you stop believing in your ability to harm other people, you also stop believing that other people can harm you hence you stop feeling anxious when other people threaten you.

AVOIDANCE OF WORKING IN GROUPS

The idealist avoids working with other people, working in groups, for he wants to be alone and in his aloneness dreams of perfect self and perfect group activities. He must learn to work in groups, with other people and within organizations and stop yearning for separated self where he is free to use his mind to construct ideals that can never come into being.

This does not mean subjugating ones self to the stifling organizations that characterize extant work organizations. It may mean starting new work organizations where optimal freedom is given to members to be their productive real selves, not their unproductive imaginary ideal selves. (Defense of the ideal important self via vanity, pride, narcissism, leads to unproductivity in the work place.)

MYSTICS ESCAPE FROM THE EMPIRICAL WORLD

The mystic chooses to negate the immanent, temporal world and concentrate on the transcendental world. He escapes from the material world and does not bother with science and technology that study and adapt to the empirical world. He does not make efforts to adapt to this world’s reality.

Generally, the mystic does not do things to prolong his physical survival in this world. Jesus, a Gnostic mystic, saw life in body as not good enough and did not defend his body when it was attacked; he died young, reportedly at page 33. (The wisdom attributed to the man is seldom found in folks under age fifty.)

I am not interested in negating this world and escaping from its realities. I am not interested in doing what the mystic does. I want to be here and understand how the world works, study science and technology to enable me adapt to this world and live for however long I can live on earth. I am not an escapist and I do not negate the empirical world, though I understand that it is illusory.

While on earth, it is possible to change ones patterns of thinking. Hitherto, one thought in an unrealistic, neurotic pattern, which is, hating and rejecting the bodily self and pursuing an idealized mental self. One can desist from doing so and, accept the bodily self and its world of space, time and matter.

One can redirect ones thinking to science and technology, so as to cope with the exigencies of this world. If one thinks of realistic ways to adapt to this world, one will do them and make a useful living in this world hence get what one thinks about.

One does not need to do what psychotics do, ignore the realities of this world and live in the world of imagination and ideals and merely wish for how things ought to be. Things are not going to become ideal. One must live with the imperfect world, as it is, and make the most of it. One must work hard to earn a living to support ones self and ones family. The material universe has enough resources to feed several billion human beings.

A healed mind is a changed pattern of thinking, from ego based to Christ based thinking. From thinking of vengeance to thinking of forgiveness, overlooking what other people did to harm you in the past, with the understanding that they could not harm you and that you could not harm other people’ real selves. (We can only harm our false self, the ego and its body. What can be harmed and or destroyed, ego and body, is not important and ought not to be defended. It is actually only defense that makes the ego and body to seem important).

When the past is forgiven, you live only in the present, lovingly. You must overlook the past, forgive it, to become aware of the only reality there is, love, union in the present…forgiveness is necessary to see the love that is always there.

A mental healer is a person who has learned to think forgiving and loving thoughts hence has peace and happiness in his life and teaches other people to do the same. When we forgive, overlook the past, live in the present now, we live in the awareness of love, union, and hence feel peaceful and happy.
HEALED MINDHEALS BODY


A healed mind, a mind that thinks only forgiving and loving thoughts, a mind that prefers union heals its physical illnesses.

Physical illness is produced by unforgiving thinking, by desire to make ones self a body so as to experience separation and specialness and avoid love, avoid other people, avoid God, avoid union.

A healed mind must produce a healed body. Where the body is sick the mind is sick (prefers separation and specialness to union and love). Love, that is, union heals the body but love requires forgiveness to produce healed body.

When forgiveness is practiced, one often experiences ones self in light form, photons and when one ultimately loves, one experiences ones self in formless unified spirit. (This is called Holy Instant, mystical union etc.).

The light body is already there, for God, as the Holy Spirit, created it at the moment we invented our dense body forms. The light body is waiting for one to forgive ones physical body and the ego to see it.

But as long one focuses on the ego and its body one cannot experience light body. It is an either or situation; you experience one at a time but not both. If you focus on spirit you experience light body, spirit, and do not know that body, ego exists; conversely, when you focus on body and ego, you do not know that spirit exists.

Light body gives joy but not as much joy as unified formless self.


FORGIVENESS IS NOT THE END BUT THE MEANS TO THE END, LOVE, UNION IS THE END

Love and forgiveness is not the same thing, although forgiveness is a means to getting to love hence, in a manner of speaking, approximates love. Forgiveness gives some of the gifts of love: peace and happiness but not to the extent of love. Love is total peace and joy, bliss, whereas forgiveness gives attenuated peace, brings one to the gate of heaven, love, union, and gives one the lesser peace, for one is still in form, albeit light form, but not the total peace of formless heaven.

Forgiveness is a means to attaining love. Love, union, God, peace, joy, sameness, and equality is all there is. Nothing that is not love/union//peace exists.

We wished for separated existence, in pursuit of specialness. Our wish led us to our mutual attack on union, love, peace, sameness, equality, God and in doing so, we no longer experience union, love.

One cannot identify with separation and experience union; one cannot be the opposite of love and experience love. Separation is love’s opposite; specialness is equality’s opposite.

To separate from union, God, we collectively attacked union, love and seem to have shattered it and each of us identifies with a fragment of it.

To be on earth, in form, in ego and the body that houses it, I attacked union, I attacked love, I attacked peace, I attacked joy, all of which means that I attacked God. You did the same thing. Thus, we see ourselves in a world of separation.

Now, if I overlook the world of separation which I made by forgiving what keeps it going, grievance and counter attack, if I forgive others attacks on me, I simultaneously forgive my own attacks on others and on myself. In forgiveness, I overlook what maintains separation and thereafter experiences the union, love that is always there.

We live in union, love, while seeing hate, separation. The prerequisite for returning to the peace, joy, love and God that is always there is for one to forgive what maintains separation and the world of mutual attack, grievance and punishment (that presupposes that attack is real and that separation is real).

Forgiveness is not love but a means to love. To forgive is to do something, to undo what we did to maintain separation.
To love is to do nothing, for we did not create love, union; God did. We merely undo what we did; we made separation and when we undo it we experience union.

We must remove what we did to mask love, union; we must remove the veil that hides the face of Christ in us. To see the face of Christ, light form, in each other we must forgive each other.
From a forgiven world, Christ vision, spiritual seeing, we return to experiencing formless unified spirit, aka heaven, which is peace and happiness, which is bliss.

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January 22, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Lectures on African Countries #4 of 54: Botswana

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- 4. BOTSWANA

Formal Name: Republic of Botswana.

Term for Citizens: Tswana.

Capital: Gaborone.

Population: 225,000

Independence Achieved: September 30, 1966, from Britain.

Major Cities: Gaborone.

Geography:

Botswana encompasses an area of 231, 804 square miles. Botswana is in South Africa. It is bounded by Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. The Okavango River creates the Okavango swamps. The river often floods and forms shallow lake over the swamp area. In the east of the country, Chobe, Shasti, and Limpopo rivers and their tributaries provide adequate water supple for the country. 80% of the people live along these rivers. The southern part of the country is mostly desert, Kalahari, and semi desert grassland. The Khoi people generally live in and around the desert areas of Botswana.

Society:

The population of Botswana is estimated at 1, 785,000.

Ethnic Groups: Tswana, Khoi and others.

Languages: Tswana, Khoisan. English is the official language.

Religion: Christianity and indigenous African beliefs.

Education: Primary education is available to all pupils of school age. Literacy rate is estimated at 79.8%.

Economy: There is some mining of coal, copper, and gold. The majority of the people raise cattle and goats and plant crops for food. Many Tswana men seek employment in South Africa. Tourism is a strong industry. Excellent hotels and resorts have been built and attract people from all over the world to them. GDP estimate: $15.1 billion; Per Capita GDP: $4, 340. Monetary Unit: Pula (BWP)

History and Government:

The British established the colony of Bechuanaland in 1884. When South Africa attained union Status in 1910 it made attempts to absorb Bechuanaland but the later resisted and remained part of the British Empire. It gained its independence in 1966. The country is made of eight semi-independent kingdoms whose people speak dialects of the same language. Government tends to be a compromise between the eight groups. However, the country appears a stable polity. It is attracting international capital and has developed an internationally known tourism industry. The country is divided into nine districts, and five town councils.


CONTEMPORARY POLITICS

Botswana, compared to other African countries, has had stable politics and sustained economic growth. When the country received its independence from Britain in 1966, a real election that was not marred by rigging brought to power Mr. Seretse Khama and his party, Botswana Democratic Party. Mr. Khama was reelected to office until 1980 when he died in office. His Vice President, Ketumile Masire, became the President and subsequently was elected on his own rights. He retired from office in 1998 and his Vice President, Festus Mogae, became the president and was subsequently reelected. Mr. Mogae was reelected in 2004 and his five-year term in office ends in 2009.
All these seeming musical chairs apparently were, in fact, legitimate elections that happened to see one party and its leaders continually get elected to office without rigging elections.
Botswana’s success in the practice of democracy, apparently, is attributable to its population make up. One group, the Setswana, make up half of the population. That group, apparently, had historical democratic antecedents. Every indication suggests that the Setswana ruled themselves democratically before the Europeans descended on them. Apparently, they transferred their well-developed sense of democracy to post independent Botswana. The other ethnic groups in Botswana are individually numerically too small to exercise negative influence on this Setswana’s democratic tendencies.

Botswana is 70 deserts, Kalahari Desert, and is sparsely populated (total population is estimated at 1.8 million). Other than the Setswana the other groups are very small, some only a few thousands. (The San, Bushmen, were the earliest people to live in the region; the Setswanas migrated into the region as a result of Zulu pushes in the 1820s.)

In the nineteenth century, the Boer farmers from South Africa began migrating into what is now called Botswana. The local Setswana population pleaded with the British for protection. Britain declared the area the protectorate of Bechuanaland. Prior to independence, in 1965, Southern Bechuanaland merged with South Africa and is now part of the Northwest province of South Africa, whereas Northern Bechuanaland became today’s Botswana. The majority of Setswana people live in South Africa rather than in Botswana. The former capital of Bechuanaland, Mafikeng, is now in South Africa. Gaborone, the current capital of Botswana, was selected during independence.

There seems real democracy with multi parties competing for political office in Botswana. The Botswana government permits freedom of press. The government operates Botswana Television, BTV and two Radios, Radio Botswana, 1 and 2, (2 is for the capital area) and one daily newspaper. Private and other interests operate newspapers, such as the Botswana Guardian, Botswana Gazette, Mmegi/The Reporter and the Midweek Sun and private radio stations such as Ya Rona FM and Gabz FM.

The key political parties in Botswana are Botswana Democratic Party, BDP, Botswana National Front, BNF and Botswana Congress Party, BCP. In the last general election, in 2004, elections are held every five years, BDP won 44 of the 57 contested seats of the National Assembly (4 seats are appointed by the majority party); BNF won 12 seats and BCP won 1 seat.

The National Assembly elects the President of Botswana for a term of five years. He now has two terms limit (the first two presidents did not have term limits.) The president has executive powers and selects his vice president and ministers from the National Assembly.
In addition to the National Assembly is the Council of Chiefs. The Council of Chiefs comprises of the traditional chiefs of the various ethnic groups that make up Botswana. The council of Chiefs has advisory functions rather than legislative ones. The National Assembly gives Bills, particularly those relating to chieftaincy issues, to the Council of Chiefs for advice.
The traditional chiefs operate local authority courts in their area of jurisdiction although any citizen can ask to be tried in the imported British legal system that prevails in Botswana.

For administrative purposes, Botswana is divided into nine districts: Central, Ghanzi, Kgalagadi, Kgatleg, Kweneng, Northeast, Northwest, Southwest and Southern, and five town councils. The Central government appoints a District commissioner for each of the districts; the commissioners have executive powers; locally elected district councils and district development committees assist them.
Each of the districts has a magistrate court as court of first instance; cases are appealed to Court of Appeals, High Court, at the national capital.

Botswana’s economy is heavily tied to South Africa’s economy. This means that if there is a hiccup in the South African economy, Botswana has fever. This situation was even more so before South Africa became freed from Afrikaans control. South African politicians had the ability to destroy Botswana’s economy and could have wrought havoc on it when in the 1970s and 1980s Botswana became a haven for anti apartheid workers.
Botswana’s economy is largely dependent on Diamond…Botswana is the world’s largest exporter of Diamonds. Other minerals exist in minor proportion. Cattle raising exist. Tourism is the second largest source of revenue for the country.
For an African country, Botswana has a well-developed tourism industry, world-class hotels and resorts etc. The government, in cooperation with the private sector, has well managed game preserves. The Okavango Delta, the world’s largest inland delta, is a well developed tourist attraction in Northwest Botswana.
Botswana’s economy is the fasted growing one in Africa. Her income per capita, $4,340, is one of the highest in black Africa. As a result of her good economic performance, those trying to escape from Zimbabwe’s poverty flood Botswana. Botswana had to build an electric fence at its border with Zimbabwe to check the deluge of economic refugees flowing from Zimbabwe into its territory.
Despite its excellent economic growth, in recent years, 9% annually, Botswana remains a poor country. Moreover HIV-AIDS is ravaging the country. Botswana has the highest HIV-AIDS infected population in the world, 37% of the population (more than one in every three persons is infected). This means that the future of Botswana is not very bright given the coming demise of nearly half of its population from the AIDS plague. However, unlike poorer African countries, Botswana is making AIDS treatment drugs freely available to those with the disease.

All said Botswana is a thriving democracy in the South African region; its economy, though dependent on diamond and tourism, is doing well. However, since only one political party, Botswana Democratic Party, a party dominated by the majority Setswanas, has ruled the country since independence, it remains to be seen if a different party can win the national election, and, if so, whether power can be successfully transferred to it. Thus, the last test of democracy, transfer of political power to different parties, has not been met yet in Botswana.

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Ozodi Osuji Weekly Series on Psychology 2006, #4 of 52: The Alienating Nature of Criticalness

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- I grew up with a father who forever was criticizing all those around him. Nothing any one did was ever good enough for the man. He judged everything we did as not good enough and found us imperfect. His criticisms and judgmentalness was so much that our house was literally tense and one could cut the tension with a knife.

No one likes to live in a tense environment. Therefore, we sought every opportunity to leave our house, to escape from father’s critical and judgmental behaviors. We looked forward to returning to schools (boarding) to avoid father’s presence. Indeed, during inter quarter recess, we would either go to friends homes or, if we came home, we would seek every opportunity to avoid father’s critical mouth. Instead of just welcoming us home from school, father would make much ado about our poor grades at school. God forgive you if you did not make excellent grades. Anything other than perfect grades brought out the man’s wrath. I do not remember the man praising me, not once; it was always finding fault with me, my brothers, our mother and every person around him.

Because of father’s criticalness and judgmentalness, I was alienated from him and so were his other children and, indeed, his wife. Nevertheless, he sacrificed to train us and we respected him for doing that.

My goal in this paper is not so much to focus on father but to use him as a jumping off point to talk about why people are critical and what it does to those criticized and to the criticizer. My goal is not to blame any one, but to understand the phenomenon and seek a solution to it.

CAUSAL FACTORS IN THE ETIOLOGY OF CRITICALNESS

It is very easy to observe who is critical and judgmental, what is difficult is to understand why he is so and to find a solution for his problematic behavior.
I believe that father and his fellow critical and judgmental persons hated and rejected their real selves; they hated their bodily selves, and juxtaposed ideal selves as replacement selves. They rejected the real self and replaced it with an ideal, perfect self. They then strive to become the substitute perfect self that they want to be but clearly are not.
There must be a reason why an individual hates his body. There are probably numerous reasons why different folks hate and reject their bodies. In the case of father, I think that it has something to do with his over excitable body. He had physical and chemical allergies. Heat made his body feel itchy and irritable. Paint and the smell of food being cooked made him feel very uncomfortable. Father inherited an over sensitive body. His nervous system was extremely excitable, too quick to stimulation. He was almost always feeling somatically over aroused. His problematic body contributed to his obvious hatred of his body. Any one who inherited his overly excitable nervous system probably would hate and reject and seek a calmer somatic constitution. I certainly would not like to have Johnson, that is, father’s body; although I do not mind inheriting his obvious superior intelligence (his IQ is over 140). When father was not busy criticizing people, he could be a joy to be around. Some evenings, he would give us lectures on astronomy, the origin of the universe, the nature of stars etc. At other times, he would talk about philosophy better any college professor I have ever encountered. He liked to debate with me on whether God existed or not. He would say: “Tom, do you really believe in God?” There we go. We could debate the existence of God for the next several hours, with him trying to prove to me hat God cannot possibly be what is written in the Bible. He would bring out his bible and use its contradictions to make his obvious agnostic case. He would say, referring to our parish priest: “Father owu onye okpere?” Is a Catholic Priest a Church person? To him, the Catholic priest seldom knows a damn thing about theology. He saw them as mere bureaucrats, functionaries performing a necessary function in society. As he sees it, human beings are born anti social and need belief in a punitive God that punishes them to make them somewhat prosocial. Without belief in a punitive God, he said that most people would be criminal in their behavior. If you are of the intellectual type, father would satisfy most your curiosity about the nature of phenomena, but be prepared to accept his negative side, his devastating critical nature.

Whatever are the reasons folks hate their bodies; they posit ideal, perfect selves and identify with them.
(This is not a technical paper, if you are interested in the literature on the origin of neurosis, aka anxiety disorder, father is clearly neurotic, see Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth; Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution. Also see the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Father meets most of the diagnostic categories for Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, just as I meet the criteria for avoidant personality, both neuroses.)
The ideal ego self is not real; it is a mental construct, the person the individual wants to become, but is not the person he is in fact. No matter what the individual does, he is never going to become an ideal self, for the ideal is mentalistic, is a mental construct and is devoid of the limitations imposed by the realities of matter, space and time. In our thinking and imagination, aka mind, we can be perfect, but in the real world we cannot be perfect, for our external world limits what we can do or not do. You can wish all you want; the fact is that you cannot fly unless you have wings.
The ideal self concept and its image form, the ideal self image has its ideal standards, perfect standards.
The neurotic identifies with the ideal ego’s perfect standards and uses them to judge himself and other people. The neurotic denies his real self and its real body and identifies with an imaginary ideal ego.
Such persons, which are all human beings, in degrees, stand apart from their real selves and put on the hat of their desired ideal selves. From the standpoint of their ideal, perfect selves, they judge the behavior of real human beings. Naturally, real human beings are never going to measure up to the ideal standards of the ideal self. Thus, neurotics find real people imperfect and reject them.

Father constructed an ideal self concept and ideal self image with ideal, perfect standards and identifies with those pure mental constructs. He, in effect, rejected the real, self and the world, and sought to become the imaginary ideal. He used his ideal perfect self to judge his real self and other people’s real selves and found them not good enough.
Nobody likes to be subjected to perpetual criticism and judgment and found imperfect. All human beings seem to want to be accepted as they are in what Carl Rogers called unconditional positive manner. When we are accepted in an unconditionally positive manner, we tend to relax and enjoy ourselves. But when we feel judged, found wanting and rejected, we tend to feel tense and unhappy.
Nobody likes to be anxious, tense and unhappy. Thus, people tend to avoid the presence of those who criticize and judge them and make them anxious and tense.
As noted, father’s children avoided his company. Thus, he was largely abandoned by his offspring. The critical and judgmental person tends to be avoided by other people hence tends to be alone.
Nobody likes to be abandoned and feel alone. The critical person, who is socially abandoned, obviously does not like to be socially rejected. He, in fact, struggles to be accepted by other people, but, alas, he does not seem to recognize that his criticalness is correlated with his social abandonment and he keeps criticizing people hence keeps pushing them away from him. Indeed, since he judges people with the standards of a perfect self, in his mind, he wants people to be perfect and naturally thinks that he has their best interests at heart. Father must have first that he has our best interests at heart by expecting us to be “A” students. Indeed, he worked two jobs to send all his children to universities and in his mind that made him a good person. What he did not realize is the tension he put into our lives by always expecting us to excel in whatever we do. It is that tension that made us abandon his presence. We left him to go seek folks who accepted us as we are, imperfect, not as we could become, perfect.

The judgmental and critical person tends to do what he does rather obsessively and compulsively and tends to feel like he is doing it for the good of those he is judging; after all, he wants them to be better. Father would tell us that he wants us to become better students and attend the right schools. Unfortunately, his favor is a very painful one. He wanted us to approximate perfect states and no human being can be perfect, so, in effect, he was really not doing us a favor.
In fact, father was attacking our real selves. To hold people to ideal standards is literally to ask them to reject their real selves and to insist that they become ideal selves. It is like the critical and judgmental person is trying to kill people’s real, imperfect selves and replace them with his mentally construct ideal selves for them.
The criticizer and the judge is not a nice human being; he is at war with real people and wants to replace them with imaginary ideal people of his making.
The criticizer and judger are at war with reality; he wants to destroy people’s present reality, for he does not like it, and replace it with his mentally constructed abstract ideal reality. As it were, he is playing God. He wants to replace the self that God created us as with a self his imagination invented for us.
To criticize and judge is not to accept and love people as they are; it is to want to love them only when they approximate an ego ideal one invented for them and since they are not going to attain the imaginary self the criticizer ends up not loving any one.
Those subjected to intense criticism actually know that the criticizer and judger do not love them, that he wants to kill them and replace them with imaginary ideal selves. They feel attacked by him hence resent him. We resented father, even though, materially speaking, he was probably one of the most caring fathers on earth. A man with scant education whose children went to graduate schools must have done something right. Nevertheless, we resented his refusal to accept our real selves. He did not love our real selves but wanted to love our imaginary ideal selves, this is impossibility, for only the real can be loved.
If you expect people to be ideal before you love them, they would put on a mask of being perfect, become phony for you to love that pretentious self. Love, real love, accepts the imperfect real self.
Love does not criticize, love does not judge, love does not condemn; love accepts people as they are, not as they could become.

To love is to unify with the person one loves. To not love is to not unify with the person one did not love. Thus, not loving people, the criticizer and judger ends up not joining people; he feels cut off from people and feels all alone in this universe.
Those around the judger and criticizer do not feel joined to him. His wife and children particularly do not feel joined to him. They do not feel joined to him at several levels. At the physical and ego level they do not feel joined to him. At the spiritual level they do not feel joined to him. In effect, he gives to people around him what he has given to himself: aloneness. He feels alone and those around him feel alone. All of them feel alone and pained. (Because I was subjected to intense criticisms, I tend to expect those around me to criticize me. To avoid being criticized and rejected, I tend to stay away from other people. When I relate to people, I do not do so intimately. Deep down, I suspect that they could judge and find me not good enough and reject me. To avoid such judgment and rejection, I emotionally put a distance between me and other people. I may physically be with people, but I have a defensive wall around my psyche. I developed avoidant personality lifestyle.)

ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM ARE THE SAME

I am very cerebral. I would rather live in the world of thinking, philosophy, psychology, the world of ideas than deal with real people. I tend to be very analytical. I tend to analyze people’s behaviors. What does this mean in real life?

To analyze is to posit an ideal standard and use its methodology to analyze real people’s behaviors. To analyze is very much the same thing as to criticize and judge. To analyze is to point out how people are not ideal. In effect, I am doing what my father did, albeit in a different mode.

As a teenager, I wanted to understand why father was always critical. I generalized that pattern of behavior to wanting to understand why people do what they do. Instead of relating intimately with folks, I stand apart from them and subject them to intense psychoanalysis. (All analysis of other people is done with ones own ego and its yardsticks hence is seldom objective; one mostly projects to other people.)

Like the criticizer and judger, the analyzer is inflicting pain on people. He is, therefore, almost always left alone by other people. People are, in effect, telling him to stop his silly analysis of them, his comparing them to ideal states and to simply accept them as they are in the here and now world: imperfect.

I hated my father for always judging and criticizing me. I recognized that his judgmental nature meant that he did not accept and love me as I am. But here I am doing the same thing he did in a different manner, via analysis. In effect, I, too, am inflicting pain and tension to those I analyze. I, too, am creating tension for those around me.

My wife and children feel that I created a tense household where every person was expected to be perfect or he or she is considered not good enough, this time via analysis. My wife once told me to “quit your god damned analysis of why I do what I do and simply love me as I am”. I thought that she had lost her mind. How could I accept her imperfect self? I wanted her to be perfect, a saint, before I accepted her. Since neither her nor any other person is about to become a saint, it followed that I could never accept her.

For our present purposes, my father, in pursuit of the ego ideal, inflicted pain on his family; I replicated the same phenomenon and inflicted psychological pain on my family via my pursuit of ego ideal.

My immediate family and anteceding families have the same problem I have. We all invent tense and anxious households where failure is unacceptable. (We have several PhDs in the kindred.) Therefore, those around us tend to feel attacked by us and resent us. They tend to abandon us and leave us.

People tend to do what their parents did, albeit in different forms. Therefore, this phenomenon must be understood and changed (that is, healed). Moralization, talking about how bad it is will not change it; what will change it is cool headed understanding of it, how it works and effort to change it. Religious precepts are as good as useless, so we cannot take recourse to religion in trying to understand this aspect of the human condition, only science of thinking, aka psychology, can help us.

(Religion is primitive man’s psychology; psychology is civilized man’s religion; the high priest of yesterday’s religion is today’s psychotherapist; my ancestors were their people’s Amadioha high priests and I am the people’s psychotherapist; it figures, I am performing my family’s existential function.)

To change a pattern of behavior is to heal it. My family’s pattern of thinking, that is, expecting people to become ideal selves, is literally an attack on people and inflicts pain on them. We must change this pattern of thinking and behaving, that is, we must heal our neurosis.

To heal is to change the mind, to change ones pattern of thinking and behaving, from pursuing ego ideal to accepting the real self in all people and over looking their empirical imperfect selves, their obvious problematic personalities, self concepts, and self images.

GIVING UP THE ILLUSION OF TRANSFORMING PEOPLE TO IDEAL SELVES

One cannot change other people. People are like trees and leaves and other things in phenomena. They are what they are and will behave as they do just as trees and leaves will be trees and leaves. You cannot change a tree or a leaf; all you can do is accepting it as it is. People cannot be changed, all you have to do is accept them as they are, not as your ego ideal wants them to become. (People’s personalities are actually largely produced by their inherited body types and early childhood experiences; by adolescence it is virtually impossible to change any human being.)

The only thing that you can do is change how you look at people. See their inner Christ self, loving selves, and accept that and over look their empirical external, imperfect selves.

Accept your and other people’s personalities as they are, you cannot change them. Over look people’s imperfect personalities and bodies and accept the perfect, loving Christ in people. That is all you can do.

To over look the imperfect self and its world and accept the perfect loving Christ self in ones self and in other people is what is meant by being forgiving.

In forgiveness one over looks the apparent self, the human personality and its behaviors and accept the hidden Son of God in people.


THE EGO IDEAL AND WORK

Father was an intellectually gifted man but he wound up doing jobs that were not exactly intellectually challenging. I have pondered this situation. I think that it has to do with his pursuit of ego ideal and the colonial environment he found himself in. In the colonial world, pre 1960 Africa, Africans were relegated to certain types of jobs; they could not just go do whatever type of job they wanted to.

Nevertheless, it was not the colonial situation alone that determined father’s job choices or lack of it. His personality played a key role in it. He looked at the empirical self and empirical world and found them not perfect, not good enough and hated and rejected them. He looked at the work world and found all of them not good enough, not perfect. No one particular profession was good enough for him. He could not reconcile himself to one vocation and channel his considerable mental energy to it. Instead, he looked for an ideal profession to suit his idea ego self concept and ideal self image.

Of course, there is no ideal profession out there. Thus, he ended up not in any meaningful profession. He, therefore, did whatever he could, trading and odds jobs, to make a living.

Once his children were out of universities, since he did not find any line of work interesting and satisfying enough, since none of them was perfect, he chose not to work any more. He retired.

Unfortunately, he still needed money to subsist on. So how was he supposed to get the money given his lack of income, savings and pension? He expected his children and wife to support him. He literally expected us to take care of his material needs.

But we had our own ideas of what life ought to be. My idea of the good life was not to sacrifice for my father. I was into understanding human behavior and could care less for money.

Father’s children could not support him. His wife kept working and literally supported him from about age sixty-five onwards. On my part, I tried to coerce him to return to work to no avail.

Apparently, the man preferred to be doing nothing productive and instead sat around nursing his ego ideal. In idleness, he fancied himself his ego ideal, a perfect self. Poor chap. If I had the power, I would prevent retirement for all men until they die, at least until they are eighty years old.

It is all too easy to say that one would force people to work until they drop dead. The fact is that until a person finds a line of work that he has interest and aptitude in, he tends not to want to work very hard, and if compelled to do so would only do so half-heartedly. Father did not find any extant line of work interesting. As I have pointed out, he was seeking for ideal work to suit his ideal self concept and no extant work was ideal enough for him.

Given what I know about him, what line of work would have suited father? Clearly, there are no ideal professions out there. Idealism is a neurotic proposition, is a mental construct of how one, other people and reality ought to be but are not, in fact. There is simply no ideal line of work that I know of. What is realistic is for one to resign ones self to a line of work that approximates ones idea of ideal but is within realism.

Total idealism is actually grandiosity; it is trying to have the power of God and recreate ones self, recreate other people and recreate the world and make them as one likes them to be. This is an impossible wish. It is a psychotic wish that can only be satisfied in imagination, not in reality.

Father could have resigned himself to being a realistic psychologist, not an idealistic psychologist. An idealistic psychologist is out to change people, to make them become what his ego wants them to become, perfect. A realistic psychologist knows that people cannot really be changed. The most that you can do is study people as they are and accept them as they are.

You can understand people but you cannot change them. You cannot even change you. Certainly, you cannot change your body and since your body influenced the formation of your personality, you cannot change your personality. All you can do is over look your personality and other people’s bodies and personalities and their behaviors and do not fret about them.

Overlook the world and accept the loving self in people, the Christ self in people, but do not expect their empirical selves to be loving selves. This is not cynicism and skepticism but realism.

PEOPLE’S BAD BEHAVIORS ARE ACTUALLY GOOD IN DISGUISE

We often focus on the bad that people do to us, but the fact is that if we reinterpret those bad differently, we see that good come out of them. Bad is good and good is bad.

Let us say that somebody did something bad to you. You can choose to be upset and angry with him or her. If you do so, you get bogged down in emotional upset. On the other hand, you can choose to over look what other people did to you. If you over look what another person did to you, that is, forgive it, you experience peace and joy.
The very bad that some one did that could have irritated you, if forgiven gives you peace and happiness.

If you forgive and overlook the wrongs of others and obtain peace and joy, you are now a beneficiary from their apparent bad behaviors. Their wrong has benefited you, instead of hurt you.

It all depends on how you choose to look at what people do; look at it one way and you feel upset and another way, you feel peaceful and happy. The choice is up to you how you look at the events in your life.

The events that could destroy you could also save you. Whatever gives you peace and happiness serves you well, would you not say that? Forgiveness of the wrong that other people did to one gives one peace and happiness and therefore serves one well.


PEOPLE CHOOSE THEIR BEHAVIOR AND WHAT HAPPENS TO THEM

Another way of looking at what people do is to see it as chosen behavior. People are thinking agents and choose their behaviors. Not only do they choose their behaviors they choose whatever they experience in their lives. This is one way of looking at phenomena, the religious alternative.

The other alternative, the scientific one, is to say that whatever happens to people are accidental, making the world an accidental, random and chancy place. Science is neat and simple; it sees everything happening to one as a product of chance. William Shakespeare wrote his great plays as a product of biological and social chances. This is an Interesting biosocial reductionism.

The alternative, metaphysical reductionism is to say that people choose their experiences and what happens to them.

I talked about my father’s critical and judgmental nature. If we adopt the metaphysical methodological approach to phenomena, which I tend to adopt, without negating science, of course, it can be said that father chose to be who he is, hyper critical. Why did he choose that painful life style? In being critical and judgmental he vicariously attained his cherished desire to be godlike and be the creator of his self, other people and the world.

You must be the creator of what you judge/criticize with your ideal standards, for you are, in effect, saying that what you judge ought to be as you want it to be, and ought to be according to your ego ideal standards.

Criticism and judgmentalness is playing neurotic god (and if you believe in your ego ideals, playing psychotic god).

Going along with my metaphysical take on reality, I would say that I chose to have a father who is critical and judgmental. Exposure to him enabled me to understand what judgmentalness and criticalness is all about, to understand the psychodynamics of it.

In as much as I am motivated to understand human behavior, I chose a father that did something that created tension and anxiety in those around him, so as to learn about his apparent neurotic behavior.

Father and I chose each other. I wanted to learn about problematic behaviors and he volunteered to play a role of a problematic person for me to learn from it.

Of course, he, too, learned from it and learned from my own behaviors. (I leave it to him to decide what he learned from my avoiding his presence…could he have learned the silliness of being critical and judgmental hence gave them up, let him decide.)

People choose their physical illnesses. Geoffrey, my brother, (he had a serious physical illness) chose his illness. He did so, to feel like is a body and deny his spirit self, his Christhood.

In physical sickness body is made real. Body houses the separated ego self, so he chose it to make his ego and its body seem real in his awareness. Initially, he denied that he chose it and felt that it was something that happened to him against his wishes hence felt angry with God (and his parents and society for allowing that to happen to him). He felt like a victim.

The real lesson to be learned from the illness is that it taught him that he is not a separated self housed in body, but is Christ spirit having physical experience. He learned that it does not matter what happens to ones body, that body can be made sick and die. The ultimate lesson for all of us to learn is that our real self is unified spirit.

Unified spirit is eternal and what harms or destroys the body cannot touch it. Thus, Geoffrey’s sickness taught him that he is an immortal spirit, a Christ self.

Christ is love, so his sickness taught him love. Geoffrey, despite his physical issues, is a very loving person. He exists to work for the welfare of his wife and children. What a great guy.

METAPHYSICS AS NEGATION OF THE REAL WORLD

Generally, metaphysics negates this imperfect world of ours and posits an ideal alternative to it. It then urges people to escape into the better world it conceptualizes and for them to ignore the exigencies of this empirical world. If the persons told to so, does so, do nothing related to adapting to the realities of this world and concentrate on meeting the conditions of God and his heaven, he ends up poor.

Because they are focused on other worldly affairs, those who embrace metaphysics tend to ignore the affairs of this world; indeed, they tend to die from diseases. India is a good example of this phenomenon.

Indians are, perhaps, one of the world’s smartest people. They ignored empiricism and focused on metaphysics and philosophy. For three thousand years, they filled the world with writings on metaphysics, writings unequaled by any other group on earth. Think of the Veda, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Upanishad, Patanjali’s Yogas, the philosophies of Shankara, Ramanuja, the insightful views of Guru Nanak, the avatar Ramakrishna and his foremost disciple, Vivekananda and others and you see the outpouring of Indian religious thinking. I do not believe that any other human group rivaled Indians in philosophical thinking. In the meantime, Indians ignored scientific, that is, empirical thinking, and the result is that despite possessing the best minds in the world they remained poor.

I say these things because my frequent incursion into religion can give the reader the impression that only religion matters. That is not so. While religion is certainly important, folks must do what they have to do to adapt to the exigencies of this material world. Adaptation to this world requires science and technology, dealing with this world on its own terms.

EGO, NARCISSISM, PRIDE, FEAR, ANGER, DEPRESSION, PARANOIA ETC ARE INEVITABLE IN THIS WORLD

Metaphysics tends to take an either or approach to human affairs. This is correct, but in this world, we must combine things. This is a world of opposites, good and bad, light and darkness, life and death, not either or. Heaven may be all good and light, but in this world we cannot have just good and light for that would mean returning to heaven. On earth, there must be bad, as well as good.

Metaphysics, for example, suggests that to have an ego and seek narcissistic goals is not good for one. It rails against vanity, pride and other neurotic goals and urges people to give them up. But the fact is that whereas the less vanity and ego people have the happier and more peaceful they are, if they were to give up all vanity, pride and narcissism, they would cease existing in this world.

If human beings were not vain, that is, were not in hell, for to be vain is to be in hell, they would not be in this world; they would escape from this world and return to bliss, peace and joy, to oneness, to heaven. As long as human beings are in this world, they need to be egotistical, vain and narcissistic, for those adapt to the exigencies of this world. Yes those mental states do cause pain, but if they are given up, the individual escapes from this world, from pain to a painless world, to heaven; he leaves the empirical world and returns to the formless spirit world.

The same applies to fear and anxiety. Clearly, fear is a noxious affect and very few people consciously like to be in a state of fear. Yet to be on earth, to be human, the individual must experience fear and anxiety, that is, must lives in psychological pain and suffers. Why so?

Fear is used to protect the individual’s separated self, his ego and its chosen home, the human body. Fear is the primary defense mechanism of the separated self, the ego. Fear alerts the individual to threats to his physical existence. He takes measures to protect him hence exist as a separated being. Without fear, the individual would not do what it takes to survive on planet earth hence would be harmed and die and exit from the realm of separation.

Children who were born without capacity to feel pain and fear tend not to take precautionary measures to protect themselves hence tend to die from physical injuries and die young. Fear and pain protects people and keeps them in ego existence. Without fear and pain people cannot live on planet earth.

Yet to live in fear is to live in pain, to live in hell. To live fearlessly is to live in heaven. But to live fearlessly, the individual must not be concerned with defending his separated ego self and its body.

To live fearlessly, the individual must extinguish his separated self and return to unified spirit self. But in as much as the individual wants to live in separated self, on earth, he must live in fear, hence live in hell.

To be on earth, what Carl Jung called individuation, is to be in hell, a hell of ones choosing. It is in undifferentiated unified state that pure joy and happiness lies.

We came to earth to experience the opposite of union, opposite of God, opposite of heaven and to experience hell, the opposite of heaven. We came here to experience pain, the opposite of heaven’s joy.

To be separated, to be individuated from the whole is to be in pain and in hell, period. In as much as the individual seeks to be on earth, in the abode of egotism and separation and body that defends it, he must live in fear, pain and hell.

Metaphysics urges him to give those up, so as to attain heaven, peace and joy. Well, is the individual willing to negate this world, to die out from it? If not, then he must not give up fear, shame, vanity, pride, fear and pain, depression, paranoia; he must choose to live in his hell.


DO NOT RY TO CHANGE PEOPLE

On earth, people play by the rules of the game. In the game, they live in flesh, are born and must die; they are limited by space, time and matter. They cannot do many things due to those limitations. It takes courage to do things in the world of limitations.

In this world, folks must do certain something despite awareness of the end game, death, and in the present, possible harm to their bodies.

The individual may opt out of this game and choose to live only in his imagination. He merely dreams about how things ought to become. In wishes he has godlike powers to change reality, but in the real world he cannot change reality given the limitations set by space, time and matter.

Living in the world of wishes and idealism is actually a wish not to play by the rules of this world and to play by a set of rules one made up, rules that are not shared with other people. (When something is shared it is realistic, if it is not shared by other people, it is fantasy, in the imagination only.)

Some persons latch unto their definition of God and hope that that God would intervene in this world and use his magical wand to change the limitations of this world. These persons are also living in fantasy land, for God does not intervene in the world’s affairs. You can pray all you want to win the Lotto and become rich; you will not win it, for the Lotto is a game of statistical chance, it is not controlled by God. You are better served to get a job and earn your living the old fashioned way, work for it.

Idealism, be it ego idealism or religious idealism, really means that the individual does not want to do what it takes to adapt to the exigencies of this world; it means that he wants to escape from this world to a never, never land of perfection that would never come into being. Such a person lacks animal courage to do what it takes to adapt to this world and merely flees into an imaginary world.

A world where things and people are whatever the idealist dreamer makes of them is a fantasy world. Indeed, the idealist lacks the courage to persuade other people to help him realize that imaginary world of his, for in reality nothing is ever accomplished without working with other people.

No dream is ever realized, in dream or reality, on earth and in heaven, without working in conjunction with other people. Ideal goals generally end up only in the imagination of their neurotic and or psychotic dreamers. Idealists live in fantasy, feeling vicarious power from it but in fact are powerless.

What I am saying is that whereas metaphysics clearly states the truth in an either or manner, that to meet its conditions, one must voluntarily choose to negate ones ego and the egos world; one must give up separation and return to unified state.

One does not have to do so. One has the freedom to live in separation for however long one wants to. Indeed, when one lives the optimal 120 years on earth and dies, one can choose to return to earth, and do so many times. There is no hurry to exit this world.

Living on earth, in separation, is a choice. Because it is a choice, one should never work to change other people, one cannot change other people, any way. Other people are who they are by choice. People choose to be who they are. They choose whatever condition they seem to be in. They choose their happiness and or suffering. They choose their wealth and or poverty. When they are sick, they choose their physical illness. They choose these conditions and want to experience them and learn from them. They do not want to change and experience something else; otherwise they would choose something else.

Even when people are mentally ill, they choose to be so, and if you try to make them mentally healthy, they would resist you. I should know, for I worked in the mental health field and initially had the illusion that I could change people. I learned from bitter experience that you cannot change the mentally ill. Only they can change them selves…and since to change is to heal; only they can heal themselves.

The mentally ill choose extreme individuation, extreme separation, extreme egotism and that is what they want to experience. They choose bodies to make their choices possible, for there is always a biological aspect to mental disorders.

When they have had enough of that, they would choose differently, but you cannot make them give up their choice.
The garden variety neurotic chose his anxiety. He is the one who insists on being egoistic and defending his idealized self concept and self image and in so doing feels anxiety. All he has to do to escape from anxiety and fear is give up defending his separated self, his ego, and convince himself that he has no separated self housed in body and see his ego and body as dream self, as illusion and stop defending it and he would no longer experience anxiety. He experiences anxiety, fear and tension because he wants to have a separated self; he wants to be an illusion and by definition must experience anxiety, for illusions are maintained with fear and other defenses.

Slaves chose to be slaves. If you try to change their status, you run into problems, for they want to be slaves and do not want freedom. They prefer to experience themselves as victims of their brother’s oppression and abuse and being slaves optimizes that experience.

But the moment a slave no longer wants to be a slave, no one can enslave him. All he has to do is take a gun and kill his slave master. It is as simple as that to end slavery. Kill the sadistic person who wants to enslave you and he would no longer enslave you. At the societal level, rises up against your social oppressors. Destroy the oppressor or he destroys you, in which case there will be no you for him to oppress.

Consider the dance of blacks and whites in America. Any one with eyes knows that blacks are physically stronger than whites and can easily destroy whites any time they so desire. So why did blacks tolerate slavery in the hands of physically inferior persons? Is it because whites are smarter than them? Whites are not even intelligent; for if they were intelligent they would not enslave or discriminate against any one…their civilization will eventually be overthrown by those they maltreated.

The point is that though blacks had the capacity to not give in to slavery and discrimination, they chose to experience those negative states. It was their choice not to be freemen.

If you doubt this fact try to enable black Americans gain their liberty and you realize how much they like their second class status in America; they like their slavery; it is their choice.

Slavery is a choice and as such only the slave can choose to regain his or her liberty, you cannot choose for him.

On a larger scale, we are all slaves of the ego and choose it and only we can choose freedom from the ego, other people cannot choose union for us.

Nobody can compel you to give up your separated self and live as your unified self. Even God can not choose for his son, you, for, like him, you have perfect freedom to choose what you want to experience.

For God to take away your freedom is for him to take away his own freedom, for, after all, you a part of him and what he does to you he effectively does to himself.

God is perfect freedom and his children are perfect freedom, so God cannot take away his children’s freedom without destroying his own freedom. For God not to be freedom is for God to die and since that is impossible, for God is everlasting, he cannot take away his freedom and cannot take away his sons freedom.

Thus, you are left free to dream that you are separated from God, from other people and from your real self. It is your choice to dream and you can dream for however long you desire.

God knows that dream is not reality. Your dream of separation does not alter the reality of union, for, in reality, you are always in union with God and all creation, while dreaming that you are separated from them.

God wills union and we are all in unified state. To separate from God is to die; to defy the will of God is to die. No one can separate from God/union, hence no one can die and, therefore, in reality we all obey the will of God, are unified and always love one another.

On earth, our acts that do not love others if seen from the Holy Spirit’s perspective are really acts of loving. Slavery, racism discrimination are really acts of love, for they enable blacks to give up their identification with separated self, egos and embrace unified spirit self hence regain peace and joy and return to heaven and its bliss.

Do not try to change other people, that is, do not try to heal other people, do not try to save other people, do not try to redeem other people, and do not try to deliver other people.

All that you can do is try to change you, to change your identity from separated self to unify self, from ego to Christ, from body to spirit, from belief in death to acceptance of immortality. The sole function of the atonement worker, Sister Helen Schucman reminds us, is to atone for his own sins.

To sin is to separate from the whole. To atone for ones sins is to give up separation and return to unified state, to God. When one relinquishes ones ego and embraces the truth of unified spirit, one is healed; one is a changed person, one is now living from Christ self, from love. One becomes an example of a changed person, so that those who wish to change, to be healed, can emulate one. One lives in peace and those who want to live in peace can emulate one.

CONCLUSION

One does not have to go about trying to change people, all that one needs to do is change ones self and one becomes an example of a changed human being for the rest of the world to emulate, if they so desire.
One does not have to criticize people, urging them to live as ego ideal selves. The pursuit of ego ideal self, which is the pursuit of fantasy, is really an attempt to replicate the perfect self of God’s unified real self on earth. Alas, God’s real son is spirit and is perfect in spirit, in unified spirit and is always so and cannot be perfect in body, in separation, so one must stop criticizing him and asking him to be ideal, for he cannot be ideal in separation, in body.

The son of God, your real self, is already ideal and perfect in unified spirit, in heaven. All he has to do is let go of his desire for separation, an ego housed in body and he recognizes that he is always in perfect state, while dreaming that he is imperfect in body and ego.

Instead of criticizing and judging people, recognize your union with them and live it via love and forgiveness for all creation. Leave other people to choose when to live out of their unified self, when to love and forgive all hence live in peace and joy.

* Africans, generally, do not pay much attention to their personalities and behaviors. When you examine them, you see lots of psychopathologies, but they do not know that they have these disorders. It is the case of ignorance is bliss! If you attempt to point out their screwed up life styles, they may think that you do not like them. Some may even think that by talking about my father’s issues publicly that I hate him. They could not be further from the truth. I love him more than I love any man on earth. I just want to understand his problem. Now that I have, more or less, understood it, I can stand his presence. He is now my greatest friend, but as a child I sought every opportunity to avoid his presence. Try, my dear reader, to understand your and your family’s behavior patterns, your personalities, and improve on the problematic aspects to them. There are too many warped and stunted Africans running around. Much of the misgovernance of Africa is attributable to many Africans problematic personalities and behaviors.

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January 19, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Lectures on African Countries #3 of 54: Benin

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- 3. BENIN
Formal Name: Republic of Benin.

Terms for Citizens: Béninoise (or Bininese).

Capital: Porto-Novo. Population: 225,000.

Independence Achieved: August 1, 1960, from France.

Major Cities: Cotonou, Porto-Novo.

Geography:

Benin is estimated to be 43,483 square miles. Benin, once called Dahomey, is located in West Africa and is bounded by Nigeria, Togo and Niger. Benin is bisected by Oueme River, which empties into the Gulf of Guinea. The coastal region is swampy and immediately after it is rainforest, giving way to savannah. In the north, the land rises to 200-500 feet. In the far north a low mountain range crosses Benin and its neighbor, Togo. The land is tropical with two seasons, wet and dry. Rainfall is heavy in the coastal regions and tapers off inland.

Society:

The population of Benin is estimated at 6,736, 000.

Ethnic Groups: The major ethnic groups are the Fon, Adja, Aizo, Bariba, Somba, Yoruba and Fulani.

Languages: Each of the ethnic groups speaks its own language. French is the official language.

Religion: Christian south, Muslim North and varieties of indigenous beliefs.

Education: Access to primary education is readily available. Literacy is estimated at 37%.

Economy: Benin is primarily a subsistence agricultural economy. Benin is heavily reliant on trade with Nigeria and when in the 1980s Nigeria closed its borders with Benin to reduce smuggling, Benin practically went bankrupt. The Benin government currently attempts to attract western capital to help develop the country. GDP estimate: $7.3 billion; Per Capita GDP: $1200.

Monetary Unit: CFA Franc BCEAO (XOF).

History and Government:

Benin or as it was called Dahomey was ruled by France. Upon independence from France, Benin inherited French type government structure. However, its democracy is weak and the president has a lot of powers. In the 1970s, President Mathieu Kerekou attempted to turn Benin into a socialist country but failed, and Benin turned towards the West for economic aid. Benin is divided into 12 Departments/counties---Alibori, Atakora, Atlantique, Borgou, Collines, Donga, Kouffo, Littoral, Mono, Oueme, Plateau, Zou.


CONTEMPORARY BENIN POLITICS

Benin was colonized by France in 1872. Prior to that, the area was inhabited by a conglomeration of many groups, the most powerful of which was Dahomey.
The origin of the Kingdom of Dahomey is not well understood, but what is known is that by the sixteenth century it had a powerful army and, unfortunately, used that army to capture slaves from its neighbors and sold them to the Americas.
The coast of what is now called Benin was called the Slave Coast. In 1704, France built a slave Port at Ouidah and in 1752 Portugal built another at Porto Novo. Dahomey was a slave state until France put a stop to that heinous practice when France incorporated it into its orbit of influence.
In 1894, the French named the area the Colony of Dahomey and its dependencies. It granted the territory some sort of autonomy, which it retained until 1904 when the territory became part of French West Africa. France replaced the trading in slaves with trading in palm oil and cotton. Palm oil and cotton remain critical products of Benin today.
Benin was part of the French empire until 1960 when she was given her independence from France on August 1, 1960. As is the case in many African countries that were put together by colonial powers, the various ethnic groups could not get along with each other. It would seem that the country was disintegrating, falling apart. Many governments were formed only to fall. The first military coup took place in 1963 and thereafter many coups and counter coups took place until 1972 when Mathew Kerekou took over.
In 1972, Mathew Kerekou, a major in the army, intervened in a military coup and took over the governing of the country. He changed the name of the country from Dahomey to Benin. In 1975, Mr. Kerekou embraced Marxist-Leninist political and economic ideology and proclaimed Benin a Marxist state.
From there on the economy of Benin went downhill. For one thing, Western powers that hitherto bought Benin’s produce were capitalist and did not kowtow to any third world country’s attempt to separate from it. Benin is an exporter of Palm oil and Cotton and the West was its primary market. The West simply refused to buy Benin’s products and strangulated the economy.
In 1979, Mr. Kerekou resigned from the army and ruled Benin as a civilian president. He began to make some changes to the economy, liberalizing aspects of it. Nevertheless, Benin remains one of the poorest countries in the world with an income per capita of $1200. Benin’s economy relies heavily on the smuggling trade that goes on between it and its neighbor, Nigeria.
In the late 1980s, there was a wind of change blowing through Africa. African countries were increasingly embracing democracy. Mr. Kerekou called for a constitutional conference at which a constitution was written for Benin in 1990. The conference, among other things, abolished Marxism-Leninism as the official state ideology, embraced multi-party system, abolished the prevailing ruling single party structures, released all political prisoners, stipulated respect for human rights and adopted a national flag.
A presidential election was held in 1991. Mr. Kerekou was not elected president and, for the first time in Benin, an African dictator peacefully handed power to a different person.

The new constitution called for an 83 seat National Assembly, for which elections are held every four years.
The constitution called for a President to be elected for five years and stipulated two term limit for the president. The president is empowered to appoint a council of ministers. The constitution set age 70 as the limit at which an individual may compete for the presidency.
The constitution established a constitutional court with the powers of judicial review and a supreme court as the last appellate court in the country.

Benin, like many African countries, is bedeviled by the problem of ethnicity and politicians tend to be voted for by the members from their ethnic groups. (There are about 40 ethnic groups in Benin, the largest being the Fon, 49% of Benin’s population, followed by the Adja, Yoruba, Somba and Bariba).

In April of 1996, Mr. Kerekou returned to power, elected this time, sort of (there were allegations of electoral irregularities). He is both the chief of state and the head of government. His term ends in March of 2006 when another differential presidential election is scheduled.

Benin appears to tolerate the existence of many political parties, some of whom are African Movement for Democracy and Progress or MADEP, Alliance of the Social Democratic Party or PSD, Coalition of Democratic Forces, Democratic Renewal Party or PRD and many others.

The Legislative branch of government is unicameral and witnesses spirited election campaigns by the various political parties for its control. The result of the March 2003 election gave parties in alliance with the president 52 members in the National Assembly and opposition parties’ 31 members, meaning that the president tends to have the support of the legislative branch of government behind his policies.

To the president’s credit, he has not suppressed opposition movements. Indeed, Benin seems to have a thieving freedom of Press and interest group politics activities. There are several independent news papers, radio stations and a National Television outfit. On the whole, there seems freedom of press and basic human rights.
What remains to be seen is how the 2006 presidential election would be conducted, whether the now reclusive, claiming Born Again Christian, Mathew Kerekou, would hand over government to a freely elected successor, retire and not meddle in subsequent Benin politics. If that happens, Benin would have made successful transition from a third world dictatorship to a thriving democracy. So far, the history and politics of post independence Benin is largely the documentation of the activities of one man, Matthew Kerekou.

AIS: African Countries, Benin
Ozodi Osuji
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January 15, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Psychological Series 2006, #3 of 52: Forgiveness as the True Meaning of Salvation, Peace, and Happiness

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- If you were brought up a Christian, as I was, you probably have had a lot of talk about salvation. I was raised a Catholic and was told that we are born in sin, live in sin and need to be saved. We are told that a Jewish rabbi that lived in Palestine two thousand years ago is our savior and that if we believe in him that we would be saved. We are told that God has only one son and that this man, Jesus Christ, is that one Son of God and that whoever believes in him shall be saved.

These teachings by traditional Christianity seem cute and quaint. Few intelligent fourteen-year old youngsters find them believable. Generally, adolescents dismiss these teachings as fairy tales. Some leave the Church and others find ways to reconcile themselves to what seems to them mythologies. I left Catholic Christianity at fourteen and thought whoever believes in the myths described in the Bible ought to have his head examined by psychiatrists and treated for psychosis.
However, this does not mean that there is no saliency to the teachings attributed to the Jewish carpenter called Emmanuel Ben Joseph, whom the Greeks called Jesus Christ. I believe that if properly understood it is correct to say that we all live in sin and need salvation from sin. Specifically, I believe that I live in sin and need salvation from my sins. How so?
I tend to bear grudges and grievances against those I see as having done me wrong. I do not easily forgive any one for the wrong they did to me. I have not forgiven white folks for enslaving black folks. I tend to study history, the past, and dredge past injustices done to those I identify with, blacks, and seek vengeance. If you push me, I will tell you that I want white folks to be punished for enslaving and discriminating against black folks. I want them to burn in hell fire for degrading Africans. Closer to home, I have not forgiven extended family members who did not financially help me when I was in college. I was so angry with them for leaving only my poor parents to support me when they could have helped, that I never wrote any of them and did not care, one way or another, when I heard that some of them died. As far as I was concerned, they were evil and I swore them off and wanted nothing to do with them. I distanced myself from these folks to the point of not even wanting to see them physically. When I completed graduated education and felt that white controlled universities discriminated against me, I swore to have nothing to do with them. In fact, I refused to step into a campus that I felt discriminated against me.
You get my point. I am capable of great anger and hatred; I tend to bear grudges and grievances and seek vengeance and punishment for those I see as having wronged me.
As long as I bear grievances and seek vengeance for my presumed enemies, I tend to be angry, fearful, tense, and unhappy. In fact, as long as I bear grievances and seek punishment for my supposed detractors nothing tends to work out well for me.
Bearing grievances and seeking punishment for others, I believe, is what living in sin means. The unforgiving person lives in metaphoric hell: in pain and tension.
Forgiveness for the wrong others did to one, on the other hand, tends to give the forgiving person the gift of peace and joy. If you look those who wronged you in the eyes and truly forgive them, you benefit from that action: you feel freed from anger, fear, hatred and tension; you feel like a heavy weight has been lifted from your head.
To forgive and love people is metaphorically to live in heaven, while still here on planet earth.
To forgive is to see an apparent injustice which ones ego sees as real and overlook it. Forgiveness is an act of choice. It is looking at what has occurred in the empirical universe and overlooking it as if it has not happened. It is a choice not to look at the past as a guide for the present.
To truly forgive is to overlook the world and what is done in it, good or bad, and love the people in the world. To forgive is to see a man who has enslaved blacks, a racist, a murderer, a rapist, and any one who, to ones thinking, has done something egregiously wrong and overlook what they did and still love them.
To love other people is to join with them and become one with them. To forgive, that is, to love and join people, gives one a sense of oneness with people.
In the state of oneness one feels peaceful and happy. In separation from other people (we separate from those we do not genuinely forgive) one feels unconnected, tense, anxious and unhappy.
I believe, in fact, I know, that to forgive those who have done one wrong, to forgive the world, all of it, is to join the world in love. Forgiveness gives one a sense of belonging to those one has forgiven and in that sense of oneness one feels peace and joy. Forgiveness, therefore, gives one the gift of peace and joy.

I believe that forgiveness and its gifts of peace and joy is what salvation is. To be saved is to forgive all people their hurtful activities on this earth. To forgive is to truly love all people, and to love all people is to join with them, to become one with them hence to be peaceful and happy.
The forgiving person is a saved person (and he lives in peace and joy and material abundance).
The unforgiving person is not a saved person; he lives in anger, fear, hatred and tension, all of which are hellish. The unforgiving person is in hell, a hell of his own making.

We tend to think that there are certain sins that are unforgivable. I, for example, believed that slavery and racial discrimination are unforgivable. My whole life was dedicated to a time when black folks would seek vengeance for the wrong done to them by white folks. I wanted blacks to acquire nuclear weapons and reduce whites to slavery, so that they experience the pain they inflicted on black folks.
What I am saying is that it is difficult to truly forgive those who wronged one. However, forgiveness is possible if one reinterprets the wrong done to one. There are essentially two modes of interpreting the events of this world, the ego’s mode and the mode of love, aka the Holy Spirit. The ego is self centered and urges one to punish those who hurt ones interests; the Holy Spirit, aka love, urges one to forgive them.
According to the Holy Spirit’s (where I employ the word Holy Spirit, you can replace it with love, for both terms stand for union, which is what God is) mode of thinking, those who wronged one were merely acting out ones script. As it were, one wrote a play, a script and placed people into it and had them act out its parts. Those who did one good or bad were mere volunteers acting out roles that ones play, drama, called for people to act for one. One, therefore, ought to be grateful to them for acting out the roles they acted in ones play.
In effect, one asked those who did right or wrong to one to do so and they merely obliged ones request.
Those who did not help one financially when one was young did so because one asked them not to help one. One wanted to go it alone and suffer and feel like one is responsible for ones education. Those who discriminated against one did so because one asked them to do so. One did not want to work for them. One wanted to be independent so as to be free to do ones own thing. To operate within the box is to be a conformist, which, more or less, is to live a stunted and warped life.
If one is fired from ones job, one asked the person who did so to do so, so that one might be out of the work place and go find out what one likes doing and have the courage to do it. Simply stated, one asked all those who did what the world calls good or bad to one.
One asked people to do these things to one with certain objectives in mind. The first objective is ego. Here, one feels wronged, feels like a victim and feels angry with those who did one wrong. (As a young man in my twenties, I was furious at white folks for discriminating against blacks and wanted them destroyed.)
This initial response to perceived injustice is later reinterpreted with a more adult response. One gradually realized that one asked the people to do what they did to one, so that one would learn ones true identity as not a separated self, not an ego housed in body.
We came to this world identifying as separated self, the ego, but later want to learn that our true identity is unified spirit, a self that is outside matter, space and time and cannot be hurt by what hurts ones body.
Ones body is a dream figure, not ones real self. The whole point to other persons attack is for one to learn that one is not a body that can be hurt, that one is spirit and that nobody can hurt spirit.
This is the lesson of Jesus. He was attacked by people and was physically hurt; he forgave those who hurt and eventually destroyed his body. He did not feel angry with them. He forgave them, that is, he overlooked what they did to him. In overlooking what they did to his body and ego, he remembered his real self, unified spirit, Christ self. He identified with Christ, unified self and detached from ego and its body, so that what was done to his body did not concern him. Of course, to the extent that he identified with body and thought himself his body, he felt pain when his body was attacked, but when he recognized that he is not body and did not defend his body when it was attacked, he no longer felt pain. He overcame the ego and its chosen home, the human body and awakened to the awareness of unified spirit world.
Jesus wrote a script in which he had some of his friends seems to betray him and others crucify him. They did what they did for him to seem to die and from death resurrect. In resurrecting from death, he proved to himself and to the world that death is not final, that our tendency to fear death is misguided. He wanted to teach us that there is life after death, hence teach us to stop fearing death.
We tend to be unforgiving and punitive primarily because we feel that this world is all there is to human existence. But if we accepted that there is a world other than our empirical world, we would be forgiving and less punitive. In fact, if we knew that there is life after death, we would be totally forgiving of those who wronged us.
Jesus taught us that there is life after death hence that we must forgive those who made a mistake in wronging us. His lesson is that we must totally forgive whoever seemed to have wronged us. Jesus taught us total love for all people.
To be a Christian is be totally forgiving and loving. If you were totally forgiving, hence loving, you would live in peace and happiness, whereas if you were unforgiving you would live in pain and tension, in hell. To forgive, love, is therefore to live in heaven, for heaven is peace and happiness; and to not forgive is to live in hell.

Considering the blessing of forgiveness, peace and joy, to forgive other people is thus to bless ones self; to give yourself peace and joy, to put yourself in heaven.
Considering the consequences of not forgiving other people, lack of somatic and psychological peace and happiness, to bear grievances and not forgive other people is to give ones self pain and conflict, to put ones self in hell.
I was an unforgiving man. I bore grudges and grievances. I wanted punishment for those who wronged me. All you had to do is not acknowledge my presence, ignore me, and I felt humiliated by you and wanted to punish you.
(Objectively, no one can ignore one, no one can humiliate one, no one can belittle one, no one can disgrace one, and no one can say anything to detract from ones worth, for ones worth is not given to one by other people. The individual’s worth was given to him by God. It is not up to other people to give or withdraw worth and dignity from the individual. Of course, if one thinks that other people can detract from ones value, they can do so. They will seem to do so, for one has given them the power to do so, and one would feel degraded by them. But if one knows that no other human being can degrade one, just as one cannot degrade another human being, then no one can degrade one. People do to one as one wants done to one.)
Do you want to be saved? Do you want to live in peace, joy and happiness? Do you want to live in material abundance? If your answer to all these questions is affirmative, then you must do what they require; you must forgive all people, not a little bit, you must forgive them all the time. You must have one hundred percent love for all people; you must forgive the wrongs that you believe that people have done to you, all of it.
You cannot have a bit of unforgiveness in your life if you want to be peaceful, happy and live life more abundantly. If there is any human being you have not forgiven, you have kept him or her in hell and you are there with him.
The person you have not forgiven is in hell and you are in hell with him. If you do not forgive a person who wronged you, he fears your vengeance and is; therefore, always defensive, trying to protect himself from your anticipated vengeance, attack on him. A defensive person is an anxious and unhappy person and, therefore, is in hell. You placed him in hell by not forgiving him. Forgiveness makes him less defensive; forgiveness makes the forgiven person relaxed and happy, hence in metaphoric heaven. To forgive people is to give the forgiven the gifts of peace and joy, which is to give them heaven.
What you give to others you give to you. If you forgive others, you forgive you; if you love other people, you love you. If you hate other people, you hate you. Giving is receiving; what you give to the world is what the world gives back to you.

Do I want peace, happiness and abundance in my life? If the answer is affirmative, then I must forgive all those who I believed wronged me. I must forgive all of them. I must forgive my relatives who did not support me financially; I must forgive whites for enslaving blacks, I must forgive Africans for selling blacks. (I hated my ancestors, the Osuji-Njokus for selling their own people into slavery.) I must forgive the world the evil I see it do.
Each act of evil is perpetrated for a purpose; the purpose is for those it is done to, to forgive and love its perpetrators. The abused asked the abuser to abuse him. The enslaved asked the slaver to enslave him. Why? So as to feel angry and abandoned by God, and to learn forgiveness and love and live in heaven.
The person who undertakes to abuse other people learns his own lessons; he, too, is in hell…look at white Americans, who is living in more hell than them?
I must forgive all people. I must forgive my parents whom I perceived as caring more for my brothers than for me.
(I used to think that my mother, Teresa, loved my senior brother, Eugene, more than she loved me. When Eugene went off to boarding school, Hussey College, Warri, mother cried for weeks. When I went off to boarding school, Anglican Grammar School, Port Harcourt, it seemed to me that mother did not miss me for a second. I certainly did not receive the type of pocket money that “Boy” my senior brother’s family name, received. The same mother I thought did not like me sold all her belongings to send me to America. She did not even want me to work in Nigeria and sent me off a few months from taking my secondary school exams. At any rate, to the extent that attention was not lavished on me, I believe that folks did so in compliance with my request for them to leave me alone. I wanted to feel not loved hence feel angry and subsequently learn love via forgiveness. There can be no island of un-forgiveness in my life if I want to be peaceful and happy.)

Forgiveness does not mean condoning evil. The best-lived life is a life of love and giving. If you, therefore, see a person abusing another person, you must speak out against it. You must tell the abuser and the abused that their dance is foolish, you must tell them that the abuser is in hell and the abused is in hell with him; both can live in heaven only when they love and work for the welfare of each other.
The abused and abuser choose their dance, but they chose it out of foolishness (ego dance of victim and victimizer), they chose it to learn from it. But there are better ways to live. You tell them what they want to learn, love and forgiveness and ask them to practice it right now and stop inflicting unnecessary pain on each other.

Consider Christians and Moslems. They fought during the crusades and that war is resumed with the Arab terrorist attack on New York on September 11, 2001. Actually, the war between Christians and Moslems never ceased, it was fought in other forms and has now resumed in overt forms.
Question: are Westerners Christians? If Christians are those who love and forgive those who wronged them, as Jesus Christ made crystal clear in his teachings….see what he told the man going to worship God and remembered that a neighbor had done him wrong; he told him to first go home and forgive the neighbor before he prayed to God, see the implication of the adulterous woman: let him who has not sinned judge her a sinner and since we are all sinners we have no right to judge her a sinner or stone her; see the “Our Lord’s prayer…God, forgive us our sins for we have first forgiven those who sinned against us”…and Jesus walked his talk by forgiving those who destroyed his body: “father forgive them for they know not what they are doing”…simply stated, Jesus taught the gospel of forgiveness of sins as path to salvation…can any one describe Americans as forgiving people, hence as Christians? They are not Christians; in fact, they do not even know what Christianity is. How can those who enslaved blacks be called Christians? At best you call them criminals.
Are Arabs Moslems? Didn’t Arabs, too, enslave Africans? Those who enslaved their fellow human beings obviously cannot be practicing love. God is love and only loving persons are exhibiting the characteristic of their father, God.
There are no real Christians in the West and no real Moslems in the Middle East. What we have here are two sociopathic people attacking and counter attacking one another. What we are witnessing are two sets of aggressive egotists fighting one another for the control of the world. Neither is right.

So what to do? Teach both sides and all humanity the true meaning of Christianity: love and forgiveness. This teaching is best done through individual example, not just by talking about it. Jesus taught his gospel of love and forgiveness by loving and forgiving people. The followers of Jesus must, therefore, teach by example, by totally loving and forgiving those who wronged them.
With regard to political policy, Americans, obviously, need to stay in the Moslem world and teach them democratic principles. Arabs need to learn democracy. America and the West will be in the Arab world for a long, long time performing that historic duty. While helping to establish democratic institutions, Americans must forgive and love Arabs, as Arabs must forgive and love Americans, for their mutual hurtful pasts.
At the individual level, each American and each Arab must learn forgiveness and love as a means of attaining salvation, that is, as a means of attaining peace and happiness.

THE MEANING OF BEING BORN AGAIN, REDEMEED, SAVED, DELIVERED, RESURRECTED FROM DEATH, THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST TO THE WORLD ETC

Traditional Christianity is chockfull of metaphors like virgin birth, immaculate conception, being born again, redeemed, delivered, saved, healed, resurrected from death, the second coming of Christ and the last judgment. If you were raised a Christian, you probably heard these metaphors and if you are like me, as an oppositional defiant teenager, you probably thought them a whole load of nonsense and threw them to the garbage dump and went on to study what seemed to you realistic adaptation to the exigencies of this world, science and technology. But in retrospection, those terms actually stand for psychological truths that are empirically observable in people’s lives. Let me; therefore, try to explain their true meaning.
To make the ensuing explanation understandable, let me address some background noise. We, human beings, tend to believe that we are born in sin and live in sin. I think that this belief originated in how we came to be in this world.

A MYTHOLOGY

Here is a story of creation for you to ponder. It is not the truth but it approximates the truth.
Originally, all of us were unified as one spirit self. In that one unified self, we are infinite in numbers but are united, we are all the same and are equal; we are eternal and all knowing.
Somehow, we desired the opposite of our true self, our unified self. We desired to be separated from each other. Separation offered us an opportunity to seem to create ourselves, as opposed to the fact that the whole created the part and if the whole is called God, and the part is called Son of God, God created the Son of God.
The Son of God, the part, cannot create himself or create his brothers and their father; the part cannot create the whole for the whole produced the part; the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. God created his children and though the father and his children are the same, the father is greater than the children.

The part wanted to create itself, create other parts and create the whole. The Son of God wanted to create himself, create his brothers and create their father. In effect, the son wanted to kill his father and become the father, become the author of reality.
In reality, the part cannot displace the whole; the Son of God cannot create his father and create himself and his brothers. But he still wished to do so. Unable to do so in reality, he forgot his truth and dreamed a different truth. We sleep and dream that the truth is not the truth; we replace the truth with our desired truth. The truth is union; we replaced it with separation.
The world is our dream of special ness and separation; the world is a place where what is eternally unified is seen as divided and separated from each other.
On earth, each of us invents a separated special self-concept for himself and for other people and use those to substitute for the unified self-God created us as. On earth, the dream of real self-forgetfulness, we assume ego separated personalities and defend them to make them seem real in our awareness.
Defense makes what is defended seem real even if it is not real. The separated self-housed in body and defended seem real but it is not real, it is a dream self.
The act of separation, in pursuit of special self, the act of splitting oneness into fragments and identifying with fragments, amounts to attack on unified reality. In truth, we cannot divide unified reality.
God’s will is union and we cannot really disobey his will, for to do so is to die and for God to die.
For the part to exist, the whole must exist, for God to exist, his son must exist, and for the Son of God to exist his father must exist.
God and his son desire to exist and do exist; they can only exist under one condition, union, so they are still unified.
The children of God merely dream that they are separated from their father and from each other, but in truth they are always unified.

THE ORIGIN OF A SENSE OF SIN

The dream of special ness (self creation) and separation makes people feel like they did something wrong. As long as people wish to be separated from their real self, they feel like they live in sin.
Separation from God, the unified self, is what Christians mean by the concept of Original sin. Since we came to this world through separation, we, as it were, committed an original sin. To be on earth is to have committed an original sin and to live in sin.

SINLESSNESS

But, in fact, we did not separate from God, our real self; we merely pretend that we are separated from the whole; the whole, even in physics is always unified. In as much as we have not separated from God and all of us, we are still as God created us, unified. To be unified is to be innocent, sinless and guiltless. The children of God are always as their father created them, innocent (lamb) and guiltless. To the extent that we see them as guilty, we made a mistake and must correct our misperception of the children of innocence.
Though still innocent and sinless, though still in union, if we believe that we are separated from each other and from God we feel sinful. Thus, those on earth, the realm of separation (space, time and matter) feel sinful. To be a human being, which is to believe in separation, is to be sinful, not in reality but in dreams.
To pursue self-interests at the expense of other people’s interests is to feel sinful. To seek social interests, to serve common good, is to feel sinless. To serve the whole is to feel sinless.
(But whether one knows it or not, whatever one does, good or bad, seen correctly, serves the interests of the whole, hence one is always serving social interests and, as such, is always sinless, innocent and guiltless. Consider the Second World War. Hitler killed people and destroyed Europe; in the process of committing evil, he weakened almighty Europe; because of his weakening of Europe, Third World countries were able to emancipate themselves from European control. Thus, Hitler’s bad produced well for Africans and Asians; he was, therefore, in spirit as sinless as any other human being.)

In the temporal universe, each of us feels separated from the whole, God, and from other parts, other people, and from his spirit self; he, therefore, feels sinful.
In pursuit of his separated interests, each of us does hurtful things to other people and that reinforces his sense of guilt. To be on earth is to feel sinful and guilty.
Feeling guilty and sinful, each of us needs to be redeemed, delivered and saved from our sin. How is this done?

A person is redeemed from sin by recognizing that he has not done what produced a sense of sin. A sense of separation produced a sense of sin. But in truth one cannot separate from union, for reality, the universe, even at the material level, is always unified. Separation is an illusion, union is the eternal truth. Thus, one has not separated from union. One is always unified, while dreaming that one is separated. Since one is always unified, therefore, one is always sinless, innocent and guiltless.
God has only one Son, one Son that is simultaneously infinite in numbers; all God’s sons are the same to him; where one son of God ends and another begins is no where and where the Son of God ends and God begins is no where; there is no space and gap between God and his children; God is in his children, as they are in him and in each other.
The Son of God is always as God created him, unified with his father and brothers, he has not separated from God and his brothers and sisters and is therefore always innocent.
Forgive the belief in separation; overlook the things done in the world of separation and you experience the world of union. Forgiveness is the path to the awareness of union.
Forgiveness is not an ego moral statement; it simply means recognizing that what is done on earth is done in a dream and is not real; hence despite what we do here, we have not done them and are still as God created us, hence we are still unified, innocent, sinless and guiltless. No matter what you have done on earth, no matter what other people have done earth, we are still innocent. Even those who do what some of us consider horrible, such as homosexuals, pedophiles, rapists, murderers, racists, enslavers, criminals etc are still innocent, for they have not done those things. They did them only in dreams, not in reality; they remain as our God created them holy, unified with all, hence innocent, guiltless and sinless.
To be saved, healed, redeemed and delivered from our sins is to recognize that despite what one and other people do on earth that one has not done those things and is not separated from ones real self, is not separated from other people, is not separated from God and is always unified with all people. This awareness of eternal union is what is meant by salvation, redemption and deliverance from sin/separation.

FIRST CREATION, CHRIST

God extended his one self to each of us. God gave all of himself to each of us and remains himself and is in us. This is the first creation. God created us unified with him. The creation of each of us is the first birth of Christ. Christ is the Son of God who is unified with his creator and his brothers.

CHRIST DIED

Christ died means that the Son of God forgot union and believes himself separated from God and his brothers. In separated state, in ego, self-concept, self image, human personality, one is metaphorically dead. To be in the dream of specialness and separation, to be on earth is to be metaphorically dead.

RESURRECTION

When one recognizes that one is forever unified with God and all people, and lives as such, one has resurrected from death. Ego is death; Christ is resurrection; separation is death, union is rebirth.
Jesus was the man who first voluntarily died to his ego self conception and resurrected to the awareness of his Christ self. He recognized that he is not a separated self but a unified self. While seeing himself as separated, he knew that separation is impossible and that he is always unified with God and creation.

BEING BORN AGAIN

The act of accepting that one is always unified with God and all creation is what is meant by the term being born again. One was born first as unified spirit and one rejected it and sees ones self as separated ego self housed in body, now one is born-again as unified, that is, accepts unified self as ones true identity. One has resurrected from ego death and now lives as Christ unified self.

THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST TO THE WORLD

The second coming of Christ to the world is the day one relinquished identification with the ego and embraced the Christ as ones true identity.
The seconding of Christ is not some fanciful thing like Jesus coming from the sky to rescue his followers (see Christian concept of tribulation and eruption). It simply means that one has changed ones identity, from separated, ego, to unified Christ. One, of course, still sees ones self as separated but now knows that separation is an illusion.

THE LAST JUDGMENT

The act of judging separation as false and union as real is what is meant by the last judgment. The individual performs the last judgment on the ego and its world, and decides that the ego is false and Christ is real and lives accordingly, lovingly and forgivingly.
The last judgment is not going to happen in a future time for all people, it happens when each individual changes his mind/thinking and rejects the ego self (which is what Christians call Satan, and his ways, the world), and accepts Christ and his ways, union. When we accept union and its requirement, that we love and forgive all people, we now obey the will of God, for the will of God is that we love him and love each other.

LIVING IN THE GRACE OF GOD

When we obey the will of God, that is, love and forgive each other, we live in the grace of God. In grace, this world becomes a comfortable place to live in. Ones life is now like one is being carried along by cool breezes on a cool summer evening. One lives a life of material abundance and whatever one wants that is in accord with the will of God, love and forgiveness, is given to one. Doors open for one, for those one loves in an unconditionally positive manner tend to bend over backwards to help one obtain what one wants from them. Those who love and forgive God’s children obtain peace, happiness and, yes, material abundance. They live in God’s grace, guided by the Holy Spirit.

HOLY SPIRIT

When we separated from God and dream that we are in this world, God entered our world, our minds as the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the immanent God, whereas God the father is the transcendental God. Thus, there seem three persons in one God: the so-called Holy Trinity, God the father, God the Son (you and I) and God the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit urges us to love and forgive one another, whereas God the Son is sleeping and identifies with the ego and enjoys seeking only self interests and not forgiving other people.
The Holy Spirit is the correction principle; it corrects the mistake of separation; it takes us home and, as such, is our guide to our real home, unified state, aka heaven; he is our comforter in the distresses of this world; he is the link, the bridge between heaven and earth; he is part of God and brings God’s will into our sleeping minds and takes our wishes back to God, where they are reinterpreted to suit the will of God; he reconciles heaven’s will and earth’s wishes, via forgiveness; Jesus identified completely with the mission of the Holy Spirit and taught that gospel of forgiveness as the true meaning of love.


VIRGIN BIRTH, IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

Jesus was born of virgin birth does not mean that his mother Mary did not have sex. She had sex all right and, in fact, lots of it. You got to have lots of sex to have the many children she had. Thomas was one of her children.
Virgin birth means that God crated one as unified with him and all people hence innocent.
This is the same meaning of the concept of Immaculate Conception. Immaculate means pure, sinless and guiltless. Each of us was conceived by Immaculate Conception means that we were created sinless; each of us was given birth to by a virgin, meaning that we were created sinless. We were created by love and in our true self love. Whatever loves is purified for love purifies whatever it touches. Love is purity and immaculate.

CHRISTMAS

(Jesus), Christ, unified self, was born on Christ-mass day. That is, God created his son unified. This is done whenever each of us is created.
Christmas is not any specific day in the year; it is whenever the individual’s real self, the unified self, is born, that is, is remembered by him. So, December 25 or January 28 makes no difference.

GOOD FRIDAY, EASTER

Jesus died to his ego identification on Good Friday (it is good when we forget the ego and do not defend it) and resurrected to his Christ self on Easter day. Ones Easter day is the day that one gave up identification with the ego separated self and now identifies with Christ unified self and does what that requires, loves and forgives all people.

THE PRODIGAL SON AND HOME COMING

The prodigal son is all of us who left the state of union and see ourselves in the state of separation. We came here to seem separated from each other and from God. We think that we can be independent of God and of each other.
In separation, while on earth, we suffer. The prodigal son eventually recognizes his mistakes and learns that union is reality and that separation is impossible and goes home. This means that he now lives in the awareness that he is always unified with his father and brothers.
He did not have to make a journey, for there is nowhere to go. God is everywhere and where you see the Son of God, you see all his brothers and his father, for all of them are one person, one self in infinite persons. Where you are, where I am, God is. Our stay on earth is a journey without distance, a journey to nowhere, for wherever we think that we are is in God.

You are here on earth. You see yourself as in a world of space, time and matter. You believe yourself as separated from other people. These beliefs constitute what folks call sin. All you have to do is recognize that you are right now in union, in God, in all people; that there is no space and gap between God and his children and his children and each other; that you are always in union while dreaming that you are separated from it.
Accept that truth and behave accordingly, love and forgive all creation, and you are now sinless, guiltless, and innocent. Despite every thing you have done in this world, things done in the illusory world of separation, you remain as God created you, unified.
You are right now in union, hence saved from the sin of separation. To know this truth, however, you must love all people, for love is union. Love does not judge and love does not condemn any one; love only forgives all.
To love is to forgive all people the wrongs you see them do to you; I mean all wrongs for to not forgive one wrong is to say that separation is real, that illusion is real. You must forgive all wrongs; this means that you must overlook the world of dreams.
If you forgive all, now, you experience oneness, holy instant, mystical union, call it what you like, for in truth, it has no name. This is experienced now, not tomorrow. In this experience you feel joined to all things, know that union is truth, know that in our true state we are formless, spirit and are eternal.

All the so-called evil you believe that you did on earth actually was necessary for some one to experience whatever he wanted to experience, what is part of his script. Let me expatiate a bit how this works.
I had girlfriend. I had to leave her and that, apparently, broke her heart. I felt evil. But I knew that I had to leave her. She wanted to experience separation. She wanted to be a special, separated self and did not want any man to destroy her cherished independence, to swallow her. She found intimacy, physical and psychological, threatening. She found it difficulty to attach to any one. Though I was not really interested in sex but it seemed odd to me that she was not interested in sex. On earth, people tend to use sex as a means of joining each other. (That is pseudo joining, true joining is done at the mind level, via love.)
I eventually recognized that the lady psychologist came to this world to experience optimal independence and gave her space to experience what she came to experience. I left her. Her ego, like all egos, felt like a victim wronged by me. But at a deep level, she wanted me to leave, so that she would experience her ego cherished feminist independence. That is what she came here to experience and set it up to happen so.
When she gets over her anger and sense of being maltreated by evil men, she will eventually learn that union is reality and give up her illusion of independence. She might do so in this lifetime or in other life times, in other dreams.
Did I do wrong by leaving her, by breaking her heart? No. I did what she wanted me to do, to offer her the opportunity to experience what she wanted to experience. Am I evil? No at all.
By the same token, all the people that have done what my ego mind believes is evil to me did what I asked them to do for me, so as to forgive them and from forgiveness, overlooking of the past (see a purified present, stop coloring the present with the past), come to the awareness that I am always a unified self despite the appearance of separated self.
I should not bear grudges and grievances against anybody that did something wrong to me, for, in fact, they did what I asked them to do to me, so as to learn the reality of union, hence become enlightened to my true self, unified self.
I asked folks to do seeming bad things to me, thus, offering me an opportunity to choose again, to choose love and forgiveness, to choose union, over anger and attack and defensiveness; to choose union over separation. When I overlook the evil done to me and choose forgiveness, I have chosen salvation and I experience peace and happiness. In this sense, the person who did seeming bad things to me, hence offered me the opportunity to forgive him is my savior.
I tell you what, I was so furious at white folks that I wanted to destroy all of them. As a twenty eight year old PhD floundering about in America, I saw all whites as devil incarnate. The day I finally forgave them the sin of enslaving my people was the happiest day in my life. I felt peaceful and happy. I felt like a heavy load had been uplifted from me. I felt in metaphoric heaven. When I was an unforgiving person, I lived with tremendous tension and conflict; I was filled with fear, anger and hatred and was unhappy. My tension dissipated with the simply act of forgiving those I was angry at. (Choose the person that you believe did the worst imaginable wrong to you and forgive him and see how you feel. If, in fact, you forgave him or she, that is, loved him, you would feel unified with that person and feel peaceful and happy, blissful, in heaven.)
From that episode, I learned that I ought to be grateful to all the people that did me well and bad. I am grateful to whites that discriminated against blacks and me, for I asked them to do so, to offer me the opportunity to forgive them, to over look their apparent evil, so as to see the Christ in them and in doing so experience the Christ in me. Without them and their seeming bad and or good, I would not have recognized my eternal unity with all being, hence becomes saved.
It is when you look at a person who came to hurt you with love and forgiveness that you experience Christ vision; this is also called spiritual sight. This is literal, not figurative. Suddenly, that person becomes indescribably beautiful in your sight. He looks like he is made of pure light particles.
(When we invented our bodies, the Holy Spirit reinvented them in light bodies…bodies made of pure photons of light. The light body is still an illusion, still a dream self, albeit a better one, for it approximates heaven’s self more than the gross, dense self we currently identify with; the light body does not last long. Whatever is temporary is a dream self. What is real is a formless and changeless, the unified self that God created us as. Nevertheless, if you love and forgive all people, you will see you and other people in light forms. This is factual, not speculative. If you could understand these matters, I would explain them to you. For now, enough said for you.)

Separation has not occurred. What people are doing on earth are done in a dream state, therefore, people have not done what you see them do.
People are right now innocent, sinless and guiltless, for they have not done what you see them do in your and their dreams of separation, dreams of the opposite of union, dreams of the opposite of eternity, dreams of death. Love them no matter what you see them do. Even if they do dreadful things like engage in racism still love them. They do those dreadful things to see whether despite doing them you would still love them, hence love yourself despite whatever dreadful things you yourself do on earth.
Despite seeing separation, accept the fact of union; accept that you and all people, right now, are unified as one self, the Holy Son of God, the eternal Christ who has lived forever with his father.
Union is not going to happen tomorrow, it is already here, now. We live in union and dream separation; we live in the presence of love and dream that wee are hated by God and all our brothers and sisters.
(If you are into philosophy, my first love, some of the ideas propounded here fall under the categories of solipsism and idealism. Solipsism teaches that the world is in our minds. See George Berkeley’s Dialogues. You also might want to see Arthur Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and William James Varieties of Religious experience. You could also study Hinduism, particularly Vedanta and Buddhism. I am not, however, writing philosophy. I am writing what I accept as truth, not some academic exercise to impress my “colleagues” so that they would give me tenure at some university. I do not need their damned tenure if I must tell lies to secure it.)

YOU CAN ONLY SAVE YOU, NOT OTHER PEOPLE

You are having your own self chosen dream and other people are having their own self-chosen dreams.
You cannot prevent other people from having their type of dreams, for they chose them before they were born on earth.
Those who will go to war and die there chose it before they were born. Those who will die of cancer will die of cancer for that is what they chose. Ramakrishna chose cancer and died of cancer. Among other things, he wanted to show that he could still be a man of God, identify with spirit despite the cancer ravaging his body. (See M. The Gospel of Ramakrishna)
Helen Schulman chose cancer and died of cancer, so Jesus could not heal her of her cancer. But she did not take ownership of her choice and felt like she was an innocent person unto whom bad was visited; she felt like she did work for Jesus by writing his book, A Course in Miracles, her book actually, and was not helped by Jesus and hence angry with him for using and dumping her. She identified with her ego to the end and did not see that nothing could happen to her without her choosing it. She was still an ego who blamed others. She did not learn that she chose her cancer to prove that she is spirit and that what could destroy her body could not destroy her spirit, just as destroying Jesus’ body did not destroy his spirit.

The lesson is that one must identify with spirit and love and forgive despite diseases that afflict ones body. One cannot wish away the diseases of ones body, for one chose them before coming to this world, but what one can do is overlook the diseases of the body and still see ones self as unified self hence be peaceful and happy despite the afflictions of the body. (We must, of course, study science and technology, and use knowledge garnered from them to heal the sicknesses of the body. I eschew Christian Science’s antipathy to medical intervention. We were given minds to think with, to study material phenomenon. Without choosing material monism, we can understand matter and device technologies to manipulate it.)
People die from the diseases they chose and will either interpret it from ego or spirit perspective. If from ego perspective, they see themselves as victims and are angry; they are not enlightened hence will come back to the dream world to dream some more, until they get it right, that they chose what happens to them, to learn that they are not bodies and not egos but unified spirit hence remain calm and happy despite it all.


CONCLUSION

In this paper, I have reinterpreted some familiar Christian concepts. I have given them the only meaning that could possibly make them acceptable to a mind bent on knowledge, Gnosis. I have, in effect, given the Bible Gnostic interpretation. I am a Gnostic Christian.
If you are interested in Gnosis, begin your studies by reading the Gospel according to Thomas, Platonus, my writings and Helen Schucman’s writings.
But be warned, the Catholic Church and, now, the Protestant Churches, would not like you to be a Gnostic Christian. The Church stamped out Gnostic Christianity during the fourth century, AD. The Church, that great egotistical institution (Elaine White, the founder of Seventh Day Adventist Church, called it the great Satan) likes people to remain in darkness and hides the unifying light of God from them.
As long as the Church keeps people in darkness, prevents them from awareness of the truth of our oneness, it controls, oppresses and abuses them, even subjects their six year old boy children to sexual abuse.
The narcissistic institution called the Christian Church, and for that matter, other religions, will probably persecute you if you try to think for yourself, if you choose Gnosis over the nonsense propagated as Christianity by the moribund church. Please be aware of what you are getting into if you choose truth over falsity.
The material world, Gnosticism teaches, was not created by a benevolent God, as the Bible seem to teach. (Actually the Old Testament God qualifies as a pathological narcissist, a psychopathic God that belongs in a psychiatric hospital for treatment, to heal his narcissistic rages and senseless punishment of those who did not gratify his narcissism by paying him unmitigated admiration and attention.)
As Gnosticism sees it, and I agree, the world was created by a malevolent God, which the Greek Gnostics call Demiurge. (In the Christian tradition, he is also called Lucifer, the proud angel that rebelled against God, and was chased out of heaven by obedient angels led by the archangel Michael, and came to the world to form his own kingdom in opposition to the will of God.)
The Greek Gnostics were mistaken, for they gave the creation of the world to an external force. I believe that we, in the collectivity, called the Son of God, invented this world. We did so in sleep, in our dreams, not in reality.
To me and to Gnostics, this world is a mistake that needs to be corrected and, indeed, has already been corrected by the Holy Spirit of God.
All we need to do is forgive the world, over look what is done in the world and we experience the corrected world. The corrected world has been called by many metaphoric names: purgatory, gate of heaven, happy dream, (the Iranian prophet, Bahaullah called it the lesser peace). Call it what you like, it is not heaven for in it people are still in still in forms, albeit light forms. Whatever is in forms is not real for it is transitory and ephemeral. Heaven, what I have called unified spirit state, is formless and is unified. Heaven is not a place; it is a state of thinking, a state of mind that accepts our eternal oneness and loves all creation. In that state, there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, all is one. In that state of oneness is eternal peace and joy, bliss. This is not conjecture but fact. I speak from personal experience.
I am not interested in deceiving any one. I am a bringer of light into a dark world, a bringer of peace and happiness into a conflicted and unhappy place called planet earth. I cannot save you, only you can save you. My function is to explain the path of salvation and leave it to you to do what you must do to attain salvation: love and forgive all God’s children. Cheers, for there is good news; there is hope for mankind. There is light (union) in this sea of darkness (separation).

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January 14, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Psychological Series 2006, #2 of 52: The External World Mirrors our Thinking

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- (1) There are basically two modes of approaching this world: one that the world is a product of accidental events and, as such, whatever happens to the individual is an accident and not his making; that the individual is a victim of random working of events. The other approach to phenomena is that the individual has effect on his world, that he does make choices that affect what happens to him and that what happens to him is not a function of accident and randomness but a function of his thinking and behaviors.

This is an either or proposition; you cannot mix them, for the two have different philosophical ramifications. If random events shape human beings, then there is no God and justice in the universe. It is only a matter of luck who gets what and who does not get what. On the other hand, if there is God in the universe, it follows that the universe is not a random place and what happens to the individual is a product of his choices.
Some persons would like to embrace both propositions, mix them, but that is not philosophically tenable given the implication of each side of the proposition. One must accept one or the other, but never both. Any attempt to accept both leads to wishy-washy-ness and fuzzy thinking. In the end, it is impossible to mix both approaches to phenomena for compromise is impossible.
It is either the universe is ruled by choice (hence is lawful) or it is ruled by chance (chaos).
Science operates on the premise that the universe is ruled by chance. Metaphysics and religion operate on the assumption that the universe is ruled by choice. So which is true?
One must figure out which proposition is true and predicate ones behavior on that decision and take the ensuing consequences. Any attempt to vacillate, to fence sit and not make up ones mind is rewarded with unproductive and unfulfilled living.
The immature, neurotic attempts not to make this existential choice, to avoid the consequences of choosing one or the other.
Science has chosen chance and religion has chosen determinism; which side of the equation do you fall? Where do I stand, what is my choice, what is my methodological approach to phenomena?


I will answer this question by drawing from my life experiences. My experience teaches me that the external world reflects my thinking. I generalize to say that all people’s individual and collective thinking affect our world. I see the external world as the out picturing of what is in the individual’s mind and the minds of all people. The seeming external world reflects back to each of us what we think about reality and ourselves in general.
If the individual has doubts in his mind, is uncommitted to anything he finds worthy of living and dying for, his world would mirrors that vacillation to him. Conversely, if the individual believes in himself and believes in certain things as right and behaves accordingly, his decisiveness would be reflected back to him by his external world.
I believe that whatever happens to me is a response to my thinking and behavior, if you like, to my personality and character.
The individual is not always conscious of his thinking yet their products affect him. Thinking is both conscious and unconscious; thinking goes on all the time, even when we are sleeping, and are not aware of thinking.
Whatever I think about who I think that I am, behave as such, produces results for me in the external world.
If I have negative thoughts about me, they produce negative happenings to me. If I have positive thoughts towards me those produce positive experiences for me.
When my negative thinking produces negative experiences for me, I am meant to learn from that experience and change my thinking patterns, so as to produce different happenings to me. I am meant to learn from my mistakes, learn from my bad choices and become a better person.

JOINED MINDS

I believe that at a higher level, all our minds are joined, that all our thinking is joined. Since all minds are joined, it follows that each of us, at a higher level, not conscious level, knows what each of us is thinking.
Each of us responds to other people based on awareness of what they are thinking. For example, if a person thinks that the world is a terrible place that people are hostile and are out to get him (this is paranoid thinking pattern), other people will tune in to his thinking and know what he is thinking. They undertake to enable him experience the world he seems to think is real, a world he actually wants to experience.
Thinking that other people are not trustworthy means that one does not trust other people (and does not trust ones self, either). Other people know this. They respond by treating him in an untrusting manner. He is hostile to people and people respond to him by being hostile to him.
The individual then forgets his own side of the equation and sees other people’s behavior. He sees other people as hostile towards him. True. What he does not see is that he is also hostile towards other people.
It is an act of hostility to believe that other people are hostile towards one. The person, who believes that other people are hostile towards him, hence is defensive and guarded around them, ignores his hostility and attack on people and sees only their hostility and attack on him. In doing so, he ignores the role he plays in his life’s circumstances and manages to see himself as a victim, a good person unto whom bad things happen, when. in fact, he is not a victim. He is a victimizer who does bad things to other people and they reciprocate in kind.
I believe that at a higher level, we all know what each other is thinking. Of course, at a lower level, the conscious level of the here and now world, we do not know what other people are thinking. Even if one tries, one cannot consciously know what other people are thinking.
(Psychotics tend to believe that they can read other people’s minds and that other people can read their minds or put thoughts into their minds; this is called thought broadcasting and thought insertion. We are not dealing with psychosis here.)
For our present purposes, the point is that at the consciously level, none of us knows what other persons are thinking; but we do know what each other is thinking at a higher, unconscious level…unconscious to the day to day mind but conscious to the spirit level of living.

Other people tune in to our higher-level mind, thinking, and respond to us accordingly, as we do to them. For example, if a person is in a state of fear, people around him tend to know that he is in fear. He sends out signals (fear vibrations) to the environment that he is fearful and people pick them up. In fact, he sends out signals that he wants to experience what he fears (to learn that there is nothing to fear).
Other people do those things that would make the fearful person experience fear. Let us say that a worker fears that his boss would fire him. What is really going on is that he wants to be fired by his boss. He wants to experience being fired by his boss, so as to learn that there is nothing to fear from losing his job. Losing his job is not the end of the world, as his conscious mind, ego, thinks. His boss picks up his fear of being fired, which is really his desire to be fired, and he is obliged and is fired.
Now that he has been fired from his job, he feels angry with his boss for firing him. He sees himself as an innocent victim unto whom his bad boss did something wrong. He feels poorly treated and is angry.
This is the typical ego response. The ego always sees the individual as an innocent victim unto whom other people, seen by the ego as evil, do bad things to. Feeling unjustly treated and angry, the ego in the individual fights back. This may mean going to court or in some circumstances, verbally and or physically attacking the boss. There are cases where fired employees actually take the law into their hands and kill those who fired them. This behavior is called going postal, for many fired postal workers have gone back to kill their ex bosses.

The person fired from his job wants to be fired. He wants to be fired for a number of reasons. He probably does not like his job and is enduring it, perhaps to make enough money to pay his bills. Apparently, he does not have the courage to figure out what he likes doing and has aptitude in doing, training for it and working in that line of work.
If a person is doing what he likes doing, nobody would fire him from his job, unless he is laid off due to lack of work.
Being fired is a choice the person made. The lesson is for him to pause and find out what he really likes doing and develop the courage to go do it and do it to the best of his ability.
Once a person figures out what he likes doing and does it cheerfully, he tends to feel like life is worth living and tends to be peaceful and happy.
The lesson of being fired, the lesson the fired person wants to learn, is to go be his real self, including doing work that reflects his real self, his real aptitude and interests ala Abraham Maslow.
The healthy person tries to actualize his real self and real interests and as a result tends to enjoy his work and is productive. The neurotic, as Karen Horney tells us, hates and rejects his real self and wants to become an alternative, idealized mentally constructed self. He wants to actualize his mentally constructed ideal self-concept and self-image, this is impossibility.
The imaginary ideal self cannot be realized in the real world hence the neurotic is fighting a futile war. He can never attain the goals of his neurotic ego ideal. He is bound to be disappointed and frustrated and become angry and sad.
The ego ideal is a fantasy self, a dream self, a wished for self but not a real self. All the wishes of the ego ideal are mere wishes that cannot be attained in the real world of space, time and matter.
Matter limits what real people can do. The ego imagines all sorts of things, such as flying, and making the world an ideal, perfect place. You cannot make people perfect, given the fact that they live in body and are limited by their bodies. Wishes, dreams, fantasies are of the idle ego; they are not possible in the real world.
The desire to actualize the imaginary leads to failure. Success lies in striving to realize the real, that which conforms to space, time and matter.

Human beings and animals in general think in concepts and images. The world is our collective picturing and imagining. As it were, there is an empty space out there and each of us projects his thoughts (which are in images) into that empty space. Our collective images constitute the world we all see. The world is our individual and collective picturing of our thinking.
(Of course there are objects like buildings, trees, mountains etc but what we know about them is conceptual and imagery. We approach them according to what we think that they are. I am working with empiricism that says that the external world is independent of our wishes. Solipsism says that the external world is in our minds. Ultimately, however, materialism and idealism are ideas; what is real we do not really know.)
The world we see reflects thinking in our minds. If we think differently, we see a different world. (Different persons, depending on their thinking about it see the same tree or building differently.)
If what the individual experiences are not to his liking, he must first accept that the world reflected his pattern of thinking. If he wants to change the world he experiences, without changing that world he must change his thinking about it. When his thinking pattern changes, he sees and experiences a different type of world.


Consider Nigerians. When you hear them talk, they talk about having a corruption free country. But when you deal with them at the individual level, you find out that they got to be the world’s most self-centered persons. Each of them thinks mostly of him. He seeks ways to gratify his interests, often at the expense of other people. He seldom thinks in terms of what serves the collective social good. Given his self-centered thinking, he is willing to use and exploit other people to get what he wants.
When Nigerians come to America, they often behave like classic users of other people; they use American women to obtain Green Cards and discard them. They have no feelings of guilt and remorse. They are sociopaths in their approach to other people.
Given their self-centered pattern of thinking, what type of world do you think that they are producing in Nigeria? They are producing a self-centered world.
Nigeria is hell on earth, literally. No one cares for other people. In fact, if you care for other people, Nigerians may think that you are crazy. They do not even care for their sick. See, the world gives them money to care for their AIDS afflicted brothers and they steal that money and put it to personal use. They do not have the slightest urge to care for those with AIDs and other sicknesses. These people are, if truth were said, animals and subhuman beings. They are totally lacking in principled moral behavior. No wonder they sold their brothers into slavery, they do not care for each other.
Their corrupt world reflects their self centered thinking. If you can get these anti social persons to change their patterns of thinking and start caring for other people, start working for what Alfred Adler called Social interest, and to always ask: how is my behavior going to affect other people and to only engage in those behaviors that serve the common good; if they make this shift in thinking, their country would become a well governed place. But until they change their pattern of thinking, they can wish all they want for a corruption free society, the fact is that they cannot get it.
They are corrupt, in fact they wish to be corrupt and see a corrupt society. The Nigeria that Nigerians see, reflect their self centered thinking; their country is an out picturing of their selfish mode of thinking and behaving.
Like all those identified with the ego, Nigerians see themselves as victims. They fancy themselves good people unto whom bad things happen. They point two accusatory fingers at others, while three fingers point right back at them, reminding them that though others contribute to their problems that they are mostly the cause of their hellish country.
Other people do contribute to our problems…the two fingers pointing at others are correct in identifying that others contribute to ones problems, but the three fingers pointing straight back at one tells one that one contributes more than others to one problems.
We live in a system and what every person does affects every other person, as well as himself.

Science teaches that human bodies are the product of evolution and chance. The environment changes and people adapt to it and that adaptation is reflected in changes in their bodies. This would seem to suggest that people are merely victims adapting to changes in a capricious environment.
It is not true that people are victims of a capricious environment. People do adapt to changes in their environment all right but the real question is how did those changes come about?
The environment is produced by our collecting thoughts. Our collective thinking changes the environment.
When our bodies adapt to changed environments, they are really adapting to changes produced by our thinking. Thinking changes the environment and bodies adapt to the changes produced by thinking.
We are not conscious of how our thinking produces changes in our environment. This subject will take us too far a field to explain than the ten pages maximum I want to limit this paper to. I have addressed it in Real Self Psychology.
It is true that we do adapt to changes in our environments, as evolution biologists teach us. What we need to add to their teaching is that our thinking, at the unconscious and conscious level, brings about the changes we see in our environment, changes that our bodies respond to.
The environment is a dream world; it does not, in fact, exist independent of our thinking. The external world is a dream and we are collective dreamers projecting our individual and collective thinking to the collective dream world and experiencing the dream as if it is something happening to us against our wishes. The world is our wish, our wish gratified in a dream world.

In eternity we are unified spirit. We wished to experience the opposite of union, separation and invented a dream world were every thing seems separated from each other. Space, time and matter were all invented to enable us experience separation and special ness. Our world is a dream where we dream that we are the opposite of our real self.
Our real self is unified self, same and equal self; our world, the dream, shows us as separated, different and unequal selves housed in bodies.
Our real self is immortal but our empirical world shows us a mortal world. Our real world is the world of knowing but our dream world is the world of perception, of not knowing anything for sure.
In the spirit world there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, all are literally one self; one self that is simultaneously infinite selves.
In our temporal world we see ourselves and see other people, there is you and I, subject and object, differences and inequality, birth and death.

Science is correct in stating that the environment is changing and that our bodies are adapting to it via gradual evolution. What science does not say, however, is that our thinking produced the changes in the environment that our bodies adapt to. If we change our thinking, we produce a different environment and adapt differently to it.
If we consistently love and forgive all people, we produce a loving and peaceful environment and our bodies adapt to it in a peaceful and joyful manner. In fact, if we consistently love and forgive, we produce bodies that are healthy at all times.
Ultimately, when we tire of wishing to live in separated self, we stop dreaming and end the dream and return to the awareness that we are unified spirit.
We are always unified spirit while dreaming that we are separated persons living in bodies, space and time.
When we change our thinking, change our mind, from wishing separation to wishing union, working for union via love and forgiveness we first see a harmonious but still separated world and ultimately we will, not merely wish, for perfect union. When we will love, that is, union; when we give up all wishes for separation and let go of separation, we reawaken in unified spirit self.


CHARACTER IS FATE


Every thing one does in this world is in accord with ones character and personality. Ones behavior, in turn, yields certain outcomes for one. Thus character is fate.
Character, personality is largely due to the individual’s inherited body and early childhood experiences. If he is not responsible for choosing his body, genes and social experiences then he is a victim and is not responsible for the fate that his character produced for him.
If it can be shown that the individual chose his body and social experiences, then he is not a victim of his world.
None of us is consciously aware of choosing his body, his parents, his genes and social experiences. That choice was made at a different level, what I have called unconscious level. (What is unconscious to our level of being is conscious to spirit level of being.)
Before birth on earth, people have different consciousness. At that level, they choose their parents, and their parents choose them, before they come to this world. They write a script that they want to play out and come to the world to enact it out. They choose every situation they find themselves in, not consciously but unconsciously.
It is because at a higher level human beings choose their experiences on earth that it can be said that justice exists in the world. If what the individual did not want to experience could happen to him then there is no justice in this world, the universe is amoral and hostile to him. If there is no justice and morality in the world then there is no God in this world.
It is only if people chose their circumstances, albeit unconsciously that justice and God exist in this world.


BEING IN CONSTANT MEDITATIVE STATE

This paper has posited that the external world we see is colored by our thoughts, that we do not see things as they are and that our perception is colored by our thinking, our state of mind.
In the immediate world, there is what is generally referred to as the objective and empirical world. That world seems immovable and implacable. However, our perception of it is a function of the concepts and ideas we have in our minds. Those concepts shape how we see the apparent objective world. The world, as it were, remains the same but how we see it determines how we respond to it. If we change our thinking, our minds, about the nature of the world, we see a different world.
If we are in a certain frame of mind, we see other people in a certain manner and if we change our thinking, minds, we see people differently. We tend to relate to other people, indeed, to ourselves in accordance with our operating concepts, our cognitive frame of reference. We seldom see any thing as it is, in fact, but see them as our perceptual lenses predispose us to see them. If we change our perceptual lenses, we change our perceptions; when we change our perceptions we change our relationship with other people.
Our thinking, good or bad, affects how we see and relate to the objective world. At any point in time, our thinking is based on the information we have. Generally, we have insufficient information in our brains and, in fact, do not know much about the nature of anything we see. Whatever the individual says about things, people included, is limited by the insufficient information in his brain. He cannot say something that is totally correct about anything he sees.
Whatever one says about phenomena is an opinion based on limited information available to one. Know about things or not, the individual behaves one way or another towards them. His behavior towards them influences what he gets out of the world. The individual experiences the world his thinking, mind ideates and conceptualizes, but not necessarily the world as it is.
I see you, I have notions of which you are, which, in all likelihood, are incorrect. I relate to you based on my perception of you and you respond to me according to my behavior towards you. In effect, how you relate to me is dependent on how I related to you and vice versa.
The individual behaves in accordance with his understanding of the phenomena he perceives. Since he always perceives phenomena incorrectly, what should he do?

Meditation is an approach to phenomena that recognizes that the individual does not know about anything for certain. He does not know who he is; he does not know who other people are and does not know about anything for certain. The individual does not know what the world is and what the world is for.
Since the individual does not know anything for certain and whatever he thinks about anything amounts to an opinion based on incomplete information (and his thinking affects how he relates to the things he thinks about and the consequent effects he has on them and their response to him), the best thing to do is to keep quiet.
That is correct, one does not understand the nature and meaning of anything one sees in the perceptual universe and ought to keep quiet and say nothing.
In meditation, the individual consciously tells himself that he does not know who he is, who other people are and what anything is or means, other than entertain incomplete opinions about them. He consciously strives to keep quiet. Instead of rushing in with an opinion about who one is, who other people are and what any thing is, one simply pleads not knowing and keeps quiet. One strives to not think at all, at least to not use ones familiar conceptual categories to conceptualize what one sees.
In the real world, when I see you, my ego self would like to know who you are and generally uses its past learning to try to understand you. We all do this.
We use our past to color our present perception, hence distort it. Instead of doing this, one now consciously attempts to not use ones past learned ego intellectual categories to understand the present.
I see you and my perception shows me a man, woman, black, or white, tall or short, fat or thin, good or ugly looking etc. This perception of you is colored by my past, my learned perceptual instruments. If I accept the evidence that my past learning shows me, I will see you in a certain manner and relate to you in a certain manner.
This is what most people do. They use their past to interpret the present and distort it and relate to their distortions. They are not relating to other people, to reality as it is, but as their past has made it to seem. Even so, they receive consequences based on their perception and behavior.
If your past disposed you to be distrusting and you do not trust people, they, in turn, will not trust you, so you generate a distrusting world.
In meditation, the individual consciously rejects his past, his learned perceptual schema, and his instrument of interpreting the world. He sees another person or thing and instead of telling himself that he saw this or that kind of person, he simply does not exercise any judgment about what he sees. In fact, he tells himself that he doesn’t know the nature of what he sees.
What the individual thinks that he sees is largely influenced by his past. I see a person, man or woman. It is my past that says that what I see is a woman or a man. Suppose I reject what my past disposed me to see and tell myself that I do not know what I see, now what?
This is exactly the point. You do not know what you see; you just think that you know what you see (and relate to it according to your misperception of it). Now be honest and accept that you do not know what you see. If you truly do this, accept that you do not know what you see and keep quiet; you have emptied your thinking, mind, of its presuppositions and preconceptions. Your thinking, that is, your mind, will be blank, void. You will feel your mind empty. You would feel light, like you have no weight. In fact, at a certain point you would feel like you do not exist.
Indeed, you do not exist in the temporal world. You merely think that you exist in the temporal world and your belief makes it seem real to you. If you negate all your thinking, perception and your past learned ways of interpreting the world, you would feel like you are empty, a void and you would feel very peaceful and happy. You would be so peaceful and happy that you would wonder how come you had not known that so much joy and peace could be found in this world.
What prevented you from knowing peace and happiness was your thinking; your thinking colors the present with the past.
If you see things and keep quiet and say nothing about their nature, and ask the universe, if it makes you feel good, call the universe God, to tell you the nature of what you see, but do not tell yourself about the nature of what you see.
Let us see how it works. I see you; my past tells me that I see an Igbo person, a brash, intemperate and egotistical person. That is my past experience of who the Igbos are. That perception is generally in accord with most people’s perception of the Igbos. (If you are a normal person, your perception of phenomena tends to be congruent with the perception of people in your society. “Reality” is a social construct; social reality is what people in a group have a consensus that it is. What actual reality is we do not know? Abnormal persons, that is, psychotics, tend to have their own unique perceptions; perceptions not shared by other person; that is why they are said to be insane, they live in an unshared world, whereas sane persons live in a shared world, shared perception of reality.).
Now, instead of accepting the perception that my past told me, instead of relating to you as my past disposed me to do, I keep quiet and tell myself that I really do not perceive you correctly and certainly do not know who you are, apart from my past colored perception of you.
If I honestly keep quiet and say nothing about you, do you know what will happen? You think that you know it all, eh? You know exactly nothing. Where I see you, if I remove all my preconceptions and presuppositions that my past told me that you are, is another person, a person in light form.
That is correct, if you extinguish all your past, the same individual that your past had shown you as living in dense body, is seen in pure light form, a light being, a beautiful, peaceful and happy person. The person that had seemed to you an ugly, arrogant Igbo person would suddenly take on the form of light, and is so beautiful that you are almost compelled to fall down and worship him.
If you continue with this pattern of being, saying nothing about what you see, and add love and forgiveness to your life style, at some point, you would escape from the empirical world and enter a world that is beyond concepts, ideas and images, the world of knowledge. You escape from our conceptual and perceptual world and enter the world of unified spirit self, a world where there are infinite selves, all of whom are one self, are the same; a world of no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, a world of perfect oneness. That world is ineffable and cannot be explained in ego intellectual categories. One does not need to even talk about it, for it is beyond talking and even if it could be talked about those living in ego-body states, normal persons, would not understand what one is talking about.

The salient point is that the world we see and experience is colored by our thinking, thinking based on our past experiences in space, time and matter. We color our world with our past.
It is possible to live in a perpetual state of meditation by consciously relinquishing ones usual perceptual instruments and choosing not to color the present, what one sees, with ones past intellectual categories.
If one is in this constant mode of mediation, ones world tends to become peaceful and happy. One tends to be so peaceful that those around one feel peaceful. One is so happy that those around one feel happy. Ones peace and joy are so infectious that one gives them to other people without doing so consciously. In fact, merely thinking about one gives those who think about one some peace of body and mind. One is now a bringer of peace to the world.
One is now the son of God who has awakened to his real self, unified self; one is enlightened to ones true self, light self; one is illuminated to the self that God created one as, unified light self. One is now an avatar, a Buddha; one lives from ones Chi self. One has reclaimed the self that God created one as, and given up the false, separated, special self one had made for ones self. One has given up the replacement self, the substitute self that human beings live as on earth and returned to being the unified self that God created one as.
Our true self is a holy self, a unified self, and an innocent, sinless, guiltless, immortal, self. That self is not the self we are currently aware of. The self we are conscious of is the opposite of our real self.
To know our real self, one must consciously give up the present ego self one thinks that one is. One must relinquish and let go the ego separated self-concept and its conceptual world to know the unified self and its unified world.
This is an either or choice, you cannot mix both selves and both worlds; you must let go of one to experience the other. At present, we have let go of the unified world and experience the separated world; we must let go of the separated self and its world to experience the unified self and its unified world.
Our temporal world is a make belief world we mutually constructed and defend. Our empirical world is a dream world. We made it up and like it. It is our idol. We are proud of our invention, the separated world and defend it.
The self that adapts to this world, the separated, special self, the ego, the self-concept, the self-image, the personality, is a made up self. It is not real but is defended to seem real. Each of us has a separated ego self housed in body and defends it and in defending it makes it seem real to him.

What is the empirical world for? The world is designed as a means for making separated selves seem real. Separation, which means, space, time and matter are all means of making the ego separated self seem real in our awareness.
I see me as a separated self-living in space and time and defend it; you do the same. In separating from my real unified self, from other people and from God and defending my seeming separated self, that self seems real to me. Thus, in my past, as an avoidant personality, I avoided most people. In avoiding them, I managed to make my separated self seem real to me.
The avoidant personality avoids people to make his separated important self seem real to him. Each person uses his personality to avoid, that is, separate from other people and make his separated self seem real in his imagination.

In meditation, one consciously stops defending the separated special self and lets it go. It does not die, for it has never existed. What has never existed cannot die.
Birth and death are variables that take place in a dream state, not in the real world. In meditation, one consciously relinquishes the separated self, the self-concept, the self-image, the personality one knows ones self as and asks God to show one who one is, in fact.
First one is shown a self in light form. The purified light self, still looks like one is in dense matter.
When we invented the ego self in body, God remade it into a light self. Each of us has his present self in body and another self in light form.
The dense and light bodies are all illusions, both are not real. However, the light body approximates reality more than the dense body. Ultimately, if one loves and forgives all people and continues with mediation and prayer one experiences oneness with all being; one reawakens to unified state and experiences the peace and joy of God that the ego cannot understand.
After that experience, one reenters the egos world to become a teacher of unified spirit, teacher of union, teacher of love and forgiveness, teacher of God. No one stays permanently in unified state, in peace and happiness, while his brothers still live in the world of separation; one must return to his brothers’ separated hell to teach them that there is an alternative world, one of union, peace and joy. The awakened child of God teaches the perennial wisdom of mankind that we are eternally unified and ought to love one another, in his own manner for those able to learn from his particular manner of teaching to learn from him. One is doing such teaching here.

CONCLUSION

The empirical world shows us a world that seems apart from us. It shows us a world that seems to be doing things we do not like to us. Each of us tends to see himself as a victim that a bad world does evil things to. This is the general state of mankind.
At some point, some of us become aware that the seeming external world actually responds to our thinking and behaviors. Other people do to us as we wish that they did to us. If we do not love and forgive and are always seeking vengeance for wrongs done to us, other people will seek punishment for our own apparent wrongs. We receive from the word what we put out to it. We are not the victims we tend to think that we are. We are active participants in inventing the world we see.
It is very difficult for our empirical selves, the ego self, the self-concept, the self-image, the human personality to accept that one is a co-inventor of ones world. What is immediately apparent to one is that one is a victim of the world one lives in for it seems that what one does not like does happen to one.
It takes wisdom to know that we make the world we experience. You and I co-invent the world we see and experience.
If you are unable to accept this view, don’t force yourself to accept it; you cannot do so any way. Be where you are at in space and time; you cannot force your spiritual evolution.
In eternity, we are all the same and equal, but in time we are different and not equal; we are at different spaces in our evolution.
When you are ready to accept our co-invention of the world, you will do so; no one can force you to do so.
My goal in this paper is to present the thesis that we are co-inventors of our world, and that our world reflects our thinking. My aim is not to convince you of the truth of this thesis. I just want you to think about it and if it does not make sense to you, reject it. If you are ready for it to be sensible, you will embrace it and turn your life around by taking total responsibility for your thinking and behaviors and stop blaming others for your life.
The individual, you, is responsible for his life on earth. And on that note, we end this week’s discourse.


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January 10, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Lectures on African Countries #2 of 54: Angola

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- 2. ANGOLA Formal Name: People’s Republic of Angola.

Term for Citizens: Angolans.

Capital: Luanda. Population: 2,819,000.

Date of independence: November 11, 1975, from Portugal.

Major Cities: Luanda, Cabinda.

Geography:

Angola is located in South West Africa. Congo-Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville, Zambia, and Namibia border it. Angola is approximately 487, 353 square miles, including the enclave of Cabinda. The coastal area is lowland, ending at the Namib Desert South of Benguela. Hills and Mountains parallel the coast, divided by many rivers. Hot along the coast than in the mountains. Two seasons: wet and dry, rainy season from September to April and dry season from May to September. Coolest months July and August, Warm and wet in Cabinda.

Society: The population is estimated at 13, 625, 000, most of which are concentrated in the Western part of the country.

Ethnic Groups: Ovimbundu 37%, Kimbundu 25%, and Bakongo 13%. Other groups are Lunda-Chokwe, Nganguela, Nyaneka-Humbe, Ovambo, and Mestico and Europeans.

Languages: Portuguese is the official language, with indigenous people speaking their various Bantu languages.

Religion: Christians 90%, the remainder practices African religions.

Education: Free and compulsory elementary education. Literacy rate is estimated at 42%.

Economy: Extractive oil industry and agriculture play dominant role in the economy. GDP estimated: $16.9 billion; Per Capita: $1, 030. Monetary unit: New Kwanza.

History and Government:

Various African groups lived in what is now Angola. The Portuguese came around 1483 and eventually took over. The Portuguese considered Angola part of Portugal and did not want it independent. A large Portuguese population settled in the country and essentially transformed Africans into slaves working in their plantations. In 1961 a guerrilla war against the Portuguese colonialist began. Different African factions formed armies to fight their colonial masters. Portugal gave Angola independence in 1975, and thereafter a protracted civil war by the African factions ensued. The protracted civil war between MPLA, FNLA and UNITAS devastated the country. The end of that war has led to attempts at democratic elections but MPLA still exercises dominant role in politics with little opposition tolerated. An elected president who governs through a prime minister rules Angola. The country is divided into 18 provinces.


ANGOLAN POLITICS

Angola is an interesting African country. It had extended colonization by a European people to the extent that two thirds of Angolans speak Portuguese as their primary language. The Portuguese settled in Angola in 1483. They named the country, apparently, from the Ngola tribe. The Portuguese has more or less lived in Luanda since that time, except for a brief interregnum, 1641-1648, when the Dutch drove them out and controlled Angola.
Portugal used Angola as its main slaving source for its South American colonies, particularly Brazil.
Portugal considered Angola part of Portugal itself, an overseas province called Portuguese West Africa).
During the post Second World War, a wind of changing blew across European colonized Africa. Portugal refused to acknowledge the wind and considered its African territories (Mozambique, Angola, Guinea Bissau etc) as part of itself. It felt that these territories were not foreign lands and, as such, not to be given independence, pretty much as France felt towards Algeria. However, the wind of change was not containable and Angola was no exception.
Angolan groups formed political parties to fight for their country’s independence. Unfortunately, as in many African countries the political parties were formed along ethnic lines.
The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movemento Popular de Libertacao de Angola) was organized around the capital of Luanda by the Mestico (mixed, white and black) and Kimbundu peoples. This party embraced socialism and had affiliations with European socialist parties. In the North was the National Liberation Front of Angola (Frente Nacional de Libertacao of Angola) FNLA; this party comprised mostly of the Bakongo peoples that exist both in the Congo and Angola, and was supported by Zaire’s Mobutu and his American Ally. In the south was the Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Uniao Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola) UNITA; this party comprised mainly of the Ovimbundu peoples.
With Portugal’s refusal to entertain the possibility of independence these three parties quickly became guerilla militias, each based in its ethnic area and a fourteen year war of independence ensued. In 1975, there was a military coup in Portugal and the Salazar dictatorship was overthrown. Portugal began negotiations with the three Angolan parties for independence and eventually gave Angola independence.
The three parties could not agree on a unity government and became armed camps fighting one another for the control of Angola. MPLA in the capital area declared itself the national government and a civil war between it and its two rivals ensued, a war that did not end until 2002 when finally Jonas Savimbi, the leader of UNITA was killed.
The Angolan civil war occasioned foreign powers jostling for control of Africa taking sides. The United States supported FNLA, the USSR and the communist block supported MPLA and South Africa supported UNITA.
In 1976, FNLA was quickly disposed of by MPLA. But the war between MPLA and UNITA became an internationalized war with Cuba sending in troops to support MPLA and South Africa, acting as USA proxy, sending in troops to support UNITA.
Each group depended on the resources in the area under its control to wage the war. MPLA had access to off shore (near the costal Luanda area it controlled) oil mining and UNITA controlled diamond mines in the Ovimbundu heartland, the center of the country.
Several efforts were made at reconciling these parties to no avail. It was the end of the cold war that eventually brought about change in Angola. With end to the cold war, Russia and America had no use for proxy wars to control the rest of the world. Russia was dead and America became the sole superpower in the world. As the sole superpower, America essentially could care less for the welfare of Africans, so it no longer supported UNITA militarily. Mr. Savimbi was forced to negotiate, particularly when South Africa, his main arms supplier, negotiated for the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela to rule South Africa. Mr. Savimbi was left in the lurch and sued for peace. In 1994, a peace accord was reached by the warring parties at Lusaka. The Lusaka protocol called for a shared government between UNITA and MPLA and integration of their forces into one Angolan military.
The two parties began negotiating for a national government. In 1992, an election of sorts was held and the result was contested. The official result claimed that Mr. Dos Santos narrowly beat Mr. Savimbi. Mr. Savimbi rejected the results. The negotiations to form a national government failed and fighting resumed between them in 1998, a fighting that did not end until Savimbi was killed in 2002.
With the death of Savimbi, UNITA ceased fighting and essentially MPLA emerged victorious. Whereas what remains of UNITA and FNLA serve as opposition parties of sorts, essentially, Angola is ruled by MPLA in an unchallenged manner. A national election is scheduled for 2006. If this election is, in fact, held and a party wins it and transition is made to democratic government, Angola would have become a democratic polity.
MPLA has essentially ruled Angola from 1975 to the present. When the first leader of MPLA, Agostinho Neto, died in 1979, Mr. Dos Santos took over the leadership of MPLA and nominally became the president of Angola. Mr. Dos Santos is still the president of Angola.
The twenty seven years war between the three groups contesting for leadership of Angola led to tremendous devastation of Angola. Four million of the country’s estimated fourteen million persons were internally displaced persons (refugees). The land was so heavily mined that people are still having their limbs blown up by exploding mines. Indeed, farmers are hesitant returning to farming, so that little farming is done in the country.
Angola depends heavily on food importation. Much of the wealth it generates from oil (which is mainly in the enclave of Cabinda, a land almost surrounded by Congo) is either wasted or used to feed the people.
Corruption is so rife in the country that in 2005 alone four billion dollars from oil revenue suddenly vanished from Angola’s foreign accounts.
In Cabinda the native population, who are Congolese, are fighting a guerrilla war to separate from Angola.
Angola’s current government is essentially government by MPLA and its leader Dos Santos.
Mr. Santos is the nominal president of Angola. He is assisted by a prime minister, Mr. Fernando da Piedade Dias dos Santos. The prime minister supposedly heads a council of ministers and runs the day to day affairs of the country, but, in fact, the president is the unchallenged ruler of Angola.
On paper, the usual institutions of democracy are in place but they are seldom used. There is a unicameral legislature that supposedly makes laws. The country is divided into 18 provinces. But the president appoints the governors of the provinces and they are beholden to him and there is no pretense of independent leadership by them.
The country is divided into 140 municipalities, only 12 of which have operational courts.
At the national level, there is a supreme court that acts as the appellate court of last resort. Its judges are appointed by the president and can hardly be said to be independent in their adjudication of law (what there is of it).
Angola is the second largest oil producer in sub Saharan Africa. With a small population and rich mineral wealth, Angola ought to be one of the richest countries in the world. Instead, Angola is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per capital income of US $1, 030 and life expectancy of 39 years for men and 42 years for women. Diseases are rampant and medical institutions, what there is, have little or no medicines and equipments to treat the sick. Schools are either closed and if functioning have little books. Government offices lack in equipments and supplies to do their work properly.
Angola is another mismanaged Africa country. Much of the country’s problems could be attributed to its prolonged war of independence and civil war. It remains to be seen if the country can make a transition to modern democracy and efficient management or whether it will continue to suffer the scourge of Africa, poor management of its resources and endemic corruption in all walks of her life.

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January 09, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Psychological Series 2006, #1 of 52

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- (1) HOW I FOUND PEACE IN A WARRING WORLD Are you living in tension and want to experience peace? If so, consider doing what I did to find peace. I have found freedom from tension and would like to share with you the gift of tension free living.

Some background information is necessary before we explore my methodology for reducing tension.
I lived in tension. In fact, I was so tense that if you touched my body, it felt hot. This was a very uncomfortable pattern of living, so I sought explanation for it and elimination of it.
I was born in Alaigbo. Alaigbo must be the most neurotic society on planet earth. See Victor Uchendu. (I) In Alaigbo, children are not accepted in an unconditional positive manner ala Carl Rogers. (2) Children are accepted conditionally, mostly only when they do what society expects of them to do.
In no uncertain terms, Igbo society tells its children that, as they are, they are not good enough until they do certain things that are expected of them. Those who perform as expected are positively reinforced with social approval and acceptance.
Those socially approved generally turn out as normal adults. The normal adult is a person who has adjusted to his society as it is, even if that society is pathological.
Igbo conditional approval of its people probably accounts for the amazing achievement of the Igbos. Igbos essentially came into contact with Western civilization in the twentieth century; they now have families whose children routinely attend universities, a feat not even achieved in the United States of America. Igbo society drives its people to achieve greatness or they are perceived as nothing. It pays a heavy price for its neurotic basis of social acceptance. Many Igbos live with inordinate fear of failure, anxiety and tension.

In all human societies, Igbo society included, some children, the physically sensitive ones, usually find it difficult to do what their conditionally accepting society expects of them to do to be accepted. I was one such sensitive child. I could not do what my conditionally accepting Igbo society expected of children and, therefore, was largely not positively rewarded.
All children are motivated to be accepted by what Harry Stack Sullivan (3) called their “Significant others” (parents, siblings, peers, teachers, authority figures).
Children know that they are very vulnerable and left alone that they are unable to do what it takes for them to survive physically. Children need adults support to survive. Fearing death, children seek ways to please those whose support they must have for them to physically survive, adults. Thus, children struggle to be accepted by the adults in their world, particularly the significant ones.
By and large, the majority of children seem able to do what their significant others require of them for acceptance. Thus, every where in the world, about 90% of children tend to turn out normal.
Some children are unable to do what their significant others require of them for positive acceptance. As Karen Horney (4) sees it, some of those children who are unable to do what their society rewards exaggerate known human tendencies. She called these children neurotic children. I was a neurotic child. The neurotic child is unable to do what his society expects of him before he is accepted, so he uses his imagination and thinking to construct an ideal self that he thinks is the type of person that his society would approve and accept, and attempts to become that idealized person. He experiences an obsessive compulsive desire to become the ideal ego self that he wishes he were, but that, in fact, he is not. He feels fine to the extent that he seems to approximate the ideal mirage he wants to become and feels anxious when he feels that he is not that ideal person. As it were, his very life depends on him becoming the ideal self, for he thinks that it is only if he were that person would his society accept him and that failure to become him would lead to social rejection hence death.
Most children under age twelve would die if not accepted and cared for by adults, since they cannot fend and shift for themselves yet. The fear of social rejection is thus rooted in social realism, for social rejection is often tantamount to death. We protect what we value and destroy what we do not value. Unvalued children fear destruction by society.
The desire to become an ideal self, a self that society would accept, is, in effect, the desire to live, given the conditional terms of social acceptance. Thus, to Horney, our conditionally accepting societies cause the sensitive child to become afraid of death and to construct an idealized false (neurotic) self and cling to it as if he is that fictional self.
In the process of trying to become their idealized selves, some persons become psychotic. These persons are not our present concern, for they are the purview of psychiatrists. See The American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. (5)

THE SELF CONCEPT/SELF IMAGE/EGO/PERSONALITY

Every human being thinks in concepts. By age six or so each child has posited a self concept, an idea of the person he or she thinks that he is.
Since human beings also think in imagery, the self concept is translated into a self image, a picture of who the child thinks that he or she is. Thus, children have self concepts and self images.
George Kelly (6) tells us how the self concept is reached. As he sees it, the human child uses his biological constitution and social experiences as building blocks and combines them to construct a self concept and self image. By age thirteen, adolescence, each human being has constructed a fixed self concept and self image and behaves accordingly.
Alfred Adler (7) conjectures that children who were born with problematic bodies, who subsequently feel inordinately weak and inferior Vis a Vis their physical and social environment tend to construct problematic self concepts and self images. They pursue superiority. They construct superior self concepts and self images and desire to become them. To Adler, the construction and pursuit of the superior self is what constitutes neurosis.
Karen Horney defines neurosis as pursuit of the idealized self image and fear of being the real self. The neurotic child associates his real self with a failed self that society would reject and desires to be an imaginary ideal self that society would accept.
As Horney sees it, society accepts children conditionally. Those children who were unable to meet the conditions for social acceptance and who therefore were not socially accepted still struggle to meet the conditions of social acceptance. They posit idealized self concepts and idealized self images, usually a very perfect self, and strive to become it. They hope that if they attain the idealized perfect self that their society would accept them. Since they fear social rejection, they fear not meeting the conditions of social acceptance, the idealized self.
The struggle to become the idealized self concept and self image produces what Horney called basic anxiety (what psychoanalysis, in general, calls neurotic anxiety disorder). The neurotic person at all times has free floating anxiety, from his fear of not living up to his cherished idealized self image, a self he believes that if he attains it that society would approve him. Sometimes, he pretends that he is his imaginary idealized self image, and acts in what Adler called “As If” he is the superior self he wants to become but is not.
The neurotic is a person who acts in an obsessive compulsive manner to become an idealized self concept/image and lives with anxiety and tension.

ADJUSTED AND MALADJUSTED PERSONS

The term neurosis applies to all people, in degrees. All human beings have idealized self concepts and corresponding idealized self images; all human beings have a desire to attain their idealized self images and all human beings feel some anxiety and tension from the desire to become their imaginary ideal selves.
The normal person is a person who, more or less, is not conscious of the neurotic anxiety in him, whereas the neurotic person is conscious of his neurotic anxiety. The neurotic person is conscious of the fact that he has an idealized self image and that he is afraid of not attaining it, hence is anxious.
What the full fledged neurotic does consciously, the normal person does unconsciously.
Consider the normal Igbo person. He must fit into his conditionally accepting society. He knows that his society accepts him mostly when he achieves something significant and ignores him when he fails. Thus, he seeks to become an important person (importance as defined by his neurotic society, not importance as it, in fact, is). He sees going to school and attaining higher education as an instrument that would make him seem important in his society’s eyes. The moment he obtains a doctorate degree he insists that every person in his world call him Dr Njoku (a typical Igbo name). Being called doctor makes him feel important in people’s eyes.
If he does not have access to higher education, he may, in fact, buy the term doctor, for he thinks that it makes him seem very important.
Generally, the term doctor of knowledge indicates a person who dedicates his life to the pursuit of knowledge. But the Igbos have perverted that term to mean a very important person. In the West, many academic doctors actually make less money than plumbers, showing how the term is not meant to reflect wealth but designation for a person who loves philosophy and science.
If the Igbo cannot buy doctorate degrees from degree mills, he buys chieftaincy titles from his village. He gives people in his village money and they invent a non-existent chieftaincy title and confer it on him. Suddenly, he masquerades about as Chief Njoku. Being called chief makes him feel important in other people’s perception.
If he happens to secure a job at a university, without even bothering to publish prolifically, he insists that the public refer to him as Professor Njoku. This makes him feel very important in society’s eyes.
If he is an engineer, he appends the term engineer to his name; if an architect, he appends the term architect before his name, if he is an attorney, he appends the term lawyer before his name, such as being called “lawyer Njoku”.
All these apparent ridiculous behaviors are undertaken by the Igbos wish to seem superior, powerful and important.
(You can substitute your own ethnic group’s name for Igbo, if you feel that they behave as I am describing; I am limiting my analysis to the people I know most, my people, myself, the Igbos. Please remember that what a person sees in others is very likely what he sees in himself. What I see in Igbos I see in me. I am, therefore, projecting what I see in me to them; this is positive use of the ego defense of projection; one is not denying what one sees in ones self by attributing it to other people.)
These behaviors are neurotic. But at the conscious level, the normal person does not know that he is being neurotic in engaging in his title crazy behavior.
The normal person is an unconscious neurotic person, whereas the neurotic person is a conscious neurotic person. In a manner of speaking, the neurotic is a more conscious human being.
In metaphysical categories, the neurotic is at the verge of awakening from the dream of (spirit) self forgetfulness and is struggling to cling to his dream separated self, whereas the normal person is fast asleep and takes his dream self as his real self. See Helen Schucman, A Course in Miracles for an elaboration of these ideas. (8)

NORMAL AND ABNORMAL NARCISSISM

The Igbo person who appends ridiculous titles to himself is gratifying his desire for specialness; he is gratifying his infantile narcissism. Whereas all human beings have aspects of narcissism, some exaggerate it and have narcissistic personality disorder. Such persons have a compulsive desire to get other persons attention and to be admired by people; they often do not hesitate using people to enable them attain positions in society that they believe would garner them the attention they think that they need; they show no remorse or guilt feeling in exploiting and using people for their ends and discarding them when they are no longer useful to them. The narcissist feels inordinately inadequate and does whatever he does to enable him seem adequate in his and society’s eyes. Generally, he tends to be hard working and is successful, as human beings consider these things. As long as he is succeeding, he feels like he is a social somebody. But when he meets with failure, he tends to feel depressed, even suicidal.
The human child desires to seem like he is important and special and matter to a world that clearly does not treat him as if he matters. Natural workings like earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes, draughts, tsunamis, plagues, diseases, virus, bacteria, and fungi sweep people to untimely death, as they sweep animals and trees to death.
To nature, human beings are no more important than animals and trees. But human beings want to seem special and important despite nature’s judgment that they are nothing significant; they want to seem special, so they give themselves useless titles that seem to make them important when, in fact, their bodies are mere food being prepared for worms. Human beings are nothingness pretending to be somethingness.

HATRED AND REJECTION OF THE REAL SELF IN NEUROSIS

For our present purposes, the salient point is that whereas all human beings desire importance, certain human beings exaggerate what all human beings do; aspire to becoming very important persons. These persons live in tremendous anxiety and tension. They know no somatic and psychological peace.
The neurotic lives a life of internal conflict, the conflict between his real self and his ideal self.
The real self is the bodily self and the ideal self is the mental self. The ideal self is exactly that, ideal, and not real. The ideal self is a mental construct, an abstraction, a fictional and mythical perfect self.
The ideal self is non existent but the constructor of it, the human person wants it to become real.
Human beings are animals that hate and reject their real selves (animal selves) and construct mental ideal selves and aspire to making these imaginary ideal selves come true.
The real is that which adapts to the world of matter, energy, space and time. The real must be imperfect for it is limited by the exigencies of the world it lives in and has no control over. You cannot stop the rain from falling.
The ideal self is merely a mental reconstruction of our imperfect selves and made perfect. In our thinking, in our minds, we invent ideal, perfect selves, but in the real world we are all imperfect selves, for our lives are restricted by the reality of space and time.
No matter how much you wish that you were godlike in your powers, the fact is that you are living in a body, body which is composed of matter, elements, atoms and particles hence not powerful. Your body is just a variety of biological organisms; you are an animal and a tree in a different form. Simply stated, your body is nothing important. You may delude yourself into thinking that you are very important; the president of the world, the fact is that you are food for worms. You will die, decay and smell to high heaven.
Human beings do not like to accept their real selves, their bodily selves; they hate what their bodies do, such as defecate and engage in filthy sex. (They hide those physical activities for they are ashamed of them.)
They reject the real bodily selves and invent imaginary mental ideal selves and attempt to become them.
As long as they quest after their idealized selves, they must live in conflict and tension.

MENTAL HEALTH LIES IN THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE REAL SELF

To live a tension free existence, one must give up the desire to live as an idealized self. One must embrace the bodily self. One must not be ashamed of the activities of the bodily self, such as eating food, defecating and having sex. One must let go of ones prideful ideal self. (Horney pointed out that pride is a neurotic property; it is the ideal self that feels proud; the real self, an animal self just is, it is neither good nor bad.)
The bodily self still has some tension; tension free existence is not an absolute proposition. Animals do not want to die. They fear death and protect themselves. If you come into a room where there are cockroaches and rats, they run away and go hide for they desire to live and do not want you to squash them to death. Their running away is motivated by their desire to live and their fear of harm and death. This biological fear means that they experience some somatic tension and do not have total peace.

If a human being accepted his bodily real self and gave up his idealized self concept and self image, he would experience the level of fear and tension found in animals, minimal fear and tension, the neurotically maximal fear and tension.
To not experience any fear and tension at all, to have perfect peace, the individual must die. I guess that is why they say RIP for the dead, Rest in Peace, for it is only when we die and no longer live in body, that we no longer defend our vulnerable bodies that we experience total peace.
As long as we live in this world and are in bodies, bodies threatened by microorganisms and other natural forces, we must have some fear and tension and not have perfect peace. But we can reduce our neurotic anxiety and tension and increase our peace by not aspiring after idealized self concepts and self images, and by accepting our real selves, our physical self.
I found peace by jettisoning my earlier quest for an idealized self concept and self image and by accepting my real self, my animal bodily self.
Now, I see myself as an animal and not more than that. I do not imagine myself anything other than an animal. Like all animals, I experience animal fear of harm and death of my body hence is a bit defensive. But I no longer have neurotic desire for an idealized self and do not have neurotic defense of that idealized self concept and self image. I tend to be relatively tension free and at peace with the world.

I live in relative peace but I see my brothers, particularly Igbo brothers living in neurotic tension and anxiety. I see them with their idealized self concepts and images and seeking to realize those fantasy selves. I see them wanting to be called professor, chief, and doctor Njoku, all in a neurotic effort to seem like they are very important persons. Their behaviors are efforts to negate the obvious, that they are food being prepared for worms.
I see them dance normal neurotic dances for worth and know that like me they are worthless and valueless.
I am totally worthless and valueless. The same goes for you. I have no illusion and or delusion of my worth. I do not see you as better than me, for I know that you, even if you are the president of the world are food for worms. I am not deceived by your crazy attempt to give you imaginary worth.

If a human being accepts his real self, his body and its worthlessness and valuelessness, he tends to give up defense of imaginary important self and only defend like animals do, hence tends to be only mildly fearful and tense.

SECULAR AND SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY

Nothing said in this paper negates the possibility of a spiritual dimension to us. In fact, I think that we are spiritual beings having physical experience. In other papers, I described my spiritual psychology.
I believe that we are part of one unified life, one life force that can be anthropomorphized as one unified self. That one self is simultaneously infinite selves.
One life, one self manifests in infinite lives/selves. In its real state, which is outside of matter, space and time, it is spirit. But in matter, space and time, it constructs the self concept and self image for each of us.
Each of us is an individualized aspect of one life, one self. As part of that unified life, unified self we are permanent, changeless and eternal. But in body, we are changeable and mortal. In unified spirit we have total worth and value. In body we have no apparent value and worth.
Spirit is all importance, body is nothing; unified self is grandeur, separated self is grandiosity. See Osuji, Real Self Psychology. (9)
In this paper, I am focusing on the temporal man, the man in body, space and time. That self is temporal, is born, grows old and dies and his body decomposes and returns to the elements, atoms and particles that constituted it. As body, I see no value to people, other than the imaginary values they give to themselves.
Imaginary values are no values. To prove that people have no value, if you, the reader, choose, you can kill me and, if I choose, I can kill you. This means that we are nothing important to nature.
Our physical importance is imaginary and pretended importance. (I used to amuse myself by watching people bedecked in fine clothes and jewelries; I would visualize them as dead and rotten bodies. I would, like Arthur Schopenhauer (10) ask: why take all that trouble to wear; why adorn the body with trinkets if it is food for worms? Human beings seemed absurd.)

For pour present purposes, the salient point is that the pursuit of the idealized important self, an imaginary self, exacerbates human fear, anxiety and tension. That pursuit contributes to people’s tendency to feel emotional upsets. In fact, the pursuit of an idealized self is implicated in most mental disorders, such as paranoia, schizophrenia, mania, depression, anxiety disorder etc.
If a person wants to live in relative peace, for absolute peace is impossible while we live in bodies, he must give up his imaginary important self and simply accept himself as unimportant self.
Accepting the self as unimportant does not mean that other people are more important than one. I do not consider any human being alive as better than other human beings. I do not care whether he lives at the American president’s house, the “Black House”, the Pope’s house at the Vatican, the Dibia House, he is still an animal.
When I visited those two places, I felt inordinately superior to the “children” living in them. I felt that they were no more than children pretending to be adults, animals pretending to be mighty human beings.

RELINQUISHMENT OF THE SEPARATED SELF CONCEPT

To live in peace and be tension free, the individual must give up his self concept and self image, all of it. Unfortunately, to live in body, to be on earth, the individual must have a self concept and self image, a personality. The most he seems able to do is ascertain that his self concept/self image/personality is flexible and not too rigid. (See David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles. (11))
In as much as the individual must have some sort of self concept, self image and personality, he must have a certain degree of fear, anxiety, anger, sadness; he must live in some somatic and psychological tension. As long as human beings live on earth, they must have tension and lack peace but they can reduce their tension and increase their peace by remaking their self concepts.
If the individual reinvents his self concept and makes it a loving and forgiving one, and uses it to serve social interests, he tends to be relatively less tense; he tends to be relatively peaceful and happy.
Jesus Christ said: I give you my peace. Indeed, his followers refer to him as the prince of peace. What that means is that whoever dedicates his life to loving; forgiving and serving all people tend to live in peace and is a bringer of peace to a world at war with itself.

REALISTIC AND IDEALISTIC JUDGMENTS

If it were possible to not judge ones self or other people, one would be in perfect peace. Judgment disturbs peace. But that is an ideal statement, not a realistic one. In real world, human beings must judge themselves and other people. They judge themselves with either real self standards or ideal self standards. Real self standards are the standard of animals in bodies, while ideal self standards are the standards of disembodied selves, abstract and unrealistic. Judging the self and other people with false ideal neurotic standards gives them tension.
It is feasible to judge with realistic standards and give up judging with ego idealistic perfect standards. Judge people as they are, not as you think that they should be, according to your perfect standards. People are animals living in body; therefore, judge them as you would judge an animal and you would not generate tension in them.
An animal eats, sleeps, and seeks survival and mates to reproduce it. There is no particular reason why it should reproduce itself except that it simply has a desire to do so.
Human beings are like animals; they do the same things that animals do: eat, sleep, have sex, reproduce and there is no particular reason why they should do so. They have no reason to live in body except that they have a desire to do so.
(You may say that they separated from their unified self to go seem to live as special separated selves, to dream that they are separated selves in bodies etc and that the dream is an illusion, since the individual cannot separate from the whole unified self; he is always unified while dreaming that he is separated; the most he can do is have a happy dream where he loves and forgives himself and his fellow dreamers but he cannot make his dream, separation real)
In the temporal universe, there is no particular reason to live or not to live. People simply live because they have an inner compulsion to live; they experience a drive to survive for as long as it is possible to do so in body (which is, perhaps, 120 years?).
In the meantime, if the individual loves and forgives all people and does something he truly likes doing and has an aptitude for doing and serves social interest, he will be relatively peaceful and happy.


THE CONCEPTUALIZER AND HIS CONCEPTS, THE DREAMER AND HIS DREAMS

Human beings have self concepts and self images, aka personalities and egos. There is no doubt that each of them, building on his biological and social experiences constructs his self concept and self image.
The individual is responsible for inventing his self concept and self image. He got a little help from other people in inventing his self concept and self image; just as he helps other people in conceptualizing themselves and their world.
The self concept and the self image were constructed by some force. Who is the conceptualizer, the image maker?
Obviously, the conceptualizer is not his concept; the image maker is not his image. The concept builder is different from his constructs. The various religions of mankind call the concept maker, the image maker spirit.
Spirit is not amenable to intellectual understanding. Spirit knows but does not understand. Understanding is for our world, the world of space, time and matter.
Ours is a perceptual world, not a knowing world. We do not know anything for certain. Our world is always changing, you cannot step into the same river twice; where things are always changing there can be no certainty of knowledge.
To perceive, to see there must be a self and not self, a you and I, a world of separation, space and time. To perceive there must be a world of things, a world of objects, bodies and forms. We live in the world of perception, the world of objects and perceiver of objects. This is the temporal world.
Unified spirit is not in the world of space, time and objects hence does not perceive things. The world of spirit is the world of oneness, sameness, and equality. Our temporal world is the opposite of the unified spirit world, for it is the world of separation, differences and inequality, whereas the unified world is the world of union. Our world is a world of change, time and mortality; unified spirit world is the world of changelessness and permanence.
Unified spirit knows itself as unified and has no sense of you and I, seer and seen, subject and object. The world of unified self, the world from which the conceptualizer, the image maker came from, is totally different from our world and cannot be understood with the categories of our world.
We leave the spirit world, for now, and concentrate on the empirical world, the world of the here and now, the world that science (which psychology is a part of).


CONCLUSION

The path to tension free living lies in understanding of the self concept, self image and personality. We must reconceptualize and rethink our self concepts and self images; we must accept the real self, the animal self and desisting from pursuit of neurotic, or psychotic, false ideal self.
If it were possible to have no self concept, no self image and no human personality, to extinguish the separated, special self and return to the unified self, folks would live in total peace. But that prospect is for after death existence in bodiless, that is, spirit mode.
In the here and now world, we can experience relative peace and happiness by shrinking our self concepts to realistic proportions.
I found peace in a world at war with itself by reconceptualizing who I think that I am; from idealistic to realistic; from hating and rejecting what is peculiar to human beings, animal behavior, to embracing them.
I no longer feel ashamed to eat, defecate, and even have sex, as I used to feel. Like Nietzsche, (12) I accept all that it means to be a human being, without pride and its opposite, shame. I just accept what is, as what is, without wishing that it be different to suit my idealistic wishes. In doing so, I found some peace in this warring world, a world where we declare war on our real selves, our animal, bodily selves by wishing to be purely mentally constructed selves, a world where we are at war with our unified spirit self by wishing to be separated special selves.


Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD



* These weekly series of articles can also be found at: www.africanpsychology.org

(Africa Psychology welcomes contributions by psychologists and other mental health professionals. Articles must be useful to actual people’s efforts to adapt to their world. These articles are also published in the journal: African Psychology. Contact: [email protected] for further information.)



FURTHER READING

Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution
American Psychiatric Association, DSM
Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth
George Kelly, Psychology of Personal Constructs
Frederick Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Real Self Psychology
Carl Rogers, Client Centered Therapy
Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea
Helen Schucman, A Course in Miracles
David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles
Harry Stark Sullivan, The Interpersonal Psychiatry of Harry Stack Sullivan
Victor Uchendu, The Igbos of South East Nigeria

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January 05, 2006

Ozodi Osuji Weekly Lectures on African Countries #1 of 54: Algeria

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- These 54 introductory lectures, each an hour long, offered by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD (UCLA), are meant to give students freshman level acquaintance with African countries. Thereafter, students are encouraged to take the 200 level courses (West Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, South Africa, North Africa, five courses).

Interested students are further encouraged to take the 300 level courses on specific African countries politics, history and economy.
The 400 level courses are deemed professional courses for advanced students. For the 400 level courses, students are expected to write a thesis of no less than one hundred pages on an African country or aspect thereof.
In all courses, to obtain grades, students are required to take an in class mid-term and final examination and to write a take home 20 pages (or more) paper. Of course, students can take the courses for interests only; such students are not given grades and, as such, are not required to take examinations.
(Grades are: 90-100= A; 80-90= B; 70-80= C; 60-70= D and 59 and under =Fail; Grade Point Averages: A= 4, B=3, C=2, D=1 and F= Fail.) This course lasts thirteen weeks, that is, one quarter. Credits: 4 credits
The lectures are in this order: 1. Algeria; 2.Angola; 3.Benin; 4.Botswana; 5. Burkina Faso; 6. Burundi; 7. Cameron; 8.Cape Verde; 9. Central African Republic; 10.Chad; 11.Comoros; 12.Congo; 13.Congo Democratic Republic; 14. Djibouti; 15.Egypt; 16.Equitorial Guinea; 17.Eriteria; 18.Ethiopia; 19.Gabon; 20. Gambia; 21.Ghana; 22. Guinea; 23.Guinea Bissau; 24. Ivory Coast; 25.Kenya; 26.Lesotho; 27.Liberia; 28.Libya; 29.Madagascar; 30.Malawi; 31. Mali; 32. Mauritania; 33. Mauritius; 34.Morocco; 35. Mozambique; 36.Namibia; 37.Niger; 38.Nigeria; 39.Rwanda; 40.Sao Tome and Principe; 41. Senegal; 42. Seychelles; 43. Sierra Leon; 44. Somalia; 45.South Africa; 46.Sudan; 47.Swaziland; 48.Tanzania; 49. Togo; 50.Tunisia; 51. Uganda; 52. Western Sahara; 53. Zambia; 54. Zimbabwe.
Each country’s vital statistics will be offered, followed with a brief introduction to its contemporary politics.
Each lecture notes is about five pages long; the fifty four lectures are about three hundred pages long. (Students can purchase the compiled lecture notes.)
The examinations will be based on the lecture notes and the assigned Textbook, Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1870-1912. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990.
Dr Osuji can be reached at (206) 464-9004; [email protected]






1. ALGERIA



Formal Name: Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria.

Term for Citizens: Algerians.

Capital: Algiers. Population: 2,861,000.

Date of Independence: July 5, 1962, from France.

Major Cities: Oran, El Djazair (Algiers).

Geography:

Algeria is located in North Africa. It is bordered by Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Libya and Tunisia. Algeria encompasses a total area of 919,594 square miles, more than four fifth of it is desert. The Mediterranean cost is mountainous and relatively fertile and is the area of most of the population centers of Algeria. The Mid and Southern section of the country is mostly deserting. The coastal regions experience mild Mediterranean climate and mild winters and some rainfall. The desert is hot and arid.

Society:

Algeria’s current population is estimated at 31, 800,000; most Algerians live in the urban coastal lowlands.

Ethnic Groups:

Algeria has a mix of Arabs and Berbers. Arabs constitute about 80% of the population.

Languages: Arabic is the official language, with pockets of Berber language. Most educated Algerians, however, also speak French.

Religion: 99% of Algerians are Sunni Muslims. Christians constitute less than 1% of the population.

Education: Education is free at all levels, including compulsory free elementary education. Literacy rate is estimated at 70%.

Economy:

The economy is mixed with the state playing a greater role in it. Agriculture accounts for less than 10% of the GDP. GDP estimate: $167 billion; Per Capita: $5, 300. Monetary unit: Dinar.

History and Government:

During the 19th century, France occupied what is now called Algeria and encouraged French persons to settle in it and displace local Arab and Berber population. Thus, a substantial French population settled in Algeria. The French took over Algeria’s choice real estate and pushed the locals to the country’s arid regions. Algeria was considered a department (administrative district) of France itself and ruled as if it was part of France. The local population resented been controlled by foreigners and the result was a war of independence against France. That war led to the toppling of the French government in Paris in 1958, and the return to power of Charles De Gaul and the formation of the fifth French Constitution/Republic. The victorious Arabs achieved their independence in 1962, and formed a government. The government is based on the French model, a strong presidential system, many political parties and separation of religion from state activities. However, fundamentalist Islamic elements strive for theocracy and law based on Sharia (Islamic law). This produces a situation where the secular government is afraid of democratic elections least the Islamic majority wins and imposes its theocracy on society. Indeed, the government has had to annul an election reportedly won by fundamentalist Muslims. There is tension between the religious and secular elements in society and this tends to lead to repression of extreme religious activities, out of fear of dragging the country to fundamentalist lines. Algeria is currently divided into 48 regions for administrative purposes. The elected president governs through a prime minister, who is in charge of the day-to-day affairs of government.



CONTEMPORARY ALGERIAN POLITICS


In 1834, France annexed Algeria and encouraged its citizens to emigrate and settle in Algeria. These immigrants displaced native Arabs and Berbers. As would be expected, this colonization policy did not sit well with the native population hence skirmishes ensued between them and the French occupiers. In 1945, pro independence demonstrations erupted throughout Algeria. Several thousand Algerians were killed. As a result, Algerians in exile formed the Front de Liberation Nationale, FLN and subsequently initiated a pro independence war. The Algerian nationalist, Ben Bella, led this war. In 1958, Charles de Gaulle came to power in France and promised to end the war in Algeria. In 1959 president De Gaulle released Ben Bella from prison. In 1962 Algeria was given independence by France. It is reported that over 100, 000 Frenchmen and 1,000,000 Algerians lost their lives during the Algerian war for independence.
In 1962 Ben Bella became the first native president of Algeria. In 1965 Houari Boumedienne sized power and placed Ben Bella under house arrest for fifteen years. In 1978, Boumedienne died in office and was replaced by Benjedid Chadly as President of Algeria.
Algeria is composed of Arabs and Berbers. Arabs are the majority and rule the country. The Berbers erupted in protestation of Arab rule in 1980. This revolt is still going on, as sporadic anti government rallies.
FLN has consistently ruled Algeria from independence to the present. Although it fought with France for independence, the FLN has tilted towards France and is secular in its orientation. The Arab population is mainly Sunni Moslem.
Aware that a free democratic election might result in victory for Islamic parties, the secular FLN resisted free and fair elections. In 1990, the ruling FLN tolerated a free election and the Front Islamique du Salut, FIS, apparently won the election. Afraid of Islamic theocracy, the Algerian Army cancelled the result of that election. This resulted in the Islamic elements forming an armed band, Group Islamique Arme, GIA, and resorting to armed struggle. A civil war ensued in Algeria. That civil war is still, in one form or another, going on. Over 150, 000 persons reportedly have been killed, so far in that civil war.
In 1994, the Algerian Army tried to extricate itself from government by appointing Liamine Zeroual as the president. In 1996, Zeroual outlawed religious parties from future elections and in 1999 held an election, an election where religious parties were barred from participating. Abdelaziz Bouteflika was elected the president. Election improprieties were alleged. Bouteflika won reelection in 2002, an election boycotted by opposition parties.
One party, FLN has essentially ruled Algeria since its independence from France in 1962. This party is secular and fears free democratic elections for it believes that in such elections fundamentalist Islamicists would win and proceed to transform the country into an Islamic theocracy. To avoid this happenstance, FLN is said to have either rigged elections or out rightly prevented religious parties from contesting elections.
On paper, Algeria has many political parties and, as such, would seem a democracy. There is Algeria National Front, Democratic National Rally, Islamic Salvation Front, and Society for Peace Movement, and many other political parties. Many pressure groups seem to exist, particularly religious interest groups, such as the FIS.
The political parties and interest groups exercise influence on Algeria’s bicameral Parliament (National People’s Assembly or Al- Majilis 389 members, and the Senate, 144 members; members of the Al Majilis serve five years and members of the Senate serve six years. The Senate is partly elected and partly appointed by the President.)
Law making seems democratic, that is, Bills are introduced, debated and voted on and must pass the two Houses and go to the President for approval or vetoing. In reality, it seems that Bills that make it to the President are those that serve the secular goals of the ruling party and its military supporters.
The struggle between the secular rulers and the Islamicists appear inevitable in Algeria and other Arab countries. It would seem that free and fair election would favor Islamicists since they appear to be in the majority in the population. Democrats would seem to like such free elections. On the other hand, given the theocratic nature of fundamentalist Islam, it follows that it could impose Sharia and other non-democratic ideas of governance on the country and thus eliminating the very democratic process that brought it to power. In this prickly situation, it seems that the West tacitly permits the secular rulers of Algeria to stay in power through antidemocratic means.
The Algerian economy is heavily dependent on hydrocarbon; hydrocarbon accounting for over 60% of the national budget, 30% GDP and over 95% of export revenues. Algeria has the seventh largest Gas reserve in the world and ranks second in exporting Gas. It ranks 14th in oil reserves.
Given the recent (2005) sky rocking of oil prices, Algeria is making substantial revenue from oil and is running trade surpluses. But despite this substantial revenue from oil, Algeria has a large population of poor persons. Many of these poor Algerian find their way to France and constitute a large percentage of the Moslem population in France.
Algeria’s international politics is generally limited to Arab issues. It supports the exiled Sahrawi Polisario Front in its struggle with Morocco. Morocco claims right to Western Sahara and the Polisario fights for independence of that country.
Over 165, 000 Western Saharans, Sahrawi Arabs, who have chosen not to live in Morocco administered Western Sahara, live in Southern Algeria towns like Tindouf, as refugees.
Algeria and Morocco have border claim issues. Algeria also has border disputes with Libya; the disputed lands with Libya contain substantial oil.
Armed robbers operating in the Sahara Desert sometimes make incursions into Southern Algeria and destabilize its towns. The Algerian Army is kept busy chasing these bandits out of Algerian Sahel territories.
It is clear that the rulers of Algeria have democratic impulse but is afraid of the consequences of a free and fair election, Islamicists control of the country. The rulers, mostly Arabs, are also afraid of the demands of the minority Berber population for that could lead to the bifurcation of the country. These fears appear to leave them little choice but to resort to undemocratic means in trying to be democratic and preserve their territorial integrity. There seem no easy and apparent solution to this dilemma at this time. Uneasy peace seems to exist in Algeria, peace that is likely to be disturbed at any time.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD
AFRICA INSTITUTE SEATTLE
Weekly Lectures on African Countries

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December 30, 2005

Redirecting the Desire to Make Fantasy Real

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- All through my life, I have hated and rejected my body and true self, and by extension, hated and rejected all people’s bodies and real selves. I have hated every thing that is real, such as anything that is in body, in matter, space and time. I preferred the abstract and beautiful to the impure but real. I have tried to replace the material with the mental construct of how the world should be.

In the process, I have lived in fantasy land, the world of idealism and imagination. I used my mind to imagine and wish for everything to be better than they are, in fact. I hated the real world and preferred the imaginary ideal world.

I never really did anything to help me adapt to the real world. Make no mistake about it, I understand the real world alright, as in studying science, but, somehow, I did not like that real world and aspired after transcending it. I transcended it in my mind, in imagination, where I preferred to live. I did not like to live in the empirically real world, the messy, imperfect world.

Because I escaped into the world of imagination, I did not do what the real world required of me to adapt to it hence failed in the real world. I failed not because of what other people did to me or did not do to me but because I could not resign myself to the real world.

I have the skills to adapt to the real world…I have as much skills as any political scientist, psychologist and management professional. If I had resigned myself to any of those professions, I would have done well in it. The problem was that none of those professions seemed good enough for me. I preferred the imaginary ideal profession and ideal world, knowing fully well that human beings cannot make fantasy, idealism (such as socialism) real.

So what should I do? I should accept the empirical world. That is, I should accept the scientific method, the most realistic mode of approaching our world. I should accept technology.

In the job place, I should seek out what people desire in the empirical world that I can do and supply it to them. What is that? What is it that enables people to adapt to their real world, not the imaginary world of religion, spirit etc but to the world of the here and now that I can do and supply it to them?

I am in a position to give people psychological science, a field that I believe that I am second to none.


SELF DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR

Sigmund Freud wrote about what he called Thanatos, the desire to kill ones self. Since his postulation was mental and not amenable to empirical verification, it was not accepted.

But I have come to the conclusion that people have a desire to kill themselves. I reached this conclusion by observing my own self destructive acts.

Recently, I found myself ignoring exercising. I used to run, at least, every other day, swim, and weight lift, ride my bicycle and generally engage in all kinds of exercises. I hated to have an extra ounce of weight on my body. But these days, I have stopped exercising; I eat more. I drink too much coffee. I have gained several pounds.

So I got to thinking why I am doing this to me? I came to the conclusion that I am doing these destructive things to me because deep down I want to kill myself? I want to self destroy with caffeine…for caffeine is a stimulant and over stimulates the heart and is correlated with cardiovascular diseases and pancreatic cancer. So, why do I want to kill myself?

I think that I want to kill myself for, as I approached middle age, it became clear to me that I had not achieved my ego ideals and that I was not likely ever going to achieve them.

My ego ideal wanted to be the most important person in whatever I was doing. If it dreamed of politics, it wanted to be the best politician in the world, indeed, the head of the world. If it dreamed scholasticism, it wanted me to be the best scholar in the world.
Well, I am not the best in anything. At my age, I ought to be at the top of my game, but the fact is that I am not at the top in anything.


Since my ego ideal expected me to be at the top of something, I could not really resign myself to being at the bottom of any profession. To avoid being at the bottom of any profession, I dropped out of the usual professions. I did not fit into any real world profession. At this point in time, I am not functioning from the parameters of any one particular profession. As a result, by the world’s standards, I am a failure.

I am not materially rich and I am not socially powerful. I am a nobody in society. I am unimportant.

I believe that as I fail to achieve my ego ideals, life lost its meaning for me. Pursuit of my ego ideals had given my life purpose and meaning, what purpose and meaning there was in it.

I recall myself as a boy. At age twelve, I had set my mind to obtaining a PhD and did so at a relatively young age for an African. My desire to become somebody important motivated me.

I worked in the mental health field and in a few years was the executive director of a very large mental health agency, supervising folks some of whom were older than my own father. Then I felt the job boring, ennui and quit and embarked on a study of the various religions of the world: Hinduism, Buddhism and New Thought Christian churches like Unity and Religious Science. I spent three years in this quest and eventually came to the conclusion that they are useful but not for me.

I am an African and cannot fit myself to Asian or Americans religions. Now what? I was back to square one.

What is missing in my life is something to give my life worth, purpose and meaning. Hitherto, pursuit of ego ideals had given my life pseudo worth, purpose and meaning. But now that I know that ego ideals are fantasy and cannot be realized in the real world, and I seem unable to fit myself to the real world, I seem goalless and stuck.

I believe that it was at this point that I embarked on an unconscious desire to kill myself via over eating and drinking too much coffee (I do not smoke cigarettes and do not do drugs, I drink a beer every once in a blue moon.)


I believe that Freud was right: people reach a point in their lives when they see no point in living and they unconsciously desire to kill themselves. Somehow, they manage to get themselves killed.
Of course, people do all this in an unconscious manner. The average person is, more or less, unconscious of the motives for his behaviors. Africans seem particularly dense in this regard. I am yet to see Africans who take interest in understanding their personal psychology. In fact, they tend to look at me and my efforts to understand us in a psychological manner as if I am insane. When you look at them, what you see are warped and stunted lives, folks living meaningless and purposeless lives, but who do not even think about it. They seem like mere animals eating, defecating and dying without asking why they live. No, my African brothers and sisters do not seem to care to understand why they live and do what they do. Be that as it, they still have death wish and like every one else manage to get themselves killed and die. Some do so by over eating and dying from cardiovascular diseases: heart attack and stroke.

If you over eat and do not exercise and die of heart attack what do you expect? You are the one who killed yourself. Even though your ego would like to see you as a victim unto whom bad things happen, the fact is that you are the one who brought your death to you. You are responsible for what happens to you in your life.


When one fails in actualizing ones ego ideal, one prefers death to living and begins to do those things that would bring about ones death.

One can understand the process and redirect ones life and give ones self a different purpose and meaning.

As I see it, empiricism is the only alternative purpose I see in this world. Understanding things as they are and devising a technology to manipulate the workings of nature seems the only realistic thing to do in this world. Thus, pursuing the sciences and technology seem the best thing to do in this world.

Escaping into ego fantasy aka idealism or sprit fantasy aka religion is unrealistic and a dead end.

Killing ones self, as in suicide, is cowardly. True, life is tough. Courage requires one to accept life on its own terms and make the most of it without illusions that it is going to become heaven on earth.

I believe that there is a life force ala Henri Bergson operative in the universe, what folks call God, but it is impersonal and does not interfere in this world.

As long as we are here on earth, we have to study science and technology and use them to adapt to our world and live up to the maximum it is possible to live in body (maybe 120 years?).

I have no illusion of worth, purpose and meaning, for I do not see self evident worth, purpose and meaning to my life (or to any ones life either).

I do what existentialist thinkers like Jean Paul Sartre urge us to do: posit a purpose that seems meaningful to me and pursue it and do not have the illusion that it is meaningful beyond the meaning I give to it.

In this light, I love and forgive every person in the world because doing so gives my life worth, purpose and meaning, not self evidently and objectively verifiable worth, purpose and meaning but subjective worth, purpose and meaning.



TO JUDGE OTHERS WITH THE EGO IDEAL IS VERY FOOLISH

One posited an ego ideal and that ego ideal invents its ideal standards and one uses them to judge real people. But real people are limited by their body, space and time and cannot ever become ideal persons.

To judge real people, ones self and other people, with ego ideals are, therefore, foolish. It is a waste of time and energy, for it seeks to accomplish the impossible, try to make the imaginary seem real.

Moreover, one is causing ones self, other people, the entities judged with ideal standards, pain.

One is actually playing an imaginary god for one’s ego invents imaginary self and imaginary ideal standards and uses them to judge real people. This behavior is play-acting imaginary god.

Engaging in judgment and other ego behavior does not enable the individual to adapt to the empirical world and does not put food on the table.

FROM EGO TO SPIRIT IDEALISM

One is tempted to go from escape into ego fantasy to escape into spiritual fantasy. Some people escape into religion and its myriad fantasies of God and what the after life is like. The fact is that whereas there is an eternal changeless life force, those on earth cannot explain him. It is a waste of time talking about God, spirit.

One must talk of real psychology, a psychology that understands human beings in the here and now world; a psychology that nevertheless recognizes the reality of God, without pretending to understand him.

Man must recognize the reality of God and bow to him, so as to shrink his ego to normal proportion, but he cannot pretend to understand God.

So what is the right thing to do? We must study real psychology, secular plus some spiritual psychology, and sell that understanding to people, for people need it to adapt to the exigencies of this world.

One should not escape into suiting but unproductive ego idealism or spirit idealism. (Whereas idealistic intellectuals like me escape into philosophy for consolation, the poor masses of urban Nigeria seek solace in Pentecostal religions. These religions essentially are magical thinking and enable poor folk to imagine that if they wished hard and prayed long enough that some god would give them what they want out of life. This is pure wishful thinking. As far as we know, no god gives us what we ask for. See the slum folk live in abject poverty and die from poor nutrition. We cannot change empirical reality by wishing for it to change. Only doing science and technology enable us to wrestle decent living from nature.) One must face the empirical while acknowledging the non empirical without fleeing into magical thinking.


NOT ABUSING UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN NATURE

I have amazing insight into human nature. I am tempted to abuse this gift of understanding. In fact, in the past I had come close to abusing it.

I believe that if one abuses ones gift that one must pay a heavy price. Consider my troubled relationship with women. Men do abuse women’s vulnerability to seeking love. Women may talk tough but when you get to know them they are different from men. They need love and without it would wither. If a woman is not loved by a man she would do funny things. If you wish to manipulate this reality, you can pretend to love women and they would fall for it. But if you do so, you have toyed with human feelings. This is a crime against knowledge, in religious terms, a sin against the real self (which is love), and a sin against God.

(However, since God does not acknowledge sin, he urges the apparent sinner to stop sinning. To sin is to not love people. To not sin is to love ones self and other people. To love requires forgiving ones mistakes and other people’s mistakes done in the past; and not consciously repeat them; to live a sinless existence is to love all people in the present. It is in forgiving the past and loving in the present that one becomes peaceful and happy. Love and forgiveness of the past is the only way to obtain the gifts of God, peace and happiness.)


I say all these because last week, I received a Christmas Greeting card from Alaska. I used to live in Alaska.

When I divorced, I decided to get out of town for a while and went to Alaska. Without really meaning to be involved in a love affair, somehow, I got involved with a female psychologist. I later found out that she was really, really in love with me. But I was not intent on having a serious relationship and certainly was not invested in another marriage, so I abruptly ended the relationship. I refused to return her phone calls and largely returned to the lower forty eight (states) to avoid encountering her.

Through mutual friends, I do hear about her. The minister of the church that both of us had attended while I lived at Anchorage, Alaska (teaching at the University of Alaska, Anchorage), recently called and gave me a picture of what she is doing with her life. The composite picture that I gathered is that she vowed to not have anything to do with men, ever, again; that she sees all men as exploiters of women’s affection. To her, men use women and abandon them in the lurch and she is going to do without men. Apparently, now she prefers the company of animals to men: she lives with her two dogs, two cats and assorted other animals.

Given what I had heard about her, I was, therefore, surprised that she sent me this cute little Christmas Greeting Card. The talking electronic card contained a dog in a snow bound surrounding, your typical Alaska ambiance during the winter months.

As an introspective type, I wondered about the import of her sending me a Christmas card and the symbolism of a lonely dog in a snowy, god forsaken sub arctic world? What was she trying to tell me?

Psychoanalysis teaches us that our behaviors are metaphors and that most of the things we do are motivated by unknown unconscious forces. We do not always know why we do what we do but there seem deeper reasons why we do what we do.

At the conscious level this woman is sending me a Christmas Greeting Card and that is all there is to it. Case closed.
But life is seldom as simple as that, is it? If life was that simple, it would all be honky dory. So, my mind went to work speculating on the probable meaning of her remembering me during this period of the year.

It is a well known fact that folks tend to want to associate with their loved ones during the Christmas session and that if they do not have close relations that they tend to feel sad.

The Christmas and other holiday periods are the most lonely periods for some folks, and it is said, the time that witnesses the highest depression, even suicide in folks.

Could it be that the lady is lonely and even depressed? Could it be that she is reaching out for love? Could it be that she is attempting to connect with an old flame?

What is the meaning of the dog in the dunes of snow? Could it be saying: see what you did to me, you abandoned me to live like this dog, lonely and lost in the snow of Alaska?

When I first got to Alaska and experienced its cold and lonely six months winter, I developed a habit of buying paintings (first, as an investment, but later as a hobby). One time I went to an Audubon society sell and bought a painting of a dog in a tundra surrounding. The dog seemed so lost and lonely! In fact, that painting, the dog, seemed symbolic of my own sense of been lost and lonely in the snowy world of Alaska. Imagine an American trudging all over Alaska, as I did, renting “bush taxis” (small planes) and flying to practically all the villages in the Lower Kuskokwim delta.

Every once in a while, I looked at that painting of a dog in a tundra setting and told myself that he is me, lonely and lost in the tundra. My God, I was so lonely in Alaska that I went and got two dogs, golden retrievers and black labs, to keep me company.

Could it be that I am merely projecting my own sense of loneliness, symbolized by the picture of a lonely dog, to my ex lady friend? Is it the case that she is not lonely, that I am merely transferring what I see in me to her?

If she is not lonely, how come she has dogs and not human beings as her friends?

Could I be making myself seem very important by imagining that a female doctor would desire me? I have had female clients who told me that certain famous men are in love with them, when those men did not even know that they existed. This is called delusion disorder, erotomanic type. When a person feels worthless and undesirable, she can delude herself into thinking that she is so beautiful that important men desire to have her as their love object. Being found attractive and loveable by important persons, apparently, make ugly duckling feeling persons feel beautiful and attractive?
Could it be that I feel like am not attractive and that I am making myself seem attractive by imaging a successful female professional desiring me? You never know how these things work out.
I have no illusions about who I am. I am one giant nothing. I am an empty vessel that makes a great deal of noise.

Nevertheless, I feel that this woman is seeking love. Unfortunately, I am not able to love her, for my own madness inclines me to be independent. My line of work requires that I be unattached to anybody. I have to be dispassionate and objective; love triangles have a way of contaminating a man’s objectivity in his perception of phenomena.

Life is a bummer, is it not?

In the final analysis, the point is for men never to mess with a woman’s love. You must love a woman but do not feel her to fall in love with you and vamoose, as I did.

If you get a woman to get attached to you and you disappear, you will pay a heavy price, as I am paying. I am always feeling guilty, feeling like I did something terribly wrong, like am evil. I tell you, this is not a pleasant feeling.

You do not want to be in my shoes. To not be in my shoes, please to do toy with women’s desire for genuine love with men.


This year, I resolve to be realistic in my thinking and behavior and to forgive and love all people in a genuine manner.

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December 29, 2005

Next week I begin my weekly profiling of African countries, my justification for being alive in 2006.

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December 27, 2005

Politicians should Write Blueprints of what they Plan to do for Nigeria

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- I have been pondering the fact that our political leaders seem to seek political offices for personal purposes, to use them to seem important and or steal from the public.

To prevent politicians from using public office for personal purposes, we ought to do certain things, including requiring all those who want to seek public office, from city council to the presidency, to write a booklet, of no more than 200 pages, in which they delineate exactly what they plan to do in office and how they plan go about doing so.

The political economy has many areas; political aspirants should tell us what they plan to do in most areas of it. The candidate for public office should tell us what is his economic plan for the level of governance he wants to participate in? What is his educational plan, his industrial plan, his agricultural plan, in short, what he is going to do in most areas of the political economy? The aspirant ought to delineate his plan, his visions and goals for the country; their costs and how exactly he intends to get the money to finance them. He ought to give us time lines when each of his goals would be accomplished.


Taking the time to write ones goals and objectives down on paper and publishing them helps the public to know what the political aspirant wants to accomplish for them. Moreover, this also enables the public to hold him responsible and accountable for accomplishing them.

In subsequent reelection bids, the public would then say to the politician: this is what you said that you were going to do for us, and this is actually what you did for us, so we think that you are a good or bad leader and reelect or reject the politician accordingly.


I am really sick and tired of Nigerian politicians seeking public office, not because of what they want to do for Nigeria but because of psychological reasons. It is obvious that most of what passes for politicians in Nigeria feel inadequate and seek high political office to give them compensatory sense of adequacy. They seek office as a means of attaining prestige. Office is restitutory for their underlying sense of inferiority.

One should not seek public office as therapy for ones psychological deficit. One should seek public office because of what one wants to do for the people.


Consider Governor Orji Kalu. His performance as the governor of Abia state is abysmal. One cannot honestly see anything worthwhile that the man has done for his people. The man cannot even pave the streets of Aba and Umuahia. Yet this man wants to be given the opportunity to become the next president of Nigeria. So why should he be the president of Nigeria? He tells us that it is because it is Igbos turn to rule Nigeria and that he is “the most qualified Igbo to rule Nigeria”. In other words, he wants us to elect him because he is an Igbo not because of what he plans to do for us.

Actually, Mr. Kalu probably wants us to elect him to give him the opportunity to steal more money from Nigeria and for him to export that money to the West. The man probably assumes that we are all imbeciles and cannot read between the lines. Apparently, the man assumes that we should offer him an opportunity to be a political 419 criminal at the national level.

(If you come close enough to the man and assess him, you recognize what a nincompoop he is; he lacks political gravitas; the man is probably mentally challenged, and is emotionally crippled. Yet this nothingness of a being wants to rule Nigeria, what travesty!)


In conclusion, I am recommending that as a matter of public policy, Nigeria require all aspirants to political office in the country, at all levels, to first write a blueprint that tells us what they plan to do for us.

Any literate man can write, edit and publish such a booklet within a month. Therefore, it is not asking too much to require those planning to rule us to write down on paper what they plan to do for us.

What do you think about this suggestion?


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Insanity Results from Searching for Worth, Meaning, and Purpose in the Wrong Places

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- INTRODUCTION: The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (1994) has done an excellent job describing the various mental disorders. However, it did so without describing the causes of those disorders.

Whereas, official Psychiatry is hesitant delineating the causal factors in mental disorders, Physiological Psychiatry seems to give the impression that these mental disorders are caused by biological factors. See Schizophrenia: Dopamine causal hypothesis; bipolar affective disorder: norepinephrine causal hypothesis; depression: serotonin causal hypothesis; anxiety: GABA causal hypothesis.
Clearly, there seem putative biochemical correlations with the various mental disorders. However, this situation does not necessarily prove that mental disorders are caused by disordered biochemical states. The identified biochemical disorders may only predispose persons to think in a manner that leads to mental disorders? At any rate, most of the phamacotherapeutic regime predicated on the assumptions that mental disorders are caused by chemical imbalances do not seem to heal mental disorders. Perhaps, it is time we sought different understanding of the etiology and healing of mental disorders?

HYPOTHESIS

In this paper, I offer a hypothesis that mental disorders are caused by individuals’ search for worth, meaning and purpose, in a world that, apparently, lack in worth, meaning and purpose?
Our world, as existential thinkers like Sartre, Camus, Jasper and Heidegger pointed out, seem to have no apparent meaning and purpose to it. Human life on earth seems worthless, meaningless and purposeless.
The individual’s body is food for worms, William Shakespeare observed in Hamlet. We are born and will die and rot. We seem the play things of nature. Virus, bacteria, fungi destroy human bodies, as they destroy other biological forms. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, draughts, and other natural disasters destroy human life, as if human beings have no value. Other human beings if they so choose can kill the individual as he can kill them.
All said, empirical evidence indicates that human life does not seem to have any apparent worth. We are born and must die and become manure that fertilizes plants. There does not seem any meaning and purpose to our lives other than our desire to live, to survive, and survive for what we do not know. Any serious observer of the human condition cannot fail but conclude that human beings are not special in the eyes of nature. In so far that human beings seem to have worth, it is self conferred and that worth seem made up, fictional and not real for if the individual has real worth, how come microorganisms make a meal of his body?
My thesis is that the mentally ill to be person is generally a very perceptive child and perceives that as persons that human beings do not seem to have any empirical worth and that their lives are meaningless and purposeless. I believe that this perception is reached before adolescence.
Perceiving himself and other people as worthless and believing that his life and other people’s lives are meaningless and purposeless, the mentally ill to child refuses to accept his obviously accurate assessment of human existence on planet earth. In place of worthlessness, meaninglessness and purposeless, he posits their alternatives: worth, meaning and purpose. Where he perceives a worthless self he posits an ideal self.
The abstract and mentally constructed ideal self and ideal everything is designed to give the sensitive individual personal worth and give his life on earth meaning and purpose.
Having postulated an ideal self concept, and its image form, ideal self image (human beings seem to think in concepts and images), the individual feels an obsessive compulsive pressure to attain that imaginary self.
In pursuing his impossible goal, he feels like his life has worth, meaning and purpose. But the price he pays for his imaginary worth, meaning and purpose is that he literally becomes a slave to the pursuit of his ego ideals and ideals of who other people should be and what the world ought to become.
If he were to stop seeking to actualize his ego ideals, his life would suddenly lack in worth, meaning and purpose. Cessation of the pursuit of the ideals would bring to the fore what was denied and repressed into the individual’s unconscious: the awareness that his life has no worth, meaning and purpose.
The awareness of his existential worthlessness, meaninglessness and purposelessness may stimulate existential depression in such a person. To avoid awareness of the ugly realities of his being, he may use his imagination to invent even a more grandiose sense of worth, meaning and purpose for himself. He may posit a very seeming important self and pursue it. In the process, he may experience schizophrenia, or delusion disorder or manic depression (bipolar affective disorder).

SELF CONSCIOUSNESS

Mental disorder is unified. The pursuit of worth, meaning and purpose are unified and where one is pursued the others are pursued. Indeed, such seeing different phenomenon as self consciousness is part of the individual’s efforts to seem worthwhile. Self consciousness emanates from an effort to have other people accept the false ideal, superior self as who one is, and awareness that it is not who one is in fact and that as such other people could appreciate that fact. Self consciousness is rooted in the misguided effort to get other people to validate the individual’s imaginary worthy self. If the individual did not have a desire for a special separated self, he would not be self conscious.
The mentally ill acutely perceives the worthlessness, meaninglessness and purposelessness of being as a separated human being housed in body that will die and struggles to give himself mentally constructed fictional worth, meaning and purpose. His goals cannot be attained in the empirical world since they are fictions and imaginary. A pure mental construct of reality cannot be attained in the world of space, time and matter.

THEISM AND ATHEISM

The mentally ill has two options: give up his pursuit of fictional worth, meaning and purpose and accept that he is living a worthless, meaningless and purposeless existence or somehow convince himself that there is worth, meaning and purpose outside this world.
The atheist accepts that he is living a worthless, meaningless and purposeless existence and accommodates himself to that reality without illusions that he has worth or that his life has meaning and purpose; he is just like any other animal life, and when he dies his body rots and becomes fertilizer for other animal lives.
The religionist gives himself faith in what he believes is a better self, a self that lies outside the reality of space, time and matter, the world of spirit; he believes in God and after death existence. The religionist believes that God is beyond space, time and matter and, as such, is permanent, changeless and unified; he believes that in the world of God all beings are the same and equal and as immortal as God, their creator; such beliefs, apparently, gives the religionist worth, meaning and purpose.
Worth, meaning and purpose cannot inhere in the human body. Just thinking about what people do with their bodies, eat, defecate, have sex etc makes the sensitive person want to vomit. The human body at best will live a hundred and twenty years and die and smell to high heaven; as such, it cannot have worth, meaning and purpose. Worth, meaning and purpose, if they exist, must be outside body.

NORMALCY

The normal person is, more or less, like a satisfied animal; he seems not capable of appreciating the worthlessness, meaninglessness and purposelessness of being. This observation gave R.D Laing (1965) the impression that psychotics are higher evolved persons than normal persons. Laing believed that the psychotic was akin to mystics. In his view, normal persons adjusted themselves to what seemed to him pathological human conditions.
Laing tended to romanticize mental disorders. The relevant point, however, is that normal persons do not seem acutely aware of the valuelessness, meaningless and purposelessness of being and therefore do not use their imaginations to construct imaginary worth, meaning and purpose for themselves. Indeed, some normal persons are even convinced that their bodies have worth. Some women, for example, take pride in their sexual organs and sexual activities; activities that give such sensitive souls as St Paul the impression that only lower human being could engage in them. As Paul saw it, the things of flesh ought to be repulsive to highly evolved human beings.
Normal human beings enjoy their food whereas the sensitive mind wonders why he must kill animals and tree and eat them to stay alive, to survive to become food for other forms of life.
Life on earth is a vicious struggle by animals to survive, in the struggle, the stronger eat the weak. And what do they live for?

SANITY
Suppose the neurotic and or psychotic person who pursues imaginary worth, meaning and purpose accepts the reality that his self has no worth, meaning and purpose, what would happen?
He would be freed from his psychological compulsions to seem what he is not. He would feel emptied of all illusions of worth, meaning and purpose. Devoid of the false baggage of personal value, meaning and purpose, he would feel able to live and do whatever he is able to-do with his life, provided that his goals are doable and are within the realities of space, time, matter and energy.
Matter, space and time limit what human beings can or cannot do. If they limit themselves to what is doable in space and time, they are realistic; if they dream of doing what those physical realities cannot accommodate, they are idealistic and bound to fail in achieving their goals.
Instead of wishing for abstract states that would never come into being, the realistic individual uses his thinking to understand how the empirical world works and studies science and devices technology to cope with the exigencies of his empirical world. He does not escape into idealistic, abstract make belief worlds that will never come into being.
The realistic individual sees his ego, his sense of separated self, the I, as an illusion since it is bound to disappear with the death of his body. The self seem a product of experience in body and dies with the body.
The disappearance of the ego false self, however, does not mean that there is not a permanent life force operative in the universe. What seems to live outside body and survive the demise of the human body is life itself. Hinduism and Buddhism construe life as undifferentiated self; one self that is simultaneously infinite selves.
Obviously life, at least in human beings, does think and behave. There is no reason to believe that thinking and behavior would end after physical death.

HINDUISM’S DREAM ANALOGY

When the individual gives up all the illusions of the ego, he appreciates that our life on earth is like a life in a dream. Dream activities seem real to dreamers but when they wake up they realize that what is done in dreams have not been done in the real world. Human egos and bodies are dream figures and their activities on earth are dream activities, Hinduism tells us.
The realistic individual learns to overlook what is done in dreams; to overlook is to forgive the seeming evil all people committed.
What are done in dreams is neither good nor bad, therefore, they ought to be overlooked, forgiven.
The forgiving person walks this world peacefully and happily. He is always smiling and laughing, for, to him, life on earth and what we do on earth seem mirthful, humorous. Just think of people having sex and see how ridiculous they seem. A realistic approach to this world must elicit laughter rather than seriousness. Life on earth is a comedy (and a tragedy if you take it seriously, as neurotics and psychotics do).

INFERIROITY AND SUPERIORITY

Alfred Adler (1911) pointed out that some children feel intensely inferior and compensate with pursuit of fictional superiority. He speculated that biological and social deficits predispose such children to feel inordinately inadequate and hate and reject their bodies and attempt to restitute with imaginary, all powerful, superior selves.
Adler did not convince us what the biological deficits are, but there is no doubt that he made an accurate observation that some people feel inferior and compensates with pursuit of false superiority. He called such persons neurotic (contemporary psychiatry has differentiated Adler’s global neurotic into the various nosological categories in psychiatric diagnostic manuals).
Karen Horney replaced Adler’s terms with her own. Where Adler employed superiority she employed ideal. To Horney, the neurotic hates and rejects his real self and seeks to become an ideal self. The ideal self is a mental construct and is not the real self. To Horney, the neurotic attempts to actualize the imaginary, the ideal self. As such, he is trying to translate fantasy into reality.
The neurotic is very proud to be his ideal self. The ideal self is his handiwork, his idol and he is proud of it and defends it. Alas, he is proud of an illusory, non-existent self; he uses the various ego defense mechanisms to defend an illusory, non-existent self, hence he is insane.
Helen Schulman (1976) gives the writings of Adler and Horney a spiritual coloration. She calls psychoanalysis’ neurotic the ego; in her psycho-spiritual system, the ego seeks to realize itself. Since the ego was invented by thinking, the mind, it is not real and cannot be actualized in the real world. Schuman urges people to give up pursuit of the ego and embrace their real self, a self she, along with Hinduism and Buddhism, believes is undifferentiated self.

INSANITY

The insane person, be he neurotic or psychotic, hates and rejects his real self and seeks to become an idealized superior self. His real self comprises of his body and ego; he believes that that real self, body and its I, the ego, is worthless, meaningless and purposeless.
The insane person rejects the real self and its real world and postulates an alternative ideal self and ideal world and pursues them. In seeking to realize his imaginary ideal states he obtains fictional worth, meaning and purpose. He is pursuing the imaginary and therefore cannot attain them hence he is insane.
Insanity is seeking to make the unreal real, seeking to make the ego ideal real when it cannot be real.
Sanity lies in relinquishing pursuit of the false ideal self-concept, false ideal self-image and false ideal personality and accepting the truth of human existence on earth, imperfection.
Buddhism helps us understand how the false can be given up and replaced with the real self. Let us, therefore, explore the nature of Buddhism.


BUDDHISM AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF NO-SEPARATED SELF

Buddhism, properly considered, is not only a religion but a psychology, a science of thinking and behaving that realistically acknowledges God but does not make much ado about him.
In Buddhism’s meditation, the goal is to attain no-separated self. On earth, each of us believes that he has a separated self and acts as such. The separated self, the self concept, the self image, the human personality, Buddhism wants to get rid of.
Buddhism believes that the separated self is not real, that it is a chimera, a smokescreen hiding our real self, which it believes is unified life. The goal of Buddhism is to eliminate the separated self so as to experience the real self.
In meditation, the individual is encouraged to give up his attachment to his separated self concept…the separated self is always conceptual. He actively negates the separated self concept that he is consciously aware of. He denies that he is his self concept, self image and personality. He denies that the thinking of his separated ego self is his real thinking. He negates all conceptual thinking. Every thought that enters his mind is seen as part of ego thinking, hence not his real thinking and denied as true. Neti, Neti, not this, not this, he tells himself (Hinduism does the same).
The goal is to deny the reality of the conceptual self and its conceptual thinking. It is hoped that at some point the individual attains inner silence. As it were, his mind is emptied of all ego separated thinking. He is now like a void, a blank slate, wiped clean of all earthly thinking.
It is said that when the individual attains this state of emptiness, void, no self, no conceptual thinking, that he may escape from the temporal world and enter into what Buddha called Nirvana (Zen Buddhism calls it Satori and Hinduism calls it Samadhi). In that state, the individual is no longer aware of his self as a separated self but knows himself as part of one unified self/one unified life, an undifferentiated life.
In unified state, the individual is not this or that person, not this or that animal, not this or that thing; he is nothing, no thing in particular. Since no-thing is everything, the individual is part of everything. He is part of one universal life.
In unified life, there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object.
However, there is still some individuality in the universal self. It is one self that is simultaneously infinite selves. All the infinite selves know themselves as part of the one self and as in it, as it is in them; they are in each other.
There is no space or gap between one self and another self, all are joined, connected and unified.
All selves share one self; all share one thinking and share one mind.
In unified self is perfect peace and happiness, bliss really. Conflict can only arise where there is separated selves, where there is disharmony.

THINKING AND BEHAVING FROM THE REAL SELF

Clearly, the goal of Buddhism is to eliminate the separated self and attain unified self. In the unified self is said to be peace and joy.
Buddhists try not to think and speak from their separated ego selves. Of course, like all human beings, they are living out of their separated selves and think and act from them. To be on planet earth, a separated place, the individual must have a separated self housed in body. But Buddhists try to rise above that separated self.
Buddhists believe that the separated self is not who they are; they believe that the separated self is a false self and that whatever it says is, ip so facto, false. They, therefore, try very hard not to think, talk and behave from the separated self. Instead of saying anything that comes to their mind, they pause and wonder whether the thought is ego related and if the answer is yes they keep quiet and do not say it. They smile and talk less.
The Buddhist tendency to try not to speak from the ego, the separated self, is probably why Oriental persons, by and large, tend to operate at a higher intellectual level than other groups of human beings.

Thinking requires that there be a thinker, a separated self that does the thinking. If you there is no separated self, there would be no thinker.
When people die, their separated selves die and there are no more selves in them that think, hence their thinking ceases.
Without thinking, the world ceases to exist for the dead. Hinduism and Buddhism extrapolates from this reality that our world is like a dream and that those in it think in a certain manner. When they awaken from that dream, they no longer think in the manner they did while they were dreaming. The world they had seen while in dream ceases being. They awaken to a different self and a different world. They awaken to unified self and unified world with unified thinking, a mode of thinking that those in our world cannot understand.
Those in the unified mode of existence do not know that our separated mode of existence exists. God as God, unified self, does not know that our world exists. The son of God, as his father created him, unified with God and all his brothers, Christ, does not know that our world exists.
It is only when the son of God sleeps and dreams that he is who he is not, special separated self who created himself, created his father and brothers that he sees himself in the perceptual world, a false world. Of course, in reality he did not create himself or his brothers or his father; God created him.
Our illusion is the belief that we created ourselves, when, in fact we are created by God; the whole produced the part; the part did not produce the whole. As long as the son of God sleeps and dreams that he is separated from his father and brothers and is in the world of space, time and matter, his father enters his dream as the Holy Spirit and guides him towards real self realization, teaches him to remember his real self, unified self. He teaches him how to do so, through forgiveness and love.
In meditation, when the individual tunes out our world, our world literally no longer exists for him; he escaped to a unified world that does not understand that our world exists. The vibrational energy of the unified world is higher than the speed of light, the most our world’s vibrations, speed, and movement can attain.

THE EGO IS FULL OF FALSE OPINIONS

The ego self is flippant and has superficial understanding of things. Any one who talks out of his ego generally is glib and not deep. Africans, for example, by and large, talk mostly from their ego selves. Because they live mostly from their shallow ego selves their actions generally do not exhibit much thought. They speak whatever comes to their minds and do not pause to ask whether they are speaking from the ego or from their real selves.
As Horney pointed out, the neurotic ego is almost always proud. Whoever speaks and behaves from his ego self is almost always a proud person. Proud persons are almost always childish persons.
Whatever is said from pride standpoint is seldom the truth. To search and know the truth, even empirical truth, the individual must relinquish his ego and its false pride.

The separated self, the ego is full of opinions about everything. It readily proffers opinions on every topic, whether it knows what it is talking about or not is bedsides the point. It just wants to have opinions on things.
The ego has opinion on which the individual is, who other people are, what things in nature are and what life is all about. None of these opinions accurately represent the truth of anything.
The fact is that the individual (as an ego, a separated self) does not know who he is, does not know who other people are and does not know what anything means. Opinions are not facts, particularly, if they are based on lack of empirical study of the nature of things.
On the other hand, when a person learns to speak and act less from his ego stand point, he tends to be less opinionated. Unfortunately, the individual may not want to be less opinionated, for it would seem that if he has no opinions he does not exist.
What actually makes the ego feel that it exists is that it has opinions on everything in its world. If it did not have those opinions, it would not exist, as it, in fact, does not exist.
Wanting to seem to exist, the separated self feels compelled to have opinions, even if they are false. (Having no opinions gives the individual peace and happiness.)
The ego is full of itself. The person who is mindful that he is not an ego tends not to be full of himself; he tends to be less opinionated.
The realistic individual accepts that he does not know who he is, who other people are and what anything means. Therefore, instead of proffering an empty opinion, he keeps quite.
This helps account for Buddhists tendency to just keep quiet rather than talk too much and be opinionated. Orientals, Buddhists tend to be less opinionated, whereas egotistical Africans are full of opinions, false views of reality.
The prideful egotists talks to make noise; he expresses opinions so that he may seem to exist when, in fact, the ego does not exist and his opinions are false.
It is generally better if the individual kept quite rather than open his mouth and talked rubbish.


THE EGO IS VERY JUDGMENTAL

The separated self, the ego is very judgmental. It posits an ideal ego and from its standpoint, judges reality: the constructor of the ego, the individual, is now judged by his ego; the son of God, the inventor of the ego false self, judges himself through the standpoint of his ego ideal; the ego judges the individual, other people and everything it sees.
All the ego’s judgments are based on its understanding of what is ideal. The ego’s ideal is a mental construct, a conceptual idea and not rooted in the world of empirical reality. The ego identifying person uses his merely abstract, mental constructs of how human beings and things ought to be to judge actual human beings and things.
Obviously, ego judgmental behavior is a mistake, for reality does not fit the fictions invented by the ego mind.
Judgments produce enormous pain and suffering for the judge and those judged. To judge is really to attack the person or thing being judged, it is to say that it ought not to be the way it is and ought to become different, become as the judge, the ego ideal thinks that it ought to become.
To judge is to seek to destroy what is judged and make it become as the judge wants it to become. To judge is to play god and want reality to be as one wish it be.
In Helen Schucman’s terms, to judge is to attack the Son of God, ones real self and other people. Whoever attacks the son has attacked the father. To judge people as not good enough relative to ones ego ideal, is to Judge God as not good enough relative to ones ego ideal.
To judge is to attempt to replace reality, God, ones real self, things, with ones idea of how reality ought to become. The ego declared war on reality, war on how things are and wants to convert them how it wants them to become: ego ideals.
To judge is to declare war on the person and or thing judged, hence to inflict pain on him. The judgmental ego is at war with reality, with God and his children and is inflicting pain on them.
It follows that to stop inflicting pain on people one must stop judging them as either good or bad relative to ones ego ideals. One must stop ones war on oneself. Judgment saps people’s energy and tires them.
If one stopped all judgment, one would become peaceful, relaxed and happy. One also makes those one do not judge, other people, peaceful and happy, for one is no longer attacking and inflicting pain on them.

To not judge, one must detach from the ego and identify with a non judgmental self, the unified self.
Buddhists struggle to detach from the ego and are usually less judgmental human beings. They are not attacking reality, they are not inflicting pain on themselves and their fellow human beings hence they tend to be more at peace with their world. Buddhist cultures are most peaceful and loving cultures on earth.
It seems that Buddhism and its aims are conducive to making human beings more peaceful and happy. The pursuit of no-separated self seem the best path to attaining inner and outer peace and happiness.


HOW BUDDHISM CAME ABOUT, GAUTAMA BUDDHA

There are many stories of how Buddhism came about. These are exactly that, stories and mythologies. One is not interested in myths but in facts.
What I will do is extrapolate from the myths surrounding Buddha the truth about him. There was a man called Gautama Sakayamuni. He was from the middle class. He was married and had a son. He was given to introspection and philosophical reflection. He wondered what life was all about. Apparently, he could not quite figure life out and left his home to go search for the truth.
He wandered about and joined many Hindu sects to learn about the truth. He listened to many Sadhus, Hindu holy men, teach their variations of Hinduism. He tried several paths to the truth and found no answer to his question.
Frustrated, he attempted Raja Yoga., meditation. (Hinduism has much Yoga, such as Jnana, Bhakti, Raja, Karma, and Tantra, see Patanjali’s Yogas.) He sat under a Bo tree and told himself that he is going to stop thinking and just sit there until he gets answers to his questions or else that he would not get up. He decided to sit there and, if need be, die rather than get up and live without knowing why he is living. He went for broke.
Until a person unequivocally throws himself one hundred percent to doing something, he tends not to succeed at doing it. People claim to seek unity with God, but want to retain their separated egos. It is only the few who extinguish their separated selves and do not want anything to do with it and its world, our world, that experience unified state, aka God.
In his meditative state, he was given many reasons why he should live in this world. The ego provides him, as it provides all of us, reasons why we should live on earth. The usual reasons are presented: Sex, there are many nubile damsels that the young man could have sex with. But Buddha said nope to that, for he recognized that sex is a ridiculous activity, a desire that when it seizes one, one pursues it as if ones life depends on it, but after ejaculation one asks: what was that all about? Sex is an irritant to the thoughtful man, an addiction that ought to be overcome, rather than given in to.
How about power and wealth? Those are ephemeral and transitory. The rich and powerful of today are not remembered a thousand years from today.
The young Gautama was not impressed by women’s bodies, wealth and power. The man was tempted by Maya, Mara, and the force that makes this world desirable to us and maintains our stay in this world and did not succumb to it.
Five hundred years later, another young man, Emmanuel Ben Joseph, whom the Greeks called Jesus the Christ, was similarly tested and, he, too, refused to give in to the temptations of the ego and flesh. It seems that those who want to overcome the ego and its world of flesh must be tempted in assorted ways; only the few with the courage to not give in to temptation to be separated ego self succeed.
Buddha refused to bite and take the bait to live as a separated ego, to live a meaningless and purposeless existence on earth, a life, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth discovered, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. We are, indeed, like actors on a stage enacting weird scripts, pursuing false worth, meaning and purpose but in the end as another Shakespearean Character, Hamlet, observed, food for worms.
(At age nine, I concluded that my life, your life, our lives on earth, is worthless, meaningless and purposeless. Like other thoughtful players in this insane drama, I sought to make it worthwhile, meaningful and purposeful by pursuing the path of understanding, Jnana yoga, science and philosophy.)
Buddha just sat there, cross legged, not eating, not drinking, not talking to any one, and willing to die if he is not shown the truth of human existence.
If you are falling off a cliff and desire to live, you will be afraid of death; but if you do not care to live, you would joyfully fall to your death or land on your feet. Gautama embraced death and did not care for meaningless ego living.
At some point, he escaped from our ego separated awareness and entered nirvana, to unified life. Nirvana is total bliss. He lived in total bliss, peace and happiness with his face shinning with the light of peace (what some people call aura, the bliss reflected on the face of those who have relinquished the ego and its turmoil and attained eternal oneness with all being).
In Nirvana, Samadhi and Satori and mystical union, one has a choice to make: to keep being in it; in which case ones body would drop dead, or to return to ones body and use that body to teach other people that there is another mode of living that is peaceful and happy.
Buddha opted to return to his body, to the ego and to this world and subsequently use them to teach human beings how to live in peace.

THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS AND THE PATH TO THEM

Buddha taught his followers that we live on earth because we DESIRE to live separated lives. Life on earth is due to desire for separation.
Separation has a goal: to go make the separated self seem real. What is real is our unified self, but we want to go make its opposite, separated self, seem real.
In Hindu terms, we cast a magical spell, Maya, on us and seem to sleep and in sleep, dream see a separated world.
This world, the material universe, is a product of our desire for separation. That desire, separation, led to the formation of space, time and matter, all to make our seeming separated selves real to us. In space and time, each of us houses himself in body and sees gap between him and others and takes time before he reaches other people. Separation seems real to us, but is so because we want it to be real; what we desire and believe is possible is what we see in our world; wishing and believing produces what is seen.
As long as we desire separated selves, Buddha says that we must SUFER. For one thing, to make separated self seem possible, we housed ourselves in bodies; body is vulnerable and prone to pain. Those who live in body must experience pain; to be pained is to suffer. Therefore, to live on earth is to suffer.
We suffer because we are living as the opposite of our real selves. Our real selves are unified and we prefer to live as separated selves.
In effect, we attacked our true self, unified self, holy self; we attacked reality and seem to split it into fragments and each fragment, each of us, thinks him self separated from other fragments. As Helen Schucman wrote in her Christological rendition of Buddhism and Hinduism, A Course in miracles, we attacked union, which is what religions call God; we attacked God and see ourselves as separated from him. The part (human beings) sees itself separated from the whole (God).
That attack on our whole self inflicts pain and suffering on us. To live on earth is to inflict pain and suffering on ones self.
To live on earth is to desire separation from God, which is to suffer. Gautama recognized that to eliminate suffering that one must give up its source.
Desire for separated self is the cause of suffering; therefore, give up desire for separated self and you return to unified self, in which there is no suffering.
But if one gave up the separated self, one would return to living in total formlessness, spirit, hence exit this world.
We do not want to give up our separated ego selves, die and leave this world. Okay, Buddha said to us: go ahead and desire the things of this world but do so with detachment. See the ego and its entire world as transitory and ephemeral; desire them but recognize that they come and go and are not permanent.
What is permanent and changeless is the real self, the unified spirit self. As long as we live on earth, in the world of separation, space, time and matter we must have some desire, for separated self and its world, for it is desire to live here that keeps us here.
Okay, go ahead and have desire to be a separated human being, but use your separated self to care for all separated selves, for they are literally part of our one unified self.
Aware of our true self as unified self, that other people share our self, Buddha taught compassion, love and forgiveness for all human beings.

THE CONDITIONS FOR PEACE AND HAPPINESS

Do you want to be peaceful and happy? If yes, Buddha asks you to forgive and love all the people; indeed, to love all the animals and trees. Why do so?
One life manifests in all biological life forms. We are all, literally, one life and what we do to others we do to ourselves.
Giving is receiving. Since other people are you, what you do to them you do to yourself, what you give to other people you give to yourself.
In our world, we believe that we are separated into discrete selves. In that world, other people are more likely to do to you as you do to them. If you love other people, hence join them and in so doing give them peace and joy, they would love you and in so doing give you peace and joy.
Peace and joy inheres only in union, in joining with all people. On the other hand, if you hate other people, give them tension; they will hate you and give you tension.
Buddha taught the four noble truths and the eight paths to them. To live on earth is to suffer; suffering is caused by desire to live as separated ego selves; to eliminate suffering, one must stop desiring separated existence and since that is impossible if one still wants to live in this world, one must desire things with detachment, desire them but do not feel disappointed if you do not get them, and if you get them do not feel disappointed when they leave you.
One must live the truth of oneness: forgive and love all; one must talk the truth at all times and refuse to give in to talking from the ego and its prideful lies (calculated to make one seem important).
The Buddha taught people to live a highly compassionate, social serving existence; a compassionate person is a person who identifies with human suffering, albeit self induced; he is generally a moral person. Buddhists tend to be very moral human beings.

Buddha set up monasteries where monks lived and meditated, so as to attain their real selves hence experience peace and happiness. He urged his monks to be detached from the things of this world, to dress in simple robes and work and beg for their food (begging humiliates the prideful ego and makes one feel humble, a precondition for experiencing unified life).
Buddha lived to old age, eighty. His disciples continued his teaching and spread from his native northern India to other parts of Asia.
As they spread out to other lands, their teachings took on the coloration of the local cultures they were living in. In Tibet, for example, certain already existing Tibetan views on God entered Buddhism. In China and later Japan, the people’s marshal spirit entered Buddhism to form Cheng, Zen Buddhism and its upshot, Samurai.
Religion, sooner or latter is corrupted and bastardized by the surrounding culture it operates in; religions fit what people want them to become. Generally, only a few persons truly understand the true import of religion, our efforts to reconnect to our source, to the source we seem separated from.

Buddhism is religion, philosophy and psychology in one piece. An American poet and clinical psychologist, Helen Schucman resurrected the true teachings of Buddha and cast it in Christological language, a form that she hopes would appeal to apostate Christians who could not accept traditional Christianity but could accept Buddhism, if cast in the Christian language that they are used to. (I studied Hinduism and Buddhism and fell in love with them. Later, my attention was drawn to Helen Schucman’s book and I read it. I marveled at her ability to translate what Hinduism and Buddhism had taught me into Christian terms. She was probably one of the best religious thinkers of the twentieth century.)


My own function is to cast Buddhism in prose and in non-religious language. I hope that in doing so, it would appeal to scientists.
Ultimately, the end of all teachers of union is the same. No matter what form the teaching takes, the goal is to help people eliminate their attachment to the separated self and live through their real self, unified self. When people live out of their real unified self, they tend to experience peace and happiness.
We cannot live as unified self while on earth, a separated place, but we can approximate it. To the extent that we approximate it, we live in peace and joy.
To the extent that a human being sees that separated self is an illusion and gives it up and live out of his true self, unified self, he tends to be happy and peaceful. Therefore, we must find a way to teach the psychology of no separated self.

CONCLUSION

Human beings suffer because they have the illusion that they have separated ego selves and live out of them. Each of them posits a special separated self, an important (and in neurosis and psychosis, superior) separated self.
They pursue a chimera that does not even exist, or that seems to exist only in a dream setting.
In awake state, what exists is our joined and unified self, God and Christ, one self with infinites parts, all of whom are it and it is all of them. In unified state, the individual is calm, quiet, peaceful, happy, non judgmental, non critical, not proud, forgiving and loving.
If somehow the individual convinces himself that his separated special self is an illusion, a dream self that seems real while he dreams but is not real when he wakens, he saves himself a lot of mental and emotional upsets. If one has no self, one would not be prone to feeling fear, anger, depression, paranoia, and other mental and emotional upsets. If one has no separated self, one would not be defensive, for there would be no self to defend.
Only the false self needs to be defended to seem real; the real self, unified self is inclusive of everything and everything does not need to defend itself from other things for nothing is an other from it.
Such a person would not experience anger, for there is no other person to attack and make him feel angry; he would not experience fear for there is no self to be fearful. He would be calm at most times.
Pursuit of the ideal self is escape from reality. It is childish refusal to deal with reality as it is. Such a person concentrates on becoming the imaginary self that he has no time to deal with the exigencies of the real world he finds himself in. He finds the real world unpalatable and negates it and escapes into fantasyland. In his idealism, he is a king and shapes the world to fit his wishes, but in the real world, he is a pauper.
The dreamy, idealist does deal with the exigencies of the real world. In the meantime, he is poor. If only he stopped idealizing and dealt with reality as it is he would be able to figure out what his interests and aptitudes are and what skill sets the job market requires, train for them and make a decent living in the temporal universe.
Having escape from the real world, he generally wounds up depending on other people to support him. In the West, he goes on public assistance, in societies with extended families; he depends on his family members, his wife and children to support him. He sits around wasting his mental energies wishing for how things ought to become rather than dealing with them as they really are.
Insanity lies in believing that one has a separated special self, a self concept, self image and personality one made for ones self and for other people and attempt to become it. Sanity lies in accepting the truth that the separated self, ordinary or superior, does not exist, is a figure in the dream of life on earth, and accepting the truth of our unified self. We all share one life, a life that is formless, unified, the same and equal everywhere and eternal.
Do you want to live a peaceful and happy life? If you relinquish your presumed separated self special, superior and accept equal, same unified self; do not give in to the temptation to speak or behave from separated self; always strive to do what serves social interest, to forgive and love all human beings, you would be peaceful and happy.
I cannot speak for you or any other human being. I can only speak for me for I am only responsible for my thinking and behaviors.
While in college, I accepted that my body and ego were worthless, meaningless and purposeless. I considered myself an existentialist thinker ala my then hero, Jean Paul Sartre. But latter in life, I learned that whereas my earthly body and its ego activities are still worthless, meaningless and purposeless that our unified spirit self has real worth, meaning and purpose.
I strive to live out of my unified self. Of course, I have an ego separated self, a prideful self, but I know it for what it is, a false self and try to over come it through love for our shared one self. To the extent that I succeed, which is seldom the case, I feel peace and joy that, as St Paul observed, passes human ego understanding.
Find out for yourself whether this is the truth or not. You do not have to believe anything on faith; just practice egoless living, forgiving, loving and social service and see whether you would not experience peace, happiness and material abundance in your sojourn on earth.


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December 22, 2005

Science and Technology of Thinking and Behavior: Focus on Paranoia (Part 2)

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- The goal of this paper, inter alia, is to help heal the brother; I enjoy the flashes of brilliance that his writing exhibits but do not like his underlying paranoia. That underlying disorder makes him quarrel with just about everybody, to the point where he hides from people, thinking that they are out to kill him.

One hears that he sought police protection, a doing that would play into his paranoid grandiosity: for one must be important for the police to be protecting one individually. Nobody wants to harm him. He ought to join all people and work for their mutual good, rather than always trying to pull them down; he must give up his perverse paranoid interest in pulling people down and develop the healthy trait of accentuating only the good in people.)

A STORY OF CREATION/METHOLOGY

I believe that every human being must have a story of creation, albeit a mythology. We do ask questions such as: how did we come into being? In as much as we ask such questions, an answer must be attempted.
Science provides an answer in the area of energy and matter. I am talking about the Big Bang hypothesis that claims that fifteen billion years ago, all matter was in a ball the size of an atom, called state of Presingularity and that this ball shattered and threw its contents out and in nanoseconds space and time were invented and subsequently particles came into being, out of nowhere, and that these particles, in time, combined to form atoms and in time atoms differentiated into the 104 elements we have on the current Chemical table and that the elements formed molecules that in time produced the stars and planets and eventually biological life forms and ultimately human beings. The Big Bang story is a fascinating imaginative fairy tale. We work with it in the area of physical science but we do not have any illusions that it is the truth. It is simply a mythology that seems to answer our question of how matter came into being.
We also need a story on how we, as human beings, came into being. We have Charles Darwin’s views on how animals evolved. Interesting hypothesis, that. However, it does not explain how the sense of I, the self came into being.
No one knows how the self came into being. Neuroscientists claim that the self is epiphenomenal, that is, a product of the configuration of atoms in our brains, the result of the dance of electrical ions in our nervous system. Oh, really? Let us amuse ourselves differently.
There are millions of stories on how people came into being. Indeed, every human group had its own story, and every individual has his own twist on his group’s story of creation, all of them false. These stories, false as they are, respond to our need to understand our origin.
As the world moves towards one universal culture, clearly, all the particularistic stories of creation will die and a universal story of creation will replace them. (See Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth.)
The story of creation in the Christian bible, the story of Adam and Eve is obviously not true and, as far as, such stories go is not particularly interesting, certainly not as interesting as the Igbo story of creation.
In as much as we need a story of creation and past ones seem not to satisfy us, consider this story of creation; it is not the truth, but it approximates the truth. I will merely summarize it here for I have elaborated on it elsewhere.
There is God. God is one. God is everything and everything is God. God is everywhere and everywhere is in God.
God extended his one self into other selves. He gave all of his self to each of his extended selves. All of God is in each of his extension; aka the son of God. The Son of God is in God and in other extensions of God, other children of God.
God is in us and we are in God and in each other. There is no space or gap between us and God and each of us and the rest of us. Where God ends and his son begin is nowhere. We are all joined as one self, the one self of God. We all share the one self of God; we all share the one mind of God.
God is creative and created us; he gave us, his creations, his creative ability and we do create, like God. We create with the creative power of God in us, not with our own powers. As it were, we co-create with God.
God and his children are infinite in numbers.
God has always existed. God has no beginning and no end. There was never a time when there was no God.
Since each Son of God is an extension of God, therefore, each Son of God has existed for as long as God has existed.
Yet God created his children; they did not create God and themselves. Though all creation is changeless, permanent and eternal yet God created them all.
The difference between the Son of God and God is that God created him and he did not create God.

The Son of God resented the fact that God created him, pretty much as adolescents on earth resent being the children of their parents and want to reverse the process and be their parents’ parents. We wanted to create God, create ourselves and create each other.
In other words, we wanted to kill God and become God, chase God out of his creatorship throne and usurp it and sit there. (All these are metaphors, so do not get carried away and think that we are talking literal truth here; enjoy the metaphor, they actually approximate the truth but are not the truth.)
We cannot create God and ourselves. But the wish to do so was so strong that we cast a magical spell, what Hinduism calls Maya, on ourselves, and seems to have gone to sleep. In our sleep, we dream that we are the author of reality, that we created God, each other and ourselves. We invented our separated self-concepts, our egos, our self-images, and our personalities. Our personalities are replacement selves; we use them to substitute the selves God created us as. God created us as unified with him, a unified self; we seem to have destroyed that holy self and invented separated selves housed in bodies for us. On earth, in the dream of specialness and separation, we see ourselves as in bodies and separated from each other.

Our world is the opposite of heaven: separation is the opposite of union, time is the opposite of eternity, change is the opposite of changelessness; mortality is the opposite of immortality, hate is the opposite of love etc.
We are on earth to oppose heaven’s will. God wills union and we wish separation; God wills sameness and equality and we wish differences and inequality. What we wish we saw in dreams. (See Helen Schucman, A Course in Miracles. Also see M. The Gospel of Ramakrishna.)
(The paranoid person wishes that he were superior to other persons, acts as such, and seems so in his dream world, hence the paranoid personalities called Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin seemed like superior persons, when, in fact, they felt inferior; in truth they are the same and equal with all people).
Each of us wishes to seem superior to other persons and invents situations that would make him seem so. The paranoid personality invented an inferior body for himself, feels inferior and compensates with a superior feeling self-concept. We have seen how he goes about feeling superior to other people when, in fact, he is not superior to any one. Hitler and the Nazis felt superior to other people, when, in fact, they were not. They felt superior to Jews, and killed Jews. They felt superior to Slavic people and killed them. People do act on their insane ideas.
The paranoid Igbo brother in naija-politics feels superior to other persons and acts as such. He sets himself up as god and from that imaginary standpoint criticizes every person. He satisfies his desire for superiority by making other people’s lives very miserable. Of course, he is not superior to any one; he is merely dreaming superiority.
But make no mistake about it: people act on their wishes. Thus, the brother acts on his delusion of superiority and does not want to see himself as the same and equal with other members of the forum. He is capable of doing harm to other people. In pursuit of his fictional superiority, he can hurt, even kill people. One must, therefore, keep studied eyes on him. Paranoid persons do kill people, so he must be watched and if he acts out arrest and place him in a psychiatric hospital.

In my experience, Igbos tend to fancy themselves smarter than other Nigerian groups. They behave as such. But in truth, they are just like other Nigerian groups. The Igbo sense of superiority is delusional sense of superiority. No ethnic group is superior to others, just as no race is superior to others. But like deluded paranoid persons, Igbos tend to think that just because they want to seem superior to others, that other Nigerian groups should accept their delusion and see them as their superiors.
In terms of material culture, most other Nigerian groups are, in fact, more developed than Igbos. The Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba and Edo are certainly more developed than Igbos in terms of socio cultural structures.
The relevant point here is that Igbos tend to deceive themselves into believing that they are superior to other Nigerian groups when, in fact, they are not so.
What the individual and group needs to do is relinquish his/their sense of superiority and come to see himself/themselves as the same and equal with all people.
To the extent that a human being accepts his sameness and equality with all people, and behaves as such, he unifies with all people.
In union with all people, the individual attains inner peace and joy.
I must confess, however, that the temptation to seem superior to other people is not easily relinquished, even by those of us who know the truth of human equality. I still find myself wishing to seem superior to other people, if not in my conscious life, but in my dreams at night. Consider the following dream that I had two days ago.

DREAM AND DREAM INTERPRETATION

Sigmund Freud attempted to understand people’s dreams. As he saw it, in their daily lives, people seem to behave in a very rational manner, but that they are not really rational. He believes that people’s dreams give us an opportunity to really understand what is in their minds. (He also employed other means to get to understand the real person; he believed that we tend to repress our true wishes into the unconscious mind and that if only we can reach that level of our mind that we would get to see what is hidden there; thus, in therapy sessions, he had his clients lay on a couch and speak without checking to make sense of what they said; they were to say whatever comes to their mind, uncensored; they were not to block their thinking, free associate, to not try to make them rational and just to let them come out, flow; the idea was for them to bring what was repressed into their unconscious to the conscious mind; to dreg it out, catharsis, and Freud would then analyze it. Freud believed that people wished to have sex with both men and women and are polymorphous sexual perverse and hid this socially unacceptable idea in their unconscious; that, in fact, they want to have sex with their parents but hid such wishes in their unconscious mind; this is the so-called oedipal complex. See Freud, Dream Interpretation.)
Freud believed that in dreams we gratify what we wish that we could not gratify in conscious living; society prevents us from doing many things, we internalized social norms as our superego and that checks our Id wishes and the ego balances the two wishes. In dreams, we gratify our day time wishes that we could not gratify lest society punish us. To Freud, dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
Other psychoanalysts also employed Dream analysis to understand the true individual. Adler, Jung and others explored dreams.
I believe that dreams are useful for the individual to understand his real wishes and real self. However, I do not believe that other people can accurately interpret the individual’s dreams, for dreams are highly specific and particular to the individual; there are no universally accepted dream interpretations.

My wife’s alarm clock went off at 7AM and woke us up. I went back to sleep. I dreamed. In this dream, I and other members of my family were walking along our suburban street. I looked back and saw what, as kids at Lagos, we used to call agwuepo, a shit carrier. During my youth at Lagos folks had tins in out houses into which they defecated. Once or twice a week, “shit carrier” would come to their house, pour their shit into a large tin and carried it off, usually on their heads. If you were walking down the streets at night, you would likely see the shit carrier doing his job and, as would be expected, spreading the smell of shit with him.
The shit carriers wore rags over their face, perhaps to cover their noses and breathe less of the feces they were carrying and to disguise their identity, so that no one knew who they were. Their covered feces and the shit they were carrying made them look scary to little boys and we fled from them. (We used to think that they could kidnap and put us in the tin of shit on their heads and go throw us away.)
Shit-carriers were low in the social pecking order and were dreaded by us kids. No one wanted to be an agwuepo. That is to say that folks wanted to be superior to them.

Now back to my dream. I was walking on an American middle class suburban street and looked behind me and saw the shit carrier coming towards us. I ran to the bank of the street to avoid contact with him. The other members of my family did not make much ado about him, they just stepped aside, as he walked pass them, indeed, my wife even said hi to him. (The dream has relevance for me, not other people.) We continued on our walk. Then I looked behind me, again. I saw another shit carrier coming towards us. Again, I jumped to the side of the street. The shit career followed me to where I jumped to. Somehow I got home and was lying on a humongous bed, a bed that could contain the entire family of five (husband, wife and three children). We were all lying comfortable on the bed when I noticed that the shit carrier was lying with us, right in our middle. I freaked out and jumped up, wondering what in the world the man was doing on my bed?
He got up with me and went to the refrigerator and came up with fruit cocktails in small plastic cuts and began handing them out to the members of the family. I was aghast; thinking that the man must have contaminated our refrigerator by touching it and certainly the fruit cocktails was filled germs? I was not going to eat what the man touched. In the meantime, other members of the family accepted the cocktails from him and ate them and thanked him graciously for preparing such a delicious meal for them.
My face was all contorted as the man handed me a cup filled with cocktail of grapes and other fruit goodies. I was thinking of a polite way to refuse it, and not to eat it. At that point, I woke up, aware of the cocktail in my hand. I looked at the clock and it was exactly 7:15 AM. That is, the sleep and dream took place within an interval of fifteen minutes.
The dream was very vivid in my mind, so I went to a room we converted into our office and sat in front of a computer and typed it.
After typing it verbatim, I began to wonder what it meant. Here is the thought that came to my mind. The shit career represents lower class persons, that is, inferior persons. I was running from the low class shit carrier. I did not want to have anything to-do with him. I wanted to be superior to him. I had no respect for him.
The significance of this dream is that despite my conscious acceptance of my sameness and equality with all people that at the unconscious level that I feel superior to some people, the shit carrier of this world. Shit carriers symbolize poor people. I wanted to seem superior to poor people.
I kept reflecting on the import of the dream and the obvious hit me. I talk about equality but, in truth, avoid the poor. Generally, if a person is not well read, I tended to avoid him.
What is the point? The point is that at the unconscious level, I still had the wish to be superior to other people. Consciously, I do not want to be superior to other people, but unconsciously the wish is still there.
In my dream, my wish was satisfied for me, for dreams provide us opportunity to satisfy our wishes that we cannot gratify in wake life.
The salience of the dream is that I still had work to do; I still must work to see every person as the same and equal with me.
The dream teaches me that we are all a family, that shit carrier are part of my family…he was laying in the same bed with my family and eating with us, so he is symbolically my family member and I must treat him as such, for all people are children of one family, God’s unified family.
On a different note, the dream means that it is very difficult for people to accept their sameness and equality. I found it difficult to accept the shit carrier as my equal and family member.

The paranoid personality finds it almost impossible to see himself as the same and equal with all people. Can you imagine our Internet paranoid Igbo character accepting that he is the same as other people? The man has the illusion that he is better than other people.
A few minutes again, I minimized my typing and read his posting on the forum and, as usual, he sounded pedantic, convoluted and superior, all in a childish effort to seem erudite and superior to other people.
This man admires the achievers of this world and has contempt for the losers of this world. His talk is replete with admiration for the powerful men and women of the world and disrespect for poor people. No, this man would rather die than accept his equality with poor folks. (See Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality.)
The point is that it is difficult to give up the wish for superiority. Even when one has consciously done so, as I have done, unconsciously, one still wants to be superior to other people.
The mentally ill wants to seem superior to other people; paranoid persons, in particular, want to seem superior to other people.
Mental illness lies in the wish to seem superior to other people, to disobey God’s will that we are the same and equal and remake us in such a manner that one is now superior to other people.
If you can get the paranoid person and other mentally ill persons to give up their not so secret wish for superiority and accept sameness and equality, you are on the way to healing them.
If a person sees all people as the same as him, loves and forgives all and serves all in some form, he is as mentally healthy as is possible in this world.
Nobody here on earth, the world of forms, can be totally mentally healthy, for to be in body is to have interfered with reality.
Our reality is spirit, not body. Body is means of seeming different and separated from other people. That is to say that to be in body at all is to be insane. The most that one can do is using ones body to love other people in bodies. When one uses ones body to love other people in bodies one approximates normalcy, normal insanity, and not mental health. One attains what Bahaullah called the lesser peace, what Ramakrishna called ego love and what our poetess, Helen Schucman calls happy dream, gate of heaven and real world.

COGNITIVE BEHAVIOR THERAPY

I believe that it is possible to understand how people think and where there is thinking disorders change them. Thinking tends to be reflected in behavior. Where there are thinking disorders there are behavior disorders. Therefore, we must correct our thinking disorders and behavior disorders.
Cognitive behavior therapists like Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck attempt to teach their clients how to reconstruct and reorient their problematic thinking and behavior. Ellis, for example, tells his clients that it is not what happens in the world that makes them depressed, anxious or angry (or any other emotional upset) but how they interpret it. As he sees it, one can choose to interpret the same event in such a manner that it depresses one or makes one happy.
Let say that a white man called a black man nigger. The black man may feel offended by it and feel angry. He may then fight the white man. On the other hand, he may choose to see the name caller as not worth responding to. Indeed, he may even pity him, from the understanding that mature persons do not put people down, but find ways to elevate them.
The point is that whether one feels anxious, angry or sad is up to one. One can respond to the same situation differently. Therefore, one is responsible for how one feels and acts.
Ellis built his therapy on Epictetus’ philosophy. Epectatus was a Roman stoic thinker, a slave who found a way to be happy despite being a slave. He did not feel diminished by his low social status. Obviously, any human being could rationalize whatever he wants to rationalize. If a woman is a prostitute, she can tell herself that she is making a living out of it and not feel degraded by her profession. Be that as it may, it is probably better not to be a prostitute, since as a prostitute, one is likely to be infected by diseases and die from them. Ellis is therefore not a very profound philosopher for his ideas could lead to tolerating abuses by other people. If you slap someone, you inflicted pain on him and ought to not do so. Because you did so, that person may choose to forgive you. I will forgive you but insist that you do not repeat the offensive action again. If you do, I want you arrested and jailed and while in jail re-socialized, so that you learn to help and love rather than inflict pain on other people.
My approach to cognitive behavior therapy is different from what Western therapists like Ellis and Beck do.
I teach people to think and behave differently. In this paper, I have pointed out how paranoid persons think and behave. I have pointed out how they need to think and behave differently. They think in terms of inferiority and superiority; they can learn to think in terms of sameness, equality, love and forgiveness.
This type of change in thinking and behaving tends to lead to healing mental disorders. Try it and find out whether it is therapeutic or not. See all people as the same and equal with you, forgive and love all people and find a way to work for our common good and see whether you would not feel peaceful and happy. We do not need to argue, for the taste of the pudding lays in the tasting, try it and find out for you.

SHRINKING THE EGO THROUGH PRAYER AND MEDITATION

Many therapists do not want to work with paranoid persons; they throw their hands up and think it hopeless trying to help paranoid persons. The reason for this is that of all the people who come to therapy, paranoids are the most difficult to help. They are difficult to help because they desire to retain their separated ego selves. Paranoids desire to seem important persons and do not want to let go of their big selves. On the other hand, the business of psychotherapy is to shrink the big ego self to normal size. That is why they call therapists shrinks: they really aim at shrinking people’s swollen egos down to manageable size.
The person who does not want his ego shrunk to rational size obviously is not going to come to shrinks…paranoids seldom come to therapists, unless forced… and are not going to benefit from therapy. Indeed, paranoids come to therapy hoping to strengthen their big egos and when they learn that the therapist aims otherwise, they get scared and quit coming. They leave and go retain their big ego selves. Unbeknown to them, as long as they maintain their big ego selves, they will live in pain and suffer.
The problem of man is that he believes that he has a separated special self. I will put it bluntly to you. Man does not have a separated special self. The separated special, that is, superior self, is an illusion; it is a self that exists as in a dream but, in fact, does not exist. What exists in truth is the unified self.
There is one God, if you do not like the word God, then say one life, for God is life.
That one God, one life, extended himself to each of us and we are united with him and with each other. Our true state is formless spirit; we are unified spirit. This is a fact, not conjecture.
We desired to seem separated from our real self and went into a dream where we dream as separated selves housed in bodies and each seeming separated self seeks specialness and importance.
The paranoid person seeks specialness and separated from God and other people to go seem special and superior. On earth, in the dream, he strives to seem self created and creator of God and all people; he struggles to be important. All these strivings are part of his delusion, and that is why they call it delusional disorder, he wants to believe in what is not true as true. He is unified with all and he wants to seem separated from all; he is the same and equal with all and he wants to seem different and superior to all; he is created by God and he wants to seem self created; in a word, he is deluded, insane. It is because he is insane that he needs healing, although he does not know it.
Healing for the paranoid, as it is for all human beings, is to relinquish the paranoid’s outward movement, ego, and return to the inward process and rediscover his true self, unified same and equal self.
Meditation is the best way to reconnect to ones real self. I practice Buddhist meditation, every day, for one hour, at least. I recommend it for you. However, you can practice any kind of meditation, Hindu, Zen etc that you like. The name does not matter, what matters is that you know what meditation is trying to accomplish and do it consciously.
Meditation is aimed at eliminating your separated special self. That is correct, meditation aims at destroying what you currently call your self concept, self image and personality and replacing them with your real self.
Twenty five hundred years ago, Gautama Buddha recognized that what human beings call their self concepts, self images and personalities seem to exist but, in fact, do not exist. This is literal not figurative. What we call our selves are dream figures, not real selves. The human personality is a pipe dream, a smoke that does not exist and only seems to exist in a dream setting, Maya. It seems to exist for those who want it to exist and defend it (with what psychoanalysts call ego defense mechanisms, such as, repression, suppression, denial, dissociation, projection, displacement, rationalization, intellectualization, sublimation, reaction formation, avoidance, fantasy, minimizing, acting out, fear, anger, pride, shame, paranoia, depression, hallucination etc). People have non-existent selves that are housed in bodies and defend them and their defense makes them seem real. Withdraw the defense and those selves are non-existent.
Do you want to find out that your so-called ego self is not real? Then try meditation. In meditation, you consciously deny the existence of your ego. You tell yourself that the self you know is not real, is a fiction. You tell yourself that what the self you know thinks is not true, is as false as itself. Thus, you negate all your conceptual thinking. You say, in Hindu terms, neti, neti, not this, not this. You deny the truth of whatever the empirical self tells you. You deny the empirical self itself. You deny knowing anything. You firmly tell yourself that you do not know anything. You then ask to be told who you are, who other people are and what things mean. Your superficial ego rushes in and tries to tell you who you are and what things are. Neuroscience, the latest ego noise, tells you that you are a product of the dance of atoms. But firmly reject whatever the empirical self tells you are the truth and try to be quiet.
In effect, you destroy your empirical self and its world. You, in Buddhist terms, aim at having no separated self. If you can truly aim at this and keep denying the reality of your ego self, you will get to a point where you attain inner silence, peace, bliss (for peace is synonymous with joy).
You feel like you do not exist. You are not any particular thing; you are NOTHING. Nothing is everything! You are part of everything.
If you continue with self negation, you literally rise above our empirical world and enter a world where all are the same and equal, where there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object. In Buddhist term, this is called Nirvana (Zen calls it Satori and Hinduism calls it Samadhi). It is a world of one unified light, a continuous light that begins nowhere and ends nowhere. All beings are part of that eternal light. It is formless, it is spirit, and it is permanent and changeless. What am I talking about? It can not be described in human terms, it is ineffable.
But to attain knowledge of our real self, unified self, one must give up the false ego self one made to replace it with. One must give up identification with the separated, special ego self. One must give up the human personality. One must give up ones self concept and self image. One must give up the substitute self one identifies with and come to ones God as he created one, unified and holy.
Our true identity is a holy self, that is, a unified self, what Christians call the Christ and Hindus call Atman and Buddhists call Buddha self. Call it what you like, it has no name, it just is.
To attain awareness of the real self, one must overcome the false ego self one currently identifies with. Additionally, as Buddha taught, one must have compassion for all sentient beings and as Brother Jesus the Christ taught, one must forgive and love all human beings and as the last of the prophets, Mohammed taught, one must submit to God; one must have no other God but Allah.
Forgive, love all and then come to our God in meditation and behold that God is real. God is the only reality that exists, all else is noise.
What is salient is that the individual, and for our present purposes, the paranoid person must give up his cherished special separated self and its facial intellect.
The Igbo chap that makes a whole lot of noise at naijapolitics forum must seek his true self. If I were him, I would do so under some religious forum. It really does not matter what religion one accepts; all religions are paths to God: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, New Age Christianity such as propagated by Unity Church and A Course in Miracles, they are all useful in enabling the individual to shrink his swollen ego and return to the awareness of his real self, unified spirit self.
But the brother is lost in ego superficial reasoning and embraces the flippant ideas propagated by childish scientists that there is no God. He quickly tells you that there is no God and that he does not accept any religion. Indeed, he has a condescending attitude towards religionists; it is as if they are not rational enough and cannot cope with the exigencies of life without seeking protection from an illusion called God.
We have heard that one before. The character called Sigmund Freud wrote a book called the Future of an Illusion in which he claimed that religionists are like children seeking a powerful father figure to protect them in our precarious world. To him, God is a fiction and belief in him is neurotic (in as much as neurosis is belief in what is not true as true). Poor Freud, he knew so much that he was addicted to a mood altering drug, cocaine, and could not overcome his anxiety and his numerous phobias. The man talked shop about anxiety neurosis and yet could not overcome his various fears and actually had to be blind folded to be dragged out of Vienna before the murderous Nazis got to his flippant ego.
The paranoid person is totally identified with his spurious ego and its intellect and finds it difficult to relinquish it and explore other ways of knowing. But to heal his paranoia, he must give up his ego; he must voluntarily not identify with the ego; he must stop trusting the separated special self and trust in God, (God as God, the transcendent God is not in this world, but an aspect of God, the immanent God, the Holy Spirit is in this world) his unified real self.
Meditation is the quickest way of attaining awareness of the real self, the unified self (hence Hinduism called Raja Yoga, the royal yoga…the other Yogas: Jnana, the path of the intellect; Bhakti Yoga, the path of worship; Karma yoga, the path of public service; Tantra yoga, the path of sensual pleasure etc ultimately lead to real self realization but take longer to do so; meditation, raja yoga is the quickest path to real self realization, to awareness of the reality of God).

Prayer and meditation are indispensable in any effort to know the truth of who we are. One must constantly pray to God to guide one, to lead one on the path of righteousness (forgiveness, love, social service etc what Buddha called the eight noble paths…recall that Buddha talked about how all life is suffering, how suffering is caused by our desire to live ego separated life, how suffering is overcome when we stop desiring ego separated self, when we give up attachment to the ego and are detached to the egos world and its ephemeral things; how we must live a moral life, always speaking the truth, not harming other people, not stealing, and having compassion for all people).
Yes, one must pray for the Holy Spirit’s guidance and relinquish the counsel of the ego self.

Prayer is talking to God. Meditation is listing to God. One must talk and listen to God hence both prayer and meditation is crucial in all efforts to know who we truly are.
Western psychotherapy generally does not include prayer and other religious practices. However, it is gradually coming around to embracing meditation. In time, it would overcome its present adolescent stage of evolution and become adult. As an adult profession, it would encourage a return to religion, and return to prayer and meditation as a means of knowing who we truly are.
In the meantime, the paranoid personality is full of him self; his ego is swollen up and he finds it difficult to pray to God. He sees himself as in competition with God. God, he thinks, is his rival for power. He wants to eliminate God and replace him and become the creator of himself, creator of other people and creator of the world. The paranoid is on a power trip. That is why he is deluded.
His delusion disorder is healed when he stops the childishness of trying to replace his father, God, and accept him as his creator.
One must accept God as ones creator and pray to him and ask him for guidance in everything one does. Before one makes any decision, one must pause and go inwards, pray and ask God’s Holy Spirit to guide one. Invariably, God asks one to act out of forgiveness, love and public service. Whatever one does out of love cannot be totally wrong.
The paranoid probably will not give up his egotism in this life time. But if he learns that the ego is his problem and makes some effort to be egoless, he will benefit.
To the extent that the individual thinks and behaves egolessly, he feels peaceful and happy.
Peace and joy are the gifts of God, are reward for being ones real self, while still in the world of forms, bodies, space and time.
Our paranoid friends must learn to start working on their swollen egos and start giving their false selves up; they must give up their self concepts, self images and personalities; they must give up the masks of specialness that they wear, so as to see their true self, a unified spirit self, a loving and forgiving, hence peaceful and happy self.
In the meantime, paranoids live a tumultuous existence, almost always alienating those around them and experiencing social conflicts everywhere they go. Sadly, they do not recognize that it is they themselves that generate their conflicts by attaching to the ego self.
To be identified with the ego self is to live in hell, a hell of ones making. To be released from the ego jail house, one must jettison the ego and embrace ones real self, the unified self, the holy self, the Christ self, the Atman self, the Buddha self, the Chi self. In the Chi self lay peace, happiness and material abundance.

CONCLUSION

My experience as a human being and from working in the mental health field leads me to conclude that people, by and large, think and behave in a manner that is not always conducive to mental health. Biological and social factors contribute to the manner people think. We need to address those. However, we also need to teach these people how to think and behave in such a manner that they are at peace with their world.
People need to see all people as the same and equal; they need to love and forgive all people; they need to find out what they like doing and good at doing and do it for all of society.
Do all these and I am convinced that you would be peaceful and happy. Peace and happiness are the indices of mental health.
I have elaborated the ideas summarized in this paper in my book, Real Self Psychology. If you are interested in this manner of thinking and behaving, you may want to take look at that book.

*This has been a year during which I introduced myself to folks. Next year, I will focus on politics; each week I will do a write up on the political economy of an African country.
Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year by Thinking and Behaving Differently: from Ego to Christ Thinking and Behaving patterns.

[email protected]

December 20, 2005

FOR FURTHER READING

Adler, Alfred (1999) The Neurotic Constitution. New York: International Library of Psychology, Routledge.

Allport, Gordon. (1961) Pattern and Growth in Personality. New York: John Holt, Rinehart.

American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, (1994) Washington, DC. American Psychiatric Press.

Ansbacher, H.L. (1985) The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. New York: Harper Torch Books.

Ayer, A.J. (1968) The Origins of Pragmatism. London: Macmillan.

Beck, Aaron (1990) Cognitive Therapy for Personality Disorders. New York: Guilford Press.

Camus, Albert, (2003) The Stranger. New York: Sparks Publishing Group.

Ellis, Albert (2004) Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. New York: Prometheus Book Publishers.

Eriksson, Erik (1993) Childhood and Society. New York: W.W. Norton.

Freud, Anna. (1936) The Ego and its Mechanisms of Defense. Amazon.com

Freud, Sigmund (1961) The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed Ernest Jones. New York: Lionel Trilling and Steven.

Fromm, Eric (1947) Escape from Freedom. New York: Routledge.

Horney, Karen (1991) Neurosis and Human Growth. New York: W.W. Norton.

Jung, Carl G. Basic Writings of C.G. Jung. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Kelly, George. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: W.W. Norton.

Laing, R.D. (1960) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. New York: Penguin.
(1961) Self and Others. New York: Penguin.
(1964) The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. New York: Penguin.

Maslow, Abraham. (1998) Maslow on Management. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

(1970) Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper.

Meissner, William W. (1994) Psychotherapy and the Paranoid Process. New York: Aronson, Jason Publishers.

Pierce, C. S. (1955) Philosophical Writings of Pierce, Ed Buchier, J. New York: Dover.

Popper, Karl. (1963) Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge. and Kegan Paul.

Rogers, Carl. (1951) Client Centered Therapy. New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co.

Ross, Elizabeth Kubla. (1969) On Death and Dying. Amazon.com

Sartre, Jean Paul. (2003) The Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre. New York: Knopf Publishing Group.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. (1995) The World as Will and Idea. London: Everyman.

Schucman, Helen (1976) A Course in Miracles. Tiburon, CA: Foundation for Inner Peace.

Shapiro, David (1999) Autonomy and the Rigid Character. New York: Basic Books.
----------------- (1999) Neurotic Styles. New York: Basic Books.

Skinner, B.F. (2002) Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York: Hackett Publishing.

Sullivan, Harry Stack. (1953) The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: W.W. Norton.

Swanson, David et al. (1970) The Paranoid. Boston: Houghlin, Mifflin.

Tzas, Thomas. (1961) The Myth of Mental Illness. Amazon.com

Underhill, Evelyn. (1911) Mysticism. New York: Dutton.

Vaihinger, H. (1935) The Philosophy of “As If.” London: Kegan Paul Publishers

Wittgenstein, L. (1969) Zettel. Oxford Blackwell.

Zimbado, Phillip. (1986) Shyness. Jove Publications.

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Science and Technology of Thinking and Behavior: Focus on Paranoia (Part 1)

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- INTRODUCTION: Psychology began with the noble intention of understanding how human beings think and behave. Unfortunately, it seems to have lost its way. One no longer knows what the business of psychology is.

What do contemporary psychologists do, anyway? The discipline now seems lost in scholasticism and, therefore, seem irrelevant to actual human beings efforts to understand and change their thinking and behavior.
The real business of psychology is to strive to understand how human beings think and behave. Psychology is the science of thinking and behavior.
Having understood how people, in fact, think and behave and appreciated self defeating thinking and behaving patterns, psychology ought to design a technology for helping people think and behave in the most adaptive manner.
Thinking and behavior have an aim, to enable the individual to adapt to the exigencies of his world, his physical and social environment. Psychology ought to enable people adapt to their world.
In this paper, I attempt a science and technology of thinking and behavior that seems realistic to the actual human beings I see in my world, not the fictional human beings studied by academic psychology.
Real psychology must be realistic and show people how to adapt to their environment and make material living in their world. Psychology should not dwell on esoteric concepts that have no relevance to the real world people live in.
Real human beings find themselves on planet earth. As Alfred Adler observed, they find it difficult to adapt to the exigencies of their world. Some are particularly challenged by the exigencies of their world. All of them, and some of them more so, hate their bodies and what they call themselves. They reject themselves. All human beings reject their real selves. (These seem like dogmatic assertions; they call for you to disprove them?)
Using their thinking and imagination, they invent alternative selves and bodies. They invent ideal selves and ideal bodies. They invent superior selves and bodies.
The ideal, superior self is purely mental and imaginary. It cannot be attained in the empirical world. Nevertheless, since it seems better than the actual imperfect body and self the individual has, he prefers it to his actual self. He embarks on a mission of trying to become his imaginary ideal superior self. Most of his activities are directed towards actualizing his imaginary ideal self (and the ideal other selves, ideal social institutions and ideal world of that ideal self).
Pursuit of the ideal superior self is an escape from reality. It is a waste of mental energy. A mental model of which one ought to become cannot be realized in the empirical world where matter and energy limits what human beings can and cannot do. Space, time and matter set limits as to what real human beings can do. We cannot fly unless we have wings.

FALSE PURPOSE AND MEANING

Impossible of attainment, yet the individual pursues his ego ideal. He does so because his ego ideal appears to be what gives his life meaning and purpose. The effort to attain his imaginary fantasy self, fantasy other people and fantasy social institutions is what gives him (neurotic) direction in his life.
If the idealist stopped seeking to attain his imaginary ideal self, the fiction of superior self, life would suddenly become ennui for him. The individual would not know what to do with his life if he did not pursue some sort of ideals.
Yet pursuit of ideals, ego ideals and or spirit ideals (as in religion) is a waste of time and effort, for nothing pursued that is not rooted in the reality of space, time and matter will be realized by human beings.

THE MISSION OF SCIENCE

Science is that endeavor which attempts to understand empirical reality, as it is, not as it should be. In the area of human beings, science attempts to understand how real human beings think and behave. It does so objectively; it describes how actual people think and behave not how they should think and behave.
Science does not indulge in value judgments, and does not moralize that this or that behavior is better than others; it merely describes how people think and behave.
However, since some thinking and behaving patterns are clearly more adaptive to the exigencies of the environment, science recommends them, not from a moral point of view, but from a dispassionate assessment of what is more useful and productive. In this light, science of thinking and behavior shows human beings the pattern of thinking and behaving that are more likely to enable them get what they want out of their lives.

All human beings think idealistically but some more so than others. All that we can do is understand and redirect human beings’ idealistic thinking and behaviors; we cannot eliminate them.
Escape into idealism, be it in philosophy, religion or politics, is a waste of time. The science of psychology must focus on the science and technology of thinking and behavior.

PARANOID THINKING AND BEHAVIOR CONSIDERED

In the last year, I participated in several Internet news groups. What became obvious to me is that some of the Igbo participants exhibit paranoid traits and don’t even know it.
I am motivated to help these people. I will, therefore, focus on paranoia, and show how such persons think and behave and then point out alternative patterns of thinking and behaving.
The terms persona and paranoia derive from Greek. (See Meissner, 1980) In ancient Greece, actors wore masks to hide their true identity, as they enacted plays on the theatre. They enacted real people’s personalities and behaviors, people who might be in the audience, and, therefore, thought it prudent to hide their identity, as they pointed out the not always healthy behavior patterns of their fellow citizens of Athens. Paranoia is Greek for denying ones real self and identifying with a different self. To the Greeks, to be insane is to deny ones true self and act as if one is a different self, apparently, a self that one considers a better self than ones real self.
The pioneers of psychology borrowed Greek and Latin terms. Persona, mask, was transformed into personality. The idea is that the human personality is a mask that the individual wears and that it merely hides his true self. Personality is an act, not reality. Each human being, as it were, hides his true self and learns those behavior patterns that his society would approve. In relating to other people, he presents a personality (which is the same as self concept and self image) to them to approve, a self image that he thinks that they would approve. The individual masks his real self and presents a socially approvable self to people to relate to in his social interactions.
Who the individual’s real self is, is not shown to other people. Indeed, the individual may not even know who his real self is. (My dear reader, do you know who your real self is? Are you just your body and or your personality? If not, who are you?)
Carl G. Jung observed that beneath the persona (lity) is another human being. Jung considered the real self that is hidden by the mask of personality a spiritual being. (See Jung, 1963)

Whereas all human beings, to certain degrees, wear masks, personas, have personalities, to be paranoid means that the individual has taken the phenomenon of personality to its logical conclusion. The normal person wears a personality and presents it to other people to approve but suspects that he is not his personality. On the other hand, the paranoid person thinks that he is his personality. The paranoid person, in effect, has taken the tree for the forest. He, like all people, has a cherished persona that he wears in society and wants other people to see him as that personality. At some point, he thinks that he is the persona he pretends to be.
The paranoid person now believes that he is the ideal self, ideal self concept and ideal self image, ideal personality that he wants to be but is not, in fact. He wants other people to see him as he wants to be seen, as the ideal, superior self he wants to be but, in fact, is not. He has completely denied his real self and identified with a false ideal self and wants other people to collude with him and validate that false self as his real self. He wants society to confirm his false self as his real self.
If the paranoid person is seen as the ideal self, the persona, the important mask, he feels good, if not, he feels upset. His real self feels inadequate and inferior. He rejects that real self and compensates with a pretended superior self. He wants other people to see him as a superior self. If they see him as a superior self, he feels okay, if not, he feels upset. His affect is a yoyo, up and down, depending on how he perceives other people as treating him. He is angry at those he perceives as not colluding with him and seeing him as a very important, superior self and anxious from anticipation of being degraded by other people. He closely scrutinizes other people’s behaviors and if they seem to be demeaning, humiliating, insulting, belittling, in a word, not recognizing his ideal self concept, ideal self image, high and mighty personality, he feels angry at them. His anger is an attempt to get people to see him as he wants to be seen: a very important, exalted and dignified self.
The paranoid person is generally very stiff, inflexible and humorless, all in an effort to seem very respectful and dignified. Important people, he thinks, do not crack jokes and do not laugh; only unimportant fools and clowns do so, so he is almost always serious and proper in demeanor.

ETIOLOGY OF PARANOIA

Paranoia is caused by a confluence of biological and social factors. Paranoids invariably inherited biological constitutions that make them feel weak and inadequate to the challenges of existence in our impersonal world.
As Alfred Adler (1911) pointed out, up to a point, all human beings feel inadequate. Paranoid persons tend to feel more inadequate than the average person. Obviously, biological factors contribute to the genesis of paranoia.
Sociological factors also play a role in the causation of paranoia. Consider Igbo society. Igbo society is very competitive. (See Victor Uchendu, the Igbos of South East Nigeria.) All children are told to compete and those who are more able to compete are positively rewarded. Those less able to compete are generally not positively reinforced. In fact, Igbos either ignore losers or makes fun of them. A non-competitive Igbo boy is called negative names and rejected by his cohorts. In time, he feels socially ostracized and marginalized.
Igbo society must be among the most competitive societies in the world. It is an achievement oriented society. Nothing is given to the individual by ascription; he has to earn whatever is socially valued. Achieve and you are a somebody, fail and you are a nobody.
Carl Rogers (1951) would say that this society is a neurotic society and that it is bound to produce many neurotic children. As Rogers sees it, children who are raised by conditionally accepting parents and society tend to become neurotic, that is, they tend to posit ideal selves that they think that society would approve and strive to become them and reject their real selves ala Karen Horney. (Horney, 1999)
On the other hand, Rogers thinks that a society that positively and unconditionally accepts all children as good is more likely to produce healthy self accepting children.
We do not need to quibble about facts. Igbo society is pathological. It accepts children conditionally. It, therefore, disposes those children who are less able to compete to fear failing. Some of such children, therefore, posit ideal selves that would like to become very important persons, indeed, superior persons, and present such false selves to other people to relate to.
In Igbo society, many adults behave as if they are the imaginary important, superior selves that they would like to be but that they are not, in fact. They spend an awful amount of mental energy defending the false, imaginary ideal and all powerful self that they imagine themselves to be that they are not. This social pretense is carried over to all aspects of their behaviors.
One such Igbo chap on Naija politics strives to seem the most intelligent person on the forum. He writes in convoluted, hiflutin and pedantic language that is calculated to make him seem like he is a genius. If his overly rational but superficial analysis is applauded by others, he feels fine, but if you dared point out that he is an emperor without clothes, he flies off the handle. He is almost always responding with anger and rage at those who dared point out that he is talking rubbish. Moreover, he seems to take particular joy in putting other people down, finding fault with them showing them as not perfect. This man spends his time and energy looking into other people’s backgrounds, with the intention of finding something negative in their history that he could use to show them up as not perfect human beings. He investigates where people went to school or not, what kind of education they have or do not have, all with the intention of making them seem unimportant. He is the only one that is entitled to be important, his paranoid thinking believes. Apparently, he satisfies his desire to seem superior to other people by making other people seem inferior to him. This is a cardinal trait of suspicious paranoid characters. Simply stated, this man is trying to become his imaginary ideal, superior self. He has paranoid personality disorder.
I believe that competitive Igbo society exacerbates whatever biological variable this paranoid Igbo man inherited that disposed him to paranoid thinking and behavior. Biosocial factors play roles in the etiology of paranoia.
(This paper is written for the average reader; therefore, it does not overly employ technical terms. If the reader wants technical understanding of paranoia, I refer him to David Swanson et al, The Paranoid; William Meissner, The Paranoid Process, and Psychotherapy for the Paranoid process; David Shapiro, Autonomy and the Rigid Character; and, of course, the purely descriptive DSM IV.)

LEVELS OF PARANOIA

There are many levels of paranoia: Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type; Delusion Disorder; and Paranoid Personality Disorder.
Briefly, in schizophrenia, the individual is psychotic; that is, he has delusions (believes in what is not true as true) and hallucinations (in any of the five senses… auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile and touch). Schizophrenia is every person’s idea of mental illness. It occurs in less than one percent of the human population. Within this small fraction of people, there are many subtypes of schizophrenia: paranoid, organic, disorganized, catatonic, simple, undifferentiated, residual etc. They are within the purview of psychiatrists, for they are generally managed with neuroleptic medications (such as Zyprexa, Risperdal, Seraquel, Geodon, and some of the older psychotropic medications like Thorazine, Prolixine, Navane, Millaril etc.) These people hear voices and see what is not seen by other people and generally have bizarre delusions, such as see themselves as god etc. For all practical purposes, they cannot operate in normal society. They are either at psychiatric hospitals or walk the streets as the insane persons folks see eating out of garbage cans. No one has figured out a way to heal them yet.
Delusion disorder means that the person believes what is not true as true. In delusion disorder there is no hallucination, just systematized delusions. (I call this disorder half psychosis, half insanity, for in complete insanity there is both delusion and hallucination, as in schizophrenia and in some severe Bipolar Affective Disorder.)
Generally, the deluded person has systematized delusions in some areas of his intellectual functioning but not in other areas. For example, he may believe that his wife wants to poison him with her food and not eat it, and still function appropriately in other areas of his social life. Genuine delusion disorder is very rare. I have seen less than ten patients with delusion disorder in twenty two years of working in the mental health field.
There are five types of delusion disorder: grandiose, persecutory, erotomanic, jealous, and somatic. Briefly, in grandiose type, the person believes that what is not true is true, for example, that he is the richest man in his world, or that he is the most intelligent man in the world, when he is not. In persecutory type, the person believes that someone or some people are out to kill him and hides from them, when those people do not have such intentions. In erotomanic type, usually more common in women, a woman believes that a famous man is in love with her and sometimes stalks him. She may believe that she is married to Jesus or any other socially important person. (Apparently, such beliefs make an inferior feeling person feel vicariously important). In jealous type, the person feels that his spouse or girl friend is cheating on him and follows her around, trying to catch her cheating on him; he generally misinterprets her behaviors and physically and or verbally abuses her. Many of the men involved in domestic violence actually have delusional jealousy. In somatic type, the person believes that she has a sickness that the medical profession is unable to figure out yet, and goes from doctor to doctor seeking treatment. (Apparently, this belief is a rationalization for her failure when she expects to be a success but fails.)
Paranoid personality disorder is characterized by desire to seem very important and superior to other people, accompanied with inner sense of inferiority and inadequacy. The paranoid personality feels inordinately inferior to other people and restitutes with desire for superiority. He posits a mask of superiority and acts as if he is that superior persona. The Igbo chap on naija politics obviously feels inferior and acts as if he is superior to other people. Although he is above average in intelligence, he is not gifted. But he presents himself as a superior intellect. He is not aware that a superior mind is not just claimed but seen by other people. In the political forum we read what each other write and most folks can easily make out those with superior minds. This Igbo brother is certainly not seen as particularly bright, pretended brilliance. He feels an inner compulsion to seem a gifted mind.
The paranoid personality wants to seem superior and for other people to see him as superior. Because of his desire for superiority, he fears been seen as inferior. Thus, he is very sensitive to being demeaned, belittled, humiliated, disgraced, degraded, criticized etc. Behavior by other people that give him the impression that he is treated in an undignified manner makes his false pride feel attacked and he reacts with anger.
He is always accusing other people of treating him, as if he is a nobody. Since other people did not treat him as such, they resent him accusing them of doing what they did not do and become angry at him. Thus, he stimulates attack on him by his accusatory behaviors. The subsequent attack from other people reinforces his hitherto belief that other people are hostile towards him. (He is hostile towards other people and projects his hostility out and sees a hostile world.)This phenomenon is called paranoid self fulfilling prophesy, he believes that people are hostile towards him, attacks them and they react in a hostile manner to him, making his belief seem true. What he does not realize is the role he plays in getting people to react negatively towards him.
The paranoid personality’s intellect is otherwise in tact. He may be a medical doctor, engineer, physicist or president of his country. Whereas his intellect seems in tact, his disordered personality disturbs his interpersonal relationships but does not affect his intellectual functioning.
He tends to over employ certain ego defense mechanisms, such as denial, projection, rationalization, intellectualization and dissociation. In the process, he comes across as rational The said Igbo chap on naija-politics appears intellectual, except that his intellect is really shallow; he is unable to nuance thinking and behaviors, he appreciates only the superficial, the seeming rational.
As Psychoanalysts tell us, behind rationality is irrationality. The paranoid personality is not a genuine intellectual, he is a wannbe intellectual.

For some reasons, there seems a higher incidence of paranoid personality among Igbos. I have pondered this issue and came to the conclusion that biosocial factors play a role in its genesis. I speculated that inherited biological constitution and Igbo competitive society play roles in producing Igbo paranoid personalities.
In most human populations, generally, less than one percent has paranoid personality, but in Igbo society that percentage is more like five. (The number of Igbo Schizophrenics appears to be the same as elsewhere in the world; the number of Igbo delusion disordered persons appear slightly higher than in other populations. It would be fascinating to perform a thorough epidemiological study to verify what my anecdotal observation suggests.)

THINKING AND BEHAVIOR IN PARANOIA

Paranoid thinking is probably the easiest thing in the world to understand. Unfortunately, the paranoid does not want to understand and or change his thinking and behaving patterns. He derives secondary gains from his thinking and behavior; he feels godlike from imagining himself superior to other people.
It is very difficult to heal paranoia. In fact, many psychotherapists don’t even bother taking paranoids as patients/clients. They see them as not likely to benefit from talk therapy and do not want to waste their time on those who do not want to change.
If a paranoid client walks into a therapist’s office and he administers psychological tests (MMPI, WAIS etc) and does verbal mental status examination, he easily diagnose him. That is the easy part. The difficult part is how to help him change.
The chances are that the paranoid client is more likely to have contempt for the therapist, and see him as naïve. He sees himself as superior to other people and sees the therapist as inferior to him, so how can the inferior therapist help him?
Factor in the paranoid’s lack of trust in other people’s good intentions and his belief that the therapist is not his friend and is not out to help him, you see an interesting dynamics developing. He is skeptical of the therapist’s good intentions and, in fact, doubts his knowledge. (The paranoid Igbo chap on naija politics doubted my knowledge and went as far as checking my credentials to see if I even went to school. His goal was to undermine my credibility so that he did not have to listen to me. That way, he retained his obvious mental disorder. Just about every person in the forum knows that he is a sick man. He is the only person who does not know that he is sick. Paranoids generally do not have insight into their problems.)
Whereas, therapists tend to give up on paranoid persons, they nevertheless understand their thinking and behaving patterns. Let us, therefore, explore paranoid thinking and behaving patterns and see whether they can be changed.
The paranoid person thinks that he is inferior. Talk to a paranoid person for an hour and you sense his deep rooted sense of inferiority and inadequacy. He generally tries, albeit futilely to deny his self assessment and tries to seem superior; indeed, he tends to project out what he sees in himself to others; thus, he sees others who seem inferior etc.
It is correct that all human beings, in degrees, feel inferior. The relevant point is the paranoid’s excessively sense of inferiority. He needs to stop worrying about other people’s inferiority and first accept his own sense of inferiority and address it squarely. He needs to understand why he feels inferior and compensates with superiority. He is the subject to be analyzed and healed. He should not divert attention from himself by focusing on other people’s minor sense of inferiority.
So why does the paranoid person feel inferior? There are combinations of causal factors in his feeling: biological and sociological.
Each individual is unique and, as such, inherited a unique biological constitution. We therefore need to explore whatever medical disorders the paranoid person inherited that exacerbated his or her sense of inferiority. Any number of medical disorders could make the individual feel unable to meet the challenges of his society hence increase his sense of inferiority.
Inferiority feeling does not have to lead to paranoia, if it is accepted and not denied. If a child feels inferior and his parents love him, in an unconditional positive manner, he is not going to develop paranoia. For example, I was born with spondylolysis and Mitral Valve Prolapse. Both medical disorders made me feel inferior. But my mother loved me in an unconditionally positive manner. My mother is a saint among women. Her love for her children was total. Surrendered by love, I trusted the people around me despite feeling inferior. Now, suppose that I was not loved in an unconditional manner, I can see myself feeling as paranoid as the said Igbo chap.
The paranoid person must explore why he feels inordinately inferior. In my experience, biological and sociological factors are implicated in the etiology of most mental disorders.
Different biological disorders can dispose different children to feel inferior Vis a Vis their environment. The individual therefore needs to understand what particular medical disorders run in his family that tends to make them feel inordinately inferior. Having done that, he needs to understand his family and society’s pattern of raising children. If it is conditional and competitive, he needs to explore the role of these in the origin of his self hatred, self rejection and aspiration after an imaginary ideal superior self.

FROM IDEALISTIC TO REALISTIC THINKING AND BEHAVIOR

The paranoid person tends to think idealistically. He rejected his real self and real every thing and posited an ideal self and ideal every thing and wants to become these ideal fictions. He posited a perfect ideal self and wants to become that perfect person. He wants other people to become perfect selves he made for them. Indeed, he wants the world to change and become the perfect ideal he wants it to become. All these are fantasies and are not going to happen. Fantasies or not, pursuing them makes him feel like he is powerful, like he created himself and created the world he wants to change and fit his self image.
Having explored the biosocial factors playing a role in his paranoia, he has to resolve to think realistically, not idealistically.
Generally, the individual does to other people what he does to himself? The paranoid person hates and rejects his body and self. He generalizes and hates and rejects other people’s real bodies and self. He wants to change himself; so he wants to change other people; he wants to become perfect, so he wants to make other people perfect; he wants ideal social institutions, so he wants society to have ideal social institutions; he wants an ideal world.

GIVING UP PARANOID JUDMENT AND CRITICISMS

The paranoid person posits an ideal self and uses that ideal fictional self and its ideal standards to judge real human beings. He uses the ideal standards of his false self to judge his real self, other people’s real selves and reality in general.
Since he is judging the real with an imaginary ideal standard, it is inevitable that he finds nobody good enough. He is always criticizing other people, pointing out their faults. The said Igbo chap is always pointing out other people’s faults. Nothing other people do or do not do is ever good enough for him. This is because he is looking at them from the perspective of an ideal standard.
(If a normal person reads this paper, for example, he would appreciate my effort to help; but the paranoid brother would be more invested in showing to the world that I do not know what I am talking about; his whole reason for being seems to be to show that people are imperfect, hence inferior to him. Of course, people are imperfect, I do not know much.)
Having appreciated paranoid thinking processes, we then show to the paranoid person how to stop wanting to seem ideal, superior and perfect.
The crux of his problem is his desire to seem better than other people. He must be taught to accept our human sameness and equality and give up the neurotic/psychotic desire to seem better than other people.

In eternity as in time, in heaven and on earth, all human beings are the same and equal. Let me repeat the obvious: we, man, woman and child are the same and coequal. No one is superior to other people. No amount of effort on any ones part can make him or her superior to other people.
Racist whites (usually paranoid personalities) tried very hard to seem superior to other races. The fact is that white folks are exactly the same as black and brown folks.
The paranoid person wants to seem superior to other people. He cannot gratify that wish in the world of reality, for the impossible cannot be gratified. In fact, if he believes that he is superior to other people and no longer merely wishes it, he has gone from neurosis, paranoid personality, to psychosis: delusion and or schizophrenia.
If he is fairly intelligent, the paranoid person is tempted to see himself as mentally superior to other people. He is not so. Although different people test out with different IQ levels, yet they are all the same and equal. The mentally retarded person with IQ lower than 70 is the same as the gifted person with IQ over 132.
(The said Igbo chap fancies himself mentally superior to others in the forum. His IQ is probably no more than 120, that is, he is above average but not in the superior range (over 132). How do I know this fact? He does not exhibit that subtle understanding of phenomenon found in the truly intelligent; he tends to be rationalistic and not understanding of true phenomenon. For example, recently, he has taken to saying that his fellow forumites feel inferior and act like they are superior. His observation is, of course, true. But what a truly bright person would do is try to understand why the people do so and try to help them out rather than seize it as an opportunity to desecrate them. The truly intelligent person wants to help suffering humanity, as Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Ramakrishna, Bahaullah and other religious geniuses did. The superficially intelligent use their shabby perception of phenomenon to destroy, rather than help.)
The paranoid person posits a self concept, and its pictorial form, the self image, and a personality that wants to seem superior to other people. He struggles mightily to become that seeming superior self.
It is the pursuit of the fictional superior self that produces his paranoia. He must, therefore, desist from seeking to become that false superior self and accept our sameness and equality.
This is obvious enough to normal persons. But the paranoid person does not want to give up his desired superior self. Indeed, if he gave it up, he might find his life suddenly meaningless and purposeless, for it is pursuit of the chimera of superior self and superior world that gave his life direction, movement and pseudo purpose. If he gave up seeking to be better than other people, he might experience the underlying depression that paranoid grandiosity is masking.
(Meissner, in The Paranoid Process, contends that paranoid persons are depressed persons, that they have low self esteem and use their grandiose self concept to mask their underlying depressed self view. In Psychotherapy and the Paranoid Process, Meissner argues that the paranoid’s grandiose self image must be given up and for him to accept his underlying depressed self opinion, and eventually work through his existential depression and come to accept the human reality of powerlessness. Meissner recommends that this process be aided by a competent therapist, for if the paranoid’s ego compensations are attacked and decompensated when he is not ready to recompensate at a normal level, he might experience transient psychosis where he goes from merely wishing to be godlike to believing that he is actually god, from garden variety neurosis to psychosis.)
The paranoid child is very perceptive and accurately appreciated the human condition as filled with pain and suffering. He hated and rejected that pain and suffering filled life. Instead of accepting that reality and making the most of it, he rejected it and used his imagination to invent an alternative reality, an ideal reality and wants to become it.
In therapy the paranoid must be helped to let go his ideal reality and embrace empirical reality. The truth is that all of us are imperfect and that we must still be loved and respected despite our imperfection. We must have the courage to accept and love our imperfect real selves. It is actually cowardly to reject the real, just because it is imperfect and seek to become the imaginary ideal.
The self rejecting paranoid person is a cowardly person; the truly courageous person accepts imperfect human beings, as they are. He loves people as they are, imperfect.
Mental health lies in ability to look ones self in the mirror, see ones imperfect self, ones weak body and still accept it as it is, not as it could become, perfect.
The paranoid rejected his real body and real self and wants to become an idealized body and self. That is not going to happen. He is wasting his time and giving himself unnecessary anxiety (from not attaining his ideal self).
He must let go of the desire to be an ideal self and accept who he is, in fact, an imperfect, ordinary human being.
Alas, he does not want to be an imperfect, ordinary human being. In fact, his delusions are efforts to convince him that he is a perfect, superior self.
Let us revisit the symptoms of paranoia and see how they exhibit his desire for superiority. Grandiosity: it is an effort to seem superior; persecution, it is an effort to seem superior, for one must be very important for others to exist to persecute one, one must be the numero uno for the entire police force of the land to have nothing better to do than try to kill one; one must be very important for ones wife to want to poison one, simply stated, persecution complex is an attempt to seem a special self; jealously, here the person wants to control the spouse. Control is power; so jealously really is paranoid desire for superiority. Erotomania, here a woman thinks that important persons are in love with her when they are not or that she is married to important person when that is not the case. What is going on here is that she feels inferior and attaching herself to seeming important persons makes her seem important; if she did not want to be superior, she would not struggle to seem married to god. Somatic type, here the person claims to have mysterious illness and uses it as an excuse to go from doctor to doctor; what she is doing is deriving a sense of superiority through illness and having doctors pay attention to her. I must say, however, that where there is hypochondrias there is always some unknown biological disorder.
Paranoid personality lacks trust in other people, is suspicious and fears being belittled. He does not trust on a higher power to protect him, he is the higher power who ought to protect him. In the real world, he is not that powerful, for he is not God. What is going on here is fear of being inferior, which really is desire for superiority. Simply stated, it is desire for superiority that is at the root of paranoia.

Every thing that the paranoid personality does is motivated by his fear of inferiority and desire for superiority. He is afraid of sameness and equality and wants to seem special. He must learn to accept our sameness and equality. He must give up his neurotic/psychotic wish for the impossible, superiority, to become possible.
The creations of God are inherently equal and there is nothing any human being can do to make any person superior to other people. The head of state is the same as the garbage collector. In fact, the garbage collector may even be more crucial for our survival than the idle politician. Consider, if the garbage collector did not collect our wastes, we would die from it. Politicians, particularly the African brand who do nothing for their people, are in the language of paranoia, inferior to garbage collectors. (In the language of mental health, every person is the same, there is no inferior or superior person; inferiority and superiority are delusions, false beliefs.)
Lest I appear overly optimistic and naïve, let me stress that it is very difficult to get the paranoid person to give up his desire for superiority and fear of inferiority. As far as I know, very few therapists (?) have ever succeeded in persuading paranoid persons to give up their delusions of superiority.
The mad man, apparently, prefers to walk the streets isolated from other human beings, rather than accept relating to other people. This is because he is unwilling to do what relationship requires: see all persons as the same and coequal with him. In his psychotic delusions, he imagines himself superior to other people. Since he is not so, other people leave him to live in his fantasy world. Thus, he pays the price of desiring specialness by being alone in the world.
To avoid being lonely, he must give up his desired special self and accept our equal self.

Paranoia is a result of certain thinking and behaving patterns: the desire for a special self. To heal paranoia, the paranoid person must learn to think and behave differently; to see him self as the same and equal to all people and to behave accordingly. He must resist the temptation to seem better than other people.
Any moment a human being yields to the temptation, which is always there, to think and behave as if he is superior to other people, he has disconnected himself to other people, in religious language, he has sinned.

In my experience, no one can heal paranoia unless we factor in the spiritual element. In fact, I think that the reason secular therapists have no track record of healing paranoia is that they took God out of the equation.
I think that paranoia arose from the individual’s efforts to take God out of his life, his rejection that God created him and that he did not create himself. His delusional efforts to seem special are really childish efforts to seem self created, beginning with his invention of the ideal self concept and its self image.
To heal paranoia, I believe that we need spirituality. I think that combined secular and spiritual psychology can heal paranoia and other mental illnesses.
Therefore, I will share with you my metaphysics. Do with it what you lay. It is not the only approach to God there is; there are infinite approaches to God, but this is the approach that makes sense to me.
Ultimately, my goal is not to get lost in theological disputations, but to enable the paranoid person to accept that he is not the author of reality, that God is. He must bow to his creator, God. He did not create himself, other people and the world, as his ego would like to believe. He must relinquish the wish to create himself and the world and accept the reality that a higher power created him and the world.

MEDICAL TREATMENT

Whereas mental health professionals do treat schizophrenia, paranoid type with the various neuroleptic medications and those medications appear to reduce hallucinations but not eliminate them (these medications, apparently, reduce the levels of the neurotransmitter, dopamine, in the central nervous system and somehow that reduces hallucinations), persons with paranoid personality disorder are generally not treated with medications.
Personality, normal and abnormal, is a systemic response to the environment; it is how the individual, his body included, responds to his world. It is, therefore, not just a product of biological disorders, although medical disorders contribute to it in as much as they play a role in the individual feeling inferior relative to our tough physical environment. Paranoid personality disorder, as well as other personality disorders are not medical issues and are not treated with medication.
However, every now and then, the paranoid person does feel anxious. His anxiety is probably psychological in nature, not medical. He posits and pursues a grandiose goal that he is never going to achieve. In the meantime, he struggles mightily to attain his goals and fears not attaining them. The fear of not becoming his ideal perfect self and not attaining whatever other big goals he set for himself produces anxiety for him.
Because he feels anxious, some medical doctors are tempted to give him some of the anti anxiety medications (such as valium, Librium, Xanax, Ativan etc). These may temporarily reduce his anxiety. But these medications have adverse side effects and are very physiologically and psychologically addictive; folks go through severe withdrawal symptoms trying to quit them, including experiencing visual and tactile hallucination and heart palpitations. It is, therefore, not a good idea to give paranoid personalities medications.
What is therapeutic for paranoid personalities, as well as other disordered personalities, is for them to change the pattern of their thinking and behavior; to cognitive restructure their mind through cognitive behavior therapy. The paranoid personality needs to give up his desire to be superior and stop acting as if he is superior to any one else. He needs to accept our sameness, equality and unified nature and work for our common interest. In Adlerian fashion, these persons need to dedicate themselves to serving social interest…Adler believed that serving social interest is the best therapy for neurosis, and, by generalization psychosis.
The paranoid Igbo brother in naijapolitics does not need medications; he just needs to change his pattern of thinking and behaving; he needs to accept all people as like him and work to uplift all people rather than try to destroy them through his tendency of trying to humiliate people, so as to feel superior to them…psychoanalytically, he feels humiliated by life and, therefore, wants to do unto other people what was done to him, to humiliate others; he feels belittled by life and wants to belittle other people etc. Now he must work to make life joyous for all people, if he is to heal his apparent paranoid personality disorder; if he heals his disorder, his obvious bright mind could be put to productive use for all Nigerians.

Continued...

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December 17, 2005

Do American Liberals have a Death Wish?

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- Given the current behavior of Liberals, one wonders whether they have developed a death wish. Do they want to marginalize themselves; indeed, do they want an end to liberalism? I do not know. One thing that I do know is that their current stance on many social issues indicates a wish to not be taken seriously as a political party.

The liberal wing of American politics has done the country a lot of good for one to stand by and witness it self destroy. One must, therefore, speak out, perchance the party changes its ways, and makes itself once more relevant in American politics. Think about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Barnes Johnson and the great good they did for America. What would America be without FDR’s New Deal legislations that radically altered the economy, from government’s lack of involvement in the welfare of the people to the present social compact whereby we all agree that Cain’s question: “Am I my brothers’ keeper”, must be answered in the affirmative. Think about LBJ’s great society programs that improved the lives of many poor minority persons, and certainly facilitated their entrance into mainstream American politics. Think about Harry Truman’s executive order that ended racial segregation in the military and the good it has done America. Yes, liberals have done America a lot of good that one wished they survived.
One wished that America’s two party systems survived. We need our two mainstream parties, one to the right of the center, and the other to the left of the center of the political spectrum. Both parties essentially accepted the underlying premises of the American polity: democracy and free enterprise economy. It is politically healthy for liberals to seek to have government be used for programs that served the people, particularly the poor and for conservatives, who understand the dangers of big government, to resist them and make sure that the government does not become so large that it begins to tell the people what to do.
John Locke’s wisdom that the best government is a limited one is balanced by John Maynard Keynes’ economic wisdom that sometimes we need to use the instrument of government to make sure that the seeming built in cycles of boom and bust in capitalist economies are ameliorated. The two parties, conservatives and liberals, balanced each other out, and the result is the excellent government we have had in this country.
Sometimes we need government intervention in, and regulation of, the economy, but realistic conservatives ascertain that the government does not go too far least it destroys the goose that lays the golden eggs. Liberals can get so carried away by their do good thinking that they want to use the government to solve just about every ill that dogs mankind, unaware of the consequences of what they are doing, enlarging the government to a point that it becomes monolithic and overbearing and begins to tell the people how to live their lives.
Think of the USSR’s government and its total control of society, all in the name of serving the people’s welfare, and how it became authoritarian and totalitarian, and, worse, killed the incentive for people to work hard and in the process essentially destroyed the Russian economy.
The free enterprise system, as envisaged by Adam Smith, has its built-in flaws and needs to be corrected by Keynesian thinking, but we must make sure that we do not go too far and over regulate the economy, and or take too much money out of the hands of hardworking people through taxes, that they no longer have the incentive to work hard. In short, America benefited from the struggles of the liberal and conservative wings of its system maintaining parties.
The thinking of liberals today suggests that they have decided to take themselves away from playing significant role in American politics. Perhaps, they have decided to exit American politics, and or be replaced by another party?
Our Anglo-Saxon tradition somehow works in such a way that two strong political parties exist in the land. This is certainly the way it is in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and until recently the United States of America. When one of the mainstream parties decides to die, it is replaced by the emergence of another, to maintain the traditional two-party system.
In Britain, the Liberal Party essentially marginalized itself and was replaced by the Labor Party, so that Britain continues to have two strong political parties, labor and Conservative. In the recent past, it was Liberal and Conservative Parties that competed to rule Britain.
In America, we had the Federalists and the anti Federalists factions, and later the Tories and Whigs, and much later the Democrats and Republicans. We have always managed to have two parties, and as one ruling party chooses to bow out, another replaces it. America has not been like continental European countries with their multiparty systems. Our traditional stability, among other factors, lies in our wise choice for two political parties, both of whom are system supportive. One of our parties always leans to the left and the other to the right. The weaknesses of continental Europe, inter alia, are attributable to their multi party system. Many political parties weaken the country so much so that occasional dictators were needed to restore some sort of stability in their polities.
Nature abhors power vacuum. If indeed the American Democratic Party has decided to destroy itself, the polity will spring forth another mainstream political party to replace it. But, in the meantime, one cannot help but ask why this otherwise acceptable political party is doing what guarantees its demise? Why are democrats indulging in social policies that alienate the American people?
Has the Democratic Party forgotten that political parties exist to articulate the wishes of the people, to compete for the right to win elections and translate public opinion into public policies? In a democratic polity, political parties do not tell the people what they should do, but do for them what they want done.
The American people do not want God removed from their social discourse, they do not want abortion on demand, and they do not want legalization of homosexuality. Yet the Democratic Party seems bent on forcing American people to accept these values.
America is a Christian nation. That is a fact and is not up for debate. However, our Founding fathers appreciated what happens in theocratic states and decided to separate church from state. They did not want to destroy religion but to make sure that secular rulers are not beholden to any particular religious sect.
If we are intellectually honest, we accept that we do not know what God is, or is not. All we know is that at a deeper level we feel that there is God.
History teaches us that sometimes some deluded individual has interpretations of what God is, or is not, and is motivated to superimpose his interpretations on the rest of society. Our founding fathers realistically appreciated that religion ought to be an individual thing, that no one ought to have others views of God imposed on him. Therefore, our founding fathers correctly insisted that religion had to be separated from the state. They wanted to leave individuals the freedom to gravitate to whatever interpretation of God makes sense to them, not the one that a state religion told them is true.
We witnessed the horrors of the Spanish inquisition and other Roman Catholic atrocities, such as making Galileo recant his scientific discoveries; we witnessed what the Church of England did to those who did not accept Oliver Cromwell’s particular view of God. Today, we witness what apparently deluded Islamic mullahs did in Afghanistan, Iran and other places in the Muslim world.
Today’s liberals consider themselves so smart that like the fool, they know that there is no God. With little scientific understanding, they are convinced that God does not exist. They see belief in God as superstitious and want to eradicate it from our society. They want our society to remove all symbols of God from its public institutions. They have joined forces with the godless ACLU and other knows it all organizations to remove God from American society.
Given man’s sinful nature, he needs moral agents to continue to teach him to behave morally. Indeed, it is doubtful that a human civilization can exist without religion?
The question is not whether there should be religion or not, but to make sure that our efforts to reconnect to our source is as rational as is possible. But liberals want to remove all signs of religion from America. They want to do so even though over 90% of Americans say that they believe in God. Apparently, these liberals believe that they know more than religious Americans do and want to impose their deemed better understanding of the nature of phenomena on all Americans. In so doing, they have become dictators and want to ram their godlessness on a godly people.
If democracy means government by the majority of the people, liberals who want to impose their godlessness on Americans are not democrats. One cannot see why less than ten percent of the people should be making policies for the 90% of the people who believe in God.
Abortion is another area where liberals want to impose their views on Americans. History teaches us that no matter what we do some women would become pregnant and want to get rid of their pregnancies. Whereas the best policy is to encourage those women to carry their pregnancy to term, and if they do not want their children, give them up for abortion, the reality of human fickleness is that some women seek abortion. Okay, abortion is a reality of life, so make it available for those who want it. Roe Versus Wade is a necessary evil. We do not need to go back to the past when women who wanted abortion resorted to back alley quack doctors to satisfy their wishes.
Nevertheless, to abort a child is to kill a child. A society that accepts the killing of children simply because some women do not want them is devaluing life. If abortion on demand is accepted, sooner or later, we must so devalue life that we shall have eugenic social policies. It should be remembered that the founders of the Planned Parenthood movement were not only eugenics but wanted to prevent poor persons, particularly minority persons from having children. These people were not always the angels they made themselves out to be. They may be nihilists.
Empirical observation indicates that certain persons are unproductive elements in society. The mentally ill and the developmentally delayed are examples. If life is to be preserved on the basis of pragmatism, as abortion choosing feminism teaches, it follows that we should exterminate the unproductive elements of society? These people are kept alive because society values all lives; they are kept alive through the support of normal persons’ taxes, taxes they themselves do not pay.
If abortion on demand or so-called women’s right to choose becomes cavalierly accepted, the next logical argument is to destroy those we do not want in society, those who do not contribute to the economy and who must be supported by the tax payers. Therefore, to avert cheapening human life, every rational society discourages abortion as much as is possible, while understanding that some form of it will always exist.
Realism teaches us that man is not an angel, and is not going to become perfect in the near future. So, rational persons tolerate some abortion but not make it an admired social policy.
What do the Democrats do? They jump in bed with death seeking radical feminists who teach abortion on demand, and want society to make abortion very easy. They accept the dangerous hypothesis of a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body. True, we all must choose what to do with our bodies, but if what you do with your body entails killing another human being; your right must be limited by society. When behavior has negative consequences for other human beings, we all must intervene to make sure that it is prosocial, not antisocial.
Some abortion must be allowed, such as when a woman’s life is in danger, and when pregnancy is as a result of rape, but reason teaches that in other instances society ought to discourage abortion, so as to preserve the sanctity of human life.
The Republican Party wisely adopts this benign neglect policy towards abortion. The party looks the other way as abortion bent women get what they want. But the Democratic Party chooses to forsake reason and mouth the death welcoming logic of radical feminists who want women to kill their children on demand.
These feminists are unaware that the logical consequences of their choice are the killing of women themselves. Just look at what is happening in China. Male dominated society and logic teaches that men will always dominate society because stronger animals always dominate weak ones, generally prefer male to female children. Developments in ultra sound technology have made it possible to ascertain the gender of the child in the womb, and if the choice is what child to abort, the chances are that it would be the female child. It is already happening in China and could happen here. If we are still an adult reasoning society, we understand why society prefers boys to girls: in times of war, and war is always a part of human society, we need strong men to defend society.
The other perplexing policy choice of Democrats is their support of legalization of homosexuality and the oxymoronic concept of same sex marriage.
It is true that throughout the animal kingdom there are always those animals that prefer sex with their gender. Probably about one to two percent of the human population has always been homosexual, two percent pedophiles, two percent psychotic, two percent developmentally delayed, and two percent antisocial. In every large population, deviance from the norm exists in the order of one to two percent.
There seems nothing we can do to change reality. We cannot wish homosexuality away just as we cannot wish criminals, pedophiles and the mentally ill away. We have to live with these deviant persons. We have to tolerate them, but toleration is not approval. Toleration does not mean that we should normalize deviancy, as the homosexual lobby would have us do. These people would like nothing better than for normal society to approve their self-destructive lifestyle, thereby making us party to it. They are seeking assisted suicide and some of us refuse to help them do so, though they are free to destroy themselves by themselves.
The main argument of the homosexual lobby is that they are the way they are as a result of biological determinism. By the same token, criminals are probably determined by their biology?
If it can be demonstrated that there are genes disposing to antisocial personality disorder, should we therefore legalize criminality?
There is putative biological factor in the etiology of the major mental disorders (schizophrenia, Delusional Disorder, Bipolar Affective Disorder, Depression etc.). Should we, therefore, stop seeking a cure for these mental disorders and simply say that because nature predisposes persons to disordered thinking, and to hallucinate in one or more of the five senses that they should be accepted as normal?
Why don’t we permit known schizophrenics and or deluded persons to become our political leaders? Why decry an Adolf Hitler who obviously had delusional disorder, grandiose type, being in politics? Why not tolerate deluded politicians who believe that we ought to kill our enemies even if those enemies are the product of their overheated imaginations?
If we put away political correctness, it is obvious that intelligence is largely inherited. We know that about two percent of the population of all races tends to have superior IQ (over 132), two percent tends to have inferior IQ (under 70) and that the rest of us have average intelligence (IQ 100-110, with some being above average, IQ between 120-130). Since about two percent of the population inherited inferior intelligence should we then stop making efforts to improve their lives and simply accept them as they are?
Research will soon show that some people are born with preference for sex with children. Yes, there are adult men who want to have sex with six-year-old children. Satan’s revered priest, Paul Shanely, wrote articles arguing that adult men should have sex with six year old or even younger boys. The North American Adult-boy Association devotes itself to seeking civil rights for adult men to have sex with one-year old children.
Whereas rational adults want to protect children, cowardly ones want to have sex with them. If you must have sex, why not do so with fellow adults and obtain their permission rather than from children whom you can intimidate into doing whatever you want them to do for you? Cowardice is afoot in the land, and these contemptible and dastardly people who ought to be shot on the spot now ask for their civil rights to inflict pain on children.
Since it can be proved that pedophiles are predisposed to be so by their genes, should society approve it? Why not? If we are going to approve homosexuality on the basis of its biological causation, why not approve other odious behaviors that are possibly determined by individuals’ biological constitution?
Just thinking about what homosexuals do makes the average male want to throw up. It takes some sort of inherited predisposition for a man to overcome what is otherwise a shameful act, and ask another man to insert his penis into his anus and mouth and call that absurd activity enjoyable. Obviously nature made the penis to go into the vagina, not the anus or mouth. (Homosexuals do not want the public to know what they do, to prevent public disgust at them; therefore, we must let the public know what these creatures do.)
Odious as homosexuality is, experience teaches us that we are not going to wish it away. In fact, if you oppose it, its practitioners are more likely to engage in it. They would do so as an act of defiance.
God’s children are a defiant lot and would defy whatever you tell them not to do. They would do so if only to tell you that you cannot make them behave in a certain manner, hence have power over them. They want to seem like they have power, and control and can do whatever they feel like doing. Indeed, some have argued that the world itself began as an act of defiance of God and is maintained by continuing defiance of God.
Rational persons, therefore, desist from telling other human beings what to do; they do not preach against homosexuality, they simply ignore it. If folks want to desecrate themselves, that is their prerogative, provided they take the consequences of their actions. Placing ones penis into feces is likely to lead to infection with bacteria, virus and fungus. Homosexuals tend to incur sexual and other diseases at a greater rate than heterosexuals. This is not including the fact that their sexual practices so widen their anuses that in their old age they practically have feces drooping out of their bowels. Many of them have to wear diapers.
There is a price to be paid for childish oppositional defiant behavior. If in your effort to seem powerful and in control of your body and what you do with it you defy nature, you must pay a price. Homosexuals pay a terrible price for their childish behavior and one does not worry about it. Adult reasoning tells one that all of us must take the consequences of our behaviors, so one does not loose sleep if one sees decrepit old homosexuals.
So you want to be homosexual? Be my guest and do as you please, provided you do not do what you do in my presence? Rational persons adopt a live and let live policy without supporting homosexuals’ self-destructive life style.
The Democratic Party forsakes prudence and wants to pass laws to legalize every absurd life style they see. They want to legalize so-called same sex marriage. They know that over 70% of Americans do not approve of homosexuality but they want to ram down our throats their absurd friend’s insistence on ramming things down people’s throats. They want to convert all of us to the wish of normalizing deviancy. Indeed, one of these days they would want us to see deviancy as normalcy. (Just wait and see; if homosexuality is legalized, the very next day the battle would be to legalize pedophilia. When societies begin to decay, they do so quickly.)
The homosexual lobby argues that homosexuality is a civil rights issue. They equate their struggle with black Americans struggle for civil rights. They point out that if left alone that white Americans would not have permitted whites and blacks to intermingle, that it took laws that did not respect racist whites’ desires to give blacks civil liberties. Even the devil Bible quotes scripture to make its case.
There is a difference between civil rights for blacks and civil rights for homosexuals, pedophiles, criminals and other antisocial persons. Blackness is a biological state. As far as one knows, no one chooses his race?
Homosexuality is a behavior. Individuals can choose their behaviors. Homosexuals can choose not to do the disgusting thing they do. Of course, they have a right to choose to do what they do but they do not have a right to ask us to approve it. If they want to destroy themselves, the universe permits that, but they do not have a right to ask us to be a party to their assisted suicide.
While we are on the subject of the similarity of black civil rights and so-called homosexual civil rights, let us point out that Africans loathe homosexuality. They consider it insulting and degrading to equate their struggle to be free men with homosexuals’ struggle to be perverted men.
In traditionally African societies, people did not approve homosexuality. Yes, there were homosexuals and other deviants in Africa but what happened was that these creatures were told to leave their villages and never to return. They were ostracized and banished for life. Those who engaged in incest were literally banished. (Ah, soon, there will be a battle cry by the decadent to legalize incest. Why not? Every thing that occurs is natural, as Homosexuality occurs and is natural, incest occurs and is natural, and so it must be legalized. As Dostoyeski said in Brothers Karamazov, once we remove God from social discourse, every behavior is permissible.)
Please take note of what is going on in the World Anglican Church. African Anglicans adamantly opposed the consecration of same sex marriages. Indeed, they have influenced the kicking out of the American Episcopal Church from the Anglican community for elevating a gay bishop, Robinson, to that high position. American Episcopalians have desecrated the Church of Christ, and Africans want them out or they go form their own Church of Christ. Let narcissistic gay Americans Episcopalians go worship their bodies, their craven idols, and leave other Christians to worship the God of the Bibles that tells us that a man should not lay with another man (Leviticus, 18:22).
Finally, there is considerable historical evidence that when homosexuality is permitted into the open that society degenerates and dies. Greek civilization died when it permitted the two percent perverted men in it to desecrate boys. Roman civilization died when it permitted the likes of Nero to abuse boys. All things being equal, Western civilization will die if it permits the legalization of the abusive behavior called homosexuality.
We must remember that great empires come and go and are replaced by others. Already China and other Asiatic peoples are poised to replace us, and would gladly do so if we permit our society to degenerate and collapse.
One is simply baffled why Democrats support every thing that is decadent and repulsive? Why do these so-called liberals depart from the struggle to improve every one lives to destroying people’s lives?
Democrats have gone sentimental and no longer appreciate the evil nature of human beings. They have bought the sentimental claptrap of academic professors who teach that human beings are good by nature and, as such, ought to be treated with kid gloves. History teaches us that men do prey on other men. In the state of nature, Thomas Hobbes hypothesized that life was nasty, brutish and short because all preyed on all. In the real world of international politics, nations prey on other nations. Therefore, adult reason teaches us to always be prepared for other nations attack on us. We must always try to balance power with whoever has power to defeat us.
As John Stuart Mill pointed out in On Liberty, our liberties are safeguarded by our eternal vigilance, and by military strength. Become weak and other nations would chew you up.
If American had not developed a strong military, the slaves of communism would today be governing us; America would be another republic in Russia’s empire of slaves. And if we do not continue to make our military second to none in the world, China and other Asiatics would gladly take our country over. In the face of this historical reality, Democrats want to weaken our military.
One watched John Kerry talk nonsense about withdrawing our troops from the Middle East. If we did not fight Arab Muslim terrorists in their lands, we would have to fight them on American streets. As a matter of fact, President Bush has not gone far enough in trying to counter Muslim terrorists. He ought to insist on change of regimes in all Middle Eastern lands. He ought to insist that their governments be elected in a democratic manner because history teaches us that elected governments who have to obtain their people’s periodic approval in order to stay in office hesitate to go to wars or support terrorists. It is autocrats that go to war at their whims.
I suggest that the United States government adopt a policy of not recognizing unelected governments worldwide. We can relate to these non-democratic governments through our embassies but they should never be permitted to talk to our elected officials like the president and congressmen. Oriental despots and their minions can talk to our appointed officials like the Secretary of state and his deputation in other countries, ambassadors, but not to our democratically elected officials.
We also ought to get the United Nations to change its charter and require only elected governments to have membership in the United Nations.
These very simple measures could get most of the oriental despots to suddenly become democratic and, as such, pose less threat to America.
The primary function of government is to protect the people from each other, and from external others. We must, therefore, have a strong military and fight wars that protect our liberties.
Give the military whatever it wants, if you want your liberty, but the Democrats want to destroy the military just as they want to destroy every value Americans cherish.
I do not know why Democrats are bent on self-destruction and the destruction of America along with it. What I do know is that if the Democratic Party continues on the path it is on, it will be marginalized and become irrelevant in American politics. The Republican Party would become the dominant party, and, perhaps, in time a new Social Democratic Party would rise to replace what has increasingly become a moribund Democratic party.
Perhaps it is time for the Democratic Party to go? But if it wants to survive, it must restructure itself and stop espousing destructive social policies.

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December 13, 2005

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December 13, 2005

The Nature of Sanity and Insanity (Part 2)

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- Come to your creator as he created you, not as you made you. Give up the self you made to replace the self he created you as. Come home to what Buddha called selflessness. (A better name for it is no-separated self, for you still have a self, a unified Christ self.)

TWO JOURNEYS: OUTWARDS AND INWARDS

Let me rephrase what I have said above. We all undertake two journeys, the first an ego based, outwards, separating journey; the other, a Christ based, homewards bound, unifying journey.
During the first journey, we separate from God, from our true self and from other people and come to the world and look after our self’ interests. This is earthly man. This journey is directed by the ego, by self interests.
During the second journey, we let go of the ego and trust in the Holy Spirit to direct us. The Holy Spirit directs the journey homewards, to our real home and real self, the unified Christ.
During the ego directed journey, ones ego is swollen and one feels in charge of ones life. One pays the price of feeling fear, anxiety, anger, hate, hostility, grievance, revenge, lack of love, lack of peace, having personality disorder, shame, pride, humiliation, belittlement, avoidance, all in a futile effort to keep the big ego. In extreme cases, one experiences depression, paranoia, mania, schizophrenia and so on.
During the homewards bound journey, the journey inwards, love and the Holy Spirit guides one and one does not feel any of the noxious effects of the outward bound journey. One is in peace and loves all people and is always happy.


FORGIVENESS

Forgiveness is overlooking the world one sees (a world one, along with other people, invented). One gives up ones ego ideals, ones plans to improve the self and world one made so as to seem all powerful from doing so. One overlooks all the hurts one had felt that made one feel angry. One loves all people, not their egos and bodies, but the spirit of Christ, union, in them. One does not judge people’s ego/body behaviors as good or bad, for those behaviors are by definition insane, since they are based on the ego and the ego is insane. What is done in insanity is neither good nor bad; what needs to be done is over look them, forgive them, to see what is truly good, unified spirit.


THE PURSUIT OF IDEALISM, FANTASY

In the past one sought an ideal ego, ideal other people, ideal social institutions, and ideal world. These ideals are not going to come about. The ideal is mentalistic, an idea, a concept, a cognition devoid of physical properties.
Ideals exist apart of matter but real human beings live in bodies, matter; their bodies limit what they do.
In our imaginations, fantasy, we do everything, including flying. In imagination, ones weak body becomes strong and one does what one could not do in the physical world: such as excel in sports and work. Idealism is a waste of time and energy, for what is idealized and desired will not come into being.
The pursuit of ego idealism is really an escape into fantasy. One negates the world of realism and lives in fantasy. One is not doing what the real world asks of one to adapt to it. Neurotics and psychotics are usually unproductive people; indeed, the psychotic is not even able to support himself materially and others have to feed him. Still, it is true that these people did not like the world they saw and want to negate it. Negation of the world is cowardly and escapist. The courageous thing to do is to understand the self that one does not like. We must study the ego in as objective a manner as is possible, that is, study the science of psychology. We must then design a technology of thinking, mind, (Cognitive Behavior Therapy) that enables the individual to properly adapt to the exigencies of this world rather than escape from it.

JUDGMENTALNESS

Having posited his ideal mentalistic yardsticks, the idealist uses them to judge real human beings’ behaviors. He is always judgmental of himself and other people.
In doing so, he makes life miserable for himself and other people, those he judges. Judgment of the physically real with the imaginary ideal is actually an insane behavior, for it merely makes ones self and other people miserable without improving any ones life. Life on earth is not going to become art; reality is not going to be fiction, for earthly reality is circumscribed by matter, space and time.
The neurotic and psychotic mind comes up with ideals. Even though the ideal self is not real, the neurotic identifies with it and from its standpoint talks and behaves. The proud identify with a proud self and try to talk as if they are their superior proud self. They feel angry when their proud self is humiliated; they feel fearful when others threaten their ideal self. That is, the ideal self, though mentalistic, is of the mind, if believed and acted on, seems real to one and elicits all the affects in one.
If one identifies with the false, one feels as the false would when attacked: fearful, angry, sad, paranoid, hateful etc.
It is the false ideal self that feels all those upsets, the real self does not know fear, pride, shame, anger etc.
Reality is not wished, it is what it is, spirit. We wish for an alternative to it, a purely mental alternative.
Thinking, mind, can wish whatever it wants and pursue them and they seem real to it. We defend what we desire and in doing so they seem real to us.
We use matter, body to defend the idea of having a self concept, a separated special self and that makes it seem real to us. We use space, time and matter, all illusions to make these separated selves seem real and they seem real to us. We dream them but they are not real.


IN DREAMS WHAT WE WISH THAT CANNOT BE FULFILLED IN REALITY ARE GRATIFIED


In our daily lives, we are limited by the reality of physical and social laws. We cannot fly unless we have wings. We cannot do all sorts of things. At night we sleep and dream and in our dreams do most of the things we wished to do during day time that we could not do. Dreams offer us opportunity to fulfill our childish, impossible wishes, to make reality of what we want it.
In reality, we are unified and were created by God; in dreams, on earth, we seem separated and self created. Once I had a dream with Jesus in it. In it, I made Jesus tell me to go write my own book on metaphysics, that is, I made him fulfill what I wish to do, write a book on metaphysics. I used Jesus to tell me to do what my ego wants to do.
What my ego wants to do, replace Jesus, if given to the Holy Spirit, can be done, not in a competitive manner but in a cooperative manner, for Jesus needs to be replaced, Bhakti religion need to be replaced with Jnana thinking.
The world is wish fulfillment, we wished to destroy God, union and replace it with separation. We seem to have destroyed union and live individuated lives. We seem to have destroyed Christ and replaced him with the ego.


EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS TO THE INDIVIDUAL IS HIS WISH FULFIMENT

Every thing that happens to the individual is his wish fulfillment. Everything happens to one exactly as one wish it, for the world is a dream in which our wishes seem realized for us. If you wish to have sex with others, you will do so in your dream. If you wish to be poor, you will be poor (for poverty makes your ego seem real to you). If you wish to be discriminated by your white brothers, you will be discriminated and discrimination makes your ego seem real to you and makes you feel justified anger and attack them and they defend themselves.
Ego wishes and dreams on earth can be understood and replaced. They can be replaced with unified wishes, still wishes hence a dream, and dreamed of.
In Holy Spirit directed wishes and dreams, one forgives and loves all people. One brings union to separation, heaven to earth, love to hate. A place where love is brought in becomes a holy place.
One is still in the world of wishes and dreams but because ones wishes now approximate heaven’s purpose of union, one is peaceful and happy.
Ones hitherto wishes for poverty and experience of poverty made ones ego seem real to one; now that one does not wish to be an ego and wish an abundant self, one would no longer be poor or suffer. This is so because if one forgives and loves all people, they forgive and love one and make ones living peaceful, happy. People who feel loved by one feel peaceful and happy around one and will reciprocate the favor; some will do their best to help one, such as open the doors of opportunity to one. Love opens doors to wealth.

The world is our individual and collective wishes represented in dreams. Nothing can happen to the individual outside his wishes (thinking) and dreams where those wishes are fulfilled.
One may deny that one wishes for what happens to one, but reality is what it is. I, for example, wished for white America to abuse me and I got what I wished. Those white Americans who wish to abuse blacks abused me.
No one is guilty for I got what I asked for. Now I wish to be loved. I love and forgive all people and they love and forgive me and make live abundant for me.
When I was a kid, I used to wish that I had a body that no bullet could destroy. I would then single handedly take over the government and transform it into doing what I thought was good for the country (mostly socialist ideals). This is fantasy. It is not going to happen, for empirically, bullets do destroy bodies; there is nowhere in history where bodies are not destroyed by bullets. History, reality, is not going to make an exception for me.
I wished to transform Africa into a modern society. That is not going to happen. Africa will evolve gradually and in the next couple of centuries catch up with other continents. Africans must learn to walk before they can run; they are not going to be at Western levels of scientific and technological attainments without first developing the educational and other infrastructures that are necessary for doing so.

Actually, my failure in life is attributable to my pursuing ideals. I do not pursue the real and did not do what is doable in the world of matter, space and time. I rejected the real and quested after the imaginary. I rejected my body, matter, space and time and sought the ideal, the mentalistic alternative to the real, that which is not going to come into being.
First, I dwelled on ego ideals and later on spiritual ideals. Both ego and spiritual ideals are concepts, mental constructs and will not occur in space, time and matter. Therefore, seeking ego and spirit ideals are ways of guaranteeing ones failure on earth.
I do not like any job in the real world; I do not even want to work within the parameters of known organizational bureaucracies. For example, I could not work for the United Nations for I did not want to operate under its political culture where the powerful nations tell the weak ones what to do. To pay my bills, I take dead end jobs; hence do not make good income.
Once you reach a fork in the road and reject the ego and its world, you cannot go back and embrace it. You have already rejected it. You may doodle and dream for a better world, fantasy, idealism, and waste your time. What you need to do is seek spiritual realism, not spiritual idealism.
Spiritual realism is not wished for; spirit is there and if you do what you must do to experience it, you experience it. If you meet spirit’s conditions, forgive and love all people, you experience it.
You did not make the spiritual world, God created it. How you experience it is beyond your ego understanding.

DISCUSION

All human beings have mental illness, for to be human is to be mentally ill. A human being and ip so facto denied his real self and identified with a false self hence is living a false existence. Whoever denies his true self is mentally ill.
Psychiatry correctly diagnoses people as having this or that mental disorder. Most of the Diagnoses in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual are true mental states and ought to be treated. What is wrong is that the West does in lieu of treatment of mental disorders.
In this world, we all rejected our true self and live as false selves. We live in a collective illusion, Maya. Those who live within the context of the collective dream are said to be normal.
At this moment, about 90% of the people are normal, about 2% have psychoses (schizophrenia, delusional Disorder, Bipolar affective disorder etc), 6% has personality disorders and 2% has mental retardations (IQ under 70).
That is to say that most human beings are normal, and are operating within normal insanity. Abnormal persons, in addition to undergoing our collective ego dream, undertake individualistic dreams that are outside the norm. Like every human being on earth, they denied their real self and identified with a false separated ego self. For some reasons, their ego selves are unable to adapt to the realities of this world. They, therefore, reject them. They then invent different separated selves, egos, ones that are outside the orbit of what society calls the normal self.
The abnormal person wants to use his new self to replace his normal self. Thus, he has two levels of insanity: the normal insanity he shares with all people on earth and a secondary insanity (neurosis and or psychosis), he shares with no one. Such persons substitute the false self they individually invented for the normal self we collectively invented. They then want everybody to accept their secondary replacement self as their true identity. They struggle mightily to get themselves and other people to accept their secondary ideal, powerful and perfect self as their true self. They struggle to get society to approve their false secondary self as their true self. They want to make the unreal real; make an illusion real.
Neurosis is the effort to make an unreal self real. Psychosis is the belief that the false self is already a true self. The insane person believes that his false self, the self he wishes to be, the ideal, powerful and superior self is real and defends it. He avoids living in proximity with other people, lives isolated existence and wanders the streets and byways of this world, alone, just so that he convinces himself that he is his wished for ideal, perfect self.
The insane person avoids other people, so as to gratify his wish for a delusion to be true. In isolation, the untrue is made to seem true. In the collectivity, even here on earth, only what the group agrees upon as true is true. Since the group does not agree that the man who sees himself as better than other people is so, they reject him, and wishing to retain his illusion of specialness, he leaves the group and wanders the byways of this world, living in his own world, talking to himself and seeing what is not seen by other people.

SELF CONSCIOUSNESS

Human beings are self consciousness. Indeed, some claim that self consciousness is what separates human beings from other biological organisms. (How do we know that other animals are not self conscious?)
Some human beings are extremely self conscious. They feel like other people are always looking at them, evaluating them, seeing whether they are good or not. (This may be called ideas of self reference and centrality. See Swanson et al, The Paranoid; William Meissner, Paranoid Process, Psychotherapy for Paranoid Process.)
Shy persons are generally self conscious. Self consciousness is associated with anxiety. Why so? The self conscious person posits a self he wants to become, usually an ideal self concept and ideal self image. He then wonders if other people see him as he wants to be seen, as ideal (superior and perfect). He fears that other people may see through his mask, and see him for what he is, not ideal. Anxiety derives in fear of not being seen as the ideal perfect self he wants to become.
The ideal self is a false self, it is not who the individual is, in fact. Only the false separated self can be self conscious. In fact, self consciousness is a futile effort to make the false separated self real. Thinking that other people are always looking and examining the separated self makes the separated self seem real in its awareness.
Human beings feel self conscious because they want to be their ideal separated selves. To the extent a person does not identify with the separated special self, he does not feel inordinately self conscious. (See Burke, Cosmic Consciousness.)
The separated self is the self consciousness self; the real self is not self conscious. The real self knows itself to be unified with other selves and does not know other people as apart from it. Since other people are part of one, they cannot be looking at one and evaluating one as either good or bad. It is the false self concept that feels evaluated by other separated selves and feels anxious, fearful etc.


MENTAL ILLNESS IS SEPARATION FROM OTHER PEOPLE; MENTAL HEALTH IS UNION WITH OTHER PEOPLE

On earth, we have all separated from the collectivity, known by religions as God. If we had not separated from the whole we would not be on earth. We came to earth to seem separated from the whole and from the other parts of that whole. We invented space, time and matter to make separation seem real. Each of us is in a body and body gives him a sense of boundary from other people; body makes separation seem real to the individual. Space between people and the time it takes to reach people make separation seem real. We live in a world of separation.
Those who live in the world of separation, by definition, have denied the truth. The truth is eternal union. The truth is union of all things.
Actually, the individual has no choice but to accept union, for it is the truth. You deliberately denied the truth and decide when you will accept it. I cannot tell you when you will accept it, for every child of God has the freedom to decide when to accept truth, indeed, he has already decided when to accept it. My function as a dibia is to remind you of the truth, not to force it on you.

Eventually, we must all return to union. We must all return to love. We must all return to God. We must all jettison our false separated self concepts and embrace our real self, the unified self. When we jettison the false separated self housed in body and embrace the unified self we become mentally healthy.
In unified state, we think as unified self, not as separated self. Unified self is spirit and cannot be in body. While in body, forms, we can, however, choose to approximate unified self by forgiving and loving every person on earth.
Forgiveness, as brother Jesus taught us, brings us closer to our real self, and as Sister Helen Schucman taught us, in her metaphor galore manner, brings us to the gate of heaven. Forgiveness gives us a happy dream and makes us live as close to the real self and real world as is possible. Forgiveness brings us close to heaven that we might as well be said to be living in heaven, the real world.
In our present world, there are levels of separation and pursuit of specialness. As noted, all of us are separated and pursue specialness. The majority of us are normal separated persons, or as I call it, normal insane persons. A handful of the people, no more than two percent of the population, are abnormal insane persons (Psychotics). A few more are neurotics and or personality disordered persons.
Schizophrenia, Delusion disorder, Mania, depression, anxiety disorders, personality disorders are more intense means of separation. These people invented more disordered special selves; they want to be perfect selves and since that cannot be possible, even on earth, for we are all the same and equal, in eternity and on earth, they separated from even the normal insane world and live in their own more insane world.
All mental illness, normal or abnormal, is pursuit of special self via separation. All mentally ill people desire superior selves and separate from other people, so as to go maintain their false superior selves. They would rather be alone, and keep their false big self than return to other people and accept our equal unified self.
(RD Laing made psychotics out as mystics and Thomas Tzas denied the reality of mental illness. Both were right and wrong; the mentally ill rejected the extant world and replaced it with his own inventions and defends that world, an illusion. It is an illusion for it is defended with fear. The real is not defended with fear and anger. Thomas Tzas is wrong in saying that mental illness is a myth; people do have mental illness and need to be healed, not through medications but through changing their thinking patterns.)
Mental disorder derives from efforts to have a false perfect self. To be mentally healthy, the individual must give up the wish that led to his mental illness. He must relinquish the desire for a special self and must stop the desire for separation. He must accept that God created him and that he did not create himself. He must give up his childish separated self, the self he invented to replace the self God created for him, the holy, unified self. He must give up the separated self concept and its self image; he must give up his ego and personality and accept the Christ self.

While still in the world of space, time and matter, it is impossible to entirely give up the separated special self and still live in this world. This world is a place of separation and specialness and those who live here must have separated selves. The most that one can do is have a normal special separated self, that is, attain normal state, normal insanity.
If you think that you have a separated self, as you must do if you are on earth, and then use it to love all people. When one uses ones ego, false as the ego may be, to love other egos, one is normal. One feels some peace and happiness. One attains what Bahaullah called the less peace. One is at the gate of heaven (Dante’s purgatory).
The lesser peace is not the same as what the Iranian mystic called the greater peace. The greater people lie only in heaven, in the totally unified world of spirit. There are no forms in heaven, so that is out of the question in the world of the here and now.
We are currently in form and that is okay. Just use your form, use your ego and body to love other children of God who also believe that they are in forms.
This means changing your pattern of thinking, from desiring special separated self to desiring unified equal self. It means stopping the defense of a special superior self. It means defending the unified, same and equal self. You give up defending your wished for ego ideal and now defend our equal self.
Though in reality, truth does not need defense to be true, but in as much as you denied it and defend the false, you must change and now defend the truth. You must defend your real self, our unified equal self.
At all times, you must see yourself as equal with all people and defend that fact, rather than defend the illusion of your superior separate self. When you consistently defend union, equality and work for our mutual common interests, have what Adler called social interests; when you forgive, love and serve all humanity, you would experience peace and happiness. If in addition, you practice meditation, you would experience what Helen Schucman called Holy Instant, what I have been calling unified state. This experience is a bit of heaven while one is still on earth. Brother Jesus called it bringing the kingdom of God, the kingdom of peace and happiness to the world of space, time and matter.
I am your ancient brother, Thomas, who has returned to teach a skeptical world that God really exists. To understand skeptical persons, he himself was a skeptical person. If you think that you are a doubting person, I am the most doubting person on earth. I considered any non-scientific notion idiocy. Then I practiced forgiveness and love and meditated and experienced a world that no one can explain to you.
Forgive and love all, affirm our sameness and equality, work for social interest and then see whether your life would not be more peaceful and happy.

CONCLUSION

Western psychiatry correctly defines mental disorders but does not understand their true causes and their true cures. Whereas neuroscience is correct in studying the biological correlations in mental disorders, the cure for mental disorders does not lie in ingesting medications.
If you have mental disorders, by all means take the medications your psychiatrist prescribes for you. You temporarily need them. When a person is in intense anxiety, he probably needs his anxiolytics to calm his over heated nervous system down; when a person is in florid mania, he probably needs his lithium to calm down his excited nerves; when a person is schizophrenic and talking to himself, he probably needs his neuroleptic medications to reduce the voices he hears; when a person is depressed, has beat himself down through depressive thinking, and no longer finds interests in the activities of daily living, such as work, schooling and play, his body is probably producing less serotonin and he probably needs his serotonin reuptake blockers to feel good for a while.
After the body has been calmed, someone ought to teach the mentally ill person to correct his thinking pattern, to go from special separated to equal unified thinking and behaving.
Mental health lies in changing ones thinking and behaving patterns. Cognitive behavior therapy seems the best means for curing mental disorders. Medications are, at best, adjunct therapy.
In the final analysis, mental disorder is thinking and behavior that says that one is special and separated from the whole, God and other parts of the whole, people; mental health is thinking and behavior that affirms our union and equality.
This is not how Western psychiatry conceptualizes mental disorder, but it is how mental disorder is. Psychiatry will, in time, come around to accepting it, for truth cannot be denied forever.
As I see it, the mentally ill person confronted a self and world that he judges as meaningless and purposeless. He does not like the world his eyes show him. He rejects the self and world and invents an alternative self and world and defends them and tries to make them real in his awareness. His new self and world are not real, they are illusions. They have to be defended to seem real. He fears their demise. Escape into ego idealism is not the solution to the problems of this world. What needs to be done is to scientifically study the self. We must cool headedly study the separated self, how it came into being and its nature.
In this paper, I have begun the effort to understand the separated self and how it thinks. I have posited that our real self is unified self and that unified self is spirit, not matter. I pointed out that in this world unified self thinks in social interest lines, it works for common good. I know that my thesis is difficult for the scientifically trained to accept. Let us then call it heuristic and study it. Of course, we must also study the biology, chemistry and physics of thinking and behavior.


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FOR FURTHER READING



Adler, Alfred (1999) The Neurotic Constitution. New York: International Library of Psychology, Routledge.

Allport, Gordon. (1961) Pattern and Growth in Personality. New York: John Holt, Rinehart.

American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, (1994) Washington, DC. American Psychiatric Press.

Ansbacher, H.L. (1985) The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. New York: Harper Torch Books.

Ayer, A.J. (1968) The Origins of Pragmatism. London: Macmillan.

Beck, Aaron (1990) Cognitive Therapy for Personality Disorders. New York: Guilford Press.

Camus, Albert, (2003) The Stranger. New York: Sparks Publishing Group.

Ellis, Albert (2004) Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. New York: Prometheus Book Publishers.

Eriksson, Erik (1993) Childhood and Society. New York: W.W. Norton.

Freud, Anna. (1936) The Ego and its Mechanisms of Defense. Amazon.com

Freud, Sigmund (1961) The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed Ernest Jones. New York: Lionel Trilling and Steven.

Fromm, Eric (1947) Escape from Freedom. New York: Routledge.

Horney, Karen (1991) Neurosis and Human Growth. New York: W.W. Norton.

Jung, Carl G. Basic Writings of C.G. Jung. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Kelly, George. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: W.W. Norton.

Laing, R.D. (1960) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. New York: Penguin.
(1961) Self and Others. New York: Penguin.
(1964) The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. New York: Penguin.

Maslow, Abraham. (1998) Maslow on Management. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

(1970) Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper.

Meissner, William W. (1994) Psychotherapy and the Paranoid Process. New York: Aronson, Jason Publishers.

Pierce, C. S. (1955) Philosophical Writings of Pierce, Ed Buchier, J. New York: Dover.

Popper, Karl. (1963) Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge. and Kegan Paul.

Rogers, Carl. (1951) Client Centered Therapy. New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co.

Ross, Elizabeth Kubla. (1969) On Death and Dying. Amazon.com

Sartre, Jean Paul. (2003) The Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre. New York: Knopf Publishing Group.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. (1995) The World as Will and Idea. London: Everyman.

Schucman, Helen (1976) A Course in Miracles. Tiburon, CA: Foundation for Inner Peace.

Shapiro, David (1999) Autonomy and the Rigid Character. New York: Basic Books.
----------------- (1999) Neurotic Styles. New York: Basic Books.

Skinner, B.F. (2002) Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York: Hackett Publishing.


Sullivan, Harry Stack. (1953) The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: W.W. Norton.

Swanson, David et al. (1970) The Paranoid. Boston: Houghlin, Mifflin.

Tzas, Thomas. (1961) The Myth of Mental Illness. Amazon.com

Underhill, Evelyn. (1911) Mysticism. New York: Dutton.

Vaihinger, H. (1935) The Philosophy of “As If.” London: Kegan Paul Publishers

Wittgenstein, L. (1969) Zettel. Oxford Blackwell.

Zimbado, Phillip. (1986) Shyness. Jove Publications.

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December 12, 2005

The ideas in this paper are elaborated on in my book: Real Self Psychology.

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The Nature of Sanity and Insanity (Part 1)

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- The mentally ill hate what is: hate their real selves and society and replace them with their own self invented ideas of what should be, their ideal selves, ideal other people, ideal social institutions and ideal world. (See Karen Horney’s Neurosis and Human Growth.) They invent alternative selves, alternative society, alternative everything and try very hard to make their alternative reality, mere mental constructs hence fantasies, come into being. Their alternative reality is an illusion and is not going to come into being. Their alternative reality is mentalistic, a product of thinking. Mental constructs cannot be used to replace reality.

Reality is rooted in the laws of space, time and matter. Reality cannot be replaced with that which is only a product of mentation. What the mind invents is abstract. In mental abstractions, we can see things in perfect and ideal states. Mental perfections cannot replace the imperfections of the world of matter.
In the meantime, mentally ill persons struggle, mightily, to make their cognitions seem real. They employ the various ego defenses that psychoanalysts (see Anna Freud, The Ego and its Mechanisms of Defense) talked about to defend their imaginary reality. Mental illness results from misguided efforts to make the imaginary constructs of the mind seem real. Mental illness results from misguided efforts to substitute reality with the individual’s wished ideal reality. Alas, no matter how much the individual tries to make his ideal self and ideal world real by rigidly defending them, they are not going to become real. Illusions cannot replace reality.
There are reasons why the mentally ill reject reality and strive to replace it with fantasy. The mentally ill person did not wake up one fine morning and say to himself that he is going to hate and reject himself, other people and the world and replace them with his own wished self and world. He did what he did for a reason. The mission of science is to find out why he did so. In as much as science studies things as they are, not things as we want them to be, and there are always people who, for some reasons, reject the real world and seek an idealized world it behooves science to find out why they do so and to design a technology, in this case, a cognitive behavior technology to help them correct their mistakes in thinking.
The real mission of the mental health profession ought to be figuring out why the mentally ill hated and rejected what is and quest for what could become that will not come into being and helping them give up their idealism, their wishes for fantasy to replace reality. The Mental Health profession ought to help the mentally ill give up their wishes to make illusions real and instead learn to accept reality as it is, imperfect.
The problem of mental health is mental and must be addressed at the mental level. Cognitive reorientation, that is, changing the individual’s habitual thinking pattern, is the proper role of the mental health profession. Of course, biological and sociological factors play roles in disposing the individual to certain thinking patterns and we ought to understand these factors and correct them. Where there is mental disorder there always are biological and sociological disorders.
Mental illness, though rooted in problematic biological and sociological disorders, is healed at the mental level. Learning how to think differently, how to think realistically is what cures mental illness.
Mental health lies in having no illusions about ones self, other people, social institutions and the world; it means not struggling to defend the unreal, illusions, so as to make them seem real; it means accepting reality as it is.

THE SELF CONCEPT, SELF IMAGE AND MENTAL DISORDER

Perhaps, it takes many characteristics to be a human being. But one undeniable characteristic of human beings is their belief that they have selves. Each human being has a self concept, an idea of who he thinks that he is. That idea of self generally is that he is separated from other selves. Each human being sees himself as a separated, individuated self living in space, time and matter (body).
No human being is aware of having a self before age two? Typically, the idea of the self is known by age six.
It seems that upon birth on earth, each human child experiences his inherited biological constitution and social givens in a certain manner. Apparently, his biological and social experiences combine to give him an idea of who he thinks that he is. By age six, generally, the child has a sense of self in place.
George Kelly (Psychology as Personal Construct) tells us that each of us is responsible for constructing his self concept. As he sees it, each human child is like an engineer and takes his biological and social experiences and uses them to construct a self for himself. The self, according to Kelly, is a personal construct.
I believe that Kelly is right. I constructed my self concept, using my inherited biological datum and social experience to do so. I believe that each human child is the one who constructed his self concept. I believe that he did so building on his inherited biological and social experiences. Biological and social factors, therefore, influence the self the child constructed.
Alfred Adler (The Neurotic Constitution) pointed out that each human child experiences the human condition as painful. (There are children born without the capacity for pain, who have CIPA, congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis. These children tend to die early, for not feeling pain, they tend not to anticipate what could hurt them hence get injured, and usually die from injuries. Pain has survival value: it enables us to anticipate what could hurt us hence avoid it, and in doing so survive.)
As Adler sees it, each child experiences his physical environment, and sometimes his social environment, as adverse to his survival. He feels his life threatened and feels powerless to do what it takes to adapt to his world. He develops an initial sense of deficit. But, sooner or latter, the child recognizes that he cannot accept a sense of deficit because if he were to do so he would die.
The environment is tough. To survive in it, one must strive to be strong. Nature seems impersonal and does not care for human beings survival. At this very moment virus, bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms are trying to feed on our bodies and our immune systems are trying to destroy them. Simply stated, nature attacks the human child and he feels threatened and inadequate. He reacts with initial sense of being attacked and is defensive (hence all human beings have some paranoia in them).
Adler hypothesizes that the human child feels inferior vis a vis his environment, and that since it takes power to survive the exigencies of the environment, tries to convince himself that he is superior to his environment, other people included.
The human child feels inferior and compensates with superiority, Adler postulates. He feels attacked and compensates with self defense.
The child who experiences more than average level of attack, may be due to inherited organic deficits, develops what Adler calls neurotic constitution. Such a child posits a fictional superior self and tries to “Act as if” he is that fictional superior self.
As Adler sees it, the neurotic is a human being who hates and rejects his real self and posits an alternative unreal self, a superior self and acts as if he is that superior self. He uses the various ego defenses described by psychoanalysts to defend his imaginary superior self.
The neurotic is a person who has rejected his real self and attempted to replace it with a false superior self and wants that false superior self to be real. He defends the false superior self. He wants people around him to collude with him and tell him that he is the imaginary superior self he wants to become. If they collude with him and validate his imaginary superior self, he gets along with them, if they do not confirm his imaginary superior self, as whom he is, in fact, he feels threatened, anxious and angry. Thus, the neurotic engages in a neurotic dance with other people, asking them to validate his false superior self.
To Adler, neurosis and psychosis is the wish to become a false fictional superior self. Sanity is being ones real self.
Adler sees the real self as a loving and socially caring self. The healthy person, Adler thinks, serves social interests, that is, works for the common good of all mankind.
Karen Horney (Neurosis and Human Growth) essentially rephrased Adlerian psychology. Her causal analysis, however, is strictly sociological, hence deficient, for man is both a biological and sociological phenomenon.
As Horney sees it, the human child could be hated and rejected by what Harry Stack Sullivan (Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry) called his “significant others” (parents, siblings, peers, teachers etc). The child, recognizing that he needed to survive and that only the adults in his life would make that possible, resolves to do what they ask of him, for them to provide for him.
As Horney sees it, neurosis comes into being when the significant others of a child expect him to live up to high standards, that he could not, before they accept him. The child, wanting to be accepted, fears not being accepted. To be socially approved and accepted, the child, therefore, rejects his real self and posits an alternative ideal self, the self that seems to be like the self his society would accept. Subsequent to positing the ideal self, the neurotic child pursues becoming it, with the hope that he if he succeeds that he would be socially accepted hence provided for and survives.
The neurotic child is afraid of not becoming his idealized social self. He experiences what Horney called Basic Anxiety, from his fears of not living up to his ideal self.
To avert making children neurotic, Carl Rogers’ (Client Centered Therapy) advices parents to love and accept their children in an unconditionally positive manner. As he sees it, doing so would dispose children not to hate and reject their real selves and help them accept their real selves hence become normal in their growth.
In sum, it seems that the neurotic hates and rejects his real self and aspires after becoming a different self, an ideal, superior and powerful self. He takes pride in his ideal self and is ashamed of being his real self. He struggles to actualize his ideal self. This is in contradiction to normal Growth. The normal person tries to, in Abraham Maslow’s terms, actualize his real self, not his imaginary ideal self. The attempt to actualize the fictional self is what neurosis and or its more severe form, psychosis is.
Since the ideal self is a mental construct, it really cannot be actualized in the real world of matter, space and time. The purely mental cannot exist in the empirical world. If one wishes that one could fly, ideal self, one is not going to fly in the real world, for in the real world the laws of physics operate. One cannot fly unless one understands and follows the laws of aeronautics.
Simply stated, the neurotic’s wishes for an ideal self, ideal other people, ideal social institutions and ideal world is not going to be gratified, for what he wishes for are mental constructs, which are not possible in the physical and social world. Thus, the neurotic is bound to be frustrated from not realizing his wishes. He feels anxious from failure to realize his wishes (has neurotic anxiety).
To free him from neurosis and its anxiety, Horney recommends that the neurotic give up his quest for an idealized self and accept his real self. As she sees it, the healthy person tries to actualize his real self. Neurotics try to actualize their false ideal self. Neurotic pattern of growth is self defeating, for the wish to realize an imaginary ideal self is not going to happen.
The problem with Horney’s thesis is that she did not tell us what the real self is. However, it should be noted that she died a sudden death and probably would have eventually grappled with what constituted the real self. Towards the end of her life, like Eric Fromm, she flirted with Zen Buddhism. Perhaps, if she had pursued that line of inquiry, she probably would have learned to meditate and in meditation let go of her self concept and experienced what Gautama Buddha called no separated self, or undifferentiated self, or life. Nirvana (unified self) is experienced when the individual lets go of his separated self construct, the ego. In unified life, the individual feels the peace and joy that Saint Paul says, passes human (ego) understanding.
Neither Adler nor Horney told us what the real self is. Carl G. Jung intimated that the real self is spirit. He made incursions into Oriental religions and philosophy. On the whole, Jung contributed useful insights into the human psyche. He helped us understand the nature of individuation and the various types of individual personalities (personas, masks worn to adapt to the exigencies of life on earth), such as introversion and extraversion. (In Horney’s terms, moving away from other people, moving towards other people.) Jung’s ideas on the collective unconscious are fascinating but not proven as true.

Behaviorists like Watson, Pavlov, Skinner, Bandura, Milligram, Zimbardo, Seligman etc tell us that the human personality is learned. B.F. Skinner went as far as to boast (Walden Two) that if given a bunch of children that through his behavior technology, operant and classical conditioning, he could train them to become whatever he wants them to become.
Behaviorists descended on our schools, prisons etc and tried to modify people’s personalities and behaviors. Needless to say that they had not one single instance of success. To the best of my knowledge, behaviorism has not transformed one single anti-social personality into a pro-social person.
Philip Zimbardo wrote on how shyness was learned but had no track record of making the shy person outgoing. (Jerome Kagan thinks that shyness and temperament, in general, is inherited, that is, is biological.)
Obviously, we do learn many things. Without social learning there probably would be no need for schools. But to say that all that we are is a product of learning seems infantile reductionism.
What is the self in us that does the learning that behaviorists talk about? Who is learning what? Who is positively or negatively reinforcing whom? Who is doing the behavior modification?
Clearly, there seems a life force, ala Henry Bergson (Creative Evolution), in us that takes our social and biological experiences and combine them into our personalities, our habitual patterns of responding to stimuli from our environment.

Behaviorism had told us that psychoanalysis was not able to change people; it, too, is not able to change people. So observers were back to the drawing board.
Observers took a look at the possible biological etiology of human personality. We are now in the era of neuroscience.
Neuroscience believes that human thinking and behavior is epiphenomenal, is a product of the activities of neurons in our central nervous system: brain and spine. It studies the nature and behavior of nerves. It claims that biochemical imbalances in the nervous system are largely responsible for mental disorders. Schizophrenia, it reduces to problematic dopamine; mania, it reduces to problematic excitatory neurotransmitters like norepinephrine; depression it reduces to low serotonin; anxiety, it reduces to low GABA. It then designs medications to correct the assumed biochemical imbalances it thinks that it has identified. Thus, these days, patients’ bodies are filled with psychotropic medications.

LIFE FORCE

Clearly, biology and social factors play some role in the genesis of mental disorders. Biosocial factors, however, are building blocks employed by an unknown life force to construct a self concept for the individual. An unknown life force in the child uses the givens of his body and social experience to construct a self concept for him. When the self concept is constructed, that life force images it. The self concept is seen in image form, hence the self image.
Each human being has a self concept and a self image. The self concept/self image is the same as personality and ego. The self concept is constructed during the first twelve years of the child’s existence.
There is a life force that we come to the world with. That life force is originally undifferentiated, but in the temporal universe is differentiated into each of us. That life force individuates into each of us. It then uses the biological constitution that it is born into and its childhood social experiences to construct a separated, individuated self concept/self image for each of us.
Once the separated, individuated self concept/self image is constructed, the human child identifies with it.
The human child is the constructor of his separated self concept and, as such, is very proud of what he constructed. The self concept is his idol. He made his self concept and takes pride in his invention. He wants his separated self concept to survive and defends it with the various ego defense mechanisms.




UNIFIED AND SEPARATED SELF

The separated self is a false self. It is an illusion. The self we know ourselves as, our individuated self is unreal. Unreal or not, we want it to be real. We defend it. Defense of it makes it seem real in our awareness.
That which must be defended to seem real is obviously not real. If the separated self concept is not defended it dies. That is correct, if one did not defend ones self concept and the body that houses it, it dies.
That which dies, is changeable, obviously cannot be real; it is at best an illusion, a temporary reality. The separated self concept is an illusion, a dream self. When it is not defended, it disappears. (Only that which does not change, that which is permanent is real.)
There is an undifferentiated life, real self, in us. That life force seeks separated existence and in space, time and matter seems separated and defends itself.
In meditation, as Buddha recognized 2500 years ago, one can consciously decide not to defend the separated self. One voluntarily lets go of ones self concept, self image, personality, ego. One tells ones self that one is not ones self concept, not ones self image, not ones personality, not ones ego, not ones body. One lets go of the self one is aware of. As it were, one consciously accepts the death of the self concept and the conceptual world.
When the conceptual self and its world are let go, one experiences ones self as part of a universal self: one life that is simultaneously all lives.
There is a real self, a formless, non material, aka spirit self. That real self is eternal, immortal, all knowing, changeless, permanent, same and equal and is everywhere.
That undifferentiated, unified self cannot be understood with the categories of the differentiated, separated self.
Our extant world is a separated place, with separated selves, you and I, seer and seen, subject and object, and a world of language.
In the unified world, there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subjected and object. The unified world is ineffable; it is beyond the categories of matter, space and time.

In our extant world, each of us has a separated self concept. That self concept is imaged: human beings think in concepts and images.
The separated self is housed in a vulnerable material medium, body. It sees itself in space, time and matter. It sees things trying to eradicate its puny life (virus, bacteria, fungus; people who attack it). The separated self feels constantly attacked and constantly defends its self. Without defense, it would not survive in this world of mutual attack.
Each person has a separated self concept/self image that he is defending. All separated selves are false, unreal. All separated selves are illusions. In Hindu categories, all separated selves are dream selves.
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INSANITY DEFINED

Insanity is the construction of a false, separated self housed in body and efforts to make that false self seem real.
The insane person is trying to make an unreal self become real. He constructed a fictional superior, ideal self and wants to make it real, via defending it and asking other people to acknowledge it.
The mad person is in a loosing struggle to deny his reality, unified self, and replaces it with a false reality of his making, separated self and has it become real.
Sanity lays in giving up the separated self, giving up the illusory self, giving up ones self concept, self image, ego and personality and accepting ones real self, the undifferentiated unified self.
Give up the self you made to replace the real self nature (and nature’s God) made you as. If you can do so, you become sane.
Sanity lies in having no separated self concept/self image, no self you are defending. What is real does not require defense to make it seem real. Only the unreal requires defense to make it seem real.
Unified self does not need defense to be real. All you have to do is give up defending your separated ideal self and you experience your real self.
But as long as you identify with the separated self and defend it, you cannot experience your unified real self.
Alas, if you stopped defending your separated self, as this world sees it, you would die, and return to the unified world.
Obviously, you do not want to die to this world yet. You still want to live in this world. Therefore, you must have some defenses to live in this world. You must, at least, have defense of your body to live in this world. If you did not defend your body with food, medications, clothing and shelter you would die within minutes. If you did not wear clothes in Alaska’s minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit, you would die within minutes. Our physical bodies require defense to exist.
The separated self is an imaginary self; it does not exist in reality. You can remove the psychological defense mechanisms with which you defend it. If you can do so for an hour, you would escape from this world and return to the undifferentiated unified world, a world of harmony, peace and joy.
The real world is a world where there is no separated self, a world where there is only one self, one self that is simultaneously infinite selves.

One is not asking you to give up all defenses and die. One is not a nihilist who negates this world. We are here to live and ought to live until at least a hundred and twenty years (the current outer limits of how long we can survive in human body before the body, like all mechanical contraptions, wears down).
What one is asking you to do is to examine your self concept and decide not to defend it, at least sometimes, and see if you would not experience a different self.
Insanity lies in constructing an imaginary, fictional separated, superior and ideal self, identifying with it and defending it.
Sanity lies in giving up the imaginary fictional self, and in not defending it. Defenselessness is sanity.
To be sane is to have no separated self that one is defending; to be insane is to have a fictional separated self that one is defending.

The separated self is a mental construct, a construct mediated by body and social experience. In as much as the self is a mental construct, it can only be understood through mental activities. One can think about the self, understand and change it. One can change ones pattern of thinking and relating to other people.
When cognition is reconstructed and reoriented (ala Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck), when the self concept is reconceptualized from separated to unified (ala Helen Schucman) though still conceptual and defended, one is normal.
The neurotic defends a wished for false separated self; the psychotic not only defends a false superior self but believes it to be real. The normal person defends a false self but one that, in Adlerian terms, is used to serve social interest.
The normal person has an ego and uses that ego to help other egos. He uses a false self to serve all false selves in his community. Because he puts his imaginary self to social use, it is normal.
When one wants to be totally healthy, sane, one must give up all self concepts and self images, give up the ego self and personality housed in body and escape to unified spirit self. (This is accomplished in what Orientals call Samadhi, Nirvana, and Satori; what Christian mystics call mystical union with God. See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience and Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism.)

Normal mental health lies in shrinking ones swollen ego self to a minimal self concept. To attain complete mental health, one must completely give up ones self concept/self image, ego, personality. When the conceptual self and the body that houses it is voluntarily relinquished, one attains awareness of being part of unified self, aka Christ self, Buddha self, atman self.

THE WORLD OF OPPOSITION, A WORLD WHERE WHATEVER IS MUST BE OPPOSED BY WHATEVER COULD BE

The neurotic and or psychotic person saw the exigencies of this world, and does not like what he saw. He hated and rejected the world as is. He then uses his thinking, aka mind, to construct an alternative ideal, perfect self and tries to become that strictly imaginary mental self.
The ideal self is a replacement self, a substitute self. It is used to replace the real self. (The so-called normal self is also a replacement self; it is used to replace the unified spirit self.)
We came to the world by rejecting our real self, which is not material. The world began in opposition. The part opposed the whole; the son of God opposed his father.
In the world, just as we rejected and opposed God, we reject and oppose whatever self we made for ourselves. All that exists must constantly be replaced.
We came here in opposition to union, and must oppose whatever we made. We oppose our separated normal selves with our separated ideal selves, normal self with neurotic and neurotic with psychotic selves.
Ours is a world made in opposition and must oppose everything in it; a world made out of defiance of union and must defy everything in it. People invented heterosexuality to procreate with, and now defy it with uncreative homosexuality.

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A CAUSAL LOOK AT SOME MENTAL DISORDERS

A neurotic is a person who feels inferior and wishes to seem superior to other people. He invents a self concept and self image that wishes to be superior to his environment. He compulsively wants to become that fictional superior self. Sometimes, he lives a lie by presenting himself as a superior person. As it were, he has an obsessive compulsion to be superior, to be who he is, in fact, not.
The neurotic invents a superior self and identifies with it and talks and acts from that imaginary person’s stand point.
The neurotic wants to be an imaginary important, ideal self. He takes pride in that imaginary perfect self. He is proud to be a fictional, mythical self and is prone to shame feeling. He is anxious, fearful, given to depression and paranoia.
However, the neurotic is still able to test reality. He knows that he is not his imaginary important self. Though he desperately wishes to be important and superior to other people, he knows that he is just like every body else. He is unhappy with his real self, his ordinary human being-ness and hankers after a picture of himself that seems perfect in his imagination. Thus he lives a life of perpetual discontent, for he is always comparing himself and those around him to an ideal and perfect self/world that no human being could ever become and is dissatisfied with his truth, and other people’s imperfect reality. In Henry Thoreau’s terms, the neurotic lives a life of quiet desperation; he is unable to accept his imperfect reality (Vis a Vis his imaginary perfect self) and is unable to become his wished for impossible perfect self. (See David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles, also Autonomy and the Rigid Character.)
The psychotic, unlike the neurotic, not only wishes for an ideal, perfect self but thinks that he has already become it. For any number of reasons, the psychotic to be child does not like who he is; he hates and rejects his body and real self. He uses his imagination and thinking to invent an imaginary ideal and perfect self. This process begins right from birth and is complete by age thirteen. He identifies with his ideal perfect self. He thinks and behaves as if he is the fantasized ideal self he wished to be but is not in fact. That is, he has lost ability to test reality. He now takes fantasy as reality. He has escaped from our shared world and is now living in his own world. People around him notice the gradual slip into fantasyland and judge him insane.
Let me give you an example. A nineteen years old college sophomore began telling those around him that he is God. They laughed and said to him: “Get out of here, man; you are old John, not no God”. He persisted on being seen as God and his peers began to make fun of him, and say to him, “Yoo, god”. This making fun of him infuriated him and he began to quarrel with them. Eventually, his issues came to the attention of his parents, who took him to the nearest psychiatric hospital. Diagnosis: Schizophrenia, paranoid type. Why so? It is because he feels like he is god, but he is not god. He has delusion of grandeur, that is, sees himself as god. He also heard voices telling him that he is God (auditory hallucination).
The man feels that he is god when he is not god. In other words, he believes what is not true as true (this is delusional mental status).
The more critical question is why he believes what is not true as true.
The answer is that he did so because he felt weak and inferior and restitutes with a desire to be powerful. God is the most important inventions in the world, so he identifies with it and in so doing felt like he was powerful. He has now gratified his desire to be somebody very important, albeit it imaginarily.
The young man is a black man in America. His racist society tells him that he is inferior, a lie. This socially induced sense of inferiority interacted with whatever biological predispositions made him feel inadequate to produce a feeling that he is an inferior person. Like all human beings, he does not like to be inferior, so he restitutes with an imaginary superior self, hence has a delusional important self.
In psychosis, the individual sees himself as who he is not, and does not know that he has done so. He presents himself as a very important person, god, and expects other people to see him as such. He is not god hence has delusion.
The neurotic, too, wishes to be all powerful, a god, but knows that he is not all powerful and is not god. So, he is able to distinguish between reality and his wishes for reality to be changed and make him all powerful. Since he still hankers after an imaginary all powerful self, even though he is not it, he is constantly anxious, from not becoming that all powerful self.
The neurotic has anxiety; the psychotic has transcended anxiety by making a leap of faith, believing in the unreal as real, seeing himself as all powerful when he is eating from garbage cans.
A manic depressive person, in florid stages of his mental illness, will believe that he is the most powerful man in the world, the richest man in the world, the most beautiful woman on earth (even though he is poor and penniless and she is, as the world judges these things, ugly).
In psychosis, the individual takes the wished for ideal self as the real self and since he is not the ideal self he is insane. A grossly fat and ugly woman who sees herself as the most beautiful woman on earth, a Cleopatra, obviously, is not testing reality well. She is deluded, as in mania (bipolar affective disorder).

The mentally ill thinks and behaves in a manner that is not congruent with empirical reality. It is his thinking and behavior that is problematic. He thinks and acts in a disordered manner. Therefore, to heal him, he must be persuaded to think in a realistic and ordered manner. He has to change his thinking patterns. He has to change his behaving patterns. His thinking must be in alignment with empirical reality.
Mental disorder is exactly that, mental, that is, thinking disorder. Mental health is exactly that, well ordered thinking, thinking that is in alignment with empirical reality.
The neurotic wishes to be perfect and ideal. He is not perfect and ideal. If he accepts that he is ordinary, like every one else, and gives up hankering after perfection, his thinking and behavior would be in alignment with reality. He must stop asking people to validate his imaginary wished for ideal self. He must want them to validate his real self, a self that is the same and equal with all selves.
The psychotic must stop thinking that he is all powerful; he must accept that he is not god, not the richest man on earth and not the most beautiful woman on earth. He must accept his reality as a powerless, ordinary human being and give up the quest of perfection.
Mental health lies in thinking in alignment with empirical reality, whereas mental illness lies in thinking in non-alignment with reality. Therefore, to heal the mentally ill, we have to teach them to think and act differently. Mental health professionals must aim at correcting peoples disordered cognitions.
This is not to say that there are no biological correlations with mental status. When a person thinks that he is god, when he is not, he is thinking falsely. He uses his thinking to excite his body into producing, say, dopamine (as in schizophrenia), or producing norepinephrine (as in mania). Conversely, when a person thinks that he is not good enough; his thinking causes his body to reduce its production of serotonin. If a person wishes that he was very important and fears not becoming so, his thinking produce the physiological state seen in fear and anxiety (less GBA and more excitatory neuro chemicals like acetylcholine).
There seem biochemical imbalances in mental disorders but psychiatrists tend to place the cat before the horse. The biochemical imbalances are probably produced by disordered thinking, not the other way around.
Of course, some persons may have inherited certain types of bodies that dispose them to certain biochemical traits conducive in mental disorders.

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ANXIETY AND AVOIDANT PERSONALITY EXPLAINED

If, as a six year child, I was psychologically assessed, I would probably have been assessed as having separation anxiety (I felt anxious at school and wanted to go home and be with familiar persons, my parents and siblings), and as a teenager, as having avoidant personality with oppositional defiance.
I was shy. I felt that I was not good enough. I felt that if other children came close to me that they would see that I was not good enough and, as such, reject me. To avoid being rejected, I kept to myself.
In social isolation, I imagined myself the important person I wished to become. I feared not becoming the important person I wanted to become.
Shy and introspective as I was, if any one dared tell me what to do, I would ask him who the hell he thought he was? I resented any one telling me what to do. This would make me oppositional defiant.
As a thirteen year old secondary school boy, if some one had given me a complete psychological battery, the assessment would have read, I think: Axis 1: Social Anxiety; Axis 11: Rule out avoidant personality and oppositional defiant personality; Axis 111: Rule out medical issues like Spondilolysis, physical allergy etc; Axis 1V: psychosocial stressors, fear of social rejection; Axis V: highest level of social functioning, good. Intelligence: superior. (On the WISC or WAIS, IQ over 132 is considered superior.)

In ordinary language, avoidant personality is called shyness. This person feels that as he is, he is not good enough. He feels that other people would reject him if they came close enough to him to get to know him. He is operating under the social reality whereby we tend to reject people who are not good enough and accept people who seem good enough (as defined by society). His assessment of social reality is realistic; hence he is neurotic and not psychotic.
The avoidant person, while fearing social rejection, secretly wishes that he were a superior person. In Adlerian terms, he rejects his presumed inferior self and juxtaposes a fictional superior (in Horney’s terms, ideal) person. He wants to accept himself as an ideal, superior and perfect self. He wants other people to accept him as an ideal superior self.
His fear of social rejection is not really motivated by fear of the rejection of his real self but fear of rejection of his imaginary ideal self. The fear of social rejection is rooted in fear of rejection of the ideal, perfect superior self.
The shy child’s social withdrawal is motivated by effort to preserve the ideal self for he knows that the ideal self is false and that other people would see it as false.


EQUALITY IS NECESSARY FOR GOOD RELATIONSHIPS

To relate to other people, one must be the same and equal with them. Any time one wishes for special, superior, ideal, perfect self, one has interfered with good relationship. If you want to be superior to other people, you cannot relate well to them.
The only way to relate well with other people is to accept the truth of your and their perfect equality.
The avoidant personality does not want to accept the truth of our equality; he wants the illusion of his personal superiority to seem true; and since it is not going to be true in the empirical world, he avoids people and in social withdrawal retains the illusion that he is better than other people.
What is the cure for avoidant personality disorder? Is it giving such persons anxiolytic medications, as our confused Western psychiatrists do? Medications, of course, have temporary calming effect. If you are fearful and anxious and take any of the anti anxiety medications, you feel calm (and get addicted to them and when you try to withdraw from them experience visual and tactile hallucination).
The individual does not need medications. What he needs is change in his thinking and behaving patterns. He has to give up the wish to seem special and superior to other people; he has to accept all human beings perfect sameness and equality. He has to accept the equality of all races, black, white and oriental, the equality of the two genders, man and woman and the equality of adults and children.
We are the same and equal. Any time the idea of inequality enters ones mind, one has escaped from truth and is now temporarily insane.
Sanity lies in accepting truth and operating from its parameters. We are all the same and equal and whoever relates to other people as if they are the same and equal with him is operating from the standpoint of truth hence is sane.

All mental and personality disorders are efforts to make a false special self seem true, to make an illusion seem real. Let us briefly look at the various personality disorders.
The paranoid personality wants to seem superior to other people and see them as not accepting his imaginary superiority hence sees people demeaning him…this person is close to delusional disorder, a psychosis. He must relinquish his wish for superiority and accept our equality.
The schizoid personality withdraws from people and in his social isolation believes that he is special. He is close to schizophrenia and needs to see himself as the same and equal with all people and go relate to them.
The schizotypal personality gratifies her wish for superiority by believing in weird matters, such as claiming to have sixth sense etc; her oddity and eccentricity is really an effort to seem superior to other people; she is close to schizophrenia.
The narcissistic personality fancies himself special and worthy of other people’s admiration and often exploits people and uses them to get what he wants without caring for them. His illusory superiority must be given up. He is close to mania.
The histrionic woman fancies herself beautiful and worthy of other peoples admiration. Her histrionic, dramatic behaviors are quest for superiority and specialness. She is close to mania.
The antisocial personality fancies himself better than other people and from that erroneous standpoint steals and does other antisocial things and does not feel remorseful for his criminal activities (the narcissistic cum antisocial slave master so felt superior to blacks that he justified using them and did not feel remorseful or guilty for his iniquitous behaviors). This person is a psychopath.
The borderline personality gratifies her wish for superiority and specialness through getting other people to take care of her. She refused to grow up and become an adult. In the adult world one must give love to get love from those one gave it. She is close to mania.
The obsessive-compulsive personality gratifies his wish for specialness by seeking perfection and fearing being imperfect. He is close to having anxiety disorder (Neurosis).
The dependent personality gratifies his wish for specialness by having other people take care of him. (This is a neurosis)
The avoidant personality gratifies his wish for specialness by fearing and separating from other people. Some have social phobia. This is a neurosis.
The passive aggressive personality gratifies his desire for specialness by not asserting himself, by permitting others to walk all over him, feeling like a good boy, read, superior boy, then feeling angry at them when they go too far. (This is a neurosis.)

All mental disorders, be they psychosis, neurosis and personality disorders, are rooted in peoples wish for specialness, superiority and separation from other people, in a misguided effort to retain the imagined ideal self. If people changed their thinking, from desiring superiority and specialness to desiring sameness and equality and working for social interest, ala Adler, they tend to become normal persons.
Schizophrenia, mania, delusional disorder, depression and the other psychoses are maneuvers to separate from people and in isolation manage to retain the illusion that one has a special, superior self.
If you change people’s thinking and behavior (through cognitive behavior therapy), from wishing specialness to wishing sameness and equality and union, you heal them. The insane person thinks and behaves in a disordered manner and can learn to think and behave in a well ordered manner, in a manner congruent with the reality of the empirical environment. When he does so, he is mentally sane.
We are all the same and equal; whoever sees him self as the same and equal with all people and serves all people is mentally healthy.

THE METAPHYICAL DIMENSION OF MENTAL ILLNESS: SEPARATION IN PURSUIT OF SPECIALNESS

Neuroscience has the delusion that mental health can be reduced to biochemical balances; it sees thinking as epiphenomenal, as a product of the configurations of particles, atoms and elements in our brains. Where there is chemical imbalance, mental disorder supposedly results.
The amazing part is that no one has dared tell these reductionisms that it is only a fool who says that there is no God.
We may not know what God is but to dismiss him and see people as only their bodies is arrant nonsense.
People kept quiet as Soviet era psychiatrists used their pseudo scientific views to abuse those who opposed the evil empire; today, people keep quiet as know nothing American psychiatrists abuse people with their so-called psychotropic medications.
Man is more than his body. He is spirit having physical experience. Therefore, he cannot be healed by merely focusing on his body. We must address his mind, his psyche, his thinking and behavior.

A STORY OF CREATION

No one on earth can explain God aka spirit in human language. Speech came into being to adapt to the world of separation, space and time.
The world of separation is the world of you and I, seer and seen, subject and object. Language and perception are adaptive to the world of separation. Language is not needed in the world of unified spirit.
In Spirit, literally, there is only one self, God. That one self has infinite selves, all of whom are it. There is one God who manifests in infinite us. God is all of us and all of us are God. But each of us is not all of God. Please note the difference, before you go psychotic and call yourself God. You are a part of God but not all of God, for God is all of us.
The whole is in all the parts and the parts are in the whole and in each other but the part is not the whole.
In as much as we need a story of creation, a mythology as to how we came into being; consider this mythology, it is not the truth but it approximates the truth.

There is God. God is spirit. God is everywhere and everywhere is him. God extends his one self into many selves. Each of us is an extension of God.
Since God is extending his already existing self into each of us, it follows that each of us has existed for as long as God existed, which is forever.
Yet God created each of us. In creation, God gave all of himself to his son, to each of us. God gave all of himself to you. He remains as God and yet is you.
God extended himself to you and me. He is in you and me. God is in us and we are in him and in each other.
There is no space or gap between God and his children and between his children. We all literally share one self, the self of God and share one mind, the mind of God.
God is eternal, changeless and permanent. As parts of him, we are eternal, changeless and permanent.
God is all knowing. As parts of him, we are all knowing.
In God, all are joined together as one self and one mind.
Only the non material can join. The physical must be separated, at least in appearance, not reality. God is spirit, that is, non material. His creations, as part of him, you and me, in our true self are spirit and not material.
Only the same and equal can join. Though God created his children, he is the same and equal with all of them, as they are the same and equal with him and with each other.
If you like the word heaven, use it and say that in heaven there is perfect union, sameness and equality.
While in eternal sameness, equality and union, (heaven) the idea of heaven’s opposite entered our thinking, mind.
What is, union, produced the idea of its opposite, separation. Equality produced the idea of inequality. Sameness produced the ideal of its opposite, differences. Eternity produced the idea of its opposite, time, immortality produced its opposite the idea of mortality and changelessness produced its opposed change.
In heaven, we are perfectly unified, the same and equal. The idea of separation, differences and inequality entered our minds.
We pursued it. We sought separation, differences and inequality. Another way of putting this idea is that God created us and that we did not create God or ourselves. The idea of creating God and ourselves entered our minds. It is impossible for the part to create the whole, for the child to be his father’s father or his own father.
What cannot happen in reality can be dreamed of? We, therefore, seemed to go to sleep and dream a world that is the opposite of God’s world. In Hindu categories, we cast a magical spell, Maya, on us and seem to go to sleep and in our sleep dream that we are separated from God and from each other and that we created ourselves.
Another way of putting it is that the son seems to have killed his father and usurped his throne. Yet another way of putting it is that the son has chased his father out of his throne and is sitting on it.
We entered the zone of illusions, Maya. In that dream world, our wishes seem gratified. We set it up in such a manner that our wishes for specialness are gratified.
We broke eternal union into fragments (Big Bang) and each fragment of God split off from him and from each other, not in reality but in illusion. In reality, we remain unified, we remain as God created us, but in our present awareness, we seem separated from God and from each other.
We separated from God and each other. The invention of separation is what science means by Big Bang, the invention of space, time and matter.
Space preceded time by nanoseconds and time preceded matter (particles, atoms) by nanoseconds.
The moment space came into being, it was logically inevitable for time to come into being, for now it takes time to traverse the distance between two selves; space time inevitably produced matter and energy (it takes energy, effort to go from one self to another, one point to another in space; energy and matter are the same).
In time, we perfected matter into biological forms and housed ourselves in it. All these took millions of years to accomplish.
We are now in the world of space, time and matter; we seem housed in bodies. Bodies give us the impression that we are separated from each other, just as space and time also give us the illusion of separation.
Separation is an illusion and an illusion must end, bodies must die. Thus, those who seem to live in body must die.
We are, as it were, born, to die. The moment a child is born on earth he starts dying. Death is the opposite of eternity. We came here to experience the opposite of immortality, to be mortal and die, we must. In truth, in unified spirit we do not die. But in illusion, in our world we do die. In realty, we are not born and do not die, but in illusion we are born and do die.
On earth, each of us uses his physical and social experiences to construct a separated self concept for himself, for other people and for everything he sees. We live in a conceptual world.
Concepts are not permanent and always change. So our self concepts are always changing. In one moment we feel inferior to others, in another moment we feel superior to them.
We chose bodies, space and time that enable us to invent our desired self concepts. For example, I chose a very vulnerable body. Feeling easily hurt, I formed a self concept that I am vulnerable. I formed an avoidant self concept, an avoidant personality.
You chose the body you are born in and chose your social experiences and combined both to form your self concept and personality.
We think in ideas and images. Thus we form concepts of who we are and image them. Each of us has a self concept and a self image.
The self concept, self image is the individual’s personality. The self concept, self image, personality, is an ego self, it is a self that sees itself as separated from God and other people. On earth, in the dream, Maya, each of us has a separated self concept.
The separated self concept, your personality, is a dream figure, a self you employ in dreaming, in being on earth. The self concept, self image, personality, ego is not real; it is a false dream self. We defend it and in defending it make it seem real to us. Defense makes the unreal seem real to us.
Upon birth on earth, each human child uses his chosen body and social experiences to form a self concept, self image, personality and ego and uses the various ego defense mechanisms to defend it. Defending it makes it seem real to him. He does so for a hundred or so years and his body seems to die and decompose. He leaves his body, for he was never in his body.
He returns to the world in different bodies and in different circumstances. You may call this reincarnation, but since one is never born or dies one really has not reincarnated, all that one did is sleep and dream several times.
In the dream, one forgets ones true identity, unified spirit. One sets the terms of ones remembering of ones true self. The dreamer writes his dream script and enacts it out.
Each of us decides when he is going to wake up and the manner he is going to wake up. There are no accidents in God’s world.
For example, I chose a very sensitive body. That body made it impossible for me to adapt to this world. I failed to adapt to this world. Having failed, I began to wonder what to do with myself. Kill myself and get it over with or explore the possibility of another world? I threw myself first into Western philosophy, then psychology and, finally, into the study of comparative religions, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism. At some point, I took Buddha’s teaching seriously and did what he asked us to do.
Buddha asks us to let go of our identification with body and ego. He tells us to relinquish the ego self. In meditation one consciously accepts that one is not ones ego, separated self, self image, personality, body. If one is none of these things, then who is one? The ego, the earthly intellect rushes in to suggest answers as to who one is. Buddha said: ignore the suggestions of the ego, they are mere noise, the chattering of a fool, just try to keep quiet and the answer will come to you; if you are a sincere seeker after the truth and do what the truth requires of you: forgive, love and have compassion for all people, it will eventually come to you.
Stop all ego intellectual thinking. If, in fact, you can stop thinking, which requires that you give up wishing to be this or that, and be silent for one hour, you would escape from this world. Suddenly, you leave your body and disappear into a world of no forms, no bodies, no you and I, just one self that is simultaneously all selves. There is no space, time and matter in the world of spirit; it is a world of oneness, literally, not figuratively. There is still a you and I but each of us simultaneously knows himself to be all of us and as part of God.
After you experience oneness, you return to the world of separation. If you stayed in the world of unified spirit, as people consider these things, you would drop off your body, die. But you cannot be permitted to stay in eternal union, while some folks are still dreaming that they are separated. So you voluntarily return to our world. You come back and teach the lesson of our unified nature in your own way. Perchance, the manner you teach it will appeal to a few persons out there and they will take the message seriously and try to experience union.
There are as many teachers of union, teachers of love, and teachers of God as those who have experienced union. Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Bahaullah, Ramakrishna being a few of them. Each teacher teaches the same truth: union, and forgiveness as a means to it. But each teacher teaches that truth in his own manner and, as such, appeals to certain persons, but not to all persons.
Jesus, for example, appeals to poetic and worshipful persons, those Hinduism call Bhakti. Jesus could never appeal to rational, philosophical persons. Buddha and his rationalism reach thinkers, what Hinduism calls Jnana. (See Patanjali’s Yogas: Jnana, Bhakti, Karma, Raja, Tantra etc).
All those who have experienced union become what Buddhism calls Buddhavista, that is, enlightened persons, avatars, come back to teach the eternal gospel that God created us unified and that we are always as God created us, unified, though we dream that we are separated. (Helen Schucman taught that message in a combined Bhakti and psychological manner. She tells her students, as she called what in old fashioned religion was called followers that we are unified and in union are innocent, guiltless and sinless; that we only seem to do bad things in separation, in dreams of separation and that what is done in dreams has not been done, hence we are still innocent. We must learn to forgive each other and stop trying to punish each other.)
I teach the gospel of union, the gospel of truth in my own way and if you choose to learn it in the manner only I teach it (philosophical, psychological) you will learn from me. But if you have decided to learn it from other folks, so it is for you.
Actually, you made the choice of how you are going to learn about your truth before you were even born on earth. You have already decided when you will learn the truth, today or a thousand years from today.
My function is not to force feed you the truth but simply to restate what Aldus Huxley called the perennial wisdom of mankind in my own inarticulate way and leave it to you to decide to pay attention to it or not. As noted, you have already decided when to learn and practice it, and like the prodigal son return home, reawaken to your real self, the unified self, the Christ. (In time, those who will meet will meet, and those who will not meet will not meet. Although in eternity we are the same, in time we are different. We have different, unique personalities, different dreams. Those whose dreams, personalities will appeal to each other will meet and learn from each other and move on, or stay together.)

To come to God, you must be God like. God is union. Union is love. To come to God you must seek union with all people. Since love is the glue which glues people together, to come to God, you must love all people.
God created love and uses it to join all his children to him; we invented fear and use it to separate from each other.
In our world, we attack one another. We hurt one another. I have hurt you. You have hurt me. Our mutual inclination is to bear grievances and seek revenge against those who hurt us.
As a black man, nothing would give my ego more perverted satisfaction than to enslave white people, so that they feel what it feels like to be slaves and discriminated against. But who are white people? In time, they seem separated from me, a black man. In reality, we are unified and what I do to them I do to me. We are merely in dreams in which one is white today and black tomorrow; the slave master today is the slave tomorrow. Therefore, there is no use punishing any one, for one merely punishes ones self, if not now, in the future.
The best thing to do is to overlook the hurt other people inflicted on one. In doing so, one overlooks the hurt one inflicted on other people.
To forgive is to overlook the past. To forgive is to see what is done on earth as if they were done in a dream and overlook them. To forgive is to recognize that what was dome on earth was done in a dream and, as such, has not been done. The person who enslaved you, or raped you, did so in a dream and, as such, has not done so in fact. Nothing has happened to you in reality.
Moreover, it is your dream and you actually made what happened to you to happen to you. Nothing can happen to a son of God without him wishing to experience it. There in lies the justice of God. If what one did not want to experience could happen to one, then the universe and its God, temporal and permanent, is unfair.
Forgive and love all people, and then meditate. Give up all wishes to be a separated self, give up your ego, give up your self concept, give up your self image, give up your personality, and give up thinking in concepts. Then sit quietly for one hour.
Do this every day. Choose a convenient time and sit quietly for one hour. Stop thinking in ego terms. Return your mind to God, return your self to God; accept the self God created you as, unified self, not the self you made yourself as, separated self. Stay quiet. Have an open mind, be a void. Do not accept your ego’s efforts to write another fairy tale in your mind about the nature of reality. Read this material but forget it, for it is not the truth. The truth is beyond what any one can write or talk about.
I must warn you that if, indeed, you take what is being said here seriously, please find yourself a spiritual guide. I had a Hindu Swami as my guide. You need someone to guide you. Why so? If you truly forgave and loved people and tried meditation, you would have experiences that could result in psychosis in you. How so?
Now listen, my boy. Your separated self and body are false; they are illusions. They do not exist. If you enter into meditation, you would experience your self concept die. This is literal, your personality will seem to die and you would seem to have no self. This is the most terrifying experience you will ever go through on earth. We do not like to die to our separated selves and will make insane efforts to seem to have them.
To re-convince yourself that you have a separated self, you may invent a different self for you, a more outrageous self, like the psychotic’s self. You go from merely wishing for a big self, as neurotics do, and believe that you have a big self, as psychotics do.
In clinical language, you would experience ego decompensation (your normal ego defenses….repression, denial, suppression, displacement, dissociation, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, sublimation, avoidance, fantasy, intellectualization, fear, anger, paranoia, pride, shame etc will fail) and you try to recompensate with a grandiose ego….employ psychotic defenses like delusion and hallucination. You can make your false ego seem to talk and see things, hence hallucinate; the mad man made his delusional self seem to talk and see things, to make it seem real in his awareness. In short, you could experience transient psychosis.
To avoid this from happening, you need a person who knows about God to guide you. I do not mean a regular corner store minister, for those are practical idiots and know nothing about the God they talk much about. They are egotists. I am talking about a relatively egoless person. A Hindu or Buddhist priest (Swami, Roshi) is probably your best bet.

In meditation, you experience your self concept and self image dissolve and illusions play themselves out in your mind. In my own case, I had what people call out of body experiences; literally, see myself outside my body. I saw myself fly to a point of light, through a dark medium etc. All these are illusions for there is no place to fly to. The real experience is simply disappearing into unified self that I cannot describe.
Without making much ado about it, there is a different self, a unified self, and a different world, a unified world. Call it what you like, it is nameless, for names apply to the world of separation and multiplicity. To go there, you must die to the self and world you know, the world of separated self living in space, time and matter.
(The ego and its world are not left by physically killing your self. Suicide is not an option. If you kill yourself, all that would happen is that you would come back to try again, until you get it right: live as unified self via forgiveness and love. The ego and its world are left by overcoming them via learning to love at all times.)
In the meantime, learn to see all people as related to you, forgive and love them all. Learn that you are joined with all selves. The payoff of forgiveness and love is peace and happiness. Forgiveness and love rewards us with internal peace.
Peace is the definition of joy and both go together. Peace and joy are the best rearwards one can ever get on this earth. Forgive and love and your earthly dream becomes like a happy dream. As it were, you would be at the gate of heaven, but not inside it, for you are still in form and heaven requires that you be formless. Forgive and love and you would approximate your real self, unified spirit self, that you might as well be said to be living out of your real self and is in the real world (hence real self living, of real self psychology and real self fellowship).

Continued....

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December 06, 2005

The Role of Fear in the Genesis and Nature of Government: An Essay on Political Philosophy (Part 2)

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, washington) ---The balance of this paper would address itself to how to live as Christ self and form social institutions that serve Christ’s purpose of love for all humanity.

FORGIVENESS AS THE MEANING OF LOVE

As Thomas Hobbes observed, and as our empirical experience verifies, people do harm one another. You do harm other people and they do harm you. The world is a place of mutual attack. Each of us is, in Adam Smith’s terms (see his Wealth of Nations, 38) pursuing his self interests, and in doing so, often steps on other people’s feet. We do hurtful things to each other.
In a world where all attack and hurt one another, the apparent rational thing to do is to defend ones self. We all do defend ourselves.
At the individual level, we defend ourselves and at the social level, we employ governments to defend us collectively (at least, to defend those in our group, our nation).
The world is a place of attack and defense. Make no mistake about it, if you did not defend yourself, you would be killed. At this very moment, virus, bacteria and fungus are attacking you, trying to make your body their meal, and you are defending yourself through your immune system by killing them. You defend your body through eating food, taking medications, wearing clothes and living in shelters. Just about every thing we do on earth is motivated by self defense. (Can you think of something you do that is not meant to defend your separated self housed in body?)
To live in body is to perpetually feel attacked and to defend ones self. Defense makes living in body, in separation, possible.
Defense makes separation (ego) seems real. If one did not defend ones ego and its body, the body would die and the ego would return to an undifferentiated state. As noted, we are afraid of harm and death and afraid of returning to undifferentiated self. We came to this world to seem separated from the whole, aka God and from one another. The world is a place of separation.
Space, time and matter are means of making our separation from one another seem real to us. I live here and you live there. There is space between us; it takes time for each of us to reach the other; we live in bodies. This is our current reality.
(What seems real is not necessarily real. Space, time and matter are illusions; they, in fact, do not exist; they seem to exist in a dream world, but not in the real world created by God. The world created by God is a unified world, which, by definition, is a non-material but spiritual world. However, in this paper, we do not need to worry about the non reality of matter. We shall assume that matter, space and time are real. When you have unified spirit experience, you would know that matter is a fiction and do not need any one else to convince you of your reality, but until you do, we shall assume the reality of matter. You do not need to be taken to a world you are not yet capable of understanding; it is enough to ask you to accept the possible reality of spirit.)
People, particularly sadists, do harm other people. To survive in body, you must defend your self against sadistic people. If you fail to defend yourself, you could be enslaved. Make no mistake about it; if black people did not struggle to be free, white people would enslave them, now, not tomorrow.
The human ego is an evil thing; there is no mistake about that. One must not have illusions about human beings, they are, in their ego states, very evil. They will kill you and urinate on your grave (assuming that they buried you at all). As Arthur Schopenhauer (see his World as Idea and Will, 29) observed, man is a mistake that ought not to have been made. It seems the universe would have been better off without human beings.
Be that as it may, we have human beings living on planet earth and the real question is what to do about them. If you kill them off, say with atomic weapons, they would simply re-evolve on earth and continue their history of mutual oppression and abuse. Thus, killing them off is not the real solution to the problem of man.
The real question is whether it is possible to change human thinking and behavior? As people think, so they act. Human beings are cognitive, mentational and ideational creatures. They do think and behave as they think. If they think hateful thoughts, they act hatefully; if they think loving thoughts, they act lovingly.
Loving thoughts are unifying thoughts, whereas hateful thoughts are separating thoughts. Can we teach people to think and act lovingly? Can we teach those who see themselves attacked by others to love one another?
To love, one must have a different frame of reference, a different conceptualization of what it means to love.
Forgiveness is the real meaning of love. Let us explore this concept for a little while.
Consider black-white relationship. White folks did enslave black folks. Every thing in me, my ego, wants to fight back. My ego would like nothing better than an opportunity to enslave white folks.
My ego-mind bears grievances and seeks revenge for whatever is done to it, that it considers wrong. As I see it, white folks had no business enslaving black folks, so I seek revenge.
And make no mistake about it, where there is a will there is a way. If black folks determine to seek revenge for the ills they suffered in the hands of white folks, they will eventually find a way to accomplish their objective. If you are impressed by the present lopsided balance of power in favor of whites, let me quickly disabuse you with historical facts.
In history, empires come and empires go. Nothing in this world is more predictable than the fact that all empires built by man must collapse. Although those in power tend to have the delusion that they are invincible, as, apparently, the leaders of America feel, the fact of history is that we live in a world of constant change. (The world of God is changeless; its opposite, our world is changeable.)
Whatever goes up must eventually come down. At one time, Rome ruled the known world. (See Gibbons, The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire, 41) The leaders of Rome considered their Germanic neighbors as primitive and used them as slaves, as white Americans currently consider Africans as primitive and use them as slaves. But guess who sacked the Roman Empire? The so-called barbarian Germans destroyed the mighty Roman Empire. The Roman Empire became so decadent that its Patricians refused to fight and recruited German barbarians to fight for them. Eventually, the barbarians took over the empire.
Does history repeat itself? White America is currently on the same path as Rome. It does not take too much political perspicacity to know that the white population is increasingly effete; in fact, most of them could become homosexual. (Homosexuality, apparently, is Westerners latest method of exercising their defiance of God. Human beings came to the world in defiance/opposition of their creator and must necessarily find ways to be defiant/oppose whatever is; the absurdity of homosexuality being one such means. In the world, people feel an urge to defy/oppose everything, including defy nature, for they came here to oppose their father’s will and must oppose their own will; they made heterosexual sex as a means of procreating themselves and now oppose it with the insanity of so-called homosexuality. Ones Machiavellian thinking would encourage homosexuality in the West, it as a means of weakening it.)
The American army is increasingly composed of the poor, blacks and other minorities. Rich white folks like George Walker Bush serve their military time in rear battalions. Poor black folks like Collin Powell serve their military duties at the war front. Warrior skills are gained at the battle front, not in club med rear brigades.
Where are Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, the Soviet Union, Britain and France, once mighty empires? They are now in the dustbin of history. Do not weep for fallen empires, for they were all unjust. The evil must fall for civilization to progress to better ends. Such is life, Ces’t la vies!
Are you over impressed by America’s military might, her possession of nuclear weapons? Let us see what history teaches us. Throughout history, a group initially invents a weapon and it confers an advantage to them. That group, generally, exercises power over its neighbors. In time, however, the very weapon that gave a group military advantage is produced by other groups. The playing fields are equalized. When this happens, power is rebalanced, often to the advantage of those who, hitherto, were suppressed.
America was the first country to explode nuclear weapons. That gave it military advantage. The Russians struggled to equalize the playing fields. In time, nuclear technology will spread to all parts of the world. There is nothing any one can do to stop this spreading. The genie is out of the bottle and cannot be rebottled.
All things being constant, it is in America’s self/national interests to try to stop the spread of nuclear technology. America knows that it would lose the current advantage it has were other nations to have weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, her sole superpower status offers her the right to be a bully, to terrorize the world.
America’s foreign policy has become: do as America says or else you are removed from power. We just witnessed George Bush give Saddam Hussein of Iraq an ultimatum to vacate power or else. Obviously, Bush’s behavior was very degrading and I assure you that every one took note of that unmitigated arrogance. Folks would not want to suffer the fate of Iraq, now a testing ground for the latest American weapons. Who cares if Iraqis are killed? In real politics, as Henry Kissinger would say, sentiments have no place. Just kill Arabs, that is all there is to it. The world is an amoral place and if you have the power, you ought to stick it to the weak, the power intoxicated real politics’ “Neocons” surrounding Mr. Bush, tell us.
All over the world, folks have taken note of America’s intolerable hubris and are quietly working to develop nuclear weapons, so as to checkmate America, if only to reduce her swollen head. If history is our guide, by the end of this century, many nations would have access to nuclear technology.
We all know who folks are arching to use those weapons on: Americans. Unless we change the pattern of international politics, I suspect that in a century or so American cities would become the testing grounds for other group’s makeshift nuclear devices. When that happens, another human empire expires. Such is life.
Nevertheless, some of us do not accept the inevitability of history repeating itself. We work to change the pattern of human thinking and behaving. Besides, one really loves individual Americans, white and black. We so love them that we must tell them what is good for them, for, in their misguided arrogance, they have forgotten what is good for them.
If history is our guide, power changes hand. We are already witnessing the passing of economic power to the Asians.
Economic power tends to go with political power. China is going to be an important player in world politics. We, therefore, cannot allow ourselves to be intimidated by America’s current stupendous power. We must emphasize the truth and only the truth and may God help all of us.
The truth is that America’s power is not going to protect her when the chicken comes home to roost, when those she alienated, the army of the weak, find courage and leadership to fight back. When external others begin to explode their bombs in America, those oppressed and abused in internal America will rise up and tear the empire sown from the inside. This is what happened in Rome.
When external others attack the empire, as they eventually will, America’s domestic slaves, like the slaves in the Roman Empire, will join battle with them and the empire implodes from the inside.
When the bullets begin to fly, America will realize that she really does not have too many admirers out there. She has alienated too many people. People smile for her because they are aware that she is currently too powerful, but when her power is challenged by a credible external power, such as emergent China, the suppressed minorities in America will, no doubt, suddenly find courage to vent their suppressed rage at their oppressors. (At present, for example, African Americans displace their anger at their white masters by abusing their spouses and children and killing each other, but when they find the courage to stand up to their abusers and stop killing themselves in senseless drive by killing, well, history would change.)
We cannot delude ourselves into believing that those Americans oppress and abuse should not seek revenge at Americans. They can and, as a matter of fact, will do so, unless we change the parameters of international politics. To avert the inevitable, we must transform politics from the politics of grievance and revenge to the politics of forgiveness.
I know that as a twenty something young man with a doctorate degree but experiencing discrimination in America, I was capable of pulling the trigger to destroy America. And I would not have felt an iota of guilt. To me, then, destroying America was like getting rid of a pestilence that ravaged the world. America seemed like cancer to be exorcised from the human body (politics).


The new paradigm of politics that would save all of us is one that insists on forgiveness of the past. We must forgive what was done to us in the past. This includes at the individual and collective level. All of us, individuals and groups, have done awful things in the past. No one has a squeaky clean past. Africans did enslave their own people. Africans, in fact, so enjoyed selling their own people that it took European intervention for them to stop oppressing and abusing their own people. Simply stated, there are no innocent persons in this world.
Because, in time, we are all guilty, although in eternity we remain guiltless, no one really has a right to point accusatory fingers at other people. If one points two accusatory fingers at others, three point right back at one.
If Africans accuse whites of enslaving them, they must also accuse themselves of enslaving themselves. Dwelling on past injustices done to one is, therefore, not a useful thing to do. If one accuses others of abusing one in the past, they can equally accuse one of abusing them in the past.
(What can black people remember doing wrong to white people, you ask? Okay, have you studied the personality of Africans? If Africans were ahead of whites in material culture, given Africans brutality to one another…see their leaders take the money that are supposed to be used to develop their people and redirect them to themselves and could care less for their fellow Africans…given Africans self centeredness, they would have abused whites more than whites abused them. This is a fact, not a conjecture. Africans are some of the world’s most brutal people. I know my people, trust me.)
Since none of us is innocent in the past, we must, therefore, overlook our mutual past. Forgiveness means overlooking peoples past behavior.
Forgiveness means loving people in the present despite the evils that they did in the past. If people did not brutalize each other in the past, there would be no need for forgiveness. We all abused each other in the past. We all therefore, as Jesus Christ recognized, need to forgive each other. To forgive each other’s past is to love each other. In a world of mutual attacks, forgiveness is the true meaning of love.

Forgiveness is not a luxury the victim exercises; it is not a charity conferred on evil others. We tend to feel smug, superior, that we forgive others, morally inferior persons, who sinned against us. There are no true victims in this world. Consider the slave. He is not really a victim. It is his fear of harm and death that led him to tolerate others abuse. True, his abusers were sadistic but he had to be masochistic to permit them to abuse him. He is not a victim, for he could have challenged the oppressors and, if necessary, die fighting for his liberty, rather than tolerate abuse. No one can oppress a man who is willing to die at any moment. No one can oppress a warrior who looks you in the face and says: go ahead and kill me but I will not accept servitude to you. It is fear of pain and death that disposes human beings to tolerate other human beings abuse. If you want to be a free man, you must overcome the fear that bounds you to slavery.
Nothing can happen to human beings unless they tolerate it. In fact, nothing can happen to human beings unless their personalities invite it. I will give you a personal example. As a child I was stubborn and willful and do not take marching others from any one. Contemporary psychiatry probably would have diagnosed me as an oppositional defiant child. As a child, if you dared tell me what to-do, I would slap your face, and it did not matter that you were bigger than me.
(These days, America’s establishmentarian psychiatrists, always out to get people to not rock the boat, to tow the line and conform to American society’s increasingly decadent values; consider some children as having oppostional defiant disorder, ODD. These teenage rebels, who, generally, are responsible for changing society, are filled with stimulant medications like Ritalin, even psychotropic/neuroleptic medications like Zyprexa, Risperdal, Seroquel, Geodon, Lithium, Depakote, Tegretol, Valium, Librium, etc in a misguided effort to numb them and get them to conform to the values of a dying empire. These medications have terrible side effects and actually do not heal any of the mental disorders they supposedly heal. America is destroying her people with quack medications. This house has fallen; it must be replaced with a better one: a love based civilization. In case you have not grasped it yet, my efforts at a political philosophy has a mission: to replace the West’s
ego/hate based civilization with a Christ/love based civilization. If this seems grandiose and not doable, hang around and witness the power of love over hate.)
When I came to America and a racist white police officer tried to harass me, I was so outraged that I insisted that he be fired from his job. And I did not care whether I was killed or not. You cannot intimidate me by pointing a gun at me, for I would automatically tell you to go ahead and shoot me. I grew up during the Nigerian civil war. Nigerian fighter plans flew at roof top level spreading bullets at whatever moved. My senor brother, Eugene, was killed and my mother, Teresa, was wounded during such raids. Upon perceiving approaching jet fighters, people scampered into hiding places. Without thinking about it, I said: bring it on, kill me, right now, but I would not hide, just so I preserve my worthless life. Thus, I walked about, as folks hid all over the place. Folks would, in fact, try pulling me into taking cover and I would say: to hell with that and went about the business of living. I had a fatalistic view that if a bullet was meant for me that it would get me,
no matter what I did, and that, therefore, there was no use hiding from anything. I have never seen any need to defend my body and ego, for even as a child under age twelve, I grasped that my body is eventual food for worms and, as such, is valueless. I do not have to protect the worthless. The valuable, our souls, do not need protection, for the real needs no defense.
The relevant variable here is my stubborn personality. How do you think that that stubborn personality would fare in slavish America? You guessed it. I found it difficult to adjust to America’s school and work organizations. I resisted being told what to do. Thus, when I say that I was unable to obtain a reasonable job after graduate school that must be qualified with the statement that my personality played a role in my fate. If I was a compliant chap who did what his bosses told him to do, I would have fitted right into America’s slavish society?
America gave me every opportunity to succeed within its cultural parameters but my personality dictated that I be an outsider in America. My personality, therefore, played a role in what I used to call my marginalization in America. I bear responsibility for what I got out of life; I am not a victim of circumstances. If anything is to be blamed for my fate, it is my personality, but since I like that personality, no one is to be blamed.
If any human being objectively examines his life, he would find out that his personality, along with the circumstances he found himself, played a role in what he gets out of life. No one is a total victim of circumstances. We all play roles in what happens to us, at least, in how we experience what happens to us. Racism is real in America; make no mistake about it, but ones personality plays a role in how it affects one.
We live in a general system where everything affects everything else; we all mutually affect each other; no one is a total victim of other persons.

THE SELF CONCEPT, SELF IMAGE AND PERSONALITY

Upon birth on earth, the child’s inherited biological datum and his social experiences interact to form a personality for him. By age six, the typical human children has formed a self concept and allied self image. (See George Kelly, Personality as a Personal Construct, 42, also see Alfred Adler, 43, Karen Horney, 44, and Carl Jung’s 20, B.F. Skinner, 45, Laswell, 46, and other writings on the etiology of personality.)
We develop ideas of who we think that we are and picture those ideas in images. Human beings think in ideas and in images.
We have concepts and images of ourselves, other people and the world. Once the self concept is set, certainly by early adolescent, age 13, it is difficult to change it. Subsequently, the individual thinks and behaves according to his self concept, self image, his ego and personality.
My willful and oppositional defiant self concept/self image was in place when I started elementary school at age six. No one dared tell me what to do. On the other hand, I saw other kids cheerfully doing what our teachers told them to do. At age nine, a teacher flogged me and I practically destroyed the entire school, for, to me, how dare he flog me? In Alfred Adler’s categories, I felt superior to the teacher and could not accept an inferior him flogging me.
You got the picture. Ones personality plays a role in what happens to one in ones life. However, it must be observed that the etiology of the human personality is not yet fully understood. Psychoanalysts speculated on end about it, behaviorists reduced it to social learning and contemporary neuroscientists believe that it is biochemical in origin. All these observers have useful insights into the human personality; nevertheless, no one has yet understood the genesis of human personality.
My own predilection is that there is a life force, ala Henry Bergson (47) that takes our biological and social experiences and uses both of them as building blocks to construct our personalities for us.
Each of us has a unique personality. Once formed, personality shapes our future. As the German writer, Novalis, observed, character is fate (the external environment held constant).

If none of us is a victim, it follows that all of us have done things to other people that need to be overlooked and forgiven. I must forgive other people what I see them do to me that I consider not right. By the same token, other people must forgive me what I did to them that they construe as not right. In other words, we must forgive each other.
Forgiveness is not a frivolous thing; it confers rewards on the forgiving person. When one forgives other people, one feels peaceful and happy.
Do you want to feel peaceful and joyous? If affirmative, then forgive those who you believe wronged you in the past. Forgive all the people that wronged you. Forgive the whole world for the wrong it did to you.
If you can honestly forgive the entire world, you would have loved the entire world. You would feel very peaceful and happy.
Forgiveness is a means of receiving the gifts of God: peace and happiness. There is no other way known to man for receiving the gifts of God, other than forgiveness, which is the true meaning of love.
Jesus taught: love God and other people; forgive your enemies, turn the other cheek to be slapped by them when one is slapped. Consider the example of the adulterous woman. Jesus said that she be forgiven. Moses, the Old Testament, taught punishment for our sins and Jesus, the New Testament, taught forgiveness for our sins. (See the Four Gospels in the Christian Bible. Pay particular attention to the Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospels according to Mathew and Luke, 48.)
Jesus taught the need to forgive other people before we pray to God. God does hear all our prayers and, in fact, have already answered all of them because he knows what we, his children, need, peace and joy, before we ask for them. But to receive the things of God, already given, we must obey God’s will: love, that is, forgive one another.
No one comes close to God without first forgiving all his brothers. As long as there is a human being that you have not forgiven, one person for whom you bear grievance and seek vengeance and punishment, you cannot see the face of Christ, your true face, and certainly cannot come to his father.
Jesus walked his talk and forgave those who destroyed his physical body, for they knew not what they were doing. The world believed that they could kill the immortal son of God; all they could do is destroy his body and ego, but his real self, unified spirit, Christ, lives for ever and ever with his father and all his brothers.


You may have studied science and believe the spurious and flippant notion that there is no other life outside our empirical world. I understand your skepticism and even cynicism. I, too, read our philosophy but, in time, learned that there is more to life than is taught in our ego based philosophy (and if you insist on the difference, natural science).
Forgive every person who has done you wrong, that is, love every person, and see whether you would not experience another world. The taste of the pudding is in the tasting. Forgive, that is, love, and see whether God is real or is a fiction.
But until you forgive God’s son for what you see him do in his dream, this world, that, in fact, he has not done while awake in spirit, please do not expect to experience God.
God is love. To come to love/God, you must love/be godlike, unified. To love is to forgive. To come to God you must be a loving and forgiving person.
Until you meet the conditions of God and his heaven, you cannot enter heaven. At the moment, you are in exile from heaven, our real home. You are the prodigal son that our brother Jesus talked about. To return home, you must acknowledge your mistakes, your separation and unloving behaviors and correct them by loving all people.
That is correct; you must make amends for your sins. We are not talking some new age “salvation is cheap stuff” here. We are talking reality. To be saved, you must be a forgiving and loving person. I mean totally forgiving. You cannot have an iota of an unforgiving thought and behavior and be saved.
Salvation, redemption and deliverance require that you be a totally forgiving person, that is, that you totally love all people. You must undo what you did.

STORY OF CREATION: A USEFUL MYTHOLOGY

God created a loving you. This means that God created a unified world. You and I chose to split that world, to fragmentalize heaven’s union, not in truth, but in our awareness. We separated from God and from each other.
We exploded in a Big Bang and each split off to his separate ways. We invent space, time and matter and each unit of life, a fragment of God, split apart from others. We then wander the world we made as separated, special persons.
We have been separating from each other since the Big Bang. Whenever we meet, we reattack each other, feel pain and or anticipate pain from each others attack and move away from each other. Whites attack blacks and blacks move away from them. Blacks attack each other and move away from each other. Human beings move away from each other. This is the world of separation. It is the world we invented, not the world God created.
God created a unified world. Return to the world God created. If you love and forgive all people, yourself included, you have returned to the world of union, for love is union. Love and you are back in God.
This is not some kind of game, we are talking here. Get up today and resolve to love and forgive every person in your world. Think loving thoughts and forgive whoever did something wrong to you, and this includes your slave master and your rapist (if you are a woman). There is no exception to God’s law.
God does not make compromises, so don’t even bother trying to ask him to love you until you have lived up to the terms of the covenant, contract, that he signed with us, when we separated from him, that we must forgive each other, that is, reunify with each other, before he unifies with us.
God is love and love is forgiveness. To obey God’s law, love, you must love all his creation.
God is in all his creation. If you love God’s creation, you love God. As long as there is one child of God that you do not love, that you bear grudges against, that you want punished, you do not love God. (God is not fragmented, he is whole, and so you must love all of him, all people, to love him.)

Love and forgive all and suddenly you escape from this world into the unified world of spirit. That world is in effable. It is beyond speech. Ego reasoning, in Kantian categories (see Critique of Pure Reason, 49), cannot understand the world of God. The world of God cannot be described by human language or with concepts and images, for concepts and images apply only to the world of space and time, the separated world.
The world of God is the world of union, a world where there are infinite persons, all of whom are one person, a world of one self that is simultaneously all selves.
One God is all of us, literally, not figuratively. God is all of us and all of us are God. But each of us alone is not all of God, for God is in all of us. God is everywhere and is everywhere.
God is in us and we are in God. There is no space between God and us. There is no gap between one child of God and others. We are all, literally, one self, or, if you like, we all share one self and one mind, the self and mind of God. There is no other in God. There is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object in God, in heaven.
God created us unified, that is, holy. We separated from him and from each other, that is, we became unholy. To experience God, we must return to holiness, that is, we must return to union. To do so, we must love and forgive one another.
Forgiveness brings us to the gate of heaven. Love takes us back into heaven. Love and forgive and then see what happens. We do not need to debate with you as to whether the truth is the truth or not.
A childish physical scientist who refuses to forgive and love, to experience God, tells the world that there is no God. Poor idiot, he is part of God and God is part of him. In denying God, he is merely denying his real self. He is saying that he is metaphorically dead.
He needs to die to the self he made for himself, the ego, the self he made to separate with and be rebirth in the self God created him as, the unified self. When he loves and forgives all and experiences a holy instant, union while still in time, he would stop the idiocy that there is no God.
God exists. All else is noise. We are in God; we are part of God. As it were, we cast a magical spell, what Orientals call Maya, on our selves and seem to go to sleep, and in our sleep, dream that we are separated from God and from each other. (See The Gospel of Ramakrishna, 47, as well as the Veda: Ramayana, Mahabharata, Bagavad Gita, Upanishad.)
According to Hinduism (see Vedas, Bagavad Gita, and Upanishads) the world is a sleep-dream place, an illusion. In truth, we are always in God. All we need to do to verify the reality of union, God, is do what God asks us to do: love and forgive ourselves. But we prefer separation; attack makes separation possible. We prefer to hate each other rather than to love each other.
Our world is a place of separation. Very few persons are ready to relinquish separation and reawaken in the world of union.
Temporary separation is permitted. God tells his son to go ahead and sleep and dream, but asks him to make his sleep-dream pleasant by forgiving and loving his fellow dreamers.

GOD THE FATHER, GOD THE SON, GOD THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE EGO


To make his sons’ sleep-dream happy, God entered their dream world and is in them as the Holy Spirit. As the Holy Spirit, the immanent God (while remaining transcendent of the world) God urges us to love one another. The Holy Spirit, the God in us, teaches us to forgive one another.
In heaven, God is originally in two selves: God the father and God the son. God is the whole; the son of God is the parts of God. We are collectively God the Son. Each of us is part of God the Son. God the son can be called the Christ, so each of us is part of the Christ.
God the Son wishes for specialness and seems to have separated from God the father to go gratify his wishes for self creation. Actually, God the Son cannot separate from his father, but in his awareness he seems to have separated from his father and brothers.
When God the Son seems to have separated from God the father, God the father created God the Holy Spirit and entered his separated son’s mind.
In the temporal universe, there now seem three Gods, the Holy Trinity: God the father, God the son and God the Holy Spirit. Thus, in each of us are three selves: God the father, wholeness, God the son, part of God, ones true self, and God the Holy Spirit.
Each of us denied his true self, Christ, union, and identifies with a false separated self, the ego. We now think as the ego. God the Holy Spirit enters our mind and tries to get us to think as God and his Son, Christ, our true self, thinks.
If you like, we have four sides to us: God the father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit and the ego. The ego is our dream self, the dream figure. In reality, the ego does not exist, it is false. But for our present purposes, the ego seems to exist, for it is the self you and I identify with. If you are reading this material, you are in ego state, for only the ego can read, conceptualize and image things; God and his Son, Christ, do not read things, they know things.
(By the way, all these talk of God the father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit and the ego are metaphors, figures of speech, they are not real; they are poor concepts that we employ to try to explain what no human being on earth can explain. God cannot be explained by any human being, certainly not by me. God, however, can be experienced. God is known only through experience. As already observed, to experience, hence know, God, you have to meet the conditions for doing so, forgive and love all creation.)

Forgiveness and love overlooks the separated world and what is done in it. When the temporal world is overlooked, the ego and its world are overcome and one experiences the unified world of God. This is a fact, not a conjecture. But since we value the ego and world we made, God accommodates us. He, in effect, tells his children to go ahead and live in the world they invented. He tells us that if we want to experience some peace and joy, not the total bliss of heaven, oneness, that we must forgive and love our fellow sleepers and dreamers.
Please note the phrase: “must forgive and love”. You must forgive and love all people, if you want to experience peace and happiness. You do have a choice not to forgive and love all people but you must pay a price for your unforgiving thinking and behaving: you must live in conflict and be unhappy. You cannot eat your cake and still have it.
A world that approximates the will of God is a loving and forgiving world. Therefore, we must love and forgive one another. If we want a Christ like world, we must love each other.

WE DO NOT NEED TO CHANGE OUR SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS BUT WE MUST CHANGE OUR THINKING AND BEHAVIORS

We do not need to change the forms of our governments and social institutions; what we need to do is put them to different purposes. The structure of the American government, for example, is good enough. Just use that government to teach forgiveness and love. Use the instruments of government to love all people. (Where governments are not democratic, of course, we must make them democratic.)
What we must do is change our behaviors, from anti social to pro-social. If a criminal does something wrong, it is his ego and body that did so. His ego is his sleeping, dreaming self, not his true self, the Christ. Arrest, try and put him in jail. While in jail, teach him forgiveness and love. If we kill him, as our ego wants to do, all we accomplished is guarantee that he would come back to the world to continue his evil ways. But, if while in jail, we teach him to love and work for our common interests, while we may not entirely succeed, we would guarantee that he would come back a better self than he is in the current lifetime.
(We do have several dreams; if you like, reincarnations, but none of the selves in the dream is the real self; the real son of God is always in God, while dreaming that he is born on earth; in truth, he is not born and does not die; he only seems born and dies in dreams; dream birth and death are not real.)
By teaching and practicing love and forgincveness we find healing, peace and happiness.
A Christ based world is a forgiving and loving world. The institutions of the world would remain as they are, or changed, if they are not democratic, but they would be put to different uses, to love and forgiveness. Let us see how that would work in reality.


On September 11, 2001, Moslem Arab terrorists attacked Americans. They randomly destroyed property and killed several thousand Americans.
Americans are human beings, that is, they identify with the separated self, the ego housed in body, other wise they would not be in this world, this dream. As egotists, Americans were outraged that some one dared come into their house and attack them.
The ego always seeks grievance and revenge. Grievance, defense and punishment maintain the ego’s world. In this ego mood, Americans sought revenge and went to war and quickly dispatched the Talibans in Afghanistan. That being not enough to assuage their anger at the Arab Moslem world, they attacked Iraq and disposed of its criminal leader, Saddam Hussein.
Now the fun part begins. Europeans have attacked and defeated Arabs. So what do you think is in the Arab’s mind? Remember that we live in a separated world, a world where there are groups of egos. What do you think the Arab mind is thinking?
Think, God gave you a mind to think with. The Arab mind, like the American mind, identifies with the separated self, the ego, otherwise he, too, would not be in this world.
The ego feels pride and shame. (Christ does not feel pride, shame or fear; he only feels love.)
The ego is the desire by the Son of God to kill his father and replace him as the creator of the world. The Son of God wished to kill his father or create his father, create his self and create his brothers. He could not satisfy these insane wishes, for the son cannot be his own father, so he went to sleep and in his dream, dreams that he is his own creator and the creator of everything in the universe. He is deluded, of course, for in reality God is the creator of everything. Each of us invented a self concept for ourselves, and for other people, as symbol of our imaginary self creation.
For our present purposes, to identify with the ego is to desire power, hence to be subject to feeling humiliated when one is shown as powerless. The American ego has humiliated the Arab ego. The Arab ego feels shamed.
What does the ego do when it is belittled and shamed? If it has the ability to fight back, it fights back, right away. But if it is weak, it bites its tongue, bides its time and waits for an opportunity to fight back, to humiliate those who humiliated it.
Arabs cannot really fight back at this time, for the power of the West is too much for them to handle. But make no mistake about it; they are going to fight back. This whole century is going to witness on going wars between the Christian West and the Moslem East. The Crusades has restarted where it stopped in the thirteenth century. The Christian European and the Arab Moslem has been at war for hundreds of years and that war merely resumed and will last for a few more centuries. George Bush cannot finish what he started.

Prior to attacking Americans, Arabs believed that Americans and Westerners hurt their interest, for example, by supporting Israel. However, the issue of Israel is merely a tip of the iceberg. These two cultures resent each other; each wants to finish off the other and impose its world view on the rest of the world. The Arabs want to arabicize the world and Americans want to Americanize the world; the battle of two sets of egos is joined.
When two elephants fight the grass suffers. The rest of the world will suffer from the titanic war ensuing before our very eyes. In our mysterious world, however, out of bad good comes. As the West and East finish each other up, other civilizations will emerge. Africa gained independence when Europe self destruct during the Second World War.
Africa will emerge truly independent when the West and Arabs, the two groups that traditionally humiliated Africans by enslaving them, self destroy. The real politician in me, therefore, encourages Europeans and Arabs to fight, so that I might pick their pieces. But the Christ in me, my loving side, knows that there is a better way to handle the situation.


ALTERNATIVE FOREIGN POLICY

It is not necessary to say that Arabs are right or wrong or that Americans are right or wrong. Both were right and wrong. What is salient is that America could have chosen to respond differently to Arab attack. America is obviously more powerful than the rag tagged Arab army. As the stronger of the two, America could have chosen to forgive Arab attackers. This does not mean tolerating and or condoning terrorist attacks. It means removing the Talibans, even removing Saddam Hussein from power (through diplomatic means).
The difference is the purpose of the attack on the Arab world. If you go to the Arab world to help them become democratic, they would appreciate you. If you do something with love and forgiveness, not punishment, in your mind, you would be appreciated. But the fact is that America went into the Arab world to punish Arabs, to teach them a lesson as to who is the stronger boy in the school yard. They will teach them a lesson all right. But as these things always turn out, those who set out to teach learns have lessons to learn.
By the time this war is over, America would have squandered most of her resources in a senseless war, while her competitors, China etc, devote their resources to economic development.
It is not necessary to dwell on what America should have done in the past. What is relevant is what America does today.
The past is over with and is gone. The future is a hope; the only real time is today, this moment.
What should America be doing now? America is now in the Arab world. It is too late for America to cut and run. She must stay where she is and help bring about capitalism and democracy in the Arab world. It must help Arabs elect their leaders, as folks now do in the West.
Elected governments have too many checks and balances to easily go to war. Of course, they do go to war, after all we saw George Bush the allegedly moronic president manipulate Americans to lead them into a war of choice.

International politics must be reframed to one whereby nations forgive and love one another. In practical terms, this means working for our common global interests. The world has really become a global village and what happens in one part of it affects all parts of it. We can no longer ignore other people’s plights.
In the new world order, real politics means helping Africans learn democratic government and manage themselves right; it means helping Americans learn to love and forgive one another, for if they fail to-do so, their country may implode from within and explode from outside.
We need a Christ based Government where the apparatus of the state is used to care for all people, to teach love and forgiveness. It means providing education, at all levels, to all young persons; it means working for an economy that provides jobs to all people, a mixed capitalist-socialite economy. It means teaching the criminal elements in our midst how to care for all people, rather than harm all people. (One is sufficiently trained in biology to know that there are putative genetic elements in human behavior. Criminals probably inherited certain genetic disposition that makes it easy for them to steal and kill without feeling remorseful and guilty? Otherwise, how can these people be as amoral and predatory animals? Reason immediately tells a rational person that serving social interests is what is good for the individual, so how can criminals do the dastardly things they do without worrying about the consequences of their actions?)
Biology not withstanding, human beings do think and can change their patterns of thinking and behaving. If the individual indulged in criminal thinking, he can change and think in pro-social terms, and seek ways to care for all people. He may not turn out a saint, a mother Teresa, but he could become more human than be animalistic.

THE FALACY OF EGO IDEALISM

One is not naive to think in terms of making the world over into a perfect place. Idealism is of the ego. It is the ego that wishes to transform the self, other selves and the world into an idealistic place. What this type of grandiose idealism means is that the ego is seeking absolute power. The idealistic egotist is seeking power to change himself, change other people and change social institutions. If he ever gets power, he is very likely to use it destructively, to get the world to kowtow to his egoistic wishes.
We witnessed what fascist and socialist idealists did in Germany and Russia respectively; they murdered those whose ideas of life were not congruent with theirs. One is not, therefore, enamored with the fantasy that human beings can be made over into angels. We are depraved creatures and will only gradually improve our lives.
Of course, in every generation, a few persons will do what it takes to make the transition to Christ like living, but the many will behave like egotists. The run of the mill human being seeks ways to satisfy his self interests, preferably in cooperation with other people, but if needs be, at the expense of social interests. In so doing, the ordinary person necessarily generates social conflicts and needing conflict resolution.
Government must exist to resolve our on-going conflicts. The world is not going to change tomorrow and attain purgatory status. It will take thousands of years before the mass of the people attains Christ like living.

No one can change other people. Each child of God has freedom to do as he likes. God is absolute freedom and since each of his children is part of him, they have freedom to do whatever they like. (Except the freedom to permanently change themselves into separated selves; they may only dream of separation but they cannot make separation real and permanent; if separation were ever to become real, all of existence would self destroy. God and his real children desire to live and do not want to self destroy, so they cannot permit separation to exist. Nothing can exist in a separated world. Existence requires union, albeit hidden union. Even the material universe is unified by super strings that are invisible to the physical eyes.)
God gives freedom to all his children. His children have the freedom to sleep and dream that they are who they are not, separated selves housed in bodies. In reality, they are unified spirit self, outside matter.
God permits the world of dreams to exist and there is nothing any of us can do about it. You cannot prevent other people from sleeping and dreaming. All that you can do is understood that you yourself are asleep and dreaming. You can study the pattern of your sleep-dream and strive to correct it. This means that you can study your personal psychology, personality, self concept and self image and work on improving them.
The individual’s sole task is to understand his own personality, that is, the structure of his ego, the manner he separates from other people and work at improving it. The goal is for the individual to use his personality and body to move towards other people, rather than away from them. The realistic ego learns to love and forgive all people; to use his specific personality and body to teach love and forgiveness.
No one can change his body and ego (although that may be made possible in the future by genetic science and engineering), but he can use them to communicate love. For example, I am still as stubborn as a mule. You cannot tell me what to do, for, before you are done telling me what to do, I am already asking you who you think that you are telling me what to do with my freaking life. Even God himself cannot tell me what to do. How about Jesus Christ? Who the hell is he? Jesus is just another son of God, albeit one that discovered a way to return to our shared home, to union. Good for him.
Thomas, a Jnana (philosophical) yogi, will find his homewards journey on rational grounds, not Jesus Bhakti (poetic and worshipful) terms. Of course, he could use the assist of Brother Jesus and all the other teachers of union, teachers of love and teachers of God, including Gautama Buddha, his favorite teacher.
The salient point is that it is not for the individual to change other people. His primary function is to find out what the truth is and live it.
The truth is love and love is attained through forgiveness. Love and forgive all people. That is all that is asked of each of us.
Having become loving and forgiving, the individual models it and, hopefully, other people learn from his example. If they do, like him, they experience the peace and joy that, as Saint Paul said, passes human, ego, understanding.


CONCLUSION

This paper hypothesized that governments have their origin in human beings tendency to feel fearful. It complements and reinforces Thomas Hobbes contention that government has its genesis in human insecurity.
The article stressed the need to redirect the purpose of government. Whatever are the reasons why human beings established governments, governments can redirect their functions, by seeing themselves as instruments for helping people to becoming their brothers keepers, loving and forgiving one another. Governments do not have to do so as communists and socialists tried to do, by killing people. They should do so by having those in government: politicians and bureaucrats use their public offices to work for the common good.
Finally, before the individual does any thing, he ought to stop and asks: why am I doing this? If the objective is to serve the public, ones action cannot be that wrong. Whatever is done out of love and forgiveness, although sometimes misguided, since the ego can define love inappropriately, cannot be all wrong. Whatever is motivated by love and forgiveness serves a better public good than whatever is done for selfish purposes.



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17. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto. New York: Nuvision Publications, 2003.
18. Horace, Ovid and Virgil, see their literary works, including Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Horace (Quintus Flaccus) Odes. See The Life of Horace, Translated by Alexander Thomson and Thomas Forester.
19. Zeno, Seneca, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Pliny, the Younger, The Philosophy of Stoicism, Epicure, see Gibbons, The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire. New York: Random House, 2003.
20. Carl G. Jung The Collected Works of Carl G. Jung
21. There are numerous books on Terrorism, for a sample see Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God.
22. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. 1642.
23. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
24. George Berkeley, Dialogues. In The Works of George Berkeley, Edited by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop. London: Thomas Nelson and sons, 1957.
25. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations. Foreign Affairs, summer 1993 v72, n3 p22 (28).
26. Francis Fukayama, The End of History. In The National Interest, summer, 1989, pp 3-18.
27. Eric Fromm, Escape from Freedom. New York: Morrow/Avon, 1994. Man for Himself. New York: Routlege, 1999. Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1972. The Art of Loving.
28. Helen Schucman, A Course in Miracles, Tiburon, California: Foundation for Inner Peace, 1976.
29. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea. 1844.
30. George F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807.
31. Frederick Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1885.
32. Blasé Pascal, Pensees.
33. Benedict Spinoza, Ethics. In Collected Works of Spinoza. Ed. Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
34. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, Discourse on Metaphysics.
35. Voltaire, Candide 1759.
36. Dante, Inferno, Divine Comedy.
37. M. The Gospel of Ramakrishna. New York: Vedanta Society, 1947.
38. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations. New York: Penguin Group, 2004.
39. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience. In The Works of William James, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
40. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism. 1910.
41. Edward Gibbons, The Decline and fall of The Roman Empire. New York: Random House, 2003.
42. George Kelly, Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: W. W. Norton, 1955.
43. Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution. in Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler. Ed Henry Stein. San Francisco, California: Alfred Adler Institute, 2003.
44. Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.
45. B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York: Hackett Publishing, 2002.
46. Harold Laswell, Psychopathology and Politics. New York: Textbook Publishers, 2003. Politics: Who Gets What, When and How. New York: Peter Smith Publisher, 1990.
47. Henry Bergson, Creative Evolution. Translation by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911.
48. New Testament, Bible.
49. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996.
50. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Washington, DC. APA Press, 9004.
51. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. New York: CPA Books, 2002.
52. Thomas Paine, Common Sense. New York: Broadway Press, 2004.
53. Plato, Republic in the Complete Works, Ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson, 1997.
54. Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
55. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790.
56. William James, Pragmatism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.
57. Karl Von Clausewitz, On War. New York: Penguin Classic Library, 2004.
58. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, New York: Sagebrush Educational Resources, 2004.

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December 5, 2005

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The Role of Fear in the Genesis and Nature of Government: An Essay on Political Philosophy (Part 1)

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- Political science seems non-theoretical. The discipline describes people’s political behaviors without striving to understand why they behave as they do. Apparently, there is a belief that speculation regarding why people do what they do leads to nowhere and, anyhow, is best left to psychologists to worry about?

Let psychologists engage in their favorite pastime of reductionism: reducing complex human behavior to unproven causal hypotheses. Psychology has had a field day reducing people’s behavior to this or that reasons, most of which turns out conjectural.

Psychoanalysis had its id origin of behavior, Behaviorism had its every behavior is learned, and Neuroscience has its every behavior is a product of biochemical balance or lack of it in people’s central nervous system. All these are conjectures that, in time, are given up as evidence indicates that we really do not know why we do what we do.

Political scientists describe what people do in the political arena and leave it at that. Apparently, it is believed that leaving the field to mere description of political phenomenon makes it a science?

What is science? Are science mere description of phenomena and or Karl Popper’s (1) definition of the scientific method, only? Shouldn’t science try to explain what it describes?

In so far that political science has a causal theory of political behavior, it includes Thomas Hobbes’ speculations on the reasons why people formed government?
Thomas Hobbes, in his seminal book, Leviathan, (2) attempted to explain the origin of government. Obviously, governments had existed before the seventeenth century when Hobbes wrote his book but, apparently, he felt a need to provide justification for the existence of government. As it were, he wanted to provide people with a rationale for accepting government as a necessary part of the social world.
In a nutshell, Hobbes pointed out that in what he called State of Nature, a pre-government society, people were in competition for access to the scarce resources provided by the environment. As he saw it, the powerful got more than the weak. Since it takes labor to wrest sustenance from nature, in his view, some of the powerful prevailed on the weak to work for them. Thus, everywhere, the strongest used the weak to work the land and lived in pleasure, while the weak lived in penury. The weak, in turn, often banded together and fought with the powerful. The result was that everywhere there was war. In this perpetual state of war, life became “nasty brutish and short”. The strong enslaved the weak today and the weak killed the strong tomorrow. All people, therefore, lived in perpetual insecurity; people were not sure whether they would live to see another day.
In order to reduce their insecurity, the people banded together and elected rulers from among them to rule them. They invented the Leviathan, government, to make laws that all of them were to obey or else be punished.
Obedience of laws made by the monarch led to peace and personal security in society. People began to respect each others rights (personal and property) or else they were arrested, judged and punished. Those who disobeyed the laws of the land were sent to jail or even killed, as in capital punishment.
As Hobbes sees it, it is the presence of the Leviathan, kings and governments that led to the existence of personal security in society. Without government and the hangman threatening to arrest, try, jailing and or killing law breakers, human beings would not respect each other’s rights. Slavery and other forms of social injustices would exist. Without government, all would be chaos, anarchy and insecurity. In his view, therefore, we need government.
It appears that Hobbes favored autocratic monarchs? Other political observers, such as John Locke (3), Jean Jacque Rousseau (4) Montesquieu (5), Madison, Hamilton and Jay (6), John Stuart Mill (7) have shown how to have a government that is not authoritarian. For our present purposes, the salient point is that Hobbes saw the origin of government in human beings’ desire for personal and social security; in other words, that he had a causal speculation, a rarity in political science, on why people do what they do.
Clearly, human beings need government if there is to be any kind of civilization. Given what we know about human nature (on aggression and territoriality, see Freud, 8, Lorenz 9), without government and laws, it is doubtful that people can have security. And without social security, people’s energies and time would be so devoted to seeking ways to survive that they probably would have less time devoted to economically productive work. As Abraham Maslow (10) indicated, it is doubtful that people can engage in actualizing their potentials in scientific and technological endeavors unless they first have security for their lives. If in doubt, look at situations where law and order has broken down and see what happened? In Somalia (11), for example, there has not been a functioning government for a period of twenty years and just about all economically productive activity has ceased. People devote most of their time and energy figuring out ways to physically survive the attack of
their next door neighbors. As a result, poverty reins in Somalia and similar anarchic situations.
Without a government passing laws that protected people in a polity, the people would probably devolve into anarchy and pillage each other’s properties. Bands of people would war with each other and total chaos would rein. The people would kill themselves like people swap flies. Life span would be less than a few decades. Clearly, we need laws, and government to implement them, if we are to have any kind of social harmony, peace, security, and material civilization. Hobbes, one thinks, had a useful causal hypothesis regarding the origin of governments. In the final analysis, we may not yet understand why there is government, but in so far that reason is our guide, Hobbes’ speculation seems relevant.

FEAR DEFINED

One does not think that Hobbes went far enough in explicating the possible genesis of government. While accepting his thesis, in this paper, I will argue that the deeper explanation of why we need governments is human tendency to fear.
Fear (see Isaac Marks, 12) is not an end, but a means to an end. The end is survival of the animal organism. Fear is a means to surviving the impersonal exigencies of planet earth. Fear alerts people to actual and or anticipated danger to their physical and or psychological integrity. Fear compels people to take measures to defend and protect themselves from threats to their biological existence.
Fear is a biological and involuntary mechanism built into human beings to compel them to run from danger and obtain security, or, if their past experiences tell them that they can stay and fight back, to fight whatever threatens their existence. In fear, animals, human beings included, undergo biochemical reactions in their bodies: adrenalin and other excitatory neurochemicals are poured out and these stimulate most of the organs of the body to work faster. The lung works fast dragging in more oxygen into the body. The heart pounds rapidly, carrying blood, oxygen and nutrition to all parts of the body. The body releases stored sugar and blood carries it to all parts of the body, giving them energy to flee or fight whatever is threatening their lives. The nervous system works very fast carrying messages from all parts of the body to the central nervous system (spine, brain), where they are interpreted and feedback sent to other parts of the body, instructing them on how to
respond to the perceived danger to the individual’s existence.
If the individual’s past experience, stored in his brain cells (neurons), tells him that he does not stand a chance in defeating the current threat to his existence, he is told to run from the perceived danger; conversely, if his past experience tells him that he is able to overcome the present danger, he is instructed to stay and fight back. These decisions and reactions are made in a split second; in fact, they seem made involuntarily, for the individual does not first pause to think about what he has to do but just does certain things, when his life is threatened. A gunman points a gun at you and you run away or, if you cannot do so, stay and beg for him not to kill you and perhaps do whatever he asks you to do; a car comes close to you and you jump away.
The purpose of fear is animal survival; people do whatever they do out of fear to survive physically and psychological as separated, biological organisms.
Fear mobilizes the individual’s whole physical and psychological energies and compels him to do what he must do to defend his existence when that existence is threatened. Without fear signaling to people that there is danger to their lives and compelling people to do certain things, involuntarily, since those activities are biologically mediated, it is doubtful that animals, human beings included, would survive in their present environment.
The environment is full of threats to animals’ existence and animals must have a ready (best inbuilt) mechanism for alerting them to danger and compelling them to take survival measures, if they are to survive in their environment. Fear is a crucial means for human and all animals’ survival on planet earth.
Assuming the absence of fear, it is doubtful that animals would live long. In fact, some human children are born without a tendency to feeling pain (see CIPA, Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis, 13), hence fear, for fear is a response to pain, and generally do not live long. They do not learn from experience that certain things could harm them; they, therefore, do not anticipate what could harm them and do not take appropriate measures to protect themselves and generally die from injuries. They seldom live to be twenty years old.
Those who are ashamed that human beings have a proclivity to fear, and want to eliminate fear, ought to think about this reality. Without fear, human beings probably would not survive as biological organisms. If so, the desire for fearlessness amounts to nihilistic desire to end biological forms of life! If other forms of existence, say, spirit, exist, perhaps, it is useful to end biological life forms? But if no other forms of life exist, apart from biological forms, perhaps it is not wise to give up fear and hence die out? One must be careful for what one wishes; those who wish for fearless existence may not like what follows, if their wishes are gratified: their personal physical and psychological demise.

Speculations on fearlessness aside, extant human beings, as we know them to be, are fearful animals. It is because they are fearful that they feel insecure. It is because of their fearfulness and consequent insecurity that they need government.
The thesis of this paper is that if human beings were not prone to fear, they would not need governments; they feel insecure because they are fearful and, therefore, need governments to reduce the threats that arouse fear and insecurity in their lives.

FEAR AND GOVERNMENT

Why do human beings feel fear? They feel fear because they have an awareness of having a separated and individuated self housed in vulnerable bodies. Body is very vulnerable and prone to been hurt and eventually to been destroyed. Human beings do feel pained when their bodies are hurt. Ultimately, they will die. Give or take, a hundred and twenty years and a human being dies.
As utilitarian philosophers (Mill, Bentham, 14) tell us, and our own experiences verify, human beings do not like pain and do not seem to like to die. Human beings fear pain and death. (See Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, 15.)
Perhaps, the greatest fear people have is the fear of the demise of their separated ego selves. People fear oblivion and finitude. Atheistic thinkers tell us that it is in their efforts to avert future finitude that human beings conjectured after death existences. As it were, the various religions of mankind came up with illusions of post death lives as a way of enabling men to tolerate their inevitable physical death. (See Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion 16) In this sense, religion and its concepts of after death world are like drugs, opium; Karl Marx (17) called it, that temporarily enable people to forget the terrible end that waits all of them in time. Freud, In the Future of an Illusion, having told the reader the functions of religion, all neurotic, that is, false, urges people to grow up and embrace the reality of death. People should give up their hankering for non-existent after death lives and, like courageous persons, accept their tragic nature.
Do all you can do to make your life as pleasant as is possible, for tomorrow you will die? Seize the day, Carpe Diem, Horace (18) said. Also see Zeno, Seneca, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius on the philosophy of stoicism and epicure (19). Don’t cry over spilled milk, for there is nothing you can do about it. Life is a tragic and comic thing, yet is worth living, stoicism teaches.
Clearly, human beings have fear of the demise of their individuated ego selves. They seem to fear return to undifferentiated state. Vaguely, human beings sense that their individuated lives emanated from an undifferentiated state. In that undifferentiated state, they fear loss of their individuation. (See the writings of Carl G. Jung, 20) Apparently, human beings want to have individuated, separated selves and fear their loss.
As long as people have separated selves and wish for those selves to live and fear their end, they would experience fear; and as long as human beings live in bodies that can be hurt they will feel fear of hurt.


Human beings are aware that each of them could inflict pain and death on other human beings. If you choose to do so, you can kill any human being close to you. In turn, other human beings, if they choose to do so, can kill you.
The fact that human beings could harm and or kill each other; the fact that human beings want to live at all costs; the fact that human beings fear death led to a situation where the sadistic elements undertake to oppress the masochistic element in society.
The slave master, for example, knows that the slave, like himself, wants to live, at all costs. Thus, he uses terror to intimidate the slave into accepting his wishes and work for him, for free. The slave master was the original terrorist. (For a useful definition of terrorism, see Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 21.) He knew that human beings are prone to pain and fear and that if you do not hesitate in using coercion to get people to do as you want, and that if you do not mind killing people to get what you want, that people would do what you asked them to do.
White slave masters in America were essentially terrorists. Americans celebrate their slave owning leaders, but actually celebrate terrorists. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison etc used force and intimidation to get African slaves to do their wishes or else the slaves were tortured and or killed. They manipulated the slave’s human tendency to pain and fear of pain and used it to enslave some human beings. These people intimidated folks into doing what they did not want to do, be slaves for other people. They were no different from today’s terrorists who use fear and intimidation to achieve political objectives.
White American slave masters were aware that black folks, like white folks, and human beings everywhere, fear pain and death, and used terror to intimidate them into becoming slaves for them or else they were beaten up, inflicted pain on (which they did not want to experience) and, ultimately, killed (they did not want to die).
Unfortunate as their fate was, slaves contributed to it. They feared pain and death and wanted to live as separated selves in vulnerable bodies. Their desire for separated existence led slaves to tolerate other human beings oppression and abuse of them. If the slave did not fear pain and death and stood up and fought for his personal liberty, nobody would have enslaved him. It is fear of harm and death that led the slave to accept his masochistic relationship with the sadistic slave master. (See Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 22, and Eric Fromm, Escape from Freedom, Man for Himself, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. 27.)
The slave master himself is very much afraid of pain and death. In fact, it is his acute awareness of pain and death and desire to live in bodies that led him to seek ways to use other people to make his life tolerable.
(On September 11, 2001, Arab Moslem terrorists attacked the world trade center at New York. One beheld folks scampering for their lives. The super rich, the whites who oppress the working classes, ran like rats looking for burrows to hide their oppressive lives in. Their behavior showed that they are as fearful as those minority persons they oppress. The events of September 11, 2001 ought to help the woefully fearful African Americans to realize that their masters are as fearful as themselves. This realization ought to enable them to do unto their masters as their masters did to them. With sufficient exercise of unsentimental brutality against their present oppressors, African Americans would liberate themselves from their current pathetic second class situation.)

For our present purposes, the relevant point is that both the sadist, the slave master, and the masochist, the slave, are afraid of harm and death. Both are operating under the same human tendency to fear harm and death. If the slave did not have fear of pain and death, the slave master, sadist, would not have been able to enslave him.
Everywhere in the world, people are able to oppress and abuse people because of human tendency to fear of pain and death.

Aware of the vulnerability of their lives, human beings formed governments to protect them. Clearly, given our fears, we will always need governments.
Governments, specifically, leaders, aware of the reasons behind the need for governments, human fear of harm and death, are tempted to oppress and abuse the people. As it were, governments say: you need me because you are a bloody coward who is afraid of pain and death; you gave me weapons to kill those who are out to kill you because you are afraid of harm and death; you made me your killer for you; you made me a murderer so that you may live secure life, I will, therefore, oppress and abuse you, for transforming me into a murderer for your safety. As it were, leaders, governments, are angry at those they govern, for transforming them into murderers who kill criminals so that they obtain their phantom security.
Thus, everywhere in the world, governments, political leaders oppress and abuse the people they are hired and paid to protect. (A minor aspect of this phenomenon is our ambivalent relationships with policemen. We hired them to protect our lives and properties. We like the fact that they defend us. We authorized them to kill criminals on our behalf. But because they can kill other human beings, we have contempt for them. All over the world, adolescents, teenagers, even the most law abiding ones, have total contempt for cops. This is probably because they vaguely know that cops are hired killers. Hired killers are not exactly any one ones ideal human being. Cops, in turn, have contempt for those who hired them to kill on their behalf. They resent being made over into murderers for peoples safety. Cops are the world’s greatest liars. They are ready to say or do anything, including planting evidence on people, to justify arresting and or killing them; many of them are, in
fact, outright sociopaths. Psychological, that is, personality, testing, suggests that anti social personality types tend to make better policemen. It figures: it takes a thief to catch a thief.)

If the people did not have fear of harm and death, they would not have governments; they would not delegate the power and authority to protect them to rulers, to those they made murderers for them. (Political leaders, the military, police, judges, and prison officials are given the power to become murderers for society. As it were, society empowers them to sentence criminals to death and carry this onerous chore out for the protection of the people.
There is no getting around the truth: the people made some of the people legal murderers, they authorized some persons to murder those who threaten their lives. For their safety, human beings transformed some of their people into killers of other human beings. This is weird, to say the least. Weird or not, such is our social reality.)

We have governments because we are prone to fear. Governments know this fact and are tempted to oppress and abuse us. As long as people are prone to fear of harm and death, their governments may oppress them. Consider Americans. They run around the world calling themselves free men. They claim that their country is the land of the free and brave. But a few months in America and you learn that white Americans live in total fear of harm and death. These people live in fear and elected their governments to protect them. Their governments, aware of the basis of their legitimacy, the people’s fearfulness, subject Americans to abuse. The white American is actually a slave, but he may not know it. He does not even have the minimal freedom enjoyed by those he considers primitive persons.
The relative freedom that this observer enjoys in his native Alaigbo is no where to be found in North America. He concluded that Americans, white and black, are glorified slaves. They are not the liberators of mankind, they pretend to be; they are to be liberated by those of us who know what true liberty (within the context of human society, love and laws) means.


THE ARAB MOSLEM TERRORIST HAS CHANGED THE EQUATION


Americans, indeed, Westerners in general, seem to operate with the assumption that human beings are motivated by fear of pain and death. They seem to assume that human beings are a cowardly bunch who, when threatened, would grovel for their life. They seem to assume that with sufficient coercion and willingness to mercilessly employ it, that they could control human beings and get them to do whatever they want them to do.
White men, as this African observer sees them, seem to have total contempt for human beings, including for themselves. (If you are a Freudian psychoanalyst, this self contempt may be unconscious. Unconscious or not, this lack of respect for humanity probably accounts for the horrendous things these people do to their fellow human beings. Loving persons would not, for example, enslave other human beings. The slave master probably hates himself and projects his self hatred to other people, those he enslaves. I cannot see how an intelligent and loving person can enslave other human beings. Pure reason leads intelligent persons to appreciate the human condition as one of suffering and disposes them to help alleviate that suffering, as my hero, Buddha did, rather than exploit it, as psychopathic slave masters did.)
Furthermore, white men know that their history is a history of terrorism, of using force to intimidate the people into doing as told. What were Europeans kings, princes, dukes, earls, counts, marquis but gangsters who used killing to intimidate their people into obeying them? The so-called divinely appointed rulers of Europe were collectively as intelligent as today’s morons. What they had in super abundance was sadistic ability to kill whoever opposed them. The European power base was intimidation of the masses.

The Arab Moslem terrorist has changed the equation for Westerners. The Moslem terrorist is willing to wrap bombs on his body and go blow himself up, along with the death of other people. His goal, of course, is the familiar terrorist goal: to kill randomly and thereby generate fear of harm and death in the people, with the hope that this would intimidate them to do as he wants them to do, in this case, get America and the West to change their policies towards the Middle East.
We are not interested in the good or bad of the Moslem terrorist’s goals. Good or bad, at any rate, is a moral, not a scientific discourse. Science looks at facts, as they are, and leaves judgment to decision makers.
The relevant proposition one is addressing is the fact that the Arab has shown that he can defy fear of pain and death and blow himself up, for a political objective. As long as he is willing to kill himself and kill other people along with him, he has brought into being what Americans did not expect from people.
Americans assume that people are cowards and want to live so much so that they would be begging for every opportunity to live. They assume that all human beings are like themselves, folks who so want to live that they are afraid of pain and death and willingly allow their government to oppress them. Americans permit their governments to oppress them so as give them an opportunity to live, to be oppressed some more. The American’s life is weird: he begs his government to help him live and knows fully well that the government oppresses him so, in effect, he is begging to be oppressed by his weird government. If one must live, one ought to live freely, but not abused by governments.
Further, American rulers assume that all human beings are like their African slaves, who were so afraid of pain and death and so desirous of living that they permitted themselves to be enslaved and abused. African Americans were oppressed in every manner is humanly possible and accepted it, rather than fight back and, if necessary, die fighting rather than live as intimidated slaves.
Americans now have to contend with Arab Moslem terrorists, those who are not afraid of death. This is an equation their narcissistic and sadistic mentality did not prepare them to cope with.
The entrance of the Moslem terrorist into America has spelled the death of America, as is currently organized. The America that will survive Arab terrorism will be a different America, a more Godly America.
In the meantime, it is only a matter of time before Arab terrorists begin immolating themselves in American cities, dragging Americans along with them to death. Given Americans fear of pain and death, they would panic and, like chicken with its head cut off, run to safety. Alas, there is no safe place for sadistic persons.
Seeing Americans run on September 11, 2001, finally exposed their fearfulness. Why not stay and deal with danger and, like men, die rather than flee? That did it for me and for those Africans who were tempted to fear American power. The people are clay footed cowards. They are terrorists who use military weapons to intimidate people, those who can be intimidated, those who fear harm and death. (I do not believe that American rulers have fully appreciated the psychological import of September 11; it shattered their supposed superiority and invincibility. They are now seen as chicken, as cowards who run when bullets fly. Their nuclear weapons do not impress any one. Human beings do not respect those who run from danger, as folks did in New York. I am yet to recover the contempt I felt for the Americans I saw fleeing like a whole bunch of rats. Stay and fight, superman. It is cowardly to stay in safe bunkers and from their lunch missiles at innocent Arab children in Bagdad.
Courageous soldiers fight amano-amano, hand to hand, and die on their feet, they do not indiscriminately and cowardly kill their enemies from afar, as American high tech weapons do.)
Just as they can intimidate other people, other people can intimidate them. The trick of their game is exposed, the game is up, and they are about to be checkmated.


THE METAPHYSICS OF TRANSCENDING OF FEAR

As Arab terrorists, and before them, Japanese kamikaze pilots, have shown, a human being can transcend fear of pain and death. Arab terrorists believe that they are going to a better world when they leave this one. It is not relevant to know whether the proposed paradise the terrorists are going to is real or not. What is germane is that they believe in its reality. Human beings generally behave on the basis of their beliefs.
The lesson is that it seems necessary to have belief in an alternative life before one gives up living in the present form of life.

To transcend fear of harm and death, it helps if the individual decides that his separated self, the ego, is an illusion, a chimera, a dream self that does not, in fact, exist, or seems to exist only in a dream setting.
He must relinquish his wish for a separated self housed in a body. He must desist from seeing himself as a body.
If he truly does not identify with his body, what hurts his body and or destroys his body would not concern him, much.
He must give up all efforts to defend and protect his body (food, clothes, and houses, everything we do on earth are done in defense of body and the separated self concept it houses). The ego/body must be given up and not defended, if the individual is to overcome his fear of pain and death.
When the separated self and the body that houses it are given up, the individual experiences himself as part of an undifferentiated, unified self.
Only spirit can be everywhere and be many and still be unified. Matter, space and time separate things. Spirit is unified. To be unified, all things must be the same and equal. Unified spirit must be the same and equal everywhere.
That which is everywhere must be eternal and immortal. Unified spirit is eternal and immortal. Spirit is changeless and permanent.
That which is the same everywhere must know it as such; spirit knows itself as the same; there is nothing that is not already part of itself for it to know.
Spirit is one and simultaneously infinite in numbers.

As long as the individual identifies with his separated self housed in body, he must be prone to fear and must defend himself; but the moment he gives up his identification with the ego and its body and identifies with a unified spirit self, he is no longer amenable to fear. Of course, he would still feel pain but if he focuses his mind on eternal spirit, real or not, he will overcome the tendency to do things out of fear. In this new state, no human being can terrorize him.
If people overcome their fear of harm and death, no one can oppress and abuse them, no government can tell them what to do.
Governments currently tell people what to do because they are bloody cowards who are afraid of harm and death. As long as human beings are prone to fear of harm and death they must have oppressive governments.
If people truly desire a less oppressive government, they must become less fearful and more willing to die for their liberty. (See David Hume, 23, George Berkeley, 24, John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 7.)


MOVING AWAY FROM AND MOVING BACK TO HOLISM

Human beings undertake two types of movements: moving away from wholeness, aka God. This movement is also called separating movement. The other type of movement is moving back towards holism, back to union, back to what religionists call God.
America and other human civilizations are moving towards separation, to illusion, to deep sleep and, as such, are fascinated by space, time and matter (material monism) and not interested by idealistic monism/solipsism.



FRANCIS FUKAYAMA’S END OF HISTORY REVISITED


With the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, it appeared like the ideological struggle between capitalism and socialism, liberal democracy and autocratic totalitarianism, had come to an abrupt end. It appeared that the West, read America, had won and their opponents, the socialist world, were defeated. The world now seemed America’s oyster; the delusion of Pax Americana began in earnest.
That delusion prevailed during the early 1990s and was shattered with the events of September 11.
Samuel Huntington’s little book, the Clash of Civilizations (25), brought to an end the illusion that the only competing ideologies in the world were capitalism and socialism. There are religious world views, which, in fact, anteceded political and economic ideologies and are probably more portent than political ideologies. People tend to define themselves by their religions more than they do by their politics.
Poor Mr. Fukayama (26) and his pandering to the emergent so-called sole superpower, the world Hegemon who tells every body what to do. Didn’t Mr. Fakuyama study the crusades, the Christian struggle to retake the Holy land from the Moslems? Since he was a product of America’s non educative schooling, could it be that Mr. Fukayama was not exposed to the religious struggles between Moslems and Christians?


The more portent struggle going on in our world is the struggle by the fearful and the less fearful, masochists and sadists. (See Eric Fromm, Art of Love. 27)
Clearly, as long as people are subject to fear and fear pain and death, governments will intimidate them into obedience. But those who have overcome fear of harm and death are not amenable to control by the terrorists in governments.
Fearless Arab terrorists are about to confront fearful Westerners. That is the war that is about to ensue in the world. The sadistic goon squad armies of the West are about to confront the armies of religious zealots.
This is the Armageddon the Bible talked about. The fearless, who, ip so factor, must be rooted in God, are bound to win this struggle.
When the fearless wins, a new type of civilization downs, a civilization that, for lack of a better name, we might call Christ based civilization. This new civilization is not based on fear and intimidation but on love and charity.
This type of civilization is not known to Western thinking. Christians call it the dawn of New Jerusalem or New Israel; others call it by different name. Helen Schucman (28) intimated this new world. It is a world where finally the will of God is done; a world where the children of God stopped doing their own wishes and did their father’s will. They and their father are one and their father’s will is their real will. In obeying their father’s will, they are really obeying their own real will. Their father’s will is that their nature is love. Love is union. To obey God’s will is to love all creation and to unify with all creation. When people love one another, they are doing the will of their father, which is their own real will, for in reality, they are unified with all people.
The kingdom of God, love, union, will come to earth and replace the kingdom of man, separation and hate. Love and union will replace hate and division. In a loving and unifying world, peace and happiness reins. (For a more philosophical rendition of philosophical idealism see Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and idea, 29; George Berkeley’s Dialogues, 24, provided a definition of solipsistic philosophy.)


THE TWO TRENDS CANNOT BE USED TO JUDGE ONE ANOTHER

The two trends, moving away from holism and moving towards holism, to ego and to Christ, to earth and to heaven, cannot be used to judge one another. Each has its own standards, they are mutually exclusionary.
Spirit is different from matter; you cannot use spirit to judge matter or matter to judge spirit. Spirit actually does not understand what matter does and matter does not understand spirit.
Therefore, one cannot judge man from the perspective of spirit. One can only have compassion for those enchanted by matter and moving towards it. A person moving towards spirit is not judgmental; he has made one judgment, the judgment that the world is nothing and does not pursue it; actually, he just overlooks the world of space, time and matter, to experience the unified world of spirit.
This does not mean that he has escaped from this world. In fact, he does not negate the world; he merely places the world in proper perspective. He still studies science and technology and uses its findings to improve life on earth for those who live on earth, those who believe that they are separated selves living in bodies. He uses his own ego and body to communicate love with other people, those, who like him, believe that they live in bodies.
Everything in the material world can be used to love people. Whatever is used to love the children of God is made Holy, actually not quite holy, for holiness exists only in spirit; earthly things can only be made to approximate holiness. Holiness is always there, for we remain whole, unified, as God created us, while dreaming that we are separated.
We remain unified spirit, while dreaming that we are separated selves housed in bodies. We live in the presence of love while dreaming that we are hated by each other and by God.
Remove the blocks to love and know that you always live in the presence of love, for love is all there is in the universe. Remove the veil masking love and know that all is love in the world.
Overlook people’s hatreds and know that all people are loving people; even their attacks on you are calls for love, when they feel unloved by you. Their attacks are calls for you to help them learn the meaning of love, and in so doing, learn the meaning of love yourself. When you forgive their attacks and love them, you affirm your union with them, in spirit, in Christ.
The payoff of forgiveness is that you feel peaceful and joyous. Return to love, to union via forgiveness and experience salvation. To be in sin is to be separated from other people; to be saved is to be unified with other people. Union, that is, love is salvation, and healing.


CHRIST BASED NEW WORLD ORDER
(A replacement of the current ego based western world order.)


I have presented a thesis that the presence of fear in human nature necessitates government. If you can refute this thesis, you do so. However, I do not think that you can succeed. At best, you can say that it is reductionistic, that human beings are too complex for their behavior to be reduced to one single motive. You are probably right in saying so.
I have also said that fear is a means and not an end. The end is the preservation of a separated and individuated self. Fear alerts the individual to threats to his individuated self and compels him to take measures to protect himself. Fear, therefore, is a mechanism for defending the separated self. The separated self is the end, the goal, and fear is the means to it. If you can, refute this thesis, you do so. I do not think that you can succeed. But go ahead and try, anyway. What you can do is tell us that the alternative to separated self, unified self, is not self evident. I used to be of that frame of mind.
In the past, I simply told religionists that they merely conceptualized an opposite of our world and claimed that it existed, when, in fact, they did not have evidence that it exists. One can perceive separation and conceptualize its opposite, union; see differences and conceptualize its opposite, sameness; see human inequality and conceptualize its opposite, equality; see space and time and can conceptualize its opposite, eternal present; in other words, one can perceive what exists in our temporal universe and conceptualize their opposite and take that putatively imaginary opposite as real.
We live in a world of change and imagine an alternative to it that is changeless and permanent; we live in a world of matter and can conceptualize its opposite, the world of spirit. We see an imperfect world and can imagine its perfect opposite. In other words, one can say that heaven is a delusion and a hallucination.
This was my cavalier approach to religionists and their seeming imaginary claims that a spiritual world exists. In fact, I went further; I believed that believing in God is synonymous with being psychotic (psychosis is characterized by the presence of delusions and hallucinations in any of the five senses: auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory and feeling). I simply had no use for religious persons.
William James (see Varieties of Religious Experience, 39, also see Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism, 40) talked about a certain type of experience that ego based reasoning cannot explain. When you experience it, you no longer would ask for evidence for God’s existence.
There is another world, a world of unified spirit. That world is not our known material world. However, we are in this present world, a world of space, time and matter, a world of separated selves. I am here and you are over there; there is space between us. We live in bodies, and for all intents and purposes are different. (Background reading of the following observers may be useful in understanding my thesis: Hegel, 30, Nietzsche, 31, Pascal, 32, Spinoza, 33, Leibnitz 34, Voltaire, 35, Dante, 36, Ramakrishna, 37, Adam Smith, 38, Bergson, 47, Kant, 49, Plato, 53, Aristotle, 54, Edmund Burke, 55, William James, 56, Von Clausewitz, 57, Machiavelli, 58 and Hitler, 51, the Christian Bible, 48.)

SOME METAPHYSICS

We live in a world of opposites, a world where everything opposes everything else. The world began by the wish for separation; separation opposes union; given its origin in opposition, everything in the world opposes everything else. There is life and death, light and darkness, good and bad. It is a world of pairs of opposites.
As the world sees these things, some persons are black and others are white, some are tall and others short, some are beautiful and others ugly. These differences do not exist in the world of spirit; there, all are the same, equal and are one. But we are not aware of the world of unified spirit; we are aware of the world of separated selves housed in different bodies.
The real question facing us, as long as we think that we are on earth, is how we are going to make our world a bit more like the unified world of God? How do we get our separated world to resemble the unified world of God?
Obviously, only the non-material, the spiritual, can unify. That which is in body, space and time can only separate, for space, time and matter were designed to separate with and exist to maintain separation. In body, we cannot unify, literally. In body, we are literally separated, so how can we figuratively unify? This is the real question facing us.
We can transform our world to what Helen Schucman, in her metaphysical poem, A Course in Miracles, called a borderland between heaven and earth, Dante’s purgatory.( See Dante, Divine Comedy, Inferno, 36). Schucman is chucking full of metaphors: she also called that world happy dream, gate of heaven, real world etc.
Call it what you like, what is important is what we are trying to accomplish. We are trying to bring about a world where human thinking and behavior approximates the thinking and behavior of those in spirit. Clearly, while in bodies we cannot think and behave like spirit (spirit is limitless; body is a limit).
Our separated world can remain separated but we can think and behave differently. The nineteenth century Indian saint, Ramakrishna (see the Gospel of Ramakrishna. 37) talked about using our egos to love other egos. In the same light, Helen Schucman talked about using what we made to separate with to unify with, what we made to hate with to love with. We made the ego and the body that houses it to separate with and she talked about redirecting their purpose, from being means of separation to being means of union. To her, what matters is the purpose to which something is put to. If your purpose is to love other people, that is, to unify with them, she said that your behavior is now redirected towards God.
Whatever is used to love with is purified and made holy, made whole. If one seeks only self interests and ignores common interests, one lives for the ego, hence is unholy, but if one works for public interests, one now lives for unified self, which in its individuated form can be called the Christ self, one is now holy.
Separation, like fear, is a means to an end and not an end in itself. We separate for a reason. Helen Schucman observes that the goal of separation is a special self. The special self is the self that desires to create its creator, create itself and create its siblings. In her thinking, the son of God desired to kill his father and usurp his creatorship throne. His goal is to become the creator of reality; he did not want to be created but to be the creator. God created him and he resented that fact and wanted to create himself. Of course, the son cannot be the father of his father, nor can he father himself. We cannot create God and ourselves. Still, the wish for self creation was so strong that we fantasized doing so.
Our world, Schucman thinks, came into being to enable us to seem to have separated from God and now created ourselves. As it were, our world is a dream where the created children of God now seem to have created themselves, created their father and created everything. We are now the author of reality. Of course, in reality, we are not the author of reality. God is still the author of reality; we merely dream that we are the author of reality.
The world is a dream, an illusion, a hallucination and delusion where what is not real is taken as real. The children of God, as it were, are temporarily insane. (Wouldn’t you say that this world is an insane place?)

Posted by Administrator at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2005

Negative Uses of Body and Personality

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. --- THE GOAL OF SELF CREATION, SUPERIORITY: To separate is a verb, not a noun. We separate for a purpose. We separate from God and other people for a reason. What is that reason? We separate from God and from other people so as to go feel like we are superior to God, to other people. Separation has a purpose; its goal is superiority.

Superiority ultimately means that one wants to seem to have created God, created ones self and created other people.
Put this way, it seems an insane wish. But that is what it is, an insane wish. It is like a light particle that believes that it is greater than the sun, indeed, that it created the sun from which it emanated. If put in this stark, unadorned manner, its insanity becomes apparent; one then is likely to laugh at it and give it up as a bad joke.
Each of us wishes for separation from God, from other people and from our real self (which is unified spirit self). We wish for separation for the purpose of seeming superior to God, superior to other people and superior to our real self (unified self).
That is correct, the self we invented, the ego self, wants to seem superior to its inventor, our real self.
That is, we made a false self and ask it to seem superior to our real self. This is absurd, would you not say so? But that is what is going on here; we make a false self, an idol and ask it to be superior to our real self, our unified spirit self.

SPACE, TIME AND MATTER

To seem to have accomplished our goal of superiority and separation, we invented space, time and matter. In space and time we seem distant from each other.

PERCEPTION

Space, time and matter produced perception, that is, we invented perception. In space, time and matter, each of us can see that he is in a different place hence seem separated from other people. He can see himself in body hence seem separated from his spirit self. We are now seemingly separated from our real selves.

BODY IS MADE VULNERABLE

We make our bodies vulnerable. Body feels weak and can be hurt, feels pain and fears pain. Anticipating that other people could hurt his body, his chosen home, he avoids them. Thus, we use weakness, pain and fear to maintain separation.
If the individual wants to seem superior to God, other people and his real self, he makes his body particularly prone to feeling pain and fear. He is born on earth with a body that is wracked by extreme pain and fear. He inherits a medical disorder, such as spondilolysis, fibramylogia, that makes him feel pained most of the time. In pain, he is afraid to play with other people least they hurt him. He avoids other people at play and that way keeps a distance between him and them. (Make no mistake about it, in the here and now, pain is real for him; a pained body cannot participate in rough sports like football. But it is all a set up. One set it up that way. One chose the body one inherited. One chose the level of pain one feels. One chose it all so as to make body, hence ego, seem real and separated from other people.)

PERSONALITY

If one has a pained body, one develops a personality that anticipates pain and fear and uses it to avoid people.
Personality is the individual’s habitual pattern of relating to his world, to other people and to himself.
Personality is a means of separating from ones real self, separating from other people’s real selves and separating from God.
Personality is a means of maintaining the illusion that one is a separated, superior self. All personalities, normal and abnormal, are means of separation and all human beings do so.
PERSONALITY DISORDERS AS MEANS MAINTAINING SUPERIOR SELF

Personality disorders and mental disorders like neurosis and psychosis are more severe means of separating from ones real self, from other people and from God. Personality disorders are a product of the desire to seem to have a superior self.
When the person on the street hears of personality disorders, he probably does not know that he may be included in the category. Indeed, he may not even know that those he admires, his political leaders, may have them. Some of the greatest leaders known to man had personality leaders. For example, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Richard Nixon etc had paranoid personality disorders. If one wanted to, I could tell you the personality disorders afflicting many African leaders. Let us just say that many Nigerian leaders have narcissistic cum anti social personality disorders. The person with a personality disorder(s) is like you and I, it is just that he has in exaggerated form what is found in most human beings. He is found in every walks of life, science, medicine, engineering, teaching etc. It is only those who have severe mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder (manic depression) and delusional disorder that seldom can make it into high political offices. At any rate, these are very few, less than two percent of the population, that the average person should not concern himself with that issue. We have to concern ourselves with personality disorders, for many of our leaders in politics, and the economy have them; that is why some of our leaders are screwing up, big time.
Briefly, paranoid personality: here the person feels that other people are out to get him and is always fighting with them; he wants to seem very important and fears being humiliated. He uses that false belief to justify separating from people. In separation he maintains his false superior self. (In social interaction no one can maintain a false superior self, not for long, anyway, for interaction requires equality.)
Schizoid personality: Here the individual keeps to himself and does not really care to be with other people. That is, he separates from other people and in isolation maintains the delusion that he has a superior self.
Schizotypal personality: Here the individual is odd and eccentric and that enables her to separate from other people; in isolation the odd fellow feels superior to other people.
Narcissistic personality: Here the person feels special and seeks others attention and admiration. In doing so, he separates from other people, for the only way to join people is to love them. If you seek to get attention, and not give it, you cannot join people.
Histrionic personality: Here the woman is the drama queen who must be paid attention. She avoids loving people hence separates from people. In isolation she maintains her illusion that she is special.
Borderline personality: Here, the person wants every person to take care of her, while she does not take care of others. As long as she is not the active lover of people she is separating from them and in doing so feels special and superior.
Anti social personality: Here the individual takes from other people and does not feel guilty or remorse. The criminal takes from people and does not give to people. The only way to feel connected to people is to give them love and attention, so the criminal is separated from people. The criminal feels superior to other people; after all he outsmarts them in stealing from them.
Avoidant personality: Here the shy person avoids, that is, separates from people. He does so for the deceptive reason that he feels not good enough and he does not want people to come close so as to see his inadequacy. But actually he wants to seem superior to other people and in isolation maintains his false superiority.
Obsessive-compulsive personality: Here the person is seeking perfection and does not really love other people; he loves his ideal self, his ego, hence is separated from other people.
Dependent personality: Here the person wants other people to care for him. To obtain union it is one who must care for others, hence the dependent personality is separating from people. One must be childishly superior to those who take care of one.
Passive-aggressive personality: Here the person is unassertive and does not seem to know how to actively relate to people hence is separating from people. He too feels false superiority.
I have given the above personality disorders a spiritual psychological interpretation. For a more secular presentation see, Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution; also see Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth. You can also see the descriptive, but non-explanatory psychiatric bible, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
The more severe mental disorders are really absurd means of separating from people. The schizophrenic lives in his own world where he hears voices and sees what other people do not see and is deluded. He is separated from other people. In his fantasies he feels superior to other people.
The deluded person believes he is more important than the rest of the people hence are separated from them.
The manic person sees himself as the best human being on earth and he lives in euphoria where what is not true is true to him. He lives in his own world and is not relating to people, is separated.
The clinically depressed person is socially withdrawn and is separated from people. Depression is a means of avoiding social relationships, so as to retain a superior self
The anxious person uses anxiety to separate from other people. Because he is anxious he avoids other people (as he tells himself, lest they see that he is not good). In his isolation he feels better than other people, hence is using anxiety to maintain false superiority.
Again, I have given a spiritual-psychological interpretation to mental disorders. As I see it, mental disorders are means of separating from other people, from God and from our collective real self. I developed these ideas in my book, Real Self Psychology.
Of course, secular psychologists may disagree with my assessment. I must, however, point out that in my over twenty years experience in secular psychology, I did not see it heal any one of his mental disorder through its secular psychological methodological approach to the problem. Psychoanalysis, behaviorism, neuroscience, and I am familiar with all of them, do not heal any one with serious mental disorders; they do not even heal anxiety and garden variety neurosis.
What heals people is a combination of secular psychological understanding of their self-concept problems and religious intervention, aka spiritual psychology. Folks with serious mental disorders obviously need to see their psychiatrists and take the neuroleptic medications, anti mania medications; anti depression medications and anti anxiety medications they are prescribed. Folks with neurosis need to see psychotherapists for talk therapy. A combination of secular and spiritual interventions is what heals people. I am not an either or type of person; I accept science and meta-science, medications and spiritual understanding. On earth, people are matter and spirit, not either or. In heaven they are only spirit, but on earth, where they currently are, they are spirit having material experience and, as such, need material interventions: food, medication, clothes, shelter, regular exercises etc to survive for as long as is possible (120 years?).
Whatever enables the individual to shrink his swollen ego, to give up his belief that he created himself, that it is up to him to create himself, to give up his sense of specialness and superiority, to accept that God created him and created all of us and to accept that all of us are his equal tends to help him cure his mental disorders.

(It should be noted that all separation, normal or abnormal, is maximal, for all of them puts one in a dream of self forgetfulness, in a state of ignorance of ones real self. The normal person is as sleeping and dreaming as the neurotic and psychotic person. The difference is a question of how they do it. Both of these dreamers require one correction: removal of the wish for superiority and separation and acceptance of equality, union and the fact that God created us, and that we did not create ourselves. This engenders humility, a cardinal indicator of mental health.)


The desire for superiority breaks eternal union. Breakage is attained through attack on union. The desire for superiority and separation attacks and fragments union. Each of the resultant fragments then goes seem superior to each other and to seem self created and creating of its creator.
Of course, one remains as God created one, same and equal with God and all creation, but in ones awareness, one maintains the illusion of superiority and separation. As long as the wish for superiority is retained, one must do something to seem separated from reality.


The avoidant personality uses avoidance to separate from other people. In his isolation, he maintains a false sense of superiority to other people. He lives an alone existence and feels lonely, by his choice. The price of his wished for superiority is loneliness, a very painful state of mind.
The avoidant personality generally chooses a sensitive body (he is born in one) that enables him to feel pain, so as to avoid people.
Body is generally used to feel separated and retain the illusion of superiority. In our contemporary world, we assign qualities to certain bodies. White body is given the quality of superiority, so that those in white bodies feel superior; black bodies are assigned inferiority, so that those in black bodies feel inferior to those in white bodies. Tall bodies are assigned superiority and short bodies are assigned inferiority; tall athletic bodies are assigned the best role. Fat bodies are assigned negative role.
Sick body is a means of avoiding people.
All these are, of course, childish games, for, in fact, the person playing all these games, the son of God, Christ, Atman, is the same everywhere.


SAMENESS AND EQUALITY OF SPIRIT



If you understand the purpose of separation and the means for maintaining it, space, time and matter and personality then it behooves you to put a stop to all these childish, silly games. Stop it, now. How?
Eliminate the wish that lead to the game. Give up the wish for superiority; give up the desire to create God, create other people and create yourself. Give it up and accept that God created you and that you are one with him and with all his creation. Return to union.
Union is only possible in spirit, not body. So give up identification with body and accept spirit as your reality. Spirit is perfect sameness and equality.

As long as you live in body, this means seeing past differences in body and accepting all people, black, white etc as the same; seeing past differences in the personalities, self concepts and egos with which people play the game of separation and superiority and accepting the equality of all people. Do so now, not tomorrow. See all persons, the seeming civilized and seeming uncivilized, Europeans and Africans, every body, as the same and equal in spirit and accept it; and relate to all people from that perspective, equality. Give up your own personality, ego and the games you play. Stop avoidance and relate to all.
Stop interfering with eternal union and accept union. You would then feel peaceful and happy. You would stop attacking union and as you do so you give all people peace. A world you have given peace would be grateful to you.
The entire world would help you, for you have helped it all remember its eternal union.
If you honor all people’s sameness and equality by treating them as such, they cannot not honor you as such. So, stop the childish game we have been playing all our lives and return to unity, sameness and equality, the condition of heaven.

CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS CHOICES


The choice to seem superior and separate from others was made in heaven. None of us is consciously aware of making that choice. This is so because the thinking pattern of heaven and the consciousness of heaven are different from the earth’s thinking pattern. In heaven, we have unified thinking and unified consciousness; on earth we have separated thinking and separated consciousness. In heaven, there is no I and you; we think in tandem with all selves. On earth, we have individuated thinking and consciousness and therefore cannot remember the choice we made in heaven, in tandem.
On earth, the choice to seem superior is not conscious, either. We make that choice, then realizing that it is impossible to be superior to our real selves and to the people, for we all know that sameness and equality is our truth, but wishing the insanity of superiority, we quickly push that wish into our unconscious mind. From the unconscious mind, that choice exercises influence on our behaviors.
In the here and now, no one is conscious of choosing superiority over other people (except in certain neurotics like racists), we must, therefore not blame people for making this decision for they are not conscious of making it.
All we need do is point out to people how they are behaving as if they are superior to other people and how that is producing the painful effects they are experiencing in their lives. Superiority attacks equality, superiority attacks love, superiority attacks union and leads to separation. That attack produces psychological pain.
Whoever seeks superiority lives in pain, by his or her choice, although he is not consciously aware of it? We can point this out to the person and urge him to seek equality, if he wants peace and joy and leave it at that without blaming any one.

SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS

Let us consider some examples of how this phenomenon works. I take the examples from my work. I will, more or less, hide the subjects’ identity.

Jane. Jane is a middle aged woman. She is white. She is from an upper middle class family (parents are medical doctors). In college, she gravitated to relationship with black men. She married a black person. The marriage did not work out and ended in divorce. Upon the end of her marriage, she had a relationship with an Arabic man. What is going on here is that she seeks superiority. She selects men whom she feels superior to. Her culture tells her that non-whites are inferior to her and she accepted that nonsense. She is not really in love with these men, for love requires perfect sameness and equality. Her motivation in her relationship is to seem superior to her men. She wanted them to place her on a pedestal. See, she is a rich white girl condescending to relate to poor, inferior black and or brown men. In effect, she was not in a love relationship with the men but in a superiority-inferiority relationship. Another term for this type of sick relationship is special relationship. As long as the men saw her as superior and accepted their inferiority, the relationship seemed to last. But as soon as the men desired equality, she could not deal with that and leaves them.
Special relationships are unholy relationships. They are an interference with the holy relationship that God designed for his children while they are on earth and dream that they are apart from one another.
In holy relationship, both partners feel perfect equality, hence feel peaceful and happy.
Those in special relationships feel unhappy. In the case of Jane, the men with her resent her and eventually leave her.
Is she a victim? Of course not. She chose that kind of superior-inferior dance. She desired to feel superior to a son of God. In a manner of speaking, she is a sinner, for to sin is to feel superior to another human being, hence to separate from him or her. She is guilty of attacking equality.
She, in fact, actually attacks her male lovers by seeming superior to them. In these neurotic relationships, she is the boss; indeed, she determines when they have sex etc. She frustrates the men in her life. She is an egoistic woman, hence is, in the language of religion, evil.
She is living in the effects of her egoistic life: loneliness, for no man can tolerate her for long.
If she does not change her personality structure and see people as equal, she will die a lonely old maid, by her choice.
She is not a victim; things did not happen to her against her wishes, they happened to her as she wished. The moment she sought superiority, things happen to her as they are happening to her now.

Monique is a female psychologist. She sees herself as totally independent of men. She does not want men to tell her what to do. In her relationships with men, she pays her way, fifty-fifty. This is fair, she believes. She is generally left by the men in her life. She feels unfairly treated and sees herself as a victim. She then resolved to have nothing to do with men. She currently lives with her dogs, cats and other animals.
This woman is egoistic. In her own way, she feels superior to men and men sense it and leave her alone. She is alone by her choice. She is not a victim. Her egoistic personality is a wish to separate from other people. She subtly feels superior to men and that feeling breaks relationship with them and they leave her alone. She is self centered and cannot really care for other people.


Lori is an expensive woman, what they call a high maintenance woman. Her men must be rich and spend liberally on her, while she does not spend a penny on them. The men soon wise up to her expensive lifestyle and leave her. Her game is thus: spend on me, for I am a superior woman. If she is superior then she cannot relate to people, for relationship requires equality.


Pam is an equally expensive woman. She seeks out successful men who spend lavishly on her. She is sexually available to such men and satisfies their every wish. Nevertheless, they leave for they see her as an expensive burden. Again, she uses “spend on me” as a means of seeming superior, hence breaking relationships that require equality.


Pat B is an older woman. She is a liberated woman. She selects men who essentially do whatever she wants, including satisfy her sexually. On the other hand, she does not bother trying to satisfy them. They see themselves as being used by her and leave her. She feels like a victim and, in fact, becomes physically sick (psychosomatic sickness). She is using people and not loving them. Love requires mutual caring, mutual satisfaction.


Pat H is like Pat B and uses men for her own satisfaction but does not satisfy them. Somewhere along the line she knows this and is learning to become a giver. To the extent that she gives, that is, loves, she has good relationships.


Bethel: is a grossly fat young woman. In a perverted sort of way, to be fat is to be superior to other people (although in general society to be fat is to be seen as gross and ugly). She uses her fat to keep men away from her life. She uses fat to prevent relationship. Men stay away from her. She feels abandoned and feels that she is a victim and sees life as unfair to her. Starved of attention and sex, she went to a bar and essentially picked up a man and from that one sexual encounter picked up herpes. This added to her sense of injustice done to her by men.


John is a successful business man. He fancies himself very worldly wise. He expects his wife to obey him. She did. But later, she went back to school and obtained a doctorate degree. John paid her school fees. Upon completing her education, she left him and married another man. John felt that what she did was unfair; he felt used by her; he is a bitter man.
John’s sense of superiority meant that she had to accept the status of inferiority he made for her. She accepted that role for a while, resented it but kept quite until she obtained sufficient education to become able to sustain herself. She then married a man who treated her as his equal. She is now in a happy relationship. The old relationship was an unholy one. Now she is in a holy relationship where both partners see themselves as equals. That is, her new relationship replicates our heavenly equality in their earthly state.
John has to learn equality and seek relationships based on equality.

UNHOLY AND HOLY RELATIONSHIPS/UNIONS

I hope that I have made my point with the above examples. The point being that when we seek superiority to other people that we separate from them. Superiority interferes with relationships, for relationships can only be based on equality, for them to work.
On earth, we came to seem superior to each other and generally form relationships where we subtly feel superior to our partners.
Even the seeming inferior partner feels a perverted sort of superiority to the superior feeling partner. Consider Jane. According to her race’s ideology, blacks are inferior to whites. She operates on that wrong premise and blacks seem to humor her and go along with it. In America, blacks seem to act the inferiority role white folks designed for them. But deep down most black persons, like all human beings, wish superiority, and, as such, consider white persons inferior to them. I am yet to talk to an African who does not see Americans as inordinately childish. (Of course they accept the technological differences between them.)
The point is that Jane’s seeming inferior partners actually see her as inferior to them, although this was not obvious to her.
On earth, most people want to seem superior to other people, for that is what they came to earth to do. Feeling superior to others, they form relationships where each partner subtly feels superior to the other. This is called special or unholy relationships.
When the basis of this unholy alliance is disrupted, partners move away, separate and go form other special relationship.
In these unnatural relations are pa, anxiety, anger and other emotional upsets. Ultimately, folks learn to let go their childish desire for superiority (self creation) and accept equality and form holy relationships where both partners accept their equality. When this is accomplished, folks begin to look beyond their bodies and experience each others spirit.
When love and forgiveness is practiced in our human relationships, folks experience union with each other, Holy Instants.

FEAR/ANXIETY AS MEANS OF SUPERIRORITY/SEPARATION


Scientific psychology teaches people that fear is what happen to them without their consent. People are told that they are victims of fear and anxiety.
Obviously, fear and anxiety have biological correlates. In fear, the body produces certain neurotransmitters in excess and some in deficit. In fear and anxiety, excitatory neurotransmitters like norepinephrine are aroused and inhibitory neurotransmitters like GABA are reduced. The body is stimulated into fear response: fight or flight response. The various organs are speeded up: fast heart rate, fast breathing, fast thinking as messages are sent to the brain, central nervous system, quickly processed and feedback sent to the rest of the body as to what to do, to run from the source of danger or to stay and fight back. Any one could observe these biochemical reactions in fear and anxiety.
Building on this empirical fact, neuroscience teaches that fear and anxiety are caused by the body. Indeed, it teaches that thinking, mind, itself is caused by body, epiphenomenalism. On the surface, this teaching seems self evidently true, but deeper thinking exposes the emptiness of biological reductionism, as was behaviorism and psychoanalysis before it.

Pure thinking can arouse the body and make it fearful and anxious. If the individual sits in his safe and comfortable room and thinks about other people killing him (as in paranoid thinking), though nobody is out to kill him, his anticipatory attack on him would arouse his body into fear response.
Anxiety disorder is largely a product of anticipatory thinking of future hurts, perhaps rooted in a past scary episode when the individual’s life was endangered. If you have been physically attacked before, when your mind sees a person who resembles the person who had attacked you, you respond with fear and anxiety and run away from him.

There is another explanation of fear and anxiety. Let me explain it from my own history. As a child, I was what Alfred Adler called a neurotic child. I felt inferior. My body felt totally weak, pained and I responded with a sense of inferiority. Of course, like all people, I did not like to feel inferior. I compensated with a desire for superiority. I tended to want to seem superior to my peers. Since I found schooling easy, I found myself feeling superior to other children, those who found what I found easy difficult. In other words, I was a neurotic, for a neurotic is a person who feels superior to other people.
We all know that sanity is characterized by a sense of perfect equality with all people.
Because I desired to seem superior to other people, I feared being seen as inferior to them. I approached examinations with fear and anxiety. I could score a poor grade in examinations. The prospect of not obtaining a perfect grade in examinations made my neurotic desire for superiority feel anxious. Whereas many students feel happy to have a B grade I felt ashamed. In My GCE Advance Level, for example, I had mostly As but one B. That one B made me feel so imperfect that for a while I hid my face from society. I felt that other people would see me as not good, just because I had one B. At the university, the prospect of having a B grade filled me with anxiety. In graduate school, I once confronted a professor who dared to give me a B grade.
What is going on here is that I posited a superior self and wanted to become it. A superior self must have perfect A grades. The prospect of not having a perfect grade made me feel anxious and fearful. In the social world, I wanted to seem ideal. The prospect that other people would see me as not ideal, which I am not, thank God, made me feel anxious. As a young man, to seem ideal, to retain the illusion that I was superior and perfect I tended to avoid people, hence avoidant personality disorder. I withdrew from people and lived in isolation. In isolation, I retained my desired ideal self. I fancied myself superior to other people. Of course, in reality I am not superior to others. Superiority is a fiction, a false self concept, a fantasy, a neurosis.
Neurosis is an obsessive-compulsive thing. Neurotics want to be superior, perfect and ideal in a compulsive manner; it is as if an inner force is pressuring them to seem superior and when they are not superior to act as if they are superior to others, to pretend superiority. (In their obsession with titles, Nigerians are pretending superiority but do not know that the force of neurosis is at work in their behavior.)

It was my apriori desire for superiority, perfection and ideal that made me feel fearful and anxious from not living up to my desired ego ideal states.
(A healer must have been sick and is healed. Because he was sick and is now healed, he knows what the sickness is and is able to help those still sick to heal themselves. I had the sickness of seeking ego based importance, vanity. I have understood the nature of that sickness. I believe that I am healed of it, although in my moments of weakness, I am tempted to return to it. Because I am healed of it, I can show my brothers, Nigerians, who are questing after very important personage, neurosis, that that quest produces disturbance or peace and how to heal it so as to obtain peace. Love and humility are means for obtaining peace and happiness in this world.)
Now that I know that I am the same and equal with all people, yes, I am the same with the beggar on the street, I do not feel anticipatory anxiety and fear. I seldom feel fear.
During the few instances when fear enters my consciousness, I quickly analyze my thinking and behavior and invariably discover that I had wished to be superior to a human being. I had made a mistake in my thinking. I had a negative thought wave and I quickly correct it by reminding myself that all God’s children are the same.
Fear is the absence of love. The absence of love produces fear. Love is union. When you disrupt union by not loving a son of God, you and other people, you feel fear. You have attacked the person you feel superior to, the person you do not love. Because you have attacked him or her, you expect him or her to counter attack you. You therefore feel fear. Feeling afraid of the person you do not love, you separate from him or her. In separation you seem secure, false security.
If you really want to feel secure, love all human beings; and forgive all those who did you wrong. There is no other known way to obtain security than to love all children of God. To love all is to be secure. It is not military power that gives us security but love.

EQUALITY LEADS TO AN END TO AVOIDANCE, SEPARATING BEHAVIORS

If I accept that we are all the same and equal, I do not go about worrying about what other people think of me (of my ego) and, as such, I tend to approach people for relationship. I am no longer interfering with relationships by desiring superiority.
Every time a human being seeks to be superior to others, and wishes for others to accept the role he made for them, inferiority, he has literally attacked them. He attacked them psychologically. They feel angry at him, and resent him and if they could, they would attack him, overtly or passive aggressively.
At the spirit level, we all know that we are the same and equal. We are all equal members of God’s one family. We feel happiest when each of us relate to us as equals. We feel resentful when any human being, black or white, man or women, dare treat us as if we are inferior to them.
Whites treat blacks as if blacks are inferior to them. Blacks resent this situation. By and by, black anger will over boil and the result would be the collapse of the American empire.
America can only survive if it becomes sane and encourage all its citizens to accept the truth of our mutual equality.
For our present purpose, the pursuit of superiority leads to feeling fear and anxiety. Fear and anxiety is produced by fear of not living up to the false superior self.
Would other people see me as their superior? Desiring to be seen as superior and knowing that in their sanity they can not collude with me and see me as superior I feel anxious.
If I desire perfect equality with all people, I do not fear them, I do not experience anxiety. Fear is a product of existential desire for specialness, that is, the desire to create ones self, create other people and create God and, in the here and now world, a product of the neurotic desire for superiority over other people.
The desire for superiority is really the desire to be the author of reality and create it, create other people, a fantasy, and the fantasy that led to the genesis of this world.
Give up any and all wish for superiority, perfection and idealism. See yourself as created by God; you did not create yourself. See yourself as the same and equal with all persons.


FROM INEQUALITY TO EQUALITY

In America, a pathological society, whites structure their social organizations such that blacks are supposed to accept the unnatural feeling that they are inferior to whites and that whites are superior to them. I could not play this childish game and dropped out of their sadomasochistic organizations, for I was not about to accept that a white person is my superior. (I am not his superior either, we are perfectly equal.)
I do not want to fit myself into America’s sadomasochistic society. I therefore, had no choice but to form an alternative organization, one where perfect equality is accepted. A few Africans and I started our own work organization. Here, we all feel the same and coequal. Any brother who tries to seem better than others is counseled to let go of that neurosis, that falsity and see all of us as the same. Of course, we have different positions, including leadership positions.
We respect each other at Africa Institute Seattle, for we know that we are equal. Our goal here is to show our deranged white brothers an alternative form of social organization, one based on truth, our perfect sameness, equality and unity.
We are in still in forms, in human bodies and are empirically separated from each other, but we try to approximate our heavenly reality: union. Union is only possible among the same and the equal. We accept that we are the creations of one father, God, Allah, Chukwu, Olorun, Obasi, call our creator what you like, he really is nameless, but he is real.

CONCLUSION

What is the point to all these? Why study psychology, secular or spiritual? We study psychology to help us understand ourselves. The goal is to understand the psychological obstacles preventing people from living fully and to help them remove them, so that they live fully. If the individual understands his personal psychological make up, understands the psychological factors that prevent him from living fully and actualizing his real self, optimizing his potential and work at removing them, and does so, he will live more fully, become more productive and more peaceful and happy. (Psychology does not remove physical and social-political obstacles hence the individual may still live a somewhat circumscribed life due to these limiting factors.)
Psychology can be abused by neurotics, as some neurotic white psychologists tried to do. They tried to use the insight they gained about human nature to seem superior to other people. For example, we know that over 90% of the people are average in their intelligence, IQ85-115; some above average, IQ 120-129; and less than 2% gifted, IQ over 130 and 2% mentally retarded, IQ under 70. This knowledge can be abused and used to put people down. You can tell the peacock strutting about as if he is a very important person that he is no more than an average person and shatter his pride and vanity.
Moreover, by analyzing people the neurotic psychologist may feel false sense of superiority over them. Racist psychologists like Arthur Jensen and Cyril Burt tried to use the information they gained about people to make their race seem superior to other races.
The truth is that appearances not withstanding all human beings, black and white, Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa etc are the same and are equal. Psychologists who teach human equality are sane; those who teach human inequality are insane.
People came to this world to seem superior to each other and to emphasize their differences. Heaven is perfect sameness and equality. The world was designed to be the opposite of heaven. Because they opposed their creator, in their world, everything opposes everything else. In our world, everything is different from everything else. We figure out ways to seem unequal to each other. We emphasize our differences, be it in skin color, our height, size, intelligence, wealth, power, gender etc; anything to make us seem different from one another is stressed. The result of this emphasizes on inequality and differences are conflict and lack of peace and joy.
The function of the spiritual psychologist is to enable us stress our true self, which is unified, same and equal, and to help us stop emphasizing our differences and start emphasizing our sameness. We must work for our common interests. We must stop opposing the will of heaven, which is love and union, and give up the world of opposition and accept the world of union. The result of obeying the will of God: love one another, unify with one another rather than separate from one another, is peace and happiness, the gifts of God.


Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

November 23, 2005

PS: With this material, I end my series on metaphysics. I do not want to be known as a religious escapist. I do not negate our world; I am fully rooted in the empirical, scientific world. I return to the empirical world, beginning January, with my series on African politics. Do me a favor, will you: pay attention to both your spiritual and material needs. On earth, man is not an either or creature, matter or spirit, but both, and must pay attention to both to be healthy. If you are interested in metaphysical psychology see my book, Real Self Psychology. Thank you.

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November 22, 2005

Self Concept and its Problems

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- One of the tragedies of contemporary Nigerian society is that people are so busy with the struggle for physical survival that few have the time to think about the higher issues of existence. Everywhere you turn to, the talk you hear is how to make money and become a socially important person.

Think about them or not, however, higher existential issues are there and exercise enormous influence on our lives.

Consider the issue of self, the object of our present interest. Every culture known to man ponders the self, its nature and what to do about it. Those ponderings led to religion, philosophy and metaphysics. Every known human group developed religion and had philosophy and metaphysics. (Metaphysics is the educated man’s religion; it is an attempt to prove the existence of God through ratiocinative processes. Where most religionists accept their inherited religions on faith, the metaphysician attempts to use reason and logic to prove the existence of God. In his efforts to understand the nature of God, he, ultimately, finds out that God is beyond his rational understanding and is beyond matter hence metaphysics, meta-science.)
In contemporary Nigeria, people are so engrossed with the economic struggles for survival that those who normally gravitated to metaphysics, the philosophical element of society ignore it. Luckily, the masses have not totally abandoned religion.

Unfortunately, however, as is well known, the masses often gravitate to what we might call magical thinking. Thus in Nigeria, many of those who attend the mushrooming Pentecostal religions are no more than engaging in irrational thinking. For example, may of them believe that if they please God long enough by chanting a few prayers that he would give them what they ask from him, usually money and power? (Some of them even pray for the power of juju, to kill their neighbors.) Indeed, some of the ministers of these incipient religions are no more than charlatans trafficking in superstition.

These folks tell the masses that they are conduit to God and can make God do for them whatever they ask through them; they promise to heal the physically ill. Of course, they cannot do any of these things; all they seem to do is con the people out of their hard earned monies and leave them in the lurch.

Physical scientists point out that the material universe has its own laws, laws that can be studied and understood by science and technologies devised to adapt to them. No amount of magical wishes makes nature give us what we ask for. What makes it possible for us to extract sustenance from nature is the understanding of the laws of physics, chemistry and biology and manipulating them through technology. The human body, a biological system, for example, has its own laws. You have to understand them and live accordingly. If you violate biological laws, you get sick and must be treated with medications that medical science and technology designed. Praying to magical gods would not heal bodies that bad living has damaged; only medical science could heal them.

The philosophical elements of society are generally responsible for making sure that religion does not degenerate into magical thinking. They do so by injecting reason into people’s religious thinking. Whereas, ultimately, the ways of God is beyond human understanding, yet, the injection of some reason into religious discourse enables the masses not to engage in irrational religious practices.

The intellectual elements of Nigeria have abnegated their function and religion in Nigeria has devolved to primitive practices. For all the religiosity seen in the masses of Nigeria, we can actually say that Nigerians are irreligious! For example, one of the hall marks of true religion is serving other people. How many Nigerians do you know engage in a life of social service without asking what is in it for him? There are churches everywhere in Nigeria but very few of the religionists actually understand the import of worshipping God. God is love. Those who worship God are loving people. Loving people serve their fellow human beings. The last time I checked, I saw very few Nigerians who actually served other Nigerians’ interests. If there were true religionists in Nigeria, we would not have the absurd level of corruption we have in the country. A person of God does not take bribery or steal from the public treasury. Simply stated, though many Nigerians go to church, they are actually heathen and know little about God.

Each of us has a separated self that wants to seem important in the individual’s and other people’s eyes. This is generally called human nature.

But here is the problem. As long as you think that you have a separated, important self you must suffer. You must live in psychological pain and suffer to the extent that you believe that you have a separated important self. This is the fact of human living.

Another way of putting it is that to the extent that you believe that you have an important separated self you are in jail. To have a separated, important self is to live in hell, a hell of ones making.

In as much as all human beings believe, at least initially, that they have important, separated selves, they are living in private hells and private prisons; they suffer tremendous psychological pain.

To not suffer psychological pain, to be freed from ones private hell and jailhouse we live in, the individual must find a way to convince himself that he does not have a separated, important self.

To the extent that you know that you do not have a separated important self and behave accordingly, you tend to be happy, peaceful.

To the extent that you believe that you have a separated important self and behave accordingly, you tend to live in fear, and are prone to anxiety, depression, paranoia and other mental upsets.

If you believe that you have a separated important self, you tend to be proud and subject to shame feeling.

To have a separated, important self is to be unhappy. Yet to be a human being is to have a sense of separated important self. In fact, what it means to be a human being is the struggle to invent a separated, important self for ones self and to struggle to actualize that imaginary important self.

Neurosis, and to a greater degree psychosis, is a misguided and compulsive effort to realize an imaginary separated, important self. The neurotic (which is every human being) and the psychotic (which is the two percent of the human population that is insane) struggle in an obsessive-compulsive manner to actualize privately constructed important, separated selves.

All people are prisoners of this struggle to become a self they themselves invented; selves that they do not know for sure are real. As far as we know, when we die, our bodies decompose and the personalities that those bodies evolved die with them.

The self the individual knows of is a product of his bio-social experiences and ceases with the death of his body.

Is there another self other than the self that adapts to body and society?


THE FUNCTION OF RELIGION: SHRINK THE HUMAN EGO

All the religions of mankind aim at helping the individual to understand and reduce his sense of having a separated important self. Religion is traditional psychotherapy for shrinking the swollen self of human beings.

Given human egoism, without religion to shrink their egos, human beings would probably destroy themselves. It seems that society cannot exist without religion?

Religion shrinks the human ego, the sense of having a separated important self to normal proportions and makes it possible for people to get along with each other. Left to their own devices, without religion, people would invent such imaginary important selves that in pursuit of actualizing them they would enslave and murder each other.
Look at Nigeria. Many people think that her problem is only economic. But her real problem is really spiritual.

How so, you ask? They believe that they have separated important selves. They are motivated to realize their assumed separated important selves. They are seeking existential and social importance. Their greatest wish is to become rich (by all means necessary, including stealing) and to have political power. They understand that wealth and political power would give them the opportunity to seem socially important. Wealth and power enables them to gratify their narcissistic desire to be very important persons. Thus they seek to be called Dr Professor chief, engineer Alhaji this or that. Their goal is to have society affirm and validate their importance.

But who is the self that is important? What self are they trying to make important? Herein lays the problem.

These people are like insane persons; they believe that they have separated selves and want those selves to become important. But do they have separated selves? A self that feels so insecure that it must always do something to make itself seem secure and powerful, when you come to think of it, is not a worthwhile and powerful self. If the self is important, it ought to be self evidently so and we need do nothing to make it so. Actually, the self that we rejected, the self that God created, the unified self, is inherently worthwhile; we cannot add or subtract from its value. It is the self we made, the separated self housed in body that is perpetually valueless and there is nothing that we can do to make it valuable.

Let us see what Gautama Buddha said on the subject. Buddha said that the human personality is a pipe smoke.

Buddhism aims at enabling the individual to get rid of his assumed sense of separated self. In meditation, the Buddhist consciously tries to deconstruct his mentally constructed self concept and self image. He consciously tells himself that he has no self concept and no self image. He tells himself that the self he is currently aware of, the separated self, does not exist, and is noise. He tells himself that his current thinking, based on the separated, important, aka ego self, is mere ego chattering. He rejects all ego based conceptual categories. He struggles to become calm, silent and to eliminate all separated, ego based thinking from his mind. His goal is to become still, to empty his mind of all ego self concepts, ego self images, ego thinking. He aims at becoming a selfless void. He believes that if he attains emptiness of mind that he would get in touch with his real self. He does not know what that real self is but he thinks that there is a real self. Buddha teaches that the real self is unified spirit self, or simply life itself. Unified spirit self has a different consciousness that is different from the consciousness of our separated self.

The Hindu, the Buddhist, the Christian mystic, the Islamic Sufi all struggle to eliminate their selves with the understanding that there is another self, a better self that they ought to become.

On the other hand, the Nigerian wants to affirm his separated, important self. Every where, the Nigerian presents his vain self for you to validate.

If only these people recognized that the self they are trying to make important is a fictional self, a phantom self, a fantasy that, at best, is temporary. The self that we are aware of exists in the world of illusions, in dreams and is not real. If only these people knew that there is another self, a better self to aim at attaining.

All the religions of mankind assert that there is another self, a real self. That self is not the self we are conscious of. We are currently conscious of separated, important selves. Our real self is unified spirit self.

Neither I nor any one living in the temporal universe can describe the real self. It is beyond words. It is ineffable. It cannot be understood with words, for language is an adaptation to the separated world, the world of division and multiplicity. Speech assumes the existence of a you and I, seer and seen, subject and object. Speech assumes the world of space, time and matter, our world. But there is another world, a unified world where every thing is simultaneously unified and individuated. The real self is one and yet infinite selves. That real self is eternal, immortal, permanent, changeless and all knowing (it knows itself as one and many).

I have made the assertion that there is another self. I know that that self is real but I also know that it is beyond human ordinary consciousness hence that there is no way the reader can ascertain it.

Religion generally urges people to have faith in that real self. But faith is not enough for our rational age. Telling some one to have faith in God is not a good way to make an argument and convince the skeptic. In the age of science, you must provide proof that what you claim to exist in fact exists.

Is there any proof that God exists? You have to find out for yourself whether it exists or not. Nobody else can provide you with proof that God exists.

God is an inner experience that when you experience it you know beyond all intellectual jabbering that he is real. In fact, God is the only reality there is. God is, and all else is noise.

To experience God you must meet his conditions. Here lies the problem. His condition is that you return to being as he created you. This means that you must give up your current sense of self. Each of us invented a different self, a replacement and substitute self, and identifies with that false self. We must give up the false self we made and accept the real self that God created us as. You must first give up the separated, important self you invented before you can experience the unified self God created you as.

THE REAL SELF REQUIRES GIVING UP THE FALSE SELF

To experience God, as all the founders of the universal religions: Krishna, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed etc teach, you must voluntarily give up your separated, important self and accept that you do not know who your real self is and ask God to reveal your real self to you. Additionally, you must love and forgive all people. You must forgive all those who have done wrong to you. You must look at the person who did the most egregious thing to you, as understood by your ego, in the eye and say: I forgive you, and mean it.
To forgive is to overlook what is done in the world, to see it as unreal. To forgive is to judge the world as an illusion and overlook it; to forgive is to experience the real world, the unified world of God. To forgive is to see the world and what is done in it as things done in dreams and awaken from that dream: unreal self, unreal world.
To forgive is to love. To love is to return to the world as it was created by God, the unified world. Love is union; to love is to return to the awareness of union, hence to return to heaven and its God.
To forgive and love is to do what the prodigal son did; to recognize that he made a mistake in thinking that separated and important self is possible and correct that mistake by giving up separated important self and returning to unified self, to God, his father, to heaven.

In the temporal world, each off us believes that he has a separated, important self. The separated, important self is an illusion.
The Nigerian takes the illusion of separated, important self as real and wants to affirm it; he wants every person to collude with him and tell him that his fictional important self is real.
The Nigeria seldom pays attention to the deeper teaching of religion, the need to shrink his ego down to acceptable proportions. All religions teach that the ego must be shrunk down and that eventually it is necessary to give the ego up altogether. To return to union, one must give up separation; to live as unified self, the real son of God, Christ self, one must give up the false self, the ego, and the antichrist.
It is difficult to give the separated ego up, for if it were given up one exits from this world. As long as one lives in this world of separation, one must have a separated self. The best one can do is improving that separated self and use it to love other seeming separated selves.


THE FUNCTION OF PRAYER AND MEDITATION

Christianity and Islam encourage people to pray. In prayer, one minimizes ego.

These two religions encourage people to always have their prayer beads (in the case of the Catholic Church, the rosary). When the ego tempts the individual to feel that he is in charge of his life, he is told to pray to God to guide him.

When you are chanting Hail Mary, Our Lord’s prayer and other prayers, you are saying, in effect, that you are not in control of your life, and that God is in charge. This behavior helps to shrink your ego. The individual needs to pray regularly, so as to shrink and normalize his ego.

Ultimately, one must sit down in meditation and try to negate ones ego; one must try to escape from the self one constructed for one, so as to return to the awareness of the self God created one as. One must consciously extinguish ones self concept, ones self image and ones personality. One must let go of the self we made to replace the self God created us as.

When we let go of our false ego selves, forgive and love all people, we finally escape from the prison house called the ego; we become emancipated from the hell called separated, important self; we attain peace and joy and overcome all the mental upsets attendant to having egos; one no longer gives in to fear, shame, anxiety, pride, sadness, paranoia, schizophrenia, mania etc.

All religions recognize that to be a human being is to have a sense of separated important self. All religions recognize that this is the real human problem. All religions recognize that as long as human beings think that they have separated important selves and strive to live as such that they live in hell and in prison of their own making.

People are slaves of their egos. (I was a slave of my ego; I was totally devoted to actualizing my false ideal self.)

As long as people are seeking to actualize their fictional selves they are in hell, for they must be fearful, prone to depression, paranoia, even schizophrenia and mania.


Psychology is an infant profession; it is about a hundred years old. Hundred years is not a long time to develop wisdom. Psychology is filled with fads. Just about every Western Psychologist has his own pet theory of what human nature is, most of which are false. Philosophy, despite thousands of years of trying, could not define human nature, neither would psychology. Human nature is more than meets the eyes; we are spiritual beings having physical experience; we are not just our bodies and mind is not epiphenomenal as reductionistic biological secular psychology suggests. Nevertheless, Psychology is becoming adult. The more it grows up, the more it recognizes what religion knew all along, that is, that the problem of man is his belief that he has a separated self and pursuit of that false self.

Psychology, like religion before it, is learning to help people, through psychotherapy, to understand that their so-called normal self, their neurotic self, and their psychotic self are varieties of the same mistaken self, the belief that one has a separated, important self.

In this light, Nigerians need some one to help them shrink their vain glory seeking selves. Whereas, we all must have separated selves to live in this world that self is not our real self.
Nigerians need spiritual psychologists, aka ministers of God, to help them understand that their real selves are the unified self that the various religions of mankind teach. They need help with becoming in touch with their unified self, so as to live peaceful and happy lives.

At present, they are so misguided that all they do is seek to become the fictional ideal selves they invented for themselves, selves they want to use to replace the self that God created them as. As long they pursue those false selves, they must live in pain and suffer. Their lives must be chaotic. Their country must be hell.

Nigeria is bedlam, literally, not figuratively. Nigerians live in an insane asylum where they are trying to become false selves that they are not. They need to become sane and transform their country to a healthy place where people are trying to live out of their real selves, which is spirit self.

We cannot attain spirit and still live in a material world. In as much as we want to live in a material world, and we are permitted to do so, we can learn to live spirit like lives.

TWO PATTERNS OF THINKING AND BEHAVING, EGO AND CHRIST

In our minds are two possible ways of thinking and behaving. We have already chosen to think and behave as the separated, important self. It is that choice that led to the origin of this temporal world. That choice is what the various religions call the Original sin, the choice to separate from our real self, to separate from each other and to separate from God. That sin brought us to this world.

All religions seek ways to reduce that so-called original sin. As long as we live in separation, we live in sin, but sin can be reduced if we learn to replicate our original home on earth. In our real home, in God, we are loving creatures. On earth, in separation, if we learn to love and forgive one another we reduce our sinfulness. All unloving acts are sinful; all loving acts are sinless. To forgive and love is to return to the world of sinlessness, guiltlessness and innocence, the world and self as God created them.

Every time you are about to think and behave ask yourself from what part of your mind you are thinking and behaving from? Are you thinking and behaving from your ego mind or from your Christ mind, from hate or from love, from separation or from union?

If you think and behave from a loving and forgiving part of your mind, which, in the here and now, translates to serving all mankind, you are approximating your thinking in heaven. When you think from love and forgiveness perspective, because you approximate haven, you tend to feel a bit like you are in heaven: peaceful and happy. You are, as it were, living at the gate of heaven.

On the other hand, you can choose to think and behave from your separated and important self. If you do, you tend to seek to optimize your self interest at the expense of other people’s interests. You tend not to care for social and common interests. You may succeed at the material level; in fact, you are most likely going to succeed, for the world was designed to make the ego successful. However, at the psychological level, you pay a heavy price, you will not receive the gifts of God: peace and joy; you tend to live in chaos and conflict.

Do you need evidence? Look at Nigeria and see what the ego/devil has made. Nigerians, that is, unmitigated egotists, live mostly for their individuated selves and seek to be important at all times. The result is that they live in conflict; they lack peace and joy. Nigeria is hell on earth.

Nigeria is Satan’s own country. Nigeria is the prison house of the ego separated self. When I see Nigerians I see a suffering people. But I know that they brought their suffering to themselves by pursuing unmitigated egoism and vanity.

I have compassion for Nigerians but I also know that as adults they have free will to choose differently. The president of the Nigerian Senate, Nnamani, just ordered an armored car, reportedly worth the annual income of hundreds of Nigerians. Why not be humble and buy a Volkswagen? Somewhere in this man’s mind, he knows that what he did was wrong. He must, therefore, pay a stiff price for his criminal thinking and behavior. He cannot experience the gifts of God: peace and happiness. His immodesty, his lack of humility, his grandiosity, a leader in a banana republic where millions are starving and he spends that kind of money on a car is nothing short of sinfulness.

At present, Nigerians chose to live out of the ego, which religion anthropomorphizes as Satan? They live egoistic, that is, satanic existence, and necessarily takes the consequences of their life styles: chaos.


THE LAW OF CAUSE AND EFFECT

There is a law of cause and effect operating in the universe. Whatever we do has consequences for us. If you smoke you may develop clung cancer. If you drink alcohol you may damage your liver. If you eat too much food, you may get fat, clog your arteries and die from cardiovascular diseases. If you do not exercise regularly you may develop medical problems. At the social level, if you choose to not care for other people and live for yourself and, perhaps, for your family only, as is the case with Nigerians, you get Nigeria, hell on earth.

You cannot cheat the universe, for the universe is a lawful place. As a lawful place, the universe does not make compromises. Your thinking and behavior are causes of the effects you see in your life. Think and behave differently and see different effects in your life.

If you want the gifts of God, peace and joy, then do Godly things, love and forgive all and serve all people. There are no two ways of going about it.

UNIFYING SECULAR IDEOLOGIES

It is not necessary to approach the self from only a religious perspective. What is necessary is that it must be shrunk, one way or another. The self is a problematic thing; left alone, it seeks self interest and must be redirected to serving social interest.

Where there is failure to redirect the self to serving social interests, people become pure egotists and serve only their self interests, and the result is chaos, as in Nigeria. Generally, the easiest way to redirect the ego is through religion and its teaching that people love God and love one another. Every society has religion and through it enables its people to understand the nature of their real self and their temporal selves. Religion enables society to raise children in such a manner that they serve the interest of society. Religion, unfortunately, often attempts to achieve its goal through fear; telling people that if they did not love and care for one another that they would go to hell and burn for eternity; this generates fear of punishment in people. Admittedly, that fear of punishment may dispose some persons to love other people but love is not to be obtained through fear. We could do better than using fear to get people to do the right thing.

Love is the opposite of fear and fear is the opposite of love. Where there is love, union, there is no fear; conversely, where there is fear there is no love. (Are you a very fearful person? If so, you are not a loving person; you separated from other people. If you are a less fearful person, you are a loving person and tend to unify with all God’s Children.)

Those who consider themselves rational often reject the bases of religion. Generally, during their adolescent years, young persons whose mental disposition makes them not amenable to accepting any proposition on faith declare their independence from organized religion and stop going to Church, Mosque and temple. These young persons provide rational, even scientific evidence why God cannot exist.
Speaking for myself, at fourteen, I rejected the Christian religion that I was socialized in. I did not see how a supposedly loving God could oversee an unjust world. I read about earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, draughts, plagues, virus, bacteria, fungus and other natural disasters that wiped out thousands of human beings. I could not square those ugly facts with Christianity’s postulation that a loving God cares for us. I read Charles Darwin’s Origen of Species and that ended my affiliation with formal religion. I said goodbye to Catholicism and gravitated to secular thinking.

Many young people, all over the world, reject their inherited religions and try using their reason to solve the problems of existence. They adopt rational secular humanism, the belief that pure reason alone can solve human problems and that we do not need, as I used to say: “The God hypothesis”. These young people, like adults before them, will fail and not use pure reason and science to explicate the nature of reality. Many of them will become disillusioned. This is to be expected.

What needs to be done is to help these young persons find a way to deal with their selves. As noted, religion is the easiest way society shrinks the individual’s ego self concept to normal proportions. If the individual falls out of religion, as some will, society must find other mechanisms to teach them social service.
Boys scout and the military are useful training for transcending the individuated self and devoting ones life to serving common interests. Even indoctrination into those political ideologies that preach social interests, such as socialism and communism, serve some useful interests. The socialist, if he is genuinely so, works for the collectivity, for society. His ego is thus civilized (made to live in the city, to live for the collectivity, to serve society).

The worse thing that could happen to a young person is for him to be left alone, so that he develops a self that thinks only of its self interests and not social interests. It is those persons who were not trained to serve social interests that tend to gravitate to only self interested behavior at the expense of social interests. Some of these people become anti social personalities, criminals. When these persons enter into politics, they do so to serve only their self interests. They are the narcissistic politicians we see in Nigeria.

THE NATURE OF MENTAL ILLNESS: SELFISHNESS

People who are not trained in psychology tend to have weird notions of what it means to be mentally ill.

Mental illnesses actually mean having a selfish separated, important self. The normal person somehow thinks of himself and other people and figures out a way to serve both.

The neurotic person (all people in degrees) posits a big self concept, a self that thinks that it is better than other people, wants to feel superior to other people and pursues the actualization of that fictional ideal and superior self. In the process, the neurotic experiences anxiety: fear of not realizing his imaginary important self. At school, his imaginary ego ideal wants to be the best student and he fears making poor grades hence lives in anxiety; at work he wants to become the best at what he does and lives in anxiety of not being the best.

In psychosis, what most people call mental disorder (schizophrenia, mania, clinical depression and delusional disorder), the individual goes beyond neurosis and believes that his wished for imaginary big self is real. In psychosis the individual hallucinates in one or more of the five senses and is deluded.

The normal-neurotic person wishes that he were very important, Godlike, but knows that he is not so, though he compulsively desires to be so.

The psychotic, on the other hand, has lost the ability to test reality and simply believes that he is now what he wishes to be, a very important person. Whereas in childhood, he had wished to be a very important person, godlike, in psychosis (which generally occurs between ages 17-27), the person now believes that he is his wishes. He fancies himself the most important person on earth, the most beautiful woman on earth; in a word, he is now a pretentious powerful god. Of course, he is none of those things. He is an ordinary human being and merely pretends to be all powerful. Generally, he presents his desired fictional important self to normal persons and they laugh at him. Since he is convinced that he is the fictional Jesus Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, Napoleon, Hitler or whatever personage in his world is seen as an important person that he identifies with, the psychotic drifts away from normal society and lives in his own world, a world of fantasy where he thinks that his wishes are real. Go to the nearest psychiatric hospital and behold paranoid schizophrenics telling you that they are god, manic-depressives, aka Bipolar affectively disordered persons, telling you that they are the richest, most powerful and most famous persons on earth; deluded persons telling you that every person is out to get them, poison them, kill them etc and they hiding from these imaginary detractors. One must be very important for other persons to have nothing better to do with their lives than seek ways to kill one. Paranoia is a function of deluded big self, a self that is so important that other selves want to kill it.

You do not have to go to psychiatric hospitals to behold what the ego has made. Look at yourself and your neighbors. The human population can be divided into the following categories: 90% of the population are normal; 2% are psychotic; 2% are mentally retarded (have IQ under 70) and about 6% has serious personality disorders (such as paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, antisocial, borderline, narcissistic, and histrionic, avoidant, and possessive-compulsive, dependent and passive aggressive).

About ten percent of the population may be said to have clinically significant mental health issues and the remaining ninety percent has those issues in minor portions. That is to say that just about every human being has issues with his self structure, for all mental health problems are problems of the self structure.

Generally, religion helps the majority of the people with minor issues with their self structures and enables them to cope with the exigencies of being on earth. By positing a God that is more powerful than human beings and urging people to worship that God, religion enables people to shrink their selves to normal proportions.
Where religion fails in enabling people to shrink their swollen selves, they tend to go from minor neurosis to personality disorders.
Religion has failed in Nigeria and the result is that many Nigerians now have personality disorders. The saddest part of it all is that they do not even know it. But know it or not, their behaviors exhibit personality disorders; the effect of their disordered selves is the chaos they have turned their country to.

Let us consider those personality disorders that are rampart in Nigerians: narcissistic, antisocial, histrionic and paranoid. (If you are interested in technical understanding of these issues, see American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, latest edition…it is revised every ten years, or so.)

The narcissistic personality looks like you and I. The difference is that he exaggerates traits found in all of us. All of us want to seem special and draw attention to ourselves. Every person wants to be rich, powerful and famous. The narcissist has this desire in a more intense degree. His whole life is motivated by desire to seem special and superior to other people and a desire to do what would bring him other people’s recognition and attention. He works hard for the attention he seeks. Generally, he does well at school (A or B student) and succeeds in the world. He may be a military general, a chief executive officer of a business, a politician etc. Generally, he is a socially successful person. What is the problem with that picture, you ask? The problem is that he works for his personal success and social validation of his desired sense of specialness and attention. He does not work for the good of other people. In fact, he is more likely to use other people to get what he wants and when they are no longer useful to him, he discards them. Have I not just described the typical Nigerian politician? You decide. Narcissists are self centered and live selfish lives. Their personal lives are marked by inner sense of emptiness and aloneness. They feel like they are nothing important. Despite seeming important in his general’s uniform or in the flowing robes worn by the Nigerian big man, he actually feels like one giant worthless nothing. In fact, he feels like he does not even exist. All his compulsive behaviors to bring attention to him are meant to make his non-existent self seem existent and his unimportant seeming self seem important. He is an empty shell, really. He does not know what gives human beings real worth. The perennial wisdom of all mankind is that service for other human beings is what gives us genuine worth. The mother who takes good care of her children has more self worth than the politician whom every sycophant worships. (If you are interested in the technical literature on narcissism please Kohut, Kornberg, Masterson and Alice Miller.)

The histrionic personality is generally the female equivalent of the male narcissist. She wants to look beautiful and be admired by men and women. Her affect is shallow. Her whole life is dedicated to getting attention, often in a melodramatic manner. (Psychoanalysts used to call such women hysterical, but we shall not go there, for political correctness reasons.) We shall just say that these drama queens want to seem special and seek attention through beautifying their bodies. If you tell them that they are beautiful, you gratify their vanity and they like you, but if you dared tell them that they are ugly, they may, in fact work for your down fall, if not death. That is how outrageous their egos have become in their quest for fictional power. Think about the wives of Nigerian big men, what do you see? They are women with personality disorders. These women actually do not know that humility and a life dedicated to service to society is the only means of becoming the important self they wish to be. Love, forgiveness and social service are the only means known to human beings for attaining peace and happiness. Adorning ones body with all the jewelry this world can provide and being the Queen of Also Rock will not make you important, what your ego craves; what will give you worth and sense of value is serving all Nigerians.
Antisocial personality disorder is characterized by a tendency to steal and engage in general antisocial behaviors without feeling guilty and remorseful. These people tend to have a sense of entitlement and feel like the world and other people owe them a living. If they do not earn good living they take it from other people. These people steal, even kill and do not feel bad from doing them. In fact, some of them seem to enjoy hurting other people. Let me ask you: what is a Nigerian leader but a person, who steals from the public, takes bribes and some times kills those who oppose him? He is nothing but a common criminal, an anti social personality disordered person. These people live empty lives. They do not understand what gives human beings real sense of worth: a life of social service and a life rooted in God.

Paranoid personality disorder. This person wants to be very important but did not figure out a way to gratify his desired importance, like the narcissist did. Whereas the narcissist has a sense of being successful, in fact, the paranoid has a sense of being a failure. Generally, he consciously feels inferior and consciously tries to seem superior. Whereas the narcissist assumes that he is superior to other people, the paranoid personality feels inferior to other people and struggles to seem superior to them. He feels inferior and compensates with pursuit of superiority. In interpersonal relationships, he wants other people to treat him as if he is a very important person, a VIP. If he senses that you are demeaning him, not treating him as if he is important, he feels upset and may ask you why you are humiliating him. He fears being disrespected, demeaned, belittled, humiliated, degraded, disgraced etc. When he suspects belittlement from other people, he lashes out at the source with anger. He accuses people of putting him down, when they did not consciously aim to do so. His interpersonal relationship is characterized by conflict. (If you are interested in the technical literature on this subject, see David Swanson et al, The Paranoid; William Meissner, Paranoid Process, Psychotherapy and the Paranoid Process; David Shapiro, Autonomy and the Rigid Character, Neurotic Styles.)

For any number of reasons, the Igbos tend to feel inferior and desire to seem superior. I hate to say it, but truth must be said, Igbos tend to exhibit more paranoid personality disorders than is found in the general population. In my twenty something years in the mental health field, the only two Nigerians with genuine delusional disorder (a more severe form pf paranoid personality) that I have seen are Igbo women. These two Igbo women had delusional disorder, erotomanic type. They felt that some powerful men were in love with them; men that did not even know about them. One felt that she was married to Jesus Christ himself and the other felt that a famous Nigerian professor was her lover, even though he did not know that she exists. In erotomania, an inferior feeling person, usually a woman believes that a famous person is in love with her etc. This feeling, apparently, makes her feel very desirable and important. A woman who feels inferior but is the object of love by a powerful man is now the most important woman in her world. It is difficult to dislodge delusional beliefs, for they serve a function for their victims: make them feel very important. If they gave up their delusions, they would recognize that they are like the rest of us, ordinary human beings. But they do not want to become ordinary human beings.

I do not want to make this paper a clinical paper, but in as much as we have broached delusional disorder, here are the rest of the delusions: paranoid, grandiose, erotomanic, jealous, and somatic. In paranoid delusion, the individual actually believes that some one, say his wife, police, ancestors etc is out to kill him and hides from them. In grandiose type, the individual believes that he is more important than other people and expects other people to accept this delusion. (Igbos tend to have the delusion that they are better than other Nigerians and expect other Nigerians to collude with their delusion and see them, as they want to be seen, as superior persons. Luckily, other Nigerians attempt to heal Igbos of their delusional disorder by reminding them that they are just ordinary human beings and are not better than other Nigerians.) In jealous type, the individual is jealous and believes that his wife is out there having sex with every man that has ever looked at her. He often abuses her for being unfaithful, when she is faithful. He consistently misinterprets her behaviors. Most men who engage in domestic violence tend to have delusional disorder, jealous type, with features of the other types. In somatic type of delusion, the individual believes that he or she has a physical disorder and goes from medical doctor to medical doctor, seeking treatment. Doctors generally do not find physical disorders in these persons.

Apparently, the belief that she has some medical disorder somehow makes the deluded woman feel special and, moreover, provides her with excuse not to do something in the real world to succeed and become the god she wants to become. She does not want to give up her belief that she has a physical illness. In my experience, such women generally have underlying physical disorders that medial science has not been able to figure out yet. Therefore, one should not dismiss such women as seeking attention through imaginary medical disorders. Whereas there is an element of hyperchondrises going on here, it is not only psychosomatic disorder; if you look deeply, you will find a physical disorder. A woman that I know kept complaining for years that there was something the matter with her. Nobody took her seriously. It happens that she has fibromylegia (muscles aches). A man that I know kept saying that something is the matter with him and nobody took him seriously. People said that he was malingering, using imaginary medical issues to avoid work and being on the doll. Well, it turned out that he had spondilolysis on both the lumber and cervical vertebrae. Where there is smoke there is fire, so look deeply before you dismiss people as suffering delusional disorder, somatic type.

The mentally ill are all of us writ large, for us all to see our own minor insanity. The schizophrenic who believes that he is god and hears voices telling him that he is god is merely acting out our wish to have a big self; the manic who, in an excited and euphoric manner, tells you that he is the most important person on earth, even though he is unemployed and has no penny to his name, is acting out the human wish to be important.

Our concern here is that man has a problematic self. He feels that he has a self, a separated important self and attempts to actualize that imaginary self.

I am not here to debate with you. I am here to tell you the truth, as I have gleaned it in my checquered existence on planet earth. My experience teaches me that all human beings are pursuing a chimerical self. The self that they think that they are, is generally a fictional, imaginary self.

All human beings think that they are separated, important selves. They came to this world to seem so. Their real self is unified spirit self. Religions have different names for this real self: Atman (Hinduism), Buddha (Buddhism), Christ (Christianity), son of God (Judaism) etc. Call it what you like, it is real.
God is very real. I know that he exists. If you think that you are cynical and skeptical, you have not seen a real skeptic. As a teenager, I did not want to hear any body talk about God. If you mentioned the word God, I freaked out and thought that you were crazy and belonged in an insane asylum. I filled my little head with information by the great philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Berkeley, Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, William James, Henry Bergson etc. I was a walking talking parrot who, at any moment, regurgitated what any of those great thinkers said. But in time, I learned that there is a force that is beyond what is taught in our philosophy.

Human beings are the creation of God. God extended himself unto us. God created us. We did not create ourselves and we did not create God.

God, our creator, is not apart from us. God is in his creation. God is in all of us. God is in each of us.

God is everywhere means that he is in us and in everything else. Everywhere is in God for God is everywhere. God is the universe (not material universe, the spiritual universe; the material universe is miscreations by the children of God).

God gave his children his creative powers. We, too, do create. Because we can create, we want to create ourselves and each other and create God; we resent the fact that we are created. We resent the fact that God created us. God created us and we cannot create God or ourselves. We resented this reality.

Since we have the ability to create, but always with the power of God in us, we left God to go miscreate a world where we seem to have created ourselves.

We are part of God and cannot leave him. All that we did was, as it were, cast a magical spell, what Hinduism calls Maya, on us and forgot the truth of our unified self and seem to go to sleep and dream that we are separated from God and that we created ourselves.

Upon birth on earth, the human child vaguely remembers his creator, God, but soon forgets him. By age two he has forgotten God and his true self as the son of God; he is already inventing a new self for himself. By age six his new self is in place.

Each of us invents a self concept and concepts for other people; we invent self images and images for other people; we give names (concepts and images) to everything in our world. This action amounts to being our own creator and the creator of everything in the world. In doing so, we satisfy our desire to seem to have created God and ourselves.

On earth, in the world of separation, we now seem like we are the author of reality. We are no longer created beings but creators of being.

This is what this world is all about. The world is a place where the children of God come to seem to create God. Each of us, working with all of us, creates his self concept (and translates it into a self image, so as to see it in form hence deceive his self into believing that it is real) and invents concepts and images of other people and things. The circle is closed.

We now seem separated from our real selves. We are away from our father. We are the prodigal son on a journey to nowhere, for everywhere we go we are in God. It is a journey without distance, for God is right at the tip of our nose, waiting for us to recognize him.

The world is a place we come to seem to be false, imaginary selves. The personalities we currently know ourselves to be are fictional. But fictional or not, that is who we think that we are.

We make these ego separated important selves and house them in bodies. Our bodies are weak and vulnerable and subject to feeling pain. We, therefore, anticipate pain and defend against pain.

If I fear that you would harm me, I would avoid you. I would separate from you. Personality is a means of separation. The ego and body that houses it is a means of separation.


Earlier on, I talked the various personality types. What is your personality? It might do you some good to take some of the personality tests, such as MMPI. It does not hurt to have a working knowledge of your personality type (and IQ; some of the best instruments for IQ are WAIS for adults and WISC for children).

Personality is a pattern of thinking and behaving. Beginning in childhood, each of us develops a pattern of thinking and behaving. Usually his social and biological experiences contributed to his pattern of thinking and behaving, his personality.

Nigerians often think that they are so well hidden that nobody knows who they are. It would take a typical mental professional less than a few hours to assess each individual’s personality pattern.

All human beings behave in a human pattern (general human personality, ego) and within that generalized pattern; each of us has an individual pattern, his personality, his habitual pattern of responding to the exigencies of living.


All human beings pursue separated, important selves, that is, pursue ego. We are all slaves to the ego; we all live in hell, for as long as we want to be egos we are in hell, for the ego is what hell means.

As long as we seek to become egos we will lack peace and joy in our lives. But within this overall picture, each of us has his own private hell. Each of us has a private personality, a self concept, a self image, a picture of the person he thinks that he is and is aspiring to become. We are all slaves to the self we made to replace the self that God created us as.

Personality testing gives one a good picture of what type of self one has. My personality tests tell me that I am an avoidant personality. It is obvious to every person that knows me that this is true. I was an inordinately shy child. Shyness is what psychiatrists call avoidant personality disorder. It means that the child, as he is, feels not good enough. Believing that he is not good enough, he concludes that if other people come close to him that they would appreciate his personal inadequacy. He doesn’t want to be seen as not good enough. To avoid being seen as not well enough, he generally avoids other people. He keeps an emotional distance between him and other people.

The shy child keeps to himself, afraid that if you came close to know him that you would see that he is not good and reject him. He fears rejection more than he fears death itself. Anticipated rejection makes him fearful and anxious. He reduces his anxiety by avoiding people. He avoids other children and keeps to himself. If he is the brainy type, he keeps to himself and reads books.

At school, the shy child is afraid that his teachers might give him poor grades hence expose the fact that he is not good enough. If this aspect of the disorder is magnified in the child, he has obsessive compulsive personality, as well. Here, the individual wants to seem perfect and fears not seeming so. He is driven to seem perfect and is afraid of not seeming perfect. Some such children, in fact, hide their school work from their teachers, for fear of not obtaining perfect grades. My God, I used to be devastated every time I am getting my papers back from my elementary school teachers, for getting a poor grade made me feel like I was valueless.

Behind the fear of social rejection, the avoidant, shy child wants to have a very important and superior self. Actually, he uses avoidance to maintain his desired important self. Social avoidance is a means of maintaining separation from other people.

Parents who have shy children ought to know that their children need to be helped out of shyness, for shyness is a psychological problem. The shy child is using his shyness to avoid relating to other people. He is hiding from other people... He is disrupting interpersonal relationship.

Life is relationships and one must relate fully to other people to be fully alive. As adults, shy, introverted persons tend to have problems on the job. They tend to keep quiet and others, the more extroverted assertive types, get noticed and promoted on the job. But since the introspective and reflective shy person may understand how to do the job better than the shallow extravert promoted ahead of him, he may feel bypassed and angry and develop passive aggressive behavior patterns. Here, he tries to defeat his employer’s goals, such as not working hard any more, because he was not properly rewarded.

Shy children have to be taught that in the social world we are all in competition with each other for the rewards that society offers and learn to compete overtly, rather than covertly, as they normally do. They avoid overt competition and, therefore, do not win in the games of society but in isolation nurse their ideal, superior self. The ideal, superior self is untested in competition and is not real, it is vacuous, and it is neurotic. As a matter of fact, as long as the individual clings to that idle superior self he is going to be a failure in society, for in society people compete in every thing and the best wins rewards. Life is pretty much like a soccer game; we are all playing a game and those who play better than others are rewarded with recognition by society. If one does not enter the games of society and play effectively, one is not going to win. Merely keeping to the side lines and wishing for an ideal superior self is not going to make one win at any thing and worse, it is not going the make the wished for self to become real. Only actual competition brings desired results.

The individual must, therefore, study what he is good at, what he has aptitude and interest in doing, train for it and compete overtly with other people. Avoiding other people is not allowed in heaven and on earth. Join people and relate fully to them that are what life is all about. Stop the temptation to avoid people, join people. It is the wish for dissociation that led to all our problems.
All personalities, normal and abnormal, are mechanisms for separating from other people and from God.

Therefore, all personalities, that is separated self concepts, self images, egos, must be given up for the individual to experience union with God and all creation.


Each of us has a unique pattern of behaving, and for relating to his world. Do you know your own pattern, your personality type? The German writer, Novalis, said that character is fate. Progressive liberals tend to dismiss his assertion. Liberals and progressives, in general, believe that with reason and effort that each of us can do whatever he wants to do. It is nice to have such un-limiting beliefs. But my experience has shown me that personality is, more or less, fate. Once the individual develops a certain type of personality, usually in childhood, certainly before adolescence, age 13, that pattern of relating to other people and the world around him tends determine what he gets out of life. Society will reward the individual according to his behaviors, which are determined by his personality. As it were, personality is fate.

Once developed, whatever will happen to the individual will happen to him? He must experience whatever he has to experience. As it were, he is destined by his personality to live and experience life in a certain manner. In fact, given the individual’s personality, he can only do well in certain professions. He will have to do what he has to do and experience what he has to experience and nobody can prevent it. For example, if you are the introverted, introspective, reflective, shy, avoidant personality type, it is obvious that you may do well in introspective disciplines like philosophy, theology and psychology and not necessarily in action oriented disciplines like engineering. Once personality is formed, and personality is formed from biological and social experiences, the individual’s fate, as it were, is set.

(A life force in us takes our inherited biological constitution and social experience and weaves them together to form our personalities. We are the conceptualizer of our personalities. A spirit that we came to the world with, though denying its real nature and sleeping is responsible for conceptualizing our self concepts and self images. We, that is, unified spirit, the thinker in us, are not our thoughts and personalities. The individual is not his thoughts and behavior; he is a son of God, spirit that came to earth to dream that he is separated from his father and brothers. Because he is not his personality he can understand his biological make up and his social experiences and his personality and up to a point change them. However, body and society are limits. Given his inherited body and the nature of society he lives in, there is only so much he can change in his life. You cannot change your genes, and body, at least not yet, not until genetic science and engineering makes that possible. Until that happy event takes place, you are restricted as to what you can do by your inherited body and social status. If you were born with a weak, sensitive body, as is almost always the case in shy children, you are not going to make your body strong by merely wishing so, hence will not make yourself extroverted. You will always be introverted, but you can learn the nature of extroversion and became socially outgoing despite the pull of shyness for you to withdraw from society. In the meantime go do what you have aptitude and interest in doing and use it to contribute to society. In contributing fully to society you receive peace and joy.)

Please find out what your personality type is and work on it, it affects what you do. Recently, I asked an Igbo Doctor an innocent question. I asked the question to obtain information from him. He had assigned an honorific title himself and I wrote to him a one line question: what does that title mean? He wrote back a rambling dissertation on how I was making fun of him. I was surprised at his sense of being demeaned.

He was projecting his self assessment to me. He thinks that he is funny, calling himself a Sir, when he is not one. That is, he was projecting to me what he sees in him. He has paranoid personality features, for paranoid persons generally over employ the ego defense mechanism of projection. They think that they are inferior and inadequate, deny this negative self assessment and project it out and come to think that other people think that they are inferior and inadequate. They then quarrel with other people for perceiving them as inferior and inadequate. They stimulate anger in other people, for if you accuse people of seeing you as inadequate and they did not see you as such, you make them resent you and quarrel with you. The paranoid personality is in a vicious cycle (self fulfilling prophecy), he accuses other people of doing what they did not do and they resent him and fight with him. This hostile response by other people confirms his earlier assumption that other people and the world is hostile towards him and is out to get him and or put him down. He does not know that he is the one stimulating how other people respond to him. If he changes his self view, gives up his neurotic wish to seem important, relinquishes his grandiosity, and accepts that he is the same and equal to all people, loves and forgives all people, he would generate more peaceful and loving responses from other people.

Igbos tend to be more paranoid than other people. I know that they may not want to hear this fact but I am actually trying to help them by stating the truth, as I observe it in them. A people’s friend must tell the truth, as he sees it. (What is the truth, you ask? I do not know, do you know? Never mind if we do not, ultimately, know what the truth is.) Who ever tells one lies is ones enemy. I think that for any number of reasons, Igbos feel inferior and want to seem superior. They want other Nigerians to see them as superior to them. Of course, other Nigerians being normal persons refuse to collude with Igbos. Thus they see Igbos for who they are: ordinary persons. Igbos then resent being seen as ordinary, for their neurosis would like them to be seen as very important persons. They accuse other Nigerians of persecuting them, when no one is persecuting them. They tell me that Yoruba’s are out to do this or that to them. The Yorubas I know are the kindest persons on earth. The Hausas I know are the most generous human beings on earth. But my Igbo brothers are unaware of the psychodynamic origin of their quarrels with other Nigerians.

I am not making other Nigerians out as angels. Every human being has a personality, which, in the final analysis, is at best normal. Normal means that it does not have exaggerated neurosis.

For example, every person is a bit paranoid. If your level of paranoid is small we say that you are normal. That does not mean that you do not have paranoia. If terrorists randomly kill people, your masked paranoia would come to the fore, as you suddenly feel that other people are out to kill you and you are suspicious of your neighbors intentions; you become guarded and scan your world looking out for danger and defending yourself. On September 11, 2001 just about every American exhibited paranoid personality traits. The point is that psychopathologies masked in normal persons come out in insecure times.

SECULAR AND SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY

What this means is that all of us have problematic selves. We, therefore, need to pause and understand our selves. This understanding is to be done at two levels: secular and spiritual.

At the secular level, we can use the science of psychology to understand our personalities, our self concepts and our self images. The chances are that you, if you are reading this material, you are normal. (See the writings of George Kelly on personality as a personal construct; he contends that each of us, building on his biological datum and social experiences, constructs his personality. Also see the writings of Alfred Adler and Karen Horney, seminal psychoanalysts.)

(The two percent of the population that is psychotic seldom read abstract materials; apparently, their hallucinations and delusions make reading tedious for them. There seem biological issues in the etiology of psychosis: there are putative problematic dopamine issues in schizophrenia, problematic neuropiniphrin issues in mania, problematic serotonin issues in depression, and problematic GABA issues in anxiety disorder. So far, no one has implicated biochemical causal factors in personality disorders. It seems that mentation, thinking, and plays a key role in personality disorders, and if the individual changes his thinking and behavior patterns his personality tends to change. It appears that cognitive behavior therapy is the best approach to healing personality disorders? Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy and Albert Ellis Rational Emotive Therapy seem to work quite well in helping persons with personality disorders change their self defeating thinking and behavior patterns.)

Psychotherapists (secular, as in psychologists and psychiatrists, and spiritual, as in religions; ministers) make their livings trying to change people’s personalities. But you do not need to go to psychotherapists. You simply can stu

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Intelligent Design by an Insane God

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- One has followed the attempt by some Christians to get American schools to teach what they call intelligent design. Apparently, these Christians do not like the implication of Charles Darwin’ (Origin of Species) doctrine that human beings, like other biological organisms, evolved gradually on planet earth, and that chance determined how they evolved.

Evolution (hypothesis) teaches that animals adapted to the exigencies of their environment and that as the environment changed, they mutated, changed along with it. Those animals that adapted to changes in their environment survive and those that did not, died out.
This hypothesis further holds that animals are in perpetual struggle for survival and that the strongest (fittest) among them survive and the weakest die off.
Economists tell us that food and other resources from which human beings obtain their sustenance are scarce and that those animals that can chase others out of where resources are found in abundance survive and those that are chased off (perhaps into reservations and Bantustans, deserts), die or survive marginally.
Evolution hypothesis suggests that human existence on earth is not from what was described in the Christian Scripture (Bible, Genesis).
Christians, one understands, believe that human beings did not merely evolve and adapt to their environment but were created by an intelligent and loving God. Furthermore, they do not seem to like the implication that follows if human beings were produced by random events. It would seem that if human beings were produced by accidental concatenation of events that they have no more worth than other things produced by chance events?
If Human beings were produced in the same manner as trees and animals, human beings are not more important than those organisms? We cut down trees and burn them; we kill animals and eat them, or just for the sport of it. We do not feel guilty or remorseful from doing these things.
If human beings are just like trees and animals and are the product of chance adaptation to the ecology, it logically follows that they have no more value than trees and animals. Shoot and kill them for the sport of it and do not feel guilty or remorseful.
Apparently, Christians fear that if you reduce human beings to the same level as trees and animals, you devalue them and make it possible to hunt them, as game hunters hunt animals, and take pleasure in killing them.
(When you come to think of it, animal and plant cells are just about the same, except that plant cells have vacuole and can make chlorophyll from light energy, from photons, through a process called photosynthesis).
If evolution hypothesis is accepted, it would seem that human worth is a fiction and there is no reason why a fascist like Hitler should not kill off any group he considers unintelligent (such as blacks, Jews, and Slavs). The powerful has a right to kill or use as slaves the perceived weak.
In America, racists like David Duke consider black persons unintelligent and only fit for slavery and set out to either kill or convert them to slaves.
If the Universe is an amoral place, those groups slated for death and or slavery can refuse to die or be enslaved and fight back and either kill or enslave those out to kill or enslave them. In a random, amoral universe, just as Hitler had a right to wish others death, others had a right to wish him death. In such a world, as Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) would say, people would live in a perpetual state of war and human life would be “nasty, brutish and short”.

Looking at the complexity of the human body, it is difficult to accept that it was a product of random evolution. What comes to mind is that some intelligent force could have put in time and effort to design this complex machine?
Having conceded that the human body was probably designed by an intelligent force, pure reason leads one to ask: why did he do it?
This very complex machine is going to die and rot. Why take the time to design this complicated machine if only it is going to die, decompose and return to the elements, atoms and particles of matter from which it was made?
We are born and must die. Give or take, a hundred years, and the human being dies and his body returns to carbon, calcium, oxygen, potassium, sodium, magnesium and the other elements from which it was made. Why would an intelligent force take the trouble to design such a complex machine that would die and smell to high heaven?
(Have you seen a decomposing human body? It smells worse than garbage. The body that you value so much is no different from feces when it is dead. If you want to retain the illusion that your body is valuable, please stir clear of battlefronts with dead and decomposing bodies.)
The human body is subject to attack by virus, bacteria, fungus and other microorganisms. The human body has a built in biological defense mechanism that constantly fights and destroys the microorganisms that are trying to make a meal of it. (Human thinking, aka mind, also has built-in psychological defense mechanisms with which it fights off threats to its worth. For example, people fight off the threat to the value of their bodies’ worth by denying that they shall die and rot like garbage. Every where, human beings deny death, but die they must.)
Ultimately, microorganisms wear down the human body. Why would an intelligent and caring force design a body and bid other organisms to constantly attack it and have it defend itself (through its immunity system)?

Natural forces like earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, tornadoes, draughts, and famine destroy human beings, as they destroy trees and animals. This year alone, thousands of human beings have died from tsunami in East Asia, from earthquake in Pakistan and from hurricanes in the United States of America. Each year, at least, a million human beings die from the above mentioned natural forces.
If a loving and kind God created human beings, why would he permit his creation to be destroyed by these natural forces?
One assumes that that creative force also created the natural forces that destroy human beings and, as such, had the capability of designing them in such a manner that they did not destroy his supposed pride of creation, his idol, human beings.
It would seem that if there is an intelligent force that designed human beings that he is, in fact, a sadistic one. A God that took the time to create complex biological organisms and then bid them fight with each other must be the quintessence of an evil force!
Just think of it. All animals survive on the back of other animals. To survive, human beings must eat vegetables, fruits and meat. That requirement entails their destroying trees and killing animals. Have you gone to an animal slaughter house, where chicken, cattle, pigs and other source of meat that grace your table are “packed”? It is not exactly a pretty sight. Expose a sensitive child to the killing of animals and give him nightmares; therefore, we hide that gruesome but inevitable business from the perception of our children.
Life on earth subsists on the death of other lives. A god that designed such a life system seems an evil god.
Have you seen a child die and seen what that death does to the mother of that child? I have seen a woman go into catatonia and clinical depression from the death of her beloved son. First, she went into catatonia and for two weeks was in a waxy, inflexible posture, not moving on the bed she was lying. Second, she became depressed and lost interest in the activities of daily living; she had no interest in food, grooming her body, work, play; she simply wanted to die. She was in that existentially depressed mood for the balance of her earthly life.
What kind of intelligent and loving God would do such dastardly thing to a Christian woman of the highest moral order? And hers is by no means a unique situation. Have you gone to battle fronts where human beings mow each other down? People are killed at war fronts as if they have no worth. Usually, after great battles, hundreds and sometimes thousands of dead bodies litter the battle field. Days latter, these bodies rot and smell worse than feces. A few weeks after a sustained battle, you have to cover your nose to deal with the stench from rotting bodies.
Ah, think of Hitler’s gas chambers and six million dead Jews. Think of Hitler’s prisoner of war camps and the millions of Slavic prisoners in them; he starved them to death, but not before they had been used to do hard labor for the Third Reich. What kind of intelligent and caring god permits these gruesome commonplaces in human existence?

One has read some of the theological and philosophical arguments in favor of God’s creation of the world. Consider Aristotle’s idea of an uncaused cause and Christian theologians (examples are Origin, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Anselem, Erasmus etc) efforts to use such logical ideas to rationalize belief in God. If you have time to kill at airports, you could read these interesting materials. In the final analysis, however, they are not persuasive, for everywhere one looks, one sees evil.
What seems plausible is that if a god created this world of pain and suffering that he could be a sadistic, evil god? A Jewish clinical psychologist, Helen Schucman, in her book, A Course in Miracles, suggested that an insane part of God, the Son of God, invented this world. To her, the world is insane and was invented by an insane part of God.
One is, therefore, urging the proponents of intelligent design to consider the possibility that an intelligent but evil god designed this world? (Alternatively, could the real God and his real creation be in a different world: unified spirit state, the opposite of our separated, material world?)


PS: Evolution is not a theory; its contention has not been proven true; it is a useful hypothesis; it is probably better than the equally unproven but dogmatic hypothesis found in the Bible. Evolution hypothesis has not accounted for human intelligence. It is not convincing to say, as neuroscience and biological reductionism holds, that thinking, mind, is epiphenomenal.
Cartesian skepticism probably remains the best position in these contentious matters. We need further evidence before we can make up our minds.
Is this agnostic position a cop out? Okay, do what Kierkegaard suggested: make a leap of faith in favor of one of the contending hypotheses on the origin and nature of human beings. Faith, however, is not reason. As long as you know what you are doing, you are in good hands.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji
[email protected]
(206) 464-9004

November 19, 2005

Posted by Administrator at 06:26 AM | Comments (1)

Why do Human Beings Tolerate Slavery? and other Little Essays

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- Hitherto, I had a dismissive attitude towards African Americans. I saw them as cowards. Why? I believed that they were so afraid of dying and wanted to live so badly that they permitted white folks to enslave them.

It seemed to me that if they were real men, men who were not afraid of dying, that they would have fought for their personal liberties and, if need be, preferred death to living as slaves, and in the present as second class citizens in America.

But the more I think about the issue the more I realize that all of us are really doing what African Americans did hence one should not have contempt for them.

White Americans would seem like free men but are they? I have lived in America. The white Americans that I see are total cowards. They fit themselves into their oppressive society and do not complain about it. Their society is like a hierarchical military set up, wit a few leaders at the top and the masses at the bottom. The leaders aren’t free men, either; they have to make sure that they abide by the ethos of the slave society they lead. White Americans are the most emasculated human beings there are on earth; they conform to their oppressive society without questioning it, just so that they have jobs and be able to feed themselves and live. If they were free men they would fight for freedom for all in their society.

How about contemporary Africans who come to America, are they free men? When they get here, they, too, fit themselves right in, into America’s slavish society. They occupy the second class role that white society designed and assigned to blacks in American society. They are shunted into menial jobs and do them. They may chaff among themselves but seldom actively do something to change their situation. They enjoy the few civil rights that black Americans fought for but, by and large, do not fight for those rights by themselves.

I have not lived in Europe and cannot speak about Europeans. But one assumes that they, too, acquiesce to the rule of their oppressive leaders. In the past, they feared and obeyed their abusive kings. They must be slavish in their behavior? At any rate, the Europeans that come to America conform to the slavish society that I know as America, they are seldom courageous persons who rock the boat of injustice that is called America.
It is correct to assert that most human beings acquiesce to unjust social set ups, where a few oppress the many. It seems most people are slaves. Why so?


THE EGO AND HUMAN TENDENCY TO TOLERATION OF ABUSE

I think that most of us tolerate slavery and social abuses because we identified with the ego, false self.
The ego is the separated self housed in bodies. Bodies are weak and vulnerable. Bodies can be hurt and eventually will die. Those who identify with body must, therefore, anticipate harm to their bodies and live in fear of harm and death.
Fearing harm and death and wishing to live forever, people who identify with egos/bodies tend to go along with whoever threatens to harm and or kill them.
The ego, while living in fear, nevertheless, desires power; it has ego ideals and wants to actualize them. It begs for opportunity to live, hoping that it would have the ability and time to actualize its ego ideals, and in the process become powerful.
Consider me, for example. Upon getting to America, I quickly appraised that white Americans are uncivilized brutes, slavers and discriminators. I developed total contempt for them. I did not want any thing to do with them. I tuned them out. But I had ego ideals. I hoped to realize my ego ideals, to eventually bring about the type of society that I liked. In the meantime, I tolerated the white controlled society, the abusive and oppressive American society. I did not do anything to change the oppressive American society that I lived in. I, in effect, condoned America’s abusiveness. I permitted myself to live as a second class citizen in America. I permitted myself to be enslaved by the enslaving white society. I am, in effect, not as courageous as I had imagined myself to be.
I used to believe that I would sooner die than tolerate slavery, as black Americans did. Now I know that I am as cowardly as black Americans seem to be. What this means is that I must learn to respect them rather than dismiss them as cowards that ought not to be listened to. I tended to want to listen to only men who are courageous, who are willing to die for what they believed to be right, men who would not permit other men to enslave them.

CONCLUSION

It seems that as long as human beings are separated from their spirit nature and live in bodies, and struggle to protect their separated selves housed in bodies, bodies they know are weak and vulnerable; they would fear harm and death. They would fear those who are able to harm and or kill them. As long as human beings wish to live as separated selves housed in bodies they must be amenable to social oppression. People set up governments to protect them from each others attack. Governments realizing that people are fearful turn around and oppress them. Governments must be abusive. Slavery and acceptance of second class social status seem an inherent part of the human condition.
Only the few who are ready to die, at any moment, can become truly free men; those who look soldiers pointing guns at them and say: go ahead, shoot and kill me, for if I must live, I must live only as a free man, are capable of living as free men.
I estimate that less than one percent of the human population, worldwide, has the courage to insist on liberty or death. I estimate that less than one percent of the human population is freemen. The rest of them are slaves and or second class citizens.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji
[email protected]

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WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ONE REALIZES THAT ONE CANNOT ACTUALIZE ONES EGO IDEALS? THE NEED FOR REPLACEMENT GOALS FOR LIVING


Ozodi Thomas Osuji

My father and grandfather were idealists. They had grand plans of how to improve themselves, improve other people and improve their world. Their minds came up with all sorts of ideals of how they and their world ought to become perfect. I am like them, I am also an idealist; my thinking, mind, is forever coming up with plans to make human beings and their social institutions perfect.
I observed my father in his middle age. When he was fifty five years old, it became apparent that he was getting old and that his grandiose ideals were not going to be realized. He despaired and gave up on his plans. From that age onwards, it was evident to me that father was a discouraged man and that he had no more hope of realizing his dreams. He became a shell of his former idealistic self. For a while, though, he tried to vicariously realize his dreams through his children. He talked and talked about how we needed to be outstanding and achieve this or that. But reality is different; none of his children had the aptitude or interest in doing what he wanted us to do. For example, he wanted us to go into politics and try to become leaders of the country. But I was not interested in politics. What interested me was studying why people behaved as they behaved. None of father’s children undertook to realize his neurotic goals, that is, false, idealistic goals. Father felt disappointed and became one unhappy man in his old age.
Clearly, father’s neurotic motivations, his quest for power and glory were what kept him going. As a young man he tried to accomplish a lot. After elementary schooling, he was assigned to a trader. His master took him to all over West Africa, teaching him the art of trading. He eventually becomes an independent trader. As I understand it, he made quite a bit of money, too. He did for his folks what in his world was considered an achievement: buy bicycles for them, buy wives for them and bring them to the urban setting, housed and fed them. He was responsible for bringing his fellow villagers to Lagos.
Father had high hopes for himself but by the 1970s, when he was a middle aged man, it was obvious that he was not going to realize his ambitions. Now what? He gave up. In the 1980s, he returned to his village, a broken man.

When one recognizes that ones goals, what gave one motivation to struggle for achievement, is not going to be realized and that even if they were realized that they are not satisfying, what should one do?
I believe that the person should strive to have replacement goals and substitute purposes to live for.
What is that different purpose to live for?
When the ego’s neurotic purpose (for superiority and idealism) is given up, one need to replace it with a different purpose: one should live for God’s purpose for his children.
God wills that we love him and love one another. To serve God’s will is to serve God and all human beings. One must learn to love all people and work for a world of love.
In real terms, as brother Jesus said, love means forgiving all human beings what they did on earth to hurt one another. One must practice forgiveness and love.
Forgiveness, love and social service are the replacement goals that one must have. Forgiveness, love and service to all people give one inner peace and give society peace and harmony.
In terms of profession in the world, of course, one must do what one has aptitude and interest in doing, but one must redirect the purpose of that profession for one. If one had sought the vocation to seem socially important, one must now use it as a means of helping other people. One must use ones vocation to point people towards God, forgiveness and love. For example, I understand secular psychology. I can now use that understanding to point out the pain and suffering inducing nature of the ego and the need for spiritual psychology, a psychology that practices love for all people.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji
[email protected]

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SHY WOMEN OFTEN MARRY MEN THEY CAN DOMINATE

Ozodi Thomas Osuji


When inexperienced men see shy women they may automatically think that such women are docile and that they can easily dominate them. It generally turns out that this is not always the case.
African men were socialized to dominate women. I am a typical African male. I was brought up to seek to dominate women. I wanted to dominate my women. I therefore gravitated to shy, quiet, seemingly unassertive women. My goal was to have a door mat that did whatever I asked her to do.
Shy women appear to have low self esteem and not to have high opinion of them selves.
Whereas it is a fact that shyness is correlated with inferiority feeling, what is not always understood is that the person who feels inferior also wants to feel superior. As Alfred Adler correctly pointed out, when a person feels inferior (be it due to inherited organic deficits or due to social deficits, such as men putting women in second class status hence making them feel inferior) they tend to compensate with a drive for superiority. The inferior feeling person restitutes with desire for inordinate sense of superiority, a superiority that borders on the unreal, hence is neurotic (if not psychotic). Such persons often behave as if they are their desired important selves.
The superior and ideal self is a fiction yet shy, neurotic persons so desire them that sometimes they feel an inner obsessive compulsion to behave “As if” they are their desired imaginary powerful selves.
I had a relationship with a shy, introverted woman, a school psychologist. Whereas on the surface, this woman seemed passive, in fact, she wanted to dominate me, to tell me what to do. It was either her way or the highway. I was surprised that my supposed wilting willow is now trying to run my life. She, in fact, wanted to determine everything that I did, including minor things like what movies we went to, what restaurants we went to, where we traveled to etc.
As a result of her domineering nature, I began to pay attention to her personality. I, too, am quiet and seemingly passive. People tend to see me as a door mat until they attempt telling me what to do. If you dared tell me what to do, my oppositional nature comes out, for my immediate response is to ask you who the hell do you think that you are telling me what to do. Just because I am a nice guy who seems to please every body around me does not mean that I give anyone permission to tell me what to do. People often feel surprised that the hitherto mild mannered person like me is now all over them wanting to know why on earth they dared to tell me what to do.
My girl friend’s bossing me around brought out my oppositional defiant nature. But since she is not a man, I was not about to talk loudly to her. I would have immediately tried to stop a fellow man who tried to boss me around. A woman, well, I was brought up not to shout at women, not to even debate with them, but to tolerate them. So I kept quiet and tried to understand her.
Building on my understanding of that woman and a few others, I posit that shy, passive women tend to desire to seem superior to men and, that some, in fact, marry men they seem superior to.
My lady friend studied psychology and makes her living giving IQ and personality tests and counseling students. She fancied herself very smart. She would correct my mistakes, even in the public.
Over time, I gradually learned that many shy women want to dominate their men. This is particularly so in interracial relationships. If the woman is white and shy, the chances are that she feels inferior and wants to seem superior. She could not feel superior to white men but feels that she could feel superior to black men, after all white society defines black persons as inferior. I suspect that many white women marry black men to feel superior to them. When such black men improve their self esteem and demand to be treated as equals and become assertive, their neurotic women no longer know how to relate to them. The premise of their relationships, superiority and inferiority, is broken. Such marriages end, unless of course both parties are willing to become equal partners in the relationship.
With the end of their neurotic relationship, the woman generally forms another neurotic relationship with a person she feels superior to, often another minority person. Of course when the new spouse wises up to her neurotic game and asks for equality she would leave. Thus such neurotic white women go from one minority male to another, seeking those they can feel superior to and or dominate. (Of course, not all interracial relationships are predicated on neurotic grounds; some are healthy relationships between two equal persons who respect each other.)
In healthy relationships, the man and woman see each other as equal and treat each other with respect. But such relationships are very few. What is common is for the man to feel more powerful than the woman and, more or less, tolerate her as one tolerates a child who acts as if he is an adult.
Most men that I know don’t even listen to their wives opinions. It is as if the wives are children and the men are adults and do not have to listen to the views of children. If the wife talks, they humor her and pretend to pay attention to what she says, just so that they do not fight, so as to have peace in the family. But deep down they really do not respect what their wives say.
In conclusion, it seems that some shy women are superiority and domination seeking women, a fact belied by their apparent passive appearance.
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
[email protected]


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WHAT IS MY VOCATION?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji


All through my life I have not really found a vocation, a career, and a profession I find satisfactory enough to devote my life to.
In the absence of a real vocation, I devoted my self to trying to actualize my ego ideals.
But now I know that the ego and its ideals are neurotic. If, in fact, one realized ones ego ideals of superiority one becomes psychotic. The lunatic is a person who believes himself superior to other people. The neurotic wishes to be superior to others but knows that he is not so but the psychotic, though the same as all of us, nevertheless, feels superior to other people.
I know that my past goals were in pursuit of my neurotic ego ideals. So what should my goals be? In other words, what should my vocation be? How should I make my living?
What does A Course in Miracle say regarding vocation? It says that our vocation is to understand forgiveness and love, and practice and teach them.
When I live from forgiveness and love, I have overcome the ego and its world; I have overlooked the evils of this world and focus on a different world, God’s world. I am now on my journey back to God. My life is characterized by peace and joy.
I model my peace and joy to the world. I give my peace and joy to the world. A grateful world then rewards me with the means to live on earth, money etc.
All these sounds nice but how do they translate to a real vocation that pays money and what is that vocation?
Ministers of God have to beg their Church members for money to help support them. I do not exactly want to beg any one for money to help support me. So how should I make my living?
Write about spiritual psychology and publish my writings. Publish a monthly magazine devoted to the same subject: Real Self magazine. Ultimately, organize real Self Fellowship.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji
[email protected]



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AMERICANS ARE LIVING IN HELL; THEY NEED AN ALTERNATIVE TO IT

Ozodi Thomas Osuji


From afar, Americans seem to live enviable lives. But when you come close to them, however, you recognize that they are a living in hell.
To live in hell is to live in the ego hence to live in fear. Americans identify with the ego and live in ego fear. Living in ego hence fear, they devote most of their energies trying to find protection from fear. They have powerful police, judiciary and penal systems. They arrest criminals, speedily try and send them to jails. But despite putting over two million persons in prisons they still live in fear of being harmed and or killed by criminals. Despite having the most powerful military in the world, they still live in insecurity of being killed by terrorists.
It is clear that Americans need some one to show them another way of living on earth, a way that does not breed the level of fear they live in. They need to be shown the forgiving and loving way of living.
Americans hurt many people and people are angry at them. People all over the world would like to get their hands on nuclear weapons and use them on Americans. Revenge, sweet revenge is motivating many terrorists behavior towards Americans.

A person whom Americans have hurt must forgive them, to forgive himself. A person who has forgiven and loves them hence models forgiveness and its attendant peace and joy for them is who Americans need as their teacher. Such a person is a bringer of peace and happiness and only God knows that Americans lack peace and joy and need them.

A Course in miracles teaches that the ego is a false self; it teaches that the ego must be replaced with a different self, the Christ self. It teaches that the ego goal of self serving must be replaced with the Christ, Holy Spirit goals of social serving.
The Holy Spirit’s goal and purpose for us gives us fearlessness, angerlessness, peace and joy, whereas the egos purpose gives us pain and suffering. America needs a teacher of God to teach her how to find the peace of God that currently eludes her. However, the teacher of God must teach the Holy Spirit’s gospel of love and forgiveness, not his own ego teachings. It is the Holy Spirit that teaches it through him; he is not the one doing the teaching. He needs to know this least his head swells in ego pride and he becomes delusional thinking that he can save America. Only God can save America, not man.

The majority Americans are like normal persons everywhere in the world; they are adapted to the exigencies of this world. They are, as such, mostly fast asleep. Only about one percent of Americans, as everywhere in the world are ready for spiritual psychology.
One cannot wake normal persons up, for they are not yet ready to wake up. When they are ready to wake up they would start rejecting their egos and their bodies and this world and start turning towards the things of spirit.
It is not for one to wake others up; that is not ones function; that is the function of the Holy Spirit; he is the one charged to awaken the sons of God. Only the Holy Spirit knows who is fast asleep and who is ready to wake up, he is the one who will direct one to go wake those ready to wake up. One should not take on the role of waking any one up unless one is led by the Holy Spirit/Jesus Christ to do so.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji
[email protected]


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SERVICE ORIENTATION IS HAPPINESS

Ozodi Thomas Osuji


There are those who truly like to serve other persons. They give of their time and energy to other people. They find out what those around them, particularly their spouses and children, need and do them without waiting to be told to do so. They do not ask to be praised and recognized for their good works. These are givers. Givers tend to be happy and peaceful persons.
On the other hand, are those who do not like to serve other people? They feel like it is asking too much of them to serve other people. They do not try to figure out what others need and do them. Indeed, some of them have such false pride that they feel humiliated were they to serve other persons. They want to be served, which makes them seem like very important persons, but not to serve, which makes them feel like they are unimportant, inferior and powerless. These are neurotics trying to seem powerful and important via being served by other human beings but not serving them.
Those who do not like to serve other persons tend to be unhappy persons. (This is where many Nigerian big men are; they like to be served but not to serve their fellow country men; they are mostly neurotic men, ala Alfred Adler.)
Do you want to be at peace and to be happy? If so, figure out what those around you, your spouse, children and fellow human beings need and quietly do them. Do not toot your own horn. Do not let your left hand know what your right hand did. Do not let the world know that you do serve other people.
Spinoza said that virtue is its own reward. I add to his wisdom by saying that service is its own reward.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji
[email protected]



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PATTERNS OF THINKING AND BEHAVING IN THE WORLD

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

The Son of God is asleep. In his sleep there are two patterns of thinking and behaving that he can engage in. The Holy Spirit pattern and the ego pattern. Both patterns are still sleep/dream thinking and behaving though one approximates God and the other is far from him (is a shadow of spirit). One pattern is led by the Holy Spirit (God) and the other pattern is led by the sleeping son of God.
The son of God is not in charge of the Holy Spirit’s pattern, he merely follows without asking questions. However, since in heaven he is one with God, by obeying God he is really obeying himself, he is not a mere slave without a will if he follows the Holy Spirit.
(The ego asks: why should the son just follow his father’s will, where is his freedom to do as he pleases or does he not have a choice in the matter; is he merely a clone of his father, who does as his father asks him to do in heaven? Is heaven a slave plantation where the children of God do only what their father asks them to do or else they are driven out to hell, to this world? Is God a dictator who expects only obedience or else one is sent to hell, out of heaven?)
When the son of God awakens from his sleep dream, his thinking is now like his father’s for he is one with his father. Awake he has unified consciousness; asleep he has separated consciousness.








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TO JUDGE OTHER PEOPLE IS TO DISTURB ONES PEACE

Ozodi Thomas Osuji



Are you judgmental? Do you compulsively judge your self and other people’s behaviors good or bad? If so, you have ego ideal wishes and expect other people to live up to your wishes, ideals, your fantasies of what perfection is. In effect you want people to be in accordance with your wishes, which would mean that you created them. H
Here are the facts: you did not create people; God created them. In the ego’s world, you did not create people either, they invented themselves. Other people cannot change to please you no matter how hard you try; they are living according to their own ego wishes.
All you are doing by judging people and wishing that they change to suit you is disturbing your peace.
Therefore, do not judge other people’s behaviors as good or bad; people are doing what they want to do, what their egos, personalities and body dispose them to do; you cannot change them.
You are playing God trying to change people. Leave people alone, they are doing their own things, as you are; each is in his private ego hell. That is what this world is, ego hell, so let it be.
Extricate yourself from hell by dropping off your ego self concept, self image and personality and reaching your real self, the unified
Christ self. Christ does not judge, for he knows that the world and what is done in it is dreams; he loves the dreamer and not his dreams, he overlooks the dreams. He forgives peoples behaviors.


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STOP WASTING YOUR TIME WITH A COURSE IN MIRACLES, SIXTEEN YEARS IS ENOUGH WASTED TIME

Ozodi Thomas Osuji



A Course in Miracles teaches that this world is a mistake and, as such, to be negated and escaped from; the world is to be overlooked, forgiven, so that a better world is experienced. It does not teach one how to adapt to this world, for to it, that would amount to adjusting to a bad mistake. In so far that it is useful to this world at all, it is in teaching that there is a better world and that teaching gives one hope that if one dies that life does not end with ones physical death. All religion teaches that there is life after death and give similar hope.
The Course teaches fate and destiny; it teaches that this world is already over and that everything done in it has already been done and that one is at the end of the dream and re-experiencing what one had already done. That is to say that what would happen to one must happen to one no matter what one does, for, in fact, it has already happened to one; one is merely looking at the events of ones life as in a movie and all that one can do is accept them with peace of mind or fret about them, but cannot really change them.
The Course teaches that ego idealism, neurosis and psychosis are useless for what they hope for, perfect man and perfect society is not going to occur, for the ego is inherently imperfect.
In sum, the Course does not help one deal with the exigencies of this world. If one wants to make a living in this world, one must do so in this world’s terms. Therefore, one must stop wasting ones time thinking about the Course and seek a way to make a living in this world.
Sixteen years of thinking about a book is long enough, would you not say so? So, now stop pretending as if you have not understood the book; reading it one more time is not going to change anything. Get on with your life.
As noted the only thing the course gives is peace of mind, from realization that one can rationalize its evil with the notion that what is done in it is done in a dream and does not matter.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]


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GRATITUDE: EGO’S AND HOLY SPIRIT’S

Ozodi Thomas Osuji


The ego and its body do feel psychological and physical pain. Therefore, it is willing to be grateful to whoever gives it pleasure and ungrateful to whomever gives it pain. If you do a good thing to a human being, he is generally grateful but if you do bad things to them they are generally ungrateful.
The Holy Spirit, recognizing that pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin, can lead to salvation, asks us to be grateful to those who give us pleasure, as well as to those who give us pain.
If a person slaps you and causes you pain, if a person enslaves you and causes you pain, he enables you to forgive him hence forgive yourself and attain salvation. (This is why Paul asks slaves to be grateful and obedient to their masters, to stay and forgive their masters and become saved.)
The ego sees situations where it is caused pain as asking it to tolerate abuse, as asking it to be masochistic and make the other sadistic. It refuses to be grateful to its attackers. (If you like to enslave others, they will enslave you to experience the pain you caused them; Americans must be enslaved by blacks to feel the pain they caused black persons; this is the fact of karma, the law of cause and effect.)
Jesus was grateful to his attackers (yet his attackers died in others attacks). Nevertheless, he recommended only love, giving people pleasure, not pain for obviously people in body must prefer pleasure to pain.




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WHY MY TENDENCY TO GIVE UP TOO QUICKLY

Ozodi Thomas Osuji


I tend to give up too quickly, such as exit naija politics because a hair brained African American woman rejected one of my pieces, The Thinker. This is because my ego wants to seem important, superior, ideal and perfect. When others reject it, it feels humiliated and seeks out to go maintain its false importance and perfection.
The lesson is not to give up too quickly. One must stay and fight for what one believes is right and worth fighting for. But one must choose ones battles; not all battles are worth fighting for.

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November 16, 2005

Salvation: Where does it Come from, Inside or out?

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- All human beings are seeking salvation. They want to be saved. The question is: what are they being saved from?

They seek salvation from their egos, the separated, special selves they made to replace the unified equal self their God created them as, the holy son of God, the Christ. They seek to be saved from their egos and the pain and suffering induced by the ego and its world.

Human beings separated from their creator and from each other and developed separated consciousness, the consciousness we all have on planet earth. Originally, we had unified consciousness, but now we have separated consciousness.

On earth, we feel all alone, pained and are unhappy. In our aloneness and unhappiness we seek surcease. Initially, we think that the way to obtain release from our pain and suffering is to seek ego perfection. Thus, we seek ego idealism, perfection and superiority, with the belief that if we became better ego selves that we would recreate the peace and joy we had in our original heavenly home.

Neurosis and psychosis, the desire for important, ideal, superior, perfect ego self and ego’s world is really the desire for God, albeit in fantasy, that is, in ego terms. God is experienced not in ego terms but on his own terms, unified terms.

We are all seeking the peace and joy of our original home, except that now we seek it in ego terms, via success in this world and becoming more perfect egos. Of course, that is not going to happen, for no matter how much we wash the anus it would still smell of feces. The ego cannot be made to become holy (unified), for by definition it is a separated self and, as such, must cause pain.

It is only when the wish for separation is given up and one desires to return to unified state, a non-ego state that one begins to obtain surcease from the pains and sufferings of this world.

And to our present interest: saved by whom? Is the savior outside one or is he inside one?

Traditional Christianity teaches that salvation comes from outside one, from a man who supposedly lived in Palestine two thousand years ago. The Christian prays to this Jewish character to save him.

But is salvation going to come from outside one, is Jesus Christ outside one and from whence comes to save one? No.

Salvation is inside one. Salvation comes from inside one. In so far that one trusts in Jesus to save one, it is not an outside Jesus, it is an inside Jesus Christ, the Jesus who has eliminated his ego and merged with the Holy Son of God, the Christ, hence is properly referred to as Jesus the Christ. That Jesus Christ is not outside one but is inside one, he is part of ones higher self, the Holy Spirit.

EXAMPLE FROM MY LIFE

It is all too easy to talk about religious principles in the abstract. Priests do that all the time. They explicate what the scripture says. What they do is religion, not spirituality. Spirituality is rooted in personal experience. The spiritual teacher teaches from his personal experience and does not just explicate what scripture says. I will, therefore, draw from my personal experience in teaching the nature of salvation.

I will examine a dream I had at age four. I know that I was four years old for that was how old I was when my parents built a new house and moved into it. The dream occurred during the week we moved into that house.

Generally, remembered dreams, like remembered childhood experiences are distorted. However, distorted or not, it is the symbolism of this dream that matters. It tells me about me: my expectation of salvation to come from outside me.

In the dream, I found myself in the middle of the street in front of our new house. I was crawling on all fours. Suddenly, a truck was coming towards me. Instead of quickly crawling away from the middle of the street, I began to cry, wailing for some adult to come and pick me up. I was literally paralyzed by fear and could not move forward or backward. I just stayed in the middle of the road crying and the truck kept coming closer and closer.

Nobody came to rescue me. In fact, there was no one in the vicinity. As the truck was about to slam into me, I woke up from the dream, still crying. My mother came into my room, apparently, to find out why I was crying in the middle of the night. I told her about the truck that nearly ran into me. She consoled me and put me back to sleep.

This dream has stayed with me all my life. Whenever I am in difficulty I remember that dream. What does the dream mean?

DREAM INTERPRETATION

Dreams can be interpreted in many ways. In fact, the same dream has several interpretations, all of which are probably true. Each interpretation serves the need of the dreamer at the time he is interpreting it; as his understanding improves, he may have different interpretations of the same dream. Here is my present interpretation of the dream.

I was in the middle of the road and danger in the form of a truck was coming towards me and I was paralyzed by fear and asked for other people, people outside of me, to come and help me. I did not try to help me. I did not go inside me to ask a higher force, God, to help me. I wanted other human beings, other separated selves, egos, to help me, not God to help me.

Other people, outside forces did not come to my rescue. Nobody outside me helped me. There is no hero out there riding on a white horse coming to rescue poor, weak me.

Obviously, I felt weak and vulnerable and could not help me either. I wanted another force to help me. Another force was necessary to help me, but I rooted that force outside me, rather than inside me. That outside force did not come to my help. If I had rooted the rescuing force inside me, and looked inside me for help, I would have been helped.

The meaning of this dream is that in life, which is always a danger field, I tend to feel weak and vulnerable and expect outside other people to come and help me. No one comes to physically help me. I cry out for external rescuers and none comes. In the meantime, I am not destroyed by the dangers that confront me. The truck did not crush me to death. Before I am crushed to death, I wake up. That is, before I am destroyed by the difficulties of this life, I manage to avoid them, but in the meantime am paralyzed by fear and anger at a world that I perceive as not rescuing, caring, and loving me. This dream shows that I have dependent personality features, that I do not help myself but expect other people to do for me what I ought to be doing for my survival. Like all dependent personalities, the hoped for rescuers do not come to rescue me, so I stay not helped.

Another episode from my life will help make the point. I was in what was called Biafra, in secondary school. At some point, I was big enough and, as such, a candidate for conscription into the Biafra Army. Recruiters used to march around and pick up boys, boys from about age fourteen on, and march them to army training camps, give them quick and shoddy training and march them right to the war front.

At some point, my father decided that all the boys in the family had to be trained and placed in rear battalions, to avoid the constant harassment we faced from recruiting soldiers. My brother and cousins went through this process and were trained at a near by local army training camp and upon completion were released and placed at such rear battalions as medical corps, signal corps, supply and transport corps etc. All of them (at least four of them) successfully went through this process. Then it was my turn. My friend, Joseph and I were sent to the training camp and the commandant was given specific instruction to release us to my family after the training. Arrangements had been made where, upon completion of our training, we were to go to. We went through the shoddy six weeks training and were waiting for discharge.

One day, in the middle of the night, an army truck came and all of us were marched into it. Joseph and I tried to remind the commandant that we were supposed to be sent home and he ignored us.

We were driven right to the war front. As we got to the front battalion headquarters, a sergeant asked us to fall in line and we did. The sergeant recognized my friend, Joseph as his home boy and asked what on earth a school boy was doing at the battlefront? He called him out of the line and said that he was going to send him right back home. Joseph asked the sergeant to call me out of the line and he ignored him. I was marched to the trenches.

Joseph was sent home, in this case, to my father’s home and he told my parents where I was. In the meantime, I became furious at being subjected to sharing the fate of what I called ordinary soldiers. In Biafra, it was well known that it was the children of the poor who were mainly sent to the battle front. The children of the rich were mostly in rear military formations. I was furious at being treated like riff raff.

I was angry at God for abandoning me; I was angry at my parents for abandoning me; I was angry at the training commandant for sending me to the war front. I was angry at those who started the war and compelled school boys like me to go fight it for them. I asked: if adults are going to settle their problems with war, why don’t they go fight it out by themselves, why use school boys to do their fighting for them? I was angry at any one in authority for subjecting me to the humiliation of being at the war front.

(Adlerian psychoanalysis would say that I was a spoilt and pampered boy and, as such, was made dependent and expected other people to do things for me, to rescue me when I am in trouble; it would suggest that I did not have the inner resources to do things for me. As Adler sees it, spoiling a child saps and robs him of his inner strength and belief in his own ability to fend and shift for himself. Adler insists on parents making their children do things for themselves so as to develop a sense of independence and self reliance. I do not recall any one spoiling me, but as a sickly child my mother did over protect me, and that probably contributed to my tendency to wanting other people to rescue me rather than rescue me. We are not talking secular psychology here; we are talking spiritual psychology.)

Interestingly, I was not afraid of being killed. While I was angry at being so treated by the world, I actually wanted to stay and see a battle before I left the battle front.

I am very willful and knew that if I made up my mind to leave that I would leave and if any one tried to stop me, it would become a battle between him and me. As a child, I was oppositional defiant and do not do something because any one asked me to do it.

I knew that there were military police stationed close to the battle front that could pick a disserting soldier and send him right back to the trenches. But I also know me that once my mind is made up, no one can stop me from doing what I want to do. I could actually shoot a person who tried to stop me from doing what I want to do. The point is that I could have left the trenches if I wanted to. I decided to experience one battle before I left. In fact, when a battle ensued, I volunteered for behind enemy activities, the most risky job. After that battle I had had enough and decided that it was time to leave, and left.

The relevant point here is my anger at being abandoned by God and man. I felt like the universe was not helpful to me. I felt that no adult came to rescue me from the battle front, just like no adult rescued me from the on-coming truck. I felt furious at the entire world for not rescuing me from danger.

My temper tantrum at the war front is really another form of crying out to adults to rescue me when I am in trouble. In the real world, each of us must help himself and not rely on others to rescue him when he is in trouble. A mature person who finds himself in a dangerous situation tries to use his own inner resources to get himself out of it rather than feel angry that other persons, his parents included, for not come running to do for him what he needs to do to cope with the exigencies of the situation. I was simply immature and childish in my response to the war situation. My being young makes no difference, after all there were fourteen year olds at the war front, and those did not cry to their mamas to come rescue them but did what they had to do to survive.

This war time experience tallies with my tendency to expect external other persons to come to my rescue. Generally, no one comes to my rescue. In the dream no one came to rescue me. At the battle front, no one came to rescue me.

No matter how much I wish that other people rescue me, other people have not rescued me. Simply stated, external others have never rescued me. I have never been saved by forces outside of me.

What this means is that no one outside of me is ever going to save me. My salvation cannot come from outside me. No hero on a white horse is going to come rescue me from the difficulties of living on planet earth. If I wish for other people to rescue me, as I have done in the past, they simply will not do so.

Please notice that my friend, Joseph was rescued by an external other but that external other, who apparently could have rescued me, did not do so. He did not do so for my destiny determined that no external other person should rescue me. Only a force inside me can rescue me.

My body is weak and vulnerable; as such, I cannot do many things by myself. Like all human beings, I am weak and powerless. I cannot do many things for myself. We all need each others help. Therefore, to say that I need to look inside for salvation does not mean that I should look to myself for total help.

By myself I can do nothing. I am totally powerless. Clearly, other people can harm, even kill me, if they want to. I have no real power to deal with the external exigencies of living on planet earth. To believe that I have the power to do many things for myself is delusional. The individual does not have that much power to help himself.

THE HOLY SPIRIT IS THE INSIDE POWER THAT CAN SAVE ONE

To look inside one for salvation does not mean looking to ones ego self for salvation. It means looking to a higher power, a power that is not ones ego self, to save one. That higher power is not outside one, it is inside one.

Let us revisit the dream at age four. Obviously, no outside person came to rescue me and I could not help me, either. My ego could not help me and other people did not help me. What then could help me? Only an internal force could help me. Only a power higher than me could help me. That power is God.

Where is God? Is God outside us? Is God inside us? Clearly, God is everywhere. If God is everywhere it follows that he is both inside and outside us.

If other people had helped me in that dream, since God is in them, God would have helped me through them. But as noted, other people did not help me. That is, the God outside me, the God in other people did not help me. (Although that God helped me by asking me to trust in the God inside me, read on.)

The only God that could help me is the God that is inside me. My salvation does not come from outside me but from inside me. What this means is that the God that is inside me, the Holy Spirit, and in so far that Jesus Christ identifies with the Holy Spirit and is the Christ, he is inside me, is the only power that could help me. The God inside me, the Holy Spirit can help me. If I learn to look inside me, to trust the God inside me, it will help me.

In the dream, other people did not come to my rescue. In the battle front situation other people did not come to my rescue. As far as I can tell, no person outside of me has consciously rescued me. In fact, as I look at my life, I cannot say that any person, outside of me, has ever saved me, cared for me and rescued me.

But do understand the meaning of the statement that people outside me have not rescued and saved me. I am not blaming other people for not helping me.

By not directly helping me, people are indirectly helping me. They are telling me to look inside me and discover the real source of help inside me, the God in me. They are asking me not to trust other men, not to trust other egos, but to trust the God in us for my salvation.

YOUR ATTACKER IS YOUR SAVIOR

I like the teaching of A Course in Miracles. It teaches that all attack is a call for love when love is missing, and that all attack is an attempt to save one. It goes like this. Other people did not rescue me. Other people did not do good things for me. Other people, in certain situations, in fact, attacked me. In America, for example, white people did discriminate against me. I was denied jobs that I believed that I was qualified for.

If I identify with the ego, I would feel angry at those who attacked me, those who discriminated against me, those who denied me jobs etc. I would hold grievances against them and seek vengeance; I would desire for those I perceive as my enemies to be punished.

This is the normal ego response to attack. Many black folks look forward to the day white folks would be punished for their sins against black folks. This is a very understandable ego response. The ego bears grudges and seeks vengeance.

But A Course in Miracles teaches that there is another way of looking at the same attack situation. For instance, there is another way of looking at white racism.

Clearly, white racists denied one jobs, there is no denying that fact. When I completed my doctoral dissertation at UCLA, I did not obtain a job. I was turned down by so many of the white employers that I had applied to that my self esteem took a blow. Ones ego felt attacked and angry. That was appropriate ego response to discrimination.

The Course says that there is another way of responding to the same anger making situation. It teaches that one should overlook the racist’s discrimination and that one should forgive the racist; see the Christ in him and still love that Christ in him.

In forgiving the racist’s discriminatory behaviors, one forgives ones own past evil behaviors. In overlooking the racist’s discrimination, his sins, one over looks ones own evils and sins toward other people.

In forgiving other people, hence forgiving ones self, one overlooks ones sinful world. One over looks the world of separation, space, time and matter. One overlooks the past, present and future. One over looks the world of multiplicity and reaches the world of union.

Our world is the world of separation and division, a world of you and me, a world of seer and seen, subject and object. If you forgive that world, if you over look the world of separation, you have essentially tuned it out. When you tune out the world, you have said, in effect, that the world is not real and that it is a dream; you have said that what is done in the world is like what is done in a dream and has not happened. What is done in a dream, hence has not been done, does not matter and is not occasion for fear and anger at those who did something good or bad.

What is done in a dream has no permanent effect on people; therefore, one should over look it and not be angry/afraid from it. What has real cause is what God created, us. God is the cause and we are his effect. God is permanent and his effect, us, is permanent. Our dreams are mere wishful thinking and are therefore causeless and effect less.

You see the world as a stream and people in it as dream figures doing dream things. You over look the dream and what are done in it. You tune out the dream world and experience a different world, the world of union, the unified spirit world of God.

If you forgive your attacker, the person who discriminated against you, you have overlooked the world he represents for you, the world of separation. You then attain the world of union, the world of God.

In effect, forgiveness brings you to the gate of heaven, to the door to union. If you forgive the world, hence your self and love all people, you suddenly experience what the Course calls Holy Instant: unified experience where you feel at one with God and all his creation; you experience what mystics of every clime call unitive experience, a world where the father and the son are one, a world where all are one, where there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, a world of unified spirit self.

The unified spirit self is eternal and immortal. It is permanent and changeless. It is the opposite of our world. It is the world of total union, peace and joy. It is a world where language does not apply, for language and speech adapts to the world of separation, the world of space, time and matter, our world.

The world of God is not the world of perception, but the world of knowledge. Perception is only possible in a separated world, a world of space, time and matter such as our world. A world of union requires knowledge, not perception. The world of God is ineffable and is beyond our ego intellectual categories. It is a non-conceptual and non-perceptual world.

The Course, in effect, says that the world that did not seem to love one, a people that did not seem to help one, a people that did not rescue one, in fact, are helping one. By ignoring one, by not helping one, by not doing anything to help me, I tuned out the external world. When I see another human being, honestly, I do not expect him to do any thing good for me. I see him as a self interested person and as doing things that serve his self. His selfish behavior neither makes me angry nor not angry. I just assume that all people are egos and, as such, are motivated by their self interests. I do not expect help of any sort from other people.

By not expecting help from other people, I go inside me and seek help from the Holy Spirit. I have faith in the Holy Spirit, the God inside us, and the God in the temporal universe. I expect the God inside me to help me and he does help me.

How does he help me? He helps me by requiring me to love and forgive all people. As noted, if I love and forgive all people, including those who overtly did not help me, I experience oneness with God and all creation.

Other people are dream figures in my dream of separation and specialness. Dream persons cannot help the dreamer. It is the dreamer that produced his dream and the dream people in it. I dream and produce the world I see. I produced the dream figures I see on earth (and, they, in turn, are dreaming and produced me and the persons they see on earth; our real self is formless, unified spirit self, but we denied that self and took on a different self, the self in body, the ego separated self.)

If I ask other people to rescue and help me, what I am doing, in effect, is asking my dream figures to care and rescue me. They cannot help or rescue me, for dream figures only do what the dreamer asks them to do.

My dream makes people do what they do to me, as their dream makes me do what I do to them. (Their dream and my dream ask me to become an enlightened person, so as to teach them about our true self, the unified self).

I am the dreamer and I am supposed to rescue myself, not my dream figures rescuing me. If I over look what my dream figures do to me, I forgive and love them. I then experience the non dream world of God, the world of total love, peace and joy. If other people, dreamers too, forgive me, and forgive all people, they overlook their dream and experience the world of God.

My duty is not to wait for other people to awaken and save me but for me to awaken and try to help them awaken, too. My concern is my own personal salvation, not whether other people are saved or not. But if I become saved, by looking inwards to trust the God in me, then, I can model salvation and teach other people, through personal example, to look inwards, to have faith in the God in them, so as to become saved from the pains and sufferings of the ego self and ego world.

EGO IDEALISM AS EFFORT TO SEEM IN CONTROL

Human beings would like to believe that they are in charge of their lives. In fact, the whole experiment on earth is an effort to seem in charge. God is in charge. God created us. God extended his one self to us. We are part of God. God gave us his creative abilities. We do create. We create like God. But we create with his power in us. Without God we cannot create. At some point we resented the fact that God created us and wanted to create ourselves and create each other, which is impossible. There can be only one creator in the universe, God. We are created and are not the creator of ourselves. To seem to create ourselves, we went to sleep and invented this world of space, time and matter.

We came to the world as if we do not have an already existing self. Our first order of business here is to invent the separated, special self concept and self image. Each of us invents a separated, special self for himself and does so for other people. Thus, I have a separated self concept and a separated concept for other people, and they do the same to me.

On earth we create ourselves and create each other, in illusions, not reality, of course. The self concept, the self image are replacement selves we made to substitute for the real unified self that God created us as. The self that we are aware of, the self concept, the self image, the human personality, the ego is made by us. It is not our real self but it is a self we made. It is our idol; we made it and are proud of it.

The ego, the self concept, the human personality is the antichrist, the opposite of Christ, Christ being the unified real self God created and the ego being the separated false self. The ego is an antichrist in that it wants to kill Christ, kill the real son of God and replace him as our self.

The ego would like to seem in charge of our lives. At some point, each of us recognizes that the ego, the self concept and self image, the personality we made to replace the real self that God created does not have power.

By myself I cannot predict what is going to happen in the future. I do not even know what is going to happen to me in the next second. I have no way of protecting myself. I am totally powerless over the past, present and future. Aware of my powerlessness, aware of our collective powerlessness in ego, we seek ego ideals.

Neurosis and psychosis are pursuit of exaggerated ego ideals and false ego power. The neurotic is aware of his powerlessness to do anything by himself. He resents that fact and invents an ego ideal that seeks to be all powerful, to be superior, ideal and perfect. His hope is that his fictional all powerful and superior self would be able to protect and save him. Neurosis, and its exaggerated form, psychosis, is an attempt to invent a self that protects one, a self that is in charge and does for one what God does for his son, protect him. But the neurotic and or psychotic self, the all powerful, superior, ideal, perfect self is as unable to protect one or defend one as the plain old ego self. The powerful ego is as unable to predict the future as the powerless ego found in normal persons.

Neurosis and psychosis are private religions; the individual invented the neurotic god and worships it, hoping that if he makes it as powerful as is possible in his imagination that it would protect him. That neurotic self image is a craven cow, a cow made of gold and worshipped to protect one, but it cannot protect one, for as a cow it does not have power.

The mentally ill worships his self concept, self image, the false powerful fantasy self he made to protect him, and despite all his worshipping of a false self he is as powerless as ever, he is not in control.

Simply stated, the ego, the separated self concept is not in control, it is not in charge. We made it to seem in charge of our lives but we are not in charge of our lives.

If we accept that we are not in charge of our lives, are not in control, that the ego is not in charge, the question then is who is in charge?

The atheist says that nobody is in charge. To the atheist, we live in an accidental universe where events just happen in a random manner. An earthquake happens and people die. There is draught and no rain and there is famine and people die. On the other hand, there is rain and good soil and people produce bumper crops and eat and live. It is all a product of accident, chance and randomness, the scientific atheist says.

The agnostic is unable to make up his mind as to whether God exists or not and as to who is in charge and is debilitated by his inability to make up his mind; he vacillates, fence sitting, doing nothing, not as bold as the atheist with made up mind, or the religionist with an equally made up mind in the other direction.

INNER SHIFT: FROM TRUST IN EGO TO TRUST IN GOD

The ego based religionist believes that God created the world and is in charge of it. He does not see how man could have created the stars, moons, mountains and the world. He believes that God created the world and prays to that creator God to protect him. He seems realistic except that the atheist and scientist is his nemesis.

The atheist asks the religionist: how can a loving God have created a world where earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, volcanoes, draughts and diseases of assorted kinds suddenly come and wipe out thousands of people? How can a loving God have created a world where an Adolf Hitler kills millions of people and Joseph Stalin wipes off millions that disagree with his irrational socialist doctrine? It does not seem to add up. A loving God would not seem to have created this world.

In fact, what seems rational is to believe that in so far that we have a need to believe that some one created this world that the world was created by an insane god. Only an insane intelligence would create a world where people live in poverty and are killed by assorted diseases. Only an insane but intelligent force could have made the human body, a marvel of engineering yet a body meant to die and rot. Only an insane god would have made a world where there is suffering and death.

If we must talk of God the only rational god we can talk of, the atheist contends, is an insane god; the creator of this world is an insane god. You know what? That is exactly the truth.

God the son became insane and out of his insanity invented this world. God is one. He extended himself to his Son, who is all of us. The Son of God, all of us resented that God created us and wanted to create ourselves.

But the son cannot be his own father and cannot be his father’s father. To seem to have created ourselves (in Hindu categories), we cast a spell on ourselves, Maya, magic, and seem to have gone to sleep, and in our sleep dream the world of space, time and matter, a world of separation, a world that is the opposite of the world of God.

God created an eternal, permanent and changeless world. The opposite of that world is a transitory, ephemeral, changeable and dying world. We invented our world in opposition to the will of God. God willed union and we desired separation; God willed love and we desired hatred; God willed that we join each other and we wished for separation from each other.

Our world is the work of an insane intelligent force, not the wok of a sane intelligent force. God did not create our world, we did. We created this world. It is, however, not real; it is an illusion, a literal dream.

The things we see in our world are dream figures; they do not exist in the real world that God created. In God’s world, everything is spirit, an idea in the thinking, mind of God and in his sons’ thinking. God is spirit and spirit is permanent, eternal and changeless.

Our world is made of energy and matter and therefore is changeable and must die. Every person born in body must die; there is no exception to that general rule. In spirit we are immortal but in body we are mortal, by our own wish.

THE TRANSCENDENT, THE SON OF GOD AND THE IMMANENT GOD

God is merciful. He knows that we are sleeping and dreaming this world. He enters the world we made as the Holy Spirit. There now seems three Gods in existence: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

God the Father is the transcendent God, he is not in this world. He is spirit. God the Son is us, all of us collectively as the one son of God.

When God the Son seemed to have separated from God the Father and invented this world, God the Father entered his Son’s dream world as God the Holy Spirit.

Only Spirit is real. Spirit does think. Spirit has mind. Thus, in our thinking, minds are God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

In addition, in our minds is the ego self, the self we made to replace God the Son. Where God the son is, where Christ is, where Buddha is, where atman is, is now the ego, the sleeping Son of God.

Our true identity is the Son of God. Our true mind is the mind of the Son of God, Christ’s mind. But in sleep and dream, we invented a different self, the ego self, and a different mind, ego thinking. On earth we are egos and think in ego terms.

The ego is the separated self who seeks to create himself, create God and create other people.

The ego does not exist independent of the son of God. The Son of God invented the ego self and ego mind and identify with it. Thus, on earth we see ourselves as separated selves living in body. Body gives us a sense of boundary from other people. We think through the separated ego self.

You are reading this material with your ego mind, for I am writing it with my ego mind. In heaven there is no ego mind and there is no writing and reading.

When we invented the ego self and ego mind and identified with it, God created the Holy Spirit and placed him where we placed the ego self and ego mind. Thus, in our minds are now two selves and two minds, two modes of thinking: the ego and the Holy Spirit. If you like, the Holy Spirit is our right self and right mind, and the ego is our left self and left mind.

On earth we think with the ego mind, but if we choose, we can think with the mind of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit’s thinking takes us back to God; the Holy Spirit is the link to God, a bridge between earth and heaven, a communication devise between the ego and Christ, the sleeping son of God and his father.

On earth we trust our ego thinking, minds. We think with our ego minds. We see ourselves as the egos. In the ego we see ourselves as in charge of our lives, and we see other people as separated from us. In ego we live in a world of space, time and matter.

When we turn inwards and recognize that there is another mode of thinking and living while we are still in this world and turn to it, turn to the Holy Spirit’s mode of thinking and living, we have made an inner shift in perception. We are still in the perceptual world, in this world; we still see other people and live in space, time and matter. But now we remember that in reality there is no space, time and matter and that other people are parts of us.

In truth, we are literally unified with God and other people. In heaven there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object. In God all share the self of God and share the thinking, mind of God. This is literal not figurative.

When there is an inner shift in perception, we recognize that the seeming other people we see in our world are parts of our one shared self and one shared mind. We think with other people, as they think with us; all thinks through our joined mind.

The person who attacked you, who did a bad thing to you, was thinking with your mind and, as such, attacked you with your permission. He is him yet is you. What he did he did do and yet you did it. What I did I do yet you did it.

In America a white racist discriminates against a black man because he thinks that he is separated from a black man; he sees space, time and matter between them. This is the illusion of the world, the belief that other people are separated from one and, as such, and that what we do to others we did not do to ourselves.

In truth we all share one self and one mind and what we did to others we did to our selves, literally. The racist discriminates against a black person. This means that the black person has discriminated against himself.

When the discriminated against black person attacks and destroys the white racists world, as will eventually happen, this means that the white racist has destroyed his world.

Let us not be too abstract, let us bring the discourse to the personal level. The racist who denied me jobs is me. I denied me jobs through the racist. I did to me what the racist did to me.

Whatever I choose to do to the racist, in retaliation for his discrimination against me, the racist did to himself. The racist and I share the same self, the Son of God, the Christ self, albeit in sleeping and seeming separated forms.

If the person who attacked me, who discriminated against me is me, what should I do to him? If I were rational, I would forgive him. If I were irrational, I would counter attack him, and since he is me, to attack me some more, through his defensive attack on me.

In forgiveness one sees the other person as ones self and chooses to overlook what he did that seems evil to one. One loves the forgiven person and models love for him.

On earth, forgiveness is the true meaning of love. If one truly loves the attacker; if I, as a black person, forgive the white racist who discriminates against me, I have forgiven myself my own evils towards other children of God.

In forgiving others I forgive myself. In forgiving myself/other people, I overlook the world of egos, the world of separation, space and time. When I forgive the egos world, overlook the world we made in insanity, I am able to see the world created by God.

Forgiveness brings me to the gate of heaven, to the world created by God. Forgiveness gives me peace and happiness; forgiveness also gives peace and happiness to those I forgive.

The person who does you evil expects you to return his evil and must live in fear of your counter evil, hence does not know peace and happiness. When you forgive him you reduce his defensiveness hence gives him some peace and happiness.

Americans, for example, live in total fear; they are like mad men, always preparing for war but always living in fear, they jail the evil doers in their society and like all jailers must live in jail with those they jailed. To be an American is to be the quintessential egotist. In America, the ego reigns supreme. Here, people trust on their egos to protect them.

The ego sees itself as fragile and in need of protection. The ego feels grievance and seeks vengeance. It expects other people to attack and hurt it and attacks and hurts other people in self defense. It believes that its attackers ought to be punished; it holds grievances and seeks revenge.

Everywhere, the American judicial system, an ego based justice system, tries and punishes evil persons and puts them in jails.

Americans set up their government: judges, courts, police, jails military etc to act on their behalf, to be their surrogate ego seeking vengeance and punishing their enemies.

America is the ego based civilization per excellence. It knows nothing of God, though Americans talk too much about God.

The death of America will be the death of the ego based civilization. After her fall, momentarily, however, there will be another ego based civilization, the Chinese civilization. That civilization will not last more than a century before it falls.

One does not need to consciously do anything to bring about the end America’s ego reign. America has her rendezvous with destiny. She must do what she is fated to do and like all other empires based on the ego, hence slavery and oppression, will disappear into the garbage dump of history. She must end for a Christ based civilization to finally dawn on earth.

Rome, Russia etc were all once great civilizations but are no more, so will America. Like Rome, America began as a slave society and continues to the present as a discriminatory society. When she has exhausted her fate, when the ego has exhausted her reign, in traditional Christian categories, when Satan (the ego is called Satan by Christians) has exhausted her appointed time, she would be replaced by a different type of society. The end of Satan’s reign will mark the beginning of Christ’s reign on earth. The end of the reign of the ego, the reign of hatred, is the beginning of the kingdom of God on earth, the reign of the will of God, which is love, on earth.

One needs do nothing for Christ replacement civilization will raise on its own accord. In so far that one needs to do something, it is to remove the obstacles to it. Love is everywhere but we mask it with hatred; when we stop hating each other we see that we always live in the presence of love. We live in love and dream that we live in hatred; we live in unified state and dream that we live in separation.

The replacement civilization is led by the Holy Spirit and Christ; it is a Christ based civilization, what Christians call a New Israel, a New Jerusalem, a world led by Jesus Christ.

In this context, Jesus Christ is not a person, but is a metaphor for love and forgiveness, a world based on love, forgiveness and human brotherliness.

(China and Asia will be the dominate power by the end of the twenty first century. In the twenty second century, Africa will emerge from the shadows and begin to contend for power. By the end of that century, all regional dominations will end and the world turns to Christ based civilization, one based on love and forgiveness.)

For our present purposes, when there is an inner shift in perception, one recognizes that one is one with the seeming other person, one with the person who seems to have attacked and hurt ones body and ego self. One forgives and loves that person. One loves the entire world.

Forgiveness and love makes one experience ones oneness with the entire world. When one constantly loves and forgives the world, one experiences what Helen Schucman called Holy Instant, what traditional Christianity calls mystical union with God and all creation; in it, one knows that God and his creation are one.

Inner shift in perception leads one to trust in God’s Holy Spirit to guide one; one now has faith in God to protect one. Even though God did not create this world, through his Holy Spirit he protects his children in the danger prone world they made.

If one has total faith in God to protect one, that is, if one relinquishes ones trust in the ego to protect one, one becomes peaceful and happy. The gifts of God are peace and happiness.

I DREAM OF JESUS CHRIST

A few years ago, I was totally immersed in studying Hinduism. At some point, I believe that I had understood it. However, I was not comfortable with its Indian language and was struggling for a way to replace it with the Christian language of my upbringing.

Where Hinduism talks about Brahman, I talk about God; where it talks about Atman, the part of Brahman, I talk about Christ, the Son of God, where it talks about self realization; I talk about oneness with God in Mystical union (see Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism and William James, Varieties of Religious experience). I, more or less, translated Hindu philosophy into Christian categories.

At some point, I had a chat with a chap and explained to him my understanding of God. Upon hearing me talk, he told me that some one had already done what I was struggling to do: put Hinduism into Christological categories, that Helen Schucman wrote a book called A Course in Miracles, in which she did what I was trying to do. He urged me to read that book.

I bought that book and tried reading it. The language was foreboding. It was written in Shakespearean verse. I am not used to reading verse poems. I am used to reading prose. I could not really get into the book. Moreover, the ideas in the book seemed convoluted, gabbled gook and I threw it away.

In fact, I was unkind to its writer. I concluded that Helen Schucman must have been a neurotic of a dissociative type; a multiple personality that dissociated from her true self and identified with an alter ego she called Jesus Christ, and from what seemed his perspective wrote her book.

I did not believe in channeling and, in fact, did not care for channeled materials. I am at home in the world of ego reasoning; it does not help one much to tell me that something is written by God; what one tells me must be self evidently true for me to pay attention to it.

I threw A Course in Miracles away and continued with my life. Then I separated from my wife, moved out of our house, and to save money, moved into a rooming house. In the house was an old high school mathematics and music teacher who, apparently, was divorced and had moved out of his house. He became a friend of mine. We talked about all sorts of subjects.

We shared the same kitchen and dinning room. One evening, I saw him reading A Course in miracles. I told him that I had tried to read that book but could not understand it. He said that that is the case with most people, and for the next few days, undertook to explain the thesis of the book to me.

Subsequently, I happened to be at a bookstore and saw that book, again. On the impulse, I bought it, and, this time, actually read it from page one to the last page. I even read the Workbook and Manual for teachers. I did not read it as a follower, but as one who wanted to understand what it is all about, that is, I read it with critical eyes.

The book contained a strange philosophy, a philosophy that stood our normal way of looking at our world on its head.

Somehow, I felt that the book contained the truth. But out of nowhere I became seized by anger at Jesus. I wanted to know why he wrote the book in such convoluted language that very few persons could understand. I have a doctorate degree and still I could not understand the book. How in the world does he expect the average person with only high school education to understand his book?

I wondered why he did not write it in simple prose, say, like Ernest Hemmingway’s, so that simple folks could read and understand it without the help of those purporting to help them understand it. Already, a veritable cottage industry has arisen purporting to interpret the book for the masses, and each claiming to teach its true meaning. It seemed to me that given the religious wars we had in the past, all due to different interpretations of what Jesus allegedly taught that the old boy ought to have spared us another headache by presenting his ideas in a readable book?

For weeks, I kept on being angry at Jesus for returning to the world and creating confusion with this confusing book. I was in fact so furious at the man that I wished to get my hands around his neck and strangle him. I vaguely remembered my anger at him in the past, too. I have always identified with Thomas the apostle and somehow see myself as him in this life time. I have always been argumentative and doubting of whatever is said to be the truth.

One evening, around 6 PM, I sat in front of my computer and tried to write down my issues with the boy, Jesus. Why am I so furious at the chap, I asked myself, why not just let the matter drop? I did not even know for sure whether he existed or not. For all I know he could be a clever story propagated by the Jews to deceive the world. Didn’t racists claim that the elders of Zion are out to control the rest of the world and cleverly scheme to control our minds? Couldn’t Christianity be part of the plot by the elders of Zion to control us gentiles?

It was Seattle during the summer. At 6PM the sun was still up. I could see through my window that the sun was up outside my room. However, suddenly my room became dark, I mean pitch black. I got up from my desk to see what was going on. I looked outside the window but everywhere seemed dark, dark at 6PM in July Seattle, that is strange! I tried to moving towards the door, to go outside, to find out what is going on.

I was standing in the middle of the room when suddenly I found myself at Venice, California beach. I was gamboling with my five year old son. I carried him on my back and was running along the shores, a sandy beech. We were having fun when suddenly my attention was attracted by a man sitting by a beech chair with a book on a table. He had a beech umbrella on over his head. What caught my attention was his hue. He was as white as snow. You could look through him. He wore the traditional Catholic priest’s white robes. He looked like Pope John Paul. (I liked John Paul so much that I actually went to Rome and tried to get a glimpse of him.)

The man before me seemed amazing so that I went towards him to find out who he is.

As I got closer, I immediately knew who I was looking at; I was looking at the old boy himself, Jesus Christ. My rage at the old boy returned and overwhelmed me. I was so furious at him that I wanted to kill him.

Suddenly my attention was caught by the book the old boy was reading; it was A Course in Miracles. That book made me even angrier at the man. I stood there wanting to tell him what a fool he is writing a confusing book etc. But I decided to be polite and not use the insulting language that came to my mind. I tried to make conversation with the old boy. (Folks out there tend to fear and respect Jesus, but I saw him as a peer, not as my master, just a friend.)

I said: good book, eh? The man ignored me. My God, I do not like to be ignored, certainly not by any body that looks white. Whites have ignored blacks for too long and if a white man dared ignore me I tend to be furious. I was enraged all over again that the man ignored me. In my mind, I was asking: who the hell does this Jewish boy think that he is ignoring an Igbo man? (The Igbos, generally, fancy themselves superior to all other people, white or black, and I share their neurosis.)

I tried to be civil and professional and tried another tactic. I said: I have read that book; it is difficult to understand what it is trying to say. The man still ignored me. He kept reading that book and ignored me. My God, my anger could no longer be contained and I decided to leave him. I decided that I had had enough and in a huff took the first step to leave him.

At that point, the man looked up from the book and said: “there are many books, many paths to God. You are meant to write your own book on God. Go write it and do not disturb your peace talking about this book. Some persons, including your self, will find some usefulness from this book, others will not. It is for you to take from it what you can and go write your own book. Some persons would find some utility in your own book.

After his brief comments, the old boy disappeared and the dream ended. My room was again bathed in sun light and I could see again.

At no point during this dream was I sleeping. I merely shifted awareness, from my room to the beach, and to the ensuing interaction with the big boy himself.

Many folks would consider the dream a vision? What is a vision? Let us not delay ourselves debating semantics. Dream or vision, what difference does it make?

I went back to my computer and typed the dream and tried to understand what it meant. I called a few friends and told them about the dream and each gave me his or her interpretation of the meaning of the dream. I had many other dreams with Jesus Christ in them. However, we need not go there; one dream is enough for us.

What does the dream mean?

Obviously, it is my thinking, aka mind that produced the dream/vision. Obviously, my experience as a Catholic boy made it possible for my mind to produce Jesus in the like of a Catholic priest. If I had been socialized a Baptist, I probably would have had a different image of Jesus Christ and produced him differently in my dream. Simply stated, it was my thinking/mind that produced the dream.

The Jesus that I saw was not outside me; it was produced by my mind. I made the image of Jesus that my mind could accept, one clad like my beloved Pope John Paul the 11.

Does this mean that the whole dream is a fiction and of no relevance? Not quite so simple. All dreams and visions are metaphors produced by the individual’s mind to teach him a lesson.

At the beginning of this essay, I narrated a dream that occurred when I was four years old. That dream was a metaphor of my dependent personality. I tended to want external others to rescue me. The dream told me that no external others would rescue me, no matter how hard I cried. The objective of the dream is for me to become independent and look inside me for rescue. Since objectively, my ego is weak and powerless, looking inside me does not mean trusting in me to rescue me, but trusting the God inside me, the Holy Spirit to rescue me.

The Jesus dream was obviously produced by my mind, my thinking. We think in concepts and images; my thinking produced the dream in images. The dream’s meaning is for me; it is designed to teach me a lesson.

In the dream, my mind produced a Jesus that my upbringing as a Catholic could accept. The symbolism of the dream is that my mind told me not to waste my time debating the merit or lack of it of A Course in Miracles, but to take from it what seems to make sense to me and go write my own book on the nature of reality. The dream further tells me that not all persons would accept my interpretation of reality, just as not all persons accept the Course.

The dream, in effect, is my mind, telling me to go find my own path to God and take from the Course what is useful, just as I had taken from Hinduism and Buddhism without getting stock in them.

Does that mean that Jesus does not exist apart from my dream? Does that mean that our minds make him up? Is he a dream figure and not a reality?

The answer is yes and no. There was a man called Jesus who lived two thousand years ago in Palestine. He was an ego like all of us. In the course of his living on earth, he recognized that he is one with all of us and one with God. He jettisoned his hitherto identification with the ego and identified with the Christ.

In our world, God and his son, Christ, is represented by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit teaches love and forgiveness. Jesus, the Jewish rabbi, accepted the gospel of the Holy Spirit and taught it. He became a teacher of God, a teacher of salvation.

The Jews did not like Jesus’ teaching of forgiveness and love. They wanted to continue teaching crime and punishment. Like Americans, Jews wanted to see criminals as apart from them, arrest, try and punish them. They wanted Moses’ law of an eye for an eye to prevail in their world. They did not want to leave the laws of Moses, the laws of the ego, the laws of grievances and vengeance and embrace the laws of Christ, the laws of God, the laws of forgiveness and love.

The Jews, moreover, did not like the fact that Jesus saw himself as one with God. They say his identification with God as blasphemy, as an attack on their ego based God, the God of the Old Testament that punished evil doers.

Recall the parable of the adulterous woman. In it, Jesus asked people to forgive sinners rather than punish them. Recall the parable of the man going to worship God and remembered that a neighbor had wronged him. Jesus said that he must first go home to forgive his neighbor before he worshipped, prayed to God. Recall the only prayer Jesus taught his apostles, the Lord’s Prayer. He asked them to forgive one another before they expect God to forgive them. Finally, Jesus was crucified and he forgave those who crucified him.

Clearly, Jesus taught his followers to forgive one another. Forgive your enemy; present the other cheek to be slapped when one is slapped. As he sees it, God has already forgiven us; God has already given us all that we pray for, but to receive the answers to our prayers, we must first forgive one another.

Forgiveness and love is the condition for receiving the gifts of God. (The gifts of God are peace and happiness.)

Jesus taught forgiveness, it is as simple as that. What is salvation? To be saved is to forgive the world, other people and ones self. To forgive is to overlook what is done in the world as if it were done in a dream.

Jesus overlooked the world of crimes and saw the face of Christ, innocence, guiltlessness and sinlessness in all his brothers. He teaches us to forgive one another, so as to see the face of Christ, innocence, in each other.

God’s holy Son is innocent; he has not done the evils we see him do on earth; he did those evils in a dream setting and what is done in a dream has not been done.

The racist discriminated against a black person in a dream and had not done so in reality; therefore, he is still as God created him, innocent.

Jesus did live in flesh. Because he taught a philosophy that is contrary to the philosophy that maintains this world…grievance and punishment maintains this world… the world wishing to keep its pathways, arrested and crucified him. Jesus was, in fact, killed and resurrected from death. His body was crucified but his spirit is eternal and could not be destroyed.

Subsequent to his death, Jesus resurrected from death and appeared in his physical body and showed himself to his disciples. He even ate food with them. Then he got tired of that childish ego-body game, and for a while lived only in Holy Spirit-light body, what Orientals call astral body…the body he was in my dream, a body of pure light form…you could walk through that body.

All of us have light bodies, if you try very hard, meditate, you would see yourself in a light body, a body that looks like your present body, but one made of pure light particles, a body made of photons and having no solidly. When we invented our present bodies, the Holy Spirit reinvented our bodies for us. Each of us has a light body. This is the body those who have had near death experiences claim to see. It is not a permanent body, for it is still in matter, though it is in the subtlest form of matter, particles. Whatever is made of matter must decompose. The light body is as temporary as our present dense body. Ultimately, we must all return to formless, spirit self, the self God created us as.

Jesus eventually got tired of playing ego games and returned to formless spirit. He seemed to have disappeared from the world. But he is now in our thinking, our minds, our Spirit. He is part of the Holy Spirit. He is in our right minds; he is the symbolic Christ.

If you insist on seeing Jesus in form, you will see him, in a manner that your experience can accept. My experience can accept him as the Catholic Pope and he appeared as the pope to me. (The pope is the Catholics idea of a holy man.)

The real Jesus, however, is not in flesh or light body, he is one with God. He has reclaimed his true self, the holy son of God, who is one with his father. Nevertheless, if you ask for him, he will appear to you in flesh. Look at the man in front of you, he is metaphorically Jesus. Love him, if you want to love Jesus. If he attacks you, Jesus has attacked you, with the hope that you would forgive him, and in forgiving him forgive yourself, and in doing so come to the gate of heaven and from their jettison the ego altogether and enter heaven, and experience oneness with God and all his creation.

For our present purposes, what I had was a dream, and if you insist, a vision. It was symbolic and meant to teach me a lesson. All dreams and visions are personalized. Each is meant to teach the dreamer, visionary, a lesson. The lesson the dream taught me is only for me. But it is also for you, for in the final analysis, you are like me.

In the here and now world, you will have different dreams and different visions to be taught the lessons you need to learn in your world of separation, your dream that the unified son of God is in many places.

Why did I narrate this dream? Was it to make me seem more spiritually advanced than you, to seem elevated than you? In eternity, we are perfectly the same and equal. It is the wish that one be superior to other people that produced this world of superiority and inferiority.

I am your equal in God. We are equal in God and eternity. But in time, on earth, we are at different places on our journey back to God. You are where you are and I am where I am.

You have asked me to return to God, to be awakened in the light that is our nature. I am part of your real self. You asked me to be an awakened figure in your dream of separation, so as to show you that separation is not real.

I am doing exactly what you asked me to do and what I want to do. I am a figure of light in your dream of the opposite of light, the dream of darkness.

I am symbolic of the Holy Spirit reminding you of your true self, the Christ. I am doing the function you asked me to do for you, a function I willingly undertook to perform. I am your brother Thomas, who has come to help you go from doubt to faith in the truth. (You must first have faith in the unseen truth of oneness, love and forgive all people, before you can experience oneness.)

WHAT IS SALVATION?

To be saved is to forgive and love all people. When we forgive and love all people, we transcend the false selves we currently identify with, the separated selves housed in bodies. When we truly forgive and love all people we overcome the world, as Jesus did. We return to the awareness of our real self, the self that is as God created it, the unified spirit self, aka the Christ self, the Atman, the Buddha. Forgiveness and love are the only means for attaining salvation; there are no other means for doing so.

WHERE IS SALVATION TO COME FROM?

Salvation comes from inside one. When we invented this world, God immediately reinvented it through his Holy Spirit. Our world has already been transformed, remade in the image of Christ. Each of us made an ego self; the Holy Spirit has remade that self in light form. The Holy Spirit has remade our world in light forms. The light world is as real as our dense world is real.

If we forgive and love all people, we momentarily experience the world remade by the Holy Spirit. It is still like our world, it is still in forms. In it, one still sees people but in light forms. It is a world of love, peace and joy. But in as much as it is in form, it is a false world. It is an illusory world pretty much as illusory as our world is an illusory world. But it is an illusion that approximates the truth.

Our truth is love; any world that loves approximates our truth and our real home. The world remade for us by the Holy Spirit has been called by many names, including New Israel, New Jerusalem, New world, new man, not fleshy man, happy dream, real world, gate of haven’t. Call it what you like, like our world, it has no name. But we must all get to that world, a borderland between our world and heaven.

When we all get to that loving world, brought there by forgiveness, we tire of being in forms, gross or light forms, and voluntarily choose to relinquish all forms and return to formlessness.

We, the children of God, disappear into God and he disappears into us, each not to be lost but to be found and to be expanded. In heaven, in the state of oneness are still many us, infinite selves, but there we all know that we are part of each other and are in each other and in God, and God is in us. The world ends and we resume the awareness of our oneness with our creator.

CONCLUSION

Salvation is inside us; it is the Holy Spirit, who is inside us, that saves us. The Holy Spirit is not a person; it is a pattern of thinking and behaving, a pattern that sees all people as part of ones self. The Holy Spirit teaches that wee must forgive and love one another. When we see no differences betwe

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November 14, 2005

Man: The Thinker

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- Man is a thinker; he is not his thoughts; he can change his thoughts but cannot make himself atop thinking; all he can do is think different thoughts. If man is not his thoughts, who is he? Matter that produced thinking or spirit that thinks through matter?

I think, therefore, I am (a thinker). Clearly human beings do think. They are thinkers. They think in concepts and images.

Upon birth on earth, it seems that their first order of business is to think out an idea of who they think that they are. Each human child comes up with a self concept, an idea of who he thinks that he is; he also comes up with ideas, concepts of who he thinks that other people are and what things in the world are. He then translates his concepts into images. He has a self concept and translates that to a self image, concepts and images of other people and the world he lives in. Human beings are concept and image makers.

All human beings think in a certain pattern, the human pattern of thinking. Within this overall pattern of thinking, each of them has his own pattern of thinking, a pattern of thinking that characterizes his personality.

The individual invents a self concept. That self concept is made by him, building on his childhood experiences and his inherited biological constitution. Subsequently, the individual sees himself as the self concept and self image he invented and strives to defend it as if it is who he, in fact, is.

One defends ones self concept and ones self image with the various ego defense mechanisms that Psychoanalysts talk about.

If other people validate ones self concept, self image, one feels (temporarily) at ease, but if they do not confirm it, one feels upset. One feels angry at those who do not recognize ones self image as who one is. Ones life is devoted to getting other people to colluding with one to accept the false self one made for one; and one gets along with people to the extent that they affirm ones self concept, self image and avoids them to the extent that they refuse to validate ones cherished self concept and self image.

The self concept and self image is an idol, a craven image one made and one is proud of it and defends it as if it is who one, in fact, is. One forgets that one is the concept and image maker and not the concept and image itself.

Ones true identity is as a part of God; man is the Son of God (God being the ultimate thinker). Human beings real self is the Christ, the holy son of God; they are unified with God and all God’s creation. There is no separation between the Son of God and his father; no separation between one son of God and another. The Son of God is in his father and his father is in him. Where you see the Son of God you see God, for God is not apart from his Son and his Son is not apart from Him. Where God ends and his Son begin is no where. There is no space and gap between God and his Son, no space and gap between one son of God and another, for they are all in each other. There is no you and I in God, no subject and object, no seer and seen in God, for all creation is one with its creator.

If one recognizes that one is the thinker, that the thinker is not his thoughts and stops defending ones thoughts, concepts and images, one is not likely to feel emotional upsets like fear (of loosing ones self concept, image) anger (at those who do not recognize ones self concept, image), depressed (from not having the self concept succeed in life), paranoid (from not becoming the all important self the self concept and image ones wants to become).

The individual is like an artist and creates concepts and images but the artist is not his creation, not his work. (By the same token, God created us and is not us; God is the ultimate thinker/artist; he is not his creations, he has a self that is not his creations self, though they are like him and do create, do think like he does; his creation share his creative self but are not him).

A good artist identifies with his creations and does defend them when others attack them; but a mature artist understands that he is not his art work and does not defend his creations. A mature artist knows that he creates with matter and that matter: rocks, stone, canvas, paint etc must wear down and disappear into nature. All things composed of matter must decay, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, elements to elements, atoms to atoms and particles to particles. We created our bodies, matter, and identify with them, but eventually our bodies must die, decompose, and return to the particles, atoms and elements that they are made of.

When one does not defend ones self concept and self image, ones idol, ones craven self image, one tends to be calm, peaceful and happy.

In every situation one finds ones self in, one must, therefore, ask: am I my self concept, am I my self image, am I my personality? The answer is no. Therefore, one must not look at attacks on ones self concepts/images as attack on ones real self.

If you know and accept this fact, you would be calm and peaceful as the world attacks your self concept and personality; you would know that people who attack your self concept/image are not attacking your real self.

Your real self is the thinker, who is not his thinking. The thinker is Spirit. In the here and now, the thinker, spirit, appears to live in body and creates with body, matter, but he is not the material with which he creates. You are not your body; you, as part of collective spirit, invented matter, body, as a means of fashioning self concepts and self images to live in the temporal universe with.

Alfred Adler (see his The Neurotic Constitution) talked about the neurotic inventing/creating a false, superior self concept and acting as if he is that fiction of his creation and defending it. Karen Horney (see her Neurosis and Human Growth) talked about the neurotic inventing/creating an ideal self concept and desiring to become it and feeling anxious to the extent that he does not approximate it. Helen Schucman (see her A Course in Miracles) talked about the neurotic inventing/creating a false special ego self and defending that false self. The Founders of Unity Church, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, in the 1880s, talked about how each of us is a thinker and uses his thinking to construct his world, and how what the person thinks materializes in his world: how ones thinking is responsible for what happens to one. Buddha, twenty five hundred years ago, talked about people being different from their thoughts, how the human personality, a thought that the individual thinks that he is and defends as if it is in fact who he is, is not who he is, and how the individual could tune out his ego conceptual thinking and become silent; in meditation, the individual negates all conceptual thinking, negates his self concept and self image and negates his ego personality and in the ensuing emptied mind, void, silence experience his real self, what he called nirvana, unified life that has no separated selves, a world of total harmony, hence a world of peace and joy.

All these people are essentially saying the same thing: that we are thinkers and that our thinking is responsible for the world we seem to live in and that we are not our thinking, hence not the effects we have produced, not the world we see around us.

SELF ANALYSIS

On a personal note, I invented a big self concept/big self image. I invented a superior self concept/image. Deep down, I consider myself superior to other people.

Since I was a child, if I do not get my way, I feel angry. For example, I tend to feel angry if others keep me waiting on line, say if a teller at a bank is taking long to attend to me. It is like they are keeping a king, me, waiting; a king that ought to be served right away.

I do not care who one is, a judge, a president of a superpower country, if he does not do what I want, I feel outraged and ask who the hell he thinks that he is. That is to say that deep down one feels superior to the allegedly most powerful person on earth. In fact, I do not even think that the president of the sole superpower is worthy of my attention.

Alfred Adler would say that I am a neurotic and pursue a superior self and want to become my desired superior self concept/self image. He would say that my real self is the same and equal with all other selves but that, for biological and social deficit reasons, I perceived that real self as inferior, hated and rejected it and invented a compensatory fictional superior self and identified with that imaginary self. Karen Horney would say that I hated my real self and posited an alternative ideal-perfect self and want to become the false ideal self and want other people to see me as that fictional self and feel anxious when I am not that false ideal, perfect self. Helen Schucman (A Course in Miracles) would see me as inventing a special separated ego self, a self that sees itself as self created and as the creator of other people and the creator of God, a grandiose and deluded self and want other people to see me as I want to see me.

Of course, other people are not obligated to see me as I see me. They see me as just another human being and treat me as such. I feel angry at them for treating me as an ordinary self.

My grandiose and delusional self concept and self image is not validated and affirmed by other people, as they should not, for if they did they would collude with me and make me believe that I am a false self, hence an insane self.

Desiring to be my ideal self, I avoid other people. In social avoidance, in social withdrawal, in isolation I retain my grandiose self concept, self image. In separation, I fancy myself superior to other people.

(I have taken most recognized intelligence and personality tests; most of them indicate that I have the type of personality I already know that I have: avoidant personality, shyness, with passive aggressive features. I wish that most people would take these tests and know who they are. Most people have problematic personalities but do not know it. If only they could find out whom they are, and seek therapy, the world would be a better place. If I had a choice in the matter, I would have all adults take the MMPI and WAIS and all children take WISC and Stanford Binnet. This would improve their self knowledge and, ultimately, as Harold Laswell observed, help them improve their social behaviors; more importantly, they would stop actualizing their personal psychopathologies in the political arena.)

I particularly fancy myself superior to white folks. For some reasons, I have always considered white folks like children and if any of them, I do not care what his social position is, dared oppose me, I feel outraged and angry, and want him punished, even killed. As it were, I say: how dare an inferior white person, a morally bankrupt animal, a slaver, oppose me?

Helen Schucman would say that I feel superior to God himself and want God to obey me. I have never found it easy to worship God. Even as a child, I did not like praying to God. I did not like to kneel down before God, as my parents asked me to do. In my mind was the thought, who the hell is this god guy that I am supposed to worship, he ought to be the one worshipping me.

Schucman would say that my behavior is the nature of the self concept; that the self concept was invented by the Son of God in his vain attempt to create himself, create God and create his brothers, that it is a replacement self, a self we invented to substitute for our real self, the son of God created by God.

The son of God, as God created him, is the same and equal to all selves; the self concept is designed to make one seem superior to other people and superior to God. The self concept, the ego, the idol, the craven idol, the antichrist, the unholy self must be let go for one to experience ones real self, the unified self, the holy self who is one with his creator and all his brothers. The real self is inside one, not out side one; when one identifies with the real self, unified self, feels equal with all, and let’s go of the false superior wishing self, one feels peace and happiness.

HAVING A SPECIAL SEPARATED SELF AND FAILURE IN SOCIETY

According to both Alfred Adler and Karen Horney, if a person pursues a superior, ideal self, that is, is a neurotic, he is likely to fail in extant society. Extant society is meant for normal persons.

The normal person does not see himself as better than other people. As such, he is able to get along with other people and is able to operate within groups. He can work in normal work organizations, where there are bosses and servants. He can take marching orders and directions from his school teachers and work bosses. He can be in the military and is told what to do, including to go kill and he does as told. The normal person is meant to succeed in organized society.

The neurotic invented and posited an ideal, superior self and wants to attain it. He, therefore, resents other people telling him what to do. He would like to be the boss at all times. If a child, at home, his big self resents his parents telling him what to do. At school, his big self resents teachers telling him what to do and he often drops out of school because he is in power struggle with teachers and do not want to listen to them. He is in constant power struggle with his parents and elders and does not want them to tell him what to do.

(These days, these children are called oppositional defiant disordered children, the stubborn, willful and unruly child.)

On the job he is in power struggle with his bosses and resents them telling him what to do. He may actively tell the bosses to go get lost and quite his jobs, or he may withdraw from them socially and keep to himself, tuning them out and not really listening to them. In social isolation, he manages to maintain his sense of superiority and idealism.

Since the power seeking person is perceived as insubordinate by his bosses, he may be fired from his job, not because he does not know how to do the job but because of his perceived oppositionality, his attitude problems.

Thus, generally, the neurotic fails at interpersonal relationships, for he tends to avoid people, to prevent them from telling him what to do; he avoids people to go retain his grandiose self concept; he fails at school and he fails at work for similar reasons.

Secular psychologists like Adler and Horney recommend that the neurotic and psychotic (who has even a more grandiose, deluded self concept) shrink his self concept to normal proportions. That is why these psychologists are called shrinks; they shrink folk’s swollen self concepts and self images down to normal proportions, so that they can be able to operate in our hierarchical world.

Normal secular therapists do not aim at eliminating the self concept and self image, but want to change it, to shrink it to normal proportions, so that one is better fitted to live in a command oriented society. Our society is organized along the military command model, with commanders and commanded. In our world, every person is told what to do by every person else. If you are going to make it in our world, be it in interpersonal relationships, school and work, you must have a less swollen ego self, you must be normal in your ego structure.

Spiritual psychologists like Helen Schucman, on the other hand, think that to have a self concept and self image of any kind is to have a problem. While acknowledging the problems of exaggerated self concepts and the need to reduce them to normal proportions, they teach that even normal egos must be let go. The self concept and self image itself is the problem. As long as one has a self concept and self image, one has defined ones self by ones self; one has attempted to create ones self and rejected the self God created one as.

The self concept and self image is always a separated self, a self that adapts to the separated world of space, time and matter and is, therefore, ip so facto, a false self. The self we know ourselves as, in this world, normal, neurotic or psychotic, is a replacement self, a substitute self we made to mask the real self that God created us as.

The self God created us as is a holy self, a self unified with him and with all other selves as one self.

It is obvious that the self in matter, in body, cannot unify with other selves, for matter is meant to divide and separate people. Only the spiritual, the same and equal self can unify. Our real self is spirit, unified spirit self, which is not the self that we are currently aware of.

Spiritual psychologists say that we have to tune out our current self concept and self image, normal, neurotic and psychotic, to become aware of our real self, the unified spirit self. That is what meditation is meant to accomplish. In meditation, one consciously rejects the self concept, the self image, and rejects all conceptual selves and imageries; one rejects all concepts and attempts to reach a non-conceptual self; one tries to keep quiet, to silence the chattering of ones ego; one empties ones thinking of all ego based thoughts, becomes a void and in the mind wiped clean of all ego thinking, a new self dawns on one, the self, as God created it, a unified spirit self that is not in body, a self that we cannot explain in ego conceptual categories, for the ego made language and language is an adaptation to the world of separation and division and understands the world of you and I, seen and seer, subject and object.

The world of God is a unified world; language is not necessary in God’s world. The world of God is a non-conceptual and non-perceptual world; it is a knowing world, a world where perception (which exists in our separated world) does not reach.

To reach the world of God, which to spiritual psychologists is to be successful, success as defined by God, one must jettison all self concepts, all self images and all ideas of separated, special self. One must have no self that one made to adapt to this world before one comes to ones God. One must re-embrace the self that God created one as, the unified self, a loving and forgiving self, before one can return to heaven, to the state of union.

You cannot be separated and come to a place of union; you cannot feel special, superior and ideal and come to a place of sameness and equality. God’s kingdom is a place of union, sameness and equality, a place of spirit, not matter.

SCIENCE AND EPIPHENOMENALISM

Is spiritual psychology and its claims true or just escape from empirical reality? According to materialistic science, all we can ascertain is the workings of matter and energy in space and time. Our very thinking seems the products of the configurations of particles, atoms and elements in our brains. Neurons fire in a certain manner and that is all that we can say for sure about thinking. Thinking is an electrical behavior in our brains. Thinking is done through the auspices of light in a biological and chemical medium. Thus thinking/mind is epiphenomenal. This is the view of science. Therefore, science dismisses the teachings of spiritual psychology, religion and even philosophy as having no basis in the empirical world?

If you follow the scientific methodology approach to phenomena, in a strict manner, you will waste your time and energy talking about spiritual psychology. That was my position in the past.

In the present, I derive meaning and purpose from spiritual psychology, aka metaphysics. I am not imposing what makes sense to me on anyone. At any rate, no one will accept what does not yet make sense for him.

When you are ready to embrace spiritual psychology you will do so, but until then, retain your secular psychology, for, as noted, it does help shrink the ego to normal proportion. The ego needs to be shrunk, if one is to live in this world. If your ego is swollen, if you feel superior to other people, as in neurosis and or psychosis, you must live in perpetual anxiety. The superior desiring ego must fear not measuring up to its desired ideal, superior self. The neurotic lives in anxiety disorder. The psychotic appears to have overcome anxiety by denying reality altogether and totally identifying with the false ideal self that he made and is no longer comparing it to reality and seeing its falsity hence feeling anxious.

By all means stick to normal ego secular psychology; up to a point, it is useful. But if it is time for you to transcend the ego self altogether, to let go of all ego self concepts and self images, to close the gap between you and other people, to end separation and specialness and return to the world of unified spirit self, you will find your way to spiritual psychology, aka Hinduism, Buddhism, metaphysical Churches like Unity Church, A Course In Miracles etc.

CONCLUSION

Rene Descartes said: cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore, I am. Whatever he may have meant by that, what is self evident to me is that human beings do think. Human beings are thinkers. They think in concepts and images. We are concept makers and image makers. We make concepts and images for ourselves. The individual makes concepts and images for himself, for other people and for everything in his world.

Having invented self concepts and self images we defend them, as if they are, in fact, who we are. Defense of these inventions of ours seem to make them real in our thinking, minds. We forget that we made the concepts and images that we defend.

The thinker is different from his thoughts; the image maker is different from his images.

We must learn to separate ourselves from the concepts, images, and ideas we made. We must stop defending the conceptual selves we made. When we stop defending the separated, special, superior and ideal selves we made, we feel peaceful and happy and less anxious.

When we give up making self concepts and self images and accept our real selves, unified spirit self, we feel totally peaceful, happy and fearless. When we have no self we made and accept the self the universe created us as, we return to our real self, to union with God and all creation and to bliss.

This ultimate result entails escaping from this world, negating this world of space, time and matter. The middle ground is what secular psychology attains: to keep the self concept and self image we made, but shrink it so that it is not too big and does not cause one tremendous anxiety and lack of peace. To the extent that one has a separated, superior self one lacks peace and one lives in fear.

No separated self means no fear, anxiety, and presence of peace. Less separated special, superior and ideal self means less fear and anxiety, but some presence of anxiety, nevertheless. The individual must choose what he wants, no separated, special self hence total fearlessness and peace, or some refined separated, special self and some disturbance of ones peace?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

Many persons do not reveal their actual selves to other people; they think that they can hide who they are from other persons’ perception. Actually, other people, more or less, do know who we are. We might as well reveal ourselves to others, as I do in my essays. There is nothing to hide from any one. Truth heals all of us. Truth makes us happy. Try to know who you, in fact, are, and if you have personality issues deal with them. The chances are that if you are reading this material you are not insane, for only two percent of the population has mental disorders and those do not read abstract materials, like this essay. (1% of the population, world wide, has schizophrenia, 1% has bipolar affective disorder; those two are considered real mental disorders, with delusional disorder a strong third?)

By and large, most human beings are normal, actually, normal-neurotic, for all of us have a bit of neurosis in us. Each of us believes what is not true as true, such as fancy ourselves better than other people. Mental health means belief in the truth; the truth of our inherent sameness and equality. All God’s children: Hausas, Yorubas, Igbos, every person, man, woman and child are the same and equal.

If you feel superior to other people, if you consider your race or tribe superior to others, you are a neurotic, aka personality disordered, such as paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, narcissistic, histrionic, anti social, borderline, avoidant, possessive compulsive, dependent and passive aggressive and need to heal that mild mental disorder, so that you know and accept the truth, the truth of our oneness, sameness and equality. We are all children of one family, God’s one family.

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Do Nigerian Politicians Inherit Criminal Genes?

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- Politicians, all over the world, tend to be realistic persons. They tend to accept themselves as they are, to accept other people as they are and accept reality as it is. The human self is always imperfect. Realistic persons accept themselves as imperfect human beings and live with that fact.

They are not motivated to change themselves and become perfect. They are not motivated to change other people and make them become perfect. They are not motivated to change reality and make it what it is not, perfect. They deal with imperfect reality as it is.

Generally, politicians tend not to be socially withdrawn, introspective, introverted, and idealistic neurotics; they tend to be socially outgoing extraverted persons.

Appearances would suggest that politicians ought to be persons who work for society’s common good. But appearances are sometimes deceiving. Some politicians tend to have the same characteristics as criminals. Most criminals tend to have narcissistic and or antisocial personal disorders.

Criminals tend to feel special and worthy of other people’s admiration; they tend to think that they deserve getting attention from other people and that they are not obligated to reciprocate and give attention to other people.

Some narcissistic personalities and all antisocial personalities tend to exploit other people. They feel superior to other people and rationalize using other people to achieve their desired superiority goals. They use people to attain their goals and then discard them when they are no longer useful to them. Indeed, they tend to see other people, whom they perceive as inferior to them, as existing to serve them. They tend to have a sense of entitlement, and feel that they are entitled to the good things of life and that other people and society exist to give them those things they are entitled to by virtue of being who they are, special. Thus a narcissistic politician may believe that he is unique and ought to prove it by going to war and conquer new lands for his people. He may justify sending young solders (18-38 olds, those who do the actual fighting and dying at wars) to war with the notion that they are fighting a noble course; nobility as he, of course, defines it, not as it is, in fact. Gullible young persons die so that the narcissistic politician may attain his desired fame and glory and write his name in history books as an outstanding politician. (So far in human history, great leaders tend to be those who won great wars, so narcissistic leaders who aspire after greatness often indulge in unnecessary wars.)

The desire for fame and glory is narcissistic; using other people to achieve ones desired fame and glory is antisocial.

Nigerian politicians carry the universal trend for politicians to be somewhat narcissistic and or antisocial in personality structure to excesses. The typical Nigerian politician is totally narcissistic and antisocial. He is totally self centered and thinks that other Nigerians exist to admire him. He feels special and worthy of other people’s admiration. He does not care for other Nigerians; in fact, he does not care for any other human being. He sees other people as existing for him to exploit, to use to achieve his infantile desire for attention and glory. He uses people and discards them when they are no longer useful to him. He thinks only of himself and not the public.

The Nigerian politician is a crook, pure and simple; he is a despicable and contemptible human being. He belongs in the garbage dump. Any one who respects the Nigerian politician is respecting a criminal. Throw these subhuman apes masquerading as human beings into the bonfire and burn them. Their mental, emotional and spiritual ages are below that of the great apes like chimpanzees and gorillas; the later, at least, love their kind and work for them; Nigerian politicians do not work for their people, they exploit their people for their belly and their belly, mercifully, is for worms. To call a Nigerian politician a human being is to insult that term; he is an animal.

Human beings are individually unique. Each of them is different from others. Therefore, one should hesitate in making general statements about them. Be that as it may, I make a general statement about Nigerian politicians. They are thieves. I know that this general statement probably does not apply to all of them, but it applies to too many of them that one might as well consider all of them thieves. Where the necessary exception to every general rule is so negligible one must go with the generalization.

I believe that most Nigerian politicians are narcissistic and or anti social personalities. Furthermore, I now suspect that most Nigerian politicians are born with a tendency towards criminal behavior. I think that they probably inherited thieving genes.

I am not a microbiologist or geneticist; if I were one, I would have undertaken a study to see if stealing is in the genes of Nigerian politicians. Since I cannot perform this research by myself, I am urging geneticists everywhere to undertake the study of the possible genetic etiology of Nigerian politicians’ proclivity to criminal behaviors.

We simply have to find out if these people are born criminals. Such finding will save us a lot of headache. If they are born as criminals then we do not have to worry about them. We simply assume that they are going to steal and then do something in anticipation of their stealing tendencies.

If they are born criminals, either we simply leave them alone, to steal to their hearts’ content and not care for their people, or we build prisons and enact draconian laws and should any of them steal, not waste our times debating putative sociological reasons why they stole, but just clamp them into prisons, lock the doors and throw away the keys.

We should get these criminals locked up in prisons until genetic engineers come up with a way to engineer out the putative criminal genes in them. We do not need to be sentimental with these criminals. We must keep them locked up for their and society’s good. And we should not feed them either; they should feed themselves. We could build prisons in remote areas and have the prisoners work on their own farms, obtain their own food and feed themselves. Society has no business feeding and supporting garbage; refuse ought not to be kept alive, it either dies or finds a way to support itself.

Elsewhere, I described the thieving behaviors of Nigerian politicians and do not need to rehash it here. At any rate, everybody already knows that the term Nigerian politician is synonymous with being a corrupt person, a thief and attention seeker.

Contemporary Nigerian politicians are totally self centered and have no social interests in their behaviors. They exhibit the same characteristics as their forefathers, those who sold their brothers and sisters into slavery and apparently did not feel guilty and remorseful for this criminal activity.

Beginning from around 900 AD, Africans sold their people to Arabs; and from around 1500 AD they sold their people to Europeans. African slave trade, thus, lasted between 900-1900, a period of over one thousand years.

For over one thousand years, Africans sold their people into slavery. They must have developed a culture of selling people and a culture of not caring for their people.

I postulate a thesis that Africans’ one thousand year history of selling each other has led to their development of anti social personality disorders. These people do not love one another; they use one another and, in fact, seem to enjoy causing each other pain. Like sociopaths every where, they seem to have no remorse and guilt feeling when they do wrong; and worse, they seem to enjoy hurting other people.

The Nigerians that I know are depraved creatures. They are fallen so low that only God knows how we are going to transform them into caring and loving human beings.

I think that one thousand years of evil behavior, selling their people into slavery, has led to genetic mutation and selection in Africans. I think that those Africans who survived slavery were largely those with preponderance towards antisocial behaviors.

I will be very frank with you: when I see a Nigerian, the word association that comes to my mind is thief.

I have never seen a more thieving people as Nigerians. How else do you explain their not helping their people, their stealing public money and redirecting it to their personal use, when the income per capita of the average Nigerian is $1 a day? Nigerian thievish politicians roll in millions and billions of stolen dollars while their fellow country men are malnourished and live in abject poverty. These people must have some sort of genetic programming to psychopathic behaviors. We might as well study and understand the genetic roots of these people’s sociopathy.

I have given up trying to understand why Nigerians are always stealing; I have given up trying to explain their unacceptable criminal behavior sociologically. These days, I just assume that these people are born thieves. Their thieving behavior no longer surprises me. What I would like to do is for those with genetic engineering skills to study the genes of Nigerians, indeed all Africans, to see if they are born with a tendency towards criminality.

Sociological and psychological explanations of why Nigerians do the incredible things they do, do not seem to cut it with any rational person any more. These people simply seem to exist only to care for themselves; to steal as much money as they could from the public treasury. They could care less for their fellow country men and women. If that is the case, then let us not bother trying to understand why they are spiritually and psychologically stunted and warped, let us understand the biological genesis of their malady and treat them medically, if it is possible to do so.

This idealist has reached the limit of idealism. I think that it is now time to pay attention to empiricism, to the possible biological genesis of most human behaviors. So let us get on with it; let us do genetic, not social-psychological studies of why people do what they do.

I do not want to hear misguided black persons crying fowl, trying to prevent such studies on the ground that it stereotypes the black race. If such black persons do not want their race to be seen as criminals, they ought to be telling their people to stop stealing too much. Some of us simply no longer want to hear excuses and rationalizations why these people steal.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

[email protected]

November 10, 2005

PS: I will send this and supporting materials to those who are in a position to do “Genetic Study of Nigerian Politicians’ Proclivity to Narcissistic and Anti social Behaviors”.

Posted by Administrator at 04:20 PM | Comments (0)

Neurotic Idealism and Unhappiness

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. --- Some human beings are idealistic. They use their thinking and imagination to conceive how the things they see in the empirical world ought to become. Perceiving an imperfect world, idealists use their thinking, aka minds, to imagine how it ought to become perfect. They invent perfections and ideals in their minds. In fact, their minds are always inventing ideals: how things ought to become perfect.

They carry their idealistic tendency to human beings. They perceive imperfect human beings and use their thinking and imagination to visualize how human beings and their social institutions ought to become more perfect.

Having invented ideals and perfections in their thinking, ideas of how people and society ought to become, they use those imaginary ideal standards to judge real people. They juxtapose real human beings, imperfect creatures, to imaginary perfect human beings and perfect behaviors and necessarily see the difference.

They perceive the difference between ideals and reality and feel disappointed and frustrated. Idealists generally are sad people, for nothing in the imperfect real world ever meets their ideals. They are perpetually dissatisfied persons.

The goalpost of what is ideal is always shifting; as you think that you have met an ideal standard, its goalpost is extended and you start struggling all over again to meet the next ideal and as you meet it, it shifts, ad infinitum. Idealism is shifting quicksand and can never be met.

Plato’s ideal state, apparently, is only ideational and not attainable in the empirical world? Not to worry for some observers argue that there is an ideal perfect state in the spirit world, the world created by God. As these persons see it, our human tendency to seek ideals is motivated by our desire to replicate the ideal spiritual state in the material universe. One assumes that this is a conjecture for one is not aware that Plato’s archetype exists in the spiritual world or not. For our present purposes, idealism is ideational and not an empirical proposition.

Apparently, aware of the impossibility of attaining imaginary ideals, normal persons don’t even bother seeking ideals; they accept imperfect reality, imperfect human beings and imperfect social institutions and work with them as they are. Social realists do not quest after neurotic, that is, unrealistic idealism.

The neurotic is a person who uses his thinking/mind to invent ideals: ideal self, ideal other people, ideal institutions and ideal everything he sees in the empirical world and aspires to making them real. He cannot make them real, for reality is not fantasy. In the meantime, the neurotic feels anxious because he is hoping to attain his ideal self and fears that he is not going to become that ideal self.

The perpetual fear of not becoming his ideal self is called neurotic anxiety by Karen Horney (See Neurosis and Human Growth, 2002). Alfred Adler, in his seminal book, the Neurotic Constitution, argues in the same vein as Horney. As he sees it, the neurotic to be child feels inferior, perhaps due to inherited genetic disorders, inferior organs and or adverse social conditions or a combination of both. The child subsequently rejects his real self and posits a superior self and wants to become the superior self. In fact, the neurotic sometimes acts as if he is his desired superior self when he is not it. The neurotic child sometimes tells lies to other people, lies about him, lies that make him seem all important, powerful and outstanding when in fact he is not so. He tells lies in a misguided effort to live up to the demands of his wished for superior, perfect and ideal self concept/self image.

The superior self is mental and not real. The real self is rooted in the individual’s body and, as such, must be weak and imperfect. The imaginary self is conceptual and imagery and is in the individual’s thinking/mind and can be made perfect by merely wishing that it be so. Wishes are not reality. The laws of matter and energy prevent all things in material form from being as the mind wishes them to be. For example, you may wish to fly, but the fact is that you cannot fly unless you grow wings. And even then, there are limitations to your flying. Matter and energy, body, imposes limits on human beings behaviors.

As both Adler and Horney sees it, the neurotic must give up questing for an ideal, superior self, ideal other people and ideal society and ideal anything, and accept the imperfect self, imperfect other people and imperfect social institutions as they are. If the neurotic accepts imperfect reality, as it is, not as he wants it to become, and does not compare it to imaginary external ideals, then he does not feel neurotic anxiety. He subsequently lives in peace, he lives with what is, reality as it is, not what his neurosis wants to become reality. He stops trying to remake himself, other people and society into his fantasy of how they ought to be.

NEUROSIS IS ACTING LIKE ONE IS GOD

Neurosis is playing God; it is effort to be God like and reinvent the self and reinvent reality. The neurotic wants to be the creator and author of himself, other people and reality. He wants to create himself, create other people, create social institutions and create everything. He wants to change reality into his ideas of what it ought to become. If he were to succeed, he would have become God: the creator of reality.

Of course, the neurotic is not God and is not going to change himself, other people and reality into ideal and perfect forms. Indeed, he cannot even change a piece of hair on his own body, what more change him.

The neurotic has an obsessive-compulsive desire to change himself and change the world. As it were, an inner pressure, a force he finds irresistible urges him to reject the real, to reject his real self, to reject other people’s real selves and reject the real world and replace them with his own versions of them. The ideal self, ideal other people and ideal world that the neurotic invents is a replacement self/world, a substitution of the self/world the neurotic made for the imperfect self the universe made him/world to be.

In his thinking, mind, the neurotic is forever constructing ideal selves and ideal everything and using those purely ideational ideals to judge himself and those around him and finding them not good enough. He is always pointing out his and other people’s faults Vis a Vis his ideal self for them.

The neurotic person invents an ideal superior self and attempts to talk and live from that false self. Instead of speaking and living from his normal imperfect self, he identifies with a false superior, perfect self and talks and attempts to live from the perspective of that false ideal self, hence comes across as a phony. Moreover, whatever he says, his moralisms and ideals are not going to happen in the real world for they are separated from reality. People tend to tune him and what he says out as unrealistic and immature.

The neurotic so identifies with his elevated and all powerful, superior self that he finds it difficult to pray to God. He feels denigrated to bow down to God and pray to him. Why? Because he is in competition with God and imagines himself as powerful, if not more powerful than God. He feels humiliated praying to God.

That is probably why most religions of the world ask people to kneel to God and worship him. They so not because God is narcissistic and vain glory seeking and desires people’s praises but because praying to him and submitting their will to his will shrinks their swollen neurotic and sometimes psychotic egos. Even normal persons are a bit neurotic, that is, they have swollen false egos; neurosis exists in degrees in all people.

According to Helen Schucman, in her book, A Course in Miracles, God created the world and gave all of it to his children. Before they ask for anything, God has already given it to them. God has granted the requests of his children’s prayers before they make them. But to receive the answers already given by God, one must do what God requires of one: one must accept God as ones father, as ones creator; one must see ones self as the same and equal with all God’s creation, other people; one must stop the insanity of trying to create ones self, create other people and create the world. One must stop trying to be God, for there can be only one God in the universe.

Finally, one must overlook the world one invented to replace the world God created. That is, one must forgive the world, see pass the empirical world to behold the real self and real world that God created. The real self and real world is not in body, for bodily self and its world is the self and world we made to replace the nonmaterial spiritual unified self God created us as, the Christ self.

The neurotic, that is, the mad person, which is all of us, in degrees, has one goal and one goal only, to kill God and usurp his creatorship throne. He wants to murder God and replace him as God the creator and proceed to create himself, create other people and create the world and its institutions. This is the wish of the son to kill his father and replace him as his own father and father of other people, the author of reality.

The neurotic finds it very difficult to respect other people. He perceives respect for other persons as personal humiliation, and he does not want to be humiliated by other persons. For example, he finds it very difficult to say sir to another man or mam to a woman. He sees saying so as a sign of weakness and inferiority and acceptance of other people’s superiority over him. Instead, he would rather look down on people and only point out the bad they do. In showing people’s imperfections he hopes to show that they are not ideal and are inferior to him, inferior to his ideal self, that is, not to his real self, for his real self is the same and coequal with all people, imperfect.

THE NEUROTIC IS A KILLJOY

The neurotic makes those around him, in fact, all people unhappy by always reminding them of how imperfect they are, vis-a-vis his perfect mental ideal constructs. He is generally perceived by other people as a killjoy, and he is a killjoy. He lives a miserable life. Since misery loves company, he seeks out the company of other people and makes them miserable by always comparing them to his false, ideal standards of how they and the world ought to become.

The joyful person accepts himself and the world as they are, imperfect, and lives with them and does not aspire after impossible ideal states.

The normal person accepts himself as he is, imperfect, accepts other people as they are, imperfect, and accepts social institutions as they are, imperfect, and lives with them as they are, not as he would like them to become. He is not aspiring after imaginary perfections of his own making. He is not playing God and inventing ideals and perfections and trying to use them to replace reality. He accepts his inherent imperfection and powerlessness. He accepts that he does not have the power to change himself, change other people or change reality because he is not God; he is a weak human being.

Because the normal person accepts imperfect reality, as it is, and coexists with it, he is generally at peace with his imperfect self, imperfect other people and imperfect world. Put differently, the normal person is at home in an imperfect world.

The scientist is a normal person. He accepts the real world, as it is, and tries to understand it on its own terms and adapt to it as it is, not as he wants it to become. The scientist studies the imperfect world we live in, understands the laws of matter and energy and uses them to devise technologies that enable him more effectively adapt to the world. He is not out to change people and their world. The scientist is not motivated to change people and make them perfect. He just wants to understand people as they are (psychology, studies people as they are, imperfect, and does not want to make them perfect; only moralistic religion, which is of the ego, wants to make people perfect) and understand the physical world, as it is (physics, chemistry and biology) and coexist with them.

The scientist, physical or psychological scientist, is not motivated by neurotic idealism to seek perfect people and perfect morality. He accepts imperfect morality with the understanding that imperfect man cannot have perfect morality.

Real human beings are motivated by desire to survive; therefore, they must place their self interests ahead of other people’s interests. Real human beings are selfish and self centered, as economists like Adam Smith and political realists like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and others tell us. The scientist, material and social scientist, accepts selfish human beings and works with them as they are, without any wishful efforts to make them over into socially centered, perfect angels.

ATTACK ON REALITY

The neurotic/psychotic is not at home in an imperfect world. He wants to change the imperfect world, himself and other people included, into his ideas of perfection. In the process, he is filled with anxiety, fear, depression and paranoia.

If you want to change your self, change other persons and change the world and its institutions, you have, in effect, hated and rejected your real self and hated and rejected other people’s real self.

Any time you want to change something into your wishes, you have attacked it. Because you have attacked what you want to change you must necessarily fear counter attack by those you wish to change, those you attacked. By hating, rejecting and wishing to change your real self and other people’s real selves you, you have attacked them and you expect counter attack from them. You expect your real self and other people’s real selves, the real son of God, Christ, to counter attack you. You therefore live in fear, hence you have paranoia.

Whoever attacks his real self and other people’s real selves has attacked the unified Son of God. God is in his children and his children are in him. Whoever attacks God’s children has attacked him.

You have attacked God by wishing to make yourself into who God did not create you as. God created you as unified with him and all people, and since only spirit can unify, as unified spirit.

You hated and rejected unified spirit and attacked it and made yourself into body and now seem to live in body, in separated, special state where you seem to have created yourself via inventing your false self concept, the ego. You have, in effect, attacked God and expect God to counter attack you, hence you fear God and run from him.

GUILT/SIN

On earth, you live in guilt for what you did, changing yourself from unified spirit to separated, and special self living in body. All human beings live in Original Sin, the sin of changing themselves into what their creator did not create them as. God created them as unified spirit but they changed themselves, not in reality but in their imagination, in the dream, that is, this world, into separated, special selves housed in bodies.

When they renounce separation, and the specialness that spawned it, and return to union with God and all creation they are no longer guilty. They return to feeling sinless, guiltless and innocent and holy. They return to living in the grace of God where all their needs are met.

Their needs in spirit are not material, for spirit is not material. Their needs are spiritual needs, the need to be close to their father and their brethren, to be aware of their union with their father and brothers. On the other hand, on earth, their needs are material, for they live in matter, in body and body has material needs. God did not create them as material beings hence do not know anything about their material needs. Nevertheless, if they forgive and love one another, the God in them, the God in the temporal universe, the Holy Spirit, knowing that they think that they have material needs, although he knows that they really do not need them in their real self, in spirit, satisfy those needs. As long as we live on earth and have material needs, false needs, if we dedicate our lives to love and forgiveness and serving God and his children on earth, God tends to satisfy our earthly material needs. God, the Holy Spirit, that is, will give you all you need to live on earth with, to do his work of bringing the word of God, love and forgiveness, to all God’s children on earth.

To identify with the special, separated self, the ego, the false self, and to expect other people to be special egos, that is, to seem ideal and perfect, is to attack people and their creator. You must expect attack from those you attacked.

The neurotic who wants to change himself and change other people have attacked those he wants to change, and knows it, and expects them to attack him hence fears them. Thus the neurotic lives in constant fear.

The person who lives in constant fear is a paranoid person. Paranoid persons are persons who hated and reject their real selves, hate and reject other people’s real selves, hate and reject reality, that is, attack reality and want to replace it with an imaginary ideal reality, ideal selves.

The paranoid person attacks reality and want to become the author of reality, and since this means attacking other people and attacking people’s creator, the paranoid person is afraid that God and other people would counter attack him hence he lives with free floating fear at all times.

When you stop trying to change yourself, other people and reality, you have stopped attacking your reality, stopped attacking other people’s reality and stopped attacking reality itself and subsequently live in peace and joy.

JUDGMENT AS ATTACK ON THE JUDGED

An idealist is always judging other people with idealistic standards. What he is doing is attacking other people and they feel attacked by him and feel defensive towards him. He may not be consciously aware that he is attacking people. When you compare people to your self invented ideal standards and, or from that ideal standard criticize them, you are psychologically attacking them and inflicting pain on them. You are not a nice person, for a nice person does not inflict pain, physical or psychological, on people.

Actually, at the unconscious level, the neurotic knows what he is doing; he knows that he is attacking people, himself and other people, trying to change them into becoming his ideal concept and ideal image of what they should become. He knows that he is inflicting psychological pain on people and he expects them to do so to him hence he is afraid of people and he is paranoid.

It is a high stakes game the insane person, all of us, in degrees, is playing. The reason I am explaining this phenomenon is for you, a normal-neurotic person, to become conscious of what you are doing when you criticize people. I want you to know that you are attacking them and trying to kill them and make them over into your ego image of what they should become.

If you insist on ego idealism, you must, therefore, expect people to counter attack you, hence you must fear them and live in ego defenses; you must be paranoid.

To heal your neurosis and paranoia, you must give up all desire to change your self, change other people and change the world. You must give up all idealism and pursuit of perfection according to your view of it.

You must stop and ask to be shown who your real self is, who other people’s real selves are, and what the real world is.

You did not create your real self; you did not create other people’s real selves and the real world. God created your real self, other people’s real selves and the real world.

There is nothing you can do to change the real self and real world God created; it is not up to you to change your real self, other people’s real selves and the real world.

In fact, you need do nothing to be your real self. Your problem (that is, the neurotic’s problem) is that you think that it is up to you to do something to become a better self, a self according to your concept of perfection. It is not up to you to create your self or create other people, for you are not the creator of the universe, God is, and you are not God.

God is our creator, you are a created being. However, as an extension of God, who is like God, you are co-creative with God and all of us, but you create with the creative power of God in you, but never by your own power. By himself alone, the son of God can do nothing; he does all he does with his father’s creative power in him, his father’s gift to him. When he loves he creates positively, when he hates he uses the same God creative power in him to create negatively, he misuses the creative energy in him.

Actually, you need to undo the ego and the egos world you already did. The ego is your block to your awareness of your real self. The special, separated self, the ego is like a veil and shields you from the experience of your real self. The ego is darkness that prevents you from seeing the light of God in you.

As long as one identifies with the ego one would never sees the face of Christ; one would never experience ones real self; one would live in darkness. To be in ego state means that one shuts ones eyes and sees darkness while all along one is in the light of God. Union is light, separation is darkness; as long as you see yourself as separated from God and other people you live in darkness. The moment you accept that you are connected, joined and unified with all people, love and forgive all people, you return to the awareness that you live in light. Love all and become aware that you always live in the presence of love while imaging yourself live in hatred.

Relinquish your false ego self concept and ego self image, that is, let go the notion that you have a separated self housed in body, and you experience your true self, the self God created you as, a unified spirit self, a self you share with God and all people. Stop seeking to become an ideal, perfect and superior self of your making, be quiet and ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to you the self he created you as, the self he created other people as and the world he created for his children to experience. If you ask honestly and do not provide the answers by yourself and just remain silent, emptied of all your ego based thinking and images, be a void, be open to God’s will in your life, not your neurotic and psychotic wishes that you replace it with, you would escape from our ego-material world and momentarily return to the real self and its real world, a self and world that our language cannot explain, for it surpasses language, it is ineffable; it is a world where there is no you and not you, subject and object, seer and seen; it is a unified world where all are the same self and the same mind, the same thinking. (See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience and Evlyn Underhill, Mysticism, for writing on mystical experience, the experience of the real self and real world that God created for his children.)

The neurotic is generally unrealistic and immature in profile, for he is expecting reality to conform to his imaginary ideals of it. He is bound to fail, for reality is not about to change and become what he likes it to become. If he is sensible he would give up his idealism, his neurosis, his tendency to constructing a fantasy, ideal self and world, and accept reality as it is.

Idealism, neurosis, is actually power seeking behavior. The idealist wants to remake himself, other people and the world to his liking. He wants to kill God who permitted an imperfect world to seem to exist and become the God who created a perfect world.

SUICIDE, IMMEDIATE AND SLOW

The idealistic neurotic is so insistent that the world become as he wants it that some of them despair when they realize that they cannot change themselves, change other people and change the world. Many of them, especially during teenage years, are unable to accept the fact that they cannot make the world become perfect and commit suicide. As it were, it is either the world becomes what they want it to become hence grant them their wishes to be godlike or they kill themselves. Since the world is not about to change to gratify their wishes such unrealistic persons kill them.

Some neurotics manage to stay alive and keep wishing for ideal states. These ones are the ones who make the lives of those around them miserable by always comparing them to ideals and finding faults with them. They are the forever critical persons. If you happen to be their wives or husbands, children and neighbors they would subject you to unending evaluation and always point out your shortcomings vis-a-vis ideal standards. It is like they see you as a performer and they are performing performance appraisal of you. They feel compelled to always judge your behavior with their ideal standards and always find faults in you.

Even though you are like every one else, imperfect, idealistic neurotics would not permit you to live with that fact peacefully. They always compare you to ideal states that you could never attain and since you are tempted to accept their neurosis, you try to live up to their neurotic false standards but quickly realize that those are impossible and stop trying to live up to them. You leave their company and go seek the company of more realistic adults.

Children of idealistic neurotics can hardly wait before they leave home and stay away from their over critical parents.

Such critical men despair and since they are lacking in the neurotic courage to kill themselves, as some did during their teenage years, they, nevertheless, kill themselves gradually. Over eating, over drinking, smoking, over drinking of coffee and other drugs are undertaken by those with death wish.

Idealists who cannot become the ideal perfect persons they wish that they were often turn their frustration and anger on themselves and gradually kill themselves through bad living habits. See an over eating person and you see a person who hates his real self and wishes that he were an ideal self. Since he is not going to become an ideal person, he undertakes to destroy his real self and its real body with over eating, drinking alcohol etc.

Most addictions are undertaken by idealists who despaired of attaining their ideals and turned around to destroy them selves.

On a personal note, my only addiction is coffee. I know that it is not good for me still I drink it. Obviously, I want to kill myself with caffeine. So why do I want to kill myself, albeit gradually? It is because I do not like my real self; I do not like my body and do not like the imperfect reality that is our fate. I want an ideal self, ideal other people and ideal world. Failing to obtain them, I acquiesced to the imperfections of being on earth and turned my disappointment and anger at myself hence tried to self destroy with caffeine.

Other persons do what I do with alcohol, or drugs or food or sex addiction. All addictions to mood altering substances are rooted in hatred and rejection of the real self, and desire for an ideal self, a self one is never going to materialize.

In heaven, in eternity, in unified state we wished for separated selves, that is, hated and rejected unified spirit and seem to have gratified our wishes by being in this world. We are in the temporal universe to experience separated, special self. Since the origin of the world is based on hatred and rejection of what God made, what is, in this world, also we continue that trend of hatred and rejection.

Thus, in this world, we hate and reject the ego and body we made to live in this world with. This world came into being from self hatred and is based on hatred and rejection and must continue only on that basis. You hate God and his son and now hate man; you hate union and now hated separated self and its separated world. You try to invent an ideal separated self and ideal, separated world. It is insanity at work.

Stop already and love the world you made. Love your separated self, love your ego, love you body, love other peoples egos and bodies, love the empirical world.

When you love the ego and its world, you recognize that the ego and its world is no other than the real self and real world in a dream of their opposite. The world is a wish for the opposite of God, the opposite of the unified self, hence is a world of separated selves. Reality is always unified; separation is impossible, for were it possible, all things would cease being. God and his children would die if separation and special selves were possible.

Jesus asks us to love the world we can see before we can love the world we cannot see, the world of God. Love all people and thereafter you experience heaven, unified spirit. But until you meet the condition of heaven, love, you cannot enter heaven. The only way to return to heaven is to love and forgive all God’s children here on earth.

Neurosis, Karen Horney pointed out, is characterized by “basic anxiety”. The neurotic is filled with fear, fear of this and fear of that. As Horney sees it, this fear is caused because the neurotic posited an ideal self concept and ideal self image and is perpetually afraid of not living up to that ideal, perfect superior self. As long as he seeks to become an ideal self he must fear not becoming it and, therefore, must live in fear; a fear whose cause he does not consciously know. Fear whose cause is not known to the fearful persons is called anxiety; the neurotic lives in perpetual anxiety.

FEAR AS A MEANS OF SEPARATING FROM OTHER PEOPLE

Horney’s description of the neurotic is, by and large, true. But fear has another function. If one is afraid of other people, fear that they may harm, kill or reject one, one tends to avoid them. To avoid is to separate from. One separates from those one fears.

(We fear harm and destruction from other people. Our sense of vulnerability is seen by those who are intent on evil. Murderers convince themselves that since people are afraid of harm and death that they can harm and or kill them. They see people over valuing their ego, separated lives and the bodies in which those lives are housed. They attack and kill people’s bodies; they destroy that which we value. In killing people the murderer feels very powerful for now it is up to him to destroy people’s life. Other people, society, want to protect themselves. They want the murderer to be captured and tried and punished. They give to the state, the police, judicial and penal systems the role of acting out their desire for grievance and vengeance. Thus society employs the police to capture the murderer and the courts to try and condemn him and the jails to house and or kill him. In effect, society does to him what he did to the individual. Society says to him, you too value your life, so we are going to destroy that which you value. We are going to seem powerful by destroying your life, as you seemed powerful by killing people. This is tit for tat. This is how the ego based society is maintained. It is an insane society, a society based on false valuation; valuation of the valueless, the ego and its body. The fact is that the real self is eternal spirit and not the body we see it as in. No one can destroy the real self. The murderer cannot destroy the individual’s real self; the state cannot destroy the real self of the murderer, either. The murderer does not murder any one and the state cannot murder the murderer. Both the murderer and the murdered are the holy children of God; they are immortal and are unified spirit and cannot be harmed. It is only in their dream of separation that they seem housed in bodies that are prone to harm and destruction. In the meantime, those who identify with the ego will pretend ability to harm and or kill other persons and society will pretend ability to punish and or kill them and the insane show continues. It continues until the children of God learn to forgive the ego and the world the ego made and live out of their spiritual self, the unified self.)

In this light, fear is a means of separating from other people. When one separates from other people one lives in isolation. In isolation, one nurses ones separated ideal, special and superior self. The big false self is retained in social avoidance.

In relating to other people, one cannot maintain ones false, superior self. The condition for relating to other people is sameness and equality and shared power. Therefore, fear, anger, shame, pride, guilt depression, paranoia, mania, schizophrenia and other upsets are really mental devices employed by the person who wants to separate from other people; they are used to enable him to do so. Perception that other people want to harm or reject one is used as a rationalization, a means of convincing himself that if he comes close to others that they would kill him. Rationalization is an ego defense mechanism; what is rationalized, explained, seems reasonable but is false nevertheless.

The person who avoids other people wants to live in body and from bodily perspective it seems to make sense to avoid those who seem able to kill him. On the other hand, if life is eternal and no one can kill one, though others can destroy ones body, but not ones soul, then it makes no sense to fear, avoid and separate from those who can destroy the body but cannot touch the soul.

DEFENSES MAKE THE EGO SEEM REAL

The ego, the sense of separated I is really a form of insanity. It is insanity because it does not exist yet one defends it as if it exists. It is defense that makes it seem to exist for the defender. When one stop defending the ego it is seen as non-existent, a mirage that had seemed real but is in fact not real. The ego is an illusion that when desired it seems real but when not desired and defended it does not exist.

In the meantime, if one identifies with the false self, the ego, and pursues ego idealism, one tends to believe that the world exists for one to do with it as one likes. One engages in perpetual imagination, fantasy, always transforming the world into whatever one wants it to become in ones imagination. In effect, one is now the god that created this world and makes it over into whatever one wants it to become.

If one accepted that God created the world, not one, then one would desist from imagining how the world ought to become; one would give up idle fantasies and accept the world the God created as it is, not as one wants it to become.

What is the world that God created? If God is permanent, it follows that he cannot create a transitory and ephemeral world. Our world is dynamic and changes every second. A permanent and changeless God could not have created our world, a world where nothing remains the same for more than a second.

A world of changes must be invented by the opposite of God. The opposite of God is the ego (in Christian terms, Satan). As long as one identifies with the opposite of God, the separated self, the ego, one must attempt to invent the world according to ones likes and be exposed to frustration and disappointment.

One must, therefore, give up ones identification with the false ideal, separated self. In doing so one gives up engaging in idle ego dreams of how the world ought to become, what other people ought to be like and who one ought to be like. One must accept the self, other selves and the world God created: the changeless, spirit world.

If one gives up ego wishes, dreams and fantasies one is healed of neurosis and psychosis. Neurosis, among other things, is characterized by an obsessive-compulsive wish to change ones self, to change other people, to change social institutions and to change the world into what one wants them to become, ideal. This wish to change things and make them what one wants them to become gives one a sense of being the inventor of the self and the world; that is, it makes one feel godlike. As it were, the son has killed his father and become his own father; one has killed God, usurped his creatorship throne and is now the creator of ones self, other selves and the world; one is now more powerful than God himself.

Neurosis is a wish for grandiose power, delusional power that is not going to come into being, for wish as one does, one did not create ones self, one did not create other selves and one did not create the world; God created us.

If one stops the insane quest to remake the world in ones ego self image, one is healed of neurosis and psychosis. One becomes calm, peaceful and happy.

The normal person is a bit neurotic and quests after some ideals and some superior self. But he does so in a flexible and less rigid manner. The neurotic and or psychotic person, on the other hand, pursues his ideal self with total dedication. The insane person rigidly and inflexibly wants to become his ideal, superior self. The normal person seeks the same ego ends that the neurotic, psychotic person does; all human beings want to seem like god, the creator of the world but the normal person goes about it in a flexible manner hence seem relatively calmer and happier than the neurotic. The normal person has his ego and ego desires but despite them successfully adapts to his changing world. The normal person is flexible and does not ask the world to change and become what he wants it to become. He has flexible ego defenses, but is defensive nevertheless. Normalcy, neurosis and psychosis are all mental disorders; normalcy seems healthier than the others, but, in fact, is equally insane. They are all insane because they are adaptation to a false ego self as if it is real and who one is. Ones real self is unified spirit self, not separated bodily self.

The cure for normalcy, neurosis and psychosis is to give up the wish to have a separated self, to give the ego up altogether.

One must give up the self concept, the self image and the empirical personality that one constructed to replace the self that God created one as. When one gives up the self one made to substitute for the self God created one as, one returns to the self that God created one as: the unified self, the self that is joined to God and all creation, aka the Christ self, the son of God who is one with his father and brothers.

In God one still has a self but not distinct from other selves. In God ones self is not sufficiently separated from others for one to be aware that others are not one; there is no you and I, no subject and object, no seer and seen; all know themselves as sharing one self, one thinking and one mind. In this condition of oneness is peace and happiness; peace and joy that no human being in the world of separated selves can comprehend.

The ego is not a person that one can touch. The ego is an abstraction; it is the concrete representation of the wish to be separated from God and other people. The ego is like Satan; Satan does not exist apart from the person who wishes to identify with it. Satan or devil is not a person; it is a mode of thinking and living, a lifestyle that separates from other persons and lives only for the self and not for other people. Satan, aka ego, is a wish to create ones self, create other people and create God.

In Christianity, Satan is given concrete form in the myth of Lucifer. Lucifer is said to be an angel that was filled with pride and resented the fact that God created him and wanted to create him self and create his creator, God. He is said to have warred with God and was chased out of heaven by God’s loyal angels led by Arch angels Michael and Gabriel. He descended from oneness, heaven to the world and formed the world of separation.

Gnosticism calls the force of separation the Demiurge. Helen Schucman, in “A Course in Miracles” calls it the ego, the separated I.

If one is on earth one has wished for a separated I and identified with it. To be on earth, one must have thought it possible to be apart from God hence sees oneself in a place of separation, space and time.

To be on earth, as Christianity correctly says, is to have committed a sin, the Original sin of separating from ones creator, God, and separating from ones real self, Unified Spirit Self. To be on earth is to live in sin, which is to see ones self as apart from God and other people and to do things only for ones self interests but not for common interests.

While on earth, one must give up the wish for separated I and replace it with a counter wish for unified self.

On earth, the unified self is represented by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, like the ego and Satan, is an abstraction, not a person; he represents our higher self, a self that is holy, that is, a self that knows itself as unified with God and his creation.

The Holy Spirit teaches love and forgiveness as the path to salvation. In as much as Jesus taught love and forgiveness he completely identified with the Holy Spirit and can be called the symbol of the Holy Spirit, the God in us, and the God in the temporal universe. In that sense, Jesus is the Christ, the unified self; he is one with God. Where you see Jesus Christ you see his father. (This is a metaphor for God does not have form and cannot be seen.)

Where you see the Son of God, since he is in God and God is in him, you see God. Where I see a human being, you or me, I see God.

The ego is a false entity, a non-existent idea of separation. As a non-existent reality, the ego must be defended to seem to exist in the mind, the thinking of the person who wishes that it exist, who wishes that he be separated from other people. The egotist must continually defend his ego self with fear, anger, pride, shame, guilt, depression, paranoia and other mental and emotional upsets. Defenses of a non-existent idea, the separated self, defenses of an imaginary self image, a picture and seen as if it exists, makes it seem to exist.

If the ego is not defended it does not exist. That is correct; if the ego is not fended with fear and anger etc it does not exist.

The next time you are afraid of somebody, instead of separating from him or her, instead of avoiding him or her, to go retain your ego, relates to him; join him or her. Forgive whatever the person you are separating from did to make you afraid of him. If he had attacked you, physically or verbally, to make you afraid that he might harm you, forgive him. To forgive is to overlook what the other person did, to see what is done to you as not real. To forgive is to see the events on earth as events done in a dream, as illusory hence have not happened. To forgive is to overlook what one perceives with ones physical eyes and to now see with Christ vision, to see with spiritual eyes. Spirit is forever unified; to see with spiritual eyes is to see holistically, to have unified perception; a perception that overlooks separation and sees union everywhere it looks. Union is reality and separation is illusion of reality.

If you do not give in to the temptation to avoid people, you join them. When you join people, the separated ego self disappears, literally. The ego is only a mere concept, it is not a reality. It is defended with body and fear and other defenses. If when someone attacks your body and you understand that despite the pain you feel and despite his harming and destroying your body, that you are spirit and eternal and overlook his attack, you literally return to the experience of oneness with God and all creation. (You feel pain in your body because you identified with body and made body seem real; you made body feel pain and in so feeling it seems real to you; if you did not believe in the reality of body and see yourself as unified spirit, you would not exist in body and would not feel pain.)

This is what Jesus did; his psychological self was attacked by all the accusations leveled against him and his body was attacked in crucifixion. He knew that he is eternal spirit and not body, hence did not defend his ego/body. He did not defend the separated self; he overlooked the world of ego and reverted to the awareness of unified self.

SURRENDERING TO THE WILL OF GOD

The individual who has decided to relinquish his false ego self has decided to give up his personal will and embraced God’s will. Now he knows that the will of the father is the same as the will of the son; the father and son share the same will. God’s will is the will of his son. Father and son will love and unity.

It was the son’s wish to be different from his father, to have a will that his father did not share with him that led him to a journey without a distance, a journey to nowhere, to this world. The prodigal son tried to go seem independent from his father but eventually learnt that he could not and accepted his mistake and returned to the state of union with his father and recovered peace and joy.

In the temporal universe, this entails surrendering ones will to the will of God; it means thinking as God thinks, loving and forgiving thoughts only; it means seeking union with all people and not seeking separation and ego. There is one will in the universe, God’s will. No other force can disobey God’s will. The son of God may wish that he disobeyed his father’s will, he may even dream that he is apart from God but in reality he is not apart from God; he lives in God while dreaming that he is apart from God; he is always in union while imagining that he is in separation.

Surrendering ones ego wishes means doing only work that is in accord with God’s will, with the Holy Spirit’s work. The Holy Spirit’s will is love and forgiveness. Any work that is in accord with loving God and all people and forgiving the bad done to one is in accord with the Holy Spirit’s will.

The Holy Spirit’s work, though the same everywhere, but in as much as on earth we see ourselves as individuated, his work is individualized in each of us. To surrender to the will of God means doing the work that God wants one to do, not the work ones ego wants to do. It means discovering the line of work one has aptitude and interest in doing and in doing which one serves God and man. Actually, it means doing what ones ego likes doing but now doing it for a different purpose, to serve all humanity.

In the process of separation each of us constructed an ego for himself and herself; that ego developed certain special skills. You may have developed skills as an engineer, medical doctor or psychologists etc. That is your ego skills, skills that enable you to adapt to the world of the ego. The Holy Spirit now takes that ego skill of yours and uses it for a different purpose. In other words, you redirect your ego skills to serving God’s purpose of love and forgiveness. This means that you use your ego talent, say psychology, to teach love and forgiveness; you use your ego talent of medicine to teach people to remember that they are spirit, while taking care of their body.

When one surrenders to ones work, the Holy Spirit’s work for one, one flows. As it were, the entire universe comes to ones help; all people open doors for one and help one to do that work.

One is no longer in ego control but allows the higher self, the Holy Spirit, love and forgiveness to be in control, to guide one. One is calm, peaceful and happy.

One is no longer addictive to mood altering substances like food, sex, drugs, alcohol, caffeine etc.; one simply eats enough food to be alive so as to do the work one has to do in God’s plan to liberate all his children from the ego.

One does not plan for ego glory but plans for God’s glory. One still makes future plans, still looks forward to what one will do tomorrow but what serves God, not what serves ones ego and makes one feel important.

One acts with the Holy Spirit. One trusts in the Holy Spirit, one does everything one can but leaves it to God to determine the outcome of ones action. One takes the outcome as the will of God for one without resorting to ego anger and frustration.

Do all that you can in every circumstance you find yourself in and leave the rest to God. You aren’t in charge or in control, God is.

You are now evolving into the conscious awareness that God is all there is and that you are only a part of him, but not all of him. You do not resist God (as ego does…if you resist God you will eventually be forced by adverse circumstances to surrender to God, so you might as well not resist and surrender right now, so as to make your life easier, peaceful and happy).

An awakening child of God accepts that only God exists, that God is. He accepts that God manifests in all of us. Each of us is an individualization of God. On earth we are not aware that we are the individualization of God and are one with God. But we see ourselves as separated from God, as the ego.

Buddha and Jesus are examples of persons who, while on earth, recognized that they are the manifestation of the God in us. They became the Buddha, the Christ, the Atman; they became enlightened to their true nature. They were enlightened and illuminated to the light of God in them.

God is creative and created his Son, aka Christ, Buddha, Atman. The Son of God is given the power to create like his father does; we create like God.

We can choose to create good or bad. In spirit we create only the good, in separation we have chosen to miscreates, to create the bad. We can choose to love/join (creation) or separation (evil).

We create with our thinking and feeling. If we wish something, our thinking and feeling produces the effect we desire, even if it is an illusion, as in this world.

Whatever happens to the individual in this world is the product of his thinking, the effect of his thinking and feeling.

Collectively, all of us create what happens to all of us on earth, but individual each of us creates what happens to him, good or bad.

We are not our thoughts and feelings. We are the thinker of our thoughts and the feeler of our feelings. Because we are separated from our thoughts and feelings, we can change our thinking and feeling and produce different effects.

If we silence our ego thinking through prayer and meditation, we access our deeper self, the Christ self, the Holy Self, the Unified Self, the Son of God who is as God created him.

Our primary function on earth is to transcend our ego-based thinking and attain Christ thinking, to reach the place of union in us.

The function of religion is to help reconnect us, to yoke us back to our source, God. Religion is any practice that enables us become aware of our real self, unified self.

There are many religions, each geared to different people. On earth we are different and, as such, need different religions. But, ultimately, all religions teach one message, return to union, relinquishment of the separated self and return to the unified self.

Religion helps us become conscious of what we are doing and enables us to consciously love and forgive all people, so as to awaken to the Christ in us.

Everything that happens to one is because of ones thinking and behaving. One can learn from it and return to love or fight it. If you fight it, is defensive to others evil actions towards you, you will live in conflict, but if you forgive those who attacked you, you would live in peace.

The individual is like the prodigal son; he left his real self, Christ, union and our father, union; now he must recognize that he made a mistake in leaving our real self and identifying with a false separated self. He tried to make our false self seem ideal and superior to others.

One now knows that one cannot make the separated self ideal and cannot make a transitory and ephemeral world permanent, so one lets go of them and return to what has value, worth and is changeless, the real self, the unified self.

HOME COMING

Everything is thinking: unified thinking or separated thinking, forgiving thinking or unforgiving thinking. Now you think in a forgiving manner and let go of all thoughts of vengeance. You no longer bear grudges against any one on earth. You are on your way home.

Home is where God and his son, all of us, are one self. The father is one side of the coin and the son is the other side of it; both complete each other and cannot exist without the other, for the father needs a son to be a father and a son needs a father to be a son.

God and his son know their proper places: the father produced the son, the son did not produce the father; God is greater than his son, though both are the same in essence. The result of acceptance of this reality is peace and happiness.

NEUROTIC WORRYING ABOUT WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK OF ONE

The neurotic is generally preoccupied with thinking about what other people think of him. Actually, what is going on here is that he is thinking about what other people think of his ideal self: do they accept his neurotic game and see him as his desired ideal, perfect and superior self?

The ideal self is the person he wants to become and he worries about other people accepting or rejecting it. If he thinks that other people have accepted it, accepted a lie, he feels validated and is somewhat at ease, but if he feels that other people did not accept this lie, this neurotic false self he feels not confirmed and angry at them. He is angry at those who did not accept his false ideal self for he wants them to collude with him and accept a false self he made up, an unreal self as real.

The neurotic wants to deceive himself; he made up a false self and wants other people to accept the false self as whom he, in fact, knows fully well that he is not that false self.

Even if other people accepted that false ideal, superior self they would not be accepting his real self. But he has played this neurotic game for too long that he does not even know who he is any longer.

Who are you? What is your real self? You do not know! The real self is unified spirit and the neurotic does not know it. He tried to replace that God created self with his self created ideal self, the separated ego.

One must stop all desire for ideal, perfect and superior self and say: I do not know who I am. This is honesty. Neurosis is an attempt to be dishonest and accept a false self as the real self. Be truthful and tell yourself that you do not know who you are and keep quiet.

In silence the real self would reveal itself to one. Whenever the desire to think about what other people think of you, you have identified with the neurotic self, that is, the false ideal and want it to seem real.

Let go of your identification with the ideal self and stay quiet. Do not think from the ego false self, just be quiet, stop all conceptualizations, ideations, and just be silent. This inner silence is called meditation. You can be in meditative state for most of the time; but to do so you must cease all ego-based thinking; ego thinking clouds your thinking with the false thinking of the ego false self.

Do not concern yourself with what other people are thinking of you. At any rate by other people you mean other peoples temporal selves, their egos; you are thinking about what their egos are thinking of your egos; thinking of false selves thinking about your false self. This is insanity, but in sanity that makes the ego seem real for if the ego thinks that other egos are thinking of it, it feels real, as if it exists in fact. You want other egos to recognize and validate your ego; for false selves to validate your false self. If they validate your ego both you and they live in the ego false world.

Do not seek other people’s approval, do not seek ego approval; do not seek external, outside approval; just be quiet and go inside you to experience your real self, the self God created you as, the unified self.

You know that you are close to being your real self when you are calm, peaceful and fearless. If you actually live as your real self, you would not see yourself in physical body, you would escape from this world and enter the world of spirit, a formless world that we cannot possibly talk about, for it is beyond speech and language.

CONCLUSION

In this essay, I have made neurosis and psychosis as all bad. Actually, they are a step ahead of normalcy. The normal person sees his earthly ego self and the world and accepts it as real and lives with them. The neurotic sees his earthly self, other people’s earthly selves, the world and its institutions and do not like what he sees and rejects them.

In America, for example, the neurotic sees the inherent evil in the American polity and does not like it. He then uses his thinking and imagination to conceptualize an alternative self, alternative other people, alternative world and alternative America. His alternative world in his mind is an improvement of the extant world he sees.

The neurotic is dissatisfied with his earthly ego self and seeks an idealized form of it, he is dissatisfied with the ego based world and seeks alternative to it. He cannot return to the normal state and go back into deep sleep and take the slaughterhouse world and its evil selves as acceptable selves and world, he must seek alternative to what is.

The issue is whether he seeks idealistic alternative or God given alternative to the self he and people already have. When we invented ourselves and world, God reinvented it for us. That new and different world, the world invented by the Holy Spirit already exists, inside us, not outside us. We did not make that world, God made it. All we need do is tune out the world we made and we see the world God made for us; a world still a physical world. We live in that light world for a while, and then let it go and return to unified non physical world, what folks call heaven. In heaven the son of God disappears into his father and his father disappear into him and both know themselves to share one self and one mind.

In America, for example, black persons are marginalized. The black neurotic sees this evil world and uses his thinking and imagination to visualize a better America, one where all are treated as the same and equally. Alas, his ideal world is still ego based and merely improves the ego.

The ego is not real and, therefore, cannot be improved. America cannot be improved. America is the ultimate ego empire. You take it or leave it, but you cannot improve it. What will happen is that the ego, America, can be relinquished, let go of, so that a different world is seen, a world already reinvented by the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit, our higher self, the God in us has reinvented the world we made. If and when we tune out our ego-based world and live only loving and forgiving lives, we experience the real world has already remade from our present world, a new Israel, a new Jerusalem, a new World, a world of love and forgiveness, a world that while still physical, hence an illusion, approximates the unified world of God.

Seek not to improve America, Africa and the world, but seek to experience the world of God, a word already inside us, not external to us. Seek the real world, the real self, and, ultimately, return to unified spirit self. This is the goal of Real Self Fellowship.

We want to escape from this world but before doing so we must be here and practice love and forgiveness and we must study science and technology and use them to understand and improve our existence in matter and optimize living on this earth. When we have lived fully on earth, we reawaken to our real self and real home.

*Who did I write this essay for? My ego would like to think that I wrote it for other people. The ego wants the individual to concentrate on other people, to see their problems and pretend ability to change them. You cannot change other people; the person you can change is you.

As long as one looks outwards, one will not look inside ones self to know who one is. The ego does not want one to know who one is. One is the holy son of God, the unified self. The ego does not want one to know that real self, hence it urges one to look outside one and see separated selves and identify with that illusion.

I am not writing this material for other people. I am writing it for myself. But who is me? There are other people who are like me; in which case, I am writing it for them, too.

Those who need this kind of information will find and benefit from. I write to understand myself and to change myself from ego separated self to unified spirit self. In unified self I experience peace and joy and share that peace and joy with all people.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

My views are influenced by the writings of Alfred Adler, Karen Horney and Helen Schucman. Representative samples of these fellows’ writings are:

Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution. New York: Ayer, 2000.

Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.

Helen Schucman, A Course in Miracles. Tiburon, California, Foundation for Inner Peace, 1976

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(Essays in Spiritual Psychology; if you are not interested in this subject, please delete it. My hope is that, perchance, one or two persons are interested in metaphysics, that which is beyond empirical science.)

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November 09, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #30: Introduction to Customer Care and E-Commerce

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- In a capitalist economy, businesses are suppliers of goods and services. They read the market and see what the people demand, what the people desire and undertake to produce and supply them to the people. If the supplier reads the market well, his goods and or services sell to the people and he makes profits and stays in business.

But if he misjudges the market and produces what there is no demand for, his goods and or services are not bought by the people. He does not make profit and goes out of business. Worse, he loses his capital investment in the business and would have wasted his time and energy producing whatever goods and services he produced.

Businesses must produce what the people desire, not what the businesses think that the people should desire. What you think that other people should want and what they actually want are two different things.

A business man simply supplies what the people want. (Of course, through clever advertisement it is possible to create a demand that was not already there hence get people to buy what hitherto they did not want to buy. Only a few years ago, none of us knew that he had a need for computers. But today, we would literally not exist if we did not have, at least, four computers around us (two at home, one in the office, and a lap top…this is the typical situation for middle class Americans; if there are children in the house each child also has his own computer, all networked and connected to the world wide web, we are all wired sand connected to the information super high way).

It is possible to come up with a new product and or service and get people to demand it, as if their lives depend on it. But this is so rare that we need not worry about that; what is generally common is for people to buy what they have needs for. Thus, for our interest suppliers of goods and or services, business men and women, must produce what the market demands, if they want to sell and make profits and stay in the business.

The market now is the world; we live in an interconnected world and are competing with folks from all over the world. The global market is a reality, not fiction. A product produced in one corner of the globe is quickly replicated elsewhere. Indeed, your product is scarcely off the line when folks in China replicate them, produce them and sell them at cheaper prices, too.

For you to sell your products and stay afloat, you must constantly strive to improve the quality of your goods and services, sell them cheaply and care for those who buy them.

Customer care is very critical for obtaining and retaining buyers of your goods and services.

I like to give the example of the former communist Eastern Europe. There, the state was the business person. Things were produced by government bureaucrats. First of all we know that governments bureaucrats tend to have job security hence are not motivated to improve the quality of their products. So the goods and services produced in Eastern Europe were generally shoddy. Bureaucrats have their jobs irrespective of whether they sell or not their products. For our present purposes, bureaucrats did not care about the quality of their customer care. Indeed, they felt like they were gods and did not bother even treating the customers nicely.

As it were, the sales clerk selling bread in the Former Soviet Russian store felt like she was doing you, the buyer of her bread, a favor, for other wise she would tell you that there is no bread and you would do without bread. You stood on the line for hours to buy bread, bread of the worst quality known to man.

Communist bread is not even fit for American dogs to eat, and that is correct. More to the point, the sales clerk treats you in the most arrogant and patronizing manner. She did not respect the customer for she did not see how it is that the customer was keeping her employed by buying from her hence making it possible for her to be employed selling her poor quality products.

Simply stated, customer care in the former Soviet Union was abysmal. A right thinking person would not want to buy anything from these people. Thus, when communism collapsed, the people simply ignored not only Soviet made goods but Soviet services and looked to the West for replacement goods and services.

Western businessmen took one look at Soviet workers and considered them lacking in good customer care and embarked on retraining them. They were retrained to care for the customer, for the customer is king. The customer gave you his money and with his money you stay in business. The worker is paid with money given to him by the buyer of the business goods and services. Were it not for the customer the employee would not have a job. Thus, it stood to reason that the employee ought to be grateful to the customer and treat him nicely.

Customer care is now an inherent aspect of capitalist economies. You must listen to what your customers want and improve your goods and services to meet their desires. If your customers complain about the quality of your goods and services, you better listen to them, for in a capitalist economy others can, and will produce what you are producing and selling. If the customer does not like your goods and services he takes his money elsewhere and buys from other businesses and you go out of business.

Do you want to stay in business? Then study what your customers want and do it. Treat your customers nicely. If they complain, take their grievances seriously and come up with actions plans to remedy their complaints. Do not shine off customers complaints. Do not be rude to customers. In fact, hire a class of employees called customer care specialists to listen to your customers’ complaints and do what they ask for. These employees must be very respectful and treat customers in the most dignified and courteous manner.

In advanced capital economies, customer care is taken seriously. This contributes to the success of these economies. But in third world countries customer care is not always taken seriously.

Indeed, in third world sections of first world countries, customer care is not excellent. If in the USA, go to the black neighborhoods and try patronizing black businesses. Generally, (there are exceptions) you would find black employees very rude. They treat you in the most disrespectful manner. Of course, you walk away and do not buy from them. Consequently, black owned business collapse right and left.

On the other hand, go to Asians run businesses. The Asians would treat you with the ultimate respect. They would make you feel like a king and or queen for a day. Your ego’s vanity is given attention. You end up buying from them. Go to a Chinese restaurant and see good service at work. Then go to a black restaurant and feel frustrated. The result is that Asians make it in the business world, whereas black Americans fail and have to depend on governments to employ them.

In government they behave like bureaucrats everywhere: lazy and inefficient. Since the chances of promotion to higher positions are slim in bureaucracies, thus, the brothers and sisters generally end up making poor incomes as government bureaucrats. If only these people could learn good customer service and go start their own businesses and serve the public well, they would make good living.

In Nigeria, customer care in the public sector is pathetic. You don’t want anything to do with government workers. They treat you as if they are god and doing you favor. Not long ago, I went to the Nigerian Embassy at Washington DC to renew my passport. The clerk was so rude that I literally walked away. The man ought to have been trained to be respectful to all customers and to smile and use the term sir or mam for all customers. Instead, he sat behind his glass windows, ignoring the people on the line and when finally the king of Nigeria had time for the customers he talked in the rudest voice you ever heard in your life. His feeling is that he is doing you a favor and that you ought to please him, god. Indeed, he probably wanted to be bribed too?

These people are simply not good workers and either are retrained or fired. The good news is that in the villages our market women and men are generally the most courteous human beings alive. I visit my town’s market and the traders there treat you like you are a king for a day and you buy their goods and services.

We do not need to belabor the obvious. We have poor quality customer care in the public sector in Nigeria. We have to change the situation. We have to get government employees to realize who pays their salaries, the public that they serve.

Although I generally hate management fads, I would institute Deming’s Total Quality Management, TQM in Nigeria right away. I would improve customer service. I would have every government care how the public perceives its treatment of them. I would have grievance procedures for the public to complain when it feels poorly treated by bureaucrats. I would fire bureaucrats who disrespect their customers, those who put bread on their table by paying their wages.

E-COMMERCE

We now live in the age of computers. The work place is computerized. The whole world is networked in the World Wide Web. Employees and businesses must now be computer literate. There are no two ways of going about it. What is needed is to train all employees to have necessary computer skills.

The typical office worker ought to be proficient with Word processing, Excel, Accel, Power point and other office technology; he ought to know how to navigate the Internet, email, searching for information with the various search engines (yahoo, Googol etc).

In addition to general computer skills, every business has specialized computer technology. Indeed, every profession, these days, has specialized software for its members work. In the past, for example, accountants and bookkeepers meticulously entered all their data entries into hand written journals. Today, many accounting software, such as Quick book, is available to book keepers. Engineers do much of their designs on computers. Airlines have specific uses of computers, both in selling tickets and operating their airlines that those in that industry must know; medical doctors are wired to other doctors and can, in fact, watch specialists around the world doing their work, diagnosing patients, performing surgery, consulting known experts in their fields.

In the world of teaching, the world is now our classroom and students can be wired to learn from professors far away from them.(When I was at the University of Alaska, folks in remote Eskimo villages were connected to the University’s IT and could participate in class rooms with professors teaching in far away Anchorage or Fairbanks or Juneau. They could also go to their local libraries and have access to professors’ lectures stored in certain websites.

All of Nigeria could be wired so that students everywhere in Nigeria could follow the teaching of secondary school physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics (the subjects that really matter in a scientific world) at the best secondary schools in Nigeria.

Let’s assume that Government College Umuahia is still the best at teaching science in Alaigbo. The teachers are connected to the internet and their lectures are fed to all students in the area who have access to the internet to follow their teachings as they do so. This way, students have access to the best teachers and the best instructions found at the best schools, not the nonsense taught in village secondary schools. Some of these new village secondary schools do not even have laboratories and students cannot perform experiments.

I was talking to a recent graduate of a secondary school in my village and he told me that he did not take science subjects because his school did not have science teachers and laboratories. I could not believe what this 18 year old was telling me. If you did not study physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and earth science you did not go to school, period.

Studying, history, geography etc, as he did, simply cannot cut it in the modern world. To avert such disasters, we ought to wire the entire country and have students who attend rural schools have access to the teachings of science at the best schools in the country. This should apply to elementary, secondary and universities and technical schools.

Information technology is here to stay and all businesses must use it to improve their business. Very soon, people will shop right from their homes: look at the goods stacked in stores’ shelves on their computer screens and use their mouse to click on items they want and have the stores deliver such goods to them at home. Some stores are already doing that in the USA. You shop from your home! You can shop from your home for all kinds of things, books, used items. Just go to Amazon.com and see what you can do with Internet shopping.

I am aware that Nigeria is a third world country and is not going to be like a first world country any time soon. It is idealistic and hopeless fantasy to expect Nigeria to have the type of technology that America has. Even European countries do not have the type of sophisticated technology available to American school kids. Give American elementary school kids home work assignment and they immediately go to the Internet and go to sites where they could obtain information on the subject and read up on them. Tell them to tell you what Newton’s mechanics is and they go to the Internet, type the name Isaac Newton and get as much information on the man’s physics that even a Nigerian secondary school physics teacher does not have.

The Internet is doing wonders for schools and education. One wishes that this type of sophistication is available in Nigerian villages.

All businesses must become aware of how they could use computers and the Internet to improve their business activities and sell their products. Advertising on the Web is now a major avenue for advertising ones products. Selling products through the Web is now a major source of selling goods and service. Simply stated, no business person worth that name can fail but seek ways to take advantage of information technology to improve his business.

Politicians and government workers must pay particulate attention to computers and information technology. All politicians ought to do what we do over here: always go to evening classes to learn about new technology. I remember when personal computers came out in the early 1980s. I went back to a community college to learn about it. When the internet came out, I went to take classes on how to use it. When any new office program is added to computers I go to take a course on it. If Microsoft adds a new program to its Windows, off I go take a course on how to use it. Learning is an unending exercise.

Our leaders and politicians ought to be in a forever learning mode. There is no longer any such thing as an end to education. One must learn for however long one lives.

There ought to be evening classes in every town where one can go and learn new things. If bored, instead of drinking the poison of alcohol or over eating why not go to your local community college and take a class on something you do not know? Become a life long learner. Life is fun and exciting if one is always learning something new and different.

Our leaders in Nigeria ought to be required to become computer literate and Internet savvy. For one thing, that would make them learn to type so that they do their own typing and stop relying on typists and secretaries. (Not long ago, a Nigerian friend faxed me hand written material to type for him. Here we have it, a younger man expected me to type his materials for him. Why? Because he knows I type very fast. So I asked him: why don’t you go learn how to type? He said that he has a typist that he pays to type his materials for him and that she is out of town hence he wanted me to type the urgent material he needed typed. I told him to go learn how to type and buy a computer…he did not have one… and join the information age. That was the last I heard from the coxcomb. He is too important to type. To him, only lowly typists type. What an idiot. He excludes himself from access to a lot of information available to those who have access the World Wide Web. What a pity.)

All politicians and government officials ought to know how to type and use computers or they should be fired from their jobs. A permanent secretary does not need a secretary to type for him; he ought to type his own materials. We do not need to make these idle people more idle than they already are.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

November 11, 2005

PS: With this lecture, I end my self imposed task of giving thirty lectures on politics and business for Nigerians. I hope that you found these essentially freshman level lectures useful. Should you seek more advanced information on any of the topics that I covered, please go study them at your local universities. And when you are sufficiently trained, please share your knowledge with our people. The level of ignorance I see in our people is unacceptable. Whoever knows something ought to share it with the rest of us. We can learn from each other.

I will edit and add references and bibliography to these thirty lectures and publish them as a monograph on Nigeria. The edited version should be ready by early next year. You can order it from: [email protected]

I will be in touch with you in January, 2006, when I start my proposed weekly lectures on African countries. Each week, I will focus on an African country until I have done 52 African countries.

May the struggle for the liberation of the minds of Africans continue!

Cheers.

Ozodi

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Ozodi Osuji Lectures #29: Introduction to Labor Relations

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- In the work force are two types of people, the owners of business (and their agents called professional managers) and the workers.

Management represents the owners of capital. The working stiff is used by management to accomplish the organization’s goal of making profits for the owners of capital. In Marxist terms, the bourgeoisie owns the means of production (capital, labor). But labor does not consider itself owned by the Bourgeoisie. Labor sees its self as an independent class of workers, selling their skills and being paid well for them.

Management and labor see things from different light. Management sees labor as a means to an end, to producing goods and services in the most efficient manner. Management wants to make profits for the organization’s owners. To management, labor is not different from capital, but is means to an end. Management, in fact, would replace labor and use impersonal equipment, such as robots, to do its work, for people are too messy and demand too much psychological attention. As Max Weber would say, labor ought to be machinery, like a factory operated as a means of production and not complain about being misused.

Alas workers are human beings and have feelings and must complain about the quality of their relationship with their employers.

When the industrial revolution began in England, around 1746, and laborers were gathered to work in emergent factories, they were subjected to inhumane working conditions. They were often worked sixteen hours a day. They were paid very little. They were not even making enough moneys to support their families.

Talking about families, sometimes the workers families were laboring along side them. Women and children, as young as twelve years old, worked in mines and factories and worked twelve hour days and died young.

It was the poor working conditions that set the early utopian socialists like Charles Fourier, Joseph Proudhon, Robert Owen etc talking about the need to organize labor and prevent their exploitation. Later in the 19th century, Karl Marx and others entered the fray and hijacked the budding movement to improve the conditions of labor and began talking globally about how the proletariat ought to rise up and take over the means of production.

Marx and later V.I. Lenin, in fact, came to a point where they did not respect the ability of labor to know what is good for it. Left to themselves, Lenin believed that labor could only rise to trade union consciousness, where they struggled for the improvement of their working life. That was not good enough. What was needed, as Lenin saw it, was for elite that understands the exploitation of society by the rich to engage in a revolution on behalf of ignorant laborers. The party vanguard was to take over the governance of society and create an equal society on earth.

The Bolshevik party, the communist party is to act as a vanguard and take over society and create a communist society where no one exploited any one else. Trade union consciousness is not good enough, moreover, in his book, Imperialism, Lenin pointed out how Western imperialists went to other parts of the world and exploited their labor and used their wealth to bribe labor in the imperial country and made it acquiesce to its own oppression.

American capitalists, for example, went to Latin America and paid the peons there pennies to work in their plantations and made tons of profits. They brought the profits that they made overseas home and used that money to improve the living condition of American labor. Thus, it came to pass that an American factory worker in Detroit who literally cannot write his name is paid so much money that he lives like the aristocrats of yesteryears. He drives a pink Cadillac and no longer feels oppressed by the owners of capital. He lives in a house, has all the modern amenities of living and cannot possibly see him self as oppressed. He aligns himself with his oppressor and both of them then oppress non Americans.

Nike builds a shoe factory in India and worked children, some as young as ten years old, twelve hours a day and paid then a few rupees. It brings the shoes those oppressed children made and sold them in America. American workers are given opportunity to live decent lives and no longer see themselves as oppressed by the owners of capital like Nike. That is, labor is bought by the owners of capital.

Communists, therefore, did not like the emerging trade unions of the late 19th century, for they saw them as in cahoots with the owners of capital.

In the meantime, labor unions emerged. These unions emerged to look after the interest of labor, within the employment situation. They agitated for improved working conditions for labor. Where the owners of capital would like to work labor until it drops dead, unions wanted them to improve labors working condition, perhaps, reduce work time to eight hours and pay labor living wages.

The owners of capital naturally resented labor unions. In the United States, the owners of capital formed an unholy alliance with the political sector and used the police to harass labor unions. The law outlawed unions and arrested those who organized for the improvement of labor. Those who called for strikes and industrial shutdowns were seen as the enemies of the state, arrested and prosecuted. Nevertheless, the struggle continued. Mr. Dale Bumpers and his followers in the emerging trade union movement kept risking police harassment until eventually they were permitted to form unions legally.

Franklyn Delano Roosevelt came to power in 1933. He borrowed quite a bit from the views of communists, as well as the views of John Maynard Keynes and embarked on what he called New Deal. Here, he tried to use the power of the state to correct known capitalist cycles of boom and burst, inflation and depression (via taxation policy, monetary policy, fiscal policy etc) and using public spending to help reduce unemployment. Working with Congress, he enacted the Wagner Act that, for the first time, established the relationships between labor and management. First, the Act made labor unions legal. Now labor is allowed to organize in the work force and reach agreements with its employers on working conditions. It set the eight hour work day and forty hour work week. Other Acts of Congress and regulations by OSHA required improved working conditions for labor.

Labor unions are now legal in most parts of the world. Essentially, these are organizations of labor demanding improved wages and working conditions from the owners of industry. Those who sell their labor for a living want to be treated decently on the job.

In advanced bourgeois society, the owners of capital are seldom in the work place. The millions of share holders of IBM, AT&T;, and General Motors etc are not at the worksite. Instead, the owners of capital (stock holders) hire professional managers to help them run their businesses. Thus, the Board of Directors hire a president and chief executive officer to run their business, who, in turn, hires a management team: vice presidents etc and those help him work for the owners of capital and make profits for them.

Labor then no longer deals directly with the owners of capital but with their surrogates, the management team. Labor must now negotiate with management for improved working conditions.

Whereas in the past labor had to deal with Mr. Ford of Ford motors in Detroit, it now must deal with the professional management team that runs that company.

Management wants to make profits for the owners of capital. Labor wants improved working conditions and good pay. Too good a pay means sharing all the profit made by the company.

If all the profit of a company is given to labor, in improved pay, it follows that the owners of capital would not make any profit, no dividend, and no capital gains. If the owners of capital do not make handsome profit, they would withdraw their capital and the company would go under.

It is yet to be seen if labor can manage companies. Cooperates are generally small scale affairs.

The salient point is that there is always tension between management and labor. This is so because they have different goals. Management wants profits for the owners of capital and labor wants to take that money and run. Therefore, both sides are at a loggerhead.

The process of forming labor unions in the work place has been streamlined. According to labor laws, labor is authorized to form labor unions. The process is very simple. If workers feel that they are not well treated by management they organize and call on the appropriate authorities from the ministry of labor to come in and hold an election at their work place. In the USA, this outfit is called the National Labor Relations Board. They come in and hold election and if a majority of the workers vote for union, they are authorized to form a union. Management, generally, does not like unions and in most cases would do everything in its power to prevent unionization, as Wal-Mart is allegedly doing in Canada, as I write.

The union meets and elects its officers, president, secretary, shop representatives etc and the leaders of the union call on management to negotiate a contract with them. The contract is to specify their working conditions on paper. This would mean that management is no longer free to hire and fire and pay workers as it chooses or promote whomever it wants; now it has to go by such things as seniority, which according to management translates to mediocrity.

As already observed, management resists labor unions for where labor is organized the work place becomes like a government bureaucracy and from then on it takes ten workers to do what one worker ought to be doing. Thus there is a struggle between management and labor. But, intimately, they write a contract based on the demands of labor and what management thinks that it could live with and still make profits for the owners of capital.

MEDIATION

Sometimes the process of writing contracts is protracted and often breaks down as the two sides are unable to agree. At that stage both sides may opt to hire a mediator to mediate their difference.

ARBITRATION

If mediation fails they may obtain an arbitrator from the government who then helps to write a contract that he thinks is fair to all concerned. Both sides must accept the resultant contract. But before they reach arbitration they negotiate long and hard.

STRIKES

Sometimes, labor exercises its option of going on strike. Or it engages in work slow downs where it throws the books on management. (If you really followed procedures and rules nothing would get done in the work place.)

CONTRACT

Labor’s contract with management specify such things as wages for positions, how people are hired and fired, and working conditions, whether benefits like health insurance are given, and Pension plans. And others. The most annoying stipulation in these contracts is the issue of seniority. Labor wants folks to be promoted on the bases of how long they have been on the job. But management knows that longevity is not correlated with knowledge and expertise.

I went into an industry and was promoted to the top position within five years, whereas there were people who had worked there for over thirty years. Dedication and expertise ought to count for something. But labor does not see it that way. It wants what it calls fairness, to elevate senior people to top paying positions. Well, senior people might be dead wood and would drag the business under.

Ultimately, a contract is drawn and during its duration (say three to five years) all agree to abide by its terms. Both management and labor agree to be guided by its terms. If an employee feels unfairly treated by his supervisors, he talks to his union representative and the rep goes to bat for him or her. He talks to the supervisor and tries to straighten ruffled feathers.

Grievance procedures are followed and the problem is resolved. In unionized situations, it is generally difficult to fire labor. The work situation becomes like a government bureaucracy where it might take years to let go an unproductive worker. In the meantime, the unproductive worker is paid and this contributes to inefficiency in the allocation of the businesses resources.

Labor unions are of many kinds. There are industrial unions that encompass those in a certain industry (say those working in certain industry, such as those working for auto producers) and trade unions encompassing those who belong to the same trade such as the American Medical Association, a trade union of American doctors looking after doctors interests. (The AMA is a powerful interest group, it largely worked to Kill Bill and Hilary Clinton’s attempt to give every American medical insurance; it works to reduce admissions to medical schools, so as to control the supply of labor/doctors hence increase the price demand pays for medical services…like my esteemed guide, Milton Friedman, I am against all unions that make it difficult to enter certain professions; let universities admit all qualified medical students and produce tons of medical doctors and therefore let the cost of doctors go down; I see no reason why a medical doctor, who essentially is a technician with limited education should earn more than a truly educated person, a physicist or micro biologist.)

We shall not dwell on the specifics of labor unions for this paper is not meant for professional mangers or trade unionists but is meant to give the general public some idea of what labor unions are and what they do.

We can talk about the various forms of strikes, boycotts, works slow downs, scabs and so on, but that is not going to do us any good. What the reader needs to know is that workers are allowed by law to organize and work out a contract with management for improved working conditions. He also needs to know that the desire of workers must be matched with the desire for business to make profits. If all profits are given to labor then management disappears. There is no evidence that labor can manage industries. I can tell you from experience that there is a difference between labor and management.

The average Joe Blow worker goes to work and puts in his eight hours shift and goes home. Management often works sixteen hour days, and sometimes even on weekends. Management is working and thinking about work for twenty four hours, trying to make the business make profit and survive. Believe me; management deserves the big bucks it makes.

It takes good ideas to make businesses work. It takes risk taking to make businesses work. Labor seldom has good ideas. A manager may stay up all night doing what needs to be done and yet work eight or more hours during the day and not expect additional remunerations. If labor puts in on extra hour of work, it demands over time pay and, if not paid, cries to the entire world that it is exploited. Well, some of us regularly work fourteen hour days and are not paid for our extra efforts and do not make noise about it. You are reading this piece as my free gift to you. I stayed up at night to write it and still work during the day. No one paid me for doing this. I did it because I think that it needs to be done, that we need to share information and perchance enable Nigerians to start governing themselves well. This is called leadership and managerial behavior.

A leader sees a problem and tries to solve it and not ask what is in it for him. Labor asks what is in it for it. There is a distinction between labor and management. I would promote to management the chap willing to dedicate his life to hard work, to work at least twelve hour work days and I do not care what his age is. I could care less if a chap is fifty years old if he is not dedicated and hard working I would not even hire him in the first place. I am a task oriented manager and would fire you in a second if you do not do what you were hired to do.

CONCLUSION

All of us need to understand a bit about labor unions, how they came into being and what they exist to do. We all have to learn to coexist with labor unions.

There are exploitative owners of capital and their surrogates, management, so in some situations we really need labor unions, although we must not have them everywhere, for they tend to generate inefficiency, For example, I think that academic departments are generally inefficient. If I had my choice, I would make all political scientists go take management courses, up to MBA level. This way, they can teach future politicians how to manage the state rather than merely teach scholastic political science. True, we need to know what Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, etc said about politics and teach them to students, but we also need to teach students the practical art of managing the state, management. My wish is not going to happen for the various unions of university teachers would not permit such an innovation to occur. Political scientists keep teaching students the old scholastic political science that guarantees unemployment for them.

Labor unions are here to stay with us and we must understand them. A course or two in industrial relations is a must for all managers and, in my opinion, for all politicians.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

November 10, 2005

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Ozodi Osuji Lectures #28: Introduction to Organizational Behavior

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- The field of organizational behavior is also called organizational psychology. Psychology studies how people think and behave. In this case, how people in organizations think and behave.

Let me ask you: how do you behave in groups, be it in informal groups, such as your friends, and formal groups, such as work groups? Do you behave differently when you are alone and when you in crowds? For most people the answer is yes.

As individuals, human beings tend to think about their behaviors and think about what they are going to do. They tend to think about the consequences of their behaviors. They choose carefully what they are going to do. On the other hand, when they are among their friends, in groups, they tend to, more or less, suspend their personal judgments and do what they think that other group members would approve. In fact, in some group instances, if the leader of the group says that a twelve inches long ruler is ten inches long, many of the members of the group would agree with him. Some will know that he is wrong and still feel influenced by the crowd to go along with the leader’s lies; others, in fact, will automatically go with the leader and unreflectively go where he wants them to go, they will agree with his perception.

And we are talking about human behavior in informal groups. In more formal groups, such as work groups, where individual’s livelihood are earned, the pull to go along with the crowd and its leader is even more intense. If you disagree with the opinion leaders of the work group, you could be ostracized and isolated. You could become a marked man, a pariah who is not rewarded with organizational rewards.

Most people know the fact that he who stands apart from the work group is not positively reinforced. To avoid such punishment, people either keep quiet or go along with the group’s direction. (Those with conscience, feel guilty, then go home and try to put their guilty conscience to sleep by getting drunk.)

Group behavior has been studied extensively by social psychologists. Shortly after the Second World War, Adorno et al wrote a book called the Authoritarian Personality. They showed how the authoritarian personality is motivated to please the group and particularly the leaders of groups. To these psychoanalysts, the authoritarian character feels inferior and wants to seem superior and strong and admires the seeming powerful group leader and seeks his approval. He conforms to the group’s norms, even if they are irrational, so that the group members would see him as strong and acceptable.

Other observers were interested in finding out why ordinary Germans, particularly church going ones, obeyed Hitler’s orders and killed those who did nothing offensive to them. These seeming nice Germans killed Six million Jews, twenty five million Russians and altogether were responsible for the death of fifty million human beings. Why did they do it? Are they different from the rest of us? So go find out.

You may sit there and fancy yourself a morally developed human being who would not kill others if told to do so, but is that so?

Stanley Milligram and his group at Stanford University performed social psychological experiments where they had two groups of students do two different jobs. Some were made prisoners and others guards. The guards were encouraged to give electric shocks to the prisoners. You know what? Most of the guards (students) did as they were told to do. In other words, they inflicted pain to those who may, in fact, have been their friends just because authority figures told them to do so.

The implication of this research is that if told to do something by leaders, particularly in group setting, that the average human being is most likely going to do it. Perhaps, a few persons have the courage of their convictions and will resist evil even unto death. Over ninety percent of humanity will do what they were told to do, good or bad, particularly if their peer groups are cheering them on.

In the Southern USA, white kids would jump on an innocent black person and beat him up or even kill him. They usually do so in groups but never as alone individuals. Indeed, they usually do it to alone black persons, but seldom to a group of black persons.

When I was in college, in the 1970s, at night I would be walking down the streets of Eugene, Oregon and a bunch of white boys, usually semi drunk, would drive by and yell at me: Nigger and sped off. But they never did that when I was with other black kids of my age. Nor did individual white kids do that to me. It was always when they were in large enough groups and apparently believed that they could beat a lone black person that these people acted out.

What does this mean to you? It means that human beings tend to act evilly in groups and that they are cowardly and tend to need the company of other persons before they engage in certain evil behaviors. To a black person, it means that if you want to survive in a racist society that you have to walk in the group of other black persons because you would not be attacked by a pack of wild white predators. In a pack you and other black persons would be able to defend yourself.

In this light, on my college campus, a 99% white campus, if a black student sees another black student he gravitates towards him and tries to become his temporary pal. He wants to feel safe in numbers. If he is in the cafeteria and buys his food, he looks around for another black face and brings his tray to that brother’s seat and sits with him. If he walks into one of those large classes, those held in auditoriums of over two hundred students, he looks for a black face and comes to sit with him. Around other blacks, he feels safe. Alone he could be abused by the wild animals he lives with.

Lesson number one is: you should always have friends when you are in enemy territory. When you are surrounded by enemies, you had better watch out for threats to your life, be paranoid, be suspicious, imagine yourself being attacked, real or not, and seek ways to defend yourself. Be tense and uptight and guarded and be ready to defend yourself when you are attacked.

This is the life of the young black American; he is always feeling attacked by white society and defending himself, thus exhibiting social or what is called functional paranoia.

Paranoia saps a lot of the individual’s energy. In paranoia, one is in a state of fear and anxiety and is guarded and defensive. In this state of mind, one is not relaxed and cannot concentrate on abstract thinking. The so-called differences in the races IQ scores is probably explained by the fear, anxiety and paranoia that the predatory white race makes blacks live in.

I have gone off the mark a bit, but I did so rather deliberately. Let me return to the subject at hand, group psychology.

People tend to behave differently in groups than they do when alone. This point has to be known by you. Your co-worker is more likely to side with an unjust boss and agree with him that you did what you did not do and what he knows that you did not do. This is crowd psychology. You are likely to do the same, too.

Organizational behavior studies many aspects of human behavior in groups. In groups, some persons avoid others (shy person do this a lot), others approach others (out going persons do so).

Those who tend to avoid other persons (approach avoidant behavior) tend to be anxious persons. They tend to want other people to like them and fear social rejection. When they anticipate that other people would reject them, they withdraw from them. In social isolation, they avert, or think that they avert social rejection. In social isolation, they think that they retain their positive self concept and its positive self image. Thus, social withdrawal is a maneuver with which the avoidant personality, the shy person, employs to retain his exaggerated big self concept and its big self image. He is trying to maintain a neurotic superior self. In avoiding other people he has separated from them. In separating from other people he retains his separated, ego self. In doing so, he maintains separation from the whole, often called God. In doing so, he keeps himself in this world. In union, on the other hand, one escapes from this world of separated existence.

As George Kelly teaches us, the self concept and its self image are conceptual. It is the individual that uses his biological and social building blocks to construct his self concept and self image and then defends them with the various ego defense mechanisms as if they are real.

Karen Horney tells us that neurotics invent ideal self concepts/self images and defend them with the various ego defense mechanisms, trying to make those false big selves seem real, a losing battle, since the false cannot be real, no matter what one does. Defense makes the ego self-concept seem real. What seems real is not real. The real does not need defense to make it real.

Alfred Adler tells us that the neurotic feels inferior and rejects the inferior self and compensates with a fictional superior self and tries to live “As if” he is the false, superior self. He feels fear and anxiety because he is trying to accomplish the impossible, make a false big self seem real. As Adler sees it, and my experience teaches me, the normal person accepts himself as the same and equal with all people, no matter their rank and status in life. The president of the country is not more important that the beggar on the street. The healthy person simultaneously works for his and for social interests.

There is another self in us that does the conceptualization. There is a conceptualizer in us who conceptualizes the self concept, self image and personality and attempts to become them. As Buddha noted, the conceptualizer is not his self concept.

You are not your self concept; you are not your self image. You are not your thoughts; you are not the ideas, good or bad, that you have about you.

Who then are you? You are the thinker of thoughts, the idealizer of ideas, the conceptualizer of concepts and the observer of the empirical world.

Who is that thinking self? From a scientific perspective, none of us knows who our real self is. Henry Bergson, the French philosopher, said that there is a life force in each of us. In that light, the life force in us is the thinker of our thoughts? Good.

How about if we say that there is a spirit in us who enters our bodies, or seems to have done so, any way, and thinks through the auspices of our physical bodies, particularly our brains?

I know that it is difficult to prove the reality of spirit; nevertheless, there are those who believe that the real self in us is spirit, unified spirit that manifests as separated spirit in the word of illusions. Enough of metaphysics; let us return to ego organizational psychology

There are those who consistently approach other people rather than avoid them. Those who avoid other persons, shy persons, seldom make good candidates for leadership. It is those who approach other people for friendship and are not afraid of social rejection that tends to make good materials for leadership.

In group settings, the leader is most likely to be extroverted and out going, while the led tends to, in different degrees not be as socially outgoing as the leader.

Of course, occasionally, some introspective, reflective introvert overcomes his seeming natural tendency to social withdrawal and becomes out going and competes for leadership positions. But ordinarily, it is the outgoing, self-confident person that tends to compete for leadership on the job: be a supervisor, manager and president of the work organization.

So what is your self assessment: socially withdrawing or socially outgoing? Do you see how your basic lifestyle contribute or hinder your leadership abilities?

It is not all who talk about leadership that can become leaders. In fact, if you make the shy kid a leader, a supervisor on the job, he may panic with anxiety and start drinking to reduce his anxiety. Many a shy person actually turns down promotions to managerial levels, for he does not want to displease other people.

To be a leader one must be assertive and tell other people the truth and not be bothered whether they accept or reject one. If one is preoccupied with others acceptance and fear social rejection, one is not going to be assertive hence is not going to make good managerial material.

(The passive person generally allows other persons to push him or her around. He tends to be a door mat. At some point, however, he gets tired of being pushed around and being taken advantage of, for people tend to take advantage of the seeming weak and explodes in anger. He engages in either passive aggressive behavior or out rightly becomes aggressive. In passive aggression response, he does a thing that would defeat the purpose of the boss he thinks is pushing him around. In pure aggression he acts destructively. He literally goes berserk and amuck and destroys things, even harms people, to show that he is a man and that no person has a right to push him around. The quiet, seemingly harmless man can turn around and kill someone in a fit of rage. The alternative to passive dependency, passive aggressive and aggressive behavior is assertiveness. In assertiveness one simply states the facts as one sees them and does what serves ones and other people’s interests, not in an either/or manner but both. One isn’t afraid of social rejection. In assertiveness, one is fully alive, for one protects ones interests and does not permit others to walk all over one. One is not a pleaser like passive persons. Pleasers seldom serve their interests, beside other people take advantage of pleasers.)

Abraham Maslow, as we noted earlier, talked about the correlation between self acceptance, self actualization and high productivity. Persons who have met their lower order needs tend to be highly productive.

What motivates people to work hard? Is it money, is it the desire for social belonging, and is it desire to do what interests one?

Many organizational psychologists have had their heart’s fill speculating on this subject. I think that real people have mixed motives, certainly, that is the case with me. I work for money. I work to get social belonging. I work to do what I like doing. I work to actualize my real self (and what is that?).

Simply stated, people do what they do for multitude of reasons. It is never only one reason why people do what they do. But just so you know, organizational psychology looks at people’s motivations for working and wants to know what makes them work very hard.

What this means to the manager is that he must understand how to motivate his employees. He must know whether it is money (high salary) that would make them work harder, group belonging, self actualization or other putative motivations?

People are different and what motivates one individual may not be what motivates another. I wake up at 4.30AM to type this lecture. I spend three hours doing so. Then I go to my real work and work for ten hours. So why did I deprive myself of sleep to give this lecture and give it for free? Do I have desire for other people’s attention, desire to seem intelligent and knowledgeable, desire for social recognition, desire for money (what money?), desire to help improve my fellow country men’s knowledge?

What do you think? I think that the answer is all the above. As a typical human being, I think that I am motivated by all that motivates human beings, some noble some base. Eco human, all too human, Nietzsche said.

The average worker is motivated by a complex system of motivations and the manager must learn how to relate to those motivations. If he is Machiavellian, the manager might even manipulate his employees’ motivations.

Suppose that I know that you like recognition and attention. I give it to you. I praise you no end. Your little ego swells up. You feel important and do exactly what I ask you to do. I have exploited your psychopathology. Leaders do exploit the masses psychopathology.

Let us see how this works. Go read Adolf Hitler’s Mien Kampf and Table Talks (edited by that English racist, Oxford scholar, Trevor Roper). Hitler learned from Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology that the average human being feels inferior. The exigencies of living on earth makes human beings feel inadequate and inferior. (Hitler is, of course, talking about himself. He was a neurotic and felt inordinately inferior. He then projected what he saw in him to other people. We all do this; it is called projective identification.)

Hitler reasoned that people feel inferior and compensate with superiority. People want to feel superior. But, in fact, they are not superior to any one. In reality, we are all the same and equal. Nevertheless, we still want to feel superior to our neighbors. So Hitler decided to manipulate that human psychopathology. He said: I am going to tell my people, Germans, that they are superior to their neighbors, Slavs, Jews. Even though they are not superior to any one, because they secretly desire to seem superior to others, they will agree with me and do what I ask them to do because I made them feel superior. I told them a big lie and said it with seeming confidence as if it is true, said it authoritatively they believe it. So Hitler told his people the big lie and they did as he asked them to do, conquer their supposed inferior neighbors.

I was in Biafra during the war. Though a boy, an observant boy, I observed the leaders of Biafra try telling Igbos that they are superior to other Nigerians.

I was born at Lagos and grew up with kids from all over Nigeria. I know that the Igbo kid is exactly like the Yoruba, Edo, Hausa and other Nigerian kids. I know so because I played with them on the streets of Lagos. No one is better than other people. Ojukwu and his inner circle were telling Igbos lies when they tried to make them feel better than other Nigerians.

In the meantime, those lies were bought by many Igbos. They went to war to kill those they thought were inferior Hausa soldiers. To their surprise, the Hausas proved better soldiers than them. That fact ought to teach them not to believe lies. But, alas, human beings are prone to lies.

I still see Igbos wanting to feel better than other Nigerians. I shake my head and wonder when we would all learn that we are all the children of one God, hence one family and learn to love one another. We are all the same and equal and whoever tells you that you are superior or inferior to other people is telling you lies; run from him. Only listen to the person who tells you the truth, who tells you that Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, all people are the same and equal. Love all people if you will feel happy and peaceful.

The point though is that leaders can manipulate the human tendency to believe lies. We all feel inadequate and listen to political demagogues who tell us that our tribe or race is superior to other tribes and or races. Their lies give us the illusion of superiority and power. In reality, no individual person and no tribe or race is better than others. But truth is not sexy, lies are sexy.

Organizations and societies in general deliberately tell their members lie. Consider wars. Before nations go to war they prepare their people to kill their enemies. Suddenly the Chinese becomes China man, gook; the Italian becomes wog, the German becomes Jerry, the black man becomes nigger and the white person becomes honky.

The idea is to put your enemy down, to dehumanize and demonize him, and in doing so you make it easier for your soldiers to kill them and not feel guilty and remorseful.

If you permit your troops to see the enemy soldiers as real human beings and they kill them they are going to have lots of emotional problems. American troops, at some point knew that the Vietnamese were human beings, and innocent too, yet they killed them. They came home to suffer lots of emotional problems (these days we call it PTSD post traumatic stress disorder, a cute psychiatric name; methinks that they are suffering from qualms of conscience).

For our present purposes, human beings have both individual and group psychology. Leaders must have some working knowledge of individual and group psychology. Supervisors and managers, on the job, and politicians must all have some working understanding of human psychology and decide to manipulate it or use it positively to increase productivity.

If I know that you have low self esteem and need some one to give you attention, to accept you, before you feel good about yourself, I will accept you and give you attention. The chances are that you would work hard for me. But in my mind, I am not manipulating your psychoneurosis?

It all has to do with intention, is it not so? Just have good and loving intentions towards all your employees and those you lead and never mind if you are exploiting any one. Who knows what is ultimately good or bad? If in my conscious mind, I believe that I am doing what I am doing out of love, if it turns out that I have unconscious motives that I do not know, so be it.

In the end, the goal of organizational behavior is to understand human and social psychology and use it effectively to generate an efficient and productive workforce.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

November 9, 2005

Posted by Administrator at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #27: Introduction to Management and Supervision

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- The study of management is actually a new phenomenon. This is very astonishing considering how long people have talked about leadership and management. There was actually no sustained study of management until the twentieth century.

Barbour, in England, did say a few things about management towards the end of the nineteenth century, but besides him, there was no literature on management apart from those written in the twentieth century.

TIME AND MOTION STUDIES

During the early parts of the twentieth century, Frederick Taylor began what he called Time and Motion studies. Essentially, he believed that he could figure out how many optimal motions it would require to do something and how long it would take an efficient worker to do that thing.

How many movements would it require to lift a brick and set it up on a wall and plaster it? If it were possible to figure out the optimal times it would take to accomplish a task, Taylor reasoned that it was possible to select the right types of persons who can do a certain job optimally and train them and that they would do it in the most efficient manner. He went around measuring how quickly a job could be done by those who seem to have aptitude for certain jobs and proposed to enable employers hire the best persons to do the said jobs.

For example, how many words would the best typists type in a minute? 100 words a minute is very common among good typists. Some even have typed double that amount. The average typist many type 60 words a minute. Perhaps, those who were meant to work as typists are those who could type 80 or more words a minute? If so, Taylor proposed that employers should hire those best able to do what they needed done.

Taylor called what he was doing scientific management. Although what he was doing is no longer applicable to day’s technology, he, in fact, began the effort to study management in a scientific manner. This is very strange given peoples interest in leadership. Indeed, leadership itself was not really studied until the twentieth century. Even such fields as political science, the study of politics, apart from the scattered writings of a few political philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, etc are a twentieth century phenomenon.

Frederick Taylor was a pioneer and his legacy is that he initiated the study of management as a field of independent study. Mr. Peter Ducker who originally trained as a journalist and political scientist began to write about management in the 1930s. Drucker actually pioneered the academic study of management.

This is amazing for when we go to schools of management like Harvard school of management we tend to think that they have always existed. These schools are, in fact, post Second World War phenomenon. That is, they are less than 100 years old.

A field that is that young, a field that fits into a human being’s life span cannot have developed good traditions and certainly cannot be said to have wisdom in it. No wonder the field of management is filled with passing fads.

HAWTHORN EXPERIMENT

After Mr. Taylor, others began to contribute to the field of management. The famous Hawthorn electric power study by Mayo showed that productivity was linked to the environment of work. The women who worked in the plant produced high or low, in accordance with the ambiance of the place. The electric lighting, the color of the walls, the interpersonal atmosphere of the work place and other factors contributed to the efficiency of work. That is to say that whereas Taylor was correct that we could figure out the best way to do something and hire those with aptitude in doing it, to do it well, nevertheless, other factors like ambiance come into play.

Folks like Mouton, Herzberg, Mary Follet, Chris Agyris, W.W. Whyte, David Riesman etc contributed the fact that other factors affected productivity. Those who are doing what they like doing and have aptitude in doing them tend to do them better than others. If a person has interest in what he is doing, he tends to do it better than those who do not have interests in what they are doing.

ABRAHAM MASLOW’S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

Abraham Maslow, in his hierarchy of needs study, showed us that people are at different levels in satisfying certain needs we all seem to have. As he sees it, people tend to have five basic needs: physiological, safety, security, social acceptance, self esteem and self actualization.

Self actualizing persons tend to be the most productive persons. But to get to self actualization, the individual must have satisfied his lower order needs. He must have satisfied his physiological needs for food, medications, clothes and shelter. When those are met, the individual must seek to satisfy his security needs. If he feels that he is relatively safe then he worries about social acceptance. Do other people like and accept him? If he feels socially accepted and esteemed he worries about his own self acceptance. Does he like himself or does he have low opinion of himself? If he has what Carl Rogers called positive self regard, he proceeds to ask: what is that I enjoy doing most? Who am I and what does that real me enjoy doing? If he figures out who he is, in fact, and what that real self likes doing, and throws himself into doing it, he tends to be highly productive. In other words, highly productive persons tend to be self realizing and actualizing persons. But before one can be self actualizing one must have satisfied ones basic needs.

(Extrapolating from Maslow’s schema, one can say that Nigerians have not met their physiological, security, and other needs and this probably explains their low productivity?)

THEORY X AND Y MANAGEMENT

Other observers contributed other ideas to management. McGovern (?) believed that there are two types of managerial behavior: those who practice what he called Theory X and those who practice what he called theory Y.

Theory X folks believe that human beings are inherently lazy and as such need to be closely supervised otherwise they would not work hard. Managers who endorse this pattern of management tend to closely monitor what their employees are doing. They tend to punish those who do not do what they are expected to do.

Those who embrace theory Y tend to see human beings as good and as needing little or no supervision. People are said to do the right thing if given the opportunity to do so. Thus, such supervisors tend to delegate power and authority to their subordinates and leave them unsupervised to do what they were hired to do. This does not mean that such supervisors are liaise faire and do not care for productivity, but that they trust their employees to do the right thing. Apparently, there is a self fulfilling prophecy here: people tend to do what you expect of them. Expect them to work hard unsupervised and they do so and expect them to be lazy if not supervised and they are lazy.

In the real world, people combine X and Y tendencies. Workers need supervision and monitoring, they also need to be left alone. It is not an either or situation. If you leave workers alone they probably will be less productive and if you over supervise them they may not be very productive either. Finding the right balance is the art of management.

TASK AND EMOTION MANAGERS

Fiedler believes that there are essentially two types of managers: task oriented managers and emotion oriented managers.

Task oriented managers enjoy being given tasks and told to go accomplish them. They tend to judge themselves by what they do. Such managers tend to fit well to management by objectives (MBOs). They like to solve problems.

Conversely, are those managers who are over invested in the feelings of their employees? They want to make peace and make every person in the work place feel good about himself or herself. They do their best to get people to become relaxed. Whereas task oriented managers may not even notice the feelings of employees, all they want is that employees do what they are paid to do, emotion oriented managers are invested in how well the employees feel while doing their jobs; they sooth ruffled feathers.

Mary Parker Follet and Herzberg contributed immensely to interpersonal aspect of management theory. They taught managers to make sure that employees get along with each other and taught employers to respect and get along with their employees, for respected employees tend to work harder.

William Ouchi, in the late 1970s, contributed to management theory by showing us how the Japanese managed their businesses and how we could copy a bit of their style. As he saw it, the Japanese are less likely to treat employees as objects to be used and discarded, as is done in the West. Instead, employees are seen as members of the family. The employer sees himself as the parent helping his children, employees, do their jobs well. Ouchi believed that this paternalistic system of management arose from the Japanese tradition of lords and servants. The Samurai and those he led formed a strong bond, working for each other. The lord protected the serfs and the serfs devoted their lives to him.

In the modern Japanese work place, the CEO is the Samurai who protected his employees. He looked after their interests, not only by paying them well but also by caring for their lives outside the work place. As result of this paternal relationship, employees devote themselves to working hard for their boss. They could come to work at 8AM and stay at work till 8PM, doing whatever needs to be done. Indeed, when work is over, they had their quality cycles meeting where they critiqued each other’s work and tried to improve on the quality of their work.

An American, Denning is said to have gone to Japan after the Second World War and taught them what is currently called Total Quality Management. Essentially, this type of management means that every employee sees those he reports to and those that report to him as his customers.

What do customers want? Customers want the best products and services at the least prices. Therefore, the employee produces goods and services that he believes that his customers, those above or underneath him, would appreciate. Every employee treats each other as customer, always striving to produce the best products for his customers and providing the best customer care services he could for other employees. This system is said to be responsible for the high quality of Japanese goods.

There are tons of approaches to management. Most of these are passing fads. Management styles come and go. For a while, the fad was transforming the work place into a democracy, what was called industrial democracy, or participatory democracy. Just imagine a work place where all voted on how to do things. This, on paper, sounds nice. The problems are that not every person equally comes up with good ideas, ideas on new product lines and or new service lines. Those who do not come up with ideas may cling to old ideas, to old product lines and resist making changes, resist investing in new products. They may, in fact, vote against new products. After all, it takes risk to invest energy and resources in new ideas and products.

It is always safe to do things the way they were done in the past. In industrial democracy, one can just see the lazy bums who are always in the majority killing new ideas by voting against them. Simply stated, it is a bad idea to have democracy in the work place.

Max Weber seems correct in stating that we need a hierarchical work organization where the few at the top, the leaders, tell the many at the bottom, the led, what to do. Those with bold ideas will always lead the timid who are afraid to come up with new ideas, new visions, new product lines, new ideas of services to be performed.

In the late 1970s, when I was in graduate school, the fad was called flat organizations. Here, folks wanted to do away with hierarchical organizations and have every employee on the same flat line. Whereas the utopians who dreamed up this nonsense did not do away with leaders, they wanted both leader and led to relate on equal basis. Good. We know that authority must be somewhat distant from the masses otherwise the masses would not accept leadership from it. The idea of flat organizations is now dead.

Then there was the idea of work enrichment. Workers are said to be bored doing routine work, so we must vary their work and give them more interesting things to do. Good idea. The problem is that workers have different skill sets. How are you going to alternate the work of an engineer and that of a janitor? It is simply impossible. How about the work of a brain surgeon and that of a nurse, can you alternate them? How exactly do you enrich jobs? Of course, you can make those doing similar jobs exchange aspects of their jobs, but you really cannot do the same thing where people’s skills are vastly different.

With the arrival of Women’s liberation movement, we were told that women need to have flex time, to come to work at different times, for example. Instead of coming to work at 8AM and leaving at 5PM, as usual, perhaps a woman could come in at 10AM when hr kids are at school, then go home when they are back from school, adjusting her time to what suits her home needs. This is a great idea, except that we run factories (assembly line) on shifts of eight hours and the individual worker is either there or not there to work a shift.

Many fads have been tried in the work place. Yours truly once wrote that since the Igbos are democratic that the work place that would suit them was a democratic one, a participatory work place. That was me in my twenties, full of youthful idealism. Now as a middle aged man, I actually do not think that the Igbos need more but less democracy. The people seem wild and need iron discipline to get them to abide by organizational rules. I want a rigid Weberian, Prussian bureaucracy to discipline the Igbos. Indeed, I want a benevolent dictatorship to whip these unruly people into some sort of shape, to make them behave as organizational men and women (ala W.W Whyte and David Riesman). They talk out of turn and insist on doing their own things and no one listens to any one or takes direction from any one. These people need military type regimentation, not democracy. This is 180 degrees change in my management philosophy. As they say, age and experience does change folks.

Fads aside, management means understanding the goals of an organization and using human and capital resources to achieve those goals. A manager is a professional who comes into an organization, studies and understands its goals, what it was established to do and agrees to achieve those goals as if they were his personal goals. He uses employees and capital resources (money, equipment) to achieve those goals. He manufactures a product, sells it and makes profit for the owners of the business.

Management, I repeat, is effort to use men and material to achieve organizational goals. Management, therefore, entails understanding human psychology, how people behave on the job, in groups and understanding where resources are to be found and obtaining them and using both to achieve organizational goals.

Within that broad definition of management, we can split it into smaller units. Thus we teach students that management entails setting goals, planning to attain those goals, organizing people to attain those goals, (in the language of political correctness coordinating people’s activities, since no one these days says that he uses others lest he seem dictatorial), monitoring the activities of subordinates and making sure that they all do what conforms to attaining the organization’s goals, monitoring finances and how it is obtained and spent, and other such things.

Management means knowing what the organization’s goals are and setting steps to attain them and using men and materials to attain them. If you do not attain the organization’s goals, do not make profit for the owners of capital, your ass is on the street.

Management is not child’s play, it is hardball affairs. It is either you make good or you are shipped out. This is not your mother’s charity house or your father’s army; it is business (or as my Chinese friends tells you, smiling while sticking it to you, no hurt feelings involved, just “bisness”).

SUPERVISION

Supervisors are those who work directly with line staff and with them achieve their unit’s sub goals within the overall organizational goals. A supervisor is a headworker, a foreman. He does what the rest of the workers are doing but has had more experience than the rest of them and shows them how to do it.

The chair person of an academic department is a supervisor. Hopefully, he has done teaching for a long time and is a tenured professor. He helps the younger professors understand teaching. He himself still teaches, perhaps, two courses per quarter, instead of the expected three courses for full time faculty.

A supervisor is not a manager. In fact, he does not really handle money or make budgetary decisions. The chair of an academic department does not even hire other faculty. The dean does that. The dean is what you might call middle management. He supervises a school and makes hiring decisions and manages the budget of his college. Top management is the president and his vice presidents. Those make the real decisions as to where the organization, university, is going, with the approval of the board of regents, of course.

Supervision entails being able to train those with less experience than one, mentor them and enable them understand the job.

A supervisor must understand the job being done, so that he teaches others how to do it. He may or may not have high leadership skills. High leadership skills entails the ability to posit goals, vision, and establish an organization to pursue that goal, obtain people and resources to achieve that goal and motivate people as they work towards that goal.

CONCLUSION

Management is often seen as that which happens in the private sector. We call public sector managers administrators. I was never able to understand this distinction until it occurred to me that public sector managers, read administrators, did not set the goals they pursued, nor can they modify those goals. The political sector, the legislators, president and even judiciary sets the goals that public civil servants attempt to achieve.

That not withstanding, a manager is a manager whether he is called administrator or something else.

Every person, including politicians, ought to understand management: how to set goals and devise ways to achieve them, using men and materials. As I see it, politicians are public managers and ought to understand management.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

November 8, 2005

Posted by Administrator at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #26: Introduction to Human Resources

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- Human resources management is generally considered the easiest part of management. Indeed, until recently it was considered a clerical and not a managerial function. Owners of business, especially factories used to stand by the door to their factories and said, you, you and you and that was all there was to hiring people. Just as they hired whoever they wanted they fired whomever they wanted to fire, no questions asked.

Perhaps the business owner did not like your look or for some reasons did not like your personality or the way you looked at him or the way he felt uncomfortable around you and you were out of the door. You had no recourse to any one for redress.

It was only in the 1930s that in the USA Congress began passing employment laws that made labor less discard-able (the Wagner Act that established the National Labor Relations Board and set the eight hour work day and overtime after that).

Human resource management is the section of the business enterprise that locates and hires qualified staff for the business. Every business has its own specialized employee needs.

Consider hospitals. It needs medical doctors (of many specialties), nurses and technicians to operate the bewildering array of equipments used in modern hospitals. Where is these specialized staff to be found? How many doctors are around town seeking employment? How many of them are specialists in say brain surgery, in Nigeria? If they are not around and you build a neurosurgery unit and want some one to operate on the brain, where do you go to find and hire him?

Are local university teaching hospitals producing brain surgeons? How much do these surgeons cost, $200 an hour? Do you have that kind of money to hire brain surgeons and have those on board or do you need to ship your patients who require brain surgery to other hospitals where brain surgery is performed?

The Human Resources Department ascertains the labor needs of employers and where they can be found. It finds out how much such labor costs (compensation) and whether the labor is willing to locate to the location where the employer does business. Take our brain surgeons. Would they want to live in the boonies, such as Owerri, or would they want to live in vibrant cities with university life, a place where they have access to the latest scientific information on the nature of the brain? If neurosurgeons are leery to live at Owerri, perhaps, there is something that human resources could do to still attract them to Owerri? How about increasing their pay? Or paying them to go to Lagos and Abuja for training, every quarter?

Human resources advertise vacancies in a business. Receives applications. Screens them and selects qualified persons for interview. The rule of the thumb is to invite five qualified applicants to interview for each available job.

The human resource manager does not do the interviewing herself (most of the people that do this job are women, so we might as well refer to them as women, this job category does not usually appeal to men since it is largely record keeping). The human resource person invites qualified applicants to an interview.

She then schedules them to be interviewed by the hiring manager, the manger or supervisor of the unit where such a person would be working.

If it is a low level position, the unit supervisor may do the entire interview by himself, perhaps, with the human resources staff sitting in. He ranks all five applicants and perhaps invites the top two for another round of interviews. Then he makes his selection decision. The person selected is informed by the human resources clerk and comes in for orientation.

For higher level positions, interviews are generally done by a team/panel interviews. The unit manager and other persons(sometimes you include one line staff in such interviews, if only to humor line staff that they are participating in making hiring decisions). The team, usually about five persons go around asking prepared questions. They rank all applicants on how they responded to them. The top two is invited to go see the hiring manager of the unit and he makes the final decision.

(In the USA, if you are black, you have probably gone through what we call employment wars. I cannot begin telling you how many times panels recommended me to the president of a university for hiring and he did not hire me. Why? There are jobs that are considered off limits to blacks at white universities. If you are black you can only go so far in racist America’s academia. Oh, every once in a while, they would have a token black vice president, such as Condoleezza Rice at Stanford University, but that is tokenism.)

When the hiring decision is made, the new employee comes in and fills out employment forms and the human resources personnel goes over with him the company’s policies and have him sign off that he received the policies handbook and understood what was written in it. He is then oriented to most aspects of the company’s operations. This may take two weeks. Thereafter, he is let lose to do the job he is hired to do.

He is placed on probation for six months, after which he is evaluated and if found satisfactory is retained, and if not, he is let go. He could be let go at any time during probation, satisfactory or not. (You are in slave-land and the slave master decides whether he is going to have you stick around or not. You had better please the man, if you want bread on your table. Please the man, keep your job and develop heart attack from repressed anger.)

Human resource keeps records on employees. This includes hiring records, benefits materials (health insurance, 401Ks, pensions etc), evaluations by supervisors, and letters of reprimands and so on.

Human sources are responsible for employee training. Every job category requires on-going training. Most businesses offer on the job training and off site training. Medical doctors, for example, must continually go receive training on new medical procedures and on how to prescribe new medications.

Human resources make sure that employees get their training needs up to date. Professionals are often required to have certain continuing education units, CEUs to be able to renew their licenses and must, therefore, be constantly trained.

I began this lecture by saying that in the past business owners used to hire and fire at will. Well, there are now umpteen laws that attempt to tell employers what to do with their employees. These personnel laws are known to human resources personnel and they advise supervisors on these laws, so that they could better deal with their troublesome employees.

Human resources are so filled with laws that it almost takes lawyers to be good human resource managers.

Human resources are increasingly becoming specialized. Within it are recruiters, compensation specialists, training specialists, organizational developers and all sorts of specialists. As we shall see when we deal with organizational psychology, human resources really boils down to figuring out ways to work well with human beings and use them to achieve organizational goals and not alienate them.

Human resources personal do such things as write each job’s description, job specification. What is expected of each position in an organization’s chart is specified. A position in an organization is a set of roles expected of that position and the employee is fitted into the role and must know what is expected of him and do them. If not he is let go.

Human resources folks go about the business asking those who actually do the jobs what they do and then write up what each position does and when a new employee is hired, he is given his job description, job specification etc and signs that he received it hence knows what he is supposed to do, what doing he would be evaluated for.

These days’ human resources handle employee benefits records. If the company has health insurance, the personnel manager manages it, that is, interfaces with the insurance company providing it. If the company has dental plan, the human resource folks manage it. If the company has pension plans, the human resource folks manage it. All these are essentially clerical functions.

The vice president of human resources attends the management team meetings. He gives management feedback on where to obtain qualified labor, its compensation and how that affects management’s future expansion plans.

If you are planning to build an engineering school, you had better know whether there are qualified engineers to teach at it and whether there are students with strong background in mathematics, physics and chemistry available to go to your school. Management needs to know about these things before it expends money in wide goose chasing.

It is probably unlikely that Nigeria has the capacity for nuclear physics and engineering in more than a few centers in the country, given the low level of the country’s technology, and poor education system. How many Nigerian students are versed in physics and mathematics? Does any one even keep such records?

Human resource managers almost always attend this or that meeting with technical managers, in other units, and with top management. These people are record keepers and their services seem invaluable.

However, it must be noted that in small businesses the owner is generally the human resource manager! In small sole proprietorships, even partnerships resources are not available to have human resource managers. At best, one trusted secretary is mandated with the task of human resources, while still doing her clerical duties.

Human resource is increasingly becoming a managerial function. But in the meantime, it performs mostly record keeping functions and, in as much as some one has to perform this task it seems necessary.

CONCLUSION

Public managers ought to know something about how their human resources departments hire people. Are they hiring employees on objective grounds, those who are qualified, or are they hiring on the bases of subjective reasons such as bribery, nepotism? What constitutes qualification? Are there validity and reliability studies indicating that the tests used in hiring employees, in fact, select qualified ones?

If you hire those who bribe you but who are not qualified for their jobs, the chances are that they would not be able to do their jobs well. Consider the Nigerian Electrical Power Authority. Do they have qualified electrical engineers at that ridiculous outfit? If so, how come electricity goes out just about every day? Poor capacity to generate the necessary electrical volume to service a developing economy? Okay. How about planning? How much electricity is needed for a population of 100 million persons? I suppose that there are mathematicians in Nigeria who can figure such things out? If so, can Nigeria’s electrical need be planned for? Can adequate generating capacity be purchased and constructed? Can the right number of technicians be hired? Can the right inputs be made to the system in general? The answer to all these is, of course, yes. But in Nigeria we hire people who cannot do anything well just because they are related to us. Then they do not do their jobs right and every thing brakes down and we seem surprised.

What do you expect? Garbage in garbage out. If you hire garbage the product you receive is garbage.

Every manager ought to know some thing about human resources management. The field tends to appeal to clerical oriented persons who like to keep records. Task oriented persons who want to use people to accomplish goals tend to go into other areas of management.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

Posted by Administrator at 01:36 PM | Comments (0)

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #25: Introduction to Business Operations

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- So far, we have talked about the types of businesses, how businesses are financed and how the products of businesses are marketed (sold). Now let us focus on what most people call the most technical aspect of business, the operations of business on a day to day basis.

Businesses exist to do something, operations or productions management tell us how they go about doing what they exist to do on the day to day basis. Since there are different types of businesses and different businesses do different things, it follows that their operations would be somewhat different. Be that as it may, there are commonalities in what businesses do, day to day.

What engineering and manufacturing firms do daily is different from what banks do on a day to day basis. Nevertheless, operations/productions managers perform related tasks. Let us look at some of these tasks in a cursory manner. The reader who is interested in productions management must take courses in it. It also helps if he has a technical degree in a line of business where he wants to produce something. Obviously, a person with engineering degree would work in the productions of electricity, a person with degree in finance and banking would work in banking operations, a person with marketing degree would work in a retailing, and a person with a doctorate degree would work in producing knowledge (teaching students at a university). Productions management requires technical education in the area one wants to produce and manage something.

We shall make this lecture realistic and not merely academic, by using examples from the real world. Consider a retail store. What goes on in a retail store? First of all, there must be space for the store to store its goods in. Some one must design that space and or rent one that suits retail operations. Not all buildings are suitable for selling merchandise. The store must be designed in a specific manner.

Immediately engineering and architecture comes to mind. Engineers and architects design the buildings and floor plans of stores, factories and offices. In doing their design, they must take into consideration what my old business studies adviser at UCLA, Professor Louis Davis, used to call sociotechnical systems.

Buildings, machines etc must be designed to accommodate production technology, as well as human needs. It is not an either or design but both. The machines must be such that they efficiently manufacture what the business man wants to manufacture and must also accommodate human needs. Human beings are biological and psychological organisms. They operate best in certain environments. The famous Hawthorn electrical power plant experiment in the 1920s teaches us that workers productivity is affected by the ambience of their environment. Seeming minor issues as the color of the paint on the wall of an office and or factory affects the psychology of workers and that in turn affects their productivity.

You walk into a room and it is painted red and that reminds you of blood in an accident scene, so you feel uptight and, if you are tense your efficiency is reduced. Such things as lightening in an office, whether there are plants in the office etc affect workers morale and productivity. Socio-technical systems attempts to design machines, office space etc in such a manner that both machines and human needs are served.

The design of machines and the technology for producing what the business exists to produce is obviously the realm of technicians. Engineers and architects design office buildings, stores for retailing, factory buildings etc. We, therefore, need not dwell on this technical subject other than to say that the design must be such that production is optimized.

If the equipment for producing what you want to produce is not good enough or is old and dated, obviously, you must modernize it. Every factory, equipment has a life span when it is able to do what it is designed to do. A typical car may run well for ten years, after which the wear and tear on its parts makes it break down. The same goes for machines for producing goods, and the same goes for office space and the equipments in offices (computers generally last less than three years before they are outdated and must be discarded and or updated).

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

Production requires bringing in raw materials and transforming them into finished products. You bring in raw materials and add labor and operations to them and produce new products. The new products are then shipped out to be sold. So where is the raw material for producing the business products going to come from?

Consider refineries. They exist to transform crude oil into the gasoline (and other petroleum derived products) that motorist use in driving their cars. Where is oil to be found and obtained? In the USA, oil is mostly found in the South (Texas, California, Louisiana, Oklahoma etc and in the frigid north, Alaska). Given where the raw material, crude oil, is found, where should refineries be built? Should they be built close to the source of raw materials or should those raw materials be shipped somewhere that production cost could be cheaper, close to the consumers of the final product, the market?

Many of the refineries in the USA are located in the Golf states, and in California and Alaska. These states have the added advantage in that imported crude oil is off loaded in their sea ports and piped to the various refineries where they are refined and then shipped inlands.

It should also be noted that the southern USA is the poorest part of the country. Labor cost is relatively cheap in the south. This means that refineries would have less labor cost than if they had manufactured their oil in high labor costing areas like the Seattle area (a place with the highest concentration of university educated persons in the country, hence it tends to have high tech industries like Microsoft, Boeing, Cancer research facilities etc.)

In Nigeria, most of the oil is obtained in the Nigeria Delta region. We have refineries in the Delta region, Port Harcourt and Warri. We also have refineries in the North.

It would seem to make economic strategic sense to spread refineries to the North, so as to avoid concentrating the source of oil in one area. For example, suppose all the refineries are in Ijawland and Ijaw youths go on rampage and destroy them all; if there are no refineries in the hinterland, Nigeria would immediately go into an economic crisis. Thus, whoever had the foresight to build oil refineries in the North seem to have thinking going on in his brain? Thinking is a rare phenomenon in Nigeria; Nigerian policy planners do not seem to have the ability to think at all; thinking is not their cup of tea. Our leaders exist to chop and grow fat tummies and die from cardiovascular diseases but not to do anything substantial for their people.

In making decisions as to where to locate factories, many economic factors are taken into consideration, including such things as location, cost of labor, location of raw materials, transportation of raw materials to factory site, markets for finished products etc. Again, this is not a technical paper, so suffice it to say that the productions management entails such things as deciding where factories are located and how those factories are constructed and run on a day to day basis.

Raw materials cost money. Businesses often do not have lots of money lying around. Therefore, decisions must be made as to how to buy raw materials. Do you purchase large quantities of raw materials and store them for future usage or do you import them little at a time? If you imported large quantities of raw materials and stored them, suppose something happened to them? Think of hurricane, even theft. What would then happen? You would have lost millions of dollars worth of inventory. Moreover, it costs money to store goods and protect them.

Would it not be nice to arrange with supplies of raw materials to just bring to you what you need on a weekly basis, so that you avoid the cost of buying large quantizes, avoid storage costs and avoid possible loss due to damage from man made or natural disasters? Think of the recent hurricane in New Orleans, if large quantities of crude oil were stored near refineries and the storage tanks were damaged and the oil wasted, think of the cost to the owners of the refineries. On the other hand, if the refineries contain only small quantizes of crude oil, enough to keep the refineries going on, for, say a month at a time, natural disaster would not produce enormous loss.

IN AND OUT. Raw materials come in and are used to produce products and the products are immediately shipped out to wholesalers and other distribution outlets. This is the ideal situation. You receive the right quantities of raw materials, use them to do production and immediately ship out your finished products to be sold. If you stored your products in your storage you run the risk of loosing them in fire and other disasters hence incurring unnecessary financial loss.

Businesses do not have the money to invest in large quantities of inventory, in this case, products, and have them lying around. If you produce something and immediately ship it out to wholesalers, those assume the cost of storing them. And if they are smart they immediately ship them to retailers, who immediately sell them.

This all sounds clean and nit. Unfortunately, life is not always that simple. Many factors affect what companies can or cannot do. Consider transportation. Is the transportation system in the country efficient? If you can count on trains bringing to your factory the raw materials that you need to produce your goods at any time you want it, you can afford the in and out inventory system. But suppose that you are in Nigeria where the trains run whenever they want to, and the roads are death traps, and you could not count that the raw materials you ordered would be there in a year’s time, what should you do? Order a lot and store them? If so, risk incurring the costs mentioned above?

In the former Soviet Union, the system of distribution of goods was so poor that farmers would harvest their products, say potatoes, and have no easy way of getting them to the markets, so that they rot in their barnyards. If the distribution methods are fine, the farm products immediately go to wholesalers, who immediately send them to retail outlets and no potatoes are allowed to rut in a farmer’s barnyard.

Consider a bank. You go into a bank to make a banking transaction. You deposit your money and or withdraw money from your already existing account. This requires your interfacing with the bank’s tellers. (Even in the age of ATM we still have to deal with human beings, tellers.) Perhaps, you went to a bank to borrow money. This requires your interfacing with the bank’s loan officers. Perhaps, you went to the bank to buy bonds (bonds the bank is selling on behalf of the local government) and this often requires your interfacing with the financial section of the bank (stockbrokers).

These are the typical operations of a bank. The bank’s operations manger is responsible for coordinating the activities of the line workers doing depositing, cashing, withdrawing, lending work etc. The operations manager is responsible for the money coming into the bank and the money going out of the bank.

Now consider a typical academic unit at a university. Its operations and productions management entails the professors teaching their subjects to their students and the chair persons of the various academic departments coordinating the professors’ actives. The chair of the department is a supervisor and supervises the activities of his colleagues, as well as the clerical staff of the department. The chair person, in turn, reports to the dean of his college. The dean reports to the Provost/vice president who coordinates all the academic colleges of the University. The provost (also called vice president, academic affairs) reports to the president of the University. Several other persons report to the president of the university, including the vice president of finance, vice president of human resources etc.

The salient point is that operations and productions management entails doing what the business exists to do, producing its products. The products are then sold by the marketing department. The production of the product is financed with money obtained by the finance department. The accounting department keeps records of how revenue comes in and out of the productions department.

The productions manager works with the marketing, financial, and human resources managers to make sure that they do what they are supposed to be doing in their business.

Consider a store manager. He must understand many things: who delivers the goods that he sales (his inventory), when do they do so? How does he take ownership of what they delivered? How are they stocked in the stores shelves: by his staff or the deliverer’s staff? What does he do with items that are not selling quickly, hence occupying store shelf space? Space has cost attached to it. How long should he permit a product to be on a shelf before he removes it as not demanded by the buyers? Shipping and handling issues. How to get customers into the store by reducing the price of certain products (while raising the price of others (You advertise that you are selling orange juice at rock bottom prices; that attracts people into the store. They buy dirt cheap orange juice but hopefully they also go to the produce and meat sections and buy vegetables and meat. You mark up the prices of vegetables and meat etc to cover the loss you took in reducing the priced of orange juice).

I will not go into detailed discussion of specific operations management in this lecture. The subject is fascinating and you ought to study it, if only for the heck of doing so.

Leaders, be they in business or in politics, ought to understand how businesses manage their productions department. A leader ought to have lots of knowledge of how his economy works and that includes what goes on in business operations.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

Posted by Administrator at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #24: Introduction to Marketing

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- A business produces something (goods and or services) and must sell it to make profit hence remain in business.

An intellectual produces ideas and must sell his ideas to those who desire them to make profits, with which he survives; otherwise he has to go get another job to be able to pay his bills. Some of the so-called intellectuals produce what there are no markets for, and, therefore, cannot sell anything and realistically should not make a living. But instead of going to do what there are markets for, they attach themselves to universities and persuade the taxpayers to believe that they need what they teach to become educated.

Thus, they teach students stuff like philosophy that has no market for it. Their products, graduates, cannot obtain jobs with what they taught them. Unless those who graduated from your field can obtain jobs with what they learned from you, the university has no business paying you to teach what you teach. Of course, you can establish your own academy and teach whatever you want to teach and if there are those willing to come to you and pay you for your services despite the fact that they have no market value that is fine. But tax payers have no business supporting professors who teach subjects that there is no market (demand) for.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

Marketing studies the market for goods and services. It asks questions like: is there demand for this good and or service? And if so, where is that demand to be found? What kinds of people demand the goods and or services produced by a company? Young people, middle aged people, old people, and children? Where do they live? What is their gender? What are their income levels? How can they be reached, through peers, radio, newspapers, TV, internet, high brow magazines, and low brow magazines such as tabloids, scientific journals like Nature?

TARGET MARKETS

Marketing responds to the above questions and depending on the answers designs goods and services for the appropriate markets. If marketing studies had asked the right questions, and did good marketing research, surveys, and ascertains where the market for a proposed good and or service is, then the producer (supplier) targets that market and sells to it.

Marketing has fancy names such as target market, market segmentation, demographics and so on and so forth. Those are interesting names but they are not particularly helpful in this lecture. In this introductory lecture, what we need to know is that a company sets about to produce a certain good or service and knows that it must sell it and make profits to stay in business. The company must, therefore, ascertain whether there is a market for what it wants to produce or not. Sophisticated corporations undertake market researches and surveys. But the sole proprietor seldom has the resources to undertake sophisticated surveys to find out where his target market is. Instead, he goes with his experience, his hunch as to where he thinks that the market for his goods and or services is. His hunch, if he is any good, is often as good as the findings of professional marketers.

Let us assume that one wants to produce “Bell bottom blue jeans with flair legs”. Who is most likely going to wear this type of pants/trousers? The answer is very simple: young persons under age thirty. One can pretty much predict with a measure of accuracy that those between ages fifteen and thirty are more likely to wear bell bottom pants than folks in their forties and above.

Where are folks in that age range found? They are generally found in secondary schools, universities and technical schools and at the lower ends of career lives. Some of these people still live at home with their parents; others are out on university campuses and college towns in general. If they are working, they are more likely to live in apartments (flats) rather than single family homes. Apartments are more likely to be in the inner city or near it than in the suburbs.

All the above statements are generalizations and, as we all know, there are always exceptions to every general rule.

What is the income level of folks between ages 15-30? Generally, not very high incomes. Of course, some persons at the higher end of this age group are done with formal schooling and are already medical doctors, engineers, lawyers, and so on but, by and large, they are still making entry level wages. It takes years of working in ones chosen profession before one makes the big bucks.

We can also assume that this age group is most likely to be the most educated in extant society. Every generation, so far, tends to be more educated than those preceding it. The present generation, those under thirty, is the most technology savvy generation mankind has ever produced. Most of them were raised on the Internet and know a lot about it.

When all these factors are added up, the producer pretty much knows where his market is. The next question is how many persons are in that market and how many in that market would buy bell bottoms? Not all young persons would buy bell bottoms. There are those from conservative homes where they were told that such pants are associated with musicians and artists and that those are losers in society. There are parents who raise their children to dress in a conservative manner. These young persons are most likely to be found wearing business suits and if in academia, wearing khaki pants, white shirts, tires and jackets. There are young persons who look like they came out of the 1950s crew cut generation.

The point is that not every one in a general market would buy a company’s products. Markets are segmented. The marketer identifies what segments of a market would buy the goods and or services a company is producing.

What is the income available to this market to spend on the proposed goods or services? Can this market afford to buy the goods? Every product takes money to produce it and therefore has a selling price range, selling at which the producer makes profits or breaks even. A bell bottom pant probably would sell for $25 a pair. Do the persons in the age range likely to buy it likely to afford twenty-five bucks for a pant? Smackaroos don’t come easy, you know.

If you targeted the twenty something year old with a Rolls Royce that sold for over $250, 000, the fact is that there will be very few buyers. Aside from a few musicians and sports persons that make that kind of money, the average young person is struggling to survive, and is making survival wage or is at entry level wage in his chosen profession. If you are selling a sports car that sold $25,000 dollars, now you are talking real business, not fantasy.

Bell bottoms will sell in certain markets not others. But then again other variables enter the picture. Fashion comes and goes. Yesterday’s fashion does not appeal to today’s persons. In the future, fashions from yesterday may return, but in the present people are not interested in yesterday’s fashion.

People want something new and different (is there anything new and different under the sun?). My generation, the 1970s, wore bell bottom pants. Then that went out of fashion in the 1980s. In the 2000s bell bottom pants came back in fashion. But, curiously, now it is in vogue with young women and not with young men. At least, I see young college age women wearing bell bottoms with flares but not college aged men wearing them, as we did in the 1970s.

What is up with that? (I am deliberately using slang, for marketers must speak in the people’s language, not the pretentious high brow language of unproductive academe.) I do not know the answer, other than to say that there is no logical reason for fashion.

Fashion has to do with taste and there is no debating why people have the tastes they have. Fashion is what people desire and one cannot explain it rationally.

Perhaps, marketers cleverly marketed bell bottoms to girls but not to boys? And if that is the case why not? Could it be that boys are in a rebellious mood and one way to show their rebellion is to wear pants that are drooping off from the wearer’s waists?

This generation is so controlled that one of the few avenues young men have for rebelling against society is to wear grungy pants that seem to tell adults: I do not care to conform to your dress codes?

Marketing studies the market and ascertains where the market for businesses products will sell. Having done market studies and pretty much decided where the market is, it decides how much money is to be made in that market. How many bell bottoms would be sold? The quantity to be sold, and what price each is sold tells the producer whether he would cover the cost of producing the pants and still make profits.

All businesses want to reach their break even points and make profits. If profit is not to be made, why bother with producing the goods and or services to be sold?

DISTRIBUTION

Marketers further study the way and manner in which the goods would be marketed. There are many forms of distribution: whole sellers, retailers etc. These are technical subjects that we need not bother with here. Suffice it to say that goods have to be brought from the producer to the buyer. In the case of bell bottoms, probably the producer sells his finished pants to a whole seller who then sells them to retailers in certain geographic areas.

The wholesaler goes to the producer and buys his pants in bulk and ships them to retail clothing shops in different parts of the country. Wholesalers have skills in distribution management that we cannot possibly cover here.

Suppose one is in the book writing businesses. One writes a book. One gets a publisher to publish it. The publisher distributes the book through whole sellers who, in turn, distribute it to retailers, and the books are sold in neighborhood bookstores. (In the USA, a few bookstores now pretty much do most of the book selling business, Barns and Noble book stores and Borders bookstores. On the internet, Amazon.com sells books too.)

ADVERTISING

Marketing goods and services involves making buyers aware of the availability of such goods and services. This entails advertising. There is no use producing goods if one does not let those who could buy them know that such goods exist. Thus, goods and or services must be advertised for the general public to know about them.

Advertising is done in many ways, including word of mouth, newspapers (classified pages) magazines, radio, television, Internet, billboards, posters, in our bell bottoms example, dressing the youths that others look up to in bell bottoms (Michael Jordon wearing Nike shoes) so as to get their age cohorts to want to dress like them and go buy such pants.

Advertising can be very expensive. Moreover, different media has different costs. A page of the New York Times could cost thousands of dollars, whereas a page of a local newspaper may cost only a few hundred dollars. It all depends on the newspaper’s reach, how many people buy it and the geographic area it reaches. People all over the USA do read the New York Times and would be exposed to whatever is advertised in it, whereas an advertisement in the Seattle Times reaches only folks in the Seattle Metropolitan area (about two and half million people; the paper’s circulation is in the hundreds of thousands).

In the past, folks used to rely on radio for their news. (Many folks still listen to radio, particularly music radio.) Therefore, they were more likely to hear about classified ads on radio. As far as I know, these days folks mainly listen to radio for music. Different folks listen to different radio stations, depending on their choice of music. Older folks may listen to classical music stations, whereas younger persons may listen to rap music stations. The implication is that the marketer advertises where he thinks that his market, audience is.

(What would be the radio station that a business person marketing bell bottom pants advertise in? Considering that the young wear rebellious clothes and listen to hip hop music, what radio station would appeal to those who want to wear retro 1970s bell bottoms?)

Television is a market that pretty much reaches most people. But most people are not at home during the day watching television. The average man gets up in the morning and prepares to go to work. He may or may not turn the TV on to listen to the news (CNN) as he prepares to go to work. He drives about an hour to reach his work place. He works about nine hours (lunch time included) and drives another hour to get home. He gets home around 6PM and socializes with his family. He may or may not watch the evening news. The chances are that he watches the evening news.

Advertising during the evening hours, 6-9PM is most likely to reach many TV watchers. This means that TV stations are most likely to charge high advertising prices during this so-called prime time. And since this is family time, with children watching TV, not everything can be advertised during this time. Obviously, salacious subjects, especially those with sexual content are not likely to be advertised in the evening (at 1-5AM, may be, for during this time children are sleeping).

Would TVs advertise bell bottoms during prime times? The answer is probably yes, but not in all markets. In the Bible belt, it is probable that the bible thumping people would oppose their children wearing what reminds them of the age of Hippies. Bell bottom pants have the connotation of loose sexuality (remember the free sex era of the 1970s?) and some persons easily associate those pants with sexual looseness and would not want them won around them. Christian fundamentalist churches probably would not want their members wearing such pants?

Young persons are more likely to be computer savvy. Since it is young persons that are more likely to wear bell bottoms, it follows that advertising bell bottoms on the Internet would seem to make sense, wouldn’t you think so? Turn on you computer and go to any search engine and see a good looking young man in a bell bottom and that image is programmed into your head and the next time you go clothes shopping you make “free choice” and buy bell bottoms?

Bell bottom clad young men in beautiful posters splashed all over town is one way to advertise bell bottoms. Bell bottom clad young men splashed in newspapers, magazines and other print media will obviously reach people, particularly if they are published in newspapers and magazines that young people read (college newspapers, Rolling Stones, music magazines etc).

You get the point: goods and services must be advertised in the right medium for the target audience to be aware of them and buy them.

Advertising costs money, so where is that money going to come from? Those glitzy looking pictures in popular magazines cost lots of dough to prepare and publish them. So where is a company to obtain the money for its advertising?

Generally, small businesses do not have large advertising budgets, if they have any at all. Big corporations have big budgets for advertising.

A beer commercial during the super bowl football game for a minute, alone is going to break the budget of many small businesses. So what to do?

Produce goods and services that ones hunch tells one that there is a market for it and do whatever one can do to bring it to the awareness of the public, and hopefully one sells some of them. Only time will determine what would eventually sell and what would not sell. The cost of advertising should not scare the small business person away from producing what he thinks that there is a market for.

Entrepreneurship is all about taking risks. If you have a good product/service and take the risks in producing it and somehow get it to buyers, the chances are that you will sell it. It may take some time before you sell a lot of the product but whoever makes a good mouse trap eventually finds buyers coming to his door steps, but he must have persistence.

As Jimmy Cliff used to sing to my 1970s generation: you can get it if you really want it, but you must try, try and try. Those who give up easily seldom make it in life.

Endurance, persistence and having a good product and or service are what pay off in the long run.

CONCLUSION

My goal in this lecture is not to provide you with thorough information on marketing management. You need several semesters training in the field to understand the subject and working in it to become well versed in it.

My goal is very basic. I want you to know that if you have something to sell that somehow you must ascertain that there is a market for what you want to sell. Remember your secondary school economics: supply and demand? As a business person, you are the supplier of goods, services or ideas. (If you are a teacher you sell ideas). Is there a market for what you supply? Are there people out there willing to pay you money for your goods, services and ideas? If so, where are they and how much are they willing to pay for it?

How much would it cost you to get your product to them (middle man costs)? If you add production costs and middle man costs would you still make profits? You figure all these things out before you even produce the product.

Political leaders are like business men and women. They must understand the economy and know what the people demand.

What do Nigerians want their government to do for them? It is self evident that among other things, that Nigerians desire that their government be realistically structured. They seem to desire a true federation where each ethnic group, so-called tribe, is a state, making for a country with about twenty states.

If the Nigerian government is truly a government, it would supply what the people demand. For example, Nigerians demand free public education, at all levels; free medical health insurance, good roads, electricity for all Nigerians, and good water for all Nigerians.

Politicians, that is, public managers, if they are worth their name, ought to seek ways to supply to the people what they demand. If you supply what the people demand, they will pay for it. If you build good roads people will pay taxes to maintain them. If you build schools parents will send their children to them and pay to maintain them through property taxes; if you build hospitals people will support them through income taxes and so on.

What we have in Nigeria is a failure of will. We do not have leaders in Nigeria. We have chicken masquerading as men (leaders). If these idiots were true leaders, existence gave them the best opportunity to achieve great things for their people.

Imagine the struggle to provide electricity for all Nigerians, building dams every where; power plants every where and so on. These are challenging and exciting tasks and ought to give men a sense of being alive and doing something worthwhile. We have the greatest opportunity to build things and instead we fool around wasting our oil money over seas.

One hopes that sometime our politicians would realize what their function is supposed to be and fulfill it. Their job description is to find out what the people demand and supply them through making public policy choices and finding ways for paying for them.

Politicians make laws and public policies that reflect the people’s public opinion and figure out ways to pay for them (such as taxes, growing the economy etc). Politicians must understand the basics of marketing management. They do not need to become professional marketers, but they need to learn how to figure out what the market, the people, demand and supply them.

My objective in this lecture is to help us understand how we can pay attention to what Nigerians demand of their leaders and produce and deliver them to Nigerians. In doing so, we become real leaders of our people.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

Posted by Administrator at 01:07 PM | Comments (1)

November 04, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #23: Introduction to Accounting

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- Those who consider themselves as intellectuals generally find accounting uninteresting. I can speak for myself, I found the subject boring. In fact, I often fell asleep in accounting classes. The subject is simply too realistic and detailed to appeal to my way of thinking. I like to deal with ideas and, more importantly, to engage in idealizations. I am a walking, talking Plato (see Republic).

I see a person, an object or a social institution and I try to understand it, speculate on its nature and imagine how to improve its perceived imperfections. I am at home in the world of philosophy and psychology. Accounting? Give me a break.

Much as I did not like accounting, in management I found that it is probably the most crucial piece of information one needed to have. Managers deal with managing businesses’ money. That money must be well spent and accounted for. One must, therefore, understand how money is spent and accounted for. It is not a question of whether one likes it or not, one must understand basic accounting if one is a manager in a business organization, and that includes for profits, non-profits and government organizations.

African governments are largely mismanaged because their leaders do not take the time to study accounting and understand how their monies are accounted for. They delegate that responsibility to the accounting staff, as they should. But the accounting staff realizing that the politicians know next to nothing about accounting takes them to the cleaners.

One does not have to be an accountant but one needs to be able to understand what accountants do and be able to read financial papers. Thus, if one is a leader in politics, I recommend that one take a few courses in accounting until one is comfortable with reading accounting statements.

If you understand accounting, you can go to a government department, ministry and ask for its budget and monthly financial statements. These are public properties and must be given to you. You study how the department manages its money and on the basis of studying the ministry’s finances know how well it is doing its work or not?

Can you pick up the Federal government’s budget, your state government’s budget, your local government’s budget, your city’s budget and study it, them, and on the basis of that study understand what the government(s) is doing right or wrong? And, more importantly, can you understand whether the government is spending our money well or not?

I believe that it is because the average Nigerian knows next to nothing about accounting that the idiotic persons that call themselves our political leaders take us to the cleaners and steal our monies. If the average Nigerian could keep his eyes on a particular ministry and know how it spends its money and calls attention to wrongful spending of money, may be we would begin to have responsible leaders?

My goal in this lecture is to stress the importance of understanding accounting and call attention to studying it and giving some general information on it. This lecture is not meant to replace taking courses in accounting. Accounting is a detailed, rigorous affair. It is filled with arithmetic and statistics and that I will not get into in this few pages presentation. I am here to give an overview of the subject and leave it to you to go seek out more information on it.

There are two parts to account, what one might call the book keeping part of it and what one might call managerial accounting.

The book keeping part of accounting deals with such things as journaling, accounts entries, preparing accounts receivables, accounts payables, pay rolls, monthly financial statements and budgets.

The managerial aspect of accounting involves working with management and understanding what it is it wants to accomplish and giving accounting information on it. Yesterday, we talked about building a textile factory. Some one must cost it out. How much would the factory itself cost? The machinery, the land, the building? How much would labor cost? How much do we have in hand and if we do not already have the money, why are we even talking about building a new factory? Managerial accounting is a complex subject and is probably best left to accountants. The part of accounting that the typical manager deals with, on a daily bases, is the book keeping part of it.

The business firm is a money spending and receiving unit. Money comes in and money goes out. Proper records must be kept of these monetary transactions. Most accountants all over the English speaking world, which includes Nigeria, follow the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. They follow the same method in keeping their journals, in doing accounts payable, receivable, pay rolls and the same methods in preparing monthly financial statements and annual budgets and annual audits.

What you have to do is study how each of these accounting procedures is done, and be able to read them.

BUDGETS

Budgets are statements of how a company plans to spend its money during the year. It shows expected revenue and how that revenue would be spent. It has lines (items) of how much would be spent on each item. How much money is going to be spent on rent (of the building where the business is housed), buying equipments for doing the businesses business, paying employees, running the office etc? I will not talk about the specifics of budgets here. Obtain your city government’s budget, your local government’s budget, your state’s budget, the federal government’s budget and take a look at them. They all follow the same pattern and if you can read one you can read them all.

A budget is a statement of future revenues and expenditures. Each unit of the business is assigned a certain amount of money to spend during the year and is expected to make a certain amount of money during the year.

MONTHLY FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

The annual budget is divided up into twelve months. Each month, each unit of the firm has a certain expected revenue and expenditure. Book keepers prepare monthly financial statements that show management how each unit in the firm did in the past month. How much money it did, in fact, receive and how much money it, in fact, spent. The income and expenditure is compared to budgeted income and expenditure and where it balances, that is a wash. In most cases, there are variances, plus or minus, that is, more money was obtained or less money was obtained, more money was spent or less money was spent on budgeted items.

Obviously, every business ought to stay within budget, for if you spend more than you receive you must have borrowed that money from somewhere, internally (from other units of the business, those making profits) or externally, from customers extending credit to you or from borrowings from commercial banks etc. A business that spends more than it pulls in is obviously heading towards bankruptcy.

The accounting department prepares monthly financial reports for the business and for each unit of the business and gives them to the appropriate supervisors, managers and CEOs. The CEO takes a hard look at the financial statement and ascertains what unit of his business is making money and what units is losing money. If he is smart, he makes immediate adjustments in the units losing money. May be he needs to let go of a manager whose unit is losing money? May be something must be done differently in units that are losing money?

A manger must take a careful look at his monthly financial statements and make adjustments. For example, suppose the unit is paying more money on personnel cost than was budgeted, say, due to salary increases given to employees during the year, how is this impacting the overall budget? Why did you give salary increases and or bonuses if you did not ascertain where the money to pay for them would come from? How about the cost of health insurance, has it raised more than was budgeted for and is eating up your budget? (Employee benefit packets may constitute 25% additional payment to their base wages.)

The point is that the accounting department gives managers financial information on how they are doing and they are supposed to make adjustments to their units’ financial operations, so that by the end of the year they are in the black, not in the red (balanced or better, make profits).

PAY ROLL

The accounting staff prepares employees pay roll. Every two weeks or so, employees receive their pay checks (or they are electronically wired to their banks). Someone has to do the job of preparing pay checks. Someone must ascertain that there is money to pay employees. (Sometimes businesses do not have the money in the bank to pay their employees. If they have lines of credits with local banks, employee paychecks may be cashed by the said banks. Employees expect their checks at the end of the pay period and could care less whether the employer has no money in the bank to cover their wages. Bank credit lines lend businesses the money to pay staff until the company makes money to replenish its money in the bank. Of course, interests are paid on such short term loans from the bank.)

Whereas it is the job of the accounting staff to prepare the pay roll, it is the job of the manager to take a good look at it and make sure that it is properly done. For one thing, you must make sure that all the monthly deductions are done properly: tax deductions (IRS), pension deductions (Social Security), workers comp deductions, health insurance deductions, unemployment deductions, 401K deductions and the other deductions that must be made from paychecks. If a manager knows how to supervise payroll, the thieves that proliferate in Nigeria’s governments would not be able to pad some of their friends payrolls hence steal from the government.

ACCOUNTTS PAYABLE AND RECEIVABLE

The accounting department prepares accounts receivable, money coming to the business from its dealings (sales, for example,) and accounts payables (moneys the company pays other people, for services rendered to it. At the end of the month, these are prepared from the Journal entries kept by accounting clerks and given to the manager to see the nature of transactions taking place during the past month. What was purchased last month (payable) and what was sold last month (receivable)? Did income and payments balance? If not, maybe it is time to stop spending and start receiving?

Businesses exist to produce some things and sell them to the public, market. What is the product that the business produces and is there a market for it? Is the business selling what it wants to sell? Is it selling it at the right price and is it making profits? Accountants keep record of these transactions.

AUDITS

At the end of the year, outside auditing firms are invited into the audit the business’ books, to make sure that the business is spending its money where it said it is doing so and to make sure that it is following the right accounting procedures in keeping its records.

External auditors give managers objective feedback on how they are doing. Internal accountants may be tempted to pad the books. In Nigeria, accountants are likely to cook the books. But external auditors can give management objective information on the state of its finances and lead it to take corrective measures.

(In Nigeria, one can see officials bribing auditing firms to tell lies about how they spent their moneys. What are Nigerians but the devil himself? These people’s genius lies in figuring out ways to cheat and steal and cover their tracks. If Nigerian corrupt public officials think that you are getting too close to catching them, they would burn the building where accounting records are kept, to prevent you having access to their records of mismanagement.

Not to worry: we know that many Nigerians are rogues; we can seek ways to catch these rogues, we can check mate them.

DEPRECIATIONS

Accountants look at the business’ equipments and account for their productivity. They depreciate old equipments. If you bought a car for your business at $20,000 and the car is slated to last ten years, it follows that each year it produces $2000 profit to the company and is depreciated by that same amount of money. At the end of ten years, when it has no more value, the car is neither producing, contributing to the company nor being depreciated (for tax purposes).

Accountants do a lot for businesses and the reasonable manager must work closely with his accountants and obtain daily, weekly and monthly information from them as to how his business is doing, financially. He must also work with his financial managers to decide where to obtain money to expand his business and if he makes profits where to invest his money.

In small business, the chances are that the sole proprietor does the accounting, book keeping and financial work of his business. When he begins to make profits, perhaps, he hires an accounting clerk to do the book keeping aspect of his work. It is businesses with over a million dollars annual budget that can afford to hire internal accounting staff. Medium businesses rely on external book keepers coming in, say, once a month to do their books for them.

For our present purposes, we do not need to know all the details of what accountants do; what we need to know is the critical role of accountants in keeping monetary records for businesses’. These people are absolutely indispensable for the health or lack of it of any business. The manager must work closely with accountants if he wants to have a proper accounting of his business.

In Nigeria, we all know how in shambles our financial management is. Our state governors go to Abuja and receive their states share of Federal revenue sharing. They see that money as their personal monies and do with them as they please. They bank some of them overseas and squander the rest in riotous living. They do not devote such monies where they ought to go, serving the people.

Why in hell is it the case that governors sign for state moneys? What does a governor know about money, anyway? Why not have the state treasurer (an accountant) go sign for the state money? Why not professional accountants have handle state money and pay the governor his salary but not have him touch money? Since the governor remains the boss, he then has the ability to fire accountants who steal state moneys.

Corruption in Nigeria is so well known that we need not rehash that sad story here. What is salient is that with proper accounting and auditing practices we can actually begin to reduce Nigerians tendency to thievery.

More to the point, if most Nigerians understand how to read financial statements, study their governments’ budgets and pay attention to how every penny of their monies are spent, may be we would start reducing our economic waste?

Consider the issue of per-dium paid public officials. How much money was budgeted for Obasanjo to spend on his numerous foreign junkets? The man is almost always outside the country. He stays in the world’s best hotels. He flies in his own private jet. How much money did we budget for him to be squandering in this manner?

In the USA, every official has a budget available to him. How much he can spend in a night in hotels is specified. He must come back with receipts and give them to the accounting department. If he uses government vehicles for his private business, he is fired and or must refund the public for so doing. If President Bush flies Air force one to a private dinner, he must repay the taxpayers of America the cost of that flight.

Obasanjo and other Nigerian leaders are all over the world spending the people’s money: how do we account for all these idiotic spending? The leaders see their states money as their personal moneys and do with them as they please, no proper accounting procedures followed. It is really pathetic that in the twenty first century folks could be behaving like primitive men.

CONCLUSION

As I see it, one of the solutions to the seeming intractable problem of corruption in Nigeria is for just about every person to understand something about accounting; at least enough to be able to read governments accounting books, and where misspending are found, call for correction and punishment of implicated public officials.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

November 4, 2005

Posted by Administrator at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #22: Introduction to Corporate Finance

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- In our over view of business (lecture 19) we talked about the various forms of business organizations, including sole proprietorships, partnerships and corporations. We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of each of these forms of organizing for business activities.

A business exists to produce goods and or services and sell them to those who demand such goods and services. If a business reads the lay of the land well, understands what the market will buy, understands the nature of current demand, what people are willing to pay for, and produces them, it sells them.

A business that sells its goods and services probably will make profits. Profits meaning that the income coming to the business exceeds its expenditure. A business spends money to produce goods and services and markets them. If the money it receives from its business activities (sales) exceeds the money it expended in producing and marketing its goods and services it makes profit.

With profit (bottom line) the business plans for its future business activities. In poorly run businesses profits may be squandered (by management giving itself raises and in the context of Nigeria having parties). In properly managed businesses profits could be used for business expansion.

The subject of corporate finance asks this question: where will the business obtain money with which to run its business activities?

New businesses often obtain their seed money from the owners of the businesses past savings. If you want to start a business you probably have some pot of money that is already available to you and with which you invest in your new business venture. Lenders seldom lend money for business start ups; it is too risky to lend to new businesses for only about five percent of new businesses survive for two years.

Already existing businesses obtain money for expanded business activities from their past profits.

Let us say that a textile manufacturing business would like to increase its capacity and build more factories and or expand already existing ones. Its engineers (productions management) and accountants provide the management (president, chief executive officer) with cost information. How much is the proposed factory going to cost? Once cost is established, the next question is where would the money come from? (In the lecture on marketing we shall see whether there is a market for the proposed product, otherwise why bother producing it?)

SAVINGS

Generally, the first source of finance is savings from past profits. A business that expects to expand in the future begins to save for it today. If it is going to cost five million dollars to fund a new factory, perhaps, the business can save that amount of money in three years and begin doing so now and when it has the money in hand undertakes construction of the factory?

COMMERCIAL BANKS

A business may opt to borrow money from financial institutions like banks. Generally, banks hesitate lending to new business money for business start ups. If a business has a good track record it may be able to obtain money from banks for business expansion.

We shall not dwell on the various types of lending that commercial banks extend to businesses, suffice it to say that there are many of them, some short term and others long term. For our present purposes, it is possible for commercial banks to lend money to an on-going business for its business activities.

VENTURE CAPITALISTS

The other source of business finance is from venture capitalists. There folks out there with large sums of money who would like to invest their monies in business ventures that they believe could yield them good profit. Thus, both new and on-going businesses write Business Plans regarding proposed new line of business activities that they would like to engage in and approach venture capitalists for funding.

Venture capitalists evaluate such business plans and make decisions whether there are markets for their products and how much profit is likely to be made. If they think that there is money to be made in the business they may agree to provide money to the business proposing to engage in the said line of activity.

A venture capitalist that thinks that textiles (clothing materials) are in demand in Nigeria and that the demand is strong enough for him to make a killing, profits from selling them could probably agree to go into business with the business and build a factory to produce the proposed textiles.

Nigerians love lace but import them from India and other countries. Perhaps, if they are produced in Nigeria the producers would sell them and make a handsome profit? But then again given the programmed self hatred Africans seem to have may be they would prefer textiles made in Manchester, England than ones made at Owerri? Perhaps, they attach prestige to imported goods and not to locally manufactured ones?

There are all sorts of variables that affect selling but for our present purposes the question is whether a product would sell? And if it would sell, would profit be made? And if profit is to be made by how much? Is the anticipated profit enough to cover the investment in the proposed new factory? The venture capitalist makes decisions and if he expects making a killing, he may provide the business with the money with which to build the proposed factory.

(Whoever pays the piper calls the tune; the person who lends you money to do something must be interested in how you do it; thus, venture capitalists often take over running the businesses they financed. Therefore, if management wants to retain its independence, it might not seek money from venture capitalists, at least, not from those who would write agreements with it that essentially entails its relinquishment of its independent decision making. It is not unusual for those who funded a business to kick out the already existing management and replace it with its own management team, if they think that in doing so that they would make better yields on their investment)

STOCKS AND BONDS

Whereas businesses obtain funds for business activities from several sources, the source of real money for business expansion is often in offering stocks (Securities). Banks hesitate lending big money for speculative business ventures. Venture capitalists seldom take risks in businesses that they do not believe that they are going to make immediate profits from. Business owners seldom have enough savings from past profits to embark on large scale business ventures. One way to obtain big money to embark on large scale business projects is to sale stocks and bonds.

Stocks and bonds are means of borrowing money from those who have them and using the money to engage in business activities. Let us return to our textile factory and see what it could do to obtain the proposed five million dollars it needs to build a new factory at Owerri. It could sell stocks for the amount it needs to finance the new factory. I am assuming that the original business is a corporation and that it has gone public and is authorized by appropriate state authorities to sell stocks and bonds.

The process of obtaining governmental authorization to sell stocks is a technical matter and is beyond the scope of this basic lecture.

The chief executive officer (CEO) of the company, working with his chief financial officer (CFO), prepares certain documents and submits them to appropriate state authorities; they are authorized to go to the public and sell stocks for five million dollars. Arrangements are made with stock companies and other financial institutions to prepare and sell the stocks.

Let us assume that each stock is sold at a $1. (Initial Product Offering, IPO) The financial institution that undertakes to sell the stocks for the business advertises the business stocks availability. Folks with money to buy stocks obtain information on the business and decide whether the company is sound enough for them to invest their monies in. If they believe that the business is sound and is likely to make profits and pay them dividends on their money (stocks) they buy its stocks and if not they do not buy its stocks.

A man with one million dollars available to him may decide to spend it buying the business’ stocks. If a stock sells at $1, it follows that the man spending one million dollars would have bought a million stocks in the business.

Several people buy stocks in a company, some more, others less. You give the business one dollar and you have one of its stocks.

The business obtains the five million dollars it requires to build its factory. It builds its factory and starts manufacturing. It produces a product, in this case textiles, and sells it. At the end of the day, it subtracts its costs from its revenue and knows whether it made profit or loss.

If it made profit, it may decide to share it with those who bought stocks in it. If it made, say, one million dollars in profits, it may decide to reinvest half of that money in its business or save it for future business expansions and share the balance with its stock holders. The five million stocks would share whatever pot of money is being disbursed and each stock would receive a certain amount. Those with many stocks, obviously, would receive the amount given to one stock times the quantity of stocks they hold.

The chances that businesses would give out dividends in the first few years of business operation are very slim. Companies may go for several years without giving out dividends. If at all they made profits, they simply reinvest them in their businesses. There is such a thing as operating costs (as well as capital expenditure, the money used in building the textile factory). Businesses have to pay the wages of their employees, maintain factories and so on. It generally takes several years before profits can be shared with stock holders in the business. Thus, if you are buying stocks in a business, do not expect to receive dividends during the first few years of the company’s operations.

There are many types of stocks and dividends. That subject is beyond the scope of our introductory lecture.

Whereas the stock owner may not receive dividends on his investments annually, he has other ways to make money on his investment. If the company that sold stocks is doing well and business looks like it is a winner, even though it is not paying out dividends yet there are some persons who would now like to own its stocks.

Whereas in the past cautious investors did not want to buy stocks in an unknown business, when that business begins to make profits and generally do well those persons may change their minds and want to buy its stocks.

Stocks are not offered everyday by businesses. Our textile factory has offered five million stocks to obtain five million dollars and may not sell future stocks in several years. In the meantime, it is making profits. Its already existing five million stocks are now appreciating in value for their holders. The stock that was bought for one dollar may now sale for five dollars. Indeed, it may sale for dollars.

This means that if the holder of that stock resells it in the stock market for twenty dollars he has made nineteen dollars profit on his original one dollar investment. The individual who bought a million shares (stocks) in the textile company at one dollar per share can now resale them for twenty million dollars, meaning that he has made nineteen million dollars gain in his original investment. (This is called capital gains.)

Each country, and segments of it, has a stock exchange, market for selling stocks, where publicly traded stocks are sold.

Stockbrokers help the public buy and sell their stocks. These days, with the advent of computers and the Internet, you can bypass stockbrokers and directly buy and sell stocks from stock exchanges.

For our present purposes, stock exchanges are, more or less, like gambling houses and study the performance of businesses and decide on how much their stocks are worth. Some stocks are overvalued and others are undervalued. There is complex mathematics available for valuing the worth of stocks. That subject is beyond the scope of this lecture.

For our present interest, all that we need to know is that the values of stocks are really speculative. A stock that is valued at $20 may, in fact, be worth nothing (as we found out in 1999 when the grossly over valued technology companies stocks crashed. Most of those companies were not even making profits yet but the market valued their stocks way too high. The market then corrected itself by essentially crashing and these companies went out of market.

What we need to know here is that companies sell stocks and that if the company does well in the market that its stocks would be valued highly and that those holding its stocks could resale them at the current high price and make profits. This is pretty much like gambling. But gambling or not, it is how the capitalist economy works.

What we need to know is that companies borrow money from those who have money in the form of stocks.

If you buy stocks in a company you become a stock holder in it. You are now technically part of the owners of the company. If the company makes profits you are entitled to receiving part of those profits (should it decide to share its profit as dividends)? If the company does not make profits, you do not receive any dividends, after all you are a part owner of the company and the company’s loss is your loss. Indeed, if the company goes broke you lose your investment in it, for, as part of its owner you risk loosing the amount of money you invested in it when it fails. You lose only your investment, not more (see lecture 19 on the nature of corporations and their limited liability).

As a part owner of the company, you obtain reports on how the company is doing. Generally, most companies have annual share holders meeting to which you are invited. The meeting elects the company’s Board of Directors (who may serve for three to five years) and the Board in turn hires the company’s president and chief executive officer. The CEO hires his management team (vice president finance, vice president operations, vice president marketing, vice president human resource etc and those in turn hire their own teams, managers and the managers of divisions hire their first line supervisors who hire line workers).

The company’s Board of Directors hires a president and CEO and delegates the responsibility of running the business, day to day, to him. If he does a good job, his contract is renewed, if not he is let go. The CEO’s job is a precarious one, for he may be unemployed at any time the Board decides to fire him, no questions asked. The board has the right to hire and fire him at will (as he, the CEO has the right to hire and fire his subordinates at will).

Generally, only those who own large shares in a company come to its annual share holders meetings. The man who bought a million dollars worth of shares in our imaginary textile firm is more likely to attend its share holders meeting than a man with only one hundred shares in it. The large share holders, in fact, are generally those who are elected to the company’s Board of Directors and, in turn, are those who hire and fire the company’s President and CEO. (Some times, for the sake of prestige and publicity, a company may invite a well known public official to join its Board of Directors. Thus, an ex-military governor could be invited to serve on the Board of Directors of our imaginary textile company at Owerri. He brings influence and connections to the rulers of the polity, intangible goods that the Board and company may benefit from.)

Whereas business firms generally obtain the money for their activities from selling stocks, these days some businesses also obtain money by selling bonds. It is generally those big corporations that have been around for so long that they might as well be governments that have access to the bond market. If you recall, in the previous lecture we talked about how governments obtain money through selling bonds. Generally, bonds are associated with governments, from city to municipalities, states and national governments. But these days’ big corporations are permitted to sell bonds.

Bonds are different from stocks. If you buy bonds from businesses you are not an owner of those businesses. You merely lent the business money to do something. If you own stocks in a company you are a part owner of that business and as noted is invited to its shareholders meeting where policy decisions are made. Bond holders merely lend their money to the company and the company agrees to repay them their money at specified dates and in the meantime pay them annual interests on their money. The interest rate vary, anywhere from 3-5%. Thus, annually the borrower (company) pays the lender (bond holder) interests on his money and at the end of the period specified for repaying the bond, the borrower pays the bond holder his money (principal) back.

As the business operates, the value of its bonds may go up or down. If the value of its bonds goes up, it means that the bond holders may resale them in the bond market, for a higher price than they had bought them. Let us say that an individual had bought a bond from a bond issuing company for the face value of $1000. The company agrees to repay him his money in ten years. In the meantime, the company agrees to pay him 3% annual interest on his $1000 investment. Each year, he receives 3% interests on his money and at the end of ten years he receives his original $1000 back. (In the 1980s we has Michael Millikan’s Junk Bonds scare.)

In the meantime, the company’s bonds are traded in the bond market. This is gambling. If the company is doing fabulously well and making lots of profits, the interests on the bond may go up to say 5%. This means that the person who originally bought it at 3% could resale the bond at a higher price and make profits. 5% of $1000 is higher than 3% of $1000 dollars. All these profit making is done at the stock/bond (securities) market level.

As noted, every country these days has its own securities exchange commission (SEC) governing the actives of the securities business. This business is like a gambling outfit and a lot of shenanigans take place in it. An in-dept look at the SEC is beyond the scope of this lecture.

For our present purposes, all we need to know is that business corporations do obtain money to run their businesses from selling stocks and bonds. The specifics of how this is done are for those interested in financial management.

Each corporation has a financial department. Here it has financial managers and accountants. Accountants, as we shall see in the next lecture, keep an eye on the company’s revenue and expenditure, and financial managers manage the company’s money.

The financial manager (Chief financial officer, CFO, comptroller etc) makes management decisions, with the CEO on where to obtain money for the business’ activities. The CFO helps the company decide whether to save money and use its savings to construct the proposed textile factory, to borrow that money from banks, from venture capitalists or to do so through stocks and or bonds.

In addition, the CFO invests the company’s profits. Companies, like individuals, do invest their money in other companies. Profits could be used to buy stocks and or bonds in other companies or even from safe government bonds. (I recommend buying government bonds, for you are not going to loose your money.) Big corporations have lots of money available to them to invest and often invest in other companies, to a point that they end up owning those companies. You have heard of hostile takeovers. A company may buy other companies stocks and literally buy a majority of them and end up dictating who serves on the companies board of directors hence hiring their CEOs and, in effect, taking them over. Again, we shall not get into such technical discussion here. It is enough for us to know how companies obtain their finances.

Corporate finance is filled with complex mathematics; I skip those for my goal is to provide basic information on the subject.

The individual ought to take a course on stocks and bonds and learn to know how the various companies stocks are doing. This information is generally printed in the business pages of most daily newspapers and, of course, in financial newspapers like the Wall Street Journal (a must read for any one who takes finance seriously). If you are going to invest your money in stocks and bonds, you ought to know how the companies you want to invest in are doing on a daily basis. You ought to study those companies, their management structure and general performance. You can learn a lot by reading the financial pages of newspapers.

I recommend that you take at least one course in corporate finance if you plan to be in leadership positions, either in government or the private sector.

Leaders deal with money and with managing the economy. Liberal arts education that purportedly train for leadership ignores the most crucial aspect of leadership training, training in managing money. Thus one can obtain a doctorate in political science and know nothing about how governments obtain and manage their monies and control the economy. This is very sad, sad indeed. Political science ought to be conjoined with business studies so that a graduate of political science is simultaneously a graduate of business administration. This is how it ought to be and the sooner the fools who run political science departments realize this fact and restructure their field and stop making it a useless scholastic field and rather transform it to a realistic field that deals with the economies of a polity the better it is for all concerned.

Some of us had PhDs in that field but had to go retrain ourselves in more realistic subjects. Young persons’ time and energy ought not to be wasted by idiotic professors who do not provide them with realistic education.

Obviously, we need to study political science but a political science that deals with the real world. The real world shows that politicians manage the country’s economy.

CONCLUSION

Those who manage the economy not only must understand basic economics but finance (applied economies) and other aspects of management. These lectures on managing the economy are designed to give us the awareness that political leaders manage the polity’s economy and ought to understand management. If politicians have not already learned about finance, public and corporate, they ought go back to night schools and study management.

If one is a legislator at Abuja, at state’s capitals and local government towns and does not have a background in business, one must register immediately at the local university and take business courses that give one the equivalent of a master’s in business administration. One must do this if one is to know what the hell is going on with managing the nation’s money.

These lectures are designed to give general information on management but are not meant to replace rigorous study of management, the type obtained at universities schools of management. Modern economies are big business and politicians as public managers must understand how to manage big businesses, they must understand public and business finance

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

November 3, 2005

Posted by Administrator at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #21: Introduction to Public Finance

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- In the preceding twenty lectures on politics I established why human beings need political systems. A political system has to be managed. People make demands on their political system. The political system translates demands made on it into public choices and public policies. Public policies must be financed. The money to finance public policies must come from somewhere. Where is that money going to come from?

Public finance addresses the question: where will revenue to fund public policies and run the political system come from? It is one thing to talk about what government should be doing and another to be able to finance them. In the real world, every activity has costs and someone must pay for it.

We live in a world of scarce resources, a world with opportunity costs. Resources are finite; resources devoted to one area are not available for other areas; therefore, we must make public choices. We must decide what areas we devote more resources and what areas less. To start with, we must have the resources. How do we obtain the money to run our governments?

Public finance ought to be taken very seriously in Nigeria and, indeed, in all of Africa. You see, Africans expect an awful lot from their governments. They don’t always concern themselves with where and how their governments would obtain the resources to finance the enormous demands they make on them.

Not only do many Africans not bother themselves thinking about where their government obtains resources, they do not even want to pay taxes. They just want their government to do certain things for them and complain when those things are not done for them. But they do not ask where their government would obtain the revenue with which it would do those things. In fact, in those instances where taxation exists, many Africans do their best to avoid paying taxes and yet these folks expect their governments to deliver public services to them. This is infantile thinking and behavior. Adult thinking and behavior knows that we must pay for whatever we get out of life, for life does not give human beings free food. There is really no free lunch in life, as economists never cease telling us.

To the best of my knowledge, many Nigerians do not like to pay taxes and generally do not declare their income completely so that they would be appropriately taxed. This resistance to paying taxes has a long history in Nigeria. In 1929, the British colonial government tried to tax folks in Alaigbo and the people went on a war path. The women literally rebelled. To them, government should not ask them to pay tax.

One then must ask: how on earth is government supposed to obtain the revenue with which to run its activities? Or don’t we need governments? The Igbos did not have Alaigbo wide government and were not used to paying annual income taxes to support governments. The idea of taxes was foreign to them.

Well, if you are going to have governments, as we must in the modern polity, you must have taxes to fund them. We have no choices in the matter, unless, of course, we revert to primitive anarchy and have no governments. In the modern polity, the question is not whether there should be taxes or not, but how much taxes? The real question is whether twenty percent or more of the individual’s annual income should be taken in taxes?

There is nothing as certain in modern life as taxes, changes and death. One might as well get used to these facts, for one cannot avoid them. Trying to avoid them is futile, reality ought to be accepted as it is and efforts not made to deny it.

In Nigeria, those who claim to be in private business seldom pay appropriate taxes; when they do pay taxes at all, they pay the most minimum tax. Each local government area has basic taxes for the people especially those assumed to be farmers and are poor. These taxes amount to a few dollars per individual. No government can maintain itself in existence with such paltry revenue. Therefore, if business men who make lots of money pay these basic individual taxes, they are cheating the government of useful sources of revenue with which to operate its activities.

Nigeria’s governments’ personnel are generally too lazy to go chasing people for taxes. This situation results in very little revenue collected from taxes. The end result is that Nigeria’s governments end up with little or no revenue to fund their public policies.

Nigeria is fortunate in that despite not obtaining appropriate tax revenues, there is revenue from oil. Nigeria relies almost exclusively on oil for its revenue to run its activities. The Federal government of Nigeria’s budget is funded primarily through oil revenue (over 90%). The states come to the federal government, hats in hand, begging for money with which they run their state governments. Some of these governments rely exclusively on their share of the federal revenue sharing to run their state governments. That is to say that they do not generate their own incomes with which to run their governments.

Question: if the states are funded by the federal government, how can they be independent of the federal government? Nigerians talk a lot of wanting true federalism in the country, how can that be possible if they entirely depend on the federal government to fund their governments? He who pays the piper dictates the tunes. As long as the Federal government funds state governments, states cannot be really equal with the federal government.

We cannot have true federalism unless each state figures out a way to fund its own activities independent of the federal government. Where the federal government has money to extend to states, it should do so on a competitive bases, as in the USA where states and non profit organizations compete for Federal grant monies with which to run certain designated projects and must account for how every penny of such money is spent to the Federal government.

In the Nigerian context, the Federal government obtains its money from oil revenue. Since oil comes mostly from Southern Nigeria, it follows that money from one section of the country is used in running all the country. Obviously this may not seem fair to those areas where oil is coming from. Clearly, we have to figure out a different way of funding the federal and state governments other than reliance on money from oil producing states.

From a purely rational calculation, it is silly to obtain ones revenue from only one source, oil. Oil is an exhaustible resource. Suppose oil is exhausted, then what? Suppose the West finds alternative sources of energy to power its economy, and stop buying Nigerian oil, then how is Nigeria going to fund its activities? Sooner or later, solar energy will become the main source of energy in powering Western economies and at that point Nigeria would not be able to sell its oil and would, one supposes, join the failed states of Africa?

Prudence suggests that one should not put all of ones eggs in one basket. The Nigerian economy must be diversified, so that revenue would be obtained from several sources to run the governments. But then again thinking and planning seems not one of the strengths of Nigeria’s present chop-chop politicians.

TAXES

Generally, governments obtain their revenues from taxes. Individuals and businesses engage in economic activities and make profits. Out of their profits governments tax them. Taxing means taking people’s incomes and with such monies run governments. Taxation is a critical source of government revenue.

There are several types of taxes: individual income taxes, corporate or business taxes, sales taxes, value added taxes, property taxes and royalties. Let us briefly explain these.

Each individual is a unit of economic activity. He has annual profits and losses. Each year (actually, monthly or quarterly) he declares, or should declare, his total income to the various governments in the country: federal, state and local. These governments determine how much of the individual’s income should be taken in taxes. There is no ideal percentage that governments should take in taxes. The polity, through its legislators, makes the decision as to how much to charge individuals and businesses in annual taxes. The range is as low as twenty percent to as high as fifty percent in Scandinavia.

From a purely rational point of view, it makes sense for the government to take at least 20% of each individual’s annual income in taxes.

Governments must obtain money to run its affairs and that money ought to primarily come from individuals and businesses.

INDIVIDUAL INCOME TAXES

There is an advantage to individual taxation. If individuals’ pay taxes, they are more likely to be interested in how their governments spend their money. They would want proper accounting procedures used in accounting for how their monies were spent. They want to know how public officials spent their money and whoever misspent a penny of the people’s taxes ought to be sent to jail for no less than twenty years (hard labor).

At present, Nigerians really do not pay large taxes; at least, not enough to support their governments hence do not feel the pains of running their governments. As noted, their governments are run with oil money. Since individual Nigerians are not paying for their governments, they do not feel the burden of having governments. Why should their governments account to them how they are spending their money, when they are not paying taxes?

If people paid taxes and government officials were required to account for how they spent public funds, perhaps, the ridiculous high incidence of corruption in Nigeria would be reduced?

In my view, 20% is the minimum individual Nigerians should expect to pay in Federal annual income tax. State and local taxes should not exceed 15%. Therefore, one anticipates a scenario where 35% of the individual’s income goes to federal, state and local taxes. With this revenue stream guaranteed, governments can do those things that we expect them to do.

We cannot expect governments to do certain things for us without giving them the resources to do them. It is ridiculous not to pay taxes and then expect governments to provide society with public services like education for all children under age 22 (K through bachelors degree, or technical degree), public health insurance, national security, activities now generally accepted as rightfully performed by the government for all citizens.

CORPORATE TAXES

Corporate taxes are taxes levied on businesses. Corporations are considered separate persons and their profit and loss are calculated as if they are individual human beings profit and losses and taxed accordingly. Sole proprietors and partnerships do not pay corporate taxes, but, instead, the owners of such business are assumed not separate from them; their businesses profits and loss are taxed as the individual owners’ incomes.

Different countries have different corporate tax structures. A rule of the thumb is to tax them as we tax individuals. If the total tax on the individual in a polity is 35% annually, corporations should also pay 35% annual income taxes. This would breakdown to something like this: 20% federal corporate taxes, 10% state corporate taxes and 5% local government area corporate taxes. (State and local taxes are, of course, paid in the state where the individual and business is located; given this lucrative source of revenue, states and localities would be struggling to attract businesses to them and to make themselves business friendly.)

SALES TAXES

Some governments, federal, state and local, obtain revenue from sales taxes. A unit of government, for example, may levy 5-10% tax per dollar on goods and services sold in it. Sales taxes are also added to restaurants and hotel bills.

Ideally, no unit of government should have more than 5% sales tax. Assuming 5% sales tax per unit of government in Nigeria, this would translate to 5%, federal sales tax, 5% state sales tax and 5% local government area sales tax, for a total of 15% sales taxes. 15% sales tax seems fair enough. Governments must obtain revenue to fund their activities.

Sales taxes tend to be regressive since they essentially tax every person at the same rate. It does not matter how much income the individual has, when he buys something he must pay the same sales tax on it. This seems unfair since the rich can afford to spend more money than the poor. One way to mitigate this apparent unfairness is to eliminate sales taxes on food, or reduce it on food, while charging more on luxury goods. If a man is buying a Rolls Royce at $250,000, he is obviously rich and one does not see why he should not be required to pay 35% sales tax on that unnecessary item of conspicuous consumption.

PROPERTY TAXES
Property taxes are generally levied on houses, lands and other properties (real estate). In most American cities, city governments collect property taxes on houses in their area of jurisdiction. Generally, the city levies say $1 or $2 per $1000 worth of the house. Let us say that a house is worth $250,000 (current appraised market value); the city would tax that house $250/$500 annually. With this money, cities perform their city activities, including running schools.

VALUE ADDED TAXES (VAT)

Value added taxes (VAT) are very tricky to calculate, for it is difficult to determine what constitutes value added. Let us say that a restaurant bought food items and added value to them to prepare the cooked food it sells to its customers. How do you determine the worth of the value added to the raw material before they were cooked? Be that as it may, governments tend to have VAT on assorted manufactured goods. This source of taxation is very controversial.

ROYALTIES

Sometimes, governments permit private businesses to mine minerals and pay them a certain percentage of the sold minerals. Let us say that oil companies explore and mine oil in a country and sell them at $60 dollars per barrel of crude oil. The government may charge them 33% on each barrel of oil they sold. This source of revenue is considered royalty.

LICENSES

Governments, particularly state and local governments, charge licensing fees for assorted services, such as car registration, drivers’ license, professional/occupational licensing, business licensing, airport taxes, seaport taxes, city parking, using national parks etc. At the municipal level, cities charge licenses for activities in the city. There are a myriad of items that governments charge money for and these generate funds for governments. For example, to use national/state parts (forest reserves) fees are charged. These generate monies to operate the activities for which fees are charged for.

FLAT TAX

Given the problems with the various forms of taxes, some people ask for what they call flat taxes. In flat taxes, the government levies every person the same flat rate, say 20% on their annual income, irrespective of the amount of money made. This is different from the present progressive tax structure we have in most capitalist economies.

In progressive taxation, the amount paid tends to be lower at the lower end of the income continuum and higher at higher levels. Let us say that a person makes $10, 0000 a year and is taxed at 10% whereas a man makes $100, 0000 a year and is taxed at 20% a year.

Russia has flat taxation of 17% on all income levels. Russia is hardly a country to be emulated by Nigeria given that its economy is in shambles, besides Russia is a newcomer to the capitalist game and really does not know what it is doing. The West is our realistic source of example.

Advocates of flat taxation seem to have interesting points but our goal in this lecture is not to debate the finer points of the economy and taxation policy. Such debates are left to more advanced lectures.

BONDS

Governments sometimes borrow money with which to fund their projects and repay the borrowed money in the future. The most common form of governmental borrowing is bonds.

Federal, state and local governments borrow money through issuing bonds. Let us say that a local government wants to build a secondary school and does not have money in hand to do so. Let us say that the cost of construction of the school is assessed at $2 million dollars. The local government council and chair passes a resolution to borrow $2 million dollars in the form of bonds. It obtains State approval for it to do so. It then arranges with a financial institution, such as a bank to sale the said bonds for it. The bonds are printed by those who specialize in such things. The units could be $1000 each. What this means is that a citizen and or business that has money to spare goes to the bond seller and buys one bond for $1000, or two or more bonds (each at $1000).

The buyer of said bond has, in effect, lent the government money and the government promises to repay him (his principal) in so many years (usually 10-30 years). In the meantime, the government pays him annual interests on his money (anywhere from 3-5%). Each year, the individual receives five percent or so on his lending to the government and at the end of the agreed upon time (bond maturity date) the government gives him back the face value of his principal ($1000 per unit purchased.). Let us assume that the individual bought 1000 units of the said bond and gave the government $1000, 0000 dollars. Each year he obtains 5% (that is $50,000) and at the end of the agreed time, say, thirty years, he receives his $1 million back.

Governments that borrow a lot of money in the nature of bonds will not only pay a lot of annual interests (debt finance) but will repay the principal. So how do they obtain the revenue to pay the interests and the principal upon its maturity? Would the financed project, in our example, a secondary school, make some profits with which to pay off the debt finance and principal? Suppose the project so financed is a bridge, would it make sense to charge tolls on it so as to recoup the cost? (Onitsha Bridge needs to be rebuilt, how is it going to be financed? Would bonds make sense? Would tolls make sense?)

BORROWING FROM INTERNATIONAL MONETARY AGENCIES

National governments like the Nigerian government can borrow money from foreign banks and or from international financial institutions like the World Bank (usually for long term financing, say thirty years), International Monetary Fund (for short term financing (say a few months to a few years). The Big banks like Chase Manhattan, City Bank and Bank of America have money to lend money to governments. The Federal government can borrow from these International Monetary Institutions for its activities or for its states and local governments.

Nigeria owes many foreign banks lots of money. In the news is Obasanjo government’s efforts to either refinance its debts, at a lower interest structure or have some of them forgiven it, written off by the European banks they are owed. These debts are usually guaranteed by the lending banks home governments, so, in effect, writing off the debt means that the home country agrees to repay the commercial banks that Nigeria owes. European governments, the so-called Paris club, agree to pay their commercial banks the amount of money Nigerian governments had borrowed from them. In effect, European taxpayers agree to give Nigerian crooks money to lavish on themselves.

(Do you think that this is a good idea? Should Euro-Americans be financing our local crooks in Nigerian government? Should our irresponsibility be paid by foreigners? I am just wondering whether we should be treated as children. Shouldn’t adults pay back what they borrowed even if they wasted it?)

There are many other sources of public financing, but the above ones are the most usual ones.

CONCLUSION

Politicians and leaders must be aware of how their governments obtain their revenue and pay attention to how such money is spent. When we deal with basic accounting, we will point out that leaders must be able to read financial statements, budgets, monthly financial reports etc and be able to supervise how government spends its money.

The average citizen must accept the need to pay taxes if he wants to have a government. The question is not whether there should be taxes or not, but how much is necessary to produce the revenue the various governments in a polity need to function annually?

The polity decision makers must determine what constitutes appropriate level of taxation and then enact it into law. Once made law, taxes must be collected. Vigorous efforts must be made to collect taxes. The internal revenue service (IRS) must collect every penny due to governments in taxes by the various sources of taxes.

Those who fail to pay their appropriate taxes ought to be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Twenty years in prison for tax evasion, I think, is the least punishment that ought to be meted out to tax evaders.

The details of how to collect taxes from individuals, businesses, restaurants, stores etc is beyond the scope of this lecture. This lecture merely wanted to call attention to the fact that governments need revenue to fund their activities and mention some of the means of generating government revenue.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

Posted by Administrator at 12:24 PM | Comments (1)

November 01, 2005

Fantasy (Idealism), Physics (Realism), and Metaphysics (Escape): Physics vs. Metaphysics

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- There are three ways of operating in this world: idealistic/fantasy, realistic/science and metaphysical/escape from the world. They are not to be mixed and cannot be mixed, anyway. You have to understand them and know what mode you operate in.

In fantasy or idealism, the individual sees reality as it is and does not like what he sees. He uses his thinking and imagination to improve the real world he sees with his five senses particularly his eyes and comes up with an ideal picture of the world. The ideal is an image in his mind and is not real. Because the ideal is an idea, and an image, his mind and thinking can improve it however many times he wants to. And he does improve it hundreds of times, every day of his life. Every time he sees the real world and appreciates its imperfection, he imagines an ideal alternative to it. This process never ends. What is ideal is always changing, its goal post always extended. When a person is idealistic he tends to forever imagine how ideal things could be. He builds castles in the air (and in excesses, such as in neurosis and psychosis psychiatrists charges him money and lives in his castles, too)

Realism perceives physical reality, as it is, and adjusts itself to it. It studies energy and matter and understands them on their own terms and copes with them as they are.

Realism accepts the world’s imperfections as reality and deals with it on those terms. It does not try to improve physical reality with imagination of how it could become.

Realism, physics and science accepts the empirical world as it is and adjusts to it. This is successful adaptation to the world. The realistic person attempts to operate in the world according to the world’s parameters and largely succeeds in it; he makes a good living for himself and his family.

Since physical reality, biology suggests that human thinking, mind, is epiphenomenal, that is, and is a result of brain activity: the configuration and permutation of the particles, atoms and elements in the human brain, the realist accepts the possibility that he ends with his physical death. He hopes that when he dies that he ceases in being and disappears into oblivion.

Materialistic monism suggests that since thinking, mind is a product of matter, that when we die, our bodies decompose and that our thinking, mind ceases being. Realism might be called ego realism.

Realism does not indulge in wistfulness; indeed, in extreme form, it is atheistic and in minor form is agnostic but seldom theistic.

Metaphysical religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism and A Course in Miracles claim that the world of physics is not real, is a dream world and needs to be transcended.

Metaphysics rejects ego idealism and ego realism. It sees ego idealism as fantasy, as misguided efforts to improve the imperfections of ego realism, in an imaginary way that would lead to no useful results.

Metaphysics rejects the realism of physics, ego realism, and negates the world altogether. It escapes from the world into what it considers a better world: a joined, unified, formless, spiritual world of God.

Only a few persons actually have experienced the world that metaphysics talks about. Those who claim to have experienced that world are called mystics.

One either accepts what mystics claim to be the nature of spiritual reality or one rejects it. There is no way for one to prove those claims in the material universe. The only way to verify their veracity is for one to experience what these folks claim to have experienced. Since most people do not have such experiences, they then must reject them or accept them on the basis of hearsay, on faith. We all know where faith has led mankind, to irrational behaviors.

Metaphysics does not attempt to adapt to the realities of the material universe but transcend it, hence transcendentalism. The term metaphysics, itself means beyond physics. (The term physics is Greek for Latin Natura, the material world. Metaphysics transcends, or claims to transcend the natural, material world.)

As far as I can see, metaphysics does not grapple with the realities of the material and social world and does not enable us adapt to them. Therefore, it does not put bread on our table.

What enable us to adapt to the exigencies of this world is science and its applied form, technology. Science studies energy, matter and human beings as they are and devises technologies to adapt to them, on their own terms.

The only use of metaphysics, that I can see, is that it gives people peace of mind of and helps them eliminates fear. If one believed in the idea of God and life after death, it enables one not to be scared by the exigencies of this world we live in and be calm. Belief in God can give one mental equanimity and calmness. (So does certain philosophies, such as stoicism.)

Those who pursue metaphysics often talk sweet talk but beg their food. Consider Christian ministers. They talk about an all powerful God who gives us everything we ask for. But that God, apparently, does not give the ministers what they ask for. The ministers often have to appeal to their Church members’ sense of guilt and out of guilt they fork out money to the ministers to live on.

As it were, church members go work in the physical world and realistically make a living and then come give ministers’ money with which they exist to talk their unrealistic, world escaping metaphysical talk.

This same phenomenon is replicated at the universities where professors of metaphysics, aka philosophy, cannot earn their daily bread through their so-called knowledge. Philosophy has no market; people are not willing to pay for it. Unable to make a living from their philosophy, these professors attach themselves to universities and have the taxpayers of society pay for their existence. They teach what has no value in the market. Their students graduate in philosophy and cannot obtain jobs with what they studied. As it were, university philosophy professors are parasites living off a host called society while contributing no worthwhile product to that society?

Scientists, especially applied ones, technologists, teach what is useful to people and, therefore, have a ready market. Those who studied science and technology easily obtain jobs with what they studied, for employers need their services to enable them produce goods and services and sell them to a public that finds them useful in adapting to its world. There are people willing to pay for the services of science professors so they are not parasites.

Philosophers and priests seem like parasites carried on the people’s backs. It is only scientists and technologists that produce wealth and who are useful to the people and legitimately earn their daily bread.

A Course in Miracles, a metaphysics, talks about how to escape from this world, how to negate the material and social world and reach an already existing world inside the mind. (Mind does not exist, in fact; mind is name for the abstraction called thinking; thinking is a process and not a tangible reality.)

The world has its physical laws and will continue operating as it has done for billions of years despite ACIM and metaphysics in general. You can escape from the world into your thinking, even into inner peace as in meditation, but sooner or later, if you want to live in this world of space, time and matter, you have to return to it and operate according to its parameters, its imperfect laws.

ACIM is a world view; it is perfectly consistent and unified in its own terms, but seems not relevant to the realities of this material world. It does not yield food and material things in this world.

Like Hinduism, if you follow ACIM, you escape from this world and as in Hinduism you would be poor. Hinduism and other religions do give inner peace, psychological peace, not social peace for there are still earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural forces beyond the control of our thinking; there is suffering in the world despite religion’s consolation (and the consolation of philosophy, for the purely rationalistic).

ACIM as spiritual psychology can enable you understand the nature of the ego (the human self concept, self image, and personality), the ego real (normal persons) and ego ideal (neurotic and psychotic persons). ACIM contains sound psychology and can enable folks to understand the fact that their self concepts/self images are mere ideas that they defend and defense seem to make those ideas real to them.

Defense does not make ego, real or ideal, fantasy real. All that defense makes is give the defender the impression that what he defends is real. What seems real is not real. It is not real and your defense of it merely gives you anxiety, fear, pain, paranoia, depression, guilt, shame, pride, and other negative affects.

You can choose to stop defending the ego, real or ideal forms of it. When you stop defending the ego, real or ideal, you tend to relax, and experience mental, emotional and somatic peace.

Indeed, if you stop defending your ego, you experience mental health, for you are no longer like the neurotic wasting your time defending a fantasy that does not exist, a fantasy of your invention.

Psychotics pretend to be their ideal self concepts/self images, fantasy. The neurotic wants to become his ideal self but knows that he is not that ideal self. He nevertheless, has a compulsion to be like his ideal self and tends to experience anxiety from fear that his ideal self will not come into being. The psychotic assumes that his ideal self has already come into being and is no longer experiencing anxiety; the psychotic has escaped from physical reality and lives in his fantasy world.

No defenses of the ego, real or ideal amounts to having no ego; and no suffering. No defenses you live in peace.

With no defenses of the ego ideal and its ideal world one lives in ego real, that is, the physical world. Here, only minor defenses are called for; defenses of the body, for body must be defended with food, medications, clothes, houses etc for it to survive.

Metaphysics teaches that when the ego and its ideals are not defended, that when body also is not defended, that when one goes inside and tunes out the external world that one experiences ones real self: the Christ self.

Remove the obstacles to the awareness of union, Christ self, love, and one experiences the love, unified self, Christ self that is always already there.

When one stops trying to be ones ego, real or ideal, one stops fighting with the environment, with other people in a foolish effort to realize ones ego, real or ideal.

The neurotic tries to actualize what does not exist, his ideal self; the psychotic thinks that he has already realized it hence lives in illusions.

The ego is mere fantasy, a fiction, an idea, an image, a picture that is always changing hence cannot be actualized, for if you think that you have actualized one picture, it changes and compels you to try to actualize another improved picture, improved idea of your ego and its improved image; there is never an end to self improvement, it is a treadmill without an end.

You must then stop and go inwards and experience your already existing unified spirit self, a self that needs no improvement, metaphysics claims.

ESCAPE FROM POLITICAL SCIENCE TO POLITICAL IDEALISM, FANTASY

Science studies reality, as it is, and designs a technology to adapt to it, as it is. This is how human beings adapt to their world.

Political science is part of the enterprise of science. In that sense, it studies how human beings live together in society and manage their social affairs. Like science in general, what it sees are imperfect human beings doing imperfect jobs of managing their social affairs. But that is reality.

Practical Politics is like applied science, engineering and medicine, that applies what pure science, in this case, political science, knows about human political behavior. The politician is a practical man, he is like an engineer and doctor, and he deals with the world of the real, not the imagined ideal world. He deals with imperfect human beings, people pursuing their self interests hence necessarily having conflicts and needing mechanisms for conflict resolution. The practical politician is a political realist, for he accepts imperfect human beings and deals with them on their terms; he does not attempt to make people and their political institutions ideal and perfect. Democracy, our present preferred social institution, is by no means perfect, but it seems the best we can do given human imperfection.

The political idealist, on the other hand, sees extant politics as not good enough and uses his thinking and imagination to construct idealistic versions of it, fantasies of how human beings ought to behave and ought to be politically organized. He constructs perfections in his thinking, mind. These are politics according to the individual’s ego wishes.

Political idealism, psychological idealism and spiritual idealism are how the individual wants society to be governed, how he wants man to be psychologically and how he wants spirit to be idealistically. This is the world according to the individual’s ego wishes, fantasy.

Of course, the real world is not going to change and become what the idealist wishes that it become. In the realm of spirit, metaphysics says that spirit and its world are already there, are as God created them and that we cannot add or subtract from it with our wishes. The real self is already there. We have to remove our ego wishes, remove our idealism, to experience the Christ, unified self already in us.

Indeed, metaphysics teaches that as long as you wish for ideal states that you are not going to experience your real self. Idealism is an obstacle to the awareness of spirit. In other words, idealisms are bad and must be given up.

In the egos real world, idealisms are certainly bad for they prevent one from adapting to the real, empirical world of space, time and matter and social realities; idealism prevents one from adapting to the physical universe and doing what one must do to adjust to it. Escape into idealistic fantasies only keeps one ignorant and poor.

One must, therefore, return to real politics, that is, political science and its applied form, what politicians do. Like an engineer, one must apply what the science of politics tells us is how human beings operate. The science of politics tells us that human beings are selfish and not socially interested and that, as such, there must be social conflicts, conflicts managed but not eliminated by politicians.

My problem was my rejection of real politics and preference for political idealism, fantasy. That was escapist and useless. Therefore, one must jettison political idealism, fantasies and embrace the real world, the ego’s real world. One did not make the egos real world (according to ACIM all of us collectively made the egos and egos real world) or the Holy Spirit’s real world.

(I need do nothing to experience the Holy Spirit’s real world; in fact, it is in doing something, in constructing go ideals that I do not experience that Holy Spirit’s real world).

A Course in miracles has some uses within the realm of psychology. It teaches basic psychology and if we understand it and do what it asks us to do, we shall experience peace and happiness.

George Kelly tells us that each of us constructs a self concept; Karen Horney tells us that some of us, neurotics construct an ego ideal and try to make it seem real. The ego and its idealized form, special self, are not real; they are ideas, ideas turned into pictures and images and then defended, as if they are real.

All that the neurotic (that is, all human beings in degrees) does with his life is defend his ego, real and ideal self image, and in doing so experience anxiety, pain and suffering.

If the individual lets his self concept and its image go, he experiences peace. But the ego so wants to be real that it attempts to use spirituality and metaphysics to make itself seem real. It attempts to use ACIM to make the ego and the ego’s world one constructed seem real to one. The ego, that is, the separated self identification of the sleeping Son of God, our earthly identity, wants God and the Holy Spirit to make its wishes real. But that is not going to happen, for the ego is the dis/ease: pursuing it gives one anxiety and other mental and emotional upsets.

The Holy Spirit wants one to give the ego up and not make it real. True spiritualism wants one to give up the ego, give up ones self concept, give up the world according to the ego and its ideals and return to the world created by God.

True spirituality wants one to die to the self concept and be reborn in the world of unified spirit self, the Christ self, that does not live in body. That new self and its world is not of the ego, is not created by one; it is created by God and the Holy Spirit, so one needs do nothing to experience it; one only needs to remove the ego and its ideals one constructed to see the real world and eventually to experience the spirit world.

Spirituality and ego idealism are not the same. Ego idealism, spiritual idealism etc are of the ego. True spirituality is not of our thinking, is not fantasy, one must be quiet to experience it.

In this world, you can choose to deal with ego realism, the ego’s physics and survive on its own terms, but you cannot make ego idealism become true. You cannot mix ego idealism, ego spiritual idealism and spirituality. Spirituality is not of ones making.

ACIM, thus, has some uses, it enables one to see that ego idealism and spiritual idealism are all of the egos making and helps one to give them up, so as to experience the world of God, a world already created by God, not invented by one.

In true spirituality, you no longer look outside you to see yourself but look inside you to know your true self that God created, that you rejected and invented the false self in body to replace with and want to be it and present it to other people to accept and keep that dance going on.

Let go of your ego, real or ideal, and experience your real self, which is calm and peaceful and happy. This is the real gift of the Course in Miracles to you: it helps you to give up your ego, real or ideal, and accept your Holy Spirit recreated self from that ego. Ultimately, it points you in the direction of accepting your God created unified self.

CHARACTER CHANGE

When you effect this change in self perception: change in thinking about who you and the world are, change in mind, and your character changes. You change your personality; you change your mind and thinking. This is transformation of the self: from separated ego to unified self. You no longer feel ego upsets. You no longer analyze yourself and other people, all in a futile effort to make your and their egos seem real, for they are not ever going to be real, for the unreal cannot be real.

If I accomplish this end, I have changed my family’s pattern of thinking and behaving, our multigenerational neurotic lifestyles. If I succeed, what I accomplish is no less than revolution of the self and its world, the internal world, not the external world.

It means that I stop trying to change other people. I cannot change other people. I cannot change the mentally it (as I tried to change them when, for over ten years I ran mental health agencies). Only the individual chooses to be who he is and can choose to be different.

The only person that I can change is me, not other people. If I change and live in peace and have no emotional upsets, no fear, anger, sadness, depression, paranoia, etc then I can model that lifestyle for the world and if they want to, they can copy it.

I write about healthy lifestyles and those who want to can read my writings. There are no accidents in God’s universe: those who read what I wrote, those who choose to read my writings, will read them. Those who do not want to read them, even if I shove them to their face, if they are not for them, they will not read them.

My goal is to understand neurosis and overcome it. The neurotic invents an ideal ego self and wants to become it. Normal persons invent realistic ego selves and live it. The neurotic who wants to become an ideal self, around people feels that that ideal self my not be affirmed by other people. Generally, he tells tall stories to make himself seem like the perfect, ideal, all important self he invented and around people fears that they may not accept his lies about himself and fear of exposure makes him feel intensely anxious. Since he is not that self he feels that it would be exposed and feels anxious. Feeling anxious, he runs away from people and in avoidance retains his imaginary, ideal big self. By retaining his desired ideal self, he guarantees that he would feel anxious the next time and the next day he is around people. As long as he desires to be an ideal and all powerful self he must be prone to fear, anxiety, anger, paranoia and depression.

The solution is for him to give up all desire for ideal self and accept normal realistic ego that does not desire perfection; here he reduces his anxiety to normal levels. In the long run, he must give up his ego self concept, and ego self image; he must give up his personality and have no ego, separated self. When he does so, has no ego self, real or ideal, to defend; now he feels perfectly peaceful and happy. If in that state of egoless thinking he dies, he would no longer come back to this world, for he does not wish to come back to the world of egos. He has transcended the world of separated egos and has no lesson to learn from this world and does not come back to it.

Thus, I leave the field of mental health to psychiatrists who believe in body and allow them to shove medications to those who believe that they are bodies; both false. I go to where I belong, the world of the intellect. My goal is to show people how to think in a healthy manner.

Real self is spirit and does not need food, clothes and material things. On earth, we make ourselves into bodies and need food, clothes etc. ACIM says that we did this to ourselves, all in a misguided effort to seem powerful, via self invention, the invention of our egos.

We condemned ourselves to this suffering. I must have pity on a humanity that does this self punishment to itself and do my best to teach it that it is spirit and does not need food etc. If one believed that one is spirit, one would not eat food. (I just went for forty days without food, just drank water.) One would not need clothes for one would not be in body.

Accept your real self, spirit; liberate yourself from the hell of seeing yourself as body and then help other people do the same, liberate them selves from their slavery to ego and its hellish existence.

God has blessed all of us. God has given all of us his grace by having us live in his heaven where all our needs were met. In heaven we are spirit and do not have physical needs. We chose to separate from spirit and go live in body. Here we suffer, scrounging for food. We made ourselves suffer. We have denied God’s blessing of us and chose to live in ego pain. If you see a human being, adult or child, man or woman, black or white, realize that he or she is suffering. Bless him or her and do what you can to reduce their suffering. Love is all that you can do to reduce others sufferings so love every person you see. When you add your blessings to God’s blessing of people, even though they deny blessing for themselves you reduce their suffering.

Posted by Administrator at 06:46 AM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2005

The Five Modes of Thinking: Studies in Science and Thinking

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- INTRODUCTION In this paper, I will describe the five modes of thinking known to man, or, at least, known to me. The five are: (1) God/Christ, unified mode of thinking; (2) Ego, separated mode of thinking; (3) Ego, separated and idealistic mode of thinking; (4) Holy Spirit directed ego, separated mode of thinking: this has two levels, absolute Holy Spirit directed mode of thinking, in which case the individual is not in this world (5) and the lesser level of it where the individual is ego driven but occasionally listens to the Holy Spirit and does as the Holy Spirit directs him to do; this is where most people are.

I will not necessarily be sequential in making this presentation for the points were pieced together from disparate notes. Nevertheless, by the end of the presentation, the reader would be able to identify the five modes of thinking and decide which one he is employing at any point in his thinking.

This paper is meant for those already searching for God, those alienated from the extant world; the paper would probably not make much sense to those comfortable with the world, as we know it.

Human beings are always thinking. They cannot, not think, for to be a human being is to think. If one ceased thinking one would cease being.

To be alive is to think. Living is thinking; thinking is living. The individual is always thinking and thus is always living.

Life is eternal. Thinking is an eternal process. Thinking takes place in this world and in all other worlds, including in the world of God.

The universe is a thinking universe. However, there are many modes of thinking in the universe. The goal of this paper is to describe the various modes of thinking, so that the individual, since he is always thinking, recognizes his mode of thinking, and where he feels that his thinking is not yielding the results he desires modifies it. One cannot, not think; all that one can do is think differently.

Each mode of thinking brings its own results. Some modes of thinking bring peace and others bring conflict. If one desires peace, one must think in the mode that brings peace. On the other hand, if one desires conflict, one thinks in a mode that brings conflict. The choice is up to us. Peace or war? Choose.

In eternity there is no choice, but in time there is choice. In our world we have the illusion that it is up to us to choose, so we must choose the mode we want to think in. In realty, in eternity, we are always thinking in unison. But we chose to seem to think separately and that choice produced our current world.

The world is the opposite of heaven. Heaven is union; the world is separateness. Heaven is sameness and equality; the world is a place of differences and inequality. The world is a place of opposites, a place of contradictions and paradoxes: good and bad, black and white, night and day, pleasure and pain. In this world, we must seem to choose, so let us then know what we seem to be choosing.

The goal of this paper and Real-Self Fellowship, in general, is to help us choose to think in a manner that would produce peace and joy for us. If you do not share this purpose, please stop reading, now. You are perfectly free to choose to live in conflict and pain.

THINKING AND BEHAVIORS HAVE CONSEQUENCES

The Son of God, you, each of us, has the freedom to choose to think and behave as he pleases. However, since there is a law of cause and effect in the universe, whatever one chooses and does have its effects. One cannot escape from the consequences of ones choices.

In reality, in heaven, we really do not have choices for we are always as God created us and cannot choose to be different. But in the world of dreams and illusions we seem to choose and our choices have effects in our dream setting; not real effect, for reality remains as God created it, unified, but temporary, dream effects.

If one chooses to think in a manner that conflict is inevitable one must accept that reality. On the other hand, if one prefers peace, as we do at Real-Self Fellowship, one must think in such a manner that peace is the inevitable result.

Science of Thinking, of which this paper is part of, aims at enabling us think in accord with our real self. Our real self is unified spirit.

When we think in accord with our real self, with unified self, we are peaceful. When we think as our real self, unified self, we think in tandem with God and all creation; we think in a unified manner. This means that we stop thinking in ego, separated manner. It means giving up our current self, the separated ego self.

If we did this, give up our egos, we would not be in this world of space, time and matter. We would reawaken in the world of unified spirit. We would return to thinking as we do in eternity, what Christians call heaven.

One cannot be on earth, a place of separation, and simultaneously be aware of heaven, a place of union. That is impossible.

One is either aware of union or separation, but never both at the same time. Thus, if one completely returned to unified thinking, Christ/God unified thinking, one would exit from this world of ego/separated thinking.

Alternatively, one remains in this ego/separated world and its thinking and do one of two things. One can give ones thinking over to the Holy Spirit to guide one.

If one completely permitted the Holy Spirit to guide one, one would say nothing unless the Holy Spirit told one what to say.

If one listened to the Holy Spirit one hundred percent of the time and spoke with his voice, that is, through his guidance, one would also exit from this world of separation. But in as much as one still has some wishes for separated living, albeit directed by the Holy Spirit, one would be in what we might call by several names, including purgatory, real world, happy dream, heaven’s gate, near heaven, near God, Bramaloca etc.

Finally, one can choose to be in our world of separation, retain ones ego and occasionally over rules ones ego thinking and choose to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit. Thus, occasionally, one does not do what ones ego self asks one to do. One overlooks ego reason, which amounts to overlooking the ego’s call for vengeance and defensiveness.

In this world, we live in bodies and bodies are vulnerable. We see environmental factors attack us. Body must be defended to stay in being. If, for example, one did not eat food, one would not live in body. We need food, medications, clothes, and shelter to protect our bodies. If we did not wear clothes, particularly during the cold winter months in Alaska, we would die within twenty-four hours. Life on earth, which is lived in body, which is life in separated, ego state, must be defended for it to exist.

Without defense, that is, defenselessness, the earthly individual’s body dies. However, one can choose to occasionally not defend ones body and ego and momentarily, therefore, die to their awareness.

When one dies to the awareness of the ego one awakens to the awareness of unified spirit. When one does not defend the ego self one remembers unified spirit self.

If one is occasionally not defensive, one is occasionally listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit. One is occasionally thinking from the perspective of the Holy Spirit.

During the moments one thinks from the perspective of the Holy Spirit one is near heaven. In this mode of thinking, one is still in ego state, but an ego guided by the Holy Spirit. One thinks in ego, separated thinking, hence is in this world but occasionally permits ones self to think like God does hence momentarily escapes from this world and come near to God, and eventually returns to this world’s mode of thinking and see ones self in this world.

This world’s primary mode of thinking is ego, separated thinking. If you are reading this material you are in the world of separation, which means that you have identified with the ego and think as an ego.

There are essentially two types of ego-based thinking. Ego normal thinking; this is what we might call normal persons’ thinking. Ninety nine percent of the people on earth are essentially normal most of the time. That is, most people think in ego normal mode. Here, the individual accepts that he is separated from God and from all people. He sees space and time between him and God and all people. He sees himself as living in a body. He accepts that what he sees with his physical eyes are facts and live accordingly. He is living in ego reality. He is not fighting with ego physical reality. He is a well-adjusted human being. He is a medical doctor, an engineer, a lawyer, and or a scientist; in short he is the normal human being. He is at home in this world. He is able to compete in this world and successfully do what the world asks of him to adapt to it; he is adapted to the realities of this world of space, time and matter.

The other type of ego thinking is what psychoanalysts used to refer to as neurosis. Here, the individual sees himself as he is, sees the world as it is and concludes that they are not good enough. He sees the world of separation, space-time and matter but does not like what he sees. He then uses his imagination to recreate and improve the world in his mind. He images himself as an improve person, he images other people as improved persons and he images animals, trees, every thing he sees in an ideal form of them.

Karen Horney, in her Book, Neurosis and Human Growth, describes this type of person very accurately. She described me to a T. Since I became self aware, which is, at least, by age six, I have rejected myself, rejected other people, rejected social institutions and used my thinking to image ideal alternatives to them. I then aspired to bringing my ideal forms into being.

I rejected my real self and created an ideal self, a replacement self, a substitute self and attempted to actualize that merely imaginary ideal. Of course, the imaginary is not the physically real. The self one imagines in ones mind is not the self in ones body. The self in body is imperfect, weak and vulnerable. The ideal self is purely ideational and therefore can be made perfect. My ideal self can seem invulnerable but my physical self is in body and experiences pain and hurt. Simply stated, the ego ideal is not the ego real.

The person who rejects the ego real self and pursues the ego ideal self is called a neurotic. He feels anxiety from not attaining his ideal self. The neurotic always lives with free-floating anxiety, for he defends his ideal self and is afraid of it failing.

Let us see how this works in real life. When I was in school, I wanted to be an A student. My ideal self preferred to make As in all my examinations. Therefore, during examinations I feared not making As. I experienced tremendous anticipatory anxiety, fear of not making As in future examinations.

When I made Bs I felt devastated. Bs was not part of my ideal self-image. My ideal self-image is that I am an A student. A very intelligent person, I believed does not make Bs, he makes As at all times.

Since I did not make As at all times, I did not live as my ideal self-image. Therefore, I felt anxious most of the time.

SECULAR AND SPIRITUAL CURE FOR NEUROSIS: GIVING UP THE IDEAL SELF, THE EGO AND ACCEPTIONG THE REAL SELF, THE UNIFIED SELF

The neurotic looks externally for affirmation of who he is. He invents an ideal self concept and translates it to an ideal self image and presents it to the rest of the world to affirm. Whenever he is around people or even not with people but merely thinking about them his primary preoccupation is how they see his self image: do they accept his ideal self image or not? If he fears being rejected, not his real self being rejected, for no one can reject the individual’s real self, it is his ideal self that fears being rejected and since it is false it must be rejected, he feels anxiety. (Karen Horney called it Basic Anxiety.)

Generally, he withdraws from other people. He avoids other people and in avoidance reduce his anxiety but not eliminate it for he still fears other people’s rejection of his ideal self. His life is wrapped around having his ideal superior self accepted by himself and by other people. This ideal superior self is not real and must be defended at all times least it is exposed as the false entity it is.

In social isolation, withdrawal from other people, the neurotic manages to convince himself that he could be his ideal self, which he is not and needs not even want to be that false self, a self trying to be which gives him nothing but anxiety, pain and suffering.

(There are many types of neurotic persons; the one that I have just described is called avoidant personality disorder, the shy person.)

What is healing for neurosis? It is letting go of the ego ideal. The individual must let go of identification with his ego ideal, must stop all wishes for a superior self, must give up all wishes for a special self that he himself invented to replace his real self. He must give up the substitute self, defense of which causes him a lot of pain and anxiety and interferes with his interpersonal relationships. He must stop looking outside himself for a self and instead look inside where his real self is.

The real self is created by God and does not look like ones body. It is not anything that the individual invented as a concept and transforms into a self image. The real self is not a concept and is imageless; the real self is an idea, the idea of God’s son in the mind of God. It is the self that God created; it is whole, holy and unified with God.

The individual needs do nothing to make the real self real; it is real because God created it and what God created is real and eternal.

The real self is inside one and one does not need other people to validate it, to like it or not. It does not matter what people in the world, in the dream, in an illusion that does not even exist say about the real self.

The real self is eternal, permanent and changeless. The real self is the son of God as God created him, unified with his father and with all his brothers in eternity and is immortal.

The real self is formless spirit and is not in physical form; it is an idea in the mind of God. Ideas leave not their source. The real self is always in the mind of God where it was created as the extension of God.

When neurosis is healed the individual feels calm, peaceful and happy. Why so? Because he is no longer looking externally to other people and the world to approve the false ideal self he invented to replace his real self with. He is being the self God created him as, the self he is given by God, not the self he gave to himself. He has rejected the self he made, the craven idol, the antichrist, (the ego is the antichrist) and accepted the self that God created, the unified Christ, as his real self. He is no longer in competition with God trying to create himself by giving himself a false self, but has accepted that God created him by accepting the real son of God that God created.

He is happy to be the child of God. That child of God is inside him, not outside him. The Child of God, the Christ in him, is the one who went into sleep, forgets its real identity as the holy son of God (holy is contraction of whole, the whole Son of God, meaning joined to God and all creation, not the unholy Son of God, the separated ego self) and invents the ego self and the ego ideal self and tries to become it.

The son of God is the dreamer of dreams and the thinker of earthly thoughts. He is not his earthly thoughts, for the dreamer is not his dreams. He is the conceptualizer and the image maker. When he recognizes that he is the maker of the self concept and self image and gives up trying to make concepts and images for himself and for other people and becoming them and just accepts the self that he already is, the self that God created him as, the holy self, he is now innocent, sinless and guiltless for he has stopped sinning.

To sin is to make a different self, the self concept and self image for ones self and try to be it. To sin is to make a false self and use it to separate from God and try to go make it seem real. When one stops trying to make the ego/neurotic/psychotic false self real one is no longer separating from God and is sinless and does not feel neurotic affects like guilt, fear, anger, sadness, depression, paranoia, shame and pride. One knows that the internal self is all worth and is magnificent, for God is magnificent and what God made is magnificent, not the grandiosity the neurotic self gives itself but the grandeur that God created his son as, a grandeur given to us by God, not the false grandiosity one gives to one by ones self.

A healed mind is a person who thinks differently, for mind is thinking, from thinking separately to thinking in a unified manner. What this means is that he loves his real self, not his ideal self, he loves all people’s real selves and he forgives what the ego selves do on earth. He is a prodigal son who is now returned to his father, to his home and is being how his father created him and wants him to be, unified.

A healed mind looks inside himself and experiences God inside and gives him thanks, as God gives thanks to him, his son, after all he was created by God to be a companion for his father and brothers. He closes his eyes to the external world and what it says of him and sees inside, his real self, the Christ self. He sees the face of Christ in himself and all his brothers and loves them all.

He seeks a vocation that he truly loves and has aptitude in doing and does it not to get attention for his ego ideal but because he has interest in doing it and loves doing it. Such a Holy Spirit directed vocation generally contributes to the rest of the community, in a positive manner. In our own case, we contribute to the community by living our real self and showing people how to live out of their real self, in atonement, in at-one-ment with the whole, in union with God and all his creation hence in peace and joy. We engage in our profession of writing on the science of thinking, to enable all people to think in such a manner that peace and joy results for them.

The neurotic has a pattern of behavior: he presents his ego ideal to others, uses its ideal standards to criticize others and nobody can ever live up to his ideal self and its deal standards. People feeling unfairly criticized by him, to judge and criticize is to attack, so he is psychologically attacking people and they feel upset and attack him in self defense. They attack him because he did not love them; they attack him because they are asking him to love them and not criticize them. But instead of recognizing their attack on him as their call for love for them, when love is missing, and love them, to love himself, he feels unjustly attacked and counter attacks people. He may even avoid people to go retain and maintain his false ideal ego.

What he needs to do is see his attackers as sending him a message; the message is that he needs to give up his ego ideal for himself and for other people and stop using it to make life hellish for all people. To be a neurotic is to live in hell, a hell of ones making. To overcome neurotic thinking, that is, to not think from ego ideal stand point but to think from love and forgiving stand point, is to feel released from all the pain, anxiety and suffering that neurotic thinking patterns induce in the individual. This improves the individual’s interpersonal relationships.

A healed mind, a mind that now joins other minds that think forgiving and loving thoughts, not separating thoughts that maintain the false ideal self, has healed relationships. One is now one with all people; one is no longer judgmental and critical; one is accepting of all people hence at peace and joy with all people. Life becomes a joy, a happy dream.

There are those who go from garden-variety neurosis, like what I had, to psychosis. The psychotic is an exaggerated neurotic. He sees the ego real, his body and self, as not good enough. He sees the world of other people as not good enough. He uses his mind to construct ideal self for himself, and for other people and an ideal world. In reality, nobody is ever ideal. The psychotic to be adolescent is thus in a dilemma. Before he is age twenty-five, he recognizes that his ideal self and world is not going to occur in the world of reality. But he fervently wants that ideal self and ideal world to occur. So what to do?

He flips over and imagines that he is living in that ideal self and ideal world. He images that he is living in the world of ideation, the mere imaginary, the world he wished existed but that does not exist in the real world. That is to say that he tunes out our ego real world and lives in his own imaginary world, in the world of fantasy.

Real-Self Fellowship (RSF)

(Seattle Center)

600- 1st Avenue, Suite 325

Seattle, WA. 98104

(206) 464-9004

[email protected]

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October 25, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #20: Training for Leadership in Nigeria (Continued)

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) ---Are you are a leader, as we have properly defined it here, and, if not, why are you calling yourself a chief, and why are you in politics?

Nigerians have identified leadership as a critical variable missing in their politics. I, therefore, suggest that we consciously train Nigerians in leadership. This training can begin at secondary school level. We can adapt the training provided at graduate schools, of management and leadership, to the level of secondary schools, and teach them.

We have to train our students, at secondary schools, technical schools and universities in leadership and management, if we want to produce good leaders and managers who would pull us out of the economic morass we currently are in. This can be done. We just have to have the will to do it. The present national political reform conference can recommend that leadership courses be taught at the various levels of education, and require all aspirants to public office to seat and pass the equivalent of MBA and MPA examinations before they run for offices.

Better still, we must require all aspirants to public office to write a blue print of what goals they want to accomplish, for the level of society they are planning to rule. They ought to state in the book why they are running for office: to make money ala wabara or to do what improves the country, as leaders ought to be doing?

Certainly, every university graduate (the minimum for seeking public office) can knock off 100 pages, or more, Political Manifesto in a week, and publish it. We, the public, then read and evaluate it, and elect him on the basis of what he intends to do for us, but not because of what he intends to steal from us.

Some American business schools make funds available to students, money with which they are encouraged to start business and see whether they can succeed. It is businessmen that create and grow jobs. The idea of giving these students loans is to encourage the spirit of enterprise. We can do the same in Nigeria, and encourage students to start businesses and/or initiate public programs, and do what it takes to make them succeed, not by stealing from the public, but by earning every penny they get. This would enable them to gain leadership skills. We would then elect into public offices youngsters that have demonstrated an excellent track record in starting projects, and seeing them through to maturity, and made profits.

DISCUSSION

This essay consciously did not address itself to the technical aspects of leadership and management. It did not address such leadership topics as planning, organizing, coordinating, controlling, delegating, hiring, training, supervising, firing, accounting, financing, reading financial statements, budgeting, cash flow issues, cash receivables and payables, payroll, span of control, power, authority, influence and so on. It did not mention the seminal studies all students of management know about, such as Frederick Taylor’s Time and Motion’ studies, the famous Hawthorn studies, Herzberg’s studies, Morton’s studies, Mary Follet’s studies on the interpersonal aspect of leadership, Field’s distinction between task oriented leaders and emotion oriented leaders, Macgregor’s idea of X versus Y leaders, Ouchi’s write up on Japanese management styles, Max Weber’s write up on bureaucratic organizations…they are hierarchical, pyramidical, impersonal, merit recruited, process and procedure bound, promotion is based on merit etc, his distinction between bureaucrats and politicians, and the nature of charismatic leaders; Abraham Maslow’s concept of hierarchy of needs; writings on transformational leaders, reformative leaders, status quo/establishmentarian leaders, Total Quality management and other management fads etc..

This paper did not engage in academic discourse because that was not its goal. If the reader is interested in those technical aspects of management and leadership, he could visit relevant texts in management. My goal was very simple: to call attention to the need for Nigerians to start training our leaders in the nature of leadership and management. This has to be done, if the country is to improve its economic and political standing. We really do not have a choice but to do these things. We can only vacillate, and put off the inevitable. Sooner or later, reality will catch up with us, and force us to do what we ought to have done.

That reality may catch up with us in a most unexpected manner. Look here, political realism teaches us not to be having illusions about human nature. Man, empirical observation shows, is very capable of evil behavior. Go read Machievelli (Prince) Hobbes (Leviathan), Pareto, Schumpeter, Kissinger and other political realities. In the world of reality, if Africans do not soon get their acts together, other races will start rethinking who we are. They will stop making excuses for our apparent failures and see us as failures in life. Already, some see us as evolution’s failure.

The liberal orgy of the1960s is effectively over. As economic resources become scarce, men will think realistically, not sentimentally, as liberals do. Liberals tell us that all men are equal. Good. In the real world, we have black Americans who cannot enter America’s top universities, whose scores on the SAT are almost half Asian scores. We have Black American students who, at best, are C students at America’s top colleges. Now we add African’s shiftlessness to this poor performance, to this mix, and disaster is brewing for us.

We have been independent for forty something years, and have not learnt to govern ourselves. For a while, liberal scholars offered excuses for our inability to do the right thing. In the meantime, the Asian countries that got their independence from Europe, at about the same time as us, are now out competing Europe. Singapore, in fact, has exceeded the United States in information technology.

What does all this mean to you? When political realism sets in, as it is bound to do, other folks may conclude that Africans are genetically unintelligent and are probably also genetically programmed criminals. They would then respond accordingly.

In 1923, the American Congress passed a law banning Eastern Europeans, Slavs, from coming to America, because they performed poorly on standard American IQ tests. It was only later, when it was shown that it was cultural differences that accounted for the differences that Congress rescinded its Act.

(As you can see, Hitler was not the only one who dealt with Slavs in a negative manner. Americans did the same, in their habitual velvet, but, nevertheless, murderous manner. America is probably the most oppressive country on earth, but it presents the face of innocence to the world, and gullible persons buy it. Behind the lovy, dovy Christian mask worn by Americans, they are really as predatory as Neanderthal, and do not hesitate murdering people, for their own gains.)

Slavic Europe is probably a century behind Germanic Europe, in material development. Moreover, the Slavic culture is not as dynamic as the Germanic culture of Western Europe (all western Europeans are Germanic: Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia…they are a mix of Germanic and Celtic population, with the later subjugated by the former. In North America, too, the Germanic race subjugated American Indians, and, of course, Africans).

We all know what Adolf Hitler did to the Slavs. Believing that they were an inferior race, Hitler set out to kill most of them, and reduce what is left of them to performing laborer jobs for their supposed Aryan masters. The Nazis killed 25 million Russians, whom they considered sub human beings, animals really. Russian war prisoners were worked to death, just as the Jews, the other supposed inferior race, were worked until they died.

War prisoners from the other Germanic groups, Western Europeans and Americans, were treated like friends and well fed, while Polish, Russian and other Slavic war prisoners were starved to death. Just imagine what this war-mongering race will do to us, black people, when they turn their attention to us. They will reduce us to slavery or wipe us out and take Africa over.

And, if we fail to prepare for this eventuality, as Stalin and Slavs failed to take Hitler seriously, we, like them, will pay a terrible price. Russians read Hitler’s 1925 book, Mein Kampf, in which he described his view that Russians are animals, and carefully delineated his plan to eliminate them, but did not take him seriously. They cavalierly dismissed what the man said. Indeed many of them thought that the man was insane. Hitler was a paranoid personality, all right, but so are many persons holding responsible positions. Moreover the man had an IQ of over 140, hence a gifted political and military strategist. . At any rate, Russians lived to regret their foolishness, for when, in 1941, operation Babarosa was unleashed on mother Russia; she was not prepared for the match. But for Hitler’s over confidence, and certain miscalculations, such as redirecting his Panzers to the Caucasus to get hold of the all mighty oil, instead of smash the weak Russian troops defending the ramparts of Moscow, Moscow would have been taken before the end of 1941. If Von Paulus army had descended, like a brick, on Moscow, instead of allow itself to get bogged down in Stalingrad; Russia would today be a German colony. We must also remember that many in the capitalist West did not like the Bolsheviks, and quietly prayed that Hitler would get rid of the pesky Communists, for them. If you are interested in political leadership, not leadership of nursery schools, you must be interested in military affairs. Wars are inevitable in human aggregations. Please read about great generals and their wars. For a starter, read about Field Marshals Montgomery and Erin Rummel.

If we ignore racist perception of us, as sub human beings, and their intention to reduce us to slavery, like foolish Russians, we shall live to regret the day we chose to be idealistic, rather than be political realists, and face facts as they are.

Human beings, their historical behaviors show, are predatory savages, and will reduce you to slavery, or destroy you and appropriate your territory, if you are weak. Racist Americans enslaved Africans, didn’t they? What more evidence do you need to demonstrate for you that man is an aggressive creature? If a people, who masqueraded about, as loving Christians, could do to Africans, what Americans did to us, well, you must be a fool not to recognize that human beings are capable of iniquitous acts.

Realists always try to checkmate other human groups by being prepared to jostle with them at wars. The force of arms guarantees peace, not by love. As Machievelli observed, teach love, but exercise force, for it is better that people fear and respect you, than love you.

In case you do not know it, the rest of the world suspects that Africans are dumb, and on that basis discriminate against us. In America, blacks are generally the last hired and the first fired.

I have never heard a Nigerian leader express disgust at how white America treats our brothers in America. Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, occasionally speak out against racist dehumanization of our brothers in America. How about Nigerian leaders? They are too parochial, particularistic and self-centered to be interested in universalistic human issues of justice and fairness. These apes do not see it as their business that how whites treat our brothers in America, is symbolic of how they would like to treat us. Thus, they run around America, staying in the most expensive hotels, unaware that if they walked around the neighborhoods where those hotels are located, at night, that racist police officers would harass them. If you are black, walk around Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, California, at night, and see what happens to you. I used to jog in those neighborhoods, and cannot begin telling you how many times racist police officers stopped me, and or shadowed me.

Nigerian leaders imagine that white America is their friend. America has no permanent friend. America’s friend is money, not human beings. One hopes that some day Nigerian politicians would become a bit more intelligent and become preoccupied with universal issues of rightness and wrongness, rather than just think about lining their pockets with ill-gotten wealth. One looks forward to the day a Nigerian leader would in fact, act like a courageous human being, and speak out against George Bush’s foreign policies, rather than thinking that it is a great honor to be invited to the White house. (Why not call it Black House; after all black slaves built it? For what it is worth, let me tell you that I visited George Washington’s house, Mount Vernon, and Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, for the sake of spitting at them. I hate the fact that those monsters enslaved my brothers, and built their houses with their free labor. During my first visit at Capitol Hill, Congress, and realizing that black slaves built it, it gave me great joy in cursing it. That act may not be much, but my intense hatred of the oppressors of my people had to find symbolic outlet.)

Perhaps we are unintelligent? Intelligence includes ability to foresee the future and plan for it. We are messing up, big time. This will result in others perception of us as hopeless. Today, out of misguided liberal, bleeding hearted, and do gooderness; the West gives us economic aid, which we promptly squander. One can just imagine a major depression, as in 1929, hitting the West. When that happens, Westerners will look out for their own survival. No one would give a damn if Africans starved to death or killed themselves in their present senseless, tribal wars. In fact, many non-Africans would probably say good riddance of us. I know many white folks who immediately turn off their TVs when yet another story of African suffering appears on the news. They say: if Africans cannot govern themselves, like any one else, let them die. Why do we have to feel guilty for a shiftless race that cannot properly fend for itself?

One does not need to be paranoid…even paranoia has its positive aspect…to visualize a future where fascists take over American government, and the rest of the western world, and resolve to return to Africa and re-colonize it. If you doubt this eventuality, perhaps you ought to take history a bit more seriously. Please read about the cyclic patterns of events.

If we keep misbehaving, another Joseph Chamberlain, Spangler, and Herbert Spencer could emerge on the ideological horizon, and argue that the 1% known genetic difference between people (people are 99% the same) is enough to condemn Africans to eternal servitude. The difference between human beings and chimpanzees is only 3% (Chimps are 97% like us) yet they are a world apart from us.

The point is that a time may come when white folks argue that the 1% genetic difference between them and us is sufficient for us to not catch up with them, to always be basket cases asking for hand outs from the West. When that happens, one can see a demagogue say: let us go to Africa and kill Africans, and take over their land.

If you think that all these are improbable, keep dreaming. Perhaps, you look to the United Nation’s Charter, and its talk about respecting national sovereignty, hence gives you the right to misgovern your nation. Revisit history.

The concept of nation-state is a recent phenomenon. It emerged after the 100 years religious war that devastated Germany. The treaty of Westphalia in 1648 established the concept of nations; prior to that, there were no nations. What this means is that the idea of nation is a social construct, and an artificial one at that. Whatever man constructs can be deconstructed, and reconstructed.

Americans formed the United Nations in 1945, at San Francisco, California, to suit the world they wanted to dominate. If that world appears to be escaping their control, they could pull out of the UN and make other arrangements. The neo-conservative elements in America already resent the United Nations. Indeed, President Reagan refused to pay his share of the United Nations budget (America contributes 25% of UN budget).

The point of all this is, that if Africans keep behaving like they are unintelligent idiots, and are unable to govern themselves, if they keep producing leaders like Abacha, Mobutu, and let us not forget, the cannibal Idi Amin, criminals in positions of political power, the rest of the world could conclude that we are born idiots and criminals.

In my world, the world of thinkers, there are already white racist psychologists who would like to demonstrate that the reason why black Americans are the dominant population in American jails and prisons is because they are born with criminal genes. These racist psychologists would like to eradicate whatever guilt they have from enslaving and discriminating against blacks, by proving that blacks are born unintelligent (they tend to score 15 points less than whites…and luckily Orientals score 15 points more than whites, and that kills the genetics argument, for if whites bring it up, they, ip so facto, imply that Orientals are superior to them, a proposition they would not like, and to avoid it, they seem to ignore the subject. (115:100:85 are the average IQ of Asians, whites and blacks.)

Racist white pseudo scholars would like to demonstrate that Africans are born criminals, and that that accounts for our leaders being thieves rather than dedicated leaders of their people.

If changes in intellectual climate occur, from liberal to conservative, you can kiss Africa good-bye. We may be re-enslaved.

Actually we are already re-enslaved. These days, Nigerian university graduates come to America and do menial jobs that white folks do not want to do. They get here, and in a few weeks obtain Certified Nurses Assistant certificate, and proceed to essentially become care talkers of older white people. They work at assisted homes for the elderly. (I call them certified domestic servants, slaves.) The rest of them work as janitors and cab drivers.

Of course, when these brothers go home to Nigeria, they pretend to be big men in America. What are Nigerians noted for but putting on acts? A taxi driver in New York goes to Nigeria and behaves like he is the president of the United States. In America itself he is relegated to living in the inner cities and breathes in smog that reduces his life span.

Of course, a handful of Nigerians actually become medical doctors and engineers and make a good living in America. A few of them even teach at American universities. Usually when affirmative Action sets out to hire a black to have as a token on a white campus, if there is an African around, he is hired. Then the token brother runs home to Nigeria, and tells his people that he is an outstanding professor at an American university.

In Europe, Nigerian women are proliferating as prostitutes. Go visit Rome, Milan, Amsterdam, etc, and the chances are that the whore on the street is a Nigerian girl (or Eastern European). That is correct, we are now exporting harlots and domestic servants to Europe and North America.

What does that make us? Slaves. For 1000 years we exported slaves to Arabia and America. We have now resumed that practice by sending to the white world our people to go perform their menial work.

If Nigeria were to take care of business, get its house in order, provide jobs to its citizens, they would not have to be running to the West for the honor of performing menial jobs. Perhaps, we shall learn, and start caring for each other, and realizing that if one of us is unemployed, we are all unemployed. The answer to Cain’s question: am I my brother’s keeper, is yes. We must care for each other for we are one. We must provide jobs for our brothers and sisters in Africa, to stop the current disguised slave trade going on, and we do not even know it for what it is.

(It is probably not wise for African governments to stop emigration to the West, as some African nationalists are advocating. Out of the evil of our slavery in the West, some of us actually acquire some useful skills that may serve Africa well. Besides, you need to get closer to the man to know him, as he really is, not as he presents himself to be. He is a beast masquerading as an angel. )

And this sad fact does not bother our so-called African leaders.

I feel angry whenever I see a Nigerian whore in Europe. I do not know about you, every Nigerian girl is my sister, and seeing her as a plaything for the man makes me angry.

Have you traveled, lately? Have you noted how folks with Nigerian passports are treated? Not long ago, I was going from France to England, and at Dover, British immigration and customs officers paid particular attention to Nigerians. They literally frisked them, searched them and stuck their fingers wherever they wanted to.

At American airports, Nigerians are presumed as criminals, and treated as such. Our so-called big men are treated similarly. I have been at airports and seen the garbage searched like they are common criminals.

The humiliation inflicted on them by white men does not make them mad enough to go home and do what they have to do to make their country respected and their countrymen treated with dignity!

My God, where did this breed of humanity called Nigerians come from? What other people consider degrading, they laugh at, hence their silly reputation as the world’s happiest people. Happiest slaves, I say. Nigerians do not feel mad when other people belittle them, at least not mad enough to fight back. Like slaves, they tolerate others abuse. Indeed, they tolerate the abuse of their local black colonialists, their so-called rulers, without rising up, and marching for freedom. Liberty is never given to a people by rulers, because the rulers are good persons, but because the people demand it, and are willing to die for it.

It is really true that, the government a people have, they deserve. Nigerians deserve the corrupt governments they have. If they were manly and rose up, and challenged the thieves ruling them, those cowards would run away. See what a little courage has accomplished in the Ukraine: drove out the Russian quisling ruling that country. If Nigerians rise up, demonstrate, get killed by the police, and do not run, but persist, their rulers would respect them, and start doing the right things by them. The problem is that if you fire a gun into the air; kill a few persons, like cowards, the Nigerian crowd runs away. A cowardly people cannot have a good government, for good government is a product of a people’s willingness to die for it.

Nigeria must do what it must do, to make its people respected all over the world. We can do it. Despite the poor state of our educational institutions, the fact is that there are many smart Nigerians. I know some of them with doctorate degrees in Nuclear physics. That is correct; there are some of Nigerians who can out compete the white man.

First, we must strive after economic strength, and later on military strength. Eventually, we must develop nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.

Why so? Grow up. If your neighbor has a weapon that you do not have, he will dictate what to do to you, whether you like it or not, for that is the reality of human history.

International relations studies have an axiom, that balance of power is what makes countries not attack and subjugate each other. According to this view, it is balance of power that maintains world peace, not misguided trust in human beings supposed good nature.

The present situation where only one country, America, is the sole superpower has witnessed American leaders, morons and all, run around the world imposing their will on other people. If you do not like what they are doing, then have the economic and military power to check them, or shut up.

I do not like America bullying every body else, but I am realistic enough to know the difference between them and me. They have the power to clubber me.

I resent whoever has the power to destroy me. But in the present, there is nothing I can do about it. But I can make sure that future Africans are not in my, our predicament. In this light, we ought to work to make sure that Africa develops economically, and, eventually, militarily. We must, in the long run, acquire nuclear power.

No weapon ever discovered by human beings remains in sole possession of its discoverers. Sooner or later, most countries will have access to nuclear power. Despite America’s self serving efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, they will spread. The genie is out of the bottle, and no one can put it back. That is reality. Besides, knowledge is such that what, at one time, seemed difficult, and was the exclusive property of a few, tends to become commonplace. A few centuries ago, only a few persons understood Newton’s mechanics. Today, he is child’s play for high school science students. By the same token, nuclear physics seems tough, but soon, most high school students would understand it. It is called the law of critical mass. In the not too distant future, many folks would be able to rig nuclear weapons in their backyards. And there is nothing any one can do to prevent this eventuality.

When this happens, the chicken will come home to roost for the world’s present oppressor of the weak. We all know whom weak, emasculated folks would like to use weapons of mass destruction on. The proposed victims also know that this is the case, hence they run around trying to prevent the inevitable, the spread of nuclear weapons.

In, as much as, all people will sooner or later have nuclear weapons, I want Africans, too, to have them.

America is the sole possessor of superior force, and she wields it as a club over other nations' heads, and uses it to intimidate them into doing what they do not want to do. This is power. Power is the ability of A to get B to do what, otherwise, he does not want to do. I resent another human being having such power over me, and over Africans. This untenable situation must be corrected. Africa’s humanity demands that the situation be corrected, for the playing field to be equalized.

This brings us to those who want to Balkanize already small African countries. Small countries are politically, economically and militarily irrelevant in world politics. Biafra, whatever that nonsense is, will be irrelevant in world politics. Therefore, we must all struggle to make Nigeria a strong, well-governed state, and forget about the nonsense of Biafra. All Nigerians, Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, are one. At any rate, in the Western world, we are treated alike, discriminated against. We must all work for our common Nigerian good.

I make no secret my wish for all West Africa to become one country. I also wish that by the end of this century, all of Africa became one country, a federation of five hundred states, with each tribe constituting a state. I am a Pan Africanist. My heroes are Garvey, Nkruma, and Padmore.

In the short run, unfortunately, a united Africa is not attainable. Africans must first go through the orgy of tribalism, then progress to nationalism, and eventually recognize their common fate, and unify. There is inevitable progression in human affairs. You must first learn to walk before you can run. Thus, my present goal is a united Nigeria. One must set small, incremental steps at a time, steps that led to a larger goal. What is currently achievable is strengthening Nigeria.

A unified West Africa is fifty years in the future, and a Unified Africa is probably a hundred years in the future. So let us do what are doable in the present, make Nigeria the best it can become.

Finally, one is a realistic-idealist; one keeps one’s eyes on a dream, African Union, but, in the interim, does what present social reality permits. One never loses touch of the larger picture, while doing what the smaller picture calls for. One is not a hopeless utopian; one knows the difference between ideals and reality, fantasy and facts. One knows what we, in Africa, are up against, the implacable forces, particularly the West, against us. But nevertheless, one knows that a totally committed, bold, and decisive leadership can pull Nigeria, indeed all of Africa, up from its present unenviable situation.

Continued from "Ozodi Osuji Lectures #20: Training for Leadership in Nigeria"

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

With this lecture, I end the series of lectures I gave in commemoration of Nigeria’s 45the Birthday. I hope that you found them useful. I plan to edit, add references and bibliography to the lectures and publish them as a monograph

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Ozodi Osuji Lectures #20: Training for Leadership in Nigeria

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- When Nigerians gather, a likely topic for conversation is: the trouble with Nigeria, and what to do about it. Invariably, they identify corruption and lack of political leadership as among the problems with Nigeria and Africa. In this essay, I will explore how to train for leadership and management in Nigeria and Africa.

Leadership is the art or science of identifying what a group of human beings need to do, to more effectively adapt to the exigencies of their environment, and doing it. The world is such that it does not provide human beings with what they need for survival. We have to work for what we need to survive. There are no free lunches on earth. The Bible said that while fleeing from Egypt and on their road to the Promised Land, that Israelis were given free food, manna. It also said that none of those Jews who ate that free food reached the land “flowing with milk and honey”.

Those who reached the Promised Land were those who did not partake in eating free food. Moreover, when the Jews got to the Promised Land, they first had to fight those already occupying it, Canaanites, defeat them in pitched battles, and took over the land. Thereafter, they worked hard to transform the semi desert land of Israel into a productive land that met their supplies.

The point is that human beings, whether they like it or not, have to work for the means of their survival. In Genesis, Bible, it is written that by the sweat of their labor will human beings survive. Apparently, it is the wish of God that we human beings must work for our daily bread? Those who engage in corruption and steal to get their daily bread are cursed, and despite appearances of superficial wealth, tend to die miserable deaths. Examples are Sani Abacha and Joseph Mobutu.

As far as one knows, there is nowhere in the world where people obtain their food without working for it. If such a place exists, one would like to be told about it. In the meantime, one operates under the assumption that we live in an impersonal universe where our survival depends on our efforts. Whether we survive or not is our choice. If we choose to survive, then, we have to do those things that enable us to more effectively adapt to the challenges of our tough physical and social environment.

The individual must do what he has to do, to address the difficult tasks his environment demands be performed for him to survive. A group of individuals must do what they have to do, at the collective level, to adapt to their environment.

Leadership is a group variable. Whereas the efforts by the individual to cope with his world is leadership, but as far as leadership studies is concerned, leadership has to do with what a group of human beings do, to adapt to the demands of their environment.

Leadership entails the ability to foresee what the environment requires for a group to survive. The leader is a person who has vision as to what his group ought to be doing, if they are to effectively adapt to the demands of their world. The leader has ideas, dreams, and visions of what needs to be done to cope with the physical and social demands of our world.

Every person probably has dreams of what needs to be done, but not every person is a leader. A leader is a person who is passionate about his dreams of what needs to be done. He is totally enthusiastic about doing what needs to be done for his group’s survival that if you are around him, he infects you with his enthusiasm, and you could not help but want to help him accomplish his vision for the group.

A leader is totally committed to his vision of what needs to be done to enable his group to do what makes them survive. He is a living embodiment of devotion to a task(s). The goals he is devoted to means the difference between life and death for the leader. He is willing, if necessary, to fight and die for what he believes needs to be done for his group’s survival. This is called total commitment to goals that one believes are necessary for the group’s survival. One’s whole existence is wrapped up in the attainment of such goals.

What does life mean to you? A leader answers that question by juxtaposing his goals for his group. The attainment of his goals is what life means for him. He lives to attain the goals he deems necessary for his people’s survival. Surviving as an individual does not make any sense to the leader, unless he does what enables his whole group to survive as a group.

A leader mobilizes the people around him in pursuit of the goals he has identified as necessary for their group’s survival.

Goal attainment requires effort. It takes people to attain goals. Leaders, therefore, generally have good interpersonal skills, and know how to gather people together, and employ their labor to attain the goals they have identified for their group. Without good social skills, one can dream all one wants about goal attainment, one would not attain them. It takes ability to work well with people, for the individual to get them to work together in pursuit of goal attainment.

To work well with people, one must know something about human psychology. For example, human beings are prideful, vain and narcissistic. They need to be praised if you want to get them to do what they have to do. If you criticize them, you make them defensive, and when they are defensive they may work to obstruct the attainment of your goals. Leaders, therefore, know how to use positive reinforcement of good behavior to motivate people. You reward people when they do a good job by praising them or giving them pay raises, if you want them to work harder. (In the context of Nigeria, people like titles like chief. Apparently, that title gratifies their narcissistic nature, so give it to them as a motivator. Give it to them only when they do something above average for the group’s well being. Britain motivates its citizens to work harder, inter alia, by giving them honors, such as being called sir this or that.)

In addition to people, it takes capital to accomplish group goals. In this world, it takes money to get anything done. That money has to come from somewhere. Leaders, therefore, are persons who understand the financial costs of goals, and seek ways to make financing available for the accomplishment of their goals.

In the modern polity, governments raise money for their projects through several ways including taxation, individual and corporate; property taxes, sales taxes, licenses, royalties etc. Sometimes, governments do not have the money that projects require, and have to borrow it. Usually, governments borrow money from the public through selling bonds. Let us say that the city of Abuja wants to build a technical college, and does not have money in hand to defray the project’s initial capital outlay. Let us say that cost accounting studies have shown that it would cost $200 million dollars to build the proposed school. The city could sell bonds to the tune of $200 million.

What selling bonds means, in effect, is that the government has borrowed money from those who have it, with a promise to repay them in the future? Usually, the government promises to repay the principal in about thirty years, while paying annual interest rates of about five percent on the principal.

To be able to repay the principal sum of $200 million, plus the accruing annual interests, there must be a regular source of revenue stream coming to the government.

National governments, these days, take advantage of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund; financial institutions set up by the United States of America at the Breton woods, Rhode Island, conference, shortly after the second-world war, and borrow from them. The United States had learned well from John Maynard Keynes’ studies that showed that capitalist economies tend to go through periods of boom and bust, and, therefore, require governments to overrule Adam Smith’s insistence that the market is the best means for allocating resources efficiently. Keynes had advocated governments intervening in the economy to fight inflation and depression. When inflation rises, governments withdraw money from the economy, perhaps through raising taxes, and or raising the interest rates the Central Banks charge the commercial banks that borrow from them, and the later, in turn, charge their individual and business customers higher interests, hence discourage borrowing, and in the process reduce the quantity of money in circulation, and reduce inflation. Conversely, if the economy is moving towards recession/depression, as exhibited by rising unemployment, slow downs in businesses’ productivity and general slow down in the demands of goods and services, governments fight it by reducing taxes and or engaging in more spending so as to pump money into the economy, and in the process fight recession/depression. The American Federal Reserve Bank, under the capable hands of Alan Greenspan, lately, fought creeping recession/depression by lowering the prime rate.

The World Bank and IMF were set up to help governments, or if you like, those governments controlled by America, to have access to funds to engage in staving off inflation and recession/depression. The idea was to prevent a collapse of the economy, as happened in 1929.

The World Bank offers long-term loans, usually money that enables governments to defray the cost of expensive capital projects. The IMF offers short-term loans.

African governments, although America did not have them in mind when it structured the international economy to benefit it, learned to borrow from America’s funded and controlled international financial institutions. Today, African governments are saddled with enormous debts from these foreign lenders. Indeed, debt financing alone is so eating up most of their annual revenues that they are left with little or no funds to engage in developing their economies. In fact, some of them are not even able to pay for their recurrent budgets, let alone engage in capital expenditures. And, we are talking about paying the interests on the loans they had, and not repaying the actual principal yet. Many of these governments are not ever likely going to be able to repay the loans that they obtained from foreign lenders, money they squandered in corruption, and have nothing to show for it.

(Some African countries, Nigeria included, are now asking their foreign lenders to forgive their loans. This is not a good idea, for it encourages embezzlers in Nigeria to go to Washington DC, borrow money from the IMF, money that Congress gave to the IMF, hence American tax papers money, and squander it. Our local thieves have no business being subsidized by the hard working, and tax paying American workers. We must repay what we borrowed, that is adult behavior.)

For our present purposes, the point is that leaders identify the cost of proposed projects, the money needed to finance their goals, visions, and dreams, and seek ways to come up with that money.

Individuals who want to start businesses generally do so through their own savings, or obtain their seed money from relatives and friends. Commercial banks seldom lend money to new entrepreneurs to start their business. New businesses are risky affairs: over 90% of them fail during the first two years. Those of them that weathered the first few years, are incorporated, and are deemed successful can be authorized by relevant civil authorities to sell stocks as a means of generating revenue for their business, especially for their business expansion.

Stocks are different from bonds in the sense that bonds are, strictly speaking, borrowing and must be paid back in full, whereas stocks are money invested in business, and do not have to be paid back. If the business makes profits, those holding its stocks get paid dividends, if not, they loose their money. Of course folks holding securities can trade them in the Stock market. As companies’ fortunes improve, their stocks improve in value, and those holding them can sell them and make handsome profits. Let us say that the initial product offering (IPO) was twenty dollars per stock, and a chap bought 1000 stocks, and now the stocks are selling at forty dollars, the chap has doubled his original investment. Without business firms paying stock holders dividends, as long as they are improving their business fortunes, their stocks may be rising in value, so that those holders of them can trade them at the various stock exchanges, and make profits (capital gains) on their original investment.

Leaders identify where money to finance their dreams are going to come from: the group’s past savings, borrowings, as in bonds, stocks (if the business is run as a private corporation, rather than as a government owned one) etc. In the context of Nigeria, it is clear that folks rely on revenue from oil to fund most projects. We sell oil, and share the money we receive among the federal government and the thirty-six states. The states, in turn, share the money they received from Abuja between the various local governments, who, in turn, share it between corrupt officials. Generally, our oil-derived money is seldom devoted to capital projects.

As an aside, assuming that there are rational persons in Nigeria, they would understand that oil revenue is an exhaustible one. Sooner or later, Nigeria’s oil will run out. And, if it does not run out, the West will eventually discover other sources of energy, such as hydrogen and or solar, and would not have to buy our oil. At that point, one supposes that we would become a basket case, and like other mismanaged African countries starve, and beg the world to feed us with handouts called aids. Financial Aid that would promptly be wasted.

If there were leaders in Nigeria that have foresight, they would be thinking of ways to diverse the economy, to prepare for the necessary rainy day. That would mean finding alternative sources of revenue. Putting all of one’s eggs in one basket is not exactly an intelligent behavior, is it?

We have coal and could develop it. We have all sorts of minerals that could be developed. We have the ability to farm and can sell our produce (cocoa, palm oil etc.). More importantly, the so-called state governments, that go hat in hand begging the federal government for money, can learn that a government ought to be generating its owns money, and start collecting income taxes, individual and corporate, property taxes, licenses and generally engaging in the other known ways governments generate funds for their programs.

One hopes that Nigerians do not have a special corner on stupidity, and would do the right thing for once, by seeking ways to generate revenue for the governments that are mushrooming everywhere in the country.

Leaders are persons who understand that their societies have needs, and seek ways to meet those needs, and dedicate their lives to meeting those needs. In this light, how many Nigerians can be considered leaders? How many folks, in our bribe taking National Assembly, dedicate themselves to identifying the needs of Nigeria, and doing what needs done to meet them?

When the Russians beat America into space, President John F. Kennedy felt shamed, and made his famous speech that by the end of the decade, 1960s, that America would place someone on the moon. He gathered around him men and material to make his vision come true. He motivated Americans to work like they were driven, and by 1969, America had landed Neil Armstrong on the moon. America beat Russia in the race to the moon. This is called leadership in action.

Please tell me one current Nigerian leader who has set a goal for the nation, mobilized resources, human and material, and dedicated his life to realizing it, and doing so? Our so-called leaders are a disgrace to humanity.

Leaders are persons who are keenly aware of what their group needs to do to survive in the world they find themselves, and resolve to do them. Let us, then, ask ourselves what needs to be done for Nigeria to survive?

One could write a whole book on this subject (and one has done so), but one will delimit one’s self to delineating a few needs of the Nigerian polity.

It is clear that Nigerians need education. Despite all the noise made about how educated we are, it is the case that our universities graduate only a handful of scientists and engineers, annually. Compare our situation to South Korea. In South Korea, over thirty-three percent of all secondary school graduates go to universities. Less than ten percent of our secondary school graduates go to universities. In South Korea, most of the university students major in the physical and applied sciences. South Korea, a small country graduates more engineers a year than all of Africa combined. That is correct, a country the size of Eastern Nigeria, produces more engineers than all of Africa. Please tell me how we are going to be able to compete with South Korea?

In South Korea, all children go to elementary and secondary schools. What is the percent of Nigerian students that go to elementary and secondary schools? Less than forty percent of Nigeria’s secondary school age children go to secondary school.

The typical Korean secondary school graduate mastered physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. In international competitions, Korean students invariably out perform other countries. Nigerian secondary school graduates can hardly be said to have attended secondary school. What is the percent of Nigerian secondary school graduates that took calculus and advanced physics, organic, inorganic and physical chemistry? Please tell me. If we graduate scientific illiterates from our secondary schools, how are we going to compete with the Asians whose secondary school graduates, in fact, do better than White America’s university graduates?

(Black Americans are a special case; many of them can hardly be said to be educated. Generally, the only way they can enter into America’s top universities is through special arrangements, Affirmative Action programs that admit them despite their possessing high school lower grade point averages and lower scores on the various scholastic aptitude tests. Many reasons have been advanced for their poor performance on these tests. These reasons are interesting. I am a realist and do not make excuses for any one. If you want to go to a particular university, you ought to study hard and get in through the right door. I do not support entering into schools through the back door. Like Saint Francis of Assisi, I do not want other people to understand why I do not do the right thing; I want to be the one understanding other people. I am sick and tired of black people always wanting other people to understand why they cannot do the right things. Asian students study very hard. If you go to libraries and laboratories they are invariably there. When libraries close up at night, you literally have to shove Asian students out. That is why they do well at American schools. They are a disciplined and studious bunch. They are every professor’s joy. I feel happy when they are in my classes, for they would do the tough work you demand of them. They do not need to be understood and helped to make C and D grades, like their black counterparts. They aim at, and make, A grades.)

India and China have more or less cornered the market on information technology. India is graduating so many information scientists that Microsoft has decided to build one of its businesses campuses in India. Please tell me what Nigeria is doing in the information technology sector? Are we not a part of the information technology world? Are we condemned to be mere consumers of other people’s inventions, and not be inventors ourselves?

If you are not aware of what is going on in higher education, let me open your eyes. Asians dominate American universities. It is mostly Asians that obtain doctorate degrees in the physical and technological sciences from American universities. Asians out compete all other students in the real sciences. We now practically have affirmative action programs aimed at admitting less qualified white students to America’s top universities. Based on merit alone, Asians would be the ones that go to the top schools. My Alma mater, University of California, is, in fact, finding creative ways to admit white students, and not the Asians who out score them in most entrance examinations. As for the black students, very few of them qualify for entrance, there.

Do all these facts seem trivial to you? If you were a leader, you would appreciate the implications of these developments in education. They mean that other countries have left us far behind. We are not part of the equation when education is talked about. These days, very few American universities recognize Nigerian university graduation as qualification for admission to do graduate work in their schools. As a matter of fact, many of our university graduates are not able to write in correct English grammar. This is an amazing turn of events. When the British were running our schools, our graduates were as good as graduates in English schools.

How did all these come about? Is it because of our so-called leaders’ lack of attention to education? It really does not matter how what is came to be. Whereas scholars need to do contextual analysis to understand the cause of the collapse of Nigeria’s education, what is germane is how to fix it. We must fix our schools, now, not tomorrow.

How do we fix it? Let us revisit South Korea, again. What are they doing right that we could emulate?

Nigerian leaders must immediately make it mandatory and compulsory for all Nigerian children to go to elementary and secondary schools. Please do not ask me where the resources to accomplish this goal would come from. The amount of money Mr. Obasanjo spends jetting all over the world can fund many of those schools. The South Korean President travels rarely, and one sees no reason why Obasanjo should be a perpetual tourist.

That is correct. Obasanjo is merely a tourist to the countries he visits. Why? People listen to leaders whose shops are well run, and since Nigeria’s shop could hardly be said to be well run, who would listen to Obasanjo? If the Prime Minister of Japan, a man running an efficient economy, talks, and people will listen to him, but not to a man whose economy is a mess. The man is merely using our money to satisfy his obsessive-compulsive craving to see the rest of the world. So let us cut down on his perpetual tours, and cut down on corruption, and use the money saved to provide elementary and secondary education for all Nigerian children, boys and girls. Remember the function of leaders, to come up with resources to accomplish group goals? Therefore, let Nigerian leaders come up with the resources to provide all Nigerians with elementary and secondary education.

And such education must emphasize science. There is no reason why we cannot invest in physics, chemistry and biology labs, and provide first-rate education in those much needed areas.

Korea sends 33% of its secondary school graduates to universities. We must do the same. If we have leaders in Nigeria, arrangements must be made for at least 33% of our secondary school graduates go to universities and, moreover, ascertain that the majority of them major in the physical and applied sciences…. subjects a modernizing economy requires. Seventy five percent of all university graduates ought to be in science and technology.

A poor developing country does not need to waste its meager resources producing social scientists and humanists who are destined to be unemployed, and worse do not really contribute that much to economic growth. Of course we need a few social scientists and humanists. Twenty-five percent of students graduating in these unproductive areas are probably acceptable risk management policy. Businessmen and technologists who produce jobs probably can afford to support a small population of idle social scientists, humanists and lawyers, but not too many of them.

Russia used to pay money to students studying physics, mathematics and engineering, as a motivation for more students to go into those fields. I say, let us pay monetary stipends to Nigerian students who go into the sciences. Those who go into the social sciences should not be paid; in fact, they ought to be paying for their higher education. Society has no obligation to help folks satisfy their hobbies.

Thirty-three percent of secondary school graduates, that is, one out of three students, is able to do university level work. The rest are not. Let us not waste our time debating the obvious. Intelligence is spread along a bell curve. About two percent of the population has superior IQ (over 132, on the WAIS), about five percent have above average intelligence (120-130) and about two percent are mentally retarded (under 70) and the rest of the population is average (85-115). These are universal facts. Not all people are Galileo, Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Kaplan, Harvey, Dalton, Boyle, Albert Einstein, Shrodinger, Hersenberg, Bohr, Pauli, Max Plank, Maxwell Taylor, Born and Bolm, the geniuses of mankind.

Most people in every country are average, and can only do average work. Therefore, a realistic polity makes allowances for the gifted and above average persons in it to go to universities, and for average persons to go to technical schools.

In practical terms, this means building no less then three hundred universities, and seven hundred technical schools in Nigeria. This must be done, now, not tomorrow.

A leader in Nigeria ought to initiate the equivalent of what Americans called land grant universities. In the late nineteenth century, the American federal government gave money and land to state governments to start state universities. Prior to that time, America had mostly private universities, schools that catered to the rich landed gentry that ruled America. When America decided to industrialize and realized that it needed to produce large middle class educated persons, it gave states the help to provide mass college education for the people. With the help of the federal government, America, a country of about 300 million persons, has 3000 universities, technological colleges and community colleges.

Nigeria, with its reported 100 million persons (can we ever have an accurate census?), ought to have one third of the number of America’s universities and colleges.

Please do not ask me where the money would come from to satisfy this seeming grandiose goal. I have already told you that it is the function of leaders to finagle resources for organizations to accomplish their goals. If you cannot find a way to come up with the labor and capital to operate the expected 1000 universities and technical colleges in Nigeria, please leave the leadership arena, and do not call your self a leader.

One performed needs assessment, and identified education, as one of the crucial needs to address, if Nigeria is to catch up with other countries. Nigerian leaders must resolve to build the elementary, secondary, technical colleges and universities necessary to educate Nigerians.

As in America, states are probably best placed to provide university and technical level education, whereas local governments are best suited to provide elementary and secondary education.

Of course, we must allow private schools. We do not need to pretend that all people are equal in wealth. As Jesus himself said, the poor will always be with us. It is the function of the public to provide education for the masses. If the rich want to have their own private schools, so be it. In fact, we must encourage private schools, if only to provide competition for public schools.

We know, from studies of public organizations that they tend to be less productive compared to private ones. America’s publicly run K through 12 Grade schools is a mess. Those Americans who can afford it send their children to well run private schools, where less unionized teachers are held accountable for teaching. We must, therefore, encourage private elementary, secondary, technical and university educational institutions. Their numbers is not a concern to us, here. The 1000 technical schools and universities identified as necessary for providing Nigeria with adequate education is what concerns us.

(Germany’s technical education system is universally acclaimed as the best in the world. Here, post secondary school students study technical subjects on campus, for two years, and then do two years on the job training in the area they studied. They then take a rigorous national examination to qualify to practice their trades. German technicians are demonstrably the best in the world. They fix and maintain things. We do not know how to fix and maintain the factories and buildings that we constructed. We ought to copy Germany’s technical schooling system. Our current British modeled Poly technical schools have mission confusion: they are confused regarding their objective, to produce academics or builders/repairers of things?)

Whereas America’s elementary and secondary schools are nothing to brag about, everybody agrees that her higher education system is probably the best in the world. We can borrow from America and hire university presidents whose job description includes finding money for their schools. The typical American university president is not necessarily hired because of his academic distinction, but because of his business acumen. He is expected to go after funds, and bring the money the university’s professors need to carry out their teaching and research functions. In other words, university presidents are managers and, as such, have the responsibility of acquiring the resources the crew working under them need to realize their organizations’ goals.

How do they accomplish this fund raising task? To begin with, they keep a list of all alumni. I get mail from my Alma mater just about every month, asking me to send money to it. Rich alumni sometimes donate millions to their former schools. Let me ask you this question. How many times has a Nigerian school contacted its alumni? The principals of our secondary schools, and the vice chancellors of our universities, do not even bother keeping in touch with their products. It is asking too much of these lazy folks to expect them to want to find out how those who passed through their schools are doing later in life.

Nigeria’s educators know only one thing: how to rely on the government to fund their shabby schools. Of course, we need government funding, but we also need to supplement that source of funds with money from elsewhere.

Consider the money that comes to American universities from its sports programs. Couldn’t we replicate that phenomenon in Nigeria?

Consider the relationship of American Universities with industry, relationships that generate income for them. Most business and engineering departments are in daily contact with relevant business organizations in their area, and work in tandem with them, know their labor needs, train students to suit them, do research for them, and garner money from them.

Simply stated, an American college president is expected to generate resources for his college, and not just rely on the lousy money state governments’ budget for higher education. Nigerian university presidents ought to have their job specification rewritten, so that they are expected to generate most of their schools’ funds through their ingenuity, and be evaluated annually by their governing boards, on how well they do in this department, as well as in the other areas they are expected to deliver.

Industrialization is a major area that Nigeria needs to emphasize. Nigerian leaders must industrialize Nigeria in a hurry. We are talking in decades, not in centuries. Joseph Stalin, like him or hate him, industrialized the former Soviet Union, in a hurry. Iron and Steel, Automobile, Airplane, pharmaceutical, textiles, etc must all be manufactured in Nigeria, now, not tomorrow. We need to borrow a bit from Stalin’s methods for industrializing Russia—his five-year economic plans, for example---- and combine it with the wisdom of the capitalist market.

Despite all the propaganda spilled out by the University of Chicago, department of Economics, regarding the wisdom of the free enterprise economy, the fact is that for developing countries to develop, a combination of government planning and free enterprise is what is called for. Milton Freedman and his fellow propagandists for capitalism have wrecked many third world economies with their privatization philosophy. I know for sure that publicly run organizations are generally poorly run, and that privately run organizations are generally more efficiently run. But the fact is that we do not have adequate private capital in Nigeria, and the government must play a key role in starting needed industries. Once these industries are up and running, it is probably wise to sell them off to private businessmen.

Again, please do not ask me where we shall get the money to industrialize Nigeria. Do remember the popular aphorism: where there is a will, there is a way. Besides, Abacha allegedly stole over 3 billion dollars, and God knows how much the other klepocrats that ruled Nigeria stole. With the money those criminals stole, we could fund a few industries.

It is the function of leaders to find the money necessary to fund society’s projects. If you are a leader, then, find ways to posit goals, and go get the funds to fund them. That is your job description.

Recently Obasanjo fired a few bad apples from his cabinet, and expressed shock that he had such corrupt persons in his government. Please give us a break. Obasanjo must have been out to lunch, if he, in fact, did not know that corruption is rife in Nigeria. Even in the 1970s, Peter Pan, (Peter Enahora) was already writing about "How to be a Nigerian" as how to bribe people to get what you want. Just try getting the Nigerian passport, and find out that you have to bribe some one to get it.

Recently, I was at the Washington DC, Nigerian embassy, trying to renew my passport. As I stood on the line to talk to the chap behind the glass window, to collect the requisite form, a chap approached me and told me not to waste my time seeking forms to apply for my passport’s renewal. He said that I should just give him $80 dollars, and that I would get my passport renewed in a few hours. Low and behold, when I finally got to the creature in the glass boot, he told me that he ran out of forms to give to me. That is correct, I traveled all the way from Seattle, Washington, to Washington DC, a distance of three thousand miles, to obtain some forms (that would not cost two dollars to Xerox them) and a whole Nigerian embassy had no forms to give me. I am not a spring chicken. Of course, the Embassy had forms to give to the public, but probably hid them, and had its bribe-collecting agent tell those seeking its services to pay bribe.

And our head of state does not know these facts! If that is correct, the man must be a moron. Of course, Obasanjo knows that corruption is the way of life in Nigeria. How does any one get any thing done in Satan’s own country, other than by bribing someone? Mr. Obasanjo please do not insult our intelligence; please treat us like the adults we are. If you want to fight corruption, by all means do so, but do not pretend that you just woke up to its reality.

It is the function of leaders, particularly founding leaders, to lay down the political system that future generations will operate on. Hopefully, the on going National Political Reform Conference will perform that task, and find a workable political structure for Nigeria. Actually, if they are intelligent persons, what they need to do is self-evident, and does not need rocket scientists to do it.

Nigeria is composed of diverse ethnic groups, each of whom fears domination by others. Therefore, Nigeria needs a federation.

There are about twenty authentic ethnic groups in Nigeria (and a few derivative small ones). Divide Nigeria into twenty states, each state comprising of one ethnic group, except in cases where the ethnic groups are too small to be a viable economic entity, as in the middle belt where there are numerous small groups, some a few thousand persons, in which case, a few of them would comprise a state.

Nigeria needs a Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, Efik, Ijaw, Edo, Urobo/Ishikiri, Tivi, Fulani, Kanuri, Bornu state etc. Any solution that falls short of making each tribe a state is a temporary solution, and will not last.

Obafemi Awolowo, perhaps the best tactical leader Nigeria has produced, had the insight to call for each tribe to be made a state. That must be the case, or else we are kidding ourselves.

Other than making each tribe a state, the present federal structure of Nigeria seems fine. We do not need to fix it, if it works. We need a president that serves no more than two five-year terms, a unicameral legislature that is elected every five years (bicameral legislatures waste money, please note that Britain is essentially moving to unicameralism, with the marginalization of the redundant House of Lords), and an independent judiciary, headed by a Supreme Court. The central structure is to be replicated at the state and local government levels.

Please, please let us allow reason to guide our behaviors. We should not listen to the clamor for the creation of more states in Nigeria. Thirty-six states are already too many.

If you give Nigerians the opportunity, they would turn every town into a state. The folks are vainglory seeking, and when they loose the race to become the governors or whatever muckity muck governs their present state, they want to divide up that state, and carve out another state for themselves to become governors of.

This phenomenon is more likely to happen among the Ibos. As we all know, Ibos did not develop large social-political organizations before white men forced them into the Nigerian polity. Their political horizon is still village based. Their psychological make-up is attuned to small-scale social organization. They are generally lost in large, bureaucratic organizations. If permitted, Ibos would return to their village based social organization. Thus, each of them would make their villages a state.

Abia state is composed of a few towns. The distance between Aba and Umuahia, the two major towns in the state, is less than forty miles. Given good roads, you could drive to any part of that state within an hour. This small geographic area cannot be a state, in fact. Properly considered, it is not even large enough to be a county.

Compare Nigerian states with American states. California and Texas are just about the same size as Nigeria. Alaska is almost twice the size of Nigeria. So who are we kidding making areas not even large enough to be a county a state?

Our states are not economically able to support the governments sprouting in them. Yet people clamor for true federalism.

Please tell me how folks are going to pay for the governments of their mini states, other than beg money from the federal government? If they obtain most of their monies from the national government, how can they be on an equal footing with it? He who pays the piper calls the tune. You cannot have true federation unless states are capable of sustaining themselves independent of the national government.

A state ought to be able to maintain itself, economically. An American state can support itself without the federal government. Indeed, it is the states that give the federal government the money it needs to survive. California is the twentieth largest economy in the world. California’s economy is larger than that of Russia, and all of Africa combined.

Therefore, I recommend that our so-called states be redacted into economically viable states. Let us stop the silly shenanigan that every town can become a state.

Nigeria was put together by the British to serve British interests. That is real politics. We do not need to waste our time on infantile anger at the metropolis for stealing from its periphery. The metropolis stole from the periphery, and that is all there is to it. That is reality. Everywhere in the world, the powerful take from the weak.

Powerful Europeans drove weak Indians away from their lands, and stole their lands. Today, we assume that America is a white man’s land, when, in reality, white sociopath(s) stole the land from weak Indians.

Powerful Europeans bought Africans, and used our labor for free to build America. Such is life, C’est la vie. No body ever told you that life is fair.

Okay, the British put us together against our wishes. So let us pity ourselves for a little while before we get on with the business of facing reality. The British are victimizers and we are victims. Now, does that make you feel good? Feel that good, but now grow up, and smell the coffee, my friend.

The reality is that we are today one country, and that is good for us. Nostalgic as the past may seem, we cannot go back to it. In our past were weak independent tribes. Those tribes were too powerless to put up a fight against marauding Europeans. A dozen well-armed criminals from Europe defeated our fathers, and superimposed their criminal superstructure on them.

Please note that even at the height of British colonial rule in Nigeria, there were just a few hundred white men in the land. Yes, a few hundred armed bandits from Britain took over our lands and ruled us. Why were they able to do so? Guess? They came from a powerful country, and our tribal states were too weak to resist them.

Africa was too weak, and its weakness invited armed robbers from Europe (that is what the colonialists were, thieves) to take it over. That is reality, and we might as well face it.

I have bad news for you. If we continue being weak, the political climate might change and Europeans may agitate to go re-conquer Africa. They could rationalize their new colonial venture with the fact it appears that Africans cannot rule themselves.

Political ideologies do change, from time to time. The fifteenth century saw the ideology that said that Africans were inferior persons, hence justifying Europeans taking us as their slaves. The nineteenth century produced the ideology that non-whites are non-persons, hence justifying taking over their lands. International law did not recognize non-whites ownership of land. As far as international law was concerned, Africa, America, Asia and Australia were terra cotta, and whichever European power first got to them, and planted its flag, owned that territory.

Such an aggressive ideology is actually brewing somewhere in the psyches of white folks. And it is given credence by black Americans pathetic performance at American schools. These folks poor showing at American schools has resulted in the perception of them, and by generalization, Africans, as less intelligent persons.

History moves in cycles, and one can see a powerful racist demagogue articulating the fascist ideology that Africans are incapable of governing themselves, and that like children, they need to be governed by the assumed adult white persons. (Let our leaders keep misgoverning us and inviting that possibility.)

Pre-colonial African tribes were not economically viable political entities. We need larger political frameworks to be able to compete with other countries.

I am thankful that we have Nigeria as a country, and all those idiots calling for the actualization of Biafra ought to be jailed. (The fools talking about movement for the actualization of Biafra are not even intelligent enough to come up with an authentic African name for their infantile state; they name their insane country with a Portuguese name. Biafra is a village in Portugal.)

We need Nigeria, and must work for her survival. Indeed, in the future, we must work for a Unified Africa, a federated Africa where each of its five hundred tribes is a state in the anticipated Africa federation. We are, however, talking about the now, not future. In the now, we have Nigeria to contend with, and must make it work. We must take one step at a time; we must learn to walk before we can fly. We must make Nigeria work before we can dream of a unified Africa.

Nigerian leaders must figure out a way to train Nigerians to identify as Nigerian. We must find ways to see ourselves as Nigerians and not just Ibo, Hausa or Yoruba.

Another need of Nigeria is her need for infrastructural improvement. Nigerian roads are abysmal. Real leaders could do for Nigeria what President Eisenhower did for America. Eisenhower was the allied military leader in Europe, and while there, saw what Hitler did to German roads: built autobahns. When elected the president of America in 1952, Eisenhower decided to replicate excellent German roads in America. His administration funded the interstate freeways.

Nigeria needs freeways built to crisscross it from north to south and from west to east. We also need to build railways, airports, seaports, and generally improve all means of transportation. We do not need to reinvent the wheel. We can go to Germany and copy its excellent high way system (it is better than American freeways…Americans are cheap, the pavement of American freeways is only eleven inches thick, whereas Germany’s is twenty seven inches; Germany’s road are better made and last longer).

We should just copy what others have done right. When, after the Meiji restoration, Japan decided to modernize, it sent delegates to Europe and America and from them copied whatever works. It copied the Prussian military and bureaucracy, copied French local government system (prefectures), and copied America’s economic system (and injected Japanese management system into it). Today, China is unabashedly copying the West, and is increasingly becoming industrialized. Indeed, China sometimes ignores Western Copy right and Patent laws, and steals the ideas behind them, to do what it has to do to industrialize. If others would not share their idea, “borrow them”.

For example, if American pharmaceutical companies insist on selling HIV/Aids medication at prices that Africans cannot afford, and Africans are dying of Aids, their actions are immoral; I say, ignore their patents, and manufacture those medications, and sell them cheap in Africa, to preserve African lives. Even though one understands that Western pharmaceutical companies invested lots of money doing the research that resulted in the medications they sell to us, and need to make profits to recoup the cost of their expenditure, but in as much as they do make usurious profits, we ought to disregard their pleas to fleece us. No one has a right to make profits while others die.

Nigeria needs rural electrification, provision of pipe borne water to all villages, and hospitals and clinics to treat the people. The fact that we have to talk about this matter is a shame. If we had leaders in Nigeria, by now, these things would have been taken care of.

It is possible to provide electricity to all parts of Nigeria in five years, to provide pipe borne water to all villages in five years, and to build hospitals and clinics in every local government area in five years.

How is this to be done? In the early part of the twentieth century, America decided to electrify its rural areas, and built dams at strategic locations, and constructed other sources of energy, and by the 1930s, had met its goal of providing electricity to all Americans. I suppose that we have scholars in Nigeria, and that they do study America’s economic history, and know how America was transformed from an agricultural society into the industrial giant it is today? When Alexis Du Toquiville visited America in 1831, he saw a rural society. The leaders of Hipville America subsequently decided to accept the industrial revolution that began in Britain in the 1740s, and become industrialized, and mobilized its energy, and by the early twentieth century, America was no longer Appalachian boondocks, but a mighty industrialized country. (The reason we study comparative economics and politics is to see how others do what they do, and if they do it better than us, learn from them.)

We can study how America accomplished its goals and do the same. That is what Nigerian leaders ought to be doing, and not devoting their intelligence to figuring out ways to rob the nation down.

Stalin decided to modernize an essentially primitive Russia, and did so in three decades. He did so through his infamous five-year economic plans. He destroyed the Kulaks that stood on his way to improving Soviet agriculture. By the 1950s, when Stalin died, Russia was considered an industrialized country. Please do not tell me that what Stalin did was all-wrong. May be he over did some things, but in the real world, the fact is that you cannot make omelet without breaking eggs. If you want to industrialize your country, you must deal with those with investment in the backwardness of the country, you must rootlessly destroy them.

Even America that today glibly talks nonsense about the virtues of the free enterprise economy did not hesitate in employing non free enterprise methods in modernizing its economy. Hamilton, America’s first Treasury Secretary, placed prohibitive protective tariffs on manufactured goods coming to the US, as a means of keeping them out, so as to give America’s infant industries a fighting chance to develop. A developed American Industry was later able to compete with Manchester and Birmingham. In case you have been sleeping, when America decides that something is in its national interests, it would destroy those who are obstacles on its path. Indeed, if America, today, decides that it is in its best interests to keep Africa a primitive continent, whose resources its companies rob, it would do so. It would not even have to try hard to accomplish its objective. All it has to do is give its comprador agents in Africa bribes, and they hold down their own people. The slave sellers, called our leaders, will sell their brothers down the river, as they have done in the last one thousand years.

If you are an adult, you pretty much know whether you have leadership skills or not. Do you have a history of initiating activities? Do you have a history of getting other people to work with you to accomplish goals that you and they set? Do you have a history of finding out where to obtain the resources needed in attaining the goals you and other people seek? Do you easily commit to goals that are larger than your personal goals? Have you ever done something for the simple fact that it is good to do so, and not because of what is in it for you? Have you so believed in something, and dedicated your life to it, that you are willing to die, if necessary, in pursuit of it?

If the answer to all these are affirmative, you have leadership traits. But if the answer is negative, you are not a leader.

If you lack leadership skills, you can train for them. Business schools do teach them. The goal of this essay is to encourage training of leadership and management in Nigeria. Read on.

Most economists tell us that national economies should strive for no more than five percent unemployment. In seeking to realize this idea of zero unemployment (five percent unemployment is considered zero unemployment, for there are those, who, for any number of reasons, cannot work, such as the mentally ill, the mentally retarded, and those between jobs), most modern governments accept Keynesian economics. (Monetary policy, fiscal policy, taxation policy etc.)

Governments now accept that it is the function of the national government to provide jobs for its citizens. Does this assumption apply to Nigeria? What is the unemployment rate in Nigeria? Sixty percent? Does Nigeria, in fact, keep good statistics on any thing? It can’t even tell you how many people are in Nigeria or how many ethnic groups are in Nigeria. It is always saying that Nigeria is about, 100, 120, and 120 million persons, and that Nigeria has over two hundred ethnic groups. Why not give definite figures? How about 100 million persons and 20 ethnic groups? Try those numbers for size; they approximate the truth, not the fantasy figures banded about by our lazy government officials.

The folks governing Nigeria actually do not know what they are doing by permitting large unemployment in Nigeria. Sociologists tell us that persons between the ages of 14-24 are more likely to engage in criminal activity. Thus rational societies keep these people occupied, at sports, schools, universities and jobs, to prevent them from having the free time to engage in antisocial activities. But what does Nigeria do? Our government, through its inaction, in effect, says that it does not care that its young people are unemployed. Do you know the consequences of this behavior? Guess? Criminality.

If the trend of high youth unemployment continues in Nigeria, one expects there to be brigands, and high way robbers everywhere. One hopes that these unemployed, hence angry youth direct their anger at their leaders, and kill them. That is correct; they should visit the various governors and legislators and kill them. Why not? If you do not do what you are supposed to do for youth, provide them with education, sports, and job opportunities, why should they respect your life? Just give me one good reason why an alienated youth should care for adults?

I am not a sentimental type of person so do not give me clap trap reasoning. I know, for sure, that if we do not address the needs of our youth that they will necessarily become criminals. See what happened in America’s inner cities. The racist white world ignored the plight of young black Americans. Of black American children, 70% are raised by single parents, usually hard pressed women (the men get the women pregnant, and abandon them…I know, I know the reasons for this, I have read one million sociological studies on this subject, beginning with Patrick Monyham’s studies on the black family, in the 1960s…black men are unable to secure jobs in racist America, hence cannot take care of their children, hence leave their women to go on welfare, and at least obtain some handout to feed the children etc.).

The nurturing and economic needs of inner city youth are not met. What do you expect of them? Do you want them to care for the black community? Care for those who abandoned them? Of course not. Thus these under-socialized kids go wild, and randomly kill black people, and do not exhibit the slightest guilt or remorse.

You feel remorseful if you harm those who helped you, not those who ignored your needs, particularly when you were young.

Nigerian leaders, like senseless fools, ignore the plight of our youth, and these youth roam the streets of Lagos etc. unemployed. Many of them will turn to criminal behavior, and hopefully, start killing the parasites that call themselves our leaders. Useless garbage needs to be gotten rid of.

I personally do not shed a tear when a Nigerian so-called leader dies. In fact, I rejoice. It may seem macabre, but the happiest day of my life was the day Abacha dropped dead.

Compare and contrast my reaction, which I assume is the same reaction of many Nigerians, to Americans reaction when Kennedy was shot. The entire American nation became depressed, literally. The American people mourned their great leader.

When our criminal leaders die, we feel good riddance. So what exactly is the good all the money these thugs in government steal doing them? If their people do not miss them when they die, what good are they?

As for history, Nigeria has not produced a political figure that would be noted in history books a hundred years after his death. Even Nnamdi Azikiwe, popularly called Zik of Africa, compared to Kwame Nkrumah, was no African leader. Mr. Benjamin Azikiwe was, at best, a tribal leader. History books will note him for the piddling, although exaggerated, role he played in anti colonial movement. He will be a minor footnote in history books. Future generations of Africans, on the other hand will read about Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela.

I have a question for you: since Nigerians are narcissistic and seek others’ attention, why don’t they, as leaders, aim at securing their places in history books? Why don’t they become the types of Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and the other great leaders of mankind? Perhaps, they want history to remember them because they stole from the public to grow fat bellies?

Talking about their fat bellies, it is poetic justice that these useless leaders generally die from cardiovascular diseases like heart attacks and strokes…although like superstitious persons everywhere, they attribute their death, not to physical diseases from over eating, but to juju.

I suppose it is asking too much for our leaders to understand that they are supposed to be role models, including physical role models? People look up to their leaders, and if they are physically trim, people will struggle to be so. A trim Kennedy made Americans struggle to be trim.

The typical Nigerian leader is around five feet ten inches tall. That means that he should not weigh more than 175 lbs. To weigh in the healthy range, he must eat right, not too much, and must stay away from cigarettes and alcohol (or limit intake of alcohol), and exercise regularly: run for an hour, three times a week, swim, ride bicycles, and generally do whatever keeps him in healthy shape.)

If you observe children, some as young as age six, you can identify those who are “natural leaders”. A child with leadership abilities will go get a ball, and gather other children to play with him, and assign roles to the other kids to play. In effect, he has set a goal (playing soccer) and gathered resources (ball, players) and organized the resources to achieve the group’s goal (play). He coordinated the activities of the players, assigned roles to the players, monitored their activities to make sure that they conduced to their goal attainment, win over another team, planned activities, evaluated others activities and performed other leadership and management tasks.

Empirical observation indicates that only a small percentage of any human population has natural leadership skills. However, many persons can be trained to become average leaders. If a nation is lucky to have a few outstanding leaders, it will achieve a lot.

Some leadership traits are inherited. Not all of us can be Napoleon. Napoleon reportedly once tested his hold over men by asking his generals to jump into an icy river, and the generals, bedecked in their military splendor, immediately leaped into the cold water; they obeyed him. They did so because they accepted his leadership. They were willing to go to war, fight, kill and get killed for their leader. Not all of us can elicit that kind of total obedience from those around us.

Psychological studies have shown certain attributes of leadership that we know are inherited. Leaders tend to be extroverted rather than introverted. Jerome Kegan, at Harvard, has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that introversion and extroversion are inherited qualities. Although you can train the shy, introverted child to become somewhat outgoing, he is not going to be totally at ease in social settings. In, as much as, leaders tend to be socially out going, it follows that they inherited that trait.

This does not mean that all leadership traits are biologic in origin. Many of them can be trained for. We can consciously train people to set goals, initiate action that serves public interests, and seek out ways to mobilize human and material resources to attaining them. In America, business schools consciously teach courses on leadership, along with management courses.

Whereas, it is self evident that not all of us are going to be outstanding leaders like Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Theodosius the Barbarian (German), Genghis Khan, Tamarind, Shaka Zulu, Napoleon, even Adolf Hitler, most of us can become lesser leaders, if we train for it. I, therefore, suggest that we consciously train for leaders in our schools.

Some make much ado about the so-called differences between leaders and managers. Leaders are said to have visions and set organizational goals. Managers are said to be those who, while they did not set the organization’s goals, come into it, and use men and material to achieve them. Management is said to be different from leadership because a great manager may not set organizational goals, while he may help whoever set the goals to achieve them. This may be true or not. It is universally agreed that management can be trained for, whereas leadership is not easily trained for.

Leadership is mostly social psychological, whereas management is mostly technical. You can train in finance, accounting, production and marketing, the core aspects of management, but it is doubtful that you can easily teach a person charisma, the ability to influence other people to the point that they are willing to sacrifice their lives for you?

If you want to be leader of a modern polity, you must understand management and that entails studying basic economics, finance, accounting, marketing, human resources, operations/productions management, general management principles, organizational behavior, e-commerce, labor relations, customer care, and the other courses taught at master of business Administration schools.

In, as much as, leaders deal with government, they must also study aspects of political science, public administration and law. However, training in political science is not relevant to being a politician. Political scientists are journalists who report on the activities of leaders, but are seldom themselves leaders. Many of them, in fact, are too timid to give other persons orders to do something. Leaders must be prepared to give people orders to march to war, to kill and be killed. It takes tough skin and iron will to be able to command men to kill and be killed. Thus Leadership has nothing to do with academic sentimentality, the type of stuff considered in graduate seminars, in safe Ivory Tower. Talk fest is not action fest.

We can package management courses in a few books, and train all persons aspiring to enter politics in Nigeria on them; and require them to sit and pass examinations based on them, to demonstrate that they understand leadership and management. No one should be a member of the National Assembly who has not taken courses on public and business finance, macro and microeconomics, and leadership.

One ought to know something about running a business; a country is a big business, before one pretends to run it. Part of the reasons why there is too much corruption in Nigeria is that our leaders, in fact, do not understand what leaders are supposed to do: set goals and achieve them through the aid of other people. Our folks call themselves chief without understanding that the term chief means leader. If it means leader, and a leader is a person who sets goals and accomplish them through the auspices of other persons, and you are not doing so, why do you call yourself chief? Chief is not just an honorific title; chief means a leader of a group.

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Ozodi Osuji Lectures #19: Nigeria and the Business World (Continued)

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) ---The on-going function of personnel mangers involves recruiting applicants for vacant positions (from either inside the organization or from outside it), and with line managers, interviewing and selecting some of these, and training them. Generally, line supervisors perform actual job evaluations on employees, but the personnel department keeps records of such evaluations on employees.

The personnel office, with the accounting office, manages the business’s benefits plans, such as health and dental insurance, disability insurance, life insurance, and retirement plans.

In the past, the business owner simply hired whomever he liked and fired whomever he did not like. Whereas this may still be much of what happens in the real world, large businesses now have to grapple with the slew of government regulations regarding proper personnel practices, including laws against discrimination. In the USA, infinite laws have been passed to discourage discrimination based on race and gender, and personnel departments are supposed to make sure that these laws are enforced. But the reality of the land is that whoever wants to discriminate does so and uses these laws to cover their tracks.

Consider affirmative action laws and American universities. From the outset, they decide to hire a white candidate. They would then go through a charade of inviting minority candidates for interviews. After this silliness, they decide that these minority candidates are not qualified, and hire the white candidate they always wanted to hire. They would provide tons of paperwork to the federal government, showing how they made efforts to recruit minorities but could not find qualified ones, hence, justifying the white person they hired. Then they pretend to sleep well, assured that their tracks are covered. They get on soapboxes and talk about how they are doing their best to end racial discrimination. These fools are so self-deceived that, they do not know that they do not deceive other persons. When the house of cards they have built collapses, they would be surprised that it did so. Any way, the point is that personnel offices are supposed to make sure that labor laws are implemented in businesses.

Personnel departments orient new employees to what is expected of them, train and develop them to do their jobs well, manage wages and compensation (including bonuses, profit sharing, merit plans, seniority plans, employee stock ownership plans), employee benefits, insurance plans, pension plans, implement guidelines to follow laws regarding worker safety and health on the job, promotion and separation from employment, etc.

MANAGEMENT AND LABOR RELATIONS

Until the twentieth century, capitalist economic theory assumed that it was up to the business to treat labor as it wished, pay whatever it wanted, and sack those who did not prove amenable to control. Most businesses did not pay attention to working conditions. Utopian socialists like Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx and Frederick Engel pointed out the exploitative relationship between business and labor during the primitive phase of the industrial revolution.

It was not unusual to work people for sixteen hours and pay them a pittance. Indeed, children as young as twelve years old were worked in factories and mines, until they dropped dead from exhaustion. It was not considered society’s function to protect these children and their equally poor parents, laboring like wage slaves in the factories of Manchester and Birmingham, England.

Human beings are predatory animals and given the opportunity, would enslave their fellow human beings and/or exploit them for their own benefits. It is simply naïve and utopian to assume that man is naturally good. In his ego state man is evil. His history is a record of exploiting and killing his own kind.

Socialists did an excellent job pointing out man’s exploitation of man. Where they made a mistake is in thinking that a socialist utopia would end such exploitation. Their communist’s heavens turned out the worst type of hell on earth. Russia and China were not much better than slave societies, with communist leaders the new slave masters, the emperors using the masses as their slaves to accomplish their self-serving goals.

The more realistic Anglo-Saxon specie of human beings discarded the rubbish of communism, and did what they could to ameliorate man’s inhumanity to man, through labor laws, without the illusion that all exploitation could be eradicated. (As we write, Western businesses are exploiting third world workers…the peons of South America pick coffee seeds from coffee plants but earn so miserable an income that they can not even afford to buy coffee.)

We have no illusions about man: he is a criminal by nature; he violated the law of union to be in separation, and has to be closely monitored lest his lack of social conscience comes to the fore. (Imagine the rich in New York living in mansions bought with several million dollars, while some of their fellow human beings live like rats on the streets of New York.) Now do not get sentimental on us, for if you aim at redressing the situation with governmental laws, you give bureaucrats a lot of power to decide what businesses do; bureaucrats are the worst type of oppressors, they are cowardly by nature and like cowards derive a childish sense of power from implementing senseless laws…. they are generally sadists and ought not be permitted to govern society. We can tolerate the narcissism of the courageous politician, but the fear-driven bureaucrat is a miserable vermin that ought to be treated as such.

Laws have been passed to govern business-labor relationships. These laws have not made the work place a heaven, but generally have improved working conditions. It is doubtful that working conditions would be ideal, whatever that is. This is so because management and labor have conflicting aims.

Management (the paid foremen of the owners of big business, if you like, the working rich, used to control the working poor) aims at making profit for their employers, the stockowners. If management does not make profits, return reasonable dividends to shareholders, they are out of jobs. Therefore they must seek ways to cut costs, including exploiting labor and material. If they could get away with it, some would rather not pay workers any wages at all or pay them the lowest wages possible, and just use employees to make money for their bosses.

Labor, on the other hand, would rather not work but be given the means of their daily bread. McGregor may say whatever he wants about Theory Y, the fact is that if the average worker could help it, he would rather not get up in the morning and go slave for eight or more hours for his daily bread. The exception here would be the person doing the work they love and are passionate about, especially if they can express themselves being creative.

Man must work for his daily bread, so the adult person reconciles himself to the inevitability of work, but many want to work as little as they can get away with. Would it not be nice to work for only four hours during the day and during the rest of the time read poetry and soak in the sun at tropical beaches? (This is the vision of Karl Marx for workers, and only God knows who would produce what those aristocrats would be expending, slaves in third world countries? Marx was a racist and did not even think that non-Europeans were human beings. It baffles the mind why Africans and Asians call themselves Marx’s followers, when clearly he had no respect for them. Indeed, he had no respect for Russians and did not expect them to lead the communist revolution; he centered his hope on Britain, his idea of a civilized land.)

The labor, that we as managers have managed, is composed of people wanting to work as little as is possible and be paid as much as is possible. This is not an academic write up but derived from actual observation of people at work. Because of the difference between management and labor, there must be conflict between them. It is therefore necessary to have labor laws to guide the relationship of the two.

Given the exploitative nature of man, in general, and in particular business owners and their lackeys, management, (the writer has been in top management, chief executive officer, hence, a lackey of the owners of wealth), laborers formed labor unions to protect themselves, and this is as it should be. The abused have a right to seek ways to prevent people from abusing them.

There are several types of labor unions, including industrial unions, craftsmen unions, professional unions and public employee unions.

Industrial unions tend to include all workers in a particular industry, like railways; whereas craftsmen unions tend to include only those possessing certain trades, such as electricians, plumbers, bricklayers; and professional unions, such as healthcare providers.

The function of unions is twofold: one, to lobby legislatures to pass laws that protect workers, and two, to negotiate with management to have rules specified in contracts governing the relationships between management and labor. These contracts specify working conditions, wages, conditions of hiring and firing workers, etc.

Where labor unions exist, it is generally difficult to fire workers, as they run to their union representative to protect them. This way inefficient labor is kept. Try to sack one government lazy bum, and it would take twenty years to do so. Clearly we need unions, but sometimes their power gets distorted out of portion. It is also obvious that where they are too powerful, productivity takes a back seat. Unions have evolved extensively from their original intent of fair wages for fair work, and themselves have created big businesses, with divisions and problem within their own ranks. Balancing the need for productivity and employee benefits is an on-going struggle.

The process of forming unions is that a group of employees desire a union, and contacts the Labor Relations Board to come and conduct an election within their work place, to see whether enough workers support unionization. If a substantial number of the employees vote for union, a union is certified for them. This certification by the labor relations board makes sure that labor is legally recognized to form a collective bargaining union, to bargain with management for their rights concerning working conditions, wages and benefits, and that management does not prevent the union from existing.

The union elects its officers and the officers form a bargaining unit to negotiate with management, the result is a contract that both agree on. (Workers generally vote on the contract negotiated for them by their union leaders before accepting them.) The bargaining must be done in good faith. If there is a deadlock and both parties cannot agree on a contract, often they agree to seek a mediator. The mediator is given the power to conciliate the differences between the two positions and both accept his recommendation. When that fails, they may seek a government arbitrator; the arbitrator’s recommendation is usually binding and final. There is voluntary arbitration and compulsory arbitration. Where management and labor fails, the government may step in and both parties must accept the government’s arbitration recommendations.

Collective agreements aim at providing workers employment security, to prevent arbitrary firing by requiring that certain procedures be followed before letting go of a worker, who must be represented by his union representative; setting down wages and benefit packets, hours of work (usually eight hours a day or forty hours a week, with anything above that considered overtime to be paid at rate and half), and promotion procedures. These contracts also lay down grievance procedures, ways workers go about seeking redress of whatever grievance they have against their bosses.

When all else fails, workers can always go on strike. Here workers walk off their jobs and picket the premises of their employer, and attempt to prevent him from hiring replacement workers (scabs).

Employers can play their own last card, seek a legal injunction to prevent striking, or work with other employers to lobby government to prevent strikes and/or negotiate industry wide working conditions, conditions that may not be good for specific situations.

INTERNATIONAL TRADE

No country is able to produce everything its peoples need to sustain themselves. And even if it were possible for a country to produce everything it needs for its survival, in the nature of economics, some other countries are able to produce certain things more efficiently and cost effectively. The same as it is able to do certain things better than other countries.

Given the realities of scarce resources and other economic factors, countries engage in international trade, selling goods and services to other countries and buying from them. Each country exports its goods and services to other countries, and imports other goods and services from them.

Each country has its principal trading partners, those countries from whom it imports most of its goods and services, and to whom it sells its goods and services. Oil producing countries like the Middle Eastern countries, for example, sell most of their oil to Western Europe and North America, and with the money they make from so doing, buy manufactured goods from them.

In an ideal situation, each country ought to be selling those goods it produces more efficiently to others, and buying from them, those goods they produce more efficiently. This way each country does best what it is able to do best, and buys from others what they do best; the result would be efficient utilization of the world’s resources. Goods and services would be sold cheaply.

Unfortunately, there are political realities that interfere with the free flow of goods and services across borders. Politics and the pursuit of national interests dispose countries to produce goods they deem in their national interest, even if allowing other countries to do so would have been more efficient and cost effective, thereby being able to buy and have them at a lower price. Consider iron and steel, for example. Iron is critical for most countries armament industries. In times of war, a country that cannot produce iron and steel is at a disadvantage, since its enemies would be able to out produce weapons and defeat it at war. Thus, whereas it might be cheaper to permit other countries to produce iron and steel, and sell it to them, many countries feel very vulnerable doing so. Therefore, they ignore the high cost of producing and selling iron and steel, and do so any way, so as to augment their countries strength.

Countries restrict the flow of goods and services into them and going outside them. They do so through laws that create barriers to international trade. For example, a country that wants to develop certain industries might discourage the importation of the goods produced by such industries, in other parts of the world. By discouraging them from selling their goods in it, it is able to encourage its own infant industry to produce those goods and sell them without the stifling competition of perhaps better-made goods from other countries.

Countries use high tariffs and other import and export taxes, to restrict the flow of goods and services into them. Some of them impose strict quotas on how much of certain goods can be imported into them, others embargo the export of certain goods to some countries (usually as a means of political punishment for a regime ruling a country).

Some countries encourage their producers to dump their goods in others …sell them at prices below production costs so as to gain market advantage in them and destroy their competitors, hence, dominate that market.

Those countries that have a sort of monopoly over the production of certain goods, often band to form a cartel, and through it, control the production of the goods and control the forces of supply, creating a guarantee of higher prices for their goods. The oil producing and exporting countries, OPEC, for example, regularly fix the quantity of oil they produce, and that way influence the supply of oil and its price in the world market.

Clearly, in pursuit of national advantages, countries try to interfere with the free flow of goods and services across their borders. These interferences to trade often lead to difficulties in international politics. Indeed they have been known to lead to war, as manufacturers in one country, who cannot sell their goods to other counties, where doing so they would make profit, encourage their nations to go to war with those countries banning the free flow of goods and services, so as to defeat them and open up their markets to their goods and services, hence, make profits. Therefore, to avert trade wars the international community formed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The World Trade Organization was recently set up to monitor compliance with GATT agreements.

Essentially, GATT attempts to get countries to not discourage trading between them due to imposing unreasonably high tariffs (taxes on goods coming into them). WTO not only monitors tariffs but discourages countries from subsidizing their industries; subsidies that enable them to produce certain goods cheaply, hence, have lower prices in the international market place, and thereby gain an unfair advantage over their rival producers in other countries. The organization also monitors such illegal economic activities as dumping, the protection of intellectual properties (that is, getting countries to respect copyright and patent laws, hence, not produce and sell goods and services copyrighted and/or patented by others, without paying them money). The organization generally acts as a mechanism for dispute resolution between countries. If country ‘A’ believes that country ‘B’ is doing something to gain unfair economic advantage in trade, it takes its case to the world trading body asking that it rule against the culprit, fine it and discourage it from doing whatever it was doing; And failing to desist from such practices, the country would risk trade embargos and other punitive actions taken by the United Nation’s Security Council.

The various regions of the world have formed their own trading organizations to encourage free flow of trade in them. The European Union, for example, has all sorts of laws governing trading among member nations, including those that encourage free flow of goods and services among them, without tariffs and other custom duties. In North America, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) seeks to open the borders between Canada, USA and Mexico to trading without undue taxes at the borders. In Asia, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) seeks to do the same for its members. In Africa such organizations as ECOWA seek to accomplish similar goals for its members.

Countries, like individuals, would like to make profits from their economic activities. They would like to sell more goods and services to others, than they buy from them, so as to have favorable balance of trades.

A country has a favorable balance of trade when its businesses sell more goods to other countries, than they import from them. If a country imports more goods and services from others, it is sending more money to them than it is receiving from them, hence, has a disadvantage in trade.

Balance of trade issues affect countries’ rates of currencies. A country with an unfavorable trade balance tends to find its currency trading, at lower exchange rates than others, in the international market for currency exchange. (Currency exchange is the value of each currency vis-a-vis others, how much other countries are willing to pay for it in their own currencies).

The world’s economic health largely depends on the free flow of goods and services across borders. Therefore, the various countries constituting the world trade organization seek to encourage the free flow of goods and services into them. Some countries clearly have a disadvantage in this regard, and find themselves unable to compete with those who can produce and market goods and services more efficiently. Thus, we have countries that are chronically poor.

Certain organizations, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) play ameliorative roles here. The World Bank lends long-term loans to struggling countries; the IMF lends short-term loans to struggling countries to meet their obligations.

Both the World Bank and IMF are head quartered at Washington DC, USA. They have been accused of being the instrument for economic control of third world countries by the economic giant of our time, the USA.

Many third world countries are owing these organizations so much money that practically all their current revenues go into paying interests on their debt, leaving them little or nothing else to finance current expenditures. Many of these countries are so poor and broke, that it is doubtful that they would be able to pay off the capital sums they borrowed.

Many people are calling for these loans to third world countries to be forgiven, if we are to extricate them from their vicious cycle of poverty.

The World Bank and IMF were originally formed to help prevent the capitalist economic and business cycles, the tendency for economies to go through periods of economic boom followed by periods of depression. The idea was to make money available to countries undergoing recessions and depressions, to stimulate their economies so as to prevent world wide economic downturns.

In 1944, delegates from forty-four countries met at a town in New Hampshire called Bretton Woods, to form both the World Bank and the IMF. Member nations were to contribute funds to these organizations, with which they were to lend to those countries experiencing economic difficulties (and wanting to engage in certain capital developments that they do not have the funds to pay for) and pay interests on their borrowings.

The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) is primarily responsible for financing development projects.

Clearly these organizations play key roles in the world of international finance and economic development. They not only stabilize the world’s economy but also affect whether third world countries are able to develop or not develop. They are thus not only economic institutions but political ones, hence, to be monitored carefully least they become instruments of control of the weaker countries by the more powerful ones.

The other key actors in international trade are multinational corporations (MNC). These are businesses that operate across national borders. They may have manufacturing concerns in different countries and/or sell their goods and services in different countries. IBM (International Business Machines), for example, is an American business that produces computers and other business machines. It sells these machines in practically every country in the world. Its revenues thus come from its worldwide operations. It is therefore a very powerful economic player in world business. Its annual revenue is in fact larger than the revenue of many African countries, and in the nature of things, it has clout over them.

Multinational corporations obviously bring needed goods and services to third world countries; they also provide missing technical expertise in developing countries. General Motors selling its cars in Africa, for example, is helping to provide the means of transportation that enables that continent to develop itself. On the other hand, some of these MNCs are so powerful that they have been accused of undermining economic development in third world countries. Those Latin American countries that got it into their heads to go socialistic have been known to be perceived as threats by American businesses, and that the latter worked with their country’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to remove them from office.

America apparently believes that it has a right to engage in regime change in weak countries. Might, it believes, makes right, and such is the nature of international politics. The so-called international laws do not prevent the powerful riding roughshod over weaker countries.

BUSINESS AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Clearly many multinational corporations are so powerful that they can and do exploit third world countries. Indeed, they also exploit people in the so-called developed countries. Therefore, there is a movement afoot to make business more socially responsible, to get it to engage in proactive socially serving behaviors. This is as it should be, but we must make sure that some unproductive but power hungry bureaucrat is not allowed to define what constitutes responsible behavior, and impose his madness on the activities of businesses responsible for producing wealth for society.

It is right that business’ decisions take into consideration the consequences of its actions on society, but it is not the role of business to engage in social and political engineering; a practice that decides what is appropriate social behavior and then enforces it on society. The primary function of business is to seek out business opportunities, produce goods and services it thinks there is a market for, sell them and make profits.

It is for the people to choose what they buy with their money, and in so doing, decide what businesses they permit to survive. That is to say that it is the forces of the market, supply and demand, that ought to decide what businesses thrive not some government committee making decisions on which business is responsible and which is not. Given the opportunity, the little fellows in government offices would over regulate business and kill the golden goose that lays the eggs, that produces the wealth that pays for their existence.

Nevertheless, businesses, like individuals, ought to have clarity as to what is moral and ethical behavior and seek to engage in them. Morality is accepted social behavior in society, and ethics is the behavior deemed right or wrong by individuals. Business ethics ought to reflect what society, in general, deems right or wrong. For example, should businesses build their manufacturing plants in India where they exploit lack of child labor laws, and employ children as young as twelve in manufacturing, paying them stipends, that is barely enough to feed them? Obviously it makes economic sense to locate factories where labor is cheaper, thereby reducing production costs, and then sending the manufactured goods to markets where profits are made. Still, employing children to do work that adults ought to be doing is reprehensible.

All children ought to be at school until at least age twenty-one (until they complete elementary, secondary, technical and/or university education) before they enter the labor market. Having said this, it would be idiotic to expect manufacturers not to take advantage of the low labor costs in developing countries, and set their factories there. They at least provide jobs for the starving masses of third world countries and also help produce persons with needed technical expertise in them. But this practice needs to have some consideration for humanity, that is, a conscience.

The bleeding hearted liberal must be checked least his sometimes irrational desire for utopia leads to passing laws that adversely affect businesses. It is true that we must make sure that manufacturers do not exploit labor or pollute the environment, but insistence on purity in everything leads to closing manufacturing plants and throwing people out of work. We certainly do not need these plants contributing to global warming and acid rain that destroys forests, but at the same time, we need these plants to produce needed goods for our survival. Modifications and changes are necessary.

The most rational thing to do is to research, and come up with environmentally friendly ways of manufacturing goods we need for survival; in the meantime keep our older manufacturing plants, but adjust and modify them until we find their replacements. But to shut down a plant because some misguided environmentalists’ demand it, is uneconomic decision. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, is a good idea but if it leads to lack of economic activities we ought to revise it and make its implementation contingent on finding replacements for our current plants.

There are areas where business’ social responsibility is not a question but a must. Discrimination is one such area. Traditionally, American businesses discriminated against non-Caucasian persons. Obviously this practice must stop. The only criterion for hiring some one for a job must be: can he or she perform that job satisfactorily, not race and/or gender issues.

It is no longer economic to practice racial discrimination. In a world with a substantial part of it composed of non-Caucasians, continuing discrimination against them will cause unaccepted consequences for Caucasians. Race war is always a possibility and its consequences would be devastating for all mankind.

Management philosophy ought to accept the idea of treating every person equally. Failure to do so, politicians and their lackeys, bureaucrats, are always hovering in the corner, ready to pass laws that restrain business activities. Businesses must therefore voluntarily audit themselves, so as to avoid government audits of their behaviors, to make sure that they are not discriminatory and/or lacking in other ethical and moral behaviors.

CUSTOMER CARE

Businesses exist to produce and sell goods and/or services. Those goods and services, in a capitalist economy, the best type of economy we know of, must be bought by customers for the business to make profit, hence, stay in business. No sales, no existence for businesses.

The customer is the god of businesses for they sustain businesses, and without them businesses would not exist. If realistically, customers foster businesses, and businesses want to survive, it follows that they must study what customers want and then strive to meet these wants. They should strive to maintain the loyalty of customers, who would then repeat buying their goods. Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend a business’ products to others who become potential customers, hence, generate business and profitability. Losing customers therefore, is expensive to businesses. Businesses that want to be afloat must cultivate excellent service skills to satisfy their customers. It costs approximately seven to ten times more to attract new customers, than it costs to satisfy, service and keep existing ones.

A business must recognize that its customers are its partners, and treat them as such with the respect they deserve. They have to get customers to trust their products as good and worthwhile, and their customer service as second to none. When customers believe that businesses look after their interests and talk to them with compassion and respect, they are likely to go to bat for them. But treat customers as if they do not matter and you alienate them, and they take their business, their buying power to other businesses.

Getting and keeping customers is an art in itself. It is not just the product that plays a role here, but also how customers perceive the personnel of the business.

The loss of one customer alone may cost the business a lot of sales’ revenue and affect its bottom line. Therefore, businesses must strive to keep their customers for life. This entails always striving to study what they consider satisfactory service, at any point in time, and doing what can be done to meet their needs.

Only customer satisfaction creates customer loyalty, which the business needs to be in business. In a capitalist business world, where many producers can enter the production market, at any point in time, and produce the goods and services a particular business is producing and perhaps do so more efficiently, hence, lower the price of the goods, the quality of customer service makes all the difference as to sales, hence, who stays in the business.

Businesses must study what brings the customer to buy their goods and services, as well as, what turns them off. Customers are human beings and have their ideas of what they do not like in those selling the goods and services they want to buy, so listen to them. Do not assume that you know what customers do not like, go find out, ask them through interviews and opinion surveys.

Generally, customers detest rude and indifferent sellers of the goods and services they are buying. They do not like to be kept waiting too long before they are served. They do not like poor quality work. They do not like shoddy products that they have to return, even if it means getting their money back. They do not like to be kept on hold when they call. They do not like dealing with service employees who do not seem to know what they are doing, they admire knowledgeable persons. They do not like employees talking to them as if they are not important, and do not like high-pressure sales personnel.

Customers, as a general rule, want to be made welcomed by the companies they are doing business with. They want to be greeted and smiled at; they do not want to be ignored when they are waiting to be served, they do not like employees who seem dirty and unprofessional in appearance.

Customers are likely to become loyal to a business, when they believe that the business makes quality of service to them, its number one priority. Essentially, human beings want to feel important and special; and when they feel like they are treated as if they are nobodies, they do not like it and if they can help it, will take their business elsewhere. Interestingly, this is more so when businesses are dealing with poor customers.

The poor already feel like they have no worth in society and detest it when they are reminded of their social insignificance by the businesses they patronize. The poor like to be treated as if they are princes. The poor are not so much impressed by the quality of the products they are buying, as the upper middle class is, but by how important they are made to feel.

Businesses can find out how customers want to be served by conducting focus groups where customers are invited, even paid, and asked to participate in discussions on how they would like to be served, then training their employees to serve them in that manner. They can also listen to customer feelings by including feedback cards with their purchases, requesting comments on how they would were treated and how they like to be served.

In the nature of things, most people suffer in silence. Many customers feel it not worth their while to complain about the poor treatment they received from a business; if they can help it, they vote with their feet and their mouths. But occasionally a few customers come forward and complain, some rather vociferously. These vocal complainers are barometers of the silent majority that do not complain, and must therefore, be listened to carefully. Instead of being put off by their sometimes rude and accusatory statements, they should be looked at as a godsend, telling the business how the public perceives it. This becomes an opportunity to know what the problem is and address it. Responding to the customers’ complaints becomes an opportunity to win their loyalty.

The customer must be made to feel like he is understood and that his problem or displeasure is appreciated by the business, rather than be cavalierly dismissed as the voice of a disgruntled customer. Even if the specific customer is a chronic complainer, as some of them are, and complains to just about any one who would listen to them, in business or in their private lives, there is always a reason for his complaining. Perhaps no one has ever genuinely paid attention or made him feel important in his life? If so, making him feel important and calmed down, becomes a means of training staff to respect customers, even the irritable and demanding ones who are seeking attention for their egos.

“I don’t get no respect and dignified treatment” is the typical complainer’s view of those who serve him, so give him what he craves, respect and dignity, and gain his loyalty.

Where possible, chronic complainers ought to be written to and thanked for bringing problems to the attention of management, and told how those problems are being dealt with. Written feedbacks as to how their issues are handled, makes them feel important and appreciated.

The customer must be given the feedback that the business is doing all it can to address and resolve his problem, or else he feels discounted and rebels. Where necessary, apologize to him and atone for the staffs’ sin of not treating him as the very important person he wants to be.

After resolving a particular customer’s complain, it should be processed, to see whether it could have been handled differently, better. If it was well done, it could become a model way for treating irate customers and used to train employees.

We admire assertive persons in social life, and there is no reason why assertive customers should be treated any differently. Even if they are aggressive, they still need to be responded to. Aggressive and passive persons are often acting out of fear. Fear makes some cower in dependent passivity, and makes others act out in pretentious bravados.

Love and respect is always the opposite of fear. Love is the cure for fear. Love the fearful person and you reduce his fearfulness and defensiveness.

The angry, hence, fearful customer is calmed down with a few kind words that really make him feel loved and respected. This is not manipulation, but being realistic to human nature.

The best customer service policy is always to exceed customers’ expectations. Find out what the customer wants and exceed it, and you obtain his repeat business. Customer expectations, like everything else in life, are dynamic and always changing. Businesses must continually seek ways to understand them and respond to them. Stay close to your customers and you would learn what they want from you, and meet and/or exceed their expectation. An aloof business is soon not in business. Nothing irritates people more than workers that seem aloof in relating to them. Every customer wants personalized treatment and resents been treated as if he is a number, a machine.

Do not assume that customers understand and appreciate your good intentions towards them; show them behaviorally so they can see that you value their business. Action speaks louder than words, so telling customers how well you care for them would not help you much; what matters is your actual behavior towards them. Did you listen to them, did you do so respectfully, and did you provide the answers they were asking for? Maintain a positive attitude to customers and they sense it, present a negative attitude to customers and they also notice it and resent it.

Good customer service is not to be left only to front line staff that deal with customers, but must be practiced by every one in the business, from the lowest employee on the totem pole to the supervisors and top management.

Good customer service must become a philosophy that permeates the entire business and become its culture so that customers stepping into the premise of the business, or listening to its employees on the phone, feel a sense of quality service everywhere. Nothing pleases the complaining customer more than to go get the boss to listen to him and address his problem. He feels special, if the chief executive officer listens to him, indeed one of the reasons why he is complaining in the first place, is that none of the big cheese listens to him, hence, makes him feel like he is a somebody. Being talked to by the boss makes him feel that he is a somebody, so make him feel like a somebody and gain his loyalty and money. You have nothing to lose by serving him right, and everything to lose by not serving him right, his money.

Praise but do not ever criticize the customer. People do not like to be criticized, it makes them feel belittled which nobody likes; so listen to them and hear them out, praise them for speaking out for their interests, and promise to do your best by looking into their complaints and addressing them, if necessary, in writing, with a promise not to permit it to fester and repeat itself. That way the complainer feels like he protected other customers and his ego is stroked.

Apply the insights of total quality management. TQM teaches the importance of customers and finding out what they want on an on-going basis, gearing one’s services to meet them if one wants to be in business. TQM wants customers to be involved in making every aspect of the business’ decisions, even top management decisions. This does not necessarily mean having the physical presence of customers in the boardroom, but that adequate effort is made to understand their desires and to incorporate them in making decisions, regarding the business’ behavior, certainly with regards to product design and service delivery.

TQM not only recognizes customer input in decision-making, but employees input. Essentially, every part of the business is to treat other employees as their customers, and take their input into consideration in its decisions and activities. In sum, TQM is a useful tool for good business-customer relations, employee-employee relations, gathering statistics and data to continually improve the quality of the business’ products and services.

Management is filled with fads and there is no doubt that aspects of TQM are faddish. Nevertheless, it is a win-win situation (for business and customers) if the philosophy of total quality service is adopted by every business organization.

Much of the relationship between customers and businesses is conducted over the phone, and increasingly through the electronic media, like email and e-commerce. It is therefore critical that those who pick up the phone when customers call, be trained in good telephone manners. The voice at the business end of the phone call, may determine whether the customer buys from it or takes his business elsewhere. Rude telephone operators put off customers.

Telephone courtesy can be taught and learned; it ought to be taught to and learned by anyone who answers the telephone when customers call. This is even more so, for those who handle customer complaints. Good telephone attitude generally emanates from a positive attitude towards people in general.

Those with a cheery temperament tend to be more suited to callers registering complaints, and ought to be particularly the choice for such jobs. Answer the phone promptly and speak in a respectful manner, letting the customer understand that you are there to serve him, and that he is not a bother that you would rather not listen to. The worst thing that you could do is to hang up on an irate customer; if you do so, you make him angrier and lose his business (if not your job, for he might complain to your boss and demand that you be fired, if only to spite his injured vanity). If messages need to be taken do so cheerfully.

In the era of Email, follow good letter writing suggestions. Your letter must have an introduction, a body and a conclusion. It must be succinct and written in correct Standard English, or whatever language it is written in. Customers are often put off by grammatical mistakes in the email and other forms of communication they receive from businesses. “My God, if they cannot even write in correct English, how can you rely on them to do well in what they say they are doing?”

English grammar is something that many persons, including writers, find difficult to master. All that can be said about the matter is that whoever writes a letter ought to take time to find out whether what he wrote is grammatically correct, before mailing it. He should employ computer spell and grammar checks, of course, but must not rely solely on them since they often make mistakes.

Whatever is placed on the businesses website ought to be edited by a person who understands grammar and syntax before being placed there. Some customers are put off by even typographical errors in the material they read. It is better to win a customer if paying a good editor enables one to do so.

It is always a good idea to write thank you letters to customers. Such letters get them to be loyal to the business, to feel as if they have been paid personal attention and being valued.

Of course, it is critical that occasionally businesses share information with their customers, by providing them with written information on what is going on in their business world and information about their products.

Publications in local newspapers and classified advertisements are good ways of getting the business to the public’s attention. A business with a good write up in a newspaper is more than likely to have a few additional sales because of the goodwill created by the publicity. Placing news releases every now and then, on the business’ products and whatever improvements have been made in them, and the awards and recognition they received from authoritative organizations and/or persons, is a sales tool for generating demand for the business’ products and/or services.

In the final analysis, businesses deal with customers, and marketing deals with understanding what customers want and getting their businesses to satisfy these desires. People generally desire personalized, one-to-one service, and whatever efforts are made to meet that need tends to secure their business and loyalty.

Relationship marketing is the only way to survive the competitive markets of the future.

Market share is gained when customers come to believe that a particular business pays attention to their needs, in addition to selling the best product in their market.

Good businesses often send Christmas cards to their customers; some are even known to send gifts to their best clients.

The future belongs to e-commerce so businesses must find ways to break into this market. Internet shopping is increasing in leaps and bounds. Essentially, this entails setting up a home page for the business and publicizing the web address, so that people could tap into them to order goods and services sold by the business. Moreover, people seeking information on the products, prices and services of the business, could visit the page to obtain such information about them.

Virtual shopping is in the air. Here a customer uses his computer to zoom into a shopping center and walk himself through the aisles as he would if he were inside a store and picking the goods he wants, except that this time he does it with the click of his mouse. When he is done shopping, he sends the information to the shop personnel and within a few hours they deliver his groceries to him at home. This line of virtual reality shopping is going to make shopping a lot easier, especially for those who do not like to go to stores.

There are many other avenues to exploit the electronic revolution, known and still unknown. Businesses must keep abreast with what is happening in the information superhighway, and take advantage of its wonderful developments to sell more goods and services, hence, make profits.

In the end good customer service means figuring out how the customer wants to be served and doing exactly that. Businesses exist to sell what customers desire, not what the business owners and their employees want. You either provide to buyers what they want and how they want it, or you are not in business in the free enterprise economy, you are out of business. In the so-called socialist and communist economic systems, the employees were so sullen and uncaring in serving the customers of their already shoddy goods and services, that as soon as those dinosaurs of economic systems collapsed these businesses went under and their employees were unemployed. Those who could find work had to be retrained, to become customer friendly, so as to sell goods and services, make profits and stay in business.

Continued from "Ozodi Osuji Lectures #19: Nigeria and the Business World"

Next lecture, #20, Training for Leadership, October 23

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Ozodi Osuji Lectures #19: Nigeria and the Business World

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- In this lecture, we shall, in a rudimentary manner, summarize the nature of capitalist economics and business organizations. This chapter is not meant to replace studying economics and business, but to give the reader a bird’s eye view of the real world, that he must deal with, in his efforts to earn a living for himself and his family.

THE CAPITALIST ECONOMY

There are primarily three types of economic systems: capitalism, socialism and a mixture of capitalism and socialism. We should very easily dispose of socialism because it is idealistic and not realistic. It is predicated on pure cognitive processes, not rooted in the realities of man, as we know him to be. Socialism wants the individual to work for the public, to serve common interests. It generally believes that it is possible to serve other persons more than the individual can serve himself. As it sees it, man is a social animal, and ought to devote his existence to serving other persons’ needs at the expense of his own needs. Obviously this is idealistic and negating of the individual, for if he cannot serve himself, how is he going to be able to serve other persons?

The originators of socialism appreciated the exploitation of workers, by the owners of capital, during the period of primitive capitalist states (during capital accumulation period), and decried the capitalist system of production. They were, of course, right in calling attention to the exploitation of labor by factory owners. However, they sought to throw the baby away with the bathwater. They sought to take away the ownership of private property from individual hands and give it to the state. They wanted the public to run factories and become the owners of the means of production. This is in the face of the obvious fact that, what is publicly owned is owned by no one, and is generally poorly managed.

What one owner would take an hour to do, would take ten bureaucrats ten hours to accomplish. Socialism wanted public ownership of the means of production. As it sees it, this is the only way to prevent exploitation of man by man.

In the Communist Manifesto, and later, Das Kapital, Karl Marx waxed strong and wrote idealistic nonsense that has no bearing on the real world we know of. Simply stated, Communism is rubbish for it has no capacity for producing wealth. Wealth is produced by individuals pursuing their private interests, working hard, working ten or more hour per day, rather than the average of two-hour days worked by bureaucrats in their public works. A gaggle of bureaucrats merely make noise, whereas productive individuals commit themselves to doing work that interests them, that they have aptitude in, and do it for profit.

We are not naïve about human nature. We know that human beings do exploit one another, and will continue to do so if they can get away with it. Therefore, some role for government in the economy is inevitable. Hence, the mixed economic system is probably the most workable economic system, given the realities of the world. In a mixed economy, the government plays some role in making sure that capitalists do not exploit the workers; it does so primarily through regulations of what capitalists can and cannot do, passing laws to protect labor and working conditions; and it intervenes to prevent and or remedy inflation and depression. By and large, a mixed economy is a regulated capitalist system, it is less productive than a pure capitalist system, but seems the best we can do given the nature of man.

The most productive economic system is the capitalist economy, so we shall devote the rest of this chapter to its workings. Many books have been written on this economic system, yet the reader should peruse the granddaddy of them all, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The premise of this economic system is that man is a rational creature, and that his rationality disposes him to pursue what optimizes his survival, his self-interests. He is motivated by self-interest and only secondarily thinks about social interests. But since he lives in society, the satisfaction of his self-interests is generally attained when he also does what satisfies other persons’ self interests. In effect, he exchanges goods and serves with others, and this way each person satisfies his self-interests.

The basic axiom of this economic system is the laws of supply and demand. Individuals need certain goods and services to sustain their lives. They demand those goods and services and are willing to pay certain prices to obtain them. Businesses supply the goods and services demanded by the people. A successful business is one that understands what the people want to buy, produces it or gets it, and sells it to them at a price they are willing to pay. In the market economy, the producer supplies certain goods or services, and people offer to pay him a certain price for his goods or services. Complex mechanisms affect the interaction of supply and demand; the result is a price for the goods that the supplier is willing to sell his goods at, to a buyer who is willing to pay a certain price for these goods or services. This is the equilibrium price.

Given the desire by the buyers to pay the least price for goods, they would always be on the look out for sellers whose prices are cheaper for similar goods. Therefore, other sellers attempt to produce the same goods and/or sell them cheaper to buyers, and in the process make profits. To be in the market, to sell, all producers of goods and services must be attempting to produce their goods and services in the most efficient manner, and to a specific sector, niche, in the market. Competition for survival in the market place, therefore, compels producers to be efficient, to utilize the factors of production (labor, capital, technology, entrepreneurship, land, raw materials, etc), in the most efficient manner possible.

The capitalist economy, therefore, is characterized by competition for consumers, for the sale of goods and services, and in the process discovering the best way to produce and market them, so as to make a profit.

There are different types of competition. Briefly, there is pure or perfect competition, also called laissez-faire; here the forces of the market, that is, supply and demand, strictly determine the production and distribution of goods and services, with no interference of government. In this type of market, the best seller of goods and services survive, and the weak disappear. This is akin to Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism, where the fittest survive and the weak die. This is an unsentimental approach to the economy.

In the real world, people do take care of their old parents and children, and never permit pure competition to determine their approaches to them. People have always intervened to help the least competitive person, the underdog so to speak, for he could be them, tomorrow. The best student may obtain scholarships to go to school but if you ignore the needs of the mediocre student, should something happen to the best student you are stuck with no one to produce knowledge. Therefore, to guarantee the presence of knowledge, you must provide education to as many students as possible, even those that may not appear to aspire in it, for educational provides knowledge on some level to all.

In monopolistic competition, a few relatively large businesses monopolize the production and sales of certain goods and/or services, and exert influence on the prices they charge for their goods and/or services. This is a very inefficient economy, for if there is less competition, there is less incentive to improve the means of production or to improve the quality of goods and services. A monopoly tends to make businesses complacent in their quality of products and services, and not keep up with increasing needs. An economy stagnates, becomes outmoded, if monopoly is permitted.

In oligopoly economy, there are few suppliers of a specific product or service, so that one’s actions can have a significant impact on prices and its competitors; often a small number of businesses produce similar products, agree amongst themselves on the prices to charge the buyers of their goods, thus disproportionately affect a large population, much like we see with gas prices due to OPEC. This is an inefficient economy.

In a monopsony, a single customer market, where a specific type of product or service is only being used by one customer, the buyers dictate prices paid to producers of goods and services.

There are many variations of these basic types of competition sketched above. For our present purpose, what is salient is that in a capitalist economy, competition is encouraged as the best way to produce and distribute wealth. It is assumed that businesses are motivated by the profit motive, and the bottom line is: “what is in it for me? How do I benefit from what I am doing? If I am not going to benefit from it, why should I do it?” Profit is the incentive for economic activity. Where there is profit to be made, resources are channeled to it, and in the process the consumers are best served.

Capital goes to where profit is to be made. This way the forces of the market allocate capital in the economy and allocate it most efficiently. No one central committee sits around in an unventilated room in the States, Moscow, Peking, Havana, etc and pools their collective ignorance, to tell the people where to spend their money, and to decide where capital is allocated in the economy.

The capitalist economy is the most efficient means of producing and distributing resources in an economy. No one has yet discovered a better alternative to it. But like everything else that is part of human behavior, it is flawed. Man is an imperfect creature and his actions must be imperfect. Capitalism has built-in problems. It tends to have cycles of inflation, depression and recession.

In inflation, there is too much money chasing too few goods and services, therefore, prices rise.

In depression, there is too little demand for goods and services, therefore, prices fall. Recession is a minor form of depression.

In a hyper inflationary economy, it may take a bucket full of currency to buy a packet of cigarettes. This happened in Germany after the First World War.

In depression, too many people do not have money, are out of work and cannot buy goods and services, hence, businesses cannot sell their goods and services, do not make profits and may have to close down, laying off many persons. As a result of the stock market crash of 1929, the United States economy and its collateral, the rest of the world’s economy went into deep recession. At a point during the depression, over twenty five percent of the adult population were unemployed, hence, had no money to buy goods and services; as a result, many businesses could not sell their goods and services, and had to close down. The world went into a funk, as hordes of unemployed men sloshed about looking for work.

John Maynard Keynes published his “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” in 1936, and in it, proposed new economic behaviors that would prevent the known business cycles of capitalist economies. His ideas were translated into new economic practices, the so-called Keynesian Revolution, that in the United States is commonly referred to as the New Deal or government intervention in an otherwise capitalist economy.

Briefly, Keynes proposed that societies lay to death the idea that governments should have no role in the economy. He suggested what governments could do during inflationary and depressionary periods, to help the economy. Lawrence Klein writings on Keynes shows that the government economic planners would have to have "complete control over the government fiscal policy so that they can spend when and where spending is needed to stimulate employment and tax when and where taxation is needed to halt upward price movements."

Many folks have since added to Keynesian economics, but the basic tenets of this economics remain the same. Keynesian economy, like pure capitalism, accepts that private ownership of property is the best economy, but suggests ways to manage the economy to avert excessive disruptions in economic activities.

Taxation policy. Here the government taxes people, raises or lowers taxes according to how the economy is doing. If the economy is in an inflationary period, that is, too much money is chasing too few goods, governments should raise taxes and that way take away some of that money from the people, leaving them with less money to spend.

With less money available to them to purchase goods and services, people would want to buy goods and services cheaper, hence, suppliers are inclined to reduce the price of their goods and services in order to sell and make profits. Prices fall and inflation is reduced, as money regains some value.

On the other hand, if the people are paying higher taxes, and have less money to purchase goods and services, sellers are unable to sell their goods and services; the economy heads towards recession and/or depression, taxes could be lowered so that the people would have money to spend. With more discretionary income to spend, they buy goods and services, thereby stimulating more production of goods and services. The economy picks itself out of depression and becomes buoyant. Taxation policy, therefore, is an ongoing process, with government raising or lowering taxes to regulate the economy.

Government spending (fiscal policy) is used to stimulate the economy. When the economy is in the doldrums the government can consciously spend money to stimulate it. It could pump money into the economy by building roads, bridges, airports, railway lines and other public infrastructure. In doing so, work is created and workers spend their money buying goods and services that stimulate the production of those goods and services. Sometimes, governments do not have the money to spend to stimulate depressed economies. In such instances, they many have to borrow that money from those who have it, through selling bonds. This is called deficit spending. The government borrows and spends money that it does not collect in revenue, so as to improve the economy, hoping to then collect more taxes to pay off what it owes. Many a government owes so much money through deficit spending, that interest payments on their debts consume much of their current revenues. That is, they pay out large chunks of the money they currently collect in taxes as interests on the money they have borrowed to finance public projects. Ronald Reagan, for example, borrowed extensively to finance his military build up. He saddled future generation of Americans with trillions of dollars of debt to be paid off. In the meantime, the government pays several billions of dollars in annual interests on the trillions it owes.

In Monetary Policy, governments, through their central banks, regulate the behavior of the economy through raising or lowering the interest they charge borrowers of funds from the government banks. Commercial banks borrow money from the central banks. They are charged certain interests for the money they borrow. They, in turn, charge their customers, those they lend to, interest on the loans. The interest the central bank charges determine the interest commercial banks charge, and indirectly affect the performance of the economy. If the prime rate charged by the central bank is low, commercial banks borrow more and lend more money to their customers, who are more likely to borrow because of the lowered interest rates. People borrow money to buy houses and cars. Businesses borrow money to invest in capital goods. This way economic activity is stimulated.

Lowering interest rates can be used to stimulate an economy out of recession or depression. Raising interest rates, on the other hand, lowers borrowing and spending, hence, reduces inflation.

Keynesian economics has ushered in an era of government intervention in the capitalist economy. This serves some good. The problem is that some idle, unproductive bureaucrat may be tempted to over do it, and in the process destroys the goose that lays the golden egg. If the government over regulates the economy, say has too high taxes, people may refuse to work hard; people see no reason why they should work eight or more hours per day to make money, so that some bureaucrat can take much of that money from them, to fatten government coffers and support the malingerers on the public dole.

Clearly, this problem does not have a simple solution, certainly not an either or one. There must be some role for the government in modern economies. The question is how much. How much should be the role of government in the economy is the subject addressed by public policy and public choice. As long as, the national policy enables the capitalist economy to grow jobs and produce wealth for the people, it seems tolerable.

As long as, the people’s standard of living is rising, the Gross National Product (GNP) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are rising, there is little to complain about the economy. (GNP is the gross value of the goods and services produced in a country during a period of time, usually a year; GDP is the GNP plus the income paid to non-residents, minus income received from non-residents. Gross national income, GNI is the sum of the various economic sectors in a country. Per capital income is the gross income divided by the population, to figure out what each individual would make if wealth were shared equitably. Unfortunately, many make incomes below poverty level wages…living wages is that wage deemed necessary to sustain an individual in an economy. Goods are generally divided into two main classes, capital goods and consumer goods. Capital goods are those devoted to producing more wealth, such as factories, whereas consumer goods are finished products bought and consumed by people.)

As we see it, governments must play some roles in the economy. It is simply nostalgic to yearn for past eras that probably never existed, when governments were supposedly hands off the economy. (In the past, we had mercantilism, trade from commodities, where governments actively tried to preserve certain trading for their citizens and prevented other countries from doing so.) As long as, governments understand that human nature dictates that people work hardest when they are working for their interests, they pretty much leave them alone to pursue their interests, so the economy grows.

Private enterprise, where most of the factors of production (land, labor, capital, technology, entrepreneurship) are left in private hands, is the most productive economic system. Until any one shows an alternative to it, that is equally productive, or better, it should be titrated and improved, but essentially left alone. We should not make the mistake naïve Russians made of adopting an untested economic system, communism, only to give the people poverty, and brutal authoritarian and totalitarian dictatorship. For all his murderous activities, Stalin did not improve the standards of living of the Russian people. So what was the point of that entire killing? Not any that pure reason can discern.

The profit motive, which drives business activities, is still the best way to generate wealth in an economy. Of course, we need to tax those with money, and give some money to non-profit organizations to use in serving the poor, those who cannot participate or benefit from competitive business. This is the way it should be, wisdom lies in knowing how not to over play our hands and allow our sentiments to over rule our reason.

We need bureaucrats to perform critical governmental functions that must be performed for the survival of the polity. But we also know that bureaucrats are inefficient, so we must keep them to the absolute minimum. As it were, they are necessary but should not be permitted to mushroom all over the place. If allowed, they expand their jobs but not their productivity. So we must keep watchful eyes on the detritus of mankind, and reward our most productive persons, entrepreneurs, those who generate wealth and employment in the economy.

SMALL BUSINESSES

Most people who have jobs are employed by small businesses. For our present purpose, we define a small business as any work organization employing less than twenty-five persons. It is, therefore, critical that we understand the nature and operation of small business ventures.

A small business comes into being when an individual has an idea that he thinks would make him money. An entrepreneur has an idea (product or service) that he thinks there is a market for, that is, he thinks that people would buy, that there is demand for). He attempts to produce and market his idea.

Unless one is trained in business, either formally (a MBA) or through work-experience, as a beginning entrepreneur one often does not possess management skills. Management is the ability to gather human beings and other resources, and coordinate them in pursuit of stated organizational goals. Human beings are complex and it is difficult to tell them what to do, and get them to do it. There is, however, a psychology to managing people that needs to be learned (human resource management).

Small businesses are often handicapped by lack of adequate financing. One may have good ideas, but not have the money to finance them. Moreover, given one’s lack of track record, financial institutions like banks hesitate lending one the money to start one’s business. Thus entrepreneurs are often forced to rely on their own savings, and borrowing from family members and friends to start their business.

We live in an era where government involves itself in practically every aspect of our lives. As noted above, if bureaucrats are permitted, they would over regulate the economy, including making it difficult for persons with good ideas to start and operate their own business. The hoops entrepreneurs have to go through to obtain all the licenses they need to operate their businesses is amazing. One would think that since they are the ones who provide most of us jobs, that idle bureaucrats who do not generate jobs for any one else, but themselves, would cheerfully do everything in their powers to make sure that entrepreneurs succeed. (It is estimated that over ninety percent of all business that start fail before the end of two years.) Often those businesses that manage to survive are burdened with high taxes, actual disincentives to their working hard to stay in operation.

Be this as it may, small businesses are the bedrock of capitalist economies, and people must be encouraged to start their own businesses, rather than aim at working for other persons.

If you intend to start your own business, you should think about it; it is desirable that you provide yourself with some business education, formally or informally, by reading books on business (and that is why we are adding this chapter to this book), studying the market, understand the structure of demand, that is, do a survey to find out whether there are people who want to buy what you want to produce or not. If there is a demand for it, then plan your production carefully to make sure that you avoid cost overruns. Chances are that you do not have training in finance and accounting, and may need to secure the skills of those trained in that field, particularly the services of a good bookkeeper. You must budget and keep good records of your revenues and expenditures, so as to avoid running into major financial problems or having to declare bankruptcy.

You must draw up an effective marketing plan, a strategy on how to sell your goods and/or services to the target market you are aiming at to buy your goods and/or services.

You must manage your time well and acquire the type of labor you need to aid you in the production of what you want to produce, and compensate them adequately…. people are motivated by self interests; if you do not reward them as they think that they deserve, they would leave, you do not want a high labor turnover rate, for if those who understand your business leave, you may have difficulty finding and training replacements.

One should go into business that enables one to do what truly interests one. Even if one is buying an existing business (business opportunity) or acquiring a franchise (a unit of a chain, like McDonald’s), one must follow a line of business that interests one.

Once the individual decides to go into business for himself, it helps if he creates a Business Plan. A business plan provides a detailed plan of the business goals and objects, and how one intends to accomplish these goals, including how the finances are to be obtained, who the market for the product of the business is, and how the revenue of the business is to be managed.

The mechanics of beginning and running a business, such as acquiring a location and facility for the business (could be out of one’s home), equipment, insurance, means of communication…such as computers and phone systems…obtaining and motivating staff to work hard, meeting the legal requirements for that type of business, going after sources of financing, and so on, can be studied in most books on how to start and run small businesses or books on entrepreneurship. Networking and talking to already successful entrepreneurs is one of the best ways to learn, gain contacts and support to bounce ideas and issues off of someone in the know.

FORMS OF BUSINESS OWNERSHIP

Businesses can be organized in several forms. The primary forms of business organization, in most capitalist economies, are sole proprietorship, partnership and corporation.

The sole proprietor is exactly what the name says, a business owned by one individual. The owner is solely responsible for the firm’s operation, and assumes all the risks involved. If he makes profit it is all his (minus taxes, of course) and if he incurs losses, he is solely responsible for them. From a legal entity the sole proprietor and individual are the same entity.

This type of business organization has some advantages, including ease of formation and dissolution, management freedom and right to do as the owner wants without interference from bosses, and, of course, the keeping of all profits by the owner without sharing it with other persons. Like everything else that has pluses, this type of business organization has disadvantages, including: unlimited financial liability, limited financial resources, perhaps limited managerial skills in the owner, and tendency for the firm to terminate with the demise/death of the owner.

Many businesses start as sole proprietors and in time change forms, perhaps become partnerships or eventually corporations. The need for capital to expand businesses often compels sole proprietors to seek partners, and eventually incorporate and possibly even to go public, financing their business activities through selling of stocks.

A partnership exists where two or more persons pull their resources to start a business and agree to share responsibility for running the business; they take equal risks in doing so. The formation of a partnership often requires following some legal procedures that delineate who the partners are, their individual investments in the business, the salary of each partner, the duties to be performed by each partner, the name of their business, how profits are to be shared, the location of the business and the conditions for dissolving the business.

Partnerships have three forms; general partners, limited partners and silent partners. In general partnership, all the partners are involved in the running of the business and share in the total liability; in limited partnerships, partners are only liable to the extent of their investment in the business, and may not take an active role in the day-to-day operations of the business; silent partners are not involved in the management of the business, but often provide financial support.

Partnerships have certain advantages, including ease of establishment, pooling of management skills, ability to pool funds from many persons and more stability than sole proprietors. Its major disadvantages are that partners have unlimited financial liability, may disagree amongst themselves as to how to run the business, inability to raise larger funds, possible dissolution of the business due to disagreement of the partners.

Corporations are legal entities; they are considered artificial persons in the eyes of the law. This is so because the law considers the corporation like it was a person, and taxes it, as it taxes individuals. The corporation is usually owned by shareholders who are liable to their investments in the corporation.

Corporations tend to have certain advantages, including: limited financial liability for shareholders, greater ability to raise money, greater longevity, greater capacity to expand, greater ability to attract top quality managers, and ease of transferring ownership. The disadvantages include lack of personal interest in the management of the business by employees, greater cost of production, government regulations, and lack of secrecy of operations.

Essentially, corporations are the most effective way to run large business concerns. Money is difficult to come by, and one of the best ways to come by it, is to borrow it from many persons. Public corporations acquire funds by selling shares in their business. Shareholders own stocks in corporation type businesses.

There are many types of stocks: preferred stocks, common stocks, and so on. (If you are planning to become an investor, you are advised to take a course on investments, so that you would understand the various types of stocks and their advantages and disadvantages.)

A board of directors usually runs a corporation. The shareholders elect the board of directors. The board of directors is usually elected from those with the most stocks in a corporation.

The board of directors hires a chief executive officer (CEO or president) to run the business on a day-to-day basis, and is responsible for reporting and keeping the board informed.

A group of individuals can form a corporation by filling out the required forms by the government, and paying the fee for starting their business. Once in business, corporations tend to expand through many ways, including mergers, acquisitions of other businesses, and sometimes through hostile takeovers of other businesses.

There are other forms of business organizations, such as cooperatives, usually a non-profit corporation organized on a voluntary basis, for the benefit of members. An example is credit unions, which is usually a financial cooperative to lend money to members, who pool their money to lend to each other, and that way counter the disadvantages of commercial banks.

MANAGEMENT

Now that a business has been started, it has to be managed on an ongoing basis. Management is the process of planning, organizing, leading and controlling the activities of work members, in order to achieve the business’ goals. Management is the utilization of men and material to achieve organizational goals and to make a profit.

Many writers have delineated the specific functions of management, including planning (setting the goals and objectives of the work team, how best to attain those objectives, the resources necessary for achieving them, and where those resources would be obtained), organizing (establishing a formal organizational structure, delineation of tasks to be performed by members of the organization, lines of reporting authority), staffing (the recruitment of people to perform specified tasks necessary for the organization’s goal attainment), leading (guiding the workers so that their activities are conduce to the organization’s goal attainment), controlling (making sure that the performance of the staff is what is expected and making sure that resources are utilized, as expected, taking corrective actions where necessary.

There are levels of management, a hierarchy of the distribution of authority in an organization. The hierarchy usually looks like a pyramid, with more people at the bottom, and less at the top. Generally, there is top management (president, CEO, Vice presidents), middle management (division managers, department managers), and supervisory management (lead workers).

Managers generally are expected to possess technical skills (the mechanics of the jobs in their organization) and social skills (how to relate to people and use them to achieve organizational goals).

Managers make decisions as to what goals and objectives are to be pursued, and how to pursue them. Therefore, managers must understand how to make decisions, positing possible solutions, costing the solutions, studying the consequences of each solution in terms of benefits and social good, and choosing the alternative solution to the problem that seems to optimize benefits and reduce costs, implementing it, and eventually evaluating whether it works, and if not, refining it or throwing it out for other solutions.

The major function of management is planning what goals to pursue and ascertaining strategies to attain them. Gathering of information and analysis of this information is crucial in making future plans as to the business’ direction.

Nowadays there are computer software programs that can aid in planning and decision-making. The manager must be familiar with computers, and respective business software; he must understand the role of computers in his particular industry. Education in computers is now a necessary part of management training. E-commerce is in the future of most business. Knowledge of computer applications, such as word-processing, data processing and management, statistical analysis, excel, and Power Point, is useful for managers.

Managers must be effective communicators. They achieve goals and objectives through people. As such, they must know how to relate to people. Communication is an effective way of relating to people. Indeed, managers are best served if they take courses in communication and human relations. They communicate up and down the organization’s hierarchy, send memos to those above them and to those under them, write business letters and reports for presentations to other managers (management meeting) and other business, etc.

Although managers do not have to become accountants, they must understand money and record keeping. They must be able to prepare budgets and read financial statements, giving the performance…revenues and expenditures…of their units, produced by the accounting department, monthly. Management decisions are based on knowledge of the state of the organization’s finances.

Managers engage in business with other business that requires having formal contracts written, regarding their relationships and obligations. Contract management is one of the required skills of professional managers, in today’s business climate.

Managers involved in production must understand inventory management, the record keeping of raw materials coming into the factory, how they are processed into finished goods and sold (department stores have to keep records on the inventory of merchandise they order and sell).

Project management is now a general skill required of most managers (how specific projects are managed, what it takes to accomplish them, when to start and complete them, costs, technical requirements for accomplishing them, the labor required to accomplish them, and the management of these resources).

Management boils down to the courage to take risks. Academic professors of business talk shop on planning, but are not known to actually set business goals and do what it takes to achieve them. Often business goals are set on a hunch, by pure intuition of what the manager thinks will work. Managers are persons who take calculated and studied risks, and are prepared to take the consequences of their actions. Those who take profitable risks make profits, whereas bureaucrats, who study a problem to death and write tons of literature on it, do nothing to take risks, make no profit.

ORGANIZING WORK ORGANIZATIONS

Work organizations tend to be organized hierarchically, with the majority of employees at the bottom and the minority at the top. This is the so-called organizational pyramid, with top management (usually the chief executive officer, and president and his functional vice presidents, who reports to the Board of Directors, usually seven to twenty members who are elected by shareholders), middle managers (division managers), supervisory or first line managers and finally the workers at the bottom of the totem pole.

The typical corporation usually has a formal organization chart that plots each employee’s position, and what it does within the organization. The formal organization delineates power relationships between employees, and suggests that those at the top tend to have more power than those at the bottom. But this could be deceiving as most organizations’ have an informal organization that indicates that, persons who are not expected to have much formal power and authority actually possesses power. The secretary to the CEO, for example, may wield actual power behind the throne of the organization. The janitor may have more say so in the organization than persons who supervise him formally.

One of the key functions of management is organizing people, to use them to accomplish organizational goals. Organizational structures, learned from the military and the Catholic Church, seem to be an efficient way of organizing people. Communists contended that hierarchical work organizations were anti-democratic, that they indicate master-servant relationships and talk nonsense about the equality of comrades at work. However, examination of communist work organizations revealed a more feudal organization with those at the top presuming to know what is good for those at the bottom while not even bother listening to them, as capitalist organizations, at least, try to do. Communist leaders presume to have all the knowledge there is to have, hence, when in office stay forever, usually until they die or until someone kills them in a coup. At least capitalists make a show of listening to the people, and theoretically, information flows both downwards and upwards, from the workers to the top management, and from management to the workers.

Usually work organizations are departmentalized by function. The work that must be done to accomplish organizational goals are divided and grouped into functional areas, and each is called a department; such as production, accounting, finance, marketing and sells, human resources, etc.

A designated person such as the vice president, finance etc, heads each functional department. The vice presidents report to the president, who reports to the Board of Directors.

Departmentalization can also be made geographically: a large corporation with operations in many geographic areas, in the same country, or even in many different countries, may organize itself by regions so that in each region a manager runs its affairs there. Some organizations have product departmentalization, that is, a unit producing a given product is a department. Some organize through project management, whereby folks from different units come together to pursue a special project within the overall organization.

Whichever way an organization is organized, the goal is to delineate the lines of authority, power and influence.

Power is the ability of one individual to tell another what to do, and he does it, even if he did not want to do it. Power generally implies an ability to punish the person it is exercised over, if he did not do as he is told to do. The boss can punish the employee by sacking him from his job, just as political authorities can put the citizen in jail if he disobeys the laws of the land.

Authority is the reposition of certain powers in positions in an organization. One may have formal organizational authority, but lack power and influence in the organization.

Influence is the ability to influence persons with or without formal authority to do so. Persons, who have the power of speech, may not have a formal authoritative position in society, yet exercise the ability to get people to do certain things.

In formal organizations, there are different types of authority, such as, line and staff. Line authority is the authority in a position within the organization chart. Staff authority is the authority exercised by those not holding formal positions in the organization’s chart.

Theoretically all the power in the organization is in the hands of the chief executive officer. He then delegates some of his power to his subordinates, who in turn may delegate some power to lower subordinates. For delegation to be meaningful, the person doing the delegating must really permit the person he gave power and authority to, the freedom to act within his given power. However, he must be expected to be accountable for his behavior; if he does not do what is expected of him, and if he does not improve as needed to work within the organizational structure, may be let go. Delegation of power must be real for folks to truly feel empowered by the work organization.

It is generally believed that each supervisor is only able to supervise so many persons, if he is to do an effective job. Some believe that six to twelve persons are the best span of control. There is no hard and fast rule about this matter, for it may depend on individual managers. Some managers are only able to keep an eye on a few subordinates, whereas others can keep an eye on a large number of subordinates. Each organization must know its people, in designing its chain of command.

There is a debate going on whether large organizations should centralize authority or decentralize it. Either end of this argument has its merits. In the nature of things, a bit of both is probably inevitable. Management must be centralized to have effective control, but it must also be decentralized to give subordinates a sense of empowerment to do their jobs. If folks feel told what to do, by people external to them, they tend not to work very hard. Yet workers must be told what to do by their bosses, while being given the impression that they are in charge of their work lives.

Large organizations often form a committee to perform a certain task and then disperse. A committee is a group of persons, usually selected from different parts of the organization, to perform a particular task or a particular project, while still performing their usual line work. Committees are useful ways of pooling expertise from many parts of the organization to solve problems.

There is an academic debate going on as to whether organizations should be flat or hierarchical, vertical or horizontal. This is an idle debate by idle academics. In the real world, persons performing different tasks tend to have different skills. Moreover, persons in an organization tend to possess different levels of information. The vice president of finance is probably more knowledgeable, or should be so, about finance than the janitor. It would, therefore, be silly to expect the janitor to have the same input as the financial manager in making decisions on where to invest the organization’s money or where to borrow money from. The point is that, whereas, democracy seems an ideal social organization, we are not going to have participative democracy in the work place; perhaps we can have an enlightened commitment to the workers’ interests by bosses, and that is the best we can hope for.

HUMAN RELATIONS

The key function of management is to get people to perform tasks, performance of which leads to the accomplishment of organizational goals. Organizational goals are attained through human beings. Therefore, to achieve these goals, human beings must be understood and motivated to do their jobs. Management theories are, in effect, ideas as to how to get people to produce at their best.

Frederick Taylor performed Time and Motion studies, and figured out how best to perform each task needed to be done in a work process, and how quickly it could be done; he then hired those who are best able to perform such tasks within the most efficient time parameters to perform them. If it takes a teller at a bank, approximately five minutes to complete each customers transaction: of depositing or withdrawing money from his checking and/or saving accounts, then test potential tellers and select those who have the capability to perform this task within the expected time parameters. This is what time and motion studies amount to. Clearly, it has some merits, and as such, is still used in hiring and training employees.

Human beings are flesh and blood creatures, not robots. Even if you hire them based on their efficiency, you still have to treat them in a certain manner, for them to perform at their best. George Elton Mayo and the Hawthorne experiment, found that the ambience of the work environment plays a role in workers’ productivity. Such a seeming minor issue, as the lighting in the room and color of the paint on the walls, affects how happy and productive workers are. Thus, the human relations school of management stressed paying attention to human psychological needs, if productivity is to be raised.

Abraham Maslow talked about the hierarchy of needs: physiological, security, social, esteem and self-actualization. Frederick Herzberg posited a hypothesis that says, jobs that offer challenge and opportunity for advancement, tend to motivate people to work harder than jobs that offer their opposite. He suggested combining good wages, security of employment with challenge, if the worker is to be motivated to work hard.

Douglas McGregor postulated that there are two basic types of managers, what he called Theory X and Theory Y. Theory X managers make assumptions that workers are lazy and need to be closely supervised if they are to work hard; whereas, Theory Y managers assume that with trust people can do what they are hired to do on the job.

Clearly this bifurcation of attitudes towards management is unrealistic, for in the real world people need to be trusted, as well as monitored, if they are to do what they are hired to do, and do it well. It is not an either or case, for men are complex creatures and no one approach to them serves them well. Theory X managers may alienate workers but then if workers are not monitored the business may not be there for the employees to be monitored.

More behavioral psychologists divided management into what they called task-oriented managers and people oriented managers. Supposedly the former is interested in the task of the organization and seldom interested in the emotional well-being of the managers. Thus he asks: what can I do to produce good computers, and does not worry about the feelings of his workers. On the other hand, people oriented managers are too preoccupied with the personal needs of the workers, to pay close attention to the technical aspect of management.

Again, this bifurcation of management into two grids is self-defeating, for in the real world, managers must be concerned with both technical and social aspects of management. The jobs needed to done to produce goods and services have technical and engineering aspects to them, and since they are done through people, the psychological needs of people must be paid attention to, also. It is not an either or question. However, it is clear that some managers tend to lean in one direction or the other, whereas excellent managers combine both traits. Morton’s managerial grid is obviously useful in talking about leadership styles.

Fred Fiedler’s contingency Theory suggests that not one-leadership hat fits all; that leadership and working conditions determine what leadership style is called for. In effect, different situations require different leadership styles, and good leaders adjust their style to suit the condition they find themselves in. In the political arena, for example, during emergency times, such as wartime, it is probably that strong-willed leaders are called for. Churchill was probable the best leader for Britain during World War II. It takes a mad dog to check another mad dog. Hitler was a mad dog and required a man unafraid of blood and dying to checkmate him. The softhearted, democratic Neville Chamberlain, was probably more suited for peacetime parliamentary talk-fests, than wartime leadership that required brutality and non-squeamishness in the face of blood, death and dying. Notice that the Great War leader, Churchill, did not make good leader material after the war, and was thrown out of office, as if the people knew that he was not suited for democratic leadership. For one thing, he was an outdated jingoist, who did not read the winds of change blowing through the world, asking for an end to colonialism. In a similar vein, the war loving George Bush did not seem to be an effective economic manager.

In the 1970s, it became clear that the Japanese were onto something that was not happening in the West; after all, the Japanese were outselling the West in such consumer goods as cars and electronics. To understand how they did it, scholars studied the Japanese management style. William Ouchi came up with what he called Theory Z management style. Essentially, he advocated doing what the Japanese were supposed to be doing: transform the work place into a family-like organization, with the leaders acting as surrogate parents, protecting the workers. The fact that there was no real democracy here was overlooked. The benign dictatorship of the Samurai system of social organization, residual in the Japanese social organization, obviously would not work in the West. For now let it be said that fascination with all things Japanese is now passé particularly since the free fall of the Japanese economy in the 1990s.

Whatever mode of management is adopted, the aim is to motivate workers to do their best at doing what they are hired to do. Management tries to improve workers’ morale, to make them identify with their work, and do their best while at it. Obviously not one approach is required to skin a cat. Whatever is necessary to make workers to like their jobs must be done, including such concepts as job enrichment, empowerment, flextime, socio-technical systems, redesigning jobs, management by objectives (MBOs), participatory management, Total Quality Management, and so on. Every decade sees its own management fad; these must be evaluated and some paid attention to, provided the bottom line is there and profit made.

FUNCTIONAL AREAS OF MANAGEMENT

Managers must understand the key functional areas of management: production, accounting and finance, marketing, and human resources.

Production entails the process of converting resources…raw material, capital and human labor… into goods and services.

In those businesses producing goods, production usually means the manufacturing aspect of their business. This area of management is often the domain of engineers and others trained in the world of machines and men.

Managers make decisions about the level of machinery and labor they need to produce their particular goods. They may need to cover some of the following aspects: decide on standardization…the production of uniform products… determine the question of automation or labor intensiveness, purchase of raw material for conversion into finished products, how much inventory of these materials is to be bought, and held in stock etc.

The organization of the production’s department is generally a technical matter, that is, it is determined by the state of the technology in the industry. This involves an idea of the products to be produced, what type of machinery is needed to produce it, and where to obtain them or how to design them, the production process itself (assembly line), plant layout, capacity planning, maintenance of equipment in good shape, planning where to locate plants, where to obtain raw materials, location of markets, work design, work measurement, forecasting of demand for the products produced, inventory management and costs of carrying large inventory versus just in time inventory, scheduling of work to appropriate work centers, purchasing and relationships with suppliers, quality controls, the role of robots in manufacturing, the role of computers in manufacturing, distribution planning, and so on.

Marketing management entails the activities that get the products and/or services of a business organization to the end user. The marketing function involves performing marketing research to ascertain whether there is demand for the goods and/or services to be produced by the business organization. And if there is market for it, what is the nature of that market? What is the target market…. their demographic, lifestyle characteristics, purchasing characteristics, motivation for purchasing the goods and/or services and their available money to do so…markets are further segmented, that is, divided into sub-markets, based on the specific needs of each segment. Marketers develop the marketing mix: the combination of products, prices, promotions, and place in order to satisfy a particular segment of the market.

Markets are divided into capital and consumer goods markets. Capital or industrial goods markets entail the demand of industry, usually businesses, whereas, consumer goods markets entail, those who buy goods that they consume, as individuals. Clearly the two markets have different needs.

Marketing managers usually work very closely with production managers in creating products to be manufactured. This is done for obvious reasons: marketers give realistic feedback as to what type of goods buyers want. Both plan products and the lifecycles of products (product life cycles include: product introduction, market growth, market maturity, and sales decline).

Production mangers and marketing managers work closely to brand, package and label their products. (Brand is the effort to identify the business products by name, packaging is the manner the product is packaged; labeling provides information on the products and its manufacturer). These two managers also work closely in pricing the product.

Pricing entails consideration of many factors, such as the cost of manufacturing the product, break even analysis, demand for the product, markup prices, skimming the market, and so on. Essentially the manufacturer strives to sell his products so that he covers his cost of production and makes profits, but do so in such a manner that buyers are willing to pay the price he is demanding.

Once goods are produced, they have to be promoted, made known to the buying public. This is usually done through promotion mix: mass advertising, personal selling, sales promotions and publicity. Each of these activities has costs attached to it and the marketer chooses what option optimizes benefits for his business.

Once goods are manufactured, they have to be gotten into the hands of their consumers. Distribution channels have to be established. These include: retailers, wholesalers, agents, etc. The idea is to get the product to the consumer in the most cost effective manner. Clearly, the nature of the product affects how it is distributed; some products can be sold directly by the manufacturer, whereas others need agents to do so, and still others need retailers to do so. Whichever mix of distribution channels are deemed optimal, arrangements must be made for the flow of goods from the producer to the consumer.

The most common form of distribution is through the chain retail stores. We go into food stores and buy manufactured and fresh food from all over the world. The manufacturers of these products have arrangements, agreements, with these stores to sell their goods and how these goods are brought into their stores. In typical department stores, like Wal-Mart, products from all over the world are sold. Arrangements are made to bring those products demanded by consumers into the store, on an on-going basis, and to stop carrying those that are no longer demanded by consumers.

Today, selling of goods and services is increasingly done through the Internet, E-commerce. This is a new form of the old practice, of ordering and selling goods through the catalogue and mail. Suppliers, through marketing, advertise their goods on their web pages; buyers order through the internet from these websites, pay with their credit cards, and have the goods shipped to their homes.

Financial and accounting management involves determining the level of funds necessary for operating the business, and ascertaining where those funds are to be obtained.

Manufacturing businesses invest a lot of money on buying equipment (fixed capital-buildings, machines, equipment, furniture, etc). Working capital (the cash used in the daily operation of the business) must be obtained.

Cash flow is the movement of money into and out of your business; it’s the cycle of cash inflows and cash outflows that determines the business’ solvency. Net or free cash flow is the difference between cash inflows and cash outflows. Accounts receivables provide cash inflows and form revenues, while accounts payables use cash outflows and form operating expenses. The difference between them becomes profit.

Businesses sometimes have to borrow money in order to operate. There is short term financing and long term financing.

Short term financing is borrowing that must be paid off in a few months to a year, such as from banks credit lines for the business. (Bank loans are usually secured with collaterals such as the business’ accounts receivables, inventories.) Long-term financing is borrowing that takes several years to pay off in full, such as a mortgage on a building.

Factoring…here businesses borrow money from lenders by selling their accounts receivable to a factor company at a discount; the factor company then collects the money from the businesses’ customers.

Businesses also obtain funds from finance companies and from venture capitalists that take risks in funding business ventures with the hope of making profits in the future.

But by far, the way public corporations obtain most of their financing for long term projects, is through selling stocks to those interested in becoming shareholders in their company. As noted elsewhere corporations are often authorized to sell stocks through the stock market. Loans are also obtained from governments.

All monies coming into a business must be kept track of and how they are spent accounted for. Financial accounting keeps tracks of business revenues and expenditures, and profit or lack of it. This is generally done through bookkeeping (a clerical function that record’s a company’s daily financial transactions, accounts received and accounts paid out).

Management accounting provides managers financial information, usually on a monthly basis, with which they make managerial decisions. This information includes how each unit of the organization is doing, how much money comes in to it, how much flows out of it, and whether it is in the red or in the black. A unit that is in the red, for example, may lead the manager to lay off some workers in order to cut costs.

The accounting process is a critical part necessary for the business’s survival. The balance sheet (which shows the income and expenditure of the business at a particular point in time, usually monthly) is critical in making management decisions, for example, to continue a line of product or to stop producing it, if it is not bringing in sufficient income to cover costs of producing it. Income statements show the net profit or loss from the firm’s operations over a period of time usually a month or year. Budgets state how a business plans to spend its money during a period, usually a year, and how they intend to obtain their income.

Much of budgets are based on forecasting of future revenue streams, hence, have to be adjusted with the reality of actual cash flow during the year. A business forecasts how much in sales it hopes to make, but reality determines its actual sales, which may be more or less, hence, profit or loss.

There are different types of budgets but the two main ones are capital budgets and operating budgets.

Capital budgets cover the cost of capital goods and equipment, and their depreciation and replacement time and cost, and where revenue for such replacement would be obtained.

Operating budgets cover current operating costs: labor costs, manufacturing costs, selling costs, administrative costs and expected sells revenues.

Financial budgeting shows how the business intends to raise funds for planned business expansion, from internal savings or from borrowings?

Corporate borrowings are usually in the nature of stocks and bonds. Stockholders lend money to businesses, on a gamble that companies would make profits in the future and share these profits with the stockholders, investors, by paying dividends.

Quarterly, although it may be less frequently, many large corporations declare their profits or losses, and on that basis elect to pay out dividends or not.

When companies are performing optimally, their stocks go up in value, hence, can be resold at profit by their holders; conversely when they are doing poorly, their stocks go down in value, and may indeed become valueless. Clearly, the buying and selling of stocks is a gamble that requires the buyer and/or his stockbroker to do background research on companies before their stock offerings are bought.

Whereas, bonds are usually the means governments raise money to finance projects they do not have money to finance, larger corporations are these days permitted to also raise money in this manner. Bonds are different from stocks in that the buyer gives the seller a certain amount of money, and the seller promises to pay him a certain annual interest on his money, and to return the entire amount during a specified period of time, when the bond matures.

The securities market (on stocks and bonds, for example, the New York Stock Exchange) provides a daily barometer on how stocks are doing. Some of the major stocks indexes such as the Dow Jones and NASDAQ provide daily feedback on how the stocks registered with them are doing.

Human resources management deals with securing the right personnel a business needs to have in order to produce its product or services effectively and efficiently, compensating them appropriately, training and motivating them to do their jobs well. Human resources is a staffing department, for it is not directly involved in the production of what the business exists to produce. For many years this department performed mostly clerical functions, handling the paperwork for hiring and paying employees. Over time it has evolved into much more, with needs to keep track of the various labor laws that govern management-labor relationship making it more of a managerial function. For our present purposes, personnel managers hire workers for large business outfits. Small businesses do not have the luxury of personnel departments, the overall owner of the business hires whomever he judges able to help him produce the goods he is there to produce, compensates them when they do good jobs and sacks them when they are inefficient.

Human resource planning entails making plans on what personnel the business requires in the future, where to obtain them, how much they will cost and whether the business can afford such costs.

Personnel departments perform job analysis, job specification and job description. They study what functions need be performed by each position in the organization, specify and describe them in specific position descriptions. New employees are given their job descriptions and are evaluated on this basis.

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October 21, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #18: Extra-legal Governments in Nigeria:: the Military, Religious Groups, and Transnational Corporations

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- In the modern polity, there is a designated government, usually elected by the people. But whereas the government formally rules the county other social forces participate in governing the country. These informal rulers of the country are often very useful in maintaining law and order.

RELIGION

Consider religion. Men obey the laws of their societies for many reasons, including the fear of the hang man, the fear of God’s punishment and, of course, in a few cases conviction that the laws are just and ought to be obeyed.

Man is that creature that desires to live forever and some of them believe that there is a God that judges and punishes them should they do bad things to each other.

Some religions tell man that if he is a sinner and dies that he may go to hell. Apparently, man does not want to spend eternity in hell. The fear of burning in eternal hell fire scares some men into doing what is right with their fellow human beings.

If a society relied only on secular authorities to bring about law and order it would be fighting a losing battle.

Atheists who say that there is no God may not have appreciated Dostoyeski’s observation in Brother’s Kalamazoo that without God and his absolute morality that every behavior is permissible. Without God’s laws of white and black, there is no reason why the individual should not do what he wants to do. Stealing? If God does not exist and there is no punishment in the after life, all that one has to do is figure out a way to avoid being caught by police authorities and being sent to jail. Nigerians do this too well. They cheat, take bribes and are corrupt and as long as the law does not catch up with them, it does not matter.

In the current secular society of the West, there are no absolutes, no right and wrong, every thing is relative. Folks ask; why not? Why should I not do it? Why shouldn’t I do drugs? Who said that one should not take drugs? Who said that I should not have sex with animals? (Bestiality is very common in America…in Seattle, a few weeks ago a man bought a horse for the specific purpose of having sex with it and died from choking from sucking the horse’s penis.) Who gave that person the right to tell me what to do? Who gave the Catholic Church the right to say that Homosexuality is wrong? There is no authority apart from the individual.

Believing in the fallacy of absolute freedom, folks do whatever they now want to do. If you push it, they ask you: who defines what is natural or not? Other people? Why should one accept other people’s definitions? Natural ness is whatever the individual says that it is. Go get lost with your bogus morality, they tell you. There is no morality in nature; the universe is an amoral place. Thus every behavior is now permitted in America and Europe.

This is a recipe for a fall. The West is on a fast track to self-destruction.

If you remove God and religion from human affairs you create a society where every behavior is permissible. In such a situation, law and order tends to breakdown. Chaos and anarchy reigns where there is no religion and belief in God.

There are those who say that through pure reason that human beings can figure out what is good for them and do it without belief in God and parasitic religious clergy. This is the view of secular humanists. Alas, whereas a few persons are given to reason the run of the mill human being does not predicate his behaviors on reason. Perhaps, only about ten percent of human beings are actually thoughtful. The rest are like animals and need the structure provided by religions and belief in God.

On a personal note, I believe that there is God. In fact, I know that there is God. God is the only reality there is, the rest is noise. I believe that we live in a moral universe.

I know that our behaviors have consequences for us and for other people. The individual’s private behaviors and choices have public consequences. In as much as the individual causes others harm, he is responsible for so doing. The individual’s choice is cause and his behavior is the effect. Whatever I choose to do has effect for me and for those around me.

There is no such thing as independence. We are interconnected and what each of us does affect all of us; we are all adjusting to what each of us is doing. Since we affect each other, the individual ought to choose to only positively affect other people. If he does what brings pain, instead of pleasure to other people, they have the right to protect themselves from his negative behaviors. One way to do so is to jail him or even kill him.

If a man engages in pedophilia, his personal choice, he hurts children and, therefore, should be in jail for the rest of his life. He has no right to walk the streets endangering defenseless children. In as much as he is a coward and imposes his perverse sexuality on children who cannot defend themselves from adults, he ought to be shot, killed. Cowardly perverts have no business living to commit their depravity in darkness.

The individual’s rights ends where other peoples well being starts. To insist on personal right to do as one wants in every situation is unrealistic. Does one have the right to steal, kill, rape etc? In nature, may be, but in organized society nothing prevents those affected by the individual’s negative behaviors from defending themselves against him. The best defense is offense. Remove evil persons from society before they strike. Build jails and prisons and put these people away.

In as much as every cause has an effect (good or bad) the individual ought to choose those causes that have positive effect for society. If not, society must protect itself by punishing the anti social individual.

The earth is a reflection of eternity. If the individual does negative things to other people, just as society punishes him, I believe that the universe also punishes him. How this works I am not quiet sure.

All I know is that Africans sold their brothers into slavery and nothing will work out well for Africans until they make amends for that evil behavior. They must ask African Americans to forgive them. I have suggested that African countries give black Americans 1% of their GDP for a generation, 34 years, as symbolic of their atonement. I have also pointed out that whereas the West appears to have gotten away scoot free from using blacks that the West will pay a heavy price for its evil behavior.

I expect America to collapse in a spectacular manner. Contrary to her self-perception as a superpower, her sins are so great that she must be punished. She is already punished. That society is so decayed that if you get to know America well you look away with disgust. America is hell on earth, not the heaven we are told that it is.

Many Americans seem to have anti social, sadistic personalities. As such, they calmly and remorselessly abuse blacks. They must pay a price for this criminal behavior. How they go about doing this, I do not know. They can, of course, make amends and ask blacks to forgive them and pay reparations to black Americans for a generation (not to Africans). For a generation, 34 years, all black children ought to be provided with universal free education, from elementary to university, preferably in the physical sciences. This would help equalize the playing fields so that they can compete on the same basis with whites. Until this is done, America will know no peace. She is condemned to conflict and must seek false salvation in drugs and stupid sexuality.

Because we live in a moral universe, as I believe, the bad behaviors people engage in are punished, how I do not know.

I believe in God and accept religion as a mechanism for approaching God. I, therefore, advocate religion and belief in God. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism etc are useful religions. The individual is free to gravitate to a religion of his choice. Government cannot tell the individual what religion to adopt, nor should government stifle religion.

From a pragmatic perspective, as Machiavellian observed in the Prince, if there were no God and religion, society ought to invent them, for those enable people behave appropriately.

A young man under age 25 who does not have God and religion in his life is more likely to engage in anti social behaviors than a religious young man.

Simply stated, religion plays a critical role in society. Therefore, religions leaders tend to exercise a great deal of influence on people. When this influence is positive, they make people behave lovingly towards one another. Unfortunately, religious authorities, for their own evil purposes, can be a negative force in society. They can incite people to hate, harm or even kill other people.

Religion and religious leaders are therefore partners with government in securing law and order in society. In every society religious authorities are, more or less, a partner in governing the people hence we call them extra legal government. They are not legal in the sense that the people do not elect them. But they are, nevertheless, partners with the elected government in socializing and making people law abiding.

In Nigeria the main religions are Christianity in the South and Islam in the north. We also have residual animists, that is, African religionists, all over the place. For all intents and purposes, however, we have two main religions in Nigeria, Christianity and Islam.

Both of these religions are fine religions. In fact, they have common roots in the religion of Abraham, Judaism. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the same religions, really. All three are monotheistic, they believe in one God. All three worship one God. Jews approach God through Moses; Christians approach God through Jesus Christ and Moslems approach God through Mohammed. All three teach morality based on God. All three teach love and forgiveness. In my opinion, these religions are excellent religions and ought to coexist with one another. I am a Christian and respect those who are Moslems. We can respect each other.

For our present purposes, religious leaders have enormous influence on the citizenry of any polity. The Pope says something and Catholic Christians fall in line. The Mullah says something and Moslems do it. Therefore, every rational polity must seek ways to get along with religious leaders. Since we need religion to have a law and ordered society we must, therefore, cooperate with religious leaders rather than antagonize them.

Whereas it is unacceptable to have a theocratic society, a situation where religious leaders rule, as Popes used to rule Europe and Mullahs rule Iran, we must listen and, in fact, consult religious leaders. If religious leaders rule, since they are human beings and have egos and vanity, they are more likely to mistake their ego wishes as the word of God.

Human wish is not God’s will. Since none of us is God, we are the children of God, we should not speculate on what God’s will is. Nevertheless, as Christian, I personally believe that the will of God is that I should love every person around me, Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa, black and white, men and women. God is one and has one family. All people are parts of God’s one family. All people are my siblings and I love them all. My Christian religion tells me never to do harm to any of God’s children.

However, if any of God’s children is anti social, I want him arrested and put in jail, and while in jail, re-socialized, corrected, taught the Bible, Koran and other Holy books until he learns not to harm any one. He should only be released to the community when he makes a personal commitment to care and love all people and work for social interest. If he fails to do so, his parole is revoked and he is returned to jail for further training in pro-social behaviors.

In my view, we must have religions in society. In fact, I do not see how we can have a civilized humanity without the positive influences of religion. I have studied man long enough to know that he is inherently self-centered. Man is a fallen creature.

In eternity man obeyed the will of God, love, and loved God and all people. But he fell from God’s grace and chose to not care for the whole but to care only for himself. Hence we have selfish Nigerians.

As long as we are selfish, we must have religion reminding us that we have common interests and asking us to work for each other. I do not mean communism using secular power to take from each and give to others. We need to give to each other voluntarily.

Religion enables us to be our brother’s keepers. (Cain asked: am I my brothers’ keepers? The answer is yes. I am my brother’s keeper. I must love all my brothers.

Who is my brother, Jesus asked and responded with the story of the Good Samaritan, the man who helps the weak on the roads of life is his brothers’ keeper. Care for all people and, in my view you are a good Christian and Moslem. Live only for yourself and you are not a religious person.

Human beings come in all sorts of varieties. As such, some religious leaders are egoistic, proud and vain. They attribute their ego interpretations to God and take their views as God’s Will. These folks often incite their religion’s members against other people. Instead of preaching inclusiveness they preach exclusion. Thus we have religious uprisings in Nigeria, with Christians and Moslems at each other’s throats.

This needs not be. These people should get along with each other. Religions leaders ought to be preaching love for all children of God, Allah.

One is not naïve regarding the nature of things; there will always be rotten apples that misguide religious people. Good government can arrest and jail such unproductive so-called religious leaders. We must monitor evil religious leaders and make sure that they do not generate riots in Nigeria.

THE MILITARY

Another very powerful institution in society is the military. As I have pointed out, man is a fallen creature. He places his self-interests ahead of others interest. Given the opportunity, he will oppress other people. Man is man’s worst enemy. The strong can enslave the weak. Therefore, we set up government to enable us have security, to prevent other people from abusing us.

Government provides us with internal security as well as security from external enemies. For government to provide us with security, it must have a strong internal police force and an army ready to fight external enemies. We need the police and military to enforce laws in the human polity.

If you make laws and have no police to enforce them, arrest and punish lawbreakers, the chances are that no one would obey the laws. You do not have far to look. Look at Nigeria and see what the devil has made. Nigeria has good laws but no one enforces them.

As pointed out in the lecture on international relations, the international arena is jungle where the strong eat the weak. Therefore, we must have a strong military to have a balance of power with our neighbors hence deter them from attacking us.

Unfortunately, those we hire to protect us can also abuse us. We give the police and military weapons with which to protect us. We all know how the police abuse their positions by using guns to extort bribes from Nigerians. We all know that the military intervened in our politics and seized power. We have pointed out Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu’s illegal seizure of power in1966, thus initiating military miss rule of Nigeria.

It would be nice to say that the military ought not intervene in politics, but that is an idealistic statement. The fact is that as long as the military has guns that it is always tempted to intervene in politics and rule through the barrel of guns.

A good society must find mechanisms to prevent the military from intervening in politics. We hire the military to protect us, and the world being what it is, a dangerous place, we cannot do without them.

We must, therefore, incorporate the military into governance. In one of his exuberant writings, Nnamdi Azikiwe talked about what he called Diarchy (the man liked to invent his own words), a situation where the military becomes part of the government. I do not think that we need to do that. What we need to-do is do what they do in Britain and the USA and consciously cultivate respect for the military and use it as training ground for political leadership.

In my view, no one should contest elections in Nigeria without first serving in the military for at least two years. If one is under age 65, one ought to belong to a reserve military unit, National Guard, and continues receiving military training. The military trains for leadership.

Exposing all men to military service intertwines the military with political leaders, without the military becoming directly involved in ruling the country. The military must indirectly be involved in ruling the country; it does so if all leaders are ex military and hence subject to military influence.

Real politics dictates that we pay the chap welding guns well if we do not want him to turn his guns at us. The military ought to be well paid. Moreover, the military ought to get most of their budgetary requests.

I personally want a strong Nigerian, and eventually a strong African military. Our military must have the best weapons available in the world. In fact, in the not too distant future, I want nuclear weapons for Nigeria. As long as White men have nuclear weapons, they will use them to intimidate black men.

White men tend to act as terrorists and use their overwhelming power to threaten blacks, to harm or kill them if they do not do as asked, obey whites. To avoid white terrorism, we need a strong military. We need all the equipment our white enemies have. But I am a realist and know that this situation isn’t going to happen soon. First things first, restructure Nigerian realistically, along ethnic lines and have a strong central government and develop the Nigerian economy.

We all know what the military is. We have lived with them since 1966 when they intervened in our politics. No Nigerian is a stranger to soldiers. But for the sake of academics let me say a few things about the Nigerian military.

Nigeria came into being when the British embarked on ruling us. Prior to establishing the Nigerian polity, the British squabbled with the French, competing with them as to who should exercise control over the territory that eventually became Nigeria.

The British recruited Africans into the military and officered them with Britons. This was called the West African Frontier Army. They were mostly composed of Hausa soldiers.

Hausa soldiers were used to taking orders from authorities and the British were more comfortable with them than with the Igbos who insisted on near wild independence and resisted organized authority.

With the West African Frontier Army, Lord Lugard marched through Nigeria, pacifying the lower Niger. Along the line, 1902, he destroyed the Arochukwu oracle that insisted on slavery. The Aro had utilized their false god in subjugating Alaigbo. Upon destroying the long juju of Arochukwu, the British easily conquered Igboland.

The Nigerian Army grew from this small force hastily put together by the British to fight off the French and eventually to subdue hostile African tribes.

During the First World War, the British increased the number of Africans in the Royal Nigerian Army, to help them prevent Germany from attacking Nigeria from Cameroon and Togo, near by German colonies. Ultimately, the British fought with the local German garrison in these African countries, defeated them and took over governing the area. These were really not real wars, just skirmishes.

A small Army existed to help the colonialists rule Nigeria. Then the second world came along and the British recruited quite a few Nigerians into their Army. These folks were used for guard duties, some as far away as North Africa. When the war ended, most of these African service men were demobilized and Britain retained a handful army in Nigeria.

In 1960, Nigeria gained her independence from Britain. Nigeria had a small army, less than ten thousand men. As far as armies go, this is not even an army, just a couple divisions. A typical army is over 100, 000 men.

The structure and training of the Nigerian army was like the British army. In fact, many of the officers were trained at Britain’s prime institution for trainings its officers, Sandhurst (the equivalent of the American West Point, in New York).

The organization of the Nigerian military is as follows: the lowest soldier is a private. Usually, he has about three months of boot camp training to transform him into a soldier. He then begins his service in the military and progresses upwards. If he is good, he is promoted to non-commissioned officer status, beginning as lance corporal, then to corporal, to sergent, to staff sergeant, to company staff sergeant, to regimental staff sergeant. His career essentially ended with that rank: RSM.

If the would be soldier has secondary school education he could be recruited into the officers class and trained to become an officer, at the officer academy. It usually took four years to complete the training, which gives the man the equivalent of bachelor’s degree in a university. While in training he is called a cadet. Upon commission, he is called second lieutenant. He leads a platoon (22 men). If he is good, he rises in leadership ranks and is promoted to full lieutenant, then to captain (commands a company, usually 100 men), then to major, then Lieutenant colonel (commands a battalion, 1000 men) and then colonel. Here he ends his career as a junior officer.

Very few officers make it to senior officer status, for that requires political skills as well as military skills. Generally, politicians, the head of state, the Commander in Chief, are involved in appointing generals. Any way, the successful colonel is promoted to brigadier (brigadier general, in America, one star general), then to major general (two stars), then lieutenant general (three stars) and finally to full general (four stars). There the typical general ends his carrier.

A major general leads a division. A full general leads an army (many divisions). One of the generals is made the chief of general staff, coordinating all the other generals,’ divisions and armies.

The chief of staff works with the civilian minister of defense, so he must be politically savvy, know how to keep quiet and listen to his civilian masters. If there is a major war, a few generals may be promoted to five star generals (field marshals).

The military has three branches, army navy and air force. The ranks in the other two branches correlate with what we have just narrated except that the names may change, private may be called seaman/ensign, general may be called admiral (or air marshal in the air force), you get the idea.

The military that Nigeria inherited from the British was well trained. It was probably as good as the British army itself? The manner in which Nigerian officers executed the civil war (1967-70) tells one that they knew what they were doing. Their tactical and strategic planning was as good as found in the US army. Even their discipline appeared good enough, though not as good as in the Prussian army. (I take interest in military strategies. I like to know why Napoleon, or Nelson or Molkte or Montgomery, or Patton, Romel, or Zukov did what they did; what blunder made Von Paulus allow himself to be encircled by the Russian army at Stalingrad, why was he unable to break out? Clautzwitz in On War observed that war is politics by other means. I say that Politics is war by other means.)

The military ruled Nigeria from 1966 to 1979 when Obasanjo handed power to Shahu Shagari. In 1984, the military returned to power via Buhari and Ideagbo. Ibrahim Babangida, then came to power. There was the civilian rule of Shonikan before Abacha put the man out of his misery. Abacha died in office and his second in command, General Abdul Salami took over. This man wrote a constitution for Nigeria and had elections and made general Obasanjo a civilian-military President of Nigeria.

(As already observed, I believe that only former military officers ought to be in politics, so I do not regret Obasanjo’s rule. However, I regret his lack of vision and plan for what he wants to accomplish in office.)

In all human polities, the military are powerful behind the scene. Nigeria is no exception. If the present government continues to be as corrupt as it is, it is quite likely that the military will return to power in Nigeria. My prediction is that if the next civilian government continues the tradition of corruption that Nigerians would be so fed up that they would welcome a young colonel taking over power. May be this time we shall be lucky and find a real nationalist in uniform and he transforms Nigeria.

The military has many uses. Nigeria is a multi ethnic country; military experience and its building of spirit d’ corps tends to inculcate a sense of one Nigeria in military personnel. In that sense, the military is a useful instrument in making Nigeria a unified polity.

Military men tend to be posted to all parts of the country and get to see how others live and develop respect for them. In fact, many military men marry from outside their tribes. As I pointed out elsewhere, Nigerians ought to be encouraged to marry outside their ethnic groups. This makes for national feeling.

All said, the military is a positive force in the country. All Nigerian males ought to be trained in the military and required to serve two years (after schooling, of course, if schooling ends with bachelors degree, one goes into the military right away for two years, if it ends with a four year technical training, one goes into the military right away and serves two years).

MULTINATIONAL CORPOATIONS IN NIGERIAN POLITICS

In our interconnected world, businesses know no borders. They go wherever they can make profits. This phenomenon will rise in the future when borders break down, as they are bound to break down. The borders have already been put aside in Europe, meaning that any business from anywhere in European can expand to anywhere in Europe.

The future holds more, not less transnational corporations.

Nigeria really does not have many MNCs. Nigeria essentially has oil. Therefore, MNCs into the oil business are found in Nigeria. Shell, BP. Texaco, Mobil AGIP etc are found in Nigeria. These explore for oil and eventually mine them and ship the crude to overseas and sell them. They pay Nigeria royalty.

Nigeria’s revenue comes almost exclusively from oil (at least 90%…this is an absurdity for when oil goes missing Nigeria goes broke; the rulers of that kleptocracy should have struggled to diversify the economy).

Nigeria is a mono-economy. The cash crops that she used to export (cocoa, Palm oil, Palm kernel etc) are now neglected. Even such possible alternative source of energy as coal is untapped.

Obviously, Nigerians rulers do not have brains. A reasonable person does not put all his eggs into one basket; he diversifies his source of income.

There are other MNC such as what remains of the Royal Niger Company, today’s United Africa Company, UAC (it operates super stores like Kings ways). There are some MNCs involved in telephone and so on.

For our present purposes, the relevant point is to know what MNC do in third world countries. These American and European companies have the resources to bribe and even topple African governments. We have noted that Nigeria relies almost exclusively on oil revenue. That means that oil companies like Shell and BP literally control the Nigerian economy. These people have the resources to bribe military officers to remove civilian governments that they do not like.

If the government engages in policies that MNCs deem detrimental to their pockets they know what to do. First, try carrot and if talking fails, you contact the homeboys, the CIA etc and have them do their thing, remove the non-complaint African government. The role of the CIA in killing Patrice Lumumba and other African leaders is yet to be fully documented. But such is life.

If you are in politics, you must anticipate that foreigners are trying to eliminate you, especially if you truly work for your people’s interest and not for Western interests.

We can talk about the specifics of what MNC’s do in Nigeria and Africa but that is not possible in our one-hour lecture. Suffice it to say that these business corporations are so powerful that they participate in governing African and third world countries. Hence we regard them as extra legal governments in third world countries, just as religious and military leaders are.

We do not need to moralize about reality. Politics is war by peaceful means. Westerners are at war with Africans and African politicians ought to know that fact and prepare to checkmate the Western warriors in their midst. It is childish to pretend that we do not know that the West wants to make profits at our expense. Our goal ought to be to do to them as they do to us, no personal feelings.

MNCs possess a lot of technical expertise we need. We need to understudy their business and technical practices and when we master them replace them with African managers. But do not replace whites with unqualified Africans. Instead, have Africans work their way up, from the bottom of the ladder and when they know what they are doing, then have them replace foreign managers.

We cannot make the mistake of nationalizing MNCs and give them to green, inexperienced Africans to manage. If we do so, those companies would collapse from poor management.

Management is acquired slowly through understudying experienced managers. Learn what they know before you attempt to get rid of them. In fact, do not get rid of them, form partnerships with them.

CONCLUSION

In this lecture, I have pointed out that whereas the people have formal leaders that, in fact, there are informal leaders that are as powerful as formal leaders. This phenomenon occurs everywhere in the world.

The military, religious groups and big business tends to play roles in governing the human polity. In America, a chief executive officer of General Motors once said that what is good for GM is good for America. American politicians and appointed secretaries of government departments tend to come from business backgrounds. There is a lot of influence from the business sector in the public sector. President Dwight Eisenhower, in his departing speech, warmed of the military industrial complex, the fact that military, and businessmen increasingly rule America. What else is new? This is reality all over the world. All we can do is building in checks and balances to protect the interests of the common man.

The military and successful businessmen usually rule the human polity. Such is political reality and we need not cry about it.

We need a lot more relationship between the military and business and political leaders in Nigeria, not less. We need to cooperate with religious leaders and nevertheless avoid theocracy. We must relate to religious leaders and take their views into making policies, particularly in the sphere of ethics and morality.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 22, 2005

Next lecture, #19, Nigeria and the Business world, October 23

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Ozodi Osuji Lectures #17: Nigeria and International Organizations

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- In this lecture, I will review some international organization and then see how Nigeria participates in them. I will begin the review with the United Nations Organization.

The First World War ended in 1918. The powers that fought that “war to end all wars” met at the Versailles Palace, near Paris, to draw up a treaty to officially end the war, and assign blames. Germany was blamed and given heavy indemnity to pay to the victorious countries.

Woodrow Wilson, the American President, came to the Treaty drawing sessions with a 14 points plan that he wanted the major powers to embrace, a plan that he believed would prevent future wars and make the world safe for democracy.

The group drew up their treaty and included the formation of what it called the League of Nations.

In this League, all members agreed to meet and work against wars and to collectively sanction any country that attacked other countries. All member nations of the League were equal and none could over rule others; each had just one vote.

Apparently, the League failed in preventing the Second World War from erupting in 1939. Adolph Hitler had quaffed that the reparations that Germany was made to pay was unfair and was crippling her economy. When he came to power in 1932, Germany quietly rearmed (the treaty had limited Germany to an army of 100,000 men). When Hitler felt ready, he simply marched into the Rohr, Germany’s industrial heartland that had been given to France. France or any other European power did not challenge this daring behavior by Hitler.

Emboldened, Hitler absorbed his native Austria in 1936. In 1938, he negotiated with the lackluster Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister and was given the Sudenteland, the German speaking part of Czechoslovakia. This appeasement at Munich was not enough for Hitler.

Hitler signed a non-aggression treaty with Stalin (USSR) to avoid war with each other and to divide up Poland. Assured that Russia would not declare war on Germany, Hitler marched into his potion of Poland in 1939.

Western powers at that point realized that Hitler’s ego was insatiable and that no amount of appeasement would stop him from attacking his neighbors, so they declared war on Germany. Hitler turned his attention westwards and marched into France in1940 in a blitzkrieg that the world had not seen the like before. He subsequently took the lowlands of Belgium and Holland and eventually marched into Scandinavia.

In 1941 Hitler’s Panzers stormed into Russia and Operation Barbarosa nearly took Moscow before the Russians stopped drinking their vodka and realized that Hitler meant business, killing all of them, and taking over their land, all the way to the Urals. In his 1925 book, Mein Kampf, Hitler had said that the Slavic race were subhuman beings that had contributed nothing to human civilization. He said that if he ever came to power that he would kill off the Slavs and take over their land and or keep a few of them alive as slaves working for Germans in their new farmlands in the East. Hitler said that he would prevent Slavs from going to school or, at best, gave them no more than elementary school education, so that they would be able to read and read instructions given to them by their German Aryan masters. Hitler said that he learnt from the Americans who had killed off Indians and took over their lands and reduced Africans to slaves. He said that he was merely repeating what white Americans did to blacks, prevent them from going to school, so as to keep them ignorant and be more able to control them. Hitler planned to do to Eastern Europeans what whites did to Indians and blacks in America. Hitler admired white American racists for doing what they did to other races. He believed that they were realistic and that there was no use keeping inferior races like Africans, Jews and Slavs alive; kill them all and keep a few alive to work for you. To Hitler, this is the course of history and ought to be respected. He was merely being realistic to the course of history. He was a man of historical destiny; doing what providence ordained, kill the weak. In nature, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spenser and Spangler said that strong animals killed weak ones. Evolution progresses when the strong heartlessly killed the weak. To Hitler, the blood (genes, we would today, say) of the various races should never be mingled. Racial mixing lowered the superior races and brought them down to the lower levels, to where Africans are. As Hitler saw it, Aryans, Germans, are superior to other races and are responsible for all human civilization. (What has Africans contributed to human civilization? Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s biographer, Hitler’s Table talks, said that Africans had not contributed any thing to human history. And Trevor-Roper was a Cambridge don.) Kill off those who have contributed nothing to science and technology, the man said.

Of course, the Slavs dismissed Hitler’s book and his planned lebensraum foreign policy as the raving of a mad man. They did not even prepare for war with him when he came to power in 1932. They lived to regret their dismissive attitude when Hitler made good on his plans and stormed into Slav lands and began killing Slavs. He killed over 25 million Russians alone; folks he said were less intelligent than his dogs.

(David Duke, the white American racist, in his various books, claims that Africans are less intelligent than dogs and that he plans to kill all of them and give Africa to white farmers. Do the idiots who rule Nigeria realize what some white folks plan to do to them? No, the idiots masquerade in the West as very important men unaware that some white men see them as sub human beings. If they had any brains in their idiotic heads they would work like driven people to develop their country, so that whites would not look down on them, rather than squander their wealth in corrupt living. If they don’t wake up and start developing the black man, soon, white racist demagogues would come to power in the West and make good on David Duke’s promise. Those who do not take paranoid racists like Hitler and Duke seriously usually live to regret their unprepared ness. Paranoid personalities are often intelligent, though mentally sick; they can do a lot of harm. In their pursuit of superiority, they can kill those they see as inferior to them. A paranoid Igbo chap on Naijapolitics forum is very capable of doing a lot of harm to other people. This man feels so inordinately inferior that all he lives for is to make himself seem superior to other people, to show that others are beneath him, he once tried to show that I did not go to school, so as to feel superior to me, and would kill whoever made him seem inferior.)

When Russians stop drinking and start fighting, they generally fight like the demon itself. You may easily march into mother Russia but the chances are that you may not march out alive. These people are real soldiers, provided that they are not drunk. At any rate, Russians gradually drove the Germans out of mother Russia and pushed them all the way to Berlin and eventually defeated Hitler.

The West aided Russia but, by and large, it was Russia that defeated Germany. Indeed, initially the West had sat back and waited for crazy Hitler to destroy the dreaded Bolsheviks. Hitler was a mad boy doing their dirty job of ridding the world of communism. But when the Russians discarded the nonsense of communism and embraced nationalism and fought like demons and shocked Hitler with the ferocity of their fighting, you killed them and they still came at you, undeterred by death, millions dying as German tanks mowed them down, well, the West recognized that the game was up and that Stalin was not going to be finished off by the little paranoid Austrian corporal. They joined forces with Russia and even then did not open the second front until June 1944,waiing for Russia to bleed to death, so that when the war-ended Russia would be subservient to the West.

In May of 1945, the European theater of the war ended and it took a few more months before Japan surrendered after its two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were obliterated with atomic weapons.

The victorious Americans called for a conference to replace the moribund League of Nations. The great powers had learned from the League’s failures. They met at San Francisco, California and drew up the United Nations’ Charter to replace the unrealistic League.

The new organization recognized power realities: not all countries are equal. Therefore, if you want to prevent war you must give the most powerful nations the right to decide when to go to war collectively. Thus, the United Nations was divided into two segments, the General Assembly where all members have one vote each and a Security Council limited to the five most powerful countries in the then world: USA, USSR, Britain, France and China. These permanent members of the Security Council had veto powers and could individually veto what the General Assembly, the mass of powerless nations, plan to do. If the five agree among themselves they can launch war against any country in the world or enact sanctions against any country.

The structure of the Security Council was recognition of political realism for, if the big boys decide to do something, the opinion of weak countries was irrelevant. As Stalin used to ask: how many tank divisions do you have? If not he did not bother talking back to you, he simply whipped you (such as occupying Eastern Europe and starting the cold war from so doing).

The General Assembly offered nations the opportunity to air their differences, to talk it out, to vent steam. It sort of is an international talk shop where folks talked all they wanted. Their talks had no power but do manage to shape world opinion.

The United Nations has other segments, such as UNESCO, UNISAFE, ILO, WHO, UNICOM, World Court at The Hague, and the recently constructed World Criminal Court and so on. These organizations play roles in coordinating the activities of an increasingly interrelated and interconnected world. They are all very useful.

There are Non-governmental organizations (NGOS) that along with the UN have made the world a safer place.

For all intents and purposes, the primary segment of the United Nations is the Security Council for it is where real decisions are made. The five big powers, in effect, determine the fate of the world.

Recently, the current Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan (by the way, the big powers agreed among themselves not to hire secretaries from their countries but from insignificant countries, so that they would be neutral errand boys for the big boys), suggested restructuring the Security Council to make it reflect current power realities. Obviously Germany and Japan (even India and Brazil) are increasingly powerful and ought to be considered for membership in the power club. Annan recommended that two African countries be represented in the Security Council.

That Annan boy must have been smoking some mind-altering substance. What African country is a powerful country? African countries collective economy is less than the economy of California in the USA, and if so, how can these poor countries stand up to the big boys? Annan, apparently, is amateurish to the ways of power politics and does not understand real politics. His recommendation is simply idealistic and silly.

Germany and Japan may be considered for the Security Council but Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa? you got to be kidding. What are those countries but starving countries, none of which can mount a military attack on the big powers?

Nigeria, one of the most corrupt countries on earth, a country that might not even make it through a few more years, unless it is cleaned up, made a lot of noises about joining the Security Council. Apparently, Obasanjo was smoking something, too. This man must be very naïve and untrained in real politics. He would spend his time better trying to industrialize Nigeria and make her economically powerful. Economic power goes with military power. When Nigeria becomes economically powerful and fund a strong military then we would be talking. If a nuclearized Nigeria demands to join the big boys, her request would be taken seriously. In the present, it was a joke for Nigeria to even take Annan's suggestions seriously.

The United Nations is funded through collection of levies on member nations. The organization assesses each country’s GDP and on that basis levies it.

The annual budget of the UN is about $4 billion dollars. Since the US economy is about one quarter of the world economy, she is assessed to pay one quarter of the UN annual budget.

Nigeria is a poor country and as such pays chicken change towards supporting the UN. A country paying chomp change into UN coffers wants to be a member of the Security Council, this tells you how deluded Nigerian leaders must be. These jokers do not even know that outside Africa that their country is not even mentioned in calculation of economic or power equations. A country that produces nothing is a useless country. It depends on oil and if the West stops buying it today the country collapses. It is oil revenue that prevents Nigeria from joining other failed African economies like the Congo.

The UN also collects monies from member states and uses such money to pay for its peacekeeping functions. Some countries cannot even pay for their troops to participate in these peacekeeping functions.

Africa Union recently decided to keep the peace in Darfour province of Sudan, but does not have the money and logistics to maintain its troops in that part of Africa. It took The EU and others to pay for these activities. Money talks, apparently, corrupt Nigerian leaders do not know that. They ought to know that, after all they bankrupt their country trying to steal its money so as to become individually rich while the country is impoverished.

The average Nigerian makes $1 a day and this banana republic wants to be a member of the Security Council, a club whose citizens make $22, 000 per capita. I have not recovered from laughing from Nigeria’s idiocy of setting up a committee to work towards joining the Security Council. Apparently, the jokers at Abuja are stark crazy and do not understand how the real world works. The Security Council is supposed to be for countries with powerful economies and militaries, none of which Nigeria has.

At the end of the second world, Europe was prostate and only the USA had the military and economic power to control the world. Russia had tanks but not economic clout. To the present, the Russian economy is less than that of California, a state in the USA.

America ruled the roosts in 1945. Indeed, it had to spend money (Marshal Plan) to resurrect the economies of Europe.

THE BRETTON WOODS FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

The leaders of America learned from the great depression and sought to structure the international economy in such a manner that depression would be avoided. We live in an interdependent world and the collapse of one economy affects others. American companies are heavily invested in other countries and if those countries fail American companies would fail and drag the USA economy with them.

To avoid this from happening, America called for a conference at Breton Woods, Rhode Island. At that conference, the participants agreed to set up certain organizations to deal with the world economy (capitalist cycles of inflation and depression and recession). They set up the International Monetary Fund, The World Bank, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (which later muffed into the World Trade Organization, WTO).

Each of these monetary organizations were given functions to perform, performing which it was expected that depressions/inflations would be prevented.

Member nations of the rich economies were expected to contribute money annually to these organizations and make them available for lending to threatened economies.

The IMF is a short-term lender, the World Bank is a long-term lender and The Bank for Reconstruction was specifically designed to help reconstruct devastated economies as in war etc.

A country can borrow from the IMF and agree to repay, with interests, in a short period of time. Nigeria, for example, sometimes does not even have the money to pay it civil servants and could go to the IMF and borrow money to pay them and repay when it gets its oil revenue.

The World Bank lends for long-term projects, say ten to thirty years, such as money to build dams for electricity etc.

These world monetary institutions were not set up for third world countries. The West set them up to help themselves deal with their capitalist economies tendency to cycle from depression to inflation. But in the 1960s African countries gained their independence and joined the United Nations. They are now playing on the international scene. The problem was that they did not have the money to foot their Bills. Imagine, say, Tanzania. It does not even have money to maintain an office space in New York, to house its so-called diplomatic mission at the UN headquarters. (Rockefeller donated the building that house the UN…whoever pays the piper calls the tune, so America dictates what happens at the UN).

African countries borrowed heavily from world monetary institutions. Debt finance alone is eating up their annual revenues. Some of them do not even collect enough money in annual taxes to pay the finance charges on their debts, what more pay off the capital.

And where did the borrowings by African countries go? They went into the Kleptocrats pockets. Mobutu borrowed and spent it on himself and in buying palaces in Europe. Apparently, this jungle boy wanted to live where European nobility used to live and that kind of made him feel civilized and powerful. He would have become powerful if he offered all his countrymen education to University level, and thus help eliminate the ignorance that Africans live in.

(I am giving these lectures for free as part of my effort to reduce the ignorance Africans live in.)

Africans are unable to repay the money they owe the West. First, the West sent in economic teams to go restructure African economies, the so-called Structural Readjustment Plans of the 1980s; here folks listened to the views of Milton Friedman of the Chicago school of economics. Milton saw privatization, as the only way to make third world countries productive, not socialized economies. Privatization, selling off state owned businesses to private businessmen, is still going on in third world countries. The problem is that many African countries still do not have money to repay their debts.

These days, the battle cry is for the West to forgive Africans their debts. Obasanjo and his Finance secretary Ms Iwuala go begging the West to forgive them Nigeria’s debts. The Paris club, European banks that Nigeria owes, has agreed to write off some loans.

Mr. Wolfowiz, the new president of the World Bank, is now amenable to writing off some loans for Africans. The trouble is that since the USA’s government guaranteed some of these loans, the US government would have to puny up and pay the banks Africans owe.

America does not have that kind of money to do so. America itself is so indebted that it is only a matter of time before her economy collapses. America owes others eight trillion dollars and annually pays over two hundred and fifty billion dollars on debt finance. America floats because of her past good credit and her military power.

Let us say that Americans are now the universal mercenaries fighting wars to make the world safe for Asians to trade in. That is what it has come to. The cowboys are really mercenary soldiers for Korea, Japan, and China. They fight to make sure that these Asians obtain their oil from Iraq. These Asians then are able to make profits and lend money to America to run her budget deficits.

THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE

Let us briefly talk about a few other organizations. The world court at The Hague. This international court of justice exists for nation states to sue each other and have the court rule on their disputes before they go to war. For example, Nigeria and Cameron have dispute over Bakasa, a region that Cameroon claims belongs to her while it is in Nigeria. The region produces oil and Cameron, apparently, wants a piece of the oil action. It claims that that region was part of Western Cameroon before the later voted in a plebiscite to join Cameroon. If so, it claims that the region belongs to Cameroon. Cameroon went to the world Court; the court ruled in its favor.

The problem is that the Court does not have a military to enforce its ruling. Generally, powerful countries ignore the Court’s ruling while weak ones obey them or risk UN sanctions.

The USA routinely ignores the Court when it rules against it and in favor of some banana republic in Latin America.

INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT

The UN recently established an International criminal court. The idea is to be able to bring criminals from other nations to that court and punish them. The USA, realizing that is military could be sued, as a criminal army given the fact that it intervenes in other countries, violating UN sovereignty rules, decided not to sign the treaty establishing the court. Indeed, the USA did not even sign the treaty establishing the League of Nations even though its President was largely responsible for initiating that ridiculously unrealistic organization. The US senate is required by law to ratify any treaty the president negotiates before it becomes law in America. Where politicians do not see an overarching benefit for America, they usually refuse to ratify treaties.

KYOTO ACCORD

Recently, the world signed a treaty at Kyoto, Japan to regulate how much pollutants countries can send into the air. We live in an interconnected world. The pollutant the West puts into the air is killing Africans who do not manufacture anything.

America’s industries did not want their government to sign the treaty because it would obligate them to invest billions in new technology to control and reduce pollution. They did not want to spend that kind of money so they prevailed on Washington not to ratify the Kyoto Accord.

Indeed, America has refused to acknowledge that the environment is being destroyed and that there may be global warming. The arctic ice is receding at an alarming rate, meaning that there may be environmental catastrophes in our future, such as rise in coastal waters, inundating coastal cities like Lagos.

TREATIES

This brings us to treaties. We live in an interdependent world and what one country does affects other countries. Therefore, treaties (either multilateral or bilateral) are negotiated to regulate countries conducts.

Consider the recent treaty on the seas. How far into the ocean does a country own? It used to be three miles from the country’s coastland. A new treaty suggested twelve miles. America claims two-handed miles.

What are you going to do to stop the cowboy from gratifying his wishes? Can you fight America? Can you lay sanction on the world’s hegemon? All you can do is talk. Talk is cheap; action is expensive. You cannot do anything to the arrogant superpower. Nigeria, for example, does not even have the capacity to board American war ships packed right off her coast.

As we talk, America patrols the Atlantic sea-lanes in West Africa. They are there to protect their oil from Nigeria, of course. Should the Ijaw militia go from-making noises to attacking Shell, BP property, the marines would land and handle them.

For our present purposes, international treaties are signed, such as treaties on Air flights …how airplanes fly into other countries, what constitutes national air space etc? The world labor organization arose to monitor labor practices all over the world and to prevent slave labor (such as Western companies paying Indian children a few rupees a day and have them work for twelve hours a day, practically enslaving them).

The various treaties signed by international groups have to be enforced. To do so, an international organization is set up. These organizations monitor the behavior of all countries. For example, if unwatched, many industrialized countries would come to the Coast of West Africa and dump their garbage into the seas (they are running out of dumpsites in their home countries). Indeed, they would dump their nuclear waste materials in Africa.

Given what we know about Nigerians, their not caring for their peoples lives, so give Nigerians a few dollars bribe and they would permit Americans to dump their nuclear waste in Nigeria. Who cares that Nigerians would die? Since when did Nigerians start caring for their own people? Isn’t the function of Nigerians in life to exploit and or sell their fellow black people into slavery and pretend to be innocent?

It is thanks to international agencies that prevent the West from bribing Nigerians and dumping their waste material in Nigeria.

UNESCO does a great job spreading scientific education in poor countries. They provide laboratories and other materials for teaching science. Some African countries cannot even provide their school children with chemicals to be used in chemistry laboratories.

NGOS

In addition to the above governmental organizations are many non-governmental organizations, NGOs working to make the international world well ordered. Consider Green Peace. This group monitors what folks do in the high seas. They make sure that Japan, for example, does not over fish whales and make them extinct. Caritas, a Catholic relief organization, helped starving Biafrans. Simply stated, there are many non-governmental organizations working to make our world a good place to live in.

NIGERIA AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

I have briefly highlighted some international organizations. Our next focus is on how Nigeria participates in them.

Simply stated, Nigeria is irrelevant in the international arena. Nigeria practically says nothing at the United Nations. It does not even have the guts to talk loudly in the General Assembly, not that such talks would amount to something. Making noises lets others know that one exists. Sitting in the General Assembly gallery watching debates, you would not hear the Nigerian delegate say anything. And when the wooden tongued clown says any thing at all, it would be silly.

It seems that Nigerian delegates to the UN are mostly interested in angling to be offered jobs at any of the UN agencies. Nigeria is irrelevant in world politics.

When Kwame Nkrumah was around, he made noises. Indeed, he was one of key players in the non-aligned nations group, the so-called Bandung group that President Sukano of Indonesia championed. Nigeria was conspicuously absent in such politics.

To the present Nigeria sends delegates to just about every international organization and the delegates just sit there saying nothing. Even OPEC, the oil cartel that sets oil production quotas hence influence world oil prices, which Nigeria is a member of, you would not see Nigeria’s delegates say a word at its deliberations.

Watching Nigerians performance at international organizations would make you feel that Nigerians are unintelligent. They just sit there like manikins in their flowing robes.

The reason for this phenomenon probably is that there is no radical politics in Nigeria. As I write, I do not know any Nigerian radical. Nigerians play it safe. In this paper, for example, I make disparaging remarks about America. You would not find a Nigerian do so. They are too bloody cowardly to stick out their fingers afraid that they would be whacked by the powerful. When I was a college student and ran around with the communist crowds I did not see Nigerian students participate. As Winston Churchill correctly observed, if one is under thirty five and is not a socialist, one has no thinking in ones brain. One is supposed to be idealist, a dreamer in ones youth. If one is above thirty-five and is not a conservative one is not thinking either.

As one grows older, one recognizes that human nature is fixed, selfish and, as such, that man is not going to become an angel no matter what one does. Indeed, those who insist on helping people, do good, bleeding hearted liberals, are often dangerous. These folks often use government to destroy free expression.

See what liberals and lesbian radical feminists did in America with their political correctness. These women talk rubbish and if you criticize their childish views they accuse you of patriarchy and sexism. To avoid being negatively seen, you keep quiet. Advocates of unhealthy lifestyles use political correctness to essentially legislate their unnatural behaviors, to browbeat society into accepting their silly behaviors.

(I am glad that the Nigerian Anglican Church has severed relationship with the English Anglican Church. if the West is bent on self-destruction by endorsing unhealthy life styles we do not have to go along with them. To hell with political correctness. It is unnatural for a man to put his pennies into another man’s anus and call that depravity sexual pleasure. These folks are insane. But political correctness requires one not to say what one thinks least one be judged homophobic, afraid of gays. No, one is not afraid of human beings but does not like some of their misguided behaviors.)

NIGERIA AND REGIONAL POLITICS

Whereas Nigeria is irrelevant in international politics, somehow, she does something in Africa’s regional politics. Nigeria seems to participate in its regional organizations. Nigeria played an effective role in establishing the economic community of West African states. She plays some useful role in monitoring trade in this regional community.

Nigeria has also played some useful role in establishing the African Development Bank. She appears to be genuinely interested in making this bank work. The bank is sort of like the World Bank and is supposed to lend money to African development projects.

Nigeria plays a useful role in Africa Union. AU’s predecessor, OAU, was a mere talk shop. African heads of states met in each other’s capital, annually, for photo opportunities and really did not accomplish anything. They had parties at their citizen’s financial expense and went home.

OAU’s clause that African countries should not interfere in each other’s domestic affairs permitted the OAU to do nothing as African tribes committed genocides against one another.

In 1994, the Hutus killed the Tutsis and Africa did nothing. Then again the Tutsis dominated the Hutus in both Rwanda and Burundi, even though they are the minority population, and Africa does nothing. Who cares that one African group maltreats another?

In 1967-70 the various Nigerian groups ganged up against the Igbos and the OAU did nothing. I am for a unified Nigeria and believe that it was a mistake for Ojukwu to secede from Nigeria.

I am a Pan Africanist and want a unified Africa, not a balkanized Africa. Nigeria needed to be kept together. Gowon was right in working for one Nigeria. Nevertheless, it was wrong for the Nigerians to use starvation as a policy against the Igbos. It was not necessary to have Igbos suffer kwashiorkor. African countries should have found a better way to prosecute that war and keep Nigeria together without permitting the pogrom that was unleashed against Igbos.

In so far that the OAU played some role in the liberation of South Africa from Apartheid, the liberation of Namibia from South Africa, the resolution of Savimbi’s egoistic war in Angola, it was through the efforts of individual countries, but not as result of the efforts of collective Africa.

Believe it or not, hapless Nigeria played an admirable role in funding liberation fighters in Southwestern Africa. That was one shining light in the sea of darkness called Nigerian politics.

Nigeria has played a useful role in peace keeping in many African countries, such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Congo, and Sudan. On the whole, one must give Nigeria high marks for her regional politics.

Nigeria must continue working for African unity. AU should become like EU; open all African borders to free movement, not require Visa to travel to anywhere in Africa, remove tariffs and duties and permit all Africans to trade with each other and have one African currency, Afrik.

Nigeria should work tirelessly to bring about an African federation where each tribe is a state in it, like the United States. The capital of that resurgent Africa should be in Nigeria, after all one out of every four Africans live in Africa. Properly managed, Nigeria’s economy would power Africa’s economy.

Nigeria also plays a key role in Africa’s regional non-governmental organizations. Nigeria’s democracy groups, for example, model democratic criticism for all other Africans countries to imitate.

The Nigerian press is relatively free. In fact, Nigeria’s Press is freer than the American Press. In America, the mainstream press will not publish what is not system maintaining. They publish your views if you praise America. Submit any article critical of America and it goes into the waste paper basket. During the lead up to the Iraq war some of us wrote against that war but the America press would not publish our views. All they did was sing George Bush’s praises, talk about what a decisive leader he was and other such nonsense. They ignored his lies, the fact that he went to war under false pretenses and did not obtain the UN’s approval.

The Nigerian press publishes material critical of the country’s political leadership. The leaders, of course, ignore such criticism, but that is better than arresting and harassing those who critic the government. The recently concluded National Political Reform Conference witnessed a lively debate in the Press, with opposing views aired. That would never happen in America. America is a velvet dictatorship and the Press is muzzled in an indirect manner. Criticize America and the advertising revenue dries up and the paper goes out of print.

The point is that Nigeria’s free Press is modeling good behavior for other African countries. Nigeria’s journalists influence other African journalists.

CONCLUSION

I have briefly described salient international organizations. I have described what they do. Nigeria does not play key roles in these organizations.

Nigeria tends to play useful roles in Africa’s regional politics; I say useful roles, not radical roles for Nigeria’s politics is devoid of radicalism and principled behavior.

Nigeria is learning and, in time, will become a productive member of the international community. In an increasingly unified world, there will be more and more treaties to regulate our behaviors and these treaties would see the creation of international organizations to monitor them. There is no such thing as independence in our world. We are all interdependent.

Whereas it is too premature to talk of a world government, it is obvious that in the future there will be a world government. I see world federation with each ethnic group a state in it. Africa’s four hundred ethnic groups would be 400 states in that world federation. But that is too far into the future to be of primary concern to us now. The future can wait. If we had a world government before African countries are developed Westerners would dominate it. I do not want Westerners to dominate Africa, not again. So we must defer world government until the playing field is equalized and Africans can play as equal members of the world community.

In the meantime, our African job is to develop Africa and restructure our inherited colonial boundaries and make them realistic of our ethnic diversity.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 21, 2005

Next lecture, #18, Extralegal Governments, October 22,

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Ozodi Osuji Lectures #16: Nigeria and International Relations

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- International relations are the study of how nations relate to one another. First of all, we must appreciate that the concept of nation-state has not always been around. In the past, there were no boundaries and human beings, like all animals, moved around.

Birds can be in Africa in one season and migrate to Europe in another. They do not have the concept of boundaries. Animals went to wherever they could find food. This way, our forefathers moved around. Where one is now living was probably not where ones ancestors lived a thousand years ago. In Igbo land, for example, where a particular group now lives was not where they lived a few hundred years ago. Ngwa people (Aba), for example, lived at Mbutu Mmbaise just a few hundred years ago. The point is that the idea of boundaries and the nation states they enclose, are a new phenomenon in human history.

NATION STATE, TERRITORY

In 1517, Martin Luther challenged the Catholic Church and precipitated religious wars that lasted over 130 years. The various kings of Europe fought each other trying to reclaim whichever land had left the Church for the Church. When the wars ended, a treaty was signed at Westphalia, Germany, in 1648. That treaty is generally recognized as the beginning of the nation-state, for, in it, the European powers recognized each other’s territory as, more or less, permanent and not to be attacked and appropriated by other kings.

However, having recognized each other’s nation-state, Europeans did not extend the same courtesy to non-Europeans. Through the early 20th century, lands not belonging to European nations were considered terra cotta, not inhabited by human beings and thus are empty land. Whichever European nation’s citizens’ first got to that new land and planted his country’s flag on it, his nation is said to own it. That way, Europeans took much of the world and saw them as theirs. They took over the Americas, north and south; Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and much of Africa and Asia.

In international law, non-Europeans did not have rights to territory until after the Second World War.

For our present purposes, nation-states now exist. They are the primary internationally recognized human grouping. Usually, if a nation-state is a member of the United Nations, it is assumed that it has sovereignty over its territory and is recognized in international law to govern itself without unnecessary interference by other nations (Except if those other nations are strong and powerful; George Bush woke up one fine morning and decided to attack and occupy Iraq and kick out Saddam Hussein from office; and as a pretext for doing so, he accused Saddam of having weapons of mass destruction, fully aware that the man did not have them; might makes right; Bush the second’s father had failed to occupy Iraq while he was at it, when he occupied Kuwait and that allegedly cost him the next presidential election and his wimpy son decided to seem tough by finishing what his father started).

The nation-state is the unit of human groupings recognized by the United Nations to exercise power within its territory without others challenging it. There are over 200 nation-states in the extant world, most of which are members of the United Nations.

NATIONAL INTEREST

In international relations, it is assumed that the international arena is a lawless arena, a jungle and that each nation is like Thomas Hobbes man in state of nature and is looking after its own interests and could care less for others interests.

National Interests is said to be what motivates nations in their relationships with other nations. Nation A wants to optimize its interests when it relates to nation B and vice versa.

Because each nation is looking after its national interests only power can limit it from getting what it wants. No law prevents nation A from attacking nation B to get what it wants. Nation A, the USA, desired the oil found in nation B, Iraq, and attacked it. It attacked nation B to gratify its national interests, its need for oil.

Of course, it is crude to put it this way. Therefore, nation A comes up with phony excuses regarding why it attacked nation B. It claims that it did so in self-defense because nation B allegedly has weapons of mass destruction that it could use on it. Thus, to protect itself, nation A preemptively attacked nation B. When A’s bold lie was seen through, another lie was invented and presented to the world. Nation A now claims that it is out to spread democracy in nation B, the Arab world.

Nation A is now the big brother of the Arab world, making sure that democracy is given to Arab countries. In the meantime, nation A steals nation B’s oil resources.

BALANCE OF POWER
The international arena is said to be a jungle and, as such, any nation would attack others if it could get away with doing so. Therefore, it beholds every nation to strive to be as powerful as its neighbors. It is not your neighbors good will that prevents them from attacking you but your ability to deter them, defeat them at war, or at least match their aggression with aggression that prevents them from attacking you.

Balance of power is said to be what prevents wars between nations. If you were able to match your neighbor’s attack he would not attack you. In this light, the former USSR and USA were matched in power. They had mutually assured ability to destroy each other (MAD).

In international politics, therefore, every nation strives to be as strong as its neighbors, if it wants to be independent for long. It tries to match its neighbor’s military, political and economic power.

If nation A builds a weapon, nation B must strive to build it, for if it does not, nation A has advantage over it and could lunch an attack on it, defeat it and write history to make it seem it was provocateur.

The winner writes history and its lies are taken as the truth. To avoid that from happening, nation B must strive to match the powers of its neighbors.

It is, therefore, balance of power that prevents war and establishes peace, what there is of it, in the international arena.

Boris the drunk Yeltsin of Russia allowed his country’s military to go to pots. Russia is now a third world country. The moment the drunkard permitted his nation’s military to decay, its opponent, the other superpower, suddenly acts as Mr. good guy. It pretends to be helping Russia, when actually it is disarming it.

Because Russia is disarmed, the remaining superpower now feels that it has hegemony over the world and that no one can do anything to stop it from doing whatever it wants to do. Like a proud cowboy, it runs around the world swaggering and boasting of its power to clobber any one who dares challenge it. These days, it runs around the world removing governments it does not like.

POLITICAL REALISM VERSUS POLITICAL IDEALISM

That is to say that the demise of Soviet power has enabled America to translate the world into its plaything. Where there is no balance of power, political realists tells us that there is bound to be instability in the international arena, that wars would be more frequent and common.

Political idealists would like to believe that human nature is loving, and would not attack innocent persons.

Political realists agree with Hobbes that man is a predatory animal and will kill and eat you, take your property and or enslave you and blame you for doing what he did. You see, white Americans, predatory animals, killed Indians and took their lands and enslaved black people. They then have the audacity to blame those they oppressed. They come up with all sorts of rationalizations for their aggression. They claim that Indians and blacks are inferior to them. No, these people are not inferior to them. What theses defeated people are, are idealists who do not fight back and expect their opponent to treat them nicely. They have idealistic views that human beings are nice. Unbeknown to them, white Americans tend to have antisocial personalities and would attack and kill you at any time, if you are not defending yourself. And they would do so coolly and calmly and show no remorse or guilt from doing so.

From the perspective of real politics in international politics, the nation must strive to be powerful and checkmate its neighbors’ aggression. A nation must be powerful if it wants to be a free nation and if it wants to have control over its territory for long.

MUTUAL SPYING/DIPLOMACY

Nations are said to be perpetually trying to do each other in. They spy on each other, trying to understand their military, political and economic capability. Where they see others as becoming more powerful than them, they try to reduce their power through diplomatic means and if that fails attack them.

Thus, the USA uses carrot and stick in international diplomacy. At this point, for example, it is using carrot, trying to bribe North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. If that fails, it clobbers North Korea with its stick. (The two countries had war in 1950 and North Korea bloodied America’s nose. Therefore, America is not particularly looking forward to a repeat of that humiliating show. But if it could get China to be neutral, the bully goes to work and clobbers Korea. So far, China plays coy. For one thing, China does not want America close to its borders, so it is not about to allow the great beast to attack North Korea. Thus, the great bully bides its time, waiting for an appropriate opportunity to destroy North Korea.)

Theodore Roosevelt said it all: in international politics carry carrot, dangle it before your enemy, but if he refuses to bit, and become subservient to you, hit him hard with your club and subdue him to serving you. As he sees it, we are like Neanderthals and are still welding clubs over each other’s heads, except that that club is now nuclear weapons.

PERMANENT ENEMIES, TEMPORARY ALLIES

In international politics, each nation assumes that others are its enemies. There are only temporary alliances but permanent enemies. The person who was your ally today may become your bitter enemy tomorrow.

The USA and the USSR were allies during the Second World War but thereafter-bitter enemies. Boris the Drunk’s destruction of his country has made the USA seem friendly towards Russia, but should Putin the Short decide to be Putin the Tall and rattle America, the lid is off and the competition begins all over.

Because there are no permanent friends but only temporary allies and permanent enemies in international relations, nations must be very careful how they relate to one another. They could instigate war by a careless behavior. For example, all nations desire to be prestigious. Man is a proud and vain animal. He is motivated by prestige. He wants his neighbors to see him as very important.

A nation is a group of men. As such, they translate their individual psychology to collective psychology. Nations, as men, want to be seen as prestigious. America wants to be seemed as the most important nation on earth. If you collude with its delusion and see it as its paranoia wants to be seen, it feels fine, but the moment you see it for what it is, a scared little boy, a clown really, it feels angry at you and may even attack you. The great bully does not reason anything out; it just attacks and destroys. These people are Neanderthals.

Nations must treat other nations respectfully if they do not want to provoke wars. Thus, you look at America’s current president, a moron, and pretend that he is an intelligent man. If you dared see him for what he is, a dullard, you would insult Americans. To avenge their hurt vanity, they could attack and destroy you.

To avoid such conflicts, international relations evolved a language of its own called diplomacy, the art of telling lies and making them seem truthful. Thus, a nation like Britain whose prime minister is probably a political genius pretends to see the president of America, a moron, as its superior and kowtows to him and goes to war with him in Iraq. Why? America is very powerful and you never know when a resurgent Germany may attack Britain and you might need American GIs to defend you.

(A powerful Germany makes France and Britain literally pee in their pants, for they know that Germany could knock them out in a few weeks of war. The German is the world’s most wonderful fighting machine. He is not even human. So Europe needs America to intimidate Germany. Western Europeans can handle the Russian bear, what they really fear is Germany. They must humor the great cowboy and pretend that they respect him when they have great contempt for him.)

EMBASSIES

In international relations, diplomacy rules the world. Failure to find ways to relate well to others, you might alienate them and risk their vengeance. Thus, it came to pass that each country has a diplomatic mission in others, as they have in it. These diplomats spy on their host countries and do what they can to foster their nations national interests in their host countries.

Diplomatic missions are dens of spies where folks are given different titles to mask their real jobs. The commercial attaché, for example, could be no other person than the local KGB or CIA operative spying on the host country. The military, commercial, education and other attaches have one thing in common: figure out the host country’s military, political and economic strength and prepare your own country on how to deal with it.

Nations agree to allow each other’s bags, (so-called diplomatic bag) to go through their borders un-searched. In these bags, reports are written about host countries, reports that if made public there could be war. For example, Western diplomats interacted with Emeka Ojukwu and concluded that he was narcissistic and vain, and could become dictatorial if given the opportunity. They saw him as a little bedroom napoleon. Thus they worked to undermine him. But in public, they pretended to support Biafra. They smiled at Ojukwu while trying cut his throat. Their reports were carried out of Biafera through the diplomatic bag. These diplomats assessed the Igbos as very bright and hard working but tempestuous and political unsophisticated and not really ready to rule themselves yet. On the other hand, these diplomats talked to Yakubu Gowon and appreciated his genuine humility. The man is probably one of the most loving men Nigeria has produced. Unfortunately, he did not have much education and, like poorly educated men, felt somewhat inferior to the Oxford-educated playboy called Ojukwu.

FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICERS AND COUNSELLORS

The relevant point is that diplomats are in their host countries to gather information about them. Generally, there are two types of people who work in diplomatic missions. Foreign service officers and counselors. Foreign service officers are usually recruited from the nation’s best schools: those who attended their countries best elementary, secondary and university schools. In England, they probably went to Eaton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester (secondary schools), Oxford and Cambridge. In America, they probably went to Andover (secondary school), Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. They probably have master’s degree in political science, history and or law degree. These are the best of the best, the cream de la cream of their society. They probably are tall, preferably six feet and more, athletic, fluent in many languages and well cultured. They are their countries best and represent their countries abroad.

You do not hire poorly educated, short, and ugly persons to represent you overseas. Most countries recruit FSOs when they are young, usually under age 26, and train them in the Foreign Service and post them overseas. They then rotate through many countries. In their host countries, they mix with the ruling elite and write reports on them and send their reports home through the infamous diplomatic bag. If a head of state, for example, likes women; that are fully noted. This weakness is exploited. Local spying agents might arrange for a few high-class hookers to dally with such head of state and through these expensive whores get information they need from him.

The FSOs progress to become their countries Charge de affairs, the head of the embassy. Some even become ambassadors, although ambassadorial appointments are political rather than merit based.

The counselors tend to be from the middle classes and their job is to give Visas to those wishing to go to their home country. These folks also coordinate other activities at the embassy and consular offices, such as talk to businessmen about business opportunities in their home country, trying to get them to go invest there. If an Asian has a few million dollars to give to Canada, Canada literally begs him o come o Canada. Canada, more or less, sells its Visa and Asians are buying. The Country is literally being taken over by Asians. If in Vancouver, you would think that you are in Hong Kong.

Each country has diplomatic missions in other countries and has consular missions scattered throughout the country to give Visas to those wishing to go to its home countries.

Diplomatic missions see themselves as on the front line of the war to protect their countries national interests. They do whatever they could to sell their country and make others see them as nice, even if they are killers. American diplomats in Africa manage to make America seem like heaven. Heaven indeed. America is nothing short of hell for Africans and blacks in general. Most blacks in America perform menial jobs. But when America shows black Americans they show the handful that seem to have glorified nigger jobs to the world and the world thinks that blacks are treated as human beings in the country. It is the job of diplomats to sell their countries in a positive light and America does an excellent job of self-marketing and self-promotion.

NIGERIA AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

I have briefly summarized international relations in general; now let us see how it applies to Nigeria. Nigeria is an artificial construct. It was put together by the British to serve British interests. The various ethnic groups living in Nigeria were at different stages of political development when they were placed together into one country. The Hausas had attained feudal level of political development. Hausa land was probably where France was before the French revolution. The Sultan of Sokoto was probably equivalent to the French King.

Yorubas were not unified as one nation but had fairly well organized groups. Oyo was probably equivalent to German princedoms before Bismarck unified Germany. Benin, though small had a powerful Oba and state.

Igbos were at the most rudimentary level of political development. They were where Greece was 2500 years ago, during the age of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The Igbos did not have a unified Igbo state; each town governed itself in the most rudimentary manner.

The British agglomerated these very different groups into one country. The whole thing had all the makings for disaster. And disaster we had.

Upon independence in 1960, Nigerians embarked on governing themselves. Since they were at different levels of socio political development, they saw things from different lights. Igbos wanted unmitigated freedom, bothering on wildness, really. The Hausas were used to social discipline and faired better. The various Yoruba states were always at war with each other and, therefore, Yorubas had learned how to relate carefully to each other. Yoruba’s are the most diplomatic Nigerians. In fact, they sought of engage in diplomatic mission of dividing and conquering. They incite the impetuous Igbos to fight with the Hausas.

The vain Igbo likes to fancy himself superior to others and imagines himself superior to Hausas, when, in fact, he isn’t even as developed as Hausas. The Yoruba gets the Igbo and Hausa to go at each other, sits back and enjoy them destroy each other. The Yoruba picks up the pieces from the warring parties. In fact, they seem to benefit most from the chaos that is Nigeria. It is as if they deliberately create the chaos and anarchy so as to benefit from it.

The Igbo lacks in diplomacy. You can literally sell the boastful Igbo, stroke his infantile ego, make him feel important and sell him to the Arabs or to the Americans.

For our present purposes, the various groups in Nigeria have differences which internal diplomacy could smooth out. But instead of learning to be subtle, the Igbos seem bent on self-destruction and always put other people down, as if they are asking to be attacked by others.

They do not seem to understand that all human beings are vain; vanity is not the exclusive property of Igbos. If you insult other people, they will attack and kill you. The killing of Igbos in the North of Nigeria was largely attributable to Igbos misguided arrogance.

The Hausa man is probably the kindest of all human beings. That he attacks Igbos means that Igbos did something to him.

Nigeria has need for developing internal diplomatic relationship among the various peoples. But in as much as Nigeria is a nation state and is the unit in the chess game called international relationships, let me concentrate on Nigeria’s relationships with its neighbors and the international community.

In 1960, the departing colonialists from Belgium created a volatile situation in the Congo. The Congo exploded. Lumumba, Kasavubu, Joseph Tsombe, Katanga. I will not review the situation in the Congo here. Suffice it to say that the country degenerated into mayhem of mutual killing. The United Nations intervened. At that time, the Nigerian army was well trained by the British and was, therefore, selected for peacekeeping duties in the Congo.

That was Nigeria’s first spat with international conflicts. The Nigerian leaders themselves had no clue as to the nature of the conflict in the Congo; the political chess game being played out in the Congo involved Belgium, France, Britain, and USA. Congo is a huge real estate with a lot of minerals and the Western boys wanted chaos and anarchy so as to offer them the opportunity to steal the country’s resources, and they did, big time.

When finally some sort of peace came to the Congo, the shrewd sergeant Joseph Desire Mobutu came to power. Through him, the West robbed the Congo clean. Of course, they looked the other way as the high way robber called Desire took his country’s wealth and carted it to Europe. As far as diplomatic behavior is concerned, Nigeria did not even know what was going on in the Congo.

After the Congo came Tanganyika and Nigerian troops were sent there. Here, again Nigerian leaders had no clue as to what the Western big boys in Washington, London, Paris etc were doing.

Eventually, Julius Nyerere got a grip on himself and managed to unify Tangayika and Zanzibar. Were it not for his socialism, nyerere would have gone down in history as an astute politician.

Then Nigeria herself exploded in 1966. The ethnic groups needed diplomatic relationships to obtain peace among them. But diplomacy went missing. Igbos, true to character, boasted, always putting Hausas down, Hausas, a warrior people took, to killing Igbos.

In 1964, the Yorubas slid back to their traditional wars with each other, and fought one another rather than unify. Chaos reigned everywhere.

In 1966 Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu and his fellow coup plotters killed Hausa and Yoruba leaders and spared Igbo leaders. That was the greatest blunder one could make in politics. If you must kill, kill indiscriminately. Igbo leaders heads should have rolled. As it was, the coup seemed like a sectional affair.

Aguiyi Ironsi, the drunk, out maneuvered Nzeogwu. This man had no clue as to the problem with Nigeria. He did not understand the need to balance ethnic politics. Reportedly, he wanted to transform Nigeria into a unitary form of government, with himself as the ruler, of course. He miscalculated and his body was found in the gutter.

Gowon, a very gentle, humble and peaceful man, a man more suited for the ministry, rather than politics, he would have made a good Catholic priest, ended up the leader of Nigeria.

At first Ojukwu seemed to out maneuver Gowon at the first Aburi conference. Later, Gowon recognized that it would not be good if under his watch Nigeria split up, so he surrounded himself with more mature advisers like Awolowo and got a grip on events. He launched an attack on Ojukwu and eventually deafeated Ojukwu.

Gowon should have divided Nigeria into twenty states, instead of twelve, each state a tribe, at least the major tribes: Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Edo, Ijaw, Efik, Tivi, Urhobo states, and placed a collection of smaller tribes into the balance of states. If he had done that, he would have solved the structural problem that is still unresolved in Nigeria’s politics. Nigeria needs to be a federation where each state is composed of an ethnic group.

For our present purposes, Gowon managed to keep Nigeria one. That is good. We do not need the balkanization of already small African countries. We need a unified Africa. By and by, black Africa will be one Africa Federation, with each of the four hundred or so tribes in Africa constituting a state.

Gowon was chased out of office in 1975. Mutala Mohammed and Obassanjo took over.

Things heated up in Angola, South West Africa, Mozambique and other Portuguese territories. For the first time, the Nigerian government got a clue as to what international politics was all about. It recognized the need to support the freedom fighters in those troubled countries. Nigeria’s foreign policy became one that supported the liberation of all Africa.

Nigeria contributed money and time to the anti colonial struggles in Rhodesia, South Africa and elsewhere. One must commend our leaders for beginning to appreciate the nature of politics on the world arena. All of Africa has one fate and we must fight along each other. Nigeria’s foreign policy was admirable to the extent that it supported Africa’s freedom fighters.

Nearer home, Nigeria made some efforts to get the countries of West Africa to come together in an economic community, along the line of the European economic community (now European Union). Nigeria worked hard for the establishment of ECOWAS.

It is difficult to know what ECOWAS’s real purpose is? But that was a good start. Clearly, we need a unified African economy. In fact, we need an Africa free trade zone, so that goods move between countries without paying duties.

We need to do away with Visa requirements so that all black Africans can travel and in fact live in any part of Africa that they desired to. Our forefathers used to travel all over Africa and I see no reason why we should be prevented from visiting all parts of Africa.

I know that in this century, Africa will become one county, an Africa federation with a central government and state governments. This is inevitable and no rational person should fight the inevitable.

In the meantime, Nigeria has a regional foreign policy that tries to unite West Africa into an economic, if not political community. The latest half-hearted effort is the desire to have a common currency in West Africa. Good, but why not a unified African currency, the Afrik? (Afrik would give the Euro and dollar a run for their monies.)

Nigeria’s role in the international arena is very negligible. Out side Africa, very few persons know that Nigeria even exists. As far as I know, Nigeria does not contribute in a significant manner to international issues.

What is Nigeria’s position on the USA running wild in the Middle East, for example? North Korea?

May be it is as well that Nigeria delimits herself to African politics and leaves international politics for the time being?

ASSESSMENT

Clearly Nigeria is not a powerhouse in international politics. The international arena is an arena of power politics. You take part in this arena if you have a powerful military, supported by a vibrant economy. Nigeria’s economy is nonexistent. We all know that the country is prevented from collapse by her oil money. Without oil money, Nigeria could disintegrate and join Africa’s other failed states.

In his book, Africans, Ali Masrui talked about the collapse of imported political institutions in Africa. He suggested that out of this collapse that indigenous African institutions would rise up. By indigenous African institutions he does not mean the Africa that existed before the white man came to Africa.

Pre-colonial Africa is dead and gone. Let the dead bury the dead. There is no need for nostalgia over the past.

What is going to happen is that a synthesis of the old and new will take place. Old Africa will mix with imported institutions from Europe and Asia and something uniquely authentic African would come into being. Africa is not Europe or America or Asia, but Africa. The new Africa will still be Africa but incorporate what from other countries work in Africa.

I have pointed out the need to have each African tribe be a state and since there are about four hundred African tribes that would mean four hundred states in Africa. They would operate like American states. Then there would be a central government. The central government would have control over military and foreign affairs and coordinates trade but otherwise have a free enterprise economy (actually mixed economy, since the states must provide free education, medical service etc to all Africans).

In the context of Nigeria, what needs to be done is to divide the country into realistic states, twenty states. These would then rule themselves as in America and abide by the central government’s rule in foreign and military affairs.

Nigeria’s foreign policy ought to be working towards a unified Africa. She is in a position to do this. But to do it she must be respectable. To be looked up to one must have integrity. Nigeria must reduce corruption if it wants other African countries to respect and accept its leadership. As it is, to be a Nigerian is to be seen as a criminal, a 419 scammer. This must stop.

CONCLUSION

Nigeria is new in the international politics game. She has not even understood the nature of international politics as a place where sharks bite and eat each other. She does not seem to realize that it is literally at war with Western powers. But in time, she would learn the nature of real politics and give up her present idealistic, sentimental nonsense. She must learn to pursue her self-interests, become powerful militarily, economically and politically.

Ultimately, Nigeria must seek nuclear weapons. Why not? Why should white men have such weapons and not black men? Of course, these weapons are awful. But as long as one group of human beings possesses them others must. If not, the possessor will bully those who do not have them. At any rate, given what we know about history, every weapon ever invented by man eventually becomes available to all people. At present, the West has these weapons, but sooner or later all countries will possess them.

Perhaps, we can eliminate the weapons of mass destruction from everywhere in the world? How I wish that that were possible. The genii are out of the bottle. Knowledge of nuclear weapons will be increasing, not diminishing.

In about a hundred years time, most college students will know how to construct nuclear weapons. Then the fun starts as the weak use them on the powerful. Of course, all can learn to respect all and work for all.

It is only love for all that would prevent mankind from mutual annihilation. In the meantime, man being what he is, self-centered and selfish, Africans must look after African interests.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 20,2005

Next lecture, #17, Nigeria and International Organizations, October 21.

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Ozodi Osuji Lectures #14: State and Local Governments in Nigeria's Politics

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- Why do State and local governments exist in the first place? Generally, they exist where there is federation and or confederation. To begin our discourse, therefore, we have to pause and understand the various forms of government and why we have them.

Essentially there are three forms of governments: unitary, federal and confederal. In a unitary form of government, one central or national government governs the entire polity. This form of government exists in Britain, France and Italy. Her Majesty’s Government at London governs the Realm. The decisions made at Westminster affect all of Britain. There were no other governments in the realm that the national government competed with. In so far that there were city governments, they derived their power to govern from the national government and, indeed, Whitehall could remove them. (Even with Tony Blair’s recent devolution of government, giving Scotland, Wells and Northern Ireland some local government powers, yet Britain remains a unitary form of government for the center can remove the local parliaments.)

France is a unitary government for the government at Paris governs all of France. France is divided into 95 or so departments/prefectures, equivalent to American counties, and the central government appoints prefects for each of these to govern it. Though there are elected city councils everywhere the national government can overrule them and even remove them from office. Simply stated France is ruled by one central government hence is a unitary government. The same goes for Italy.

In a confederation, on the other hand, the central government is very weak, whereas the governments of the constituting parts are very strong. Such situations are rare in the world, for such countries generally are weak countries and very few countries want to be that weak. An example of such a country is Switzerland.

This little central European country has a unique situation. It is composed of citizens from several countries, including France, Italy and Germany. The part that speaks French wants to retain their French identity, so do the parts that speak German and Italian. Thus, the various groups retain their ethnic identities and form of governing themselves, while forming a central government that, more or less, does not really tell them what to do. The central government is so weak that the country is one only in name.

This type of government works out in Switzerland for several reasons, including that the European governments around it agree for it to be so. The Concert of Europe (See the writings of Prince Metternich of Austria) agreed to retain Switzerland as it is, a weak non-military power, so that it acts as a place where all could take refuge. All agreed not to attack Switzerland, to leave it as a heaven where refugees from European countries wars could take refuge. Its financial institutions are deliberately structured so that other countries can hide their wealth in it. Simply stated, Switzerland exists because its powerful neighbors agreed to keep it weak, so that they have buffer zones between them and a place they could meet, a neutral territory, to hash out their problems. They do not want it to become another powerful country challenging them.

The United States of America began out as a confederation. If you recall, there were original thirteen colonies in British North America. For any number of reasons, these colonies united to fight Britain. They were essentially thirteen different countries that banded together to fight a common enemy, their colonial master, Britain and its King George the third. It is commonly believed that the war is initiated by the colonies anger at being taxed by Westminster without representation. However, the causal factors were more than that.

We shall not go into the specifics of American history here. Suffice it to say that originally the thirteen states wrote what was called Articles of Confederation to guide them. That Article did not really call for a national government. Instead, each state governed itself and periodically sent delegates to a Congress to go talk with other states on how to manage their common affairs. There was no federal government, no president, no common judiciary etc.

Eventually, many issues arose between the states, including trading issues, the same very issues that led to war with England. Remember that England had prevented the colonies from importing goods from wherever they wanted and imposed taxation on the goods they imported from different countries other than England. The famous Boston tea party occurred because England was taxing tea imported from elsewhere to prevent the colonies from importing tea other than from England. England itself did not produce tea but imported it from India and other places. That means that English merchants imported tea from India and resold it in the colonies at a higher price. Why not allow the colonies to import tea from the same source hence sell it at a lower price? But the traders in England banded together to get the House of Commons to pass a law preventing American traders from doing what they themselves did, so as to retain their higher profits. Their cousins in the colonies resented their behavior and threw their tea into the Boston harbor.

The thirteen states were having major trade and other disputes and sent their delegates to meet in Philadelphia in 1787, to hash out how to deal with those issues. The delegates were not sent to go draw up a new constitution for America, but simply to go resolve some identified issues and prevent others from occurring. Instead of limiting themselves to solving those issues, the delegates, called Congress, locked themselves up in a chamber, and did not let any one know what they were doing and in secrecy wrote a spanking new constitution for the colonies. They resolved to go sell it to the people.

After writing it, they went home, each charged with the obligation of marketing it to his state. It was agreed that if two thirds of the states accepted it and their state legislatures passed laws ratifying it, that it passes. In the meantime, those who supported federation, folks like Madison, Hamilton and Jay (the first chief justice) went to work writing newspaper articles, trying to convince the people that the new document is good for them. Their writings in various newspapers were eventually collated and published as the Federalist Papers. This book provided a rationale for why America chose federation over other forms of government.

Eventually, the constitution was ratified by the required number of states and became law. A new Congress met at New York and elected George Washington, the military leader during the revolutionary war, as its president. Old George formed his government at New York and later moved to Philadelphia.

Congress voted to build a brand new capital in the middle of the country and Virginia and Maryland volunteered lands, today’s Washington, District of Columbia. When President Washington began out, he had his wife work as his secretary and that was the extent of the Federal bureaucracy. Today, over two million folks, the military excluded, work for Uncle Sam.

In the Federalist Papers, the writers offered reasons why they chose the federal structure of government. As already noted, the confederal structure tends to be very weak, since it lacked a national governmental structure to look after the interests of all the constituting parts. If enemies decided to attack a confederal nation, they could easily defeat it. Any one can defeat weak Switzerland, even the Nigerian army could, but as already pointed out, Europeans agreed not to attack it, to keep it neutral so that it can act as a seat for their conferences to settle their issues.

America was weak in a confederal structure. Furthermore, America was too large a geographical area to have a unitary government. So something in-between had to be designed and that was a federation, a situation where the national government is given substantial powers to be powerful but not so powerful as to intimidate the states. Thus the United States 1787 constitution balanced the powers of the center and the periphery. The center was given powers to defend the country, engage in foreign affairs and coordinate the commerce of the states (hence provision was made for secretary of war, secretary of foreign affairs, called secretary of state, and secretary of treasury…the other departments were created as the situation warranted, in the future).

Even then the initial United States government eschewed a strong central government and tried to remain weak. There was, for example, no standing army. It was believed that if the nation was attacked that a people’s militia could be quickly put together to fight the attacker.

There were two parties during the Washington administration, the federalists who wanted a strong national government and the anti federalists who wanted a weak center and strong states. Hamilton was a federalist and Jefferson was an anti federalist. The cleavage between advocates of a strong center and weak states and vice versa continues to this very day. Those asking for strong states, state rights, tend to want to be left alone so that they can have slaves and abuse black folks, their favorite abuse objects.

The war of 1812 taught America how weak its national government was. British forces simply marched into Washington DC and burned it down, including the White House, then called the President’s Mansion. (When the house was repaired and painted white, to cover the darkness from the burns, it was affectionately called by its new color, white house. In fact, that new name symbolizes that the house belongs to white Americans only and that whites rule America. That horrible name therefore ought to be changed to “Black House” to symbolize black rule of America. Kidding aside, the name is an insult to non white Americans, so one prefers that the house return to its original name, the President’s House).

After the war of 1812, it dawned on the state rightists that they had to provide for a strong center and a strong army to prevent other countries from defeating America so easily. Thus, gradually the center began to grow in power. Even then, it was only in the 20th century that the central government became powerful. Washington DC remained a village until the 1930s. Even today, the town is not a world class city, as national capitals are supposed to be. The city remains a sleepy small southern town with nothing to do in it.

It was only in 1913 that Congress passed a law requiring Americans to pay income taxes hence producing the money to run a central government. In the 1930s, FDR’s New Deal policies enlarged the scope of the central government and made it the colossus it is today.

Washington DC is a company town with mainly one industry in it, the Federal Government. Other than that major employer it is really not a world class city. New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, Los Angles etc are the main cities of America, not the nation’s ponky-donky capital.

The Federation of the United States eventually became a model for other countries to imitate, such as Canada, Australia etc. For our present purposes, federation is now a reality in forms of government.

When the colonial rulers of Nigeria decided in 1914 to unify the original two separated protectorates, Southern and Northern, into one country, they looked at the North American model. They chose federation for emergent Nigeria. Initially, they had two regions, north and south, but eventually divided the south into east and west. Thus, for the longest time (in Nigeria, a decade is a long time, whereas in countries with long histories a decade is a second in their history) Nigeria had three regions in its federation.

The post independence government, the most incompetent and idiotic government known to man…they make you wonder if the black man can really govern himself, for if he could he would have restructured Nigeria and made each tribe a state and formed a federation of ethnic based states, the only solution that would work for Nigeria, well, the first republic managed to carve out the Mid-West region from Western Nigeria. One senses mischief in that behavior, perhaps, it was done to punish the Yoruba’s by reducing the size of Western region?

Nigeria had four regions when the civil war started. Gowon divided the country into twelve regions in 1967. Subsequently, the Mutala/Obasanjo government divided the country into 19 states.

Thereafter, the fun started. Every town wanted to become a state even if it produces nothing to fund it. The idea was to form a state to give some local ego the opportunity to masquerade around as a governor and go to Abuja and participate in stealing the Delta’s oil revenue. So without consideration of economic viability, thirty six states were created and some are still asking for more states.

Nigerian states are not states in the American sense, but counties, not even counties, for they cannot even fund themselves, as American counties are able to do. These idiotic states look to the center to steal Ijaw money and give it to them, so that they can pretend to govern themselves.

Nigeria today has thirty six states. These are not states. What they are no one knows for sure, a cabal for mismanaging Nigeria, may be. On paper, the states are supposed to function like American states.

The 1999 constitution carefully delineates the powers of the center and the states. As in America, the center has the power over war, defense, foreign affairs, international trade etc. States are given residual powers, that is, any power not specifically given to the center belongs to the states.

What state powers are, no one quite knows. This is so because we do not have true federalism in Nigeria. We actually have a pseudo unitary form of government in Nigeria. The states are glorified French prefectures, who fancy themselves to have elected their governors when, like the French prefect, they are practically appointed by the central government’s ruling party, the peoples democratic party, PDP.

Nigeria is practically a one party state, with the leaders of that party at the center deciding what happens every where in Nigeria.

No matter. Let us proceed with this sham federalism. The states are divided into local government areas, sort of like American counties. For Christ’s sake, why not call them counties, or better still, districts, as they call them in Canada? We all know that their function is local government and we do not need to call them by their function, a function they do not even perform.

The local government areas are composed of towns and villages. There you have the structure of Nigeria.

The governments at the state levels replicate the governmental structures at the national level. There is a state legislature that supposedly makes laws, a state governor that supposedly executes the laws and a state judiciary that supposedly adjudicates the laws.

At the local government area level, there is a council that supposedly makes the laws, there is a chair person that supposedly executes the laws and there is a court that supposedly adjudicates the laws.

At the town and city level, there is a town council and mayor that perform legislative and executive functions.

Simply stated, Nigeria copied the American political system and understanding of America helps one understand Nigeria, on paper, any way.

So let us see how state and local government works in America. In these lectures, I deliberately inject Britain and America into them, to give them a comparative flavor, and, more importantly, to enable Nigerians understand how other people do what they are trying to do. Nigerians are trying to have state and local governments. They do not know how to make these governments work. So talking about how those who know how to do it well might help them do it well.

America runs responsive state and local governments and one hopes that Nigerians copy from them. Therefore, I will spend some time talking about the American state, county and city structure of government.

In the United States, we have fifty states. Each state has a state legislature that passes laws. Most legislatures are bicameral except for a few like Nebraska that has unicameral legislature, that is, has only one house of legislature.

Generally, there are about fifty members of the lower house and about forty members of the upper house. That is, 50 members of the House of Representatives and 40 members of the Senate.

The procedure for making laws in state legislatures is the same as at Congress. Bills are introduced by any member, and the speaker/president of the House/Senate sends them to the appropriate committee. The committee discussed them and holds public hearings. The bills are voted on and if passed by simple majority are returned to the whole house for another discussion and voting on. Bills go through the two houses concurrently. If they pass, a conference committee is called to reconcile differences between the two houses and the final product is voted on again by both houses. If they pass, the Bill is sent to the governor to sign it or veto it. If he signs it, it becomes law, if he vetoes it, it dies, unless over ridden by two thirds vote…which is near impossible to obtain since the two parties, republicans and democrats, tend to be more or less equal in the legislature, and since each member tends to vote party line, it is difficult to obtain two third vote on any issue.

Parliamentary procedure at state legislatures is the same as at the national legislature. We covered those in our lecture on the legislative process and do not need to rehash them here.

State legislators are elected to serve two years and can be re-elected. Some states are now instituting term limits, to throw out the bums, the professional politicians who, apparently, cannot earn a living from doing something else but have the tax papers support their idle life styles. (One ought to be a professional in doing some thing and then go into politics part time; politicians should not be paid by the public, they should merely serve the public, and earn their daily bread from their own professions; okay, may be we should pay them some sort of stipends, but that should not be more than the minimum wage in the state.)

Each state has a governor who is elected for four years. Many states have term limits for their governors. He can only serve two terms. He is the chief executive officer of the state. He uses the bureaucracy to implement the laws and policies made by the legislature. Like at the center, though, he is not only a legislator he is, in fact, the chief legislator for most Bills that become law tend to originate from the governor’s office. Individual legislators seldom see their Bills become law, unless supported by the governor, after all the governor could veto them.

The governors in American states do not touch money. The state treasurer does. In some states, the treasurer is elected and in others he is a bureaucrat. Either way, the idea is that legislators/governors approve funds for their bureaucrats but do not disburse them. The governor is then in a position to evaluate how the money is spent. Any one who misspends a penny has his “ass in jail”. This practice ought to be copied by Nigeria. At present, Nigerian governors go to Abuja and take their sates share of the federal revenue sharing and take that money, at least, a substantial part of it, and board the next flight to Europe or North America and deposit them in their personal accounts. If we prevent governors from touching money, may be we would prevent them from being the thieves that they currently are? This would also strengthen governors’ over sight functions and give them the ability to monitor how bureaucrats are spending the monies allotted to their departments.

Each state has a judiciary. This is usually composed of the three tier system: state Supreme Court, state Appeals Court and county Superior court(s) (and in cities, city magistrate courts, to deal with fines and such minor issues). Governors recommend judges and the legislature approves them. As at the federal level, there is a judiciary committee in the Senate and this examines the qualifications of proposed judges and after public hearing votes to recommend them to the full house or not. If approved by the full house, such persons become judges. In some states, judges are elected (this is a very bad idea, an idiotic idea, really, judges ought to be meritocrats, aristocrats, really who have their positions based on qualification. As I pointed out yesterday, the German system of selecting judges, via written examinations and having them working for the ministry of justice seem the best way to go).

The state judiciary tends to be well ordered. In fact, were it not for the judges obsession with sending young black males, whom they fear more than they fear their God, to jail, America would be said to have a good society. But for some reasons, when a white man sees a black man he essentially pees in his pants. He is so afraid of blacks that obviously he feels inferior to them. The only way he knows how to deal with his fear of the black man is to arrest black men’s male children and put them in jail. If you are black and fourteen to twenty four years old, the chances that white policemen will arrest and molest you, is high. These policemen usually act in packs, never individually when dealing with blacks, four or more of them would tackle one fourteen year old black boy, cowards, we are talking, here, well these folks reason for existing is to jail black kids.

Each state has a state bureaucracy pretty much as at the federal level: department of education, transportation, social services (usually the largest department, composed of divisions of mental health, alcohol and drugs, elderly, the mentally retarded, child and family services and health). State bureaucrats are so carefully monitored that one instance of stealing and they are in jail. Overall, these machines for carrying out the people will tend to do what they were hired to do.

At the local level is the county system. Again, here the governing apparatus is as at the federal level. There is a county council, usually made up of about nine persons and a county executive implementing the decisions of the council. As at the sate and national levels, the county council is the legislative body and the executive the executive officer. In reality, the executive is also the chief legislator.

Each county has its superior court, which generally is part of the state judicial system. Judges are appointed by the governor, not county executive.

Beneath the county are city and town councils and mayors. (Some cities have city mangers who, in fact, manage the city’s bureaucracy and then reports to the mayor. These are usually small cities, not big cities.) The council makes laws (ordinances) and the mayor implements them, via his city bureaucracy.

Each city performs the usual local government functions, such as providing electricity, water, removing garbage, paving roads etc.

By and large, American cities are well run. However, in the past, the cities were run by machine politicians. In Chicago, for example, the mayor was as corrupt as Nigerians are. No one got any thing done unless he bribed the Irish mafia that ruled Chicago. But things are changing. The current mayor of Chicago, Daly, the son of a past corrupt mayor is said to follow the law. On the whole, American cities tend to be efficiently run.

Most cities chose to run their school districts through an independent school board (school district Board of Directors). These elected officials hire a school superintendent, usually an outstanding headmaster at a secondary school and through him run the K through 12 grades. Each school district runs its own school: hires its own teaches and does what it wants. Schools are funded through property taxes. Every house in the city is taxed, say a dollar for each thousand of its worth. Some cities supplement that with sales taxes, usually five percent on goods sold in the city.

I believe that counties should be the ones running K through 12 grade schools. I also believe that counties should provide technical education to those who cannot proceed to higher education. I believe that states should run universities. As I pointed out elsewhere, all children must go to elementary and secondary schools, at the tax payers’ expense. We have an obligation to educate our children. We know that not all children can do university work. Perhaps, only a third of secondary school graduates can do university work. So the state must have enough universities to educate 34% of secondary school graduates, those who passed at A and B levels in their secondary school leaving examinations. The rest of the graduates should go to technical schools where they learn to become mechanics, electricians, carpenters, masons etc. Only God knows how much Nigeria needs technicians. We build things and cannot repair and maintain them. I recommend the German technical school system, two years workshop training and two years apprenticeship in a relevant industry and then passing a national examination in the field to be licensed to work in it.

This is very much the American structure of local governance. The idea behind it is to give citizens access to their leaders. The average American can talk to his city councilor, mayor etc and complain about the quality of services he is receiving from the city. May be Nigerian local government leaders can learn to be accountable and tell the people what exactly they are doing for them?

LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN NIGERIA IN ACTION

Nigeria has experimented with several forms of local governments. This began with the British. They tried establishing local governments and using them to govern the people. In Northern and Western Nigeria were there were already existing administrative structures, be they feudal in nature, the British used those to rule the masses. In the east, particularly in Igbo land where political development was very rudimentary, there were no centralized administrative mechanisms, and the British had to fashion them out of nothing. They invented local governments and appointed chiefs, warrant chiefs they were called. Those idiots became the first batch of corrupt Nigerians. The various warrant chiefs grew rich by exploiting their people. In fact, their children were the first to go to Western type schools and are the rulers of Igbo land today. In Owerri, the Osujinjemanzes were a product of Lugard’s warrant chiefs and they are supposedly the most important family in the area.

The British toyed with many forms of local administration; at one point creating counties and at another districts.

Today, Nigerians have what they call local government areas, which generally fall within the boundaries of the district council areas that the British established. What we have going on is musical chairs, changing of names but doing nothing new really. We still have the same old district councilors who exist to extort bribes from the people and their head, the big bribe eater of them all. What are Nigerians but kola nut eaters, bribe eaters? These people live for their bellies and their bellies live for worms.

The current state structures in Nigeria are untenable. The states are too economically unfeasible. Consider my state, Imo state. The total area of this state would fit into an American county. I live in King County, (whose largest city is Seattle) Washington State. The county is over two million people. The area of land is probably twice the area of land of Imo state. Its economic base is probably one trillion times the economic base of Imo state. (We have Boeing, the world’s largest airplane manufacturer; Microsoft, the world’s largest manufacturer of PC programs etc.)

What does Imo state produce? Yams, Cassava, corn, Cocoyam, and assorted other crops. It probably has a tiny bit of oil. If you add up the GDP of the state it is only a few million dollars. There is, therefore, no way on earth that this state can support a government.

All of Igbo land, from Port Harcourt (Ugwuocha) to Abo, from Enugu to Umuahia, is about the size of the four counties that make up the Seattle metropolitan area: king, Snohomish, Price, Thurston, that is, from Olympia to Marysville, a distance of about one hundred and twenty miles. Nowhere in Igbo land is more than a hundred miles from Owerri. Owerri to Port Harcourt is 48 miles, to Onitsha is 58 miles, to Aba is 38 miles, to Umuahia is 40 miles, to Asaba is 60 miles, to Abo is 98 miles, and to Enugu is less than 100 miles. Thus we are talking of an area of a hundred miles radius. This area is not even large enough to be a state in the American context. It is more like a county in Alaska. Alaska itself is almost twice the size of Nigeria and yet it is only a state in America.

The point is that Nigerian states are too small to be economically viable. But if you make each of the large ethnic groups a state, you have about eleven states and then you bundle the small ethnic groups together into nine states for about twenty economically viable states. Each of the ensuing states would then be able to support itself, to pay for its services. No state government should ever have to wait for the federal government to go steal money from Ijaw land and give it to it to run its services. Each state ought to be totally self sufficient.

Each state ought to be in total control of its resources. Let the ensuing Ijaw state have 100% control of its oil revenue. Let them have it and let Ijaw citizens, like every one else, pay taxes to the federal government.

Each person must pay at least 20% of his yearly income into federal taxes and 10% of his income to state taxes. We need those taxes to run our governments. And when governments begin to depend on peoples taxes people would be conscious of how their leaders spend their money and slap them into jails should they misspend their tax money. At present, the people really do not carry the burden of government. The government derives over 90% of its money from oil and shares that money among the states and local governments. This way, the people are not really paying for their governments and do not care what they do with their monies.

As long as our governments depend on oil money, there will be corruption in Nigeria. It is when we turn to taxes, individual, sales, corporate property etc as means of funding our governments that we would overcome the monster of corruption.

In the meantime, there really is not much else to say bout Nigerian state and local governments other than to say that they are corrupt and are not doing their jobs. These governments do not provide education, water, electricity, medical health, remove city garbage and pave roads, as they are supposed to do. We hear about the travails of Ngige and Chris Uba. We hear about two primitive egos squabbling for national attention. But we do not hear about them removing garbage from Onitsha. Onitsha has feces dumped on its streets and the people die before they are forty years old. That is, we do not hear about what folks do in local government but hear about their egos dances of vanity. One is not interested in colluding with infantile men and making them seem like they are important when they are not.

One is important, to the extent that one does something for other people, not because one fancies ones self an important ego. We need humble persons in the governor’s mansion, in the chairman’s house and in such other places where power resides.

CONCLUSION

Nigeria currently has a state and local government structure modeled after that of America. If one understands America’s local government structure, one understands how it is supposed to work in Nigeria. Therefore, to help us understand how it is supposed to work in Nigeria, I took the trouble to describe how it works in America.

It is not working in Nigeria. What we have in Nigeria are the same old thing, same same, same tale of black men selling each other into slavery, albeit now by not caring for their people.

Africans have a culture of not caring for their own people, for selling their people. For over a thousand years, all they ever did was sell each other into slavery. From about 900 AD they sold themselves into Arab slavery and from about 1500 AD they sold themselves into American slavery. These people have developed a culture of selling each other and not caring for each other.

See a Nigeria and be very careful with him for if you are not, he would sell you into slavery. Of course, the law now prevents him from doing so; otherwise he would do so, and obtain trinkets to adorn his body, his body that is food for worms. These people now sell each other by not caring for each other. Give them positions in governments and they use their positions to rob their people blind.

You never hear of them making self sacrifices for their people but of stealing from their people. They are a contemptible and despicable people.

Out of this detritus of mankind, we shall produce decent men and women. We shall do so by showing them what it means to be a human being. A human being is different from an animal, though his body is animal, because he cares for other people. A true human being works for social interests. To be mentally healthy, one must work for social interest, Alfred Adler, a psychologist tells us.

My function in life is to help train Africans to care for one another, to refuse to eat while other Africans starve. That is what I came to this world to do. And I am doing it, by, for example, writing these lectures and giving them to folks for free. Every body must do his part. Africans make one want to puke but one cannot deny ones own people. One must help them become truly human, folks who care for one another.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 18, 2005

Next lecture, #15, October 19, The Nigerian Bureaucracy

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Ozodi Osuji Lectures #15: the Bureaucracy in Nigeria's Politics

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (seatle, Washington) --- DEFINITION The bureaucracy is an instrument for implementing the policies and laws made by the political decision makers in a polity. Legislators, executives and judges make decisions as to what needs done in the human polity. Those decisions have to be implemented otherwise they might as well not have been made. Laws and policies must be applied or they are no good.

Bureaucracy is that instrument through which society operationalizes its decisions on governing itself. The bureaucracy is a machine, a mechanism through which policies and laws are realized. In theory, the bureaucracy is not supposed to make the decisions and policies it implements, but be a neutral organization through which decisions are actualized in a human polity.

HISTORY

The origin of bureaucracy is long lost in the past. For our present purposes, we know that the Romans had bureaucracy through whom they implemented the laws and rules made in Rome, in Rome’s far-flung Empire. Laws and policies were made at Rome and those were implemented throughout the Roman Empire. Those doing the implementation are bureaucrats.

A person who did not make decisions but merely implements them is a bureaucrat. He is implementing other people’s, not his own personal, decisions. As such, a bureaucrat must be impersonal, objective, impartial, unsympathetic and detached in implementing the decisions he is implementing. Rome gave an order for a general to go to war and conquer yet another territory for it, and the general and the army he leads does as Rome’s political authorities (emperor, Senate etc) asked him to do. It is not for him to decide whether the decision to go to war is right or wrong, that is for political actors to determine; his role is to do as told.

Bureaucracy is a giant wheel through which society rolls its decisions into motion. Each person working in the bureaucracy is a spoke, an object doing what he is told to do and not asking questions why he should do what he is told to do. The day a bureaucrat asks questions and disobeys orders, he is no longer a bureaucrat, perhaps, and he is now a politician, may be. He at that point should get out of the bureaucracy and go to where he belongs, politics, or he is booted out.

A bureaucrat is a humble servant, a machine operated by the decision makers of society. He is not supposed to have opinions of his own, or if he does to keep them, to himself. Just do what your bosses ask you to do or if you do not want to do them you must quit your job. As long as you want to retain your job as a bureaucrat, you must obey orders and do what told to do, it is not relevant whether what you were told to do is right or wrong.

The Roman army and civilian bureaucracy was, perhaps, the world’s best bureaucracy and did what it was told to do. Told to fight and good soldiers fight. Die while fighting for the empire and the good soldier lays his life for his superiors. He does not ask questions.

Rome decides to punish Jews by destroying their temple in 70 AD and gave the order to the local Roman bureaucrat in Jerusalem and he does as he was asked to do and destroyed the temple. He does not ask why he should destroy such a historic monument but just does what he was asked to do.

When the Roman Empire fell in 450 AD, for a while, there was chaos in Europe. Later, the Catholic Church emerged as a universal European Church. The Church replicated the bureaucracy of the Roman army and spread throughout the Roman Empire. It had its headquarters at Rome and the Pope and his cardinals made decisions and the decisions were relayed to the Church’s army in the field: Rules emanated from Rome (from the Pope and his council) and went to cardinals in major population centers of Europe, and from them to Archbishops in major cities and from them to Bishops in medium sized cities and from Bishops to reverend fathers, priests in their parishes.

The Church had monasteries and nunneries through out Europe. Here scholastic monks and nuns lived and, among other things, researched how best to control the local areas where they were located. The monks and nuns practically controlled the lives of every person in their areas of operation. Like the modern secret police, these people made sure that the will of Rome was obeyed and that those who did not were punished. An example is for the offender to be ex-communicated from the Holy Church, hence sent to hell fire…later the Church could not wait for people to be damned in hell fire and subjected them to fire right here on earth, I am talking about the Spanish inquisition that burned heretics on the stake.

The Roman Church was a far-flung bureaucracy for controlling Christendom. It worked well. For our present purposes, the Church was part of the roots of modern bureaucracy.

The Church exists to the present except that its power has been weakened. In 1517, Martin Luther challenged the authority of the popes of Roman and precipitated wars that lasted over 130 years. At the end of those religious wars, the Catholic Church failed to bring back Protestants to the Church. The treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the religious wars, essentially saw the creation of the modern nation states.

The Catholic Church was further weakened by the rise of secularism and scientism. Today, very few educated persons really pay much attention to the doctrinal policies emerging from Rome. In the past, the Popes encyclicals ruled the Christian world. Today, folks see them as just another superstition that they have to tolerate until religion is done away with from human society.

The various kings of Europe had their own bureaucracies for governing their kingdoms. They had officials spread out in their kingdoms making sure that folks obeyed the kings’ divine rights to rule, to make laws for them. Those who did not obey the king were arrested by the sheriff, judged, and if found guilty, sent to jail or even killed. Bureaucrats enabled the monarchs of Europe to control the people and maintain law and order.

The above past bureaucracies contributing to the modern bureaucracy were exactly that, antecedents, for none of them remotely resembles the modern bureaucracy.

The modern bureaucracy is a 19th century phenomenon. Throughout the Western world efforts were made to professionalize the bureaucracy. Prior to that movement, in America, for example, winning presidents used to sweep into town and appoint their cronies into most government offices. This was called the patronage and spoils system. You won the presidency and you came to Washington and kicked out whoever was working for Uncle Sam and replaced them with your own people, those who worked in your campaign.

In 1887, Congress passed the first civil service law requiring that civil servants be hired on merit and not just be the cronies of the president. A Congressional Act established the Civil Service Commission to hire and supervise a professional civil service. Ultimately, Congress passed laws that civil servants are employed by Uncle Sam, not by the president, and that they be recruited on the basis of merit and promoted on the basis of merit. Thus, it came to pass that a professional civil service was established in God’s own country, thanks largely due to the efforts of Woodrow Wilson, the scholar President of Princeton University who later became an idealistic president of the United States (remember his 14 points proposals to make the world safe for democratic?)

While America was turning its corrupt civil service into a professional civil service, other European countries were doing the same thing around the same time. In Prussia, the Kaiser’s chancellors turned their civil service and army into a marvelous machine for carrying out the will of their emperor. The German civil servant and soldier did exactly as he was told to do, no questions asked. He was the quintessential bureaucrat, a machine for carrying out the will of politicians. Max Weber wrote admiringly about these Prussian machine men.

With those machine men, the iron fisted chancellor, Von Bismarck, smashed the French army in 1870 and made Germany a united country.

The modern bureaucracy came into being in the late 19th century. By the 1920s we essentially have the bureaucracy we have today. Max Weber described this new type of human organization so well that we just have to summarize what he said. As he sees it, the bureaucratic organization is hierarchical in structure, is a pyramid with fewer persons at the top, many at the bottom and few in the middle. Those at the top giving orders to those at the bottom. Those at the bottom obey what they were told to do without asking questions. Those at the top, in turn, are told what to do by the civilian leaders of society and they obey without asking questions.

For example, Congress passed laws/policies and gave them to the right bureau to implement. The top bureaucrats in that bureau write procedures on how to carry that order out and go about doing so in an impersonal, objective manner. There is nothing personal about the bureaucrat’s behavior; he is just doing his duty.

Bureaucrats are recruited on the basis of merit. Generally, they are required to take examinations and qualify for the positions that they are applying for.

The jobs that bureaucrats do are not their personal jobs. Rather, those jobs are roles in an organization, and any one could be hired to perform the job specification described for each role. Indeed, it would be better if machines could do the jobs, so that we did away with human sentimentalities and emotions.

There is a job description and one is hired to do that job. If one can do it one stays, if not one is fired. That is all there is to it. A bureaucracy is not a charity house. The employee is used by the organization to achieve goals others set, that he did not set. His job is to help the organization accomplish the goals the decision makers of society set for it.

Bureaucratic organizations must follow procedures. They must rigidly adhere to procedures, policies, how things are done there and should never deviate and do their own things. It does not matter whether the person in front of a bureaucrat is a family member or friend or foe, he is supposed to treat him or her according to the rules of his bureau. No favoritisms allowed and no nepotism permitted.

Bureaucrats are required to do their jobs without enthusiasm and feelings of rightness or wrongness, but to just do what the job descriptions call on them to do or they are sacked from the bureau (French for office…bureaucrats, office workers).

Bureaucratic organizations are not democratic organizations where all members gather and collectively make decisions regarding what to do. Instead, they are machines used by the decision makers of society to accomplish their goals and objectives. Bureaucratic organizations are non-democratic for employees cannot be democratic when the decisions that they are implementing are not theirs in the first place.

Bureaucratic organizations are excellent instruments for those who formulate political policies to implement them.

Max Weber’s abstractions not withstanding, the real world is a bit different. In the real world, top bureaucrats tend to possess a lot of information and expertise on their line of work. Therefore, the decision makers of society often rely on their expertise in making decisions.

Consider the British minister. He is assigned to a ministry. He may or may not know much about the ministry he is supposed to rule. The permanent secretary in the ministry and his assistants probably has spent upwards of thirty years running that ministry. Who has more knowledge about how the ministry works? The permanent secretary, of course does. Therefore, the minister, if he is a sensible chap, must ask the opinions of his top civil servants before he makes any decision. Nevertheless, the minister does not have to rely on the opinion of civil servants.

The minister, prime minister and the rest of the cabinet was elected by the people to implement certain policies and do not need to rely on the opinion of civil servants to do so. He just needs to take the views of civil servants into consideration, particularly on how to implement his policies, but not the policies themselves. In the final analysis, the minister is the decision maker and if the public deems his decisions inappropriate he may not be reelected during the next election, while the stiff and proper bureaucrat retains his job.

In the real world, civil servants do influence public policy because they have information that politicians may or may not have. Some observers, indeed, argue that we are in the age of technocracy, that experts now rule our governments. This view seems a bit exaggerated for we all know that technocrats/bureaucrats tend to lack vision. As Max Weber correctly pointed out, there are differences between the political personality and the bureaucratic personality.

The politician is a force of nature with ideas and visions of what society should look like. Bureaucrats, on the other hand, tend to be doers who do what they are asked to do and may not have innovative ideas. Thus, it is highly unlikely that technocrats would soon rule society. What is true is that experts in the various ministries do provide useful information to their civilian leaders.

If the ministry of transportations is going to build a road from Port Harcourt to Onitsha, for example, it is the technocrats in the ministry, the civil engineers, that will draw the plans, and the accountants in the ministry will cost those plans out. These technicians would bring their plans and expenses to the minister of transportation. His job is to study the plans as given to him and take political equation into calculation before he makes a decision to build the roads or not.

We live in a world of scarce resources and there is such a thing as opportunity cost. If you spend money on one project, you may not have money for other projects. Thus, perhaps, instead of building that road what is needed is to build elementary and secondary schools in Alaigbo? The minister is supposed to make such tough choices.

Decision making entails evaluating several alternative courses of actions and choosing a few and letting go of others. The decision maker takes the consequences of his choice. It may mean being thrown out of office come the next election.

The technocrat, bureaucrat has a secure job and is, therefore, not qualified to make risky choices…unless he is ready to loose his job if his decisions do not pan out and prove a winner to the public.

The modern bureaucracy began in the 19th century. Even then, bureaucracies remained small affairs. Governments until the twentieth century were small affairs. It was after the 1929 depression when it was accepted that governments ought to be playing a role in the economy, largely due to the influence of socialists and John Maynard Keynes economic views that governments grew in size. In the United States, the New Deal polices of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt expanded the United States government from a few thousands to million employees. Today, over two million employees work for Uncle Sam, plus another two million in the military. The various states, counties and cities in the United States have their own civil servants. Today, many Americans work for the government or government related employers. The bureaucracy is now a humongous affair, touching just about every citizen’s life.

In Africa, there were really no bureaucracies, not as we know them in the West, until the twentieth century. Oh Hausa and Yoruba states had some bureaucrats working for them, but these employees, by and large, were not really impersonal bureaucrats ala Max Weber. It was when the European colonialists established their rule in Africa that the modern bureaucracy began to take roots in Africa.

In Nigeria, the birth of the modern bureaucracy can be traced to the Royal Niger Company. The British Government took over from the Royal Niger Companying in the early 20th century and formed the Southern and Northern protectorates of Nigeria in 1906. In 1914, the British amalgamated the two protectorates into one Nigeria and began the enterprise called Nigeria. The colonial officials raided the personnel of the Royal Niger Company and used them to start the first Nigerian civil service.

Frederick Lugard was made the first Governor General of Nigeria. To help him govern Nigeria, he established a small secretariat at Lagos and appointed lieutenant governors for the North and South, along with district officers. He sent out the district officers to work all over the country. He established the famous indirect rule system whereby he used already existing Afriocan leaders to rule the people. One white district officer would work with the emir of a large area and through the emir ruled the people. In Alaigbo where there was no king or bureaucracy for controlling the people, Lugard created Warrant Chiefs and superimposed them on the Igbos and used them to impose his will on the people.

By the 1940s, it could be said that there was a rudimentary bureaucracy in Nigeria. But at no time were there more than five thousand British administrators governing Nigeria. So we are talking about a small bureaucracy here.

Nigeria gained her independence from Britain in 1960. Thereafter, Nigerian leaders expanded the role of government in society and began expanding the bureaucracy.

If you create a new function for government, you must also form a new bureaucracy for it to accomplish that function. For example, if you accept the function of supervising environmental matters as appropriate role for government, then you must have a civilian bureaucracy to make sure that the government’s rules regarding protection of the environment are implemented.

Modern society, and Nigeria is not an exception, is giving governments a lot to do and, as such, is creating bureaucracies all over the place. Today, governments are the largest employers in Nigeria.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE NIGEERIAN BUREAUCRACY
The Nigerian bureaucracy is essentially like the British Bureaucracy. It is structured like this: At the top is the secretary to the Federal Government. This man supervises the various permanent secretaries.

A permanent secretary heads each ministry. Below him is the under secretary, then the deputy permanent secretary, the principal assistant secretary, the senior assistant secretary, and at the bottom of the administrative ladder is the assistant secretary. Assistant secretaries are hired from university graduates. Candidates generally take and passed written examinations, are then interviewed and recruited by appropriate ministries. They are recruited into the administrative class and work their ways to the top. It is expected that they would get to the top at the tail end of their public service, after thirty something years of service in the government. The typical civil servant works for the government for about forty years and mandatorily retires at age 65.

Beneath the administrative class are clerical persons. These are usually hired from secondary school graduates; clerks work their way to junior executive positions and do not make it into the administrative class (except in exceptional cases).

Each government ministry is a functional area and requires different training. To work in the foreign ministry, for example, may require studies in political science, history and law. To work in the ministry of finance may require training in finance and or economics. To work in the ministry of transportation may require training in engineering. Each ministry thus hires those trained to do what it exists to do and promotes them upwards. Hopefully, the best employees get to reach the permanent secretary positions.

Believe it or not, the Nigerian civil servant is as good as any civil servant in the world. The typical Nigerian permanent secretary tends to be as good as the typical British permanent secretary.

STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT CIVIL SERVANTS

Nigeria is a federation. That means that there is a federal government, state governments and local area governments. These various levels of government have their own bureaucracies. They generally follow the same British format.

The British themselves have attempted to modify their stiff civil service and borrow from the more flexible American model. In America, there is something called lateral entry into the civil service. Non civil servants, say those in the private sector, can be hired into any level of the civil service ladder, if they are deemed qualified. Any citizen can apply for positions in the civil service that he believes himself qualified to perform, including the director of government departments. A CEO of a medium sized cooperation can be hired to run a government department without prior experience in the civil service. This could not happen in the British system where folks are hired for positions at the bottom of the administrative class and work their way upwards.

The American system has a tendency of bringing in new blood into the bureaucracy, whereas the British system tends to perpetuate the same old ways of doing things. The American system is a bit more innovative than the British. I said a bit more innovative because despite his non civil service background, once a chap comes into the bureaucracy, he is quickly socialized to its ethos and becomes unproductive and lacking in creativity. The job of bureaucrats is to have jobs, not to do anything worthwhile. It actually takes ten of these folks to change a light bulb.

The British is experimenting with hiring non civil service folks into the middle echelon of their bureaucracy rather than rely on dead wood that worked their way to the top. If an individual spends all his career life in one ministry, he may have zero ideas of what leadership is all about, taking risks? America itself is quietly relying on internal promotions than it did before. This tends to reduce the amateurish nature of the American civil service.

Nigeria is mix of the British and American systems, with heavy tilt towards the British system.

As we have observed, the primary function of the bureaucracy is to implement the policies made by the political sector. Parliament passes a law, policy and it is given to bureaucrats who then write regulations regarding how they intend to implement it. They hire the right people and implement the law. They set up internal administrative judicial systems to offer all opportunity to contest how bureaucrats applied the law. For example, a bureaucracy regulates the Airline industry. If a member of that industry thinks that it was treated unfairly by the agency regulating it, it could appeal to the administrative judge regarding such complaints and have a hiring. If he wins he gets redress, if he loses he is punished.

In the West, modern bureaucracies tend to do what they were set up to do. However, it is a well known fact that bureaucrats once hired want to keep their jobs even if what they were hired to do is no longer needed done. To deal with this issue, some governments now pass sunset laws requiring agencies to go out of existence when their agency objective is accomplished. But government agencies, by and large, tend to find something else for them to do, even if it means duplicating other department’s jobs. They seldom go out of existence.

Government agencies tend to be inefficient. What a few persons can do in the private sector takes many persons to do in the public sector.

Government agencies tend to duplicate each other’s jobs. Several agencies doing the same line of work. This costs government a lot of money.

We can go on and on pointing out some problems with government work but, by and large, they tend to do what they are supposed to do.

Obviously, we need the public sector. If you assign functions to government to perform you must be willing to pay for civil servants to help it do what you want it to do. Thus, the bureaucracy is a necessary part of modern life. As long as you expect your government to provide the people with education, health insurance, public transportation, electricity, water, garbage removal, you must have bureaucrats performing those tasks. The most we can do is make sure that the bureaucrats are a bit efficient and cost conscious.

We can have citizen oversight committees scrutinize bureaucrats and make sure that their budgets don’t just grow but that they do so only when necessary. We must make sure that only necessary personnel is hired, not personnel to fetch coffee for the permanent secretary.

With regards to the tendency for bureaucracy to be full of red tape and procedure bound that seems inevitable for only persons assigned jobs should do them. We must have a bureaucracy where folks pass the bucks and get others to do jobs that they could do but that are not in their job descriptions. This is how we maintain accountability.

Our job is to make government responsive to the peoples needs, to have policies that serve people and recruit civil servants that serve the people. Those asking for reduced bureaucracy are not going to get their wishes satisfied. We live in a modern world; our lives are interconnected; we need government workers to perform services for us. We cannot go back to the past when less government was needed. If any thing, there will be more governments in our future.

NIGERIA’S INNOVATIONS

We have talked about Bureaucracies in general. Is there anything to say about the Nigerian bureaucracy? In so far that there is anything unique about the civil service in Nigeria, it is the tendency for public officials to demand bribes before they do their jobs. But this is not unique to the civil service; bribery permeates every aspect of Nigeria’s life.

If a policeman stops you for routine traffic violations, he expects kola money from you or else he delays your business. To pick up a form from a ministry often requires bribing the clerk handing out such forms or suddenly there are no forms available, come back next week, you are told. Fork out the required sum and the form appears.

If you desire to have a contract from a ministry, well, be prepared to pay ten or more percent of your gross income from the said contract to the awarding committee.

We do not need to repeat the obvious. In Nigeria, you bribe to get what you want. Even the custom and immigration officer examining your passport at the airport expects you to slip a few dollars into the passport as you hand it to him or else your name is suddenly not spelled right, as he thinks that it should be spelled, and he delays your entry into the country.

PERSONALIZATION OF THE BUREACRACY

African civil servants generally tend to see their positions as their personal offices and their work as their personal work. They do not detach from their jobs and do them impersonally. They do not seem to recognize that they are supposed to be machines doing what they are told to them. They fancy that they are important because they are occupying government positions. They want the public to treat them as very important persons. This illusion probably explains much of the nepotism and corruption in Nigeria.

The civil servant uses his job to do favor for those close to him, his relatives and tribal people. In doing so, he fancies that they see him as a very important person in their community.

Many Nigerian civil servants are nepotistic and will give jobs to their relatives and friends before they do so to other Nigerians. Moreover, they want you to bribe them before they do what they were hired to do. That is to say that they personalize their offices.

I have given this phenomenon some thinking. I think that it has something to do with importation of African cultures into an otherwise impersonal civil service.

In African societies, we are our brothers’ keepers. Therefore, when folks obtain jobs with the government they feel obligated to use their positions to help their relatives. This desire to help sometimes goes beyond merely helping them obtain jobs to stealing from government coffers to have the money to help a coterie of siblings and town’s people that are dependent on the official for help.

Much of the corruption that exists in Nigeria is motivated by goodwill; officials desire to obtain money to help their people. Very few persons can rely on their official salaries if they want to help their people. Indeed, most government officials cannot even rely on their salaries to be able to train their children in school.

If Nigeria had good elementary, secondary and university systems, all paid by the public, it would reduce the burden on officials to take bribes so as to have the money to pay for their children’s fees. The policeman taking bribes is often doing so to obtain the money to train his children and be useful to his people, not because he is a bad person.

Whereas we must improve the pay structure of Nigerian officials, yet it is not for them to steal or take bribes. One cannot rationalize their thieving behaviors. I just wanted to point out that our extended family system and its burden on the few persons with jobs may play a role in the high incidence of corruption in Nigeria. If folks were individualist and did not expect to be helped by any one else once they are eighteen years old, they would not have to depend on others who would feel the pressure to take bribes so as to be able to support them.

It seems that Nigerian cultural variables contribute to the corruption in the Nigerian civil service. To reduce that corruption those cultural variables have to be addressed. Of course, we must also address socialization of civil servants, training them to have high ethics so that they no longer think that the degrading behavior of taking bribes is something that they could do. You see, the moment you give a policeman bribe, he has lost his authoritative position in your eyes; he is, as Nigerians’ say, nwabugger, a nothing.

CONCLUSION

Bureaucracies are really a modern phenomenon. Though they existed in the past, such as in the Roman Empire, what we now regard as bureaucracies are inventions of the 19th century Europe and North America. We had Chinese mandarins, who took examinations to obtain their jobs, but they were not quite what we mean by modern bureaucrats. The emperor, for example, could hire and fire the Chinese worker. In a modern bureaucracy, even the president cannot fire the government worker. Given their union contracts, it often takes years to fire a bureaucrat and it costs more in money and effort to fire them than it is worth. Once a bureaucrat is hired and he passes probation, he is difficult to let go.

Modern bureaucrats are hired to do their jobs in an impersonal manner and, by and large, do so. In Nigeria, there is a personal quality to the civil service. If you know somebody working in a government ministry, he is more likely to serve you first and well before others on the line (what line, since when did Nigerians started queuing up to be served?).

This lecture is designed to be basic and not graduate seminar material so we shall not get into debates as to what to do to fix the Nigerian bureaucracy. Put your energy to figuring out a way to make the Nigerian civil service less corrupt and that would be enough improvement for the time being.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 19, 2005

Next lecture, #16, The Nigerian international relations, October 20.

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October 17, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #13: the Judiciary in Nigeria's Politics

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- Parliaments make laws. Presidents execute them. Some one must adjudicate them. Someone must be an impartial umpire that settles disputes between citizens (civil laws) and between citizens and their government (criminal laws).

We have laws because we have conflicts and laws are designed to enable us solve those conflicts. Therefore, there must be some one that interprets and applies the law when conflicts arise. The social institution that interprets and applies the law is the judiciary.

Let us trace the origin of the judiciary in Nigeria. Nigeria is composed of many ethnic groups. Before their encounter with the British, each of these ethnic groups had its own laws. However, these were not the origin of the judiciary in Nigeria as we now know it. Contemporary Nigerian judiciary was essentially imported from Britain, so we have to understand that institution in Britain for us to understand what there is of it in Nigeria.

British jurisprudence is complex and has roots in the various peoples that settled in England. In 27 BC, the Romans conquered what they subsequently called Britannia and ruled it for four hundred and fifty years before the barbarian uprising led them to pull out of Britain around 450 AD. While in Britannia, apparently, the Romans instituted their judicial practices. The native Celtic Britons were Latinized by the time the Romans left Britain.

When the Romans left, the very barbarians (Germans) that the Romans went to fight in Rome itself crossed the English Channel and invaded England. A bunch of Germans from Saxony and Angel land (Germany) crossed the channel and settled in England (hence the name Anglo Saxon, German tribes). The Celts of Britannia were conquered by the Germans and the Island was taken over by the Germans.

The Anglo Saxons ruled England until the Vikings, Scandinavians, another Germanic tribe, began menacing the Island, beginning in the eight century. The Scandinavians settled in many parts of England.

In 1066, the Norman French, themselves Scandinavians who had settled in northern France, Normandy, conquered England and took the island over. William, Duke of Normandy, became the King of England and his lieutenants became the dukes, earls, counts and marquis of England. The French nobility spread through out England and ruled it. In fact, they imposed their French language on the people.

Over time, French language mixed with the mix already in England to produce the language that we now call English. English language is a Creole language, a language formed from the mixture of many peoples: Celts, Romans, Germans, Scandinavians and French.

In the meantime, the Norman kings in London imposed French law on England. They appointed judges to go from one part of England to others hearing cases and settling them. Initially, local squares, the French nobility on the scene, heard cases and made rulings. However, the persons involved may appeal their Lords’ rulings. If they did, they had to wait for a judge to ride his circuit, (literally on a horse) and come by and hear their appeals. This is the origin of circuit courts or courts of appeal in the English world.

For our present purposes, the locals tried to interpret the law as they saw fit until the circuit judge came around and finally settled the matters. The circuit judges, French men, mostly deferred to the locals and respected their understanding of the law as it applied in their shires/counties. (Shires…from which we have sheriff, the police officer who enforced the law in the shire, the county.)

The judges made decisions and when they came back in the future referred to the decisions they had made in the past and or the decisions made by other judges. This is how the English legal system, called Common Law, grew up. Laws were not necessarily written down; England still does not have a written constitution, but is the accumulation of decisions made by judges and the Acts of Parliament.

A judge in England, a common law country, hears a case and tries to see how other judges ruled on it in the past, this is called Precedence, and takes into consideration Parliamentary Acts relating to the case. He rules on the bases of his understanding of precedence and statutory law.

The Common law countries, which include Britain’s former empire: USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa and African countries ruled by Britain, have a different legal system than continental Europeans. The continental Europeans were more rigidly ruled by Rome and had a more lasting Roman influence on them. Their legal system tends to be part of the Romano legal system. Rome tended to have written and codified laws. Thus, Europeans tend to formalize and codify their laws. Moreover, when Napoleon went conquering most of Europe he wrote a legal code and imposed it on wherever he conquered. Thus, in much of continental Europe, the law tends to be codified and adhered to as it is written.

In continental Europe, judges tend to be, more or less, bureaucrats applying the law as written and not interpreting it. For example, a jury hears a case and finds the defendant guilty or not. If guilty, the judge looks up the law and applies it impartially and impersonally, as written. The judge does not have a lee way to decide to send the accused to prison or not, how long, and or release him and or place him on probation.

Britain has county/shire courts. These courts of first instance hear evidence and make judgments. If the case is a criminal case, the crown counsel represents society and the criminal is represented by his own lawyer. A jury of twelve or so men and women hears the case and decides whether the accused is guilty or not. If guilty, the judge decides sentence. As noted, in common law countries, the judge has a lot of leeway how long to sentence the guilty to jail. The loser can appeal his case to a higher court. The circuit court hears appeals and if the loser still loses he may appeal his case to still a higher court in London. If he loses, he may appeal his case to the highest court in the land, Parliament. The Privy Council, a judicial committee of the House of Lords, is the highest court in the land; its ruling is final.

In America’s legal system, a judge makes the decision on how to punish a guilty person. Generally, he follows sentencing guidelines laid down by the state and reads the pre-sentence investigation reports written for him by his legal and psychological staff. In the end, the judge may decide to let the guilty go without serving jail time, or send him on probation, or sentence him to the amount of time in jail he deems appropriate etc.

Thus, it came to pass that for stealing the same amount of money, a person could get five years in jail, or only probation time, depending on the judge’s disposition.

As you would imagine, a black man found guilty of criminal offences tends to be thrown into the slammer, to go cool his heels in the Big House and do so for as long as the law permits, whereas a white man is likely to be given the least amount of jail time in the Big House, if not placed on probation or even not punished. Indeed, if the white person is jailed, the chances are that he would earn parole quicker than a black man.

The judge decides whether the accused is a threat to the community or not, and whether he is remorseful for his crime, likely to re-offend or not. On the basis of his judgment, he sentences or releases the accused.

People tend to see those who are like them as good and those unlike them as bad. Since most American judges are white, they tend to see white folks as good and black folks as bad.

In America, there are two justice systems, one for blacks and the other for whites. This is not the way it is supposed to be, for on paper, justice is supposed to be blind. But in reality, we all know that the chances of one doing time in jail has a lot to do with ones race and gender. This is the American reality, ugly but that is what it is.

In America of today, one out of every four inner city black males between the ages of 14-24 is either in jail or is under the supervision of parole and probation officers.

Please note that if one is a felon or ex-felon that ones citizens rights, such as voting or being voted for, is taken away. Thus, America uses the legal system to remove many blacks from participating in politics. The number of black Americans who can vote and or be voted for is very small. As I write, 2 million Americans, mostly black persons, are incarcerated in America. This is nothing short of war on the black race. The man is using his criminal justice system to decimate blacks from politics.

America is a house of injustice and will self destruct, implode. It cannot go on and on being unjust for much longer.

There are many types of law: common law, codified law, and within those two broad categories are many forms of law: criminal law (where the state is the party prosecuting the accused, alleged to have committed a crime against the community by committing a crime against one person) civil law (where it is a suit brought by one citizen against another and the state, judge, merely acts as an impartial arbiter of the truth and the defendant and plaintiff agree to abide by his ruling). Within the broad category of civil law itself there are many varieties of it, such as torts, contracts, family law, etc. There are other forms of law such as admiralty or marine law (pertaining to the oceans), administrative law (that interprets regulations made by administrative agencies of government), statutory law (law made by parliaments), ordinances (law made by city councils), corporate law (law regarding corporations, artificial persons) and so on.

Britain brought her common law system to Nigeria. She gave Nigeria her legal tradition, as she gave it to America. In this legal tradition legal system, the courts tend to have three tiers. In the USA, there is the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land whose decisions are final, unless overruled by Congress and or constitutional amendment. There are appellate courts and district courts.

The Supreme Court, under its first chief justice, John Marshal, in the Madison versus Marbury, 1803 ruling, gave itself the right of Judicial Review, the right to examine what the other branches of government did and rule whether they were legal or not. Thus, it came to pass that if a law is passed by Congress; those who do not like it, immediately go to the nearest federal district court and challenge it. The law would not be implemented until the challenge of it goes from the district court to the appellate court and reaches the Supreme Court. This process may take years before the Supreme Court finally rules on the constitutionality of the said law, thus frustrating the law made by the people’s representative in Congress.

More importantly, the Supreme Court may rule against the law, that is, overrule Congress. This way, the Supreme Court is acting as a legislative institution, what the framers of the constitution never intended for it to do. Article one of the constitution specifically stated that only Congress shall make laws. But, as noted, John Marshal gave the Court the right of judicial review and President Thomas Jefferson’s failure to challenge him on constitutional grounds has made that right part of the legal custom of America.

Today, America’s law is dependent on the whims of unelected nine white persons on the Supreme Court. If the court comprises of judicial activists who are of the left or right they rule as such. Seldom do we have judges who are strict constructionist of the law. Why should judges be strict constructionists of the law, after all the very first chief justice did not construct the constitution in a strict manner?

Other chief justices left their own unjust marks on the court. Chief Justice John Taney ruled in the Dared Scott case, where a run away slave was brought to court and the question was whether he should be returned from the non-slavery state he had ran to, to the slave state he ran from. Taney uttered the most infamous statement a human being could. He said, and I quote: “no black man has rights that a white man ought to respect” hence returned Dred Scott to slavery.

That no black man has rights that whites ought to respect remain the legal tradition in America. White judges do not believe that black men have rights that America should respect. This stupidity has built the foundation for America’s eventual collapse, for though the universe seems amoral it is actually a moral universe. The evils we do eventually come to hunt us. America must pay a heavy price for her abuse of African Americas.

In 1896, the Supreme Court literally instituted Jim Crow laws and ended desegregation which the fourteenth amendment that ended slavery had brought about. The Court ruled that separate is legal in America. Thus, the races were separated in America: separate buses, separate housing, separate areas of living, separate bathrooms, separate sitting places in public transportation, separate schools, separate eating places at restaurants.

It was only in 1954 that the Earl Warren (a republican) Supreme Court ruled that separate is inherently unequal. That ruling ended segregation in America?

After that ruling, it took several demonstrations in American cities, with the likes of Bull Connor setting police dogs loose on black demonstrators, for America to start integrating its society. To the present, if you are black and have a case and the judge is a white man, you might as well not expect justice. A white judge is likely to rule against a black man, even if he is right. These pompous white judges, in fact, make up their minds to find blacks guilty from merely seeing their black faces in court. Moreover, they figure that blacks are too poor to have good counsel representation and, as such, that no one would know if justice was miscarried or not.

America sits on mass injustice while pretending to be just. If you are afar from America all you see is the glitz, the razzmatazz presented to the world to see and see America as a just place. But come close and you see a rotten house.

Britain, believe it or not, tends to have a color blind justice system. John Bull is fair and square. If you commit a crime in Britain, the chances are that the judge will be impartial in treating you, black or white. I will take my chances with a British judge than with an American, any time.

For our present purposes, there are three tiers of courts in the land. We have talked about the Supreme Court. Beneath it is the Circuit, also called Appellate Courts. These are usually composed of three judges collectively hearing the same case. They hear appeals from Federal District courts.

In America, each state has, at least, one federal district court (as you could imagine, a large state like California has many district courts, whereas a small state like Alaska has only one).

A group of states constitute an appellate court area, a circuit court. Folks in that area appeal their cases to it.

Cases begin at the District Court, then are appealed to the circuit court and finally at the Supreme court.

The president nominates all federal judges, with the recommendation of the senior senator of the state where the judges are to serve. The Senate approves the judges.

The three tier judicial system at the federal level is replicated at the state level. Each state has a Supreme Court, its highest court interpreting state laws, an appeals court, there could be more than one, depending on the size of the state, and county courts (also called Superior Courts). Cases originate at the county Superior Court and are appealed all the way to the state Supreme Court.

In addition to the three tier courts are town magistrate courts. These deal with minor issues not requiring possible imposition of jail time, such as traffic tickets.

In America, each county has its own jail. Jails can hold inmates for up to one year. Each state has its prison(s). Prisons can hold inmates for life. The Federal Court System has its own prisons.

As noted, America has over 2 million persons in jails and prisons. America has the largest percentage of her people in jail/prisons of all countries in the world. As also noted, most of the inmates are African-Americans and these days, the other threatening minority, Latinos.

Jails are essentially political instruments with which the white ruling class removes unruly minority persons from society. That is, jails are mainly political instruments for controlling those who challenge the white power structure. Most blacks in jail are, in a sense, political prisoners. Minority persons know this fact and do not necessarily feel stigmatized from going to jail. In fact, going to jail is often seen as a badge of honor for these folks. It means that one has challenged “the man”, hence is a man and not an Uncle Tom doing what the man wants him to do; one is not a house or field nigger, but ones own man..

In America, it costs upwards of $35, 000 dollars a year to keep a person in prison. Annually, America spends less than $6,000 dollars on each of its students. That is, it spends more money to house Americans in jail than to train them for productive work. This is one of those penny wise pound foolish policies that only happen in America.

As James Brown, the rhythm and blues singer croons: it is only in America that the unreal seem real. No matter. These racist policies will come to hunt America. A white police officer stops a black motorist and if no one is looking will beat him into unconscious state and claim to have done nothing. See what they did to Mr. Robert Davis, only a few days ago in New Orleans. They would commit crimes and write false reports regarding how the black person is the one that attacked them. American police men seem singularly sociopathic and nothing they ever say regarding black men is true.

(If I may personalize, when I was a graduate student at UCLA, one day, while walking on campus, I saw a police car stop and two white police officers jumped out and literally pushed me to the ground. In seconds, they treated me as I had not imagined human beings could treat one another. I asked what I had done and I was told to shut up. Eventually, I was bundled into the policy cruiser, car and taken to an apparent crime scene and released. I learned that what happened was that a bank clerk had reported that a young black male, about my age, 25, had behaved inappropriately in a Westwood bank. The man is supposed to be about 6 foot, four inches tall. The call went out to the police. The campus police saw me walking on campus and mistook me for the man. I was only five feet, eight inches tall, and how on earth any one could take me for s six foot four inches man is a wonder that can only happen in America.

Being who I was, I wanted the case investigated and wrote a citizen report against the said police officers. I was given their own report to read. Every thing they wrote was a lie. They said that I fit the suspect. That I was six foot four inches tall (how I wish) and that I looked suspicious etc. There you have it. The cops lie through their teeth and get away with it. But being me, I was outraged and challenged everything they wrote and insisted that they be punished for telling lies. The case lingered and somewhere along the line, a few of the black faculty on campus had a meeting with me. They asked me to let the matter drop. Why, I asked, and one said that if I insisted and got the two obviously white trash police officers in trouble, that they would come after me. How? That someone would just find my body riddled with bullets, dead. As they saw it, most white police officers have antisocial personalities. Apparently, it takes a criminal to catch other criminals. My counselors said that typical white police officers are from the poor class and that the best they could do in America is work as police officers or fire officers and that any one who deprives them of those jobs returns them to poverty and that they might not like it. No matter, I do not fear death; in fact, I say bring it on, now. Anyway, the case was eventually settled when the said officers wrote me a letter of apology.)

Let us see how Nigeria’s judicial system works. The British bequeathed its legal system to Nigeria. The legal system that operates in Nigeria is the British Common law tradition. However, during the colonial era, some British social scientists, anthropologists mainly, studied the various Nigerian tribes and their laws and recommended that their legal traditions be incorporated into the British system superimposed on Nigeria.

The British set up Local Authorizes in the various ethnic areas. The judge in these Local Authorities tried to take into consideration local traditions in his ruling.

Often the judge was also the administrative office of the district (District Officer or County Officer).

The local authority courts had local authority police, court messengers, they were called. The Igbos called them Kotima (which is still what some Igbos call police men or, alternatively, “Ndi uwu ojie” men in black, for police men wore black uniforms in the then Nigeria.)

For all intents and purposes, though efforts have been made to incorporate some Nigerian legal traditions into extant Nigerian law, Nigeria’s law is still of the British variety. Many of the top Nigerian lawyers and judges were trained and called to the bar in Britain.

Recently, I looked at the curriculum of a Nigerian law school and it is not that much different from what obtains at American law schools. Students in Nigeria study criminal law, constitutional law, torts, contracts, corporate law, and family law and so on and so forth. The point then is that if you understand law as it is in Britain and America, you probably understand law in Nigeria.

The legal structure in Nigeria, on paper, is like what obtains in Britain and USA. At the federal level, there is a federal Supreme Court, Appellate Courts and District Courts.

At the state level, each of the states has similar courts. The counties, that is, the local government area, have the courts of first instance where original evidence is taken and evaluated and decisions, guilty or not, made. The larger cities have magistrate courts.

Appointments to these courts are in the same manner as in America. (I personally think that the American system of appointing judges stinks. I prefer the German system. In Germany, lawyers take examinations to become judges and those that pass in an outstanding manner are interviewed and hired by the ministry of justice. They work for the state; often in several different capacities before they are deemed qualified to become judges. When a judgeship is available, one of these lawyer civil servants is promoted by the ministry to it. He then works his way up the legal ladder until he gets to the highest court in the land. This way, judges tend to be well qualified. In America, George Bush appoints a woman who has not written a legal opinion in her life to the Supreme Court. At the state level, many of the judges are appointed by governors because they contributed to the governors’ election or for other reasons other than judicial experience. Thus, many judges tend to be political hacks working in cahoots with the political system. It would be nice to separate judges from politics and make them totally professional, as in Germany.)

Nigerian Judges tend to be well qualified and are as good as any anywhere in the world. As elsewhere in the British common law tradition, they are supposed to hear cases and apply the law. If the case is a criminal case there is supposed to be a jury of ones peers judging the accused. The jury of twelve men and women hear the case and decide guilt or innocence. The judge then applies the law, following certain procedural guidelines,

What makes judges’ ruling legal is their following proper procedures. Law must follow the rules laid down for it to be legal. A judge must have the qualification to hear the case before him or else he is incompetent to hear it. If a judge has vested interest in a case and cannot be impartial, he is supposed to excuse himself from the case. The judge must not take sides in a case. He must carefully listen to both sides in a dispute and to the best of his knowledge, may God help him, decide guilt or innocence and apply the law properly. He must follow the rules of evidence and go to where they take him. He is supposed only to accept facts, not his personal opinions, into consideration in his ruling. It does not matter whether he likes the law for not, he must rule as the law requires him to rule.

Consider the latest craziness in America, the three strikes and you are out law. If you repeat offenses and have been convicted three times, you are sent to jail for life (which is usually 25 years before parole hearing are held). If a teenager stole a pack of cigarette three times that puts him away in prison for life. But a George Bush sends American kids to go die in Iraq, just so he proves to his father that he has balls that he is not a wimp, that he completed what his old man started, and he is not sent to jail. Where is justice in all these? A murderer walks the streets a free man and a black boy who was foolish enough to steal three packets of cigarettes spends the rest of his life in prison. This is absurd and many judges know it. Nevertheless, the law is the law and they must sentence the confused brother to life in prison. Send the boy to the big house and go drink the spirits to cheer your spirit up. A majority of American judges are drunks. That is the only way that they can tolerate the injustice they dish out to minority persons in America.

Nigerian judges tend to be as well educated as any other judge in the world. In fact, in comparison to American judges, they tend to be very erudite. Go read the decisions and legal opinions of Nigerian judges and see good thinking at work.

All this notwithstanding, the bane of Nigeria comes into play. Corruption is the main issue in Nigeria’s politics. Judges, like every one else in Nigeria, are corrupt. To start with, judges have to bribe some one to be appointed judges. Having become judges, they have to recoup their investments. Thus, they take bribes. If you have a case before a Nigerian judge, you do what you are expected to do. You do not approach him directly, of course. You talk to, say, the court messenger, whose real job is to collect bribes for the judge. You talk to whomever you have to talk to and you are told what you have to do for a favorable hearing of your case.

I once witnessed this practice at work. A cousin, an auto mechanic, was involved in a car accident. It was not his fault. That is not the point. He was arrested any way and after several bribes the police released him from custody. The case was taken to the court at Owerri. Here, the game begins. Through intermediaries, an amount was negotiated and the judge gets his “kola”. Then the bloated judged ruled in his favor.

What is self evident is that judges in Nigeria, from the local government area court to the higher court in the land, the Supreme Court, take bribes. Recently, Obasanjo has been making noises about anti corruption. The Chief Justice of the federation, Owais, has been accused of taking millions of dollars in bribes. Mr. Owais is currently under investigation. The investigation may last indefinitely.

If you make sufficient noises, the powers that be in Nigeria will humor you and initiate some fruitless investigation of your allegation. But nobody investigated is ever jailed. Obasanjo’s so-called anti corruption war investigates several persons but, so far, no big cheese has been jailed.

The former Inspector general of the Nigerian police, Mr. Balogun, who was caught red handed with billions of police cash redirected to his personal bank account, as we write, is still not judged guilty and jailed, as he should be. Mr. Balogun’s lawyers play the Nigerian game and who knows, the man may walk away free. He is in Nigeria after all.

It takes the English Bobby to arrest the governor of Bayelsa State for money laundering in London.

All the governors, repeat all of them, redirect money they got from the federal revenue sharing to their personal bank accounts, but what is happening to them? There is an immunity clause in the 1999 constitution that prevents hauling governors and the president to court. Okay. Amend the constitution, now, and remove that nonsense. Send all the bastards to the slammer where they belong. Chop off their heads. What are we waiting for? For the white man to come put our house in order for us?

Are we waiting for most Nigerian professionals to run out of the country and go to America? One of America’s strengths is the ability to attract the best and brightest from all over the world. Home grown Americans are usually too lazy to amount to much, so America attracts the smartest from other countries. Most of the best scientists at America’s universities came from Germany and other European countries, and now that Asians have gone from being mere copycats, from merely being good at technical matters to doing original research, America has scoped down on Asia, attracting their best to American universities.

Go to a typical American university, particularly to the science departments, and you would think that you are in Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bombay, Soul, and Taipei. Asians are now mostly the science students and teachers at America’s top twenty five universities. Not long ago, I went to my Alma matter, University of California, and could not believe where I was: it was like I was in Asia.

America opens her doors to the best and brightest from all over the world. Nigerians with good education, particularly in the sciences and engineering, are joining this mix. Just about every Nigerian with technical degree, engineering and medicine, can come to America and obtain a fairly good job.

In America, a typical engineer makes about $50, 0000 a year; a typical medical doctor makes at least $100,000 a year. In Nigeria, they would make about $10, 000 a year. So what do you think? Being self centered animals, these folks obtain a visiting visa and come to America, obtain jobs and stay there.

If you studied the social sciences, however, don’t even bother coming to America, for America cannot even provide jobs for its own social scientists. PhDs in sociology drive cabs in New York. America buys technicians not intellectuals.

Corruption is the lay of the land in Nigeria. That notwithstanding when I talk to Nigerian lawyers and judges I tend to find them second to none in the world. It is too bad that our political leadership does not create a corruption free environment for Nigerians to show the world who they are. Nigerians, in fact, are some of the world’s smartest persons. We have had only one hundred years of experience with the West, yet some of us are knowledgeable about Western ways. Indeed, some of us can compete on equal terms with the best of the best, the cream de la cream in the West.

Improve Nigeria and no country in the world would out-compete her. We have heard so much about how well Asians are doing; improve Nigeria and Nigerians will not be second to Asians or any one else in the world.

In papers on the judiciary, it is customary to review some salient cases. Who can write a paper on the American judiciary without reviewing civil rights cases, abortion cases, privacy cases, pornography cases (free speech) and so on? I could do that in the context of Nigeria but nothing would be gained from so doing. I would not be elucidating a serious legal principle.

In Nigeria, in so far that there are controversial cases that seem worthy of review, they have to do with the constitutional immunity for governors. But then again that constitution itself is, strictly speaking, illegal. It was not written by the people.

A constitution is supposed to be written by the people and or their representatives to represent their wishes as to how they want to play the political game. The Nigerian 1999 constitution was written by only God knows whom. Some one wrote it for General Abdul Salami, for obviously the soldier boy does not have the legal skills to write that, admittedly fine piece of work.

The 1999 constitution, on paper, is good. The point is who wrote it and who authorized him to do so? Only the people can write their own rules of the game and, in as much, as Nigerians did not write their so-called current constitution, it is not legal.

That means that the current government in the country is illegitimate. That is one reason to scoop the garbage to the garbage dump.

Nigerian lawyers seem to be up to the task and are giving the courts an opportunity to earn some of their living. The various democracy groups seek every opportunity to sue this or that person, even government agencies, challenging the legality of what they are doing. Recently, our president had his cronies raise money from those doing business in Nigeria. As it were, he stiffed them, hit them up for contributions or else they would not obtain contracts from his government. He raised billions of naira to build his Presidential library. He is now building that library in his home town. The man couldn’t even wait until he does what American presidents do. American presidents end their tenure in office before they build their monuments to their vanities. They do so to avoid conflict of interests, as they raise funds for their final memento to human pride and vanity.

Our man Obasanjo has no real polices that would make his name last in Nigerian history. Would a library, that if we know any thing about Nigerians, would decay a few years after it is built, make his name last in Nigerian history? Of course not. As soon as the bugger is out of office, his successors would erase his name from everything he ever touched with his grubby fingers. The library would become dilapidated and decay in a few years, the books, rot. Apparently, the big boy does not even understand the Nigeria he pretends to rule.

It would have served the man better if he did something salient, so that future generations would remember him for it. He could, for example, restructure Nigeria into twenty states, each composed of a major ethnic group. He could make the country’s legislature unicameral; we do not need bicameral legislatures. He could make the country a parliamentary system, so that the prime minister has to debate facts and know what he is doing, rather than be running around the world leaving other people doing his job for him.

Obasanjo’s comes to America and hires a third rate woman who works for the World Bank, and makes her his finance minister. Worse, he pays her almost a quarter million dollars annually, in American dollars, too. The average Nigerian makes a dollar a day, so why pay a woman with no contribution to economic theory and practice that much money? Only in Nigeria do such things happen.

The Nigerian judiciary is in shambles, but not as bad as it could be, all things considered. With a bit of thought, it could be made one of the best in the world.

CONCLUSION

The Current Nigerian judiciary is a mix of the Anglo Saxon common law and a mesh marsh of local Nigerian legal systems. If you understand how law is practiced in Britain and the USA, you pretty much understand how it is supposed to be practiced in Nigeria.

But like every thing else in Nigeria, the evil of corruption affects the judiciary in Nigeria. Nevertheless, one gives high marks to the judiciary in Nigeria.

With a little effort, the Nigerian judiciary could be as good as the best in the world. In fact, many Nigerian judges have been deemed outstanding enough to be hired by the World Court at The Hague.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 17, 2005

The next lecture, #14, is on state and local governments in Nigeria, October 18

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Ozodi Osuji Lectures #12: the Executive in Nigeria's Politics

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- As we saw yesterday, laws and policies are made by legislatures. These laws have to be implemented or they might as well not have been made.

Any one who knows contemporary Nigeria knows that the main issue is not laws but law enforcement. Nigeria’s 1999 constitution, on paper, is perhaps one of the best in the world. The problem is that very few persons adhere to its provisions. Nigerians make laws and public policies but seldom enforce them. Strict enforcement of the rules of law is what makes for social order.

Every society has mechanisms for law enforcement. In ancient Greece, when Athenians gathered and made laws and policies, they selected the manly part of them and charged them to enforce those laws.

Law enforcement generally involves show of force hence the manly type of person is always chosen to enforce it. Human beings, by nature, want to do their own things and left alone would be negatively affecting each other. You have to use threat of harm, coercion to get the average human being to override his apparent immediate self interest and do what is in social interest. All societies threaten to arrest and jail those who do not abide by the laws of the land to get people to obey the laws. If you baby human beings and merely talk about the need to obey the laws and do not crack a few heads when they do not obey the laws, the chances are that very few persons would obey the laws.

Law enforcement requires having police, courts, judges, jails and, yes, the hang man, the executioner waiting in the wings ready to chop off people’s heads if they transgress the law. Ignore law enforcement and you would have present Nigeria, chaos and anarchy. But round up a few thousand Nigerians and shoot them, that is, correct, kill them and the rest of them would know that you mean business. You can talk all you want about how corruption is bad, but until folks begin going to jail, people would not stop taking and giving bribes. Just talk about corruption and do not arrest most of the public officials known to have enriched themselves and chop off their heads and you would have corruption in Nigeria.

We know that corrupt persons are generally fearful and cowardly persons. The criminal may talk tough, but he is the most cowardly human being on earth. A man who sticks people up from the back or steals in the dark is a coward. Kill a few criminals and the garbage who want to live, and live for what we do not know, would beg for their useless lives and straighten up.

The problem with Nigeria is not lack of laws but inability to enforce laws in a draconian manner. That is to say that the executive branch of government in Nigeria stinks.

In traditional Igbo society, the Oha gathered and made laws and social policies. They selected a few manly men to implement the policies and punish those who disobeyed them. They selected men who were not sentimental, men who obeyed the letter of the law. Chinua Achebe captured this reality in his seminal novel, Things Fall Apart. He narrated a bone chilling incident; I am talking about the fate of the lad Ikemefuna. Another town had done something bad to a town and for reparation gave one of their children to be killed, Ikemefuna. Never mind whether it is right to kill any one, we are talking about law enforcement now. The child was kept with Okonkwo, the town’s strong man, the police type of man. The lad got emotionally attached to Okonkwo and his family. But when the town required him killed, Okonkwo did not hesitate in chopping off the lad’s head. That is what is meant by law enforcement. You do not need to like killing any one but you must nevertheless do it if you want to implement the law. You must be ready to send to jails members of your own family if they disobey the law.

And it does not matter whether the law is right or wrong. We discuss rightness and wrongness in philosophical discourse but once law is enacted it must be obeyed. Plato showed this at work when he narrated Socrates drinking poison, hemlock, willingly and dying. Socrates’ only crime was teaching proper thinking. He asked people to think in a logical manner and not just accept nonsense as the truth. As a result of getting people to think, many young persons began to question the authorities that ruled Greece. That would not be accepted. Authority must be obeyed for there to be social order. So, Socrates was perceived as a threat to law and order, was arrested, tried and condemned to death.

Now, from a philosophical point of view, Socrates did not do wrong but from a political point of view, he did generate disobedience of the law. In this regard, he was properly tried and condemned to death. He willingly obeyed the law and died. He could have insisted that he was only doing the right thing by teaching rhetoric. But he recognized that once law is made that it must be obeyed or else we would have chaos.

The only right a citizen has is to struggle to change laws, if he considers them inappropriate and unjust, but once a law is in place he is obligated to obey it, period. That is the lesson of Socrates’ death, that law, just or not, must be obeyed, after all determination of just or unjust is a subjective matter.

Laws must be obeyed or else one is arrested, tried and sent to jail, even killed, if you want a law and ordered society. Without law and order, human society is not different from animal society, wild. We are predatory savages and need law and order to humanize us. We are potential criminals and need law and its swift application to make us live in civilized society.

Man must live under law or else he is not man, an animal may be. In the Serengeti veldt, predatory animals like tigers and lions kill and eat weaker animals. That is not organized society. In organized society, the powerful do not kill and appropriate the property of the weak. The powerful must respect the weak in the commonwealth or there is no shared wealth. Law is what makes human beings who they are; without laws and obedience to laws man is not different from predatory animals like lions.

Even in heaven, what we imagine that it to is, since we have not been to it, is law and order. We imagine God making the laws of heaven and we, his children, obeying them.

According to Christianity, God is unified state and the earth is separated state. God is union and the world is separation.

Love is that which glues things together. If you want things to be unified you must glue them together with love. Thus, in heaven law is love. God demands that we obey heaven’s law. This means that God demands that we love one another, for love unifies us.

If we do not love one another, we separate from one another, and things fall apart. If we do not love one another we are punished.

Apparently, we chose not to love one another, to separate from one another, to go do our own things, to be egocentric rather than be unified and the result is that God punished us by sending us out of his unified heaven.

Our present world is a prison where God sent us for our transgression. The world is a jail where those who disobey God are sent to go serve their jail terms. The earth is hell, a place folks come to suffer because they disobeyed the law of love.

While on earth, if one remembers that ones nature is love and resolves to love ones self, love other people and to forgive those who wronged one, one has remembered the condition of heaven. One must meet the condition of heaven to return to heaven. One must obey God: love one another, to come back to God. Love is the criterion for being in God and his heaven. Union requires love to be in it.

Jesus remembered that love, that is union, is God’s law and obeyed it. He obeyed the will of God and gave up his ego’s wish to live in separation and do his own thing. Jesus loved every person; he loved his real self, which is unified spirit, and loved all persons, who are part of that unified spirit. Unified spirit is Christ, the son of God who is as his father created him, unified with his father and all his brothers.

Jesus let go the will of rebellion, hate, and accepted the will of God, love for all creation and its creator. In doing so, he overcame the world of separation and returned to the world of union, to his father. The prodigal son, Jesus, (and still all of us) gave up his willful desire to separate from his father and returned to his father.

In overcoming the ego, the desire for separation, Jesus reconciled the earth to heaven, man to God. He is subsequently the mediator between man and God, asking men to love one another so as to return home to their father, God and bringing God’s good news of love to man. Jesus teaches human beings that love is their reality and that forgivingness is the best meaning of love on earth.

Jesus is our intercessor and pleads with God to have mercy on us and welcome us back to his heaven despite our imperfection. But God does not make compromises. God is law, the law of union and love. God and heaven are always unified.

You cannot have the desire to separate from others, to go do your own thing and be in unified state.

If you desire separation, God would not stop you from doing so, for God is perfect freedom and permits his children to dream that they are separated from him. God knows that union, love is reality and that no one can separate from union, love. All that we can do is seem to do so in our dreams. To dream is not to destroy reality, but merely to delude ones self. Reality, union, remain what it is as the children of God dream that they are separated from him. They merely have an illusion of being separated from union, for, in fact, they are always in union. They are always in love while dreaming that they live in the opposite of love.

It is impossible to disobey the will of God, union, for no one can separate from union; all that one can do is pretend to be separated from God while one is always in God. God is everywhere and wherever we are we are in God. The world is a journey to nowhere, a journey without distance. Wherever we are God is and where God is his sons, us, are.

So you wish separation? God permits you to have the illusion that you are separated from him. Then you find yourself in this world, a prison of your own choice. You suffer until, like the prodigal son, you remember that union is truth and voluntarily embrace union, which is love, and love all, hence return to union, to your father, love.

On earth, to love is to forgive. The real meaning of love is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook separation and what is done in it. To love is to forgive the mistake of thinking that separation and what is done in it is possible. You give up the illusion that you can disobey the will of God; no one can. Union, love is reality. You give up the wish for separation and return to union, love, God, heaven. In doing so, you find salvation, redemption and deliverance; you are saved from the suffering of this egoistic world.

In the last few passages, I talked metaphysics. But we are not here to talk metaphysics. We are currently in the world of separation. Here we have people who see themselves as apart from each other and have different interests and look after their interests. Each of us pursues his self interests. In doing so, as Thomas Hobbes reminds us, we have conflicts. We clash with each other. We kill each other.

To obtain some surcease from conflict, as Thomas Hobbes tells us, we formed civil society. We formed Governments to make earthly, not heavenly, laws under which we must live to have personal security and social harmony. Without laws and law abidance we revert to the state of nature and threaten each others lives and live in insecurity.

To be on earth, to be human, is to live under the law, St Paul tells us. We must have laws.

We have legislatures to make laws under which we live. Those laws must be executed, implemented for us to obtain the benefit of laws. And that brings us from the philosophical to the real, to the here and now world.

Our topic today is how does society execute the laws and policies made by the legislative arm of Government? Let us see how that is done in the human polity in general and then see how it is done or not done in Nigeria.

Nigeria began her journey of self governance by accepting to operate under the parameters of the British system of government. Let us revisit that government and see how it executes its laws. Yesterday, we talked about how Britain makes laws, now let us see how it executes its laws.

Britain has a parliamentary system of democracy. That means that parliament makes, executes and adjudicates laws. The three branches of government are in one place, parliament.

Britain has a representative democracy. The country is divided into over six hundred constituencies and each, every five years or so, elects a representative to Parliament, the House of Commons in London. The party with the largest Members of parliament, MPs, is invited by the Queen to form Her Majesty’s Government. The leaders of the party become the cabinet, with their chief becoming the Prime Minster.

The leaders, prime minister and cabinet, are supposed to be generals, literally; they are generally selected from the manly type of men, the military type, and these are military leaders, not wimpy academic, intellectual and artistic types.

Men are wild animals and it needs power to rein them in. So we need generals, the men who are willing to close their eyes, shoot and kill other men at war, to lead men.

The wining victorious army, read, political party, is given the opportunity to govern England, Albion, that fabled realm of Arthur and his knights of the round table, Camelot, that most bloodied island, that most inveterate island of killers among men. John Bull, though smiling and seeming effete and civilized, is ready to kill for king and country at any moment. The English man is ready to sacrifice his life for England. He is a truly civilized man. A civilized man must be willing to sacrifice his life for civitas, the city, and the polity that nurtured him. Without the city we are wild animals; we must, therefore, give our lives, what we value most, to our cities, polities.

The prime minister and his cabinet govern England. Each minister is assigned a ministry to supervise and use force to get the civilian civil servants to implement the law. The minister, a general commanding a division of the army, can punish civil servants who disobey the law, who fail to follow his marching orders.

What are bureaucrats but spokes in a giant well? Bureaucrats are mechanisms through which ministers implement the will of their party, which should be the will of the British people. If it gets into a bureaucrat’s head that he is an important person he is slapped down. The permanent secretary is nothing but a gloried servant doing what he is told to do by the minister. This is reality; bureaucrats are soldiers and must carry out the law to the T or punished.

We cannot have bureaucrats with personal opinions as to how things out to be, running around, creating disturbances. We hire bureaucrats as Max Weber tells us, to help us implement the law and policies made by the rulers of society in a very dispassionate and impersonal manner. We are not interested in what a bureaucrat thinks; he must just do his job, implement the law as blindly and as unsympathetically as possible.

If given the order to shoot and kill, the soldier, bureaucrat must do so or he should be shot. A disciplined army, civilian or military, carries out orders without asking questions. The Prussian army is a model of discipline and only God knows that we need that kind of iron discipline in Nigeria. Line up corrupt persons and shoot them and go drink beer after wards. Do not even think that you did something wrong. The things you shot are garbage. Get rid of garbage without feeling remorse, or guilt. Why feel remorse when feces are carried to sewage disposal? If you leave feces around you cause disease, so get rid of it, get rid of Nigeria’s present pseudo leaders, they are causing disease for the polity.

The British prime minister and his cabinet and a host of helpers enforce the laws of England through an impersonal civil service, the bureaucracy. The prime minister and his cabinet are also charged with helping to make laws and policies that they implement. Her majesty’s government, so far, is excellent in governing England.

Antisocial persons in England used to have their heads chopped off. In fact, not longer than two hundred years ago, ones head is chopped off in England for stealing a few pennies. Subsequently, criminals were shipped off to England’s colonies, America and Australia and told never to return to that fabled misty island. (May be the reason why these colonies tend to have a substantial number of antisocial personalities is because their ancestors were criminals? You never know if criminality is in people’s genes. That is no matter, we are not here engaged in sociological causal factors debate, just get rid of criminals and worry about what caused their antisocial behavior, genes or social experience. I do not care what makes men do bad things, all I know is that if they do, they ought to be punished. Draconian punishment makes for a law and ordered society.

At any time, the prime minister and his cabinet are discussing laws and policies that they think serve England’s national interests. They introduce those ideas that they think are good for England in the House of Commons, as Bills, and shepherd the Bills through the various steps they must go through before they become parliamentary Acts, hence the law of the land.

Once made law, the Cabinet gives them to the appropriate ministry to implement. The bureaucrats go to work and write regulations based on the law and implement the law. The law enforcement arm of the bureaucracy, the police is mandated to arrest and punish those who disobey the law. If you disobey the law, Bobbies arrest you and take you to court (to the old Bailey) and the somber judges protect England’s interests by putting you to jail, in a merciless manner. England is perhaps the best governed country in the world.

England gave its system of governing to Nigeria. But Nigerians went missing from governing; actually, they listened to the call of the wild and permitted their country to descend into anarchy, a lawless hell.

Nigeria is hell on earth. Everything goes. A policeman stops you on the road and asks for bribes, and you feel like putting him out of his misery by clamping his “sorry ass” into jail. He is there to enforce the law, not destroy it. Apparently, those charged with executing the law in Nigeria construe their jobs as destroying the law.

We have talked about the British form of Government; since Nigeria has seen it fit to borrow from the American system of government, let us talk a bit how law is executed in America.

In America, the executive arm of government, called the presidency, is separated from the legislative arm of government. The president is elected separated. Initially, he was elected to serve four years and there was no term limits. But George Washington served only two terms and, apparently, was exhausted and decided not to serve another term. His self imposed two term limit became sort of the law, for subsequent presidents served only two terms, not because the constitution forbade more terms but because of following custom.

In 1932, Franklyn Delano Roosevelt was elected president. He ran for four times and was reelected each time. He died in office in 1945. (Who knows whether he might have served for life, president for life, aka king?)

The Republicans introduced a Bill and eventually amended the constitution and made two terms the limit on how long a person can serve in the office of the presidency, the elected king of America.

The Constitution of the United States carefully delineated what the president can or cannot do. It is Congress that is given the responsibility of making laws and raising money. It is the Supreme Court that is given the responsibility of adjudicating the laws of the land.

The president was given the responsibility of executing the laws made by Congress, and spending the money appropriated by Congress. The president was also made the commander in chief of the armed forces of America. He appoints ambassadors and Supreme Court members. Simply stated, the president executives the laws of the land, he is the chief executive officer of these United States of America.

In actual fact, the president is not only the chief executor but also the chief legislator and chef appropriator of money. Bills that eventually pass Congress and become law are mostly those that emanate from the executive branch of government. The typical Congress man may serve twenty years in the House and have not seen one Bill become law; his real job is to amend the Bills introduced by the president. As we saw last year, during the presidential election, John Kerry had been in Congress for twenty years and in all that time had not succeeded in getting a Bill become law. This is not for lack of trying, but because, in real politics, it is mostly the president’s Bill that stand the chance of becoming law.

The president is the chief legislator of the land. This is the ugly truth. But truth must be stated, any way.

The president is also the chief appropriator of funds for running the government. The president decides how much taxes he wants to levy on the people, or whether to reduce their taxes. His decision, if passed by Congress, becomes the law and people are levied appropriately. In effect, whereas the constitution says that only Congress shall appropriate money to run the government, in reality, the president does so.

The president appoints members of the Supreme Court. George Bush just appointed a member of his upper class, John Roberts, to become the chief justice of the land, and, as if that was not bad enough, has nominated his personal attorney, Harriet Meirs, to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court. This sixty year old woman has not written any legal opinion, assuming that she can write at all, and yet she is going to sit on the highest court of the land.

What is the point? It is that the president is a very powerful man, indeed. He makes most of the laws of the land, he adjudicates most of the laws through his judicial appointments and he executes the laws. That makes him king, the most powerful king in the world. Richard Nixon nearly turned that symbolic fact into reality when he tried to subvert the constitution and turned his office into an imperial presidency.

The American president is the most powerful man on earth. George Bush decides to remove Saddam Hussein from office, right or wrong, and it is done. If he decides to remove Obasanjo from office, the useless imp would be gone from Aso Rock tomorrow. All that Bush needs to do is give a signal to his CIA operatives in Nigeria and they go to work in Nigeria. Given Nigerians fickleness, their readiness to be bought, just give a few military officers a few dollars and off Obasanjo’s head goes.

This is the real world. Don’t cry for me, Argentina. Accept the world as it; it is a slaughter house and a bedlam. Like men, we must toughen our hearts and do what we have to do to survive in this impersonal world. Please do not go emotional on us. No sentimentalities accepted, certainly, not in governing men.

Nigeria accepted the American form of government and today the Nigerian president does what the American president does. He rules Nigeria like a king. The man even fancies himself ruling a wealthy polity, as the American king does, and bought himself a private plane to match the American king’s plane. Imagine the head of state of a banana republic jetting around the world in a Boeing jet while his country men make a dollar a day. That is how powerful Obasanjo fancies himself to be in his upside down world. The man couldn’t wait to industrialize his country before he begins living like a king, as America did, but dives right in and enjoys the amenities fit for a king.

This is very sad, very, very sad, indeed. A president that ought to be staying put in Nigeria, working his heart out trying to develop his country is all over the world masquerading as a very important president. See, the semi illiterate, high school drop out, soldier boy cannot even speak in the English language. He is a big, fat clown, a nothing pretending to be something.

You are somebody if your economy is thriving, not if you have fifty percent unemployment. Obasano belongs in jail not in the presidency.

In the new political dispensation, the president supposedly implements the laws and policies made by the National Assembly. In fact, he is the one whose Bills are likely to pass out from the National Assembly and become law. But since he has no vision, no clue as to what he wants to do for Nigeria, very little Bills ever come out of the National Assembly as the laws of the land.

I cannot remember any thing the man has done for the country. I honestly cannot lay my hand on a policy he has initiated and seen from inception to implementation. This manikin is a disgrace to humanity.

Oh, I can remember something that the man does well. He and his cronies at Abuja enacted laws making themselves the sole owners of all resources in the land. Since currently Nigeria’s government is financed for well over 90% by oil revenue, the man and his goon squad go to oil producing states, mostly in the south, and appropriate that oil and sell it to the West, mostly to America. They keep most of the oil money in America and Europe. Most of that money goes into their personal bank accounts.

(This man has not paved one single road in my state, Imo, not one single road has been paved since the 1960s. This is what we are dealing with here, do nothing apes in government.)

Whatever oil revenue they bring back to Nigeria, the president and the governors share among themselves. It is called federal revenue sharing. The president is supposed to use the federal share of that money to do federal work. The governors are supposed to use their states shares to do work in their states. But, in fact, what happens is that the governors go home and personalize a substantial part of their states shares, then share what is left of it with the chair persons of their various local government areas.

Each takes his share of the loot from the lootocracy and banks it overseas. Nothing is ever done to improve the lives of ordinary Nigerians. Schools are so run down that students have to bring their own desks and chairs to school and teachers have to buy their own chalk. Teachers sometimes go months without being paid. Of course money had been appropriated to pay them but the governors must first invest it and make some profits from the stock exchange before they bother paying those responsible for raising our next generation. Teachers are probably the most important persons in society, they help civilize us; they ought to be priority in payments. But we are talking hell on earth, Nigeria, not human society.

I will be very frank with you. I do not hide my feelings. I want the leaders of Nigeria arrested and shot. It is as simple as that. These people’s blood must be used to water Nigeria’s tree of liberty. There is no two ways of going about it. I want to see blood flow. I mean rivers of blood, not just a little blood. Joseph Stalin where are you when I need you most. I want at least a million Nigerian crooks jailed, now, not tomorrow.

Nigerian leaders are beyond contempt, they are despicable. They have brought us shame and must go. Instead of making us proud they make us ashamed to be Nigerians.

You see, first, the world thinks that black men are unintelligent. Indeed, some suspect that we are born with criminal genes and are all thieves. Our leaders insist on validating the speculations of white racists that black men are born with criminal genes in them. They turn themselves into criminals and all they do is steal and steal some more. They import lace clothes from India; they cannot even manufacture it in Nigeria, and bedeck their useless bodies in them. (I just feel like getting my hands on those bloated bodies of theirs).

These criminals are not even as good as dogs; at least dogs give their owners friendship. I generally do not want to be in the same room with them; they make me want to vomit. Literally, my stomach turns if I see a Nigerian governor. They are garbage, scoop them to the garbage dump, I say.

We need a revolution in Nigeria. Remember the French revolution of 1789? We need the reign of the Jacobeans to mercilessness go after these idiots. Robespierre where are you, we need you in Nigeria.

The idiots governing Nigerian do not even have the presence of mind to change their country’s name. Frederick Lugard’s girl friend gave them the name of Nigeria. A white woman named their country, Nigeria. What did she mean? Niger river area? What is Niger River derived from? Nigger. So properly put Nigeria means nigger area or niggerland. So why not change that insulting name to some thing more appropriate, say an African name. I do not care what African name we choose, as long as it is African. I have a suggestion. The Igbos call human beings Manu; they call land, Ala, so why not call Africa Alamanu, people’s land, a place where human beings live?

What is the matter with Africans any way? Why can’t they do such simple things as change their name? Why have names given to them by Europeans? Africa is given to them by the Romans, from Latin Aferi, black, hence Africa is land of black people. Must we always be defined by our color? Arabs call us Sudan, the land of black people for in Arabic el sud is black.

We call ourselves people, so our land should be people’s land, Alamanu. Actually, I do not care from what African tribe’s language we derive a name for Africa, as long as it is of African origin that is fine with me. But for Christ’s sake do not call me by A European name. I have always refused to be called a Nigerian. I say that I am from Alaigbo, which is from Alamanu. (Do you have better ideas? If so, let us hear them.)

The executive organ of government in Nigeria. What executive are we talking about? No one executives the law in Nigeria. As observed, the so-called executives gather and share the national treasury and go partying overseas. But in as much as this is a lecture on political science, let me grudgingly provide the executive structure in that woeful land called Nigeria.

At the central level is the president. He is supposed to be the American styled chief executive officer of the republic. But as we all know, he is almost always outside the country, in the West, doing only what God knows. We essentially do not have a president in reality. We have an absentee president.

Nigeria is currently divided into thirty six states. Every politician wants to turn his town into a state, so that he may qualify to share in the federal looted money. (Nigeria should not be more than twenty states, each state composed of a major ethnic group, Hausa state, Yoruba state, Igbo state, Edo state, Ijaw state, Efik state, Tivi state and so on. Each state should have 100% control of its resources and then pay taxes to the federal government, as is done in the United States of America. I have outlined my idea of a realistic federation for Nigeria in a different paper.)

The structure of government at the center is replicated at the periphery. Thus, at the state we have a legislature and a governor and state judiciary. The governor is the chief executive officer. He is supposed to implement the laws of the state and initiate policies and implement them. He does what the president does except that the president is in charge of foreign policy and is the commander in thief of the armed forces.

State governors neglect their jobs and for all intents and purposes are not the chief executives of their sates. I call them the chief thieving officers of their states. They belong to the guillotine rather than the governor’s mansions. I would not even dignify any of these rogues by mentioning their damned names. To me, they do not exist, except as garbage to be removed.

The states are divided into local government areas. The LGA are equivalent to American counties. As in America, they have county councils and county executives. They are called by different names but their functions are supposed to be the same. The council is the legislature; the chair person is the executive. The chair person is supposed to implement the laws and policies made by the council. He is supposed to head the county bureaucracy and use it to enforce the law. But, in fact, he uses the bureaucrats to destroy the laws of his county area.

Local government areas are composed of several towns. The towns are supposed to govern themselves through town councils and mayors (in big cities). Again, these people are not there to do their jobs but to enrich themselves and we do not need to bother with them.

There you have it. I have given you a brief summary of the present political structure of Nigeria. On paper, it is like what obtains in the United States of America, but in reality what exists in Nigeria is chaos and anarchy. The executives exist to pillage the country.

As I see it, our leaders are modern versions of African slave sellers. These people are like our ancestors who sold our brothers and sisters into slavery. Instead of physically selling us, they are doing so indirectly. They do so by not caring for us. They take the resources that could have gone into developing our world and use them on themselves; they cart our money to the West and leave the rest of us starving.

The Nigerian, in fact, the African, is the world’s most self centered human being alive. The African is callous beyond belief. He eats and sees his brothers starving and does not care. If there is such a thing as the devil it is an African. Africans are evil through and through. A people who sold their children into slavery are evil people. Indeed, instead of taking responsibility for their evil past they deny it and blame only the white man for his own evil part in slavery. True, it takes two to tango. Whites were available to buy slaves but we sold them the slaves, so both of us are equally implicated in the iniquitous trafficking in human misery.

I am really not interested in the white man. He will have to make peace with his maker. I am interested in the role played by my people, Africans. I want Africans to take responsibility for their part in the crime against humanity called slavery. It is only if they accept their criminal past, regret it, make amends for it, that they can change in the present and start caring for their people. As long as they remain like children and are always blaming others for their behaviors they aren’t going to change.

When I see a Nigerian, I see a big child, for I see a person who does not take responsibility for his behaviors. I see a person who always blames others for his fate. I see politicians who are no different from highway robbers robbing the country and yet having the audacity to blame the white man for their people’s poverty. I am not naïve; I know that the Whiteman is screwing us Africans. But what hurts most is being screwed by my own people.

We shall obviously deal with Europe, by and by. Europe must pay reparation for slavery. You cannot use someone’s labor to develop your land and pretend that no wrong was done. But reparation is not for Africans, for we are partners in the crime of slavery. Reparation is to be paid to black Americans. Africans, too, must pay reparations to black Americans. As I pointed out elsewhere, all black African countries, and I do not care how poor they are, must give 1% of their annual GDP to black Americans, for a generation, at least 35 years. This is the least we could do to appease the “gods”, our conscience, for our past criminal behaviors. Until we make this amend and ask our black American cousins to forgive us, I believe that Africa is going nowhere, developmentally. Just thinking about what our people did: sell our brothers sand sisters makes me ashamed to be an African.

CONCLUSION

The current political dispensation in Nigeria is based on the American model. If you have understated the American executive structure you would have understood how the system is supposed to work in Nigeria. But in Nigeria, it is not working out as planned because of Nigerians perversion of every thing that they lay their thieving hands on.

As we shall see when we discuss the bureaucracy, the Nigerian instrument for implementing public policy is a mix of British and American systems. Thus, in the various ministries we still have permanent secretaries and their subordinates running the show. In America, we do not have permanent secretaries, we have disposable secretaries, hence people who work hard to keep their jobs.

Nigeria needs total overhaul, not minor one, but total one. Until then, we must continue talking about what is wrong with Nigeria, or as Achebe put it in a salient pamphlet, “The trouble with Nigeria”.

The trouble with Nigeria is corruption. You cannot have a country of corrupt people having an efficient government. That is impossible. Criminals are not known for law and order, but for chaos and anarchy.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 16, 2005

Next lecture, #13, the Judiciary in Nigeria, October 18

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October 16, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #11: the Legislative Process in Nigeria

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- It is difficult to ascertain when legislatures came into being. I suppose that the difficulty lies in defining what is meant by legislature. In ancient Greece, the people of Athens gathered at the Acropolis, discussed matters affecting Athens and voted on them. Was such behavior legislative? In Igbo land, the entire male citizens above age fifteen gathered at the village square as Oha, Amala and discussed matters affecting the village and voted on what to do. Was such practice legislative? These were probably legislative behaviors except that they are not quite what we mean today when we think of formalized legislative process.

In 1066 AD, Norman Frenchmen invaded England at the famous battle of Hastings. The French defeated the English army and subsequently began French rule of England. The French Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror, became the King of England. He appointed his lieutenants the dukes, earls, counts, marquis etc of England. These folks, the Plantagenet, more or less, still constitute the English aristocracy in the present. Since the aristocracy in France itself are of German (Franks) and Scandinavian origin, the English aristocracy has Germanic origin.

The emergent kings of England had a tendency to claim a right to participate in French politics after all they came from France. If the monarchy in Paris was vacant, the English King, himself a French man, would vie for it. Failing to get it he could go to war with his cousins ruling France for the right to rule France. Thus England and France had numerous wars.

The English kings spent the treasury dry fighting wars with France. During one such war, the king of England, John, had less money to prosecute his foreign ambitions and called together his dukes, earls, counts etc to a council. His intention was to get them to support the war and puny up with the money to fight it. The Lords managed to get the king to sign a contract with them to henceforth consult them before he makes decisions involving spending of money. This was the famous Magna Carter of 1215. This date is deemed the origin of the English Parliament (the word parliament is French for council, those making legislative decision in a community).

Subsequently, the Lords met and advised their king on assorted array of issues. It came to pass that when the Lords met to advise the king, they were said to meet in Parliament. In the English world which, ip so facto, Nigeria is a part of, Parliament began in 1215?

The King did not have to accept the advice of the Lords but it was a good start to have a belief that the king needed others input in the making of laws and policies affecting his realm.

Subsequent developments in England led to the rise of the House of Commons. We shall not recount English history here but suffice it to say that the House arose to accommodate non-hereditary aristocrats who were by now becoming important in English economy. Gradually, the House of Commons displaced the House of Lords as the main policy making body in England.

Today, the House of Commons rules England. The House of Lords is essentially ceremonial and has no real power. The House of Commons makes decisions, send them to the House of Lords for input and may or may not accept the input of the House of Lords and sends its decisions to the Queen who is obligated to sign the decision into a parliamentary Act. In effect, the Queen is as ceremonial and nominal as the House of Lords.

England is now ruled by the people, not by the king and his Lords. The King and his Lords, apparently, are retained for historical purposes and otherwise are irrelevant in contemporary English politics. Indeed, the present British Prime Minister, Tony Blair has reformed the House of Lords and gotten rid of hereditary peers. Henceforth, only life peers, those the prime minister recommended and the queen honored can serve in the House of Lords; and do so during their lives but cannot pass such privileges to their children. Again, the House of Lords can only advice the House of Commons, but are not a co-policy making body with the House of Commons.

England established effective control of Nigeria in 1914. She bequeathed to Nigeria her parliamentary form of government.

The first republic of Nigeria was parliamentary. In understanding how the English made laws, we understand how laws were supposed to be made in the first era self governing Nigeria.

In the British Parliamentary system, elections are held. Many parties contest elections. At the end, votes are counted and whichever party wins the majority is invited by the Queen to form Her Majesty’s next Government. In England of today there are many parties but only two are relevant in real political discourse: the Labor party and the Conservative Party (we might also mention the Liberal party and the Social Democratic party). English governments are these days formed by either Labor or Tory (Conservatives).

The leader of the winning party becomes the Prime Minister. His lieutenants assume the posts that they had been shadow ministers of when they were in opposition.

The Prime Minister and his cabinet essentially rule England. Each minister is given a ministry to supervise. In real life, the permanent secretary of a ministry, a civil servant, rules his ministry, but in political terms, the “perm-sec” merely advises the political minister, and the later is supposed to be the one who makes decisions regarding his ministry. The minister, in turn, works with his fellow cabinet members and the prime minister in making the decisions affecting the Realm.

Legislation in the House of Common goes like this. The prime minister and his cabinet introduce most of the Bills that are discussed and eventually become law. But on paper, all members of Parliament are entitled to introduce their ideas of what policy they want enacted into law. The Bill is handed to the Speaker of the House. The Speaker gives it to the civil servant clerk of the House to read. It is then routed to a parliamentary committee where it is studied, debated and hearings held. Ultimately, amendments are made to the Bill. Then the committee votes on it and if it passes it is routed to the Full House for further debate. If the entire House approves it by a simple majority, it is sent to the House of Lords for further debate and voting. As noted, the opinion of the Lords is not binding, for if the Lords reject the Bill, the prime minister can still submit it to the Queen for her signature (assent) anyway. The Queen must sign the Bill, she has no choice in the matter for she does not rule England and cannot reject the people’s will. When she signs it, it becomes a Parliamentary Act, part of the statutory law of the Land.

(Unlike the United States that has a written constitution Britain does not have a written constitution so her laws are essentially an accumulation of parliamentary Acts and the rulings of judges. Britain is a Common Law country. I should say that unlike the United States, there is no Supreme Court in Britain. The highest court in the land is the Privy Council, a committee of the House of Lords. This council acts as the final court of appeal in England.)

The above is a brief summary of how laws are made in Britain. It seems very simple but the devil lies in the details. For our present purposes, the relevant point is that Nigeria inherited the British parliamentary democracy system and for the first six years of her independence attempted to practice that mode of making laws and public policies.

It appears that the first Nigerian republic learnt well from Britain and from all available evidence was initially well behaved. The then Nigerian MP, apparently, was as good as the English MP. Then Nigerians listened to the call of the jungle and embraced lawlessness.

In 1966, the military intervened in Nigerian politics and scattered the politicians who by then had redefined their function as that of being thieves stealing from Nigeria’s treasury rather than leaders managing the Nigerian economy. (I must confess that one of the greatest joys of my life is sitting in the galleries watching British Parliamentary debates, particularly watching cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister Answer questions. Their mastery of the English language and knowledge of facts and figures on every facet of British life is something that one wished that Nigerian leaders had. The typical Nigerian politician would not know such a simple data as how many students are in Nigeria secondary schools, how many passed the O. L last year etc. But the British Prime Minister, on the spot, would give you data on most aspects of British life. That is real governance.)

Nigeria was ruled by the military from 1966 to 1979. During that time, the military ruling council, composed of the head of state, the military upstart that took over the government, and his appointed cabinet made decisions that governed the entire country.

At the state level, the military governor, appointed by the head honcho military leader at the center, and his cabinet made decisions that governed the state.

In 1979, the then military leader, Olusegun Obasanjo decided to hand power to a civilian government. Before doing so, he wrote a spanking new constitution for Nigeria. He embraced the American presidential system of government and discarded the British parliamentary system.

Shehu Shagari was elected the first executive President of Nigeria and governed until 1984 when the military returned to power. The military, playing musical chairs among them selves, governed Nigeria until 1999. In 1999 the last military strong man Abdul Salami handed the government to a civilian elected president, a former military leader of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo.

The 1999 constitution bequeathed to the nation by Mr. Salami is American styled presidential system. It is doubtful that this constitution is legitimate? A constitution is a set of rules that the people accept as how they want to play their political game. It is legitimate only if the people themselves wrote it, or wrote it through their elected representatives. In as much as the 1999 constitution was not written by the people, even if it is good on paper, it does not represent the people’s wishes and, therefore, strictly speaking, is illegal. Shall we then say that the present political dispensation in Nigerian is illegal? In as much as they rule under a constitution that was not written by the people they are not ruling, as Jean Jacque Rousseau would say, by the people’s general will.

That not withstanding let us briefly see what this Yankee constitution demands of legislators in Nigeria.

Whereas in the British Parliament the three branches of government: legislative, executive and judicial are fused and are in Parliament, the American system of government separates the three branches of government.

Charles Montesquieu had recommended the separation of powers to avoid tyranny and the Americans listened to him and structured their government accordingly. Thus, the three branches of governing are separated and are in fact required to compete with each other; they are supposed to be in adversarial relationship. The idea is that their in-fighting would prevent one person from becoming too powerful, prevent tyranny and, that way protects democracy and liberty. The legislature is supposed to check the president , the president the legislature and the judiciary is supposed to make sure that all play by the rules of the game and punish whoever does not do so. (John Marshall, the first Chief Justice of America managed to extend the role of the judiciary by adding judicial review to it, even though the constitution did not specify that it do so.)

In America, Congress is parliament. Congress is composed of two houses, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Members of the lower House (Representatives) serve two years, members of the upper House (Senate) serve six years.

America is divided into 435 Congressional districts and each elects a Congressman to Congress every two years. The upper House, the Senate has each state electing two senators to the Senate every six years.

(As you know, there are differences in the population of American states and you wonder why large and small ones should have the same number oaf senators? California, the largest state in the union, has 35 million people. Alaska, although geographically the largest state in the country, has only 635,000 people. Yet each state has two Senators. Alaska has just one Congressman while California has 54. This is because representation in the lower house, more or less, is based on population; each representative represents approximately 500,000 Americans. Smaller states can have one representative, as Alaska and others do. The idea is to make the lower house democratic and the upper house aristocratic. The lower house represents the people and the upper house represents vested interests in the country. Moreover, the equal representation of the states in the Senate is a way of saying that all states are equal despite their population differences. It remains to be seen whether this structure is democratic or not, but we are not talking about American democracy but Nigerian’. We only referred to America for Nigeria has seen it fit to copy America’s system of democracy, a very problematic democracy itself. In America, the powerful and the rich rule the land. It costs millions of dollars to elect Congressman so that only the rich can run for political office. America is ruled by the rich, making what obtains in America either an aristocracy of money or Oligarchy, but strictly speaking, not a participatory democracy. Indeed, 50% of Americans don’t even bother going to the polls to vote on Election Day.)

In the American system, the House of Representative has 435 members, and the Senate has 100 members. Both Houses follow similar parliamentary procedures. The lower House is headed by the Speaker and the upper House is headed by a President (who is always the vice president of America…he is not always there in the Senate, so the senate generally has a president Pro Tem during its discussions; if there is a tie in votes, the vice president is shipped in to break the tie in favor of the president.)

Laws are made in America pretty much as they are made in Britain. Theoretically, each member of Congress can introduce a Bill but only Bills introduced by the administration and or powerful members of the House are likely to be acted on. A member writes a Bill, that is, writes on paper what he wants to see become law, or policy; he does so in the accepted legalistic format; there is a department of Congress that helps members draft their Bills in legal jargon. The Bill is handed to Mr. Speaker, if in the lower house, or to Mr. President, if in the upper house.

The Speaker/President reads the Bill to the House. Actually, his clerk reads it, usually to an empty House since members are not obligated to hear it. The Speaker/President then routes the Bill to the Committee that he thinks should handle the matter.

Congress has many Standing committees and Ad hoc committees. Standing committees tend to correspond with government departments, such as defense committee (overseeing defense matters), judiciary committee (supervising judicial matters, appropriation committee (supervising financial matters), international relations committee (supervising international relations matters etc). Ad hoc committees are set up to deal with temporary issues and end when the issues are resolved. Each committee is further divided into sub-committees, to deal with specific issues.

Each committee is composed of about 19 members. Generally, the committee is divided among the two parties, Republicans and Democrats. It is divided according to their representation in Congress. At the present, the Republicans have a slight edge over Democrats, so they generally have about two more members in each committee and have its powerful chair persons. Thus, there would be 11 republicans and 8 democrats in each committee, with the chair a republican.

(For decades, democrats ruled Congress before the Republicans took over control of it in the 1990s. It looks like the Republicans are going to be in control of Congress, Presidency and Judiciary for a long time to come. Why? It seems that the democrats have marginalized themselves; they have managed to alienate ordinary Americans by championing such absurd policies as homosexuality, abortion on demand, and other idiotic liberal courses that destroy the social fabric rather than strengthen the nation.)

A Bill comes to the committee and the committee chair decides when to hold public hearing on it. In the meantime, he sets his civil service staff to study it, particularly to cost it out; that is, show the financial aspect of the Bill, figure out what the proposed bill would cost the tax payers. If you want to give the entire country medical coverage, how much would it cost to do so and where would we obtain the funds to pay for it? Bureaucrats come up with these figures for the chair. It might take these bureaucrats many years to obtain the required information.

The chair then decides what to do with the Bill, and if he judges it frivolous, kills it by not wasting time on it by having public hearing on it. If he decides that it warrants public hearing, he sets a date for such hearing and publicizes it in Congressional reporter (journal).

All American citizens who wish to testify, for or against the bill, have the right to call and ask to come and testify. In reality, it is mostly interest groups that have the ability, information and other resources who come and testify.

On the scheduled day, folks come and testify for and against a Bill. The testimonies may last weeks, months or forever. When hearings are done, and amendments are made to reflect the consensus of the committee members desires…it is at the committee that real politics takes place, Bills are changed, amended to obtain other members support…Bills are bargained, trade offs made, and compromises reached, this is real politics stuff, not idealistic politics…. the chair then calls for vote.

If members approve the Bill by a simple majority, it goes to the Full House. But before the vote, party leaders, through their whips make sure that their party members on the committee vote as the party requires them to vote. Whereas each member has a right to vote independently, a member who ignores the party’s wishes may not be reelected come the next election. Indeed, the party leadership might marginalize him and get him out of the loop, the backdoors where real decisions are made, not in public hearings where members grandstand for the press and public.

If the Bill passes committee it goes back to the Speaker who decides when to have the full House debate it and after debates (here further amendments are made to the Bill) a vote is called for. Again, party leaders remind members how they are expected to vote on the Bill. If it passes the entire house and passes the other house (Bills are introduced in the two houses concurrently, if it originates in one house, the person introducing it must find some one in the other chamber to introduce it in the other house), the two leaders of Congress, the Speaker and President pro-tem, appoint a conference committee to reconcile whatever differences there are in the two Houses approved versions of the Bill. Then the final version is voted on again and approved by the two Houses.

I must add that the Senate has an added procedure that the lower house does not have, filibuster. Here, a Senator can talk for however long he wants to on an issue and thereby prevent bringing the Bill to a vote. He represents a sovereign state and no one can ask him to stop speaking if he decides to talk. He could bring a novel and read it aloud to the House. He may talk for days, weeks and years. Whenever the Bill is brought up, he takes the floor and talks his heart out and takes up the entire time scheduled for the Bill hence prevent voting on it.

Senate Procedural rules stipulate that a Bill will not be voted on until all senators have talked all they want on it. In the past, Southern Senators used to use this mechanism to kill voting on any civil rights Bill. That way, they did nothing to end segregation.

Frustrated, blacks bypassed Congress and went to the judiciary for help. The 1954 Supreme Court landmark ruling on Brown versus Topeka, Kansas School Board, in effect, ended segregation in schools. Congress had refused to integrate schools and the NAACP had to use the court system to change the Jim Crow laws of the land.

Using the Court in this manner is a double edged sword, for all kinds of radicals now use the Court to legislate their views into law, rather than have the people’s representatives do the law making. Thus, judicial activist judges in either the right or left use the Bench to make laws, rather than construe the constitution strictly. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe versus Wade made abortion legal even though a majority of Americans oppose abortion on demand; the courts are on the curve of making homosexuality legal.)

If the conference committee reconciles the differences in the Bill, it goes to the President to sign it. If he signs it, it becomes the law; if he refuses to sign it, veto it, it dies. If it is vetoed, Congress can revote on it and if two thirds vote for it, it overrides the President’s veto. No party has two-thirds majority in Congress so it is near impossible to override the president’s veto.

The above is pretty much how laws are made in America, be it at the national, state or local level. At the state level, the state legislature follows the same procedures and when a Bill is passed goes to the governor for his signature or veto. Governor Arnold Schwasenegger just vetoed a California Bill that would have made homosexuality legal in that state. At the county and city levels, the same process is followed. The County council is the legislative body and the County Executive is the executive arm of government. At the city level, the city council is the legislative body and the mayor is the executive. The same process is followed in making laws at the local level as at the state and central levels.

As we pointed out in our lecture on interest groups, laws in America are made by a confluence of parties including the President, Congressional committees (particularly the chairperson), top bureaucrats and interest groups. Some argue that in fact interest groups rule America. Socialist scholars tend to argue that America is ruled by elite of powerful interest groups. There is some merit to their views but as I pointed out before, it seems that America is a pluralistic democracy and many groups affect law and public policy.

What is self evident is that the rich and powerful have more access to influencing Congress than the poor. African Americans, who are generally poor, have little or no influence on legislation. (In Louisiana, the average black makes less than $1000 a month, an amount not even good enough to for renting a good apartment.) Blacks are poor and do not affect public policy. Until last year, there was not even one black man in the Senate. Barrack Osama, whose father is from Kenya, was elected Senator from Illinois.

It is simply self-evident that whites rule America and that blacks are marginalized. But this is real politics and one is not being sentimental about reality. It is for blacks to get their acts together and figure out a way to play an effective role in the governing of America. Consider that at present all Western Europeans can come to America without visas. But Africans are required to have visas, which they seldom obtain, to come to America. The result is that America preserves its European majority. Why not encourage more Africans to come to America and that way reduce the domination of whites over blacks? Politics is war by other means, so Africans must fight their war to make themselves given the same opportunities, as others are given. In war as in politics people do not get what they want without struggling for it.

MAKING LAWS IN NIGERIA

I took the trouble to describe how laws are made in Britain and America because Nigeria’s legislature is supposedly patterned after them. If you have understood what I described above, you have an idea of how laws are supposed to be made in Nigeria.

Let us recapitulate the legislative process in Nigeria. The 1999 constitution gives Nigeria a bicameral legislature: a lower house and an upper house, a National Assembly and a Senate. As in the U.S, the lower house is elected democratically (supposedly) and the Senate is elected on equal basis, each state sending five senators to Abuja.

The legislative process in both houses is supposed to work as in America. When the new political dispensation began, Nigerian legislators came to America to understudy how Congress works. They went home and, as expected, “Nigerianized” the new system. What does it mean to be a Nigerian?

To be a Nigerian is to have the genius for figuring out ways to steal. So the Nigerian National Assembly is nothing but an outfit for figuring out a way to rob the country.

Bills are introduced in the house and sent to the respective committees. The chair of each committee is supposed to study the Bill and have public hearings. Here, the real Nigerian rises to the occasion.

Those who introduced a Bill usually go to work and bribe the committee members…if not the Bill dies. Even government ministers, as testified by Mr. Fabian Osuji, the former minister of education, (my cousin, Fabian Osuji, the real Fabian Osuji, I hope that you read this lecture) have to bride the committee chairs to see policies introduced by their ministries voted on. If you have money to bribe someone your bill sees the light of day, voted on and passed.

If you have the money to bribe the executive branch of government, at least, those working there, if not the president himself (?) the president signs it into law. The chances are that the president would not be shown the Bill unless some one bribes the lower echelon persons working for him.

It takes bribery to even obtain supposedly free government forms. If so, you can only imagine how much it would cost for the minions and sycophants working for the president to bring a Bill to his attention.

Obasanjo claims to be fighting corruption. Fighting corruption indeed. Let us see. He jets around in a publicly funded plane. Does he refund the public when he uses that plane to fly to his home for pleasure? In America, the president can only use Air Force one for official business. If he uses it for personal business, such as fly to raise funds for his party, he must refund the public for the cost. If a public official uses a government vehicle for non-official purposes he must refund the public for such exercise.

In Nigerian, government ministers have publicly paid drivers drive them around for non-official business. In America, they would be fired from their jobs for such an act. Members of Congress do not have public vehicles assigned to them and fly commercial planes when they travel.

The point here is that on paper Nigeria has a system that is supposed to make laws in a democratic manner but that is not what happens in reality. As a master of fact, the National Assembly has a broken record. As I pointed out on the lecture in public policies, the Nigerian government is solving no problems. One cannot point to any serious policy by this government in six years in office. What exactly has Obasanjo and company done to benefit Nigeria?

Nigerian school leavers cannot obtain jobs; we have over 50% unemployment. If an American president has over 6% unemployment he is out of office. But it is only in Nigeria that folks are placed in office to do nothing. So what are Obasanjo and the members of the National Assembly doing for Nigeria other than “eating bribes” and growing fat bellies?

The outstanding educational system Nigerian inherited from Britain has fallen apart. Those of us who went to secondary school in the sixties and early seventies found American education a joke for our secondary school education was as good as the first two years of university education in America. But now, university graduates in Nigeria cannot even do undergraduate work in America. So why did the government permit our school system to fall apart.

Do we, in fact, have leaders in Nigeria or is it the case that what we have are animals governing Nigeria? One wonders. From what jungle did the leaders of Nigeria crawl out from? These people are an insult to the term human beings. They are beneath contempt. Here we have a situation where the rest of the world thinks that Africans are subhumans and are unintelligent and our leaders give them the ammunition to have that belief.

Look at the streets of Onitsha and Aba: garbage is on them. What fools govern these cities? Have they not heard about city administration, about how to tax citizens and their properties; obtain the funds to run city. The primary function of city administration is to provide water, electricity, collect and dispose garbage, pave roads and run elementary and secondary schools. So how come our city leaders are not doing these things. Are they men or animals? Ah, they see being elected to offices as opportunity to be very important persons. But very important doing what?

You are standing in line to buy food at a MacDonald restaurant and behind you is your Senator or Congressman or Governor or Mayor. He cannot jump the line. You sit down with him and chat about politics. You relate to him as you would any other person. You ask him what he has done for the state, city lately. He tells you why he should be elected to office: because of what he does for you and the state.

By contrast, in Nigeria we have semi-illiterate politicians masquerading as very important men and women. In fact, when you talk to them…and I have had the opportunity to talk to many of them…you feel like you are talking to fools. They practically know nothing about management of public affairs. All they seem to care for is being seem as very important persons and stealing from the public. The governors’ specialty is to take their state portion of federal revenue sharing and come to the West and buy multi million dollar mansions.

So what are these people, human beings or animals? They are despicable. (Notice that I do not even bother mentioning their names, why mention the nations of criminals. I know exactly who is in the National Assembly and who chairs what committee but why bother mentioning their names if they do not do their jobs? These creatures are not even worthy of footnotes in books on politics.)

In the current Nigerian dispensation, the legislative system at the national level is replicated at the state and local levels. Nigeria is divided into 36 states. These states are essentially dependent on the center for their survival. The center goes to oil producing states, takes their oil and the revenue from oil and shares it between the federal government and state governments. This way the state governments do not have to generate their own income, as they should. Every state government ought to be able to fund its activities by itself. That is the case in America.

In America where the federal government has money to extend to states, states compete for it. Grants. States and or businesses apply to get federal rant money to perform specific functions and if they succeed in getting it, account for how every penny of it is spent.

Nigerian states are not real states. Folks talk of wanting real federalism; how can you have true federalism if the states are dependent on the center for funding? Whoever pays the piper calls the tune. Obasanjo controls the so-called state governors. The later, in turn, control their local government chairs.

The states are divided into Local Government Areas, LGA (as in counties in America). Each LGA has its own council and chair person. The council is the legislative arm and the chair is the executive arm of government. The chair person obtains money from the Governor (who is supposed to share the money he obtains from the center with the local governments). The chair person proceeds to do with that money as he wants. No accountability is built into the system.

I have question: why do we need politicians, governors and chair persons of local governments handling money? In America, money is not handled by elected persons but by civil servants. Thus the state chief accountant could receive the state’s federal revenue share and work with his staff to manage it. As a civil servant he can be removed from office at any moment, so he has less leeway to mismanage the funds. At present, Governors have immunity from prosecution and cannot be prosecuted while in office. This way they steal all the money they want and nothing can be done about it. It is only in Nigeria that such an absurdity can happen.

The local government areas are composed of towns and cities. The towns and cities have their own town councils and leaders; these two obtain some money from the LGA and proceed to squander it in riotous living.

Nigeria is a country where the city council doesn’t accept that it is its function to pave city streets. So what is its function? Dress up in flowing robes and masquerade as ogas?

Last week, Governor Orji Kalu, that child in an adult’s body, was blaming the Federal government for the deplorable condition of the streets of Aba. As he sees it, it is for the Federal government to pave his city streets. If so, what exactly is his job, to visit America every week and stay at his several mansions? This man is an imbecile and is not worthy of being a dog catcher. But this brain dead nothing wants to become the next Nigerian president and plans to ride ethnic jingoism to that office. He claims that it is the Igbos turn to produce the next president of Nigeria and positions himself as the most qualified Igbo candidate. If the best that the Igbos can produce is this nincompoop, the Igbos are finished as a political force in Nigeria.

CONCLUSION

On paper, the legislative process in Nigeria is similar to what obtains in the United States of America. Understanding the legislative process in America enables one to understand how it is supposed to work in Nigeria hence I spent some time offering a summary of how this phenomenon works in America.

The legislative process is not working in Nigeria. One hopes that in time that Nigerians will gather and write their own constitution and make it work for them. I personally prefer the British parliamentary system. I wish that Nigeria has that system. But should Nigerians prefer to have a presidential system, as long as it is their choice, made freely by their delegates, so be it.

If Nigerians choose the American system of government, then let them make it work as it should. Let them make laws as they should.

No one in his right mind expects human beings to be perfect. We are not angels; there will always be corruption in the human polity. There is corruption every where in the world. There is corruption in America.

What realistic men expect is for corruption to be reduced to the absolute minimum. If, say, five percent of public officials in Nigeria are corrupt, we can manage to get things done despite them. But for the entirety of officials to be corrupt, well, nothing can be accomplished.

Nigeria is a pathetic country. It only seems to be doing okay because it obtains oil money. But when that source of revenue runs dirty, Nigeria will become another failed African state.

Imagine what would happen if 130 million Nigerians are starving. The world has never seen such suffering before. But Nigerians seem to insist on producing this catastrophe.

Nigerians destroy their country and run to the well ordered polities of America and Western Europe. Here, too, they embark on their nefarious criminal actives. Left alone, these lawless, wild men will destroy the honor system that makes America work.

In America, for example, you go to a newspaper stand, put in your money, fifty cents, and take one paper and nobody is watching you so you could take more than one. If it were in Nigeria, one person would take all the papers and go resale them. He would think that what he did is smart. It never occurs to him that if every person does what he did that chaos and anarchy would reign in the land.

In effect, Nigerians seem very unintelligent. May be they are less intelligent than other races, as white racists speculate? If these people were minimally intelligent, they would recognize the utility of making their house as orderly as it could be. If ones house is disordered, one is not likely to have peace of mind. But, like thoughtless children, Nigerians think that they can create disorder and have an orderly country, impossible.

Be that as it, we shall never give up on our mother hand. We will keep talking about the problems of Nigeria, though they seem intractable, until we fix them. We must fix them. We must eventually make our legislative body a real law making arm of government. Until then we do not have real legislatures in Nigeria.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 15, 2005

Next lecture, # 12, October 17, topic: the executive organ of Government in Nigeria.

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October 15, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #10: Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in Nigeria

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- Governments, ah governments, we love them, we hate them, don’t we? We set up governments over us. The very reasons why we set them up and the duties we charge them to perform for us make them very dangerous to our health.

Let us see, in the Bible, it was said that Israelites felt threatened by their neighbors and to organize themselves for war, to protect themselves, they needed a secular/military leader. Apparently, they could no longer trust their divine leader, God, to protect them in human affairs. God granted them their wish alright and had them appoint Saul as their first King.

Beware of what you ask for, for if you get it, you might regret it. In addition to helping the Jews defeat their enemies Saul turned around and oppressed the Jews. Saul became the Jews worst nightmare. We ask for governments but governments can be tyrannical hence our worst nightmares.

Let us try another track, this time, secular. Why do we have government? Logical positivists, empiricists who eschewed reference to God, responded to that question with several philosophical treatises, including those by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, Jean Jacque Rousseau and others. Whereas in the past someone might have said that we have governments because God gave them to us, in the age of Cartesian skepticism it was no longer permissible, certainly not acceptable to rationalize any thing with sacerdotal arguments; one must provide a rational, read, secular rationalizations.

So why do we need governments? English empiricists gave us answers. The most important of English political philosophers, Thomas Hobbes gave us enduring answers. Let us briefly review his mythology, his story of the origin of governments. Please take this story very seriously for it is what is behind the behavior of governments, at least, those in the Western world.

In the beginning, all stories of origin begin with “in the beginning”, don’t they? In the beginning, human beings lived in the state of nature. That means that they were like other wild animals. They were predatory, kind of like lions and tigers. They roamed around the Serengeti Veldt. (I am assuming that man began his journey on earth in Africa, as Paleontologists tells us.) These predatory creatures were each concerned with personal survival and could care less for others survival.

As Charles Darwin told us in his seminal book, The Origin of Species, and Herbert Spenser reinforced in his book, Ethics, all we do is struggle for survival. We forage for food in search of survival. (But survive for what? Why do we live? Ah my beloved epistemology is useful after all? But let us not go there; let us concentrate on secular reductionism for a while.)

Animals, human beings included, search for food to enable them survive. At some point they discovered that it made sense to take the food other animals acquired. Why work if you can take the food other animals worked for? Better still, since we must work for our food, why not kidnap some persons and use force to compel them to work for your survival? Why not have slaves and threaten to kill them should they disobey you and since they fear death and they would work for you and make it possible for you to survive and survive in luxury?

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October 13, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #9: Public Opinion and Public Policy in Nigeria

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- PUBLIC OPINION In a democracy, public policies are supposed to reflect public opinion. Public opinion is what the public thinks on a variety of issues and, more importantly, it is what the public thinks that their government should do on specific issues facing the polity.

What should the government do regarding mass transportation: should it build roads, railways, fund light rails, fund city buses, build canals, airports, seaports etc, or should it not do any of those?

What should the government do in regards to industrialization in Nigeria: should it play a key role in getting the nation industrialized or should it allow the nation to remain agriculture based, a rural economy? Assuming that it should encourage industrialization, should it engage in partnership with industrialists and establish industries or should it stay on the side and merely encourage private enterprises to be the ones establishing industries? Should the government merely create an atmosphere that is favorable to industries, such as have a policy of lower taxes, less rigorous environmental impact studies requirements, allow labor to be cheap, not implement quality work place requirements, thus permitting employers to work their labor hard, produce and not worry about the human cost of it all? What exactly should government do?

When people gather they talk about politics. Generally, they proffer their opinions on what they think that their governments ought to be doing on this or that issue. That is what public opinion is all about.

Newspapers write about the opinions of opinion makers in society. Mayors, governors, presidents, members of parliament and local council offer opinions and the mass media report on those opinions. Powerful citizens offer opinions and reporters write about them, too. In the opinion pages of newspapers, columnists write opinions on assorted issues before the polity.

Many people read these opinions and think about them. People discuss with their friends what they read in newspapers, what they heard on the radio, what they heard from the television news broadcasters and more recently what they read on the internet.

Opinion makers, be they public servants, powerful citizens, newspaper columnists etc influence public opinion. These opinion makers shape the ideas most people in a polity talk about and certainly determine the ones they consider to be important and warrant public action.

OPINION SURVEYS

How do we know what the people’s opinions on specific issues are? In the West, the primary method of finding out is conducting opinion polls. Specialized opinion gathering outfits like Gallop, Harris etc have developed surveying methodologies that they tell us are accurate in ascertaining what the people think on specific issues. Surveying, say 1500 people in a polity the size of Nigeria (120 million?), these polling companies tell us is sufficient to get an idea on what the entire nation thinks on specific issues.

These polling companies have criteria for selecting the persons whose opinions they seek, such as income level, education level, type of work they do, where they live, their gender and so on. The idea is that if you randomly select a certain number of people across the nation and ask them about their opinions on certain subjects that what those people say is representative of what the entire nation says on those issues.

Let us say that the question is whether Nigeria should have a presidential system of government (like the United States of America) or a parliamentary system of government (like Britain). Asking a carefully selected 1500 group of Nigerians this question is said able to tell us where most Nigerians stand on the issue. If 65% of the respondents to the Poll say that Nigeria should revert to British like Parliamentary system of government and 25% say that Nigeria should retain the current America style presidential government, the conductors of such a survey tell us that their result represents what Nigerians think on the subject. They tell us that they choose their samples, those they ask questions, so carefully that the result they obtain is statistically, plus or minus a few standard deviation points, accurate.

These opinion polling firms seem to accurately predict where people stand on political candidates. Generally, those they predict will win elections tend to do so, often by the percentage of votes they predict, with the margin of error being less than five points. Simply stated, there seems credible evidence that opinion surveying firms have figured out a way to find out what the public opinion on specified issues are. Their results seem valid and reliable. They seem to meet validity and reliability standards, critical standards in statistics.

On the other hand, are those who question the trustworthiness of these firms and their predictions? These people point out that the manner in which questions are asked affect the responses obtained. Indeed, some go as far as to say that the opinion firms lead their respondents on and get them to respond as they want them to respond on specific issues. The same question can be asked in many ways and the manner in which it is asked determines how folks answer it.

Consider these two questions. Should Nigerians modernize their agriculture by employing tractors, chemical fertilizers and other chemical products on their farms? High tech equipments like tractors and certain chemical materials tend to erode tropical soils, so much so that the quality of agricultural yield become less than when farmed in the old traditional low tech method.

Providing the additional information on the effects of high tech methods in agriculture may influence people’s response to the question on whether Nigeria should go modern on farming. If the people are given negative information on a proposed issue, they are likely going to express negative opinion on that issue than if they are given positive information on the issue. If you merely say that there is a correlation between using tractors on farms and high yields (which is generally true during the first few years in tropical countries) and then proceed to ask the question on whether agriculture should be mechanized, the chances are that the respondents would be more favorable in their responses. (Advocates of sustainable growth, who tend to be liberals, tend to discourage mechanization of agriculture in third world countries, whereas conservative thinkers tend to want the market to decide, if the market favors mechanization so is it.)

The point is that there are those who criticize polling companies and assert that they tend to skew questions in such a manner that pollsters obtain the results that they want to obtain.

There is no doubt that there are inherent problems with polling opinions. We can always improve our methodologies over any activities human beings engage in. However, the current issue is public opinion. It is a fact that individuals do have different opinions on issues and that in a democracy that the preponderance of public opinion ought to determine public policy.

However, one must observe that if the majority of the people are ignorant of facts their majority opinion, if used as the basis for propagating certain public policies, amounts to foolish public policy. For example, in the 1950s, the majority of Southern (USA) white persons opposed integration. If their opinions were used as determiner of racist public policies, America would experience international opprobrium and suffer. Thus, sometimes, public opinion should not always be the criterion for public policy.

Statesmen, sometimes, must overrule the opinion of their constituents and implement public policies that, in their judgments, are more prudent for the polity to have. John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke addressed these issues in their various writings on the problems of democracy. Majority rule, if the majority is uninformed, can be dangerous. Sometimes the minority has the correct view on issues calling for public policy. But then again who determines what the truth is? This is dangerous ground, so leaders must walk very carefully here: balancing public opinion and the leaders’ conception of the truth.

PUBLIC POLICIES

Public policies are what governments do. They include the laws made by the governments, the economic policies engaged by the government or their lack of. Everything done by a government is public policy. If the Nigerian government decides to provide electricity to the entire country, to give pipe borne water to all villages and towns in the country, to provide publicly paid medical services to all Nigerians, to provide publicly paid education, from primary school to secondary school, technical school and university, those are public policies.

Public policies have costs attached to them. Where will the money to fund them come from? Would they come from taxes? Are there enough taxation bases to collect sufficient money from the people to fund those policies? If not, will the revenue to fund them come from petroleum products, revenue from corporate taxes, revenue from sales taxes, and revenue from income taxes?

And when implemented, are these policies working as they were designed to work? If you embark on providing publicly funded medical services to all Nigerians, how is the program working out in real life? Are all Nigerians provided with medical services whenever they want it or do they have to wait for years to have simple surgeries? How responsive are medical personnel? Are hospitals more like hospices where people go to die rather than recover from illnesses? Do doctors and nurses provide high quality services to their patients?

How about the costs of these services? Are there built in mechanisms to make sure that costs are within budgets, avoiding cost over runs? There is a tendency for public services to not be mindful of costs and what would have cost a few dollars ends up costing several dollars. Government workers tend to take their sweet time in doing something. What could be done in a few hours’ takes days to be done by civil (in Nigeria, evil) servants.

We know that whereas it takes only one person to change a light bulb in his home that it takes ten bureaucrats to change the same light bulb for the public. Ten bureaucrats are rather an expensive deal compared to one person doing the same amount of work.

Policy studies monitor the operation and costs of public policies, providing the public with information on how public policies are working out in the real world; whether they are accomplishing what they were designed to accomplish and how, and if not, what can be done to correct them. If publicly funded medical services are eating up most of the national budget, what can be done to reduce the costs? Where are cost cutting appropriate?

Or may be free enterprise delivery of medical services is the most effective way to provide medical services in a polity? If so, how about the poor and others who do not have money to buy private medical insurance?

There are no simple answers and solutions to human issues. Indeed, whatever solutions we come up with eventually create their own problems. There are no permanent solutions to human problems. As they say, death is probably the only permanent solution to our problems. Until we die and rest in peace we shall always have problems to deal with, and such is life.

Embracing problems and seeing them as opportunities to do our best is a positive way of living. Desiring to live a life devoid of problems is a wish to live a dull life. First of all, it is impossible to have such a problem free existence. It is a waste of time and energy to desire such a life; it is escapist from life as we know it on planet earth. We shall always have problems and must always seek ways to solve them.

Thus, society continues to design one policy after another to deal with its infinite problems. There is never going to be a time when society would run out of problems and out of policies. Policy making is an ongoing part of the political process. Indeed, governments exist to solve problems through public policies. The legislature, the presidency and the judiciary, even the bureaucracy are always making new policies.

Whereas in the West opinion surveys are conducted trying to ascertain what the people think on issues, the practice is absent from Nigeria. The Nigerian government does not have the resources to find out what the people are thinking on specific issues. This may seem bad but when we realize that what really needs done in Nigeria are known to every Nigerian, it seems a waste of time and energy conducting frivolous surveys trying to ascertain what the people want. Opinion surveys after all are recent phenomenon in the West.

In the past, the leaders in the West somehow figured out what their people wanted and did it without conducting opinion polls. (Bill Clinton reportedly over relied on focus groups and polling to find out what the people wanted and did it; this sometimes lead to lack of initiating trail blazing, bold public policies by his administration.) Past American leaders did not conduct opinion polls to recognize that their people needed rural electrification and water. In the 1930s America provided rural America with electricity and water.

An argument can be made that if opinion surveys were made in those days that since some people would have opposed rural electrification that the government may not have engaged in the policy of rural electrification. See, today, opinion surveys are often used to avoid giving people publicly funded medical services. These surveys tell us that publicly funded medical services would be too costly, or that it would be too bureaucratic, or too socialistic and so on. In the meantime, 45 million Americans have no medical insurance coverage, an outrage to human decency. If Americans had to conduct opinion surveys perhaps they would not have initiated free K through 12 schooling in the land. At least, 33% of the population, free enterprise diehards, would have opposed such an educational policy because, to them, it is socialistic, or because liberal teachers would be given the opportunity to teach students, their children, liberal ideas and in the process destroy the nation’s moral fabric.

The point is that we do not always have to wait to hear from all people to know what ought to be done. Good leaders sometimes have to bite the bullet and risk rejection in the next election and just go ahead and do what in their judgments are good for their nation.

In the context of Nigeria every body desires electricity, water, medical health, and schooling. We do not need fancy opinion surveys to confirm the obvious. If a Nigerian leader does not know that his people need those things and sets about converting their wishes to public policy, he is not a leader.

We Nigerians know what we want from our governments. If that is the case then the politicians can engage in public policies that provide us with what we desire. They do not need sophist opinion surveying firms in New York to tell them what everybody already knows to be the people’s wishes. The leaders should just do it and do it now. Do what? Give all the people electricity, water, medical insurance, free education at all levels, subsidized public transportation, and then leave the free market to take care of the rest of the economy. (This is called mixed economy, not socialism or laissez faire economy.)

Let public administration professors, accountants and think tank egg heads have something to do studying the costs of those public policies and helping society operate them efficiently.

Most Nigerians want paved roads, paved streets, affordable housing, good jobs, good food, good clothing and so on. Public policies ought to be made to provide the people with what they need without haggling over how we come by the information on what the people need. We know what we need. It is not difficult to know about basic human needs, where differences lie are in figuring out extraneous needs.

So what is the government in Nigeria doing to meet the people’s needs? How responsive are the governments in Nigeria to public opinion? The answer is that the governments are not at all responsive to the peoples needs. We do not have governments that see themselves as existing to meet the people’s needs.

The process of making public policies in Nigeria is as in everywhere else. Politicians are elected to office. They are supposed to know what their people want.

Leaders are supposed to articulate the aspirations of those they lead and find ways to satisfy them.

The people do not elect politicians to go be their bosses, to sit at Abuja doing nothing. Nigerian politicians, in fact, seem to believe that they are placed in political offices to be godlike and have the people adore them, even as they do nothing for the people. Being in office makes these people feel like very important persons, VIPs, and that is just about all they seek public offices for. Apparently, Nigerian politicians do not construe their jobs as from which they serve the people.

Ordinarily, people elect members of parliament to go enact public policies. Parliaments are supposed to be arenas where members articulate their policy preferences and introduce Bills on what policies they want funded and debate with their fellow parliamentarians, bargain with them and make compromises and the result is some policies that all members can live with. But the Nigerian National Assembly can go for years without actually passing any Bill that substantially creates a new policy that serves the people’s interests. Their first order of business is to pass resolutions giving themselves millions of dollars to spend.

The presidency is supposed to represent the entire country. As such, he is supposed to look after the entire nation’s interests. He is expected to introduce Bills in the National Assembly that serves the entire nation, not just certain constituencies, as members of the House are expected to do. The question then is what policies have Obasanjo introduced and seen through the National Assembly and implemented? What exactly is the man doing for the nation?

Has the life of the average Nigerian improved in the six years that Obasanjo is president? Is that even a right question to ask, as folks do in America, where they evaluate what their presidents have done for them? Is it not part of the job of the Nigerian President to create jobs for Nigerians, and, if so, how come unemployment in Nigeria is over 50%? Did Nigerians elect Obasanjo to merely dress in flowing robes, jet around the world and be a perpetual tourist?

Does the man have a job description other than to be the oga pata pata of Nigeria? Does he, in fact, have something to do in a typical eight hour work day? We know that he is politically astute and figures out a way to disgrace his opponents, but that is not all there is to governing, is it? Do we need a manikin in Aso Rock and that is all? An expensive manikin indeed.

The judiciary is supposed to be an independent umpire, a watch dog making sure that every one plays by the rules of the game. The rules are embodied in the country’s constitution, such as it is, and the statutory laws of the land. Judges are supposed to make sure that we all obey the laws of the land and punish those who choose not to play by the rules.

If a law is bad, a citizen’s sole right is fighting to change it, but as long as it is still the law of the land he must obey it. (This is the whole point of Socrates drinking hemlock and dying, even though the law under which he was killed was unjust; he spoke out against that unjust law but obeyed it to death, anyway. See Plato’s writings on Socrates death.)

Failing to obey the laws of the land one must go to jail. There should be no exception to this fact. The rule of law is what keeps society going. Without laws we are wild animals and might as well live in the jungle. Without draconian obedience of the law, chaos and anarchy replace civilization.

How are Nigerian judges umpiring the laws, making sure that all play by the rules and that the game is fair and that those who disobey the rules are punished? How many crooked politicians have the law put away? If the law is applied correctly, just about all Nigerian politicians would be in jail.

How about the judges themselves? They too seem to have a price for their services. A few dollars and they rule in favor of the briber and against the person without money to bribe them. Is this how courts and judges are supposed to behave in any polity, democratic or not?

At the state and local levels of governing in Nigeria, the governors, legislatures and courts are supposed to formulate policies and use their bureaucracies to implement them. State legislatures do exist alright and seem to be doing something: sharing the little money the governors give to them, among themselves. State governors, too, seem to be doing something: they go to Abuja, collect their state’s share of federal revenue and take much of that money right out of the country? They take it overseas and buy mansions. These governors spend as much time overseas as they spend in their states.

State judges are no different from other politicians; they, too, are part of the racket and look away as folks loot the treasury.

Local governments are supposed to have councils and chair persons. The councils are supposed to act as legislatures making laws (ordinances) and initiating policies that positively benefit the local council area. The chair of the council is supposed to be the executive arm of the council. The char is supposed to work with the local government’s bureaucracy in implementing the policies made by his council.

The local courts are supposed to make sure that all play by the rules of the game. On paper, Nigeria has an excellent constitution and governmental structure. But what are the personnel in that structure actually doing?

At the town and city levels we have similar structures, city council and council chair and municipal courts (magistrate courts). They are supposed to perform city and town governance.

Are Nigerian towns governed? Take a trip to Aba or Onitsha and notice what the devil has wrought: the roads have not been paved and or maintained since the 1960s; trash is dumped on the streets. What we have here is not government by caring human beings but government by anti social personalities.

MENTAL HEALTH POLICY

Nigeria does not have a well delineated policy towards mental health issues. Nigeria inherited some mental health service delivery structure from her colonial master, Britain, and that structure is what still obtains in Nigeria. That structure consists of a few asylums for the chronically mentally ill. A few mentally ill persons are locked up in these facilities but by far most mentally ill persons roam the streets and byways of Nigeria without medical intervention. No one does anything to help these folks.

Traditionally, no one knew what to do with the mentally ill. Indeed, no one even understood the nature of mental illness. Some said that the mentally ill were possessed by the devil. In the Bible, Jesus was said to have cast off evil spirits from the mentally ill.

In the 19th century Psychiatry, as a profession, came into being and society began to study the mentally ill. For a while, Sigmund Freud diverted attention from the serious study of psychosis with his voodoo conjectures. Emil Kraepelin, on the other hand, focused on the biology of mental illness. He speculated that mental disorder may have something to do with the brain chemistry of the persons involved.

Recent studies have correlated psychosis with brain chemistry. Neuroscientists tell us that in schizophrenia that there is elevated dopamine, that in mania that there is elevated norepinephrine, that in depression there is low serotonin and that in anxiety disorders that there is low GABA.

Whether these chemical imbalances cause mental disorders or not is debatable. What is self evident is that certain types of thinking can affect the individual’s biochemical status. If one is grandiose in ones thinking ones dopamine, a neurotransmitter, tends to be elevated, if one is negative in ones thinking ones brain serotonin tends to be lowered and if one is fearful in ones thinking ones excitatory neurochemicals like adrenalin tends to be elevated whereas ones inhibitory neurochemicals like GABA tends to be lowered. In other words, there are biochemical correlates with mental disorders but whether the disorders are caused by preexisting biochemical imbalances or that the biochemical imbalances are the result of disordered thinking is not proven yet.

In the 19th century Western world, the mentally ill were housed in psychiatric hospitals, State hospitals, they were called. All sorts’ experimentations were done on these unfortunate people, including administration of electro shuck treatment on the clinically depressed. Nothing seemed to work and the mentally ill languished at state hospitals.

In 1952, by accident, it was discovered that Thorazine had some calming effect on schizophrenics. Psychiatrists began using that medication in treating schizophrenics. No one knows exactly how it works but it does seem to reduce the gross symptoms of schizophrenia. (Schizophrenia is characterized by the presence of hallucinations and delusions. Hallucinations can occur in any and all of the five senses: auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory and feeling; delusions: believing what is not true as true). Eventually other medications were synthesized, such as Haldol, Prolixine, Navene, Milaril etc. These medications have terrible side effects, so researchers kept searching for cure for psychosis. Lithium was found useful in reducing the gross symptoms of mania…euphoria, poor judgment etc. Lithium has been joined by other medications, such as Depakote, Tegretol etc.

Because of the reduction in the symptoms of psychosis made possible by anti psychotic medications, anti mania medication and anti depression medications, there was no longer any need to keep psychotics at asylums for the rest of their lives. Thus, they were deinstitutionalized. They were given medications and discharged from hospitals.

But they were not really cured for the residual symptoms of psychosis still remain in them. They still hear voices and see what other people do not see. Moreover, they could not hold down jobs, do not get along with other people and tend to live isolated lives.

They are unable to support themselves and some of them roamed the streets and or lived at homeless shelters or wound up in jails. It is said that a third of those in jails and prisons have some kind of mental disorder.

In 1963, President Kennedy and Congress passed the community mental health centers Act. Communities were given federal funds to start out-patient treatment centers where the chronically mentally ill could come and receive their medications and have them monitored. Some of their medications require close physician monitoring. Lithium, for example, requires that the manic person who takes it have his blood drawn regularly and tested for lithium levels in it. Too much lithium in the body apparently damages the kidney and liver.

Community mental health centers eventually were funded to add other components to their array of treatment regime, such as provide day activities for the mentally ill, and provide recreational programs for them. Eventually alcohol and drug treatment was added to these centers.

The mentally ill tend to be unable to take good care of themselves and needed to be case managed, so case management as a profession came into being.

Since these people were unable to work and make money to pay for their own housing, they had to be given supported housing. All told, a lot is done to help the mentally ill and to maintain them in the community. It is cost saving to have them in the community rather than to keep them at expensive state hospitals.

Society has not yet found a cure for mental disorder but until it does so the palliative measures taken to help these people seem all that can be done at the present.

What is being done to help the mentally ill in Nigeria? There is no comprehensive mental health policy in Nigeria.

In a few big cities, the asylums built by the colonial administration exist in dilapidated condition. If even government ministries are housed in run down shacks you can only imagine what the housing of the mentally ill looks like: gross. Nevertheless, a few city mentally ill persons are consigned to these dreadful asylums. They are not properly treated. Who cares for them?

If the country does not care for its productive normal citizens how can it care for its unproductive mentally ill citizens? Uncared for, psychotics leave their asylums and wander our city streets. The streets of our cities are filled with insane persons talking to themselves while eating from garbage cans.

Is it possible to have a comprehensive mental health policy in Nigeria? Of course the answer is affirmative. All we have to do is understudy what other countries do. We can study how Americans, Britons, Germans and Frenchmen approach this problem and modify their policies to suit our impoverished situation. Clearly, Nigeria is too poor to provide the type of sophisticated services provided the mentally ill in North America. Some of the more recent neuroleptic medications like Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seraqual are so expensive that they could break the budget if Nigeria were to give them to her schizophrenics.

It is simply impossible to provide the type of comprehensive treatment offered the mentally ill in America, to the mentally ill in Africa. But there is something we can do. We can, at least, have a well thought out mental health intervention policy that specifies what we are going to do for the mentally ill.

There are all kinds of mental illness. There is psychosis, the type treated by psychiatrists. Then there is neurosis, the type found in most human beings. Indeed, there are personality disorders. As many observers have pointed out, there seems a higher level of antisocial personality disordered persons in Nigeria.

Whereas, world wide about two percent of the population tends to engage in criminal activities, clearly a large proportion of Nigerians engage in criminal activities.

What are our corrupt leaders but anti social personalities without social conscience, persons with no sense of guilt and shame; persons who hurt their fellow country men by stealing their moneys and seem to enjoy doing so?

I would imagine that upwards of ten percent of Nigerians have antisocial personality disorders. (There are other types of personality disorders such as paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, avoidant, obsessive-compulsive, dependent, passive aggressive etc). This is not the place to talk about these mental disorders.

What is critical is that we could have a policy on how to help people with mental health issues. Perhaps, we could establish community clinics and train psychologists to provide psychotherapy to the normal neurotic citizen? Perhaps these clinics could do didactic training, teach people to behave ethically and morally? Perhaps doing so could reduce Nigerians tendency to criminal activities? I do not know what we should do, but we ought to do something before the entire country becomes composed of criminals and the rest of the world writes us off as criminals.

Indeed some racist psychologists already suspect that there is such a thing as criminal genes and that it exists at a higher level in Africans and that it accounts for Africans tendency to criminality.

(This view is not true. At any rate, if there is such a thing as criminal genes, it exists in white folks, after all, they were the ones who stole on a grand scale; they killed Indians and took over their lands and enslaved Africans. Let us not divert our attention by talking about the frivolities of genetic influence on human behavior. Human beings are affected by their environment and do make choices; sometimes they learn to make bad choices and develop a culture of making bad choices. Criminals make bad choices; we can teach them to make pro-social choices and those that insist on being anti social should be jailed.)

There ought to be a comprehensive mental health policy in Nigeria that delineates how to approach not only the seriously mentally ill but also the mildly mentally ill, the personality disordered Nigerians. Doing nothing, as is currently the case, is not the best option to pursue. We cannot not do something to reduce the incredible high level of anti social behaviors among Nigerians.

CONCLUSION

Public opinion has to do with what the people think on the issues of their times, particularly what they would like to see become public policies.

Methodologies exist, albeit that they are imperfect, for ascertaining what public opinion on key social issues is.

Public policy is translation of public opinion into action. Governments listen to the people, hear them, know what they want done and go about doing them. Public policies actualize the people’s opinions, their aspirations, what they would like to see done in their world.

Once public policies are legislated into law the bureaucracy is charged with implementing them. The bureaucracy is supposed to be an impersonal mechanism for carrying out public policies and enforcing the laws of the land.

Public policy experts, mainly college professors, and experts at think tanks, study whether these policies are properly carried out or not, and make recommendations on how to correct faulty actions plans that do not seem to be working out well.

In the context of Nigeria, folks seldom bother finding out what the people desire and even if they found out seldom implement them into public policies.

Who does not know that all Nigerians want to go for a full day without interruption of their electricity? Sound public policy should have figured out a way to fix that problem. But in Nigeria, folks talk about problems and talk and talk and talk them to death but do nothing to fix them. Indeed, attempts to fix problems become opportunities for financial self enrichment and for other corrupt practices. The result is that the half-hearted efforts at public policy making in Nigeria exacerbate the problems.

Nigeria is a mad house, bedlam, pure and simple. The leaders have gone bananas, bunkers; there is no other generous way of putting it.

Does this mean that all hope is lost? If there is no hope one would not bother writing this material. There is always a glimmer of hope, even in the worst situation. Hope springs eternal in the human heart. When hope dies the man dies.

We must keep harping away at what needs to be done to fix Nigeria’s problems, even if our voices are not listened to. By and by, a generation of Nigerians will rise to the challenge and decide to listen to their people’s opinions and translate them into public policies that serve the polity well.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 13

Lecture 10, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in Nigeria, October 14

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October 12, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #8: The Media in Nigeria's Politics

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- The word media is plural; it encompasses many outlets of news. The media includes print media, such as newspapers, magazines and journals; electronic media, such as radio, television, internet, faxes and so on. Information and news can be spread through any medium that connects people.

In pre-modern societies people talked to one another and told stories about what was going on in their lives and in their world; such interpersonal communication was a medium for sharing information. In ancient Greece, books and plays were written and used to communicate ideas from writers to readers. That was print media at work.

In renaissance Europe people began writing books and plays, a rediscovery of Greek style writing and plays, and that too became a form of spreading information. Later on, the novel was born and folks wrote fictional novels as a way of telling stories to each other about what was going on in their lives and world. A novel is a disguised way to talk about ones character and human character issues in general and to show how individuals’ characters play roles in their life outcomes. Much later, when mass literacy was becoming a reality, newspapers and magazines came into being.

Newspapers became a medium through which writers talked about what was going on in their town and world. People were educated regarding current events particularly political issues exercising people’s minds. Newspapers made it possible for people to be informed about what is going on in their world and as such became less isolated from their neighbors. Newspapers informed people about who were the political big wigs in their town, who had the most pull and influenced political decisions at city council.

Of course, newspapers also informed their readers about who were the richest in town and gave people tit-bits about the lifestyles of the rich, powerful and famous. People like to read salacious materials about the rich and famous. They are titillated by reading every goings on in the lives of the powerful. Apparently people derive vicarious sense of power and fame by reading about the powerful.

People always want to read about the powerful; they want to read about their presidents, governors, mayors (and in eras gone by, their kings, dukes, earls, counts, marquis and other princelings). It seems part of human nature to want to know how the rich and powerful live and try to imitate them. American Tabloids wrote obsessively about the late Princess Diana. Her picture was practically on the cover of most ladies magazines, week after week. Apparently many women in America wanted to look like her. They imitated her hair style and clothing. If she starved (from some psychological disorder, anorexia-bulimia) they went on diet to look like Di. Even though the girl was a secondary school drop out, rich and well educated American women strove to be like her; she was their role model. That is how much power influences people’s behavior. Power and wealth rules the world, not wisdom.

When newspapers first came into being it was not unusual for the rich and powerful to take control of them and use them to slander their enemies. The wealthy funded papers to espouse their particular political views and desecrate their enemies political views. Thus, there were conservative and liberal rags, each unabashedly espousing its ideas of how human beings ought to be and behave and how governments ought to be. This era was called the era of yellow journalism. Newspapers did not make any effort to be objective and state the truth as they saw it but, instead, approached the truth in such a manner that their sponsors views were served.

It took a lot of struggle for newspapers to train their writers, now called reporters, to merely report what they observe in the human polity rather than editorialize and espouse a certain position on issues. This attempt at objectivity was helped a lot when schools of journalism and mass communication came into being in the early part of the twentieth century. These schools trained reporters in a certain style of writing, writing that merely described what was observed without trying to suit any particular point of view.

When reporters began to report news, without adding their individual opinions to them, the public began to see them as professionals and relied on what they wrote as independent source of information that they could count on. Journalists kind of became respected professionals. (Nevertheless, they invariably were among the lowest paid persons in the world. A few well known journalists make the big bucks, but the run of the mill reporter seldom makes enough income to buy his own house or support a family decently.)

Alas reporters’ touted objectivity is seldom true. Beneath the mask of objective reporting is a world view that the newspaper is espousing. For example, most of the big city newspapers in America’s East Coast, The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe etc claim to be merely reporting news as they saw them happen. But an impartial analysis of their content shows that they tend to be tilted towards leftist views, liberal views. For one thing, they are owned by liberals and cannot help but serve the liberal social agenda of their owners. Of course, some papers tilt towards conservative views, some even right wing. One can think of Washington Times.

Most American newspapers, however, tend to be in the middle, reporting on what the political establishment approves. By and large that is the liberal-conservative continuum. Liberalism and conservatism are the mainstream political ideologies in America; they are accepted as official ideologies. Any paper that steers within this liberal-conservative ideological spectrum will survive in America, but if a paper deviates from the norm and publishes, say, socialist or fascist views it is simply killed off by the powers that be, or is so marginalized that one must seek it out to see it.

Those in America who want to read about non-mainstream ideas, from so-called alternative media, search for them. Sometimes one has to read foreign papers to see things differently from the way that the establishmentarian press wants one to see them. The American mainstream press literally brainwashes Americans to see the world in a certain manner. The average American is so programmed by his society’s educational system and media that he, more or less, spouts the same ideas, even uses the same phrases and clauses in his speech. Americans are so uniformized that if you have talked to one you pretty much have talked to others. In fact, they even use the same words and speak in the same sentences. They are boring. (I am out of here, am off to where I can, at least, talk to people with minds of their own and can talk in individuated sentences, one tells ones self. Go to France and listen to real individuated opinions. Americans talk of their so-called individualism but are the most socially conformists people in the world.)

One has to listen to foreign radio stations to hear how other people interpret the same news given liberal-conservative slant in America.

And to prevent Americans from listening to foreign news and being exposed to alternative points of views, most of the radio stations in America are either FM or AM stations; they only reach a small radios; only short wave ratios have far reach. One literally has to search for places where one can buy radios with short wave in America. Most of the locally produced radios are AM/FM. These were designed to give listeners access to local news but not international news. This way Americans are kept unaware of what is going on in the rest of the world.

Americans are the world’s most isolated and parochial people. Even little boys in African villages know more about the larger world than city dwelling American kids. The political system did this on purpose, to get the people to think only in American terms and to support Americana at all costs, to not have international points of views. The more ignorant the people are kept, the easier it is to control them by the powers that be.

This policy in the short term is clever but in the long run is self defeating. Americans ignorance means that very soon they would not be able to compete with others in an increasingly intertwined global market place. As it is, they are unable to compete with Asian well schooled kids.

It is difficult to tell when the first newspapers came into being, but it must be after the discovery of Guttenberg’s printing press in the fifteenth century. We know for certain that by the 1600s newspapers were published in American colonies, Boston, for example.

Newspapers came to Nigeria with the advent of the British in Nigeria. The British occupied Lagos in 1851, primarily to remove the reigning Oba, Kosoko who, apparently, was incorrigible and adamant in selling his own people into slavery. With the settlement of the British at Lagos and the advent of British type education in Nigeria, a crop of Nigerians learned to read and write in English. By the late nineteenth century the first newspapers were published at Lagos.

During the anti colonial era, newspapers became a weapon for fighting the colonial administration. The incipient anti colonialists of 1920s Lagos, headed by Herbert Macaulay printed papers in which they criticized the activities of the colonial administration that they found odious. These papers gave vent to the petty bourgeois desired for the colonial Administration to include them in governing. The Lagos elite, mostly composed of returned slaves and a handful of educated Yorubas, wanted the governor general to appoint a few of them to serve in the legislative council, at least, as ex officio members.

These papers also documented the activities of the educated and, should we say, rich Lagosians of the era. Actually, those papers, like most African American newspapers of that era, even of today, tended to be of tabloid quality, giving information about the activities of the socialites of Lagos; writing about who married whom, who had a great party and who attended such parties and what fancy clothing they wore. A man who had a steady job at the post office, a clerk, was a big African man. Thus, when we talk about rich Africans we are talking about the petty bourgeoisie.

While still in graduate school at Lincoln University, one of the negro universities in America, Nnamdi Azikiwe recognized the power of the media as a weapon for setting national agenda and correcting wrongs and made a decision to go study journalism at Columbia University. Instead of pursuing the PhD in political science, he satisfied himself with a master’s degree in that subject and went on to obtain a one year training in journalism and returned to Africa.

First Zik settled at Accra, Ghana where some rich Ghanaians bought him a printing place and set him up as a newspaper editor. When his association with his Ghanaian benefactor soured, he returned to Nigeria and settled at Lagos. He raised enough money to start his own newspaper and published what he wanted without being beholden to the dictates of his Ghanaian benefactor…the later had not wanted him to publish anti colonial issues for those got them into trouble with the colonial authorities, but instead to concentrate on tabloid matters. Azikiwe started his own publishing business and later had newspapers all over Southern Nigeria.

Azikiwe’s newspaper empire largely contributed to gaining independence for Nigeria. This is because Zik’s newspapers documented colonial shenanigans and made them known to the emergent African literate class. His readers read about and understood how they were been shafted by their white masters. A white boy with only secondary school education, for example, would be given a high placed job within the colonial order, whereas a Nigerian with university degree would go begging for a job. When educated Nigerians eventually obtain jobs, it is to serve the secondary school educated white boy.

Zik’s flagship newspaper, West African Pilot became the anti colonial mouthpiece of the era. It was a must read paper for those seriously engaged in fighting colonialists. The colonial establishment had its own sponsored papers, such as the Lagos Daily Times. The Daily Times wrote status quo stories, stories that did not rock the political establishment. Reporters working for the daily times had more prestige for they were part of the Lagos colonial elite. Zik’s papers wrote stories that aroused African emotions and got them to resolve to fight colonialism.

Zik’s newspaper writings propelled him into the political lime light and made him a household name in Nigeria. He became his people’s champion and began making public speeches. It was reported that hundreds of people packed auditoriums where the man spoke. Indeed, people looked forward to go listen to him speak. His speeches cheered the oppressed African crowd of the 1940s Lagos. His speeches were probably the only thing that made the depressed Africans of his era feel cheerful; they enjoyed hearing him rant and rave against what white men did to them. He was their undisputed hero, the champion of their course. African manhood was slighted by colonialists and Zik helped African folks to rehabilitate their humiliated egos; he made Nigerians proud to be human beings once again. (A good leader must make his people feel proud to be alive. He does so by emphasizing their good aspects and stressing their enemies bad sides. Objective writings that try to show ones peoples faults would never get one their vote. These lectures, for example, would never buy me the peoples respect for I am pointing out their short comings. As it were, I am making the people feel bad about themselves. A leader, on the other hand, must make the people feel good about themselves. Let us just say that there are several types of leadership functions and that one is serving one such function. Ones goal is not to insult the people but to correct their unacceptable behaviors. This is or should be the role of the scholar. Nevertheless, one is acutely aware of a depressing aspect to ones writing; talking about what people did wrong is depressing.)

The people adored Zik for here he was, an African talking back to the then feared white man. Colonized Africans were impressed with their alleged inferiority. Africans were taught not to look the white man in the face and never to talk back to him. They were cowed by their colonial masters. But here was one of them looking the white men in the face and telling them what he felt about them, telling them to get lost. He seemed so bold and courageous that some of his African contemporaries, in fact, thought that he had magical powers. Some even thought that he was born by the gods for certainly a mere mortal African could not look the colonial governor general in the face and ask him to go jump into the lagoon and get away with such audacity! Rumor, in fact, spread that the man had magical spells that no white man could kill him.

Zik probably encouraged all these primitive views of his prowess, it served his purpose, to mobilize the masses and give them courage.

In his autobiography, My Odyssey, Zik made his birth at Zungeru, Northern Nigeria seem auspicious, giving the gullible reader the impression that he was special, and had godlike birth. He, apparently, read his Homer’s “Odyssey” too well (and Illiad) hence built himself up along Greek hero proportions. In Greek mythology, the hero, such as Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon and Paris, was always born through the intervention of the gods and are on earth to play heroic roles. Zik, in that boyish, extraverted nature of his, apparently took such fairy tales too seriously and made his life out as such. Of course, he was a mere mortal and had no supernatural powers. When he irritated the colonial authorities enough they tried to arrest him and he fled to the East and laid low for a while. Emissaries were sent to placate the colonial authorities so that they would not throw him into jail when he returned to Lagos.

The man was one of the few anti colonialists who did not spend the obligatory time in jail. Doing time in prison was a badge of honor for anti colonialists. Zik not doing time in jail as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Nelson Mandela did, actually makes some folks to question his anti colonial credentials. They wonder whether the man publicly talked tough but behind the scenes begged the colonial authorities for mercy?

Zik liked to write and talk in grandiloquent language; he employed big, big words, sometimes inappropriate words, but no matter. Whether Zik understood the English language is in question, but that notwithstanding, his people admired him for talking in the colonial master’s language and seeming to do so eloquently. Zikism became synonymous with talking in big words that may or may not be in English dictionaries.

Radio was discovered in the 1920s but did not really come to Nigeria until the 1940s. When it did come to Nigeria, radio was primarily limited to the few urban areas of the country, such as Lagos, Enugu, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Kaduna, Kano etc. Radio became a means of spreading news. The news was read in the colonial master’s language, English, and then translated to the three main languages of Nigeria: Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo.

Not many Nigerians could buy radios. Until the 1960s the average Nigerian could not afford to buy radios so radio was really a luxury for the few educated Nigerians who at that time was less than 1% of the population.

Television became a reality in the West in the 1940s. By the 1950s most American households had black and white Television. By the early 1960s television came to Nigeria, mostly to a few urban areas such as Lagos, Enugu, Kaduna and Ibadan. Only a few, the middle class could afford television. The Middle class in Nigeria through the 1970s was less than 5% of the population so less than five percent of the population had TVs. These days just about every urban dweller in Nigeria can afford Television.

Fax machines became available to the masses in the 1980s. Fax machines had being available for American military and hospitals’ use many years before they became available to the general public. People could now fax their letters and documents to people all over the world. This became a means of spreading news.

However, to use fax, one must have access to telephones. Whereas third world countries like Nigeria have had telephones right from the time the technology was discovered by Alexander Bell in the late 1800s, unfortunately, very few Nigerians lave access to phones. As I write, very few of them have access to land phones.

The discovery of mobile phones has helped matters a lot, for it helped bypass the difficult task of laying telephone wires all over the country. Now all a country has to do is pay the advanced countries to help it put a satellite into space/orbit and it coordinates its mobile phone system.

These days, most Nigerian secondary school leavers have access to mobile phones. This would be about ten percent of the population. Mobile technology has improved communication in Nigeria. Folks can now share news almost instantaneously among themselves. A person at Lagos can now directly communicate with a person at Owerri and not have to wait on the incompetent Nigerian postal service to deliver his mails.

(Most letters sent through the Nigerian postal service are opened by the criminals that work for that outfit, are rifled through, in search of possible enclosed money to steal and or documents that they could use in their nefarious criminal activities. Emails and mobile phones have reduced business for Nigeria’s postal crooks.)

In the 1970s Personal Computers became a reality in North America. By the 1980s most middle class Americans were buying computers. Today, most American middle class households have several computers at home.

By the 1990s most Americans had access to the internet. The Internet was originally developed for the United States army in 1967 but was not put to civilian use until the late 1980s. Today, the world wide web is probably the quickest means of spreading news. Most people in the West have computers and email addresses and can pretty much communicate with each other. The world wide web has made communication among people very easy. You sit and type a letter and mail it and a few minutes later the person you sent it to read it. The Internet is probably the quickest and best way of spreading information. (For example, you are probably reading this material in the Internet?)

The media is a means of spreading news and opinions on subjects in the public domain. The media is a powerful means of educating people and persuading them to think in a certain manner. As such, whoever controls the media, more or less, controls what the people think about.

Whoever controls the media has the power to set the political agenda for public discourse. In America, white middle class persons control the media. White folks own most of the newspapers, magazines, radios, televisions, internet etc in America. This means that whatever these folks permit to be printed or to have air time is given public forum, and what they do not permit access to their media is not heard of. In effect, white folks decide what the general American public thinks and talks about. They decide what social issues are given prominent attention and which ones are ignored.

By and large, issues that concern African Americans are ignored by the American media. You can read the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times and not read about black American issues. You can read Time magazine, Newsweek, US News and World Report and other weekly magazines and not read about 12% of the population, African Americans. You can listen to radios in America and not hear about issues relating to blacks. You can watch American television and not hear about issues relating to black Americans. Indeed, you are most likely to see only white faces on American television even though one out of every ten American is black.

Academia is no exception. American academic journals publish whatever serves white American interests. Try submitting articles on black issues and or African issues to these journals and they would not publish them. Years ago, I tried to publish something at Columbia University Business Journal. In that article, I argued that management in contemporary Africa is equivalent to what obtained during American’s revolution and compared African leaders with American leaders. The editor of this so-called academic journal went ballistic, asking me why I dared compare “primitive Africans” with, what to him were sophisticated founding fathers of America. He could not see how Azikiwe is equivalent to Thomas Jefferson. How can an African be like a white man, he probably thought. Of course, he did not publish the article.

America’s gate keepers, be it in academic publishing or in mass publishing serenade princess America and ignore issues black. (This idiocy will soon come to hunt them, for the average American is so uneducated, so ignorant of what is happening all over the world that it comes as a surprise to him that other countries are doing quiet well; the idiots will wake up one day and find that the rest of the world has long surpassed them.)

America’s media completely shuts out issues African and African America. Black people’s agenda seldom make it to national news and, as such, do not get discussed when public policy is discussed. Public opinion determines public policy and if black public opinion so ignored policies favoring blacks are ignored.

The media is very powerful in influencing public opinion. Therefore whoever controls the media controls public opinion.

Nnamdi Azikiwe must be given credit for realizing the importance of the media as a weapon in correcting the colonialist generated fear of white men and women. The colonial masters made themselves seem superior to Africans and propagated that nonsensical view in their colonies. Indeed, even the colonialists themselves believed in that propaganda. The typical white boy serving in colonial Africa actually had the delusion that he was superior to Africans. He was in fact psychotic for he believed in what is not true as true.

To feel superior or inferior to any human being is to have delusional disorder. Mental health lies in accepting the truth of our human equality. All people are the same and equal, and if you believe differently you are insane. If you feel superior (delusion/psychosis) or inferior (neurosis) to other people, you belong in a nut house. Your false feelings and beliefs about the human reality needs to be corrected. Correct thinking accepts all people as the same and equal.

GOVERNMENTS ALWAYS TRY TO CONTROL THE MEDIA

Control of the media is sought by governments. This behavior is not restricted to any particular form of government. Both capitalists and communists do so. By and large, all governments try to influence, if not out rightly control, the media.

If newspapers print what the government considers seditious, the paper’s editors are generally invited for a chat with national security agencies. They are subtly warned and intimidated to refrain from saying anything against the government.

In America the intimidation of the media is done subtly. Most American newspapers and magazines are funded through advertisement. If a paper writes anti American stuff, it can kiss goodbye to advertising. Thus communist papers seldom have any one advertising in them. This practice means that communist and socialist papers do not have the money to publish on a large scale. At best, they manage to publish a few pages of material that they cannot even circulate widely, since the national distributors would not touch them. America is a velvet dictatorship and uses refined means to keep undesired opinions out of the public domain. America rewards and encourages those opinions that support it.

Other political systems out rightly censor opinion that is not their system supportive. In communist Russia, the leaders simply owned all the newspapers, radio stations and Television outlets and decided what is permitted publication and viewing. The communist monoliths controlled what the people read.

Of course some bold souls defied the powers that were in Russia and managed to publish contrary opinions. These dissidents were generally hounded, picked up and jailed and the keys to their jail cells thrown away. In fact many of them were tortured. In Soviet Russia, they even tried using their psychiatrists to drive dissidents insane and failing to succeed, ship them off to the Gulag in Siberia and work them to untimely death.

In contemporary China, the powers that be censor not only newspapers but even the internet. They monitor folks emails and clamp those expressing anti government views into jail.

In America, the government has authority to selectively monitor people’s emails. Those who oppose the political system are known to the system’s gatekeepers and are generally marginalized. Oppose Citadel America and kiss goodbye to obtaining good jobs in it. America is not crude and will not arrest and throw you in jail but will get you where it thinks that it counts most, in your pocket book. America is probably the most totalitarian, authoritarian and dictatorial political system in the world. It just goes about its social control in a subtle manner.

I should observe that America has dug its grave. It mostly permits the nonsense that supports it and keeps out objective information. The system is mediocre beyond belief. American high school graduates are virtual illiterates. American college graduates are practically not much better. What America does well is technology, its graduates tend to be technology savvy but intellectually underdeveloped. Try talking to an American medical doctor who makes over a $100, 000 a year, and you would be shocked at the poverty of his general knowledge; it is like you are talking to an elementary school kid. This is sad, very sad. In a misguided effort to protect itself, the system deliberately keeps its people ignorant. It does not want to produce smart people who could question its misguided policies.

Emergent third world countries are even more pernicious in their efforts to control the media. Most African leaders tried to own their countries newspapers, radios and televisions. These crude dictators would, in fact, send their goons squared to go beat up newspaper men who dared to publish opinions critical of them. The death of Dele Giwa, the editor of Nigeria’s New swatch is still unresolved. Who murdered Dele? The goons squad of the military dictatorate?

A few months ago, the wife of the president of Kenya, Mrs. Mwai Kibaki, went to a newspaper room and destroyed every thing in sight. She and her goons physically roughed up reporters they believed wrote against her husband’s corrupt government. Kibaki came to power promising to clean out corruption in Kenya but, if anything, corruption has skyrocketed during his watch. He promised to write a new constituent for the country within the first 100 days of his administration; several years later, there is not a new constitution; the draft he has managed to write makes him more dictatorial than his predecessors.

In Nigeria the government controls the media in several ways. The Abubaka Tafawa Belewa government set up its own newspaper, The Nigerian Morning Post, to combat the strident writings of West African Pilot.

The Nigerian government owned radio and television stations. Radio and television simply spouted what the ministry of miss-information wanted said.

The various military governments were crude and simply beat up journalists who wrote negative news about them. In time, reporters learnt to look the other way as the criminals in government looted the government treasury. Indeed, it is reported that some reporters were in the government’s pay roll. Such reporters had nothing better to do with their time than write serenades of the powers that be. They covered every Owanbe party at Lagos and did not write about the sufferings in the shanty towns of Lagos..

The present Obasanjo civilian administration in Nigeria seems to have left news papers alone. The current administration simply ignore the views of the media. Obasanjo and crew simply do whatever they want to do and let news papers cry their hearts out and ignore them. The man is so tough skinned that he does not seem to loose sleep from anyone talking about the corruption in his government.

Apparently, Obasanjo discovered that there is corruption in Nigeria when he went oversees begging for debt relief and his creditors insisted that he do something about Nigerians rampart corruption. The man every now and then croaks about his government’s commitment to anti corruption.

If the man was committed to anti corruption how come no high government official has been jailed, or better still, executed? It takes the British to arrest a money laundering Bayelsa state governor.

And who does not know that Nigerian governors convert the money they obtain from Federal revenue sharing into their own private moneys? These criminals have mansions all over the world while their country men live in poverty. If Obasanjo is not corrupt, I can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. For starters, it is corruption for Obasanjo to live at luxurious Also Rock while the average Nigerian lives in a shack.

The mass media in Nigeria somehow manages to tell the world what is going on in Nigeria. One must raise ones hat for them. The quality of Nigerian news papers sometimes rivals, even surpasses the quality of American newspapers. I find the Guardian, Champion, This Day, Vanguard and other Nigerian newspapers as good as any in the world.

The quality of writing in these papers are comparable to any in the world. The media is one area where Nigerians are as good as their counterparts in other parts of the world.

CONCLUSION

The media is a means of spreading information in a polity. It is a means of expressing opinions on issues of the day. It is a means of trying to influence public opinion and public policies. Access to the media is a good way to influence what the political system does.

In America, the media is controlled by white folks. Moreover, American media is very expensive. To advertise in the New York times sets one back thousands of dollars. Poor folks do not have that kind of money hence are shut out of the media. The media mostly propagates what serves the system’s interests, this means white folk’s interests.

In Nigeria, the media is relatively free but it is ignored by the powers that be. The rulers of Nigeria leave newspaper men to do their thing and ignore them. As they say, who needs to pay attention to what starving reporters write about? Ignore them and pay attention to the other power players in the polity.

Share wealth with those capable of kicking you out of office and ignore what riff raffs in the media say. This is the situation in Nigeria. The media is relatively free to say whatever it likes but it seldom has effect on public policy. The big boys of Aso Rock simply do whatever they want to do and the public be damned.

The Nigerian Media is doing an outstanding job. It is one bright spot in the darkness that is Nigeria. It is one of the few spots in Nigeria where men and women of courage seem to exist. Reporters write negative materials about the country’s leaders and sometimes risk arrest and beating, even been killed. These reporters are real human beings, they are not afraid of death. They are fully alive for a human being is fully alive only when he is not afraid to speak the truth even if it means being harassed and killed.

The Nigerian media is to be commended for doing an outstanding job. Unfortunately, the media’s marvelous job does not seem able to change Nigeria. Nigeria’s problems are too entrenched for good journalists alone to make a positive dint in them.

There is no cause for despair. The good work of journalists is laying the foundation for a renascent Nigeria, a Nigeria where there is the rule of law and men and women serve common interest rather than only self interest.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 12, 2005

Lecture 9, Public Opinion and Public Policy in Nigeria, October 13

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October 11, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #7: Political Parties and Elections in Nigeria

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph. D. (Seatle, Washington) --- This lecture will briefly define the nature of political parties and elections. It will first do so in a generic sense and later look at the phenomenon in Nigeria.

HISTORY

Political parties are a recent phenomenon. We have not always had them. They came into being in the eighteenth century. In fact, at the time of the American revolution political parties were only coming into being. Indeed, back then they were called political factions and many astute politicians cautioned against them for they were deemed divisive. In his parting address to the nation, George Washington, the first President of the United States of America warned the nation against the dangers posed by the emerging political factions. During his term in office two distinct factions emerged in American politics: the Federalist and the Anti federalists.

The Federalists supported the new constitution enacted in 1787 and wanted the center to have more power than the periphery, the states, whereas the Anti Federalists were more in favor of the confederation that had obtained in the land before the Philadelphia convention that produced the new Federal constitution. The Anti Federalists wanted more power for the states and less power for the central government. To the present, American politics is still characterized by this division: those wishing for more centralized power and those seeking more state rights.

Alexander Hamilton, George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, was a federalist whereas Thomas Jefferson, his secretary of state, was an Anti federalist. These two factions: federalists and Anti federalists became the foundations for America’s two party system. The Anti Federalists evolved into today’s Democratic party, the oldest party in the country. The Federalists first evolved into what was called the Whig party and in the 1850s transmuted into today’s Republican party.

(For what it is worth, I would like to mention that it was the Republican party, the Party of Abraham Lincoln, that fought for the emancipation of Negroes in America. Black Americans were initially members of the Republican party until Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s great realignment of the parties in the 1930s. Black Americans then flocked to the Democratic Party. It should also be mentioned that it was the Republican Party that gave women the vote in 1920. On says all these because some misguided folks tend to associate the Republican party with retrogressive measures. It was the Democratic party that fought to maintain segregation in America. As late as the 1960s, Southern Democrats, who largely controlled Congress, refused to pass any civil rights Bill that was introduced in Congress. The chair persons of Congress’ committees tended to be southern white men and these were, by and large, racists and segregationists and opposed civil rights measures. It was northern Republics who, in fact, struggled to liberate blacks from the chains of oppression. One says all these because one is often baffled why blacks flock to the Democratic party, to liberals who take their votes for granted and seldom do any thing substantial for them. The Republican party stands for free enterprise economic system and for individual self help and one does not see any thing particularly wrong with that stance. The liberals in the Democratic party present themselves as the champions of poor people but, by and large, keep poor people down and perpetuate their dependency by giving them monetary handouts, and not making them to go train for skills and work and earn their own livings by themselves, as adults should. It is actually dehumanizing for any adult human being to be fed by other adults. That is unnatural. In nature animals survive by struggling to earn their living and those who fail to work hard simply die out.)

President Andrew Jackson in the 1820s made the Democratic party what it is today. As already noted, the Republican party came into being in the 1850s as the anti slavery and pro industrialization party. Back then, the Democrats not only supported slavery but were against industrialization; they wanted to keep America rural. Being rural means having slaves working in white plantations. The Democratic party of Douglas fought to keep slavery alive in America. (See Douglass famous debates with Lincoln.)

While two parties were evolving in the United States, two parties were also evolving in the motherland of Americans, Britain. The English Whig party transmuted into today’s Conservative party and the other party of note was the Liberal party (of Lloyd George). After the first world war, the Liberal party died a slow death (it still exists in skeleton form) and was replaced by the party of labor unions, today’s Labor party. Ramsey MacDonald became the first Labor Prime Minister of Britain in the 1930s.

Today, Britain essentially has two key political parties: the Conservative party and Labor party. The other parties, the Liberals and the Social Democrats are, for all intents and purposes, fringe parties. As already noted, the United States also has two parties, Republicans and Democrats. It seems that those with roots in England, Anglo Saxon people, tend to be comfortable with two political parties. Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Anglo Saxon countries, each has two main political parties. There must be something in the culture of England and her upshots that make for two political parties?

In continental Europe, the situation is reversed: many political parties exist. France and Italy have so many political parties that one does not even know where to begin counting them.

Some observers have suggested that the proportional representation system found in continental Europe account for the existence of multiple political parties there. In proportion representation, all political parties vie for election and after counting the votes cast, parties are allotted seats in the Parliament (French for council) according to their percentage of votes. Any party that has, at least, five percent of the votes is assigned some seats in the Parliament. This way many parties get to be represented in Parliament.

In the Anglo Saxon system, on the other hand, what exists is single constituencies where the winner takes all. In such a system, only powerful parties are able to win majorities in most districts hence are represented in Parliament.

I am not sure that this factor alone accounts for the existence of two parties in the Anglo Saxon countries. One suspects that there is a cultural variable at work in the phenomenon. Anglo Saxons value stability; two party systems make for stable polity than the divisive multiple party systems of Europe; France and Italy are almost always weak polities. They are so weak that the well organized German army generally walks through them. In 1870 Bismarck marched to Paris. In 1940 Hitler marched to Paris, and when he liked it, marched into Rome to support his threatened junior partner in the Axis alliance, Mussolini.

Let us just say that the Anglo Saxon world has a history of two parties. In the United States of America several efforts have been made to start third parties but they always fizzled out; the polity keeps marching along with its traditional two political factions.

By the twentieth century, the concept of democracy was accepted in much of the civilized world and party politics became the accepted mode of electing governments. As noted, this has not always been so. In the past there were no democratic governments anywhere and, as such, there was no need for electing folks into office through political factions. In the present world, most people accept the idea of democracy and political parties are the order of the day.

THE PURPOSE OF POLITICAL PARTIES

Political parties exist for one reason and one reason only: to compete at elections. They hope to win at elections and be given the opportunity to govern their polities. Political parties are organizations that exist to compete for an opportunity to govern their polities.

STRONG AND WEAK POLITICAL PARTIES

There are many types of political parties. There are the strong European political parties and the weak American political parties. In Europe, political parties are organized like government bureaucracies, with central offices, bureaucrats running them and with branches across the country. There is a central committee that manages this centralized organization with a party chair person at its head. Power and authority emanates from the center and travels downwards to the periphery. The bosses at the central office pass rules and those rules are implemented throughout the party structure in the country.

Every few years, the party has a national convention and elects its leaders. These leaders take their positions at the national office, usually at the nation’s capital and control the party’s activities. The leaders of the party, if in opposition, in the case of Britain act as the shadow cabinet. Here, each member of the central committee is assigned a functional area of government to monitor and collectively they become what is called a shadow cabinet: shadow minister of finance, trade, foreign affairs etc. When the party wins an election the shadow ministers essentially become the ministers of the ministries they had been shadowing. The chairman of the party becomes the prime minister (or chancellor in Germany).

The European political parties are structured along Max Weber’s bureaucratic lines, that is, hierarchical, with those at the top telling those at the bottom what to do; and following strict procedural rules. Orders come from the top and travel the organizational chart downwards to the lowest step on the party ladder. Indeed, the folks at the central office even determine who runs for elections in all the constituencies in the country. They select party members they consider party stalwarts, those who have worked for the party and run them for elections.

To be noticed for leadership position in European political parties, individuals must first apply to join political parties. When they join (some applicants may be rejected), they are expected to work for the party and prove their loyalty to it. Those who seem to have leadership skills are then selected by party leaders for leadership training and subsequently ran in elections. Simply stated, the national headquarters of European parties control these party.

The American party structure is very different from the European party structure. The national committee of each of the two parties in America are mere over sight committees and really do not have much power. To the extent that they have any power at all it is to raise funds for the party. The national committee of each political party is composed of the state chair persons of each party. The state committee, in turn is composed of county chair persons of the party. The county committee is composed of precinct chair persons of the party. Most of these committee persons work as volunteers and are not paid. Moreover, they are not full time party workers, they keep their day jobs in whatever professions they are in and on ad hoc bases help out with party activities. In order words, they are seldom professional politicians.

Americans do not have to join any political party and carry party member ship cards. All that they are required to do is vote for one party or the other. To run for election on behalf of a party, one is not selected by the party leadership. (In the real world, those approved by the party leadership, such as there is, tend to be the ones who run for office; at any rate, those who tend to be supported by the parties with party resources, including money and publicity tend to win elections.)

The individual simply declares himself a candidate for a particular party and competes in that party’s primary election. Several persons compete in the party primary election. Whoever won the largest vote becomes the candidate of that party. For example, during the biannual elections for Congress, each party holds a primary (say in March). Several candidates declare themselves as Democratic or as Republican. These candidates duke it out and an election is held. They usually campaign with their own monies or monies they individually raised. Let us say that ten candidates campaigned in the Democratic party, whichever one wins the largest vote becomes the party’s candidate to face the other party’s candidate during the general (national) election, usually on the first Tuesday of November.

The two candidates campaign and whichever one wins the election represents the constituency in Congress (Washington DC). Elections are generally conducted through the secret ballot system, that is, each voter goes into a boot and secretly casts a vote for one or the other candidate (and for whatever propositions, referendums are also on the ballot…citizens can place any proposition on the ballot by collecting 5% of the signatures of those who voted during the last election, within a specified time and having the state secretary of state verify the signatures; propositions are another way of passing laws, ones that bypass the various states legislatures).

The two political parties are evenly balanced in America. Pool after pool shows that about 33% of Americans declare themselves as Democrats and 33% consider themselves as Republicans and the balance consider themselves as independents.

Political candidates appeal to their base during primaries but during the November general election come to middle so as to attract the 33% independents if they are to win the election. Thus, whoever wins American elections tend to be centrist, moderate rather than be a flaming right winger (fascist) or left winger (socialist).

This situation has lead some political scientists to say that there are not much difference between the Republican party and the Democratic party. This is true up to a point. Whereas most American politicians are centrists, yet there are those who lean to the right and those who lean to the left. They are not just twaddle Dee and twaddle Dom as some social science professors tend to teach students. There are distinct difference between conservatives and liberals.

The two mainstream parties, the liberal democrats and the conservative republicans have distinguishing characteristics but agree on certain things. Both accept the reality of America and work for the nation’s survival. To even say something challenging the territorial integrity of America would amount to treason. Both accept the basic premise of American democracy and economy. Both parties accept democracy as their political frame of reference. Both parties agree that capitalism is the best economic system for America and want America to be capitalist.

Democrats want to use government to improve the lives of ordinary citizens, hence tend to favor big government and big government spending. Republicans tend to favor limited government and want the individual to fend for himself. As conservatives see it, the function of government is to provide the people with security: military and legal; apart from that leave the people alone to shift for themselves. Republicans tend to be in favor of unmitigated free enterprise whereas Democrats tend to prefer Keynesian economics.

Republicans tend to detest using the government for social engineering purposes, such as using the government to encourage abortion on demand and approve homosexuality. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to see the average citizen as ignorant and not knowing what is good for him. As such, Liberals feel like big brothers and know what is good for the people and want to use the power of government to get the people to do what they do not want to do.

Liberals think that homosexuality and abortion on demand are acceptable behaviors and want to use the power of government to make people change their attitudes towards these contentious and controversial issues. Liberals impose their policy preferences on the people with the understanding that the people would eventually change their minds and come to approve what they had hitherto detested. Liberals cite the case of civil rights. As they see it, the average American white was opposed to racial mingling and it took government passing laws that made integration mandatory, laws that, in effect forced white people to tolerate black persons. To the liberal, if the government had not used the power of coercion to force white people to see blacks as human beings, white people would still see black persons as not human beings and treat them as such.

Reasoning from this premise, Liberals think that the majority of the people’s current hatred of homosexuality would change if government used state force to make people accept homosexuality.

What these liberals do not seem to appreciate is that there is a difference between natural status and behavior. A human being is born black or white. He cannot change his color.

A human being can choose what to do with his sexuality. If he chooses, he can stay away from sex altogether. Homosexuality is a chosen behavior. But Liberals would like to make it a status thing by coming up with phony genetic studies showing that these people are born the way they are.

If human beings are programmed by their genes to choose their behaviors, they are no longer rational beings but animals. If they are animals, nothing prevents fascists like Hitler from deciding to kill them off. We do not cry when animals are killed. Why should we cry if criminals are born that way and to protect society they are killed?

There is great danger in reducing human behavior to genetic causation. This very foolishness is engaged by neuroscientists who tell the mentally ill that they are schizophrenic, manic, deluded etc because of their genes and consequent chemical imbalances in their brains. We know as a matter of fact that thinking alone does alter biochemistry. If a person thinks in a certain manner he can make himself excited and manic; if he thinks in a grandiose manner he can make himself deluded, if he keeps thinking that he is all powerful and godlike he may, in fact, alter his brain chemistry so that he now hallucinates.

Man is a thinking creature and a choice making one; to reduce him to only biological programming is a dangerous liberal sentimental trip. If liberals and their so-called neuroscientists manage to convince the gullible public that their behaviors are programmed by their genes, you might as well kiss civilization goodbye, for fascists would rise and rationalize killing homosexuals, the mentally ill and the mentally deficient because they cannot change and are born that way. If criminality is inherited then killing criminals can be justified, for why waste time and resources trying to rehabilitate them in jails if they are not ever going to change? Since criminals are socially unproductive why not safe society resources by wasting them? (And carrying this argument to its logical conclusion, since Africans are, more or less, corrupt, if their tendency to corruption is genetic, why bother trying to change them, why not throw a few nuclear weapons on Africa and get rid of them and populate the continent with decent human beings? By the way, these ideas are being discussed by white racists, so let Nigerians keep being criminals and think that the rest of the world think that it is funny for them to be nuisance.)

There are distinctions between liberals and conservatives. Some persons are naturally conservative and others are liberals. Conservatives tend to be self reliant whereas liberals tend to look for a big father to take care of them; they tend to transpose their dependency traits to desire for big government to care for them; eventually that government tells every body what to do, as in the monstrosity called the Soviet union.

Political parties exist to compete for elections. Generally, whichever party wins the greatest number of seats in Parliament is invited to form the next government. It proceeds to govern the land for however many years the constitution, written or unwritten, specifies before another election is held.

Britain’s unwritten constitution specifies five years for each government before another election is held. (The Prime Minister, however, can call for election at any time; also when the party in power loses a vote of no confidence on a key issue it resigns and calls for a new election.)

The US written constitution specifies two years for members of the House of Representatives, six years for the Senate and four years for the president. (The original US constitution did not have term limit for the president, but George Washington served two terms and quit and two terms became sort of the expected unofficial term limit. FDR ran for office four times and won all. To avoid that from happening again, Americans amended their constitution limiting the presidency to two terms. It is still debated whether you can bar a citizen from running for office; term limits seems a bad law.)

In the European context, often no single party wins an outright majority and has to form a coalition government. As I write, the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, liberals and conservatives in Germany are negotiating a coalition government that would make Angela Merkle the first German female Chancellor.

Coalition governments tend to fall apart when partners disagree on key policy issues. In which case, new elections are called and new governments are formed. (Italy has had numerous governments since the second world war; each lasting, on the average, two years.)

Political parties are organizations that recruit members and train them for political leadership. They exist to take over governing of their countries and therefore make it their business to train for leadership. Members are trained in the art and science of leadership, management and governing. I am talking about Western parties.

Political parties are organizations of like minded persons, persons with similar beliefs, values and ideologies as to how society ought to be governed.

Political parties articulate the aspiration of those they lead, those who think as the party thinks, those with similar ideology.

When political parties are truly acting as such they tend to have party platforms, blue prints of what they want to accomplish should they win elections. Each party specifies what exactly it wants to accomplish for the nation and ask the people to vote for it and thus give it the opportunity to implement those ideas into public policies.

Labor and Tony Blair campaigned to devolve the British government, to reform the House of Lords and to bring about a strong economy. They won. They have devolved government by giving Wells, Scotland and Northern Ireland local Parliaments; they have transformed the House of lords by making its members life peers rather than hereditary peers; they have improve the economy; the unemployment rate in Britain is one of the lowest in Europe. In other words, the Labor party had an agenda and is accomplishing that agenda.

On the other hand, Nigeria is the only country in the world where political parties have no goals, no agendas other than to come and steal from the public treasury. Olusegun Obasanjo and the present crop of thieves at Abuja have a Nigeria with over 40% unemployment . And the criminals who call themselves Nigerian leaders have no shame at the level of unemployment and poverty in their country.

In any decent country, leaders with that much unemployment would be hiding their faces. It is only in Nigeria that the incredible happens. Folks do nothing for the citizenry yet they masquerade around as their leaders. Even gang leaders who go out of their way to way lay people and steal give something to fellow gang members. Nigeria is the only country in the world where the government does not care that its citizens drink feces in water and die at age 43.

Nigeria is that country where nobody cares for anybody. This is hell on earth, pure and simple. Bill Clinton came to office and balanced the U. S. budget and reduced unemployment to less than 4.5%. That is leadership.

Obasanjo comes to office, buys a jet and cruises the entire world, staying in fancy hotels while his fellow country men literally eat shit. This is hell. Nigerians are in hell.

Black man’s land is hell and our leaders are happy to have it that way. These shameless criminals ought to be shot on sight and save us the embarrassment they cause us. These days to say that you are a Nigerian is to say that you are a thief or a potential thief. What an inheritance we got from Nigeria.

NIGERIA’S POLITICAL PARTIES

I have, hopefully, delineated what political parties are in the Western world. Now let us look at what passes as political parties in Nigeria.

Nigeria was a British colony and, as would be expected, it developed British type political parties.

In the 1920s, Herbert Macaulay and his fellow middle class Lagosians gathered together to make some requests from the British colonial administration. They would ask the Governor General to make this or that changes, such as permit Africans to be hired in the civil services, particularly the higher civil service. In those days, Africans were limited to messenger and clerical positions in the civil service, whereas white Britons were allowed into the administrative class. The emergent educated Nigerian elite sought to be permitted to work in the higher echelons of the civil service.

This is hardly the place to review the colonial administration in Nigeria, but suffice it to say that political parties in Nigeria grew out of these early organizations agitating for participation in civil society.

In 1933 Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe came back from America with a masters degree in a new discipline called political science. Prior to leaving America, he obtained some training in journalism. He embarked on publishing broadsheets attacking the British colonial administration. He and similar minded young persons formed what was then called the Nigerian Youth Movement. This group agitated for the British administration, for example, to build a high school in Nigeria, Yaba College. This group eventually muffed into the NCNC. Zik, as Benjamin Azikiwe was called, made life a bit difficult for the colonial administration, criticizing every thing he considered “color bar”.

After the second world war, Britain, though victorious, was prostrate. Britain was exhausted and did not have the military wherewithal to control its sprawling colonies. America, the benefactor of Britain, refused to sponsor her going back to regain control of her colonies. Thus, in 1947, Britain reluctantly relinquished her Crown Jewel, India, to Nehru. Africans saw an opening for self governance and called for independence. Many constitutional conferences were held in the late 1940s and early 1950s cumulating in the Lancaster House conference that gave Nigeria independence in 1960.

Three political parties emerged in the years running up to Nigeria’s independence: NCNC, NPC ands AG. Whereas NCNC made a show of being national, it quickly became associated with the tribe of its leader, Zik. NCNC, for all intents and purposes, was an Igbo party. NPC did not pretend to be a national party, it delimited itself to the North, hence it was an unabashed Northern party. Awolowo’s Action Group party was actually the only ideologically based political party in Nigeria. It had a platform, a blueprint of what it actually wanted to do for all Nigerians. For a party to set out to, in fact, do something for Nigeria is an unheard of phenomenon in Nigeria. Unfortunately, given Nigeria’s tribal nature Awolowo’s exceptional political party became associated with his Yoruba tribe. Whereas Awo had meant the party for all Nigerians, yet the party became a defacto Yoruba party.

There we have it, three tribal political parties. These parties competed at the pre independence election and none emerged clearly victorious. The NPC formed a coalition government with the NCNC. Abubaka Tafawa Belewa was made the prime minister and Zik was given the honorific position of Governor General and in 1963 the equally vacuous position of president of Nigeria was bestowed on Zik.

The ensuing coalition government was mired in do nothingness. Nigeria slid backwards and the politics of tribe took center stage. The then Western region, Yoruba land experienced tremendous civil unrest in 1964.

I am not going to review Nigeria’s history here. I have done that elsewhere. Suffice it to say that in 1966 the military intervened and ended party politics in Nigeria.

All that is really relevant is that the immediate post independence parties were organized along European lines. I have reviewed how European parties were organized and that should suffice for information on such parties in Nigeria.

The Military ruled Nigerian until 1979. Before they handed power to politicians, Nigerians organized political parties. As usual, those emergent parties were formed along ethnic lines, with Awolowo’s party based in Yoruba land, Azikiwe’s party based in Igbo land and Shagari’s party based in Northern Nigeria. As before, the Northern party won with slight margin and ruled Nigeria until the military dispersed the politician crowd in 1984.

The military then ruled Nigeria until 1999, changing leadership hand. Military rule is a game of musical chairs, one soldier boy is bound to cut the throat of another at any moment. Initially, Buhari ruled (up to the present no one associates him with corruption, he and Ideagbo probably were the best government that Nigeria has mounted), then Babangida, the Maradona of Nigerian politics, the smiling artful dodger who took Nigerians for fools, dribbling them as the Brazilian football soccer star, his name’s sake, did. Babangida finally had enough from the Nigerian treasury and handed power to a lackluster Yoruba civil servant who was immediately dispatched by another military general from the North, Sani Abacha. Abacha then really, really turned Nigeria into his private preserve. All of Nigeria’s oil money was his. He was like the Saud Family in Saudi Arabia. Everything in Nigeria was his personal property. This man was so corrupt and useless that his name will forever live in infamy. It was alleged that he died of heart attack.

Abacha was replaced by another general, Abdul Salami. This man took as much as he could from the treasury and wrote an American style constitution for Nigeria and imposed it on Nigerians. He held an election and managed to have an ex military ruler, Olusegun Obasanjo given power. Apparently, he transferred power to a “civilian military”.

Several parties vied for the 1999 election but the peoples democratic party, PDP won and is still in power. The PDP has almost a strangle hold on Nigerian contemporary politics.

Nigeria’s new political dispensation is along the line of America’s. Political parties were formed so that they supposedly operated like American parties. However, in reality, they are a mix of European and American parties.

Each of the parties has a national committee that supposedly governs it. Each has a party chair person. The chair person and his national executive govern the party. But in reality the president of Nigeria places and removes PDP chair persons at will. Indeed, the President removes the president of the Senate at will.

(For some reasons, perhaps to cajole the Igbos? the Senate President is zoned for Igbos and Obasanjo plays musical chairs with these incredibly incompetent Igbo politicians; they never learn from their predecessors; one is removed for corruption, the very next one comes along and occupies the presidential suit of the most expensive hotel in Abuja. only God knows what Ken Nnamani has been smoking; at any moment now, Obasanjo will accuse him of corruption and the man’s SSS goons, of course, will have the goods on him, and make them public, and this idiot will be out the door and another Igbo Idiot will replace him as the senate President and repeat the charade. Igbo political naiveté baffles the mind; for a group that are supposedly smart to be such political dunces is amazing; they are played as fools by the more politically shrewd Nigerians.)

We really do not need to waste our time and energy describing Nigeria political parties, for they are not parties in the sense of organizations existing to articulate the people’s aspirations, with agenda of what they want to accomplish for the nation and competing for opportunity to govern, to implement their agenda.

What is called political parties in Nigeria are criminal gangs looting Nigeria’s wealth. That is all there is to it. There is no use pussy footing. We must call thieves by their real name. As our old folks used to say: call the devil Satan so that he is ashamed. Except that Nigerian leaders are beyond shame. These are antisocial personalities, criminals through and through and have no sense of pride, shame and guilt. These idiots fly to the West and despite their so-called high positions in Nigeria are searched like common thieves at European airports and yet they do not feel outrage and like men go home with resolve in their hearts to improve their country so that white boys would not treat them disrespectfully.

All that Obasanjo has to do is walk around Beverly Hills and Bel Air California at night and he would be harassed by the local white police. I know what I am talking about. I used to-do my jogging in that neck of the wood and cannot begin telling you how many times the racist police shadowed me, often stopping me and asking me ridiculous questions. Given Obasnjo dark color, and as we all know, in America the darker you are, the more you are assumed to be nothing and treated as such, he would be harassed. But then again these people have no shame. Even if harassed by racist white Americans these people shine it off and pretend that all is well in the land.

Given the opportunity to govern, all our folks can think of is how to steal. God, from what corner of Dante’s Inferno did these people come from?

Political parties in Nigeria are organizations training folks in the art of joining the free for all stealing fray; the goal is to see how much one can steal from the government uncaught. These people are experts are protecting their behinds. They do not even bother having an agenda for the country.

PDP, what exactly does that party exist to accomplish for Nigeria? Nothing. Ask Tony Blair and the Labor party why they want to govern Britain. Go find out. They work for England.

A political party ought to have a reason for being, but we are talking about Nigeria, that wonder land where the world is upside down.

ELECTIONS IN NIGERIA

Political parties exist to vie for elections. The winning parties generally form the governments. In this mode, Nigerian parties supposedly prepare for elections. They hope to win and form the governments. But to call what takes place in Nigeria elections is to abuse that word, election. Let us just say that the rich and powerful use their money to buy elections.

All elections in Nigeria, from 1959 to the present, were rigged. We do not need to belabor the obvious. Nor do we need to pretend that real elections where voters go out and vote for alternative candidates take place in Naijaland. The electoral Board simply fixes the election so that the party that is expected to win wins.

The gullible masses are bribed and they do what they are told to do, and if they refuse they are beaten up, even killed.

The boxes where votes are cast in get stuffed; opponents boxes disappear in transit to counting venues.

The Nigerian election situation is so pathetic that it is beyond even bothering with.

One is not a spring chicken and is by no means naïve. One is a political realist. As such, one knows that tampering with elections takes place all over the world. Man, after all, is an ego, not an angel. Egos are selfish creatures that exist for their personal survival and at best cooperate with other egos for their mutual interest serving. One is trained in Hobbesian/Freudian skeptical but realistic view of human nature. One has no misguided sentimentalities about how good human beings are. Human beings are not angels. They are self centered creatures. A human being will sell you down the river if you allow him. That just about says it all.

Even in America, some sort of election rigging takes place. We all know about state legislatures apportioning Congressional districts (apportionment), depriving poor blacks of the opportunity to vote for black candidates. Despite being about 40 million and 12% of the American population, only a few blacks are in Congress. (We just elected Barrak Obama, to the Senate, thank God, at last there is a Blackman in that all white domain.) I know about all the shenanigans that the white establishment engage in to disenfranchise black folks, such as literacy tests, poll tax requirements etc.

Congress itself is not free from corruption. Who does not know about Pork, logrolling, boon-ducks? In short, in America the powerful shaft the weak.

One is not expecting human beings to become angels. But one expects them to be decent in going about their selfish nature. Of course there will always be political corruption, even in the best polity, but if corruption can be limited to the fringe, say to less than ten percent of public officials, that ought to be acceptable. But if corruption is so pervasive that just about all Nigerian politicians are corrupt, well, that is unacceptable.

This is unacceptable because these folks will soon find themselves with no money to rob. The West is working feverishly to come up with alternative sources of energy. When that happens, Arabs will be left to drink their oil and roam the deserts as Bedouins, as they have always done. Nigerians will be left to starve to death.

At present, even the so-called rich Nigerians live like idiots, see, they eat like fools, grow fat, do not exercise and die from cardiovascular diseases. Just imagine what would happen when the anticipated starvation hits Nigeria, these criminals will be dropping dead right and left. It is really sad that human beings could do this sort of thing to themselves, or are Nigerians not human beings? Some times I wonder about that.

Let us not waste our time talking about elections in Nigeria, they are fixed. It is probably the case that some minds are somewhere in Nigeria figuring out how to fix the upcoming 2007 election. I assume that there will be an election? We can never discount the probability of some soldier boys intervening and wasting the thieves calling themselves politicians. Actually the soldiers do not have to kill any one. All they have to do is fire guns into the air and the little cowards called Nigerian politicians would scamper into underground burrows and hide. They go hide it out waiting for future opportunity to come for more robbing of the polity.

CONCLUSION

I hope that I provided some information on political parties and elections in general.

We all know that there are no political parties and elections in extant Nigeria. Let us just hope that by and by Nigerians would have had enough of the foolishness called corruption and decide to put their house in order. When they do, hopefully, this brief information on political parties and elections might come in handy, preparing them to form real political parties and electing their leaders, as decent human beings all over the world do.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 11, 05

Lecture 8, The Nigerian Media, October 13.

This afternoon, I took a look at some of the lectures I had mailed out. I was appalled at the many typographical, even grammatical errors in them. Please forgive me. I generally wake up at 4:30 AM, sit by my computer and type for 2.5 hours, read what I typed for another 30 minutes and then send it out. I am always in a hurry to get to work at 9AM. That does not leave me much time to make corrections on what I typed. As I said in the first lecture, when I get to the last one, #30, I plan to edit the entire lectures, add notes, references and bibliography. If you desire the much improved version of the collated lectures, please contact Africa Institute Seattle for a copy: [email protected]

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October 10, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #6: Interest Group Politics in Nigeria

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- As in my earlier lectures, I will first explain the concept of interest group politics and then apply it to Nigeria. My goal, as usual, is to help us understand the idea of interest group politics in general and to see how it operates in Nigeria.

Robert Dahl characterized America’s politics as Polyarchy. By that he meant that America’s politics has many interests groups, each trying to influence public policy in its favor. As he sees it, America is a pluralistic democracy with many groups, each looking out for its interests and working within the established political system to optimize its interests.

Each interest group tries to influence the political establishment’s decision makers to enact public policies that benefit it. Since other groups are pretty much doing what every group is doing, trying to get the political system to work in their favor, all the groups have no choice but find a way to bargain with each other, so that each gets something in the process, but not everything it wants. In American democracy, many interest groups bargain, trade off and compromise. The result is that policies do not always reflect what each group wants, but a bit of what it wants and what other groups want. Policies are compromises that serve every ones interests but no particular person’s whole interests.

Politics is the art of making compromises and the art of giving up something to get something in return. A Bill introduced in Congress goes through many bargaining and negotiating sessions that by the time it becomes a Congressional Act, it seldom looks like what it was when it was originally introduced. This is because many interest groups go to work on the proposed Bill, each trying to make it reflect its interests. The final version of any Bill is something that serves the interests of many interest groups.

The fact that final Bills tend to be very watered down tends to frustrate political idealists who, think that their Bills ought to be enacted into law as they were introduced. For the idealist’s desire to happen, however, all human beings in the human polity must see things as the idealist sees them. In as much as people see things differently and desire different public policies, the inevitable outcome is that public policies must reflect diverse public opinions, hence must be compromised.

Failure to do so is to alienate powerful interest groups. Alienating powerful interest groups is not exactly good politics. As we observed elsewhere, politics is war by peaceful means. If you ignore some powerful interests’ desires, you risk their converting politics to war by violent means. When negotiations fail, cold war ends and people embark on hot war and shoot it out. At wars, the powerful win and the weak lose. The powerful get the spoils of war and the weak get nothing.

Statesmen avoid war from breaking out in the human polity by striving to please all relevant interest groups. Statesmen know that war is always looming around the corner when public policy is discussed, and to avert war, make sure that they serve the interests of all those capable of making war a reality.

In a pluralistic democracy, policies and laws must reflect the competing interests in the polity. Policies cannot serve one interest group’s desires at the expense of others.

Campus socialists, for example, wish for certain idealistic social policies. They wish that society could enact their pet projects into law. But that would never happen as long as other people oppose them. The only way it could happen is for the socialists to use violence to take over the government and proceed to use force to superimpose their views on the rest of the people. If socialists have preponderance of power, they may succeed for a while, but as soon as power shifts locus they are thrown out.

It is difficult for communists to understand that there are human beings who are conservative in political ideology and hate everything that communists stand for. For example, there are people who hate abortion, out of wedlock bearing of children and homosexuality. Communists in their arrogant thinking tend to believe that conservatives are ignorant and that all that needs done is to reeducate them to see things in their way. These communists are not aware that there are conservatives who are willing to go to war rather than permit communists and liberals to enact their wishes into law.

Liberals trying to get around taking into consideration conservative opposition to their proposed policies often resort to the judiciary. They employ activist judges to legislate their pet desires into social policies. Judicial activist Judges who seem naive of what politics is all about use the bench to enact into legislation what there is no political consensus for. Thus, in today’s America, liberal activist judges abhor strict construction of the constitution and legislate for abortion and homosexuality. They do what is strictly the purview of Congress to do. They believe that they have succeeded in changing society, but, in fact, have only sown the seed for social discord. If these liberal judicial activists proceed on the path they are on, there is no doubt that conservatives would try to use violence to reverse the situation and the result could be civil war in America. The alternative, of course, is to go back to politics and let people’s policy ideas battle each other and produce compromises that most people are willing to live with. It is arrogant for liberals and their judges to assume that conservatives who oppose them are ignorant and ram down their throats policies they do not approve and hope that in time that they would accept such policies. There simply are some social behaviors that some persons are unwilling to accept and any effort to make them accept them leads to schisms and break ups of polities.

In a pluralistic democracy, there are many interest groups, each jostling to influence public policy in its favor. Resultant policies tend to reflect the inputs of these many interest groups. This is the only way peace is served in such societies for the alternative of serving one group at the expense of others is social discord, conflict, wars.

INTEREST GROUPS VERSUS POLITICAL PARTIES

Interest groups are unlike political parties in the sense that they are not interested in campaigning, winning elections and governing the human polity. Instead, they want to influence the government into making laws and policies that reflect their interests. Interest groups do not want to govern but influence those who govern. This is the main difference between interest groups and political parties. Both are interested in enacting policies that govern the polity but political parties want to constitute the personnel of government whereas interest groups only want to influence the behavior of government.

In America, interest groups are, in fact, as powerful as political parties, if not more so. In America, policies are made by three key groups: the President, Congressional committees (particularly their chairpersons) and interest groups. These three are called the Iron triangle. The three, apparently, work behind the scenes and agree on policy options and Congress passes their agreed upon desires into laws.

In America, failure to obtain the consent of powerful interest groups essentially means that a Bill is not likely going to become law.

To better understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to briefly see how Bills become law in America.

Any Congressman, and for that matter, any American citizen through his congress man, can introduced a Bill in Congress. A Bill is a wish, an idea on how things should be to become public policy/law.

A Congressman hands over his drafted Bill (written in the accepted legal format for Bills) it to the speaker. The Clerk of the House reads it to (usually an empty House). The speaker then routes the proposed Bill to a committee that he believes is appropriate to discuss it.

The committee chair evaluates the Bill and decides whether to hold a hearing on it or not. Most Bills introduced by members of Congress do not see committee hearings. It is mostly Bills introduced by powerful members of the House and the administration (Presidency) that gets to have a public hearing. The typical Congressman may spend ten years in the House without seeing one of his Bills passed into law. At best, he aligns himself with powerful Congressmen and co-authors Bills with them and see such Bills see the light of day.

The chair of committees are very powerful; they can kill or not kill a Bill or just sit on it. Assuming that the Chair decides to hold a public hearing on a Bill, he does so on his own time table, which may be two years from the time that the Bill was originally introduced.

The Bill is scheduled for public hearing. The hearing’s date is publicized in Congressional Journals so that the public may come and testify for or against it. Citizens call and schedule to testify for or against it. Then the hearings are held. These hearings last for however long the Chair wants them to last. After public testimony the Chair calls for a vote on the Bill. If a majority of the committee members are in favor of it, it is voted out of the committee and goes to the entire house where the speaker then schedules it for debate and eventual vote.

The United States legislature is bicameral. Thus the Bill must undertake the same process in the two houses, Representative and Senate. In practical terms, this means that if a member of the lower House introduced a Bill in that House, he has to find a Senator to introduce it in the upper House. Right there making of compromises begin, for the Senator is not about to introduce a Bill that he does not like or a Bill that does not serve his interests and the interests of those he represents, his constituencies. If the Bill passes both Houses, a conference committee is appointed by the Speaker of the House of representative and President of the Senate to reconcile the differences between the two versions of the Bill and the reconciled version is voted on again by the two chambers and then sent to the President for his signature. If the President signs it, it becomes a Congressional Act, part of the Statutory law of the land. The President can veto the Bill. If vetoed, Congress can override it with two thirds vote, which is almost impossible to muster.

A Bill that is discussed at the committee level is worked on by all committee members. These committee members make changes to the Bill, called amendments. It is the various changes that finally is voted on and passed to the entire House for vote. If the person who introduced the Bill insists that no changes be made on it, well, it dies right at the committee level.

In the meantime, interest groups, who are the ones with resources to come and testify in favor or against a Bill before a committee, come and do so. The average American does not have the resources to fly to Washington DC to go testify in favor or against a bill. Indeed, the average American may not even be able to understand the legal mumbo jumbo language that Bills are written in.

Interest groups have the technical expertise that the average citizen does not have, indeed that the average Congressman does not have. Their testimony carries more weight than the testimony of the average citizen. Let us say that the Bill has something to do with building a road. Whose testimony would be important, a citizen who knows nothing about building roads or an engineering firm that builds roads? All things being equal, it is the testimony of civil engineers, experts, that counts the most.

The opinion of interest groups, top bureaucrats working for the President and the predilection of committee chairs decide what Bills become laws. Hence it is said that in America interest groups(via their agents, lobbyists), the executive branch and top bureaucrats are really the rulers of the land. The term democracy seem a misnomer.

LOBBYISTS

Each powerful interest group generally hires lobbyists whose full time jobs are to network with Congressional committees, top bureaucrats and the President and see to it that Bills serving their interests get favorite attention. Some left wing political scientists speculate that these interest groups and their lobbyist write a majority of the Bills that go on to become laws in America. Whereas there is no doubt that interest groups and their lobbyist impact Bills, it would be stretching it to say that they are responsible for most of the Bills that become laws in the land. What is more likely the case is that since interest groups and their lobbyist are experts in their fields, that they are consulted as Bills are written. If Congress wants to pass a Bill on oil matters, who else to consult than the executives of oil farms? Shell, Chevron, Texaco, Arco, Mobil, etc are certainly going to play a more effective role in public policies on oil matters than the average citizen who knows next to nothing about energy issues.

Washington DC, particularly K street is filled with thousands of lobbyists whose job is to try to influence the behavior of Congress, the President and top bureaucrats. These lobbyists sometimes were themselves former Congressmen, top bureaucrats and or top executives of the industries that they represent. These people know the lay of the land and know who to talk to and what to do to shape public policies.

Additionally, lobbyists and the interest groups that they represent have the money to help politicians get elected. The typical politician to be is not rich. It costs a lot of money to run for elections in America. It is estimated that Congressional seats in California and New York take several millions of dollars to compete for them. Where do poor candidates for Congress obtain such money? They do so through interests groups and other persons with cash to give away. (Political Action Committees etc).

Whoever pays the piper calls the tune. Interest groups that have the money to fund elections are in a position to decide what Congressmen do.

These interest groups also have the resources to fund the lavish life styles of politicians. A politician could be funded to fly to somewhere, to go evaluate issues that he supposedly is going to vote on; housed in plush hotels and wined and dined in the best restaurants in town. Interest groups do this. It stands to reason to suspect that politicians so treated by interest groups are often beholden to them?

All said, interest groups are very powerful in America’s politics and largely influence public polices. Socialist oriented scholars tend to draw from this fact the conclusion that a small elite rules America. Hunter’s study of Atlanta claims that a small cabal of powerful persons rule America. To these socialists, America is not a democracy but a land ruled buy powerful elite families.

Other observers say that is not so. These point out that not one group rules America, that many interest groups compete to influence public policies. Since not one group is entirely responsible for all policies, these observers claim that what we have in America is a pluralistic democracy. They point out that different interest groups influence different policy areas but that no one group influences policies across the board. For example, the American Medical Association and the Health Insurance Industry influences policies on health issues but not on other assesses.

In 1993, Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton tried to provide all Americans with European style, publicly paid health insurance. The American Medical Association and the Insurance industry felt that such a policy would not serve their interests and lobbied to kill the proposal. These interest groups spent millions of dollars to kill a Bill that would have provided all Americans with public health insurance.

In America, medical doctors somehow managed to convince most people that they are a very important and indispensable group. They form a powerful interest group and lobby to prevent the mass training of medical doctors by limiting admission to medical schools. The result is that they restrict entry into the market of potential medical practitioners. Having controlled the supply of medical doctors, they affect the price paid by demanders of their services. Thus, in American a medical doctor makes more than $100, 000 a year . If the forces of the market were allowed to determine medical wages an American doctor would not make more than $45, 000 a year.

As it were, the medical group rigged the system to work for it and if any one tries to change the situation they immediately perceive threat to their economic welfare and fight it. If health care is nationalized, the typical American doctor would make, perhaps, half of what he is currently making. To protect their group’s interests , medical doctors fight a policy option that would have benefited all Americans. Today, there are 45 million uninsured Americans. The inner cities are generally filled with uninsured Americans.

PUBLIC VERSUS SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS

There are public interest groups and specialized interests groups. Specialized interests like the AMA, the National Rifle Association, the various labor unions (AFL-CIO) and others serve specialized interests; they work for their members interests and not for the general public. On the other hand, are those interest groups that claim to work for the generalized public’s interests. Those working for the protection of the environment, for example, tend to claim to work for public interests.

This may not be quite true, for conservatives have different approaches to the environment than liberals. Conservatives, for example, would like to mine oil in the Alaska National Wild Life Preserve, whereas liberals want to prevent such oil exploration, to preserve the pristine nature of the preserve. This liberal stance sounds good except that the same liberals drive gas guzzling SUVs like any one else in America and must get their oil from somewhere. They a do not mind if Shell desecrates the mangrove forests of IJaw land, provided they obtain their oil to support their expensive life styles.

The liberal is not the angel he tends to make himself out to be. He is as selfish as any one else. His sentimentalities does not deceive any one. The conservative’s unabashed self interested behavior is actually refreshing. Realistic persons would rather deal with the conservative white American for they know who he is, “a selfish son of a bitch” and can bargain with him for mutual self interests. In dealing with a conservative, you have no illusions. You know that he is not pretending to look after your self interests; he is serving his own self interests, and if you are realistic, as you should be, you serve your own self interest. The result is adult bargaining to serve mutual self interests.

The White liberal, on the other hand, is a phony; he pretends to serve the poor when, in fact, he is serving his own self interests. Liberals pretend to like black Americans. If liberals ruled America Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice would never be made the Secretary of State. The secretary of Housing and Urban Development, may be. Liberals are the most condescending racist breed of Americans. They do not even think that black Americans are intelligent enough to do any thing for themselves. They, the paternalistic white liberals, want to do things for poor black folks. In doing so, they prevent black folks from doing things for themselves. These people baby black folks. It is amazing that black Americans have not seen through the racism of the democratic party and joined the realistically self centered Republican Party, where, at least, there are no games, no pretence of helping the poor while screwing them.

INTEREST GROUPS DEFINED

Interest groups are association of persons with similar interests who band together to protect their self interests. They work together to influence public policies in such a manner that their interest are served. They tend to focus their political activities to the area of their interests, not globally, as political parties do.

The American Bar Association, for example, only focuses on protecting the interests of lawyers; if an issue does not directly affect lawyers it stays out of it. The various labor unions try to influence policies that serve labor’s interests. The NAACP deals with issues that affect the interests of colored people (whoever is a colored person).

American politics is the politics of interest groups. Interest groups working with top Congressmen, top bureaucrats and the President influence the making of laws in America. Interest group are powerful in America, they are so powerful that some political scientists believe that they rule America.

UNDERDEVLOPED INTEREST GROUP ACTIVITY IN NIGERIA

Nigeria is not a democracy and, as such, public policies are not made through the inputs of several persons and organizations. What seems to be the case is that powerful elements rule Nigeria. Interest group politics is underdeveloped in Nigeria.

However, there are a few interest groups in Nigeria. The Nigerian labor congress does make certain noises that occasionally affects public policy? The various professional associations, such as the Nigerian Medical Association and the Nigerian Bar Association seem to be well organized enough to look after the interests of their members. However, since the processes of making laws in Nigeria is not really democratic, it is doubtful how effective these mutual admiration societies are.

The various professional associations in Nigeria offer Nigerian professionals opportunity to grandstand as outstanding professionals. These folks gather in their regular meetings and bamboozle the public with their social importance. But what exactly is the Nigerian Medical Association or the Nigerian Bar Association contributing to Medical/legal research? Very little. As far as the world is concerned, little or nothing comes out of Nigerian professionals thinking. But within the context of Nigeria, these fellows masquerade as outstanding professionals. Their associations offer them opportunity to meet and admire each other and derive egoistic sense of importance. They bedeck themselves in flowery lace robes and jewels, look like manikins and imagine that they are very important persons.

To the rest of the world, a very important person is a person who makes seminal contribution to his filed of knowledge. To Nigerians, a person is important just because he calls himself a doctor do nothing or chief-thief.

We shall proceed on the assumption that whereas the various interested groups found in the West seem to exist in Nigeria, that they are not effective in influencing public policies.

ETHNIC GROUP POLITICS IN NIGERIA

Ethnic groups are the only salient interest groups in Nigeria. They are the only ones that seem to have the power to influence public policies. We shall, therefore, spend some time on these groups.

Nigeria’s politics is the politics of ethnic groups. The various ethnic groups jostle for power and control of the polity. They bargain with each other and the resultant compromises serve as Nigeria’s public policies, the little there is of it..

As pointed out in other lectures, Nigeria is a conglomeration of many ethnic groups. No one knows exactly how many ethnic groups there are in Nigeria. Some say hundreds. I have tried counting them and counted less than fifty. (It is for the government and its officials to make themselves useful by delineating the ethnic groups in Nigeria and stop giving us estimates of how many ethnic groups there are in Nigeria)

The major ethnic groups in Nigeria are, in order of population size: Hausas, Yorubas, Igbos, Jaws, Edos, Efiks, Fulanis, Kanuris, Urobos, Ishikiris, Bornu, Tivi, and so on. These are the ethnic groups that jostle for power and control in Nigeria.

No one knows exactly the census figures of each of these groups. The various census figures were rigged to serve ethnic goals, for if an ethnic group is perceived to have more persons, even if it does not have them, it claims the right to rule others.

The World Book Almanac, probably a more reliable outfit than any in Nigeria, gives Hausas 24 million people, Yoruba’s, 22 million and Igbos 20 million people, the Jaws, Efiks etc about 2 million each. In the absence of accurate figures from Nigeria, we shall proceed with the assumption that the above World Book Almanac’s figures are closer to the truth than other figures banded around by Nigerians.

(The Igbos claim to be the largest group in Nigeria. They tag themselves as 45 million. They want ethnic affiliation to be included in the upcoming Census count in Nigeria because they think that it would show that they are the largest group in Nigeria. It is probably useful to know the actual numbers of each ethnic group in Nigeria, but given that that issue led to rigging past census figures one understands the decision not to include ethnic affiliation as a unit of count in the upcoming census count.)

The 1959 pre-independence election gave the Hausa party, NPC some edge, but not enough to form government by itself. NPC formed a coalition government with the Igbo party, NCNC. The Yoruba party, AG was the opposition party. The Yoruba party’s chieftain, Obafemi Awolowo feeling marginalized tried to forcefully overthrow the Federal government. His coup failed and he was arrested, charged with treason, tried and sent to ten year prison term.

In the meantime, the NPC/NCNC government turned the government into a free for all corruption game. People were frustration and the military gave vent to this frustration. On January 15, 1966 Major Nzeogwu and his group over threw the Federal government.

Mr. Nzeogwu made the worst mistake any aspirant to power could make: he killed Hausa and Yoruba leaders and spared Igbo leaders. One does not know what he was smoking. Common sense would have told him that the other groups would see his so-called revolution as ethnic based. If he was going to waste anyone, he should have included Igbo politicians.

A compromise was struck whereby Nzeogwu was jailed and the most senor military officer, an Igbo took over. The military government of Major General JTU Aguiyi Ironsi was the most inept government that ever graced Nigeria’s checkered political history. The man did absolutely nothing. It was rumored that he was about to abolish the Nigerian federal structure and impose a unitary structure on the nation and that this proposal enraged certain elements that did not like that form of government. In August of 1966, Ironsi was eliminated and Major Gowon took over and said, on quote: “thank God, the government has returned to northern hands.”

The Hausas, more or less, governed Nigeria until 1999. (The 1975-79 Olusegun Obasanjo interregnum notwithstanding). In 1999, a Yoruba man, Olusegun Obasanjo won the Presidency. The election was supposedly fixed?

The government is now in Obasan/Yoruba hands. The Igbos claim that it is their turn to produce the next president in 2007. Why? Because ethnic calculations make it there turn. How about talking about what a president is going to do for Nigeria as the criteria for electing him to office?

In Nigeria, politicians are not placed in office for what they plan to do but because of ethnic calculations. In office, the politician is supposed to deliver bread to his group. The Igbos hope to produce the next president so as to get their own share of the national cake. The idea is not to have a good government, but a government that delivers to the Igbos, after all the other governments supposedly did not deliver to the Igbos. These other governments supposedly delivered to Hausas and Yorubas. (And despite what they supposedly got from the national booty, their lands still look as underdeveloped as any other African lands.)

No one who understands Nigerian politics can blame the Igbos for doing what they are doing, seeking to become the next president. In the context of Nigeria’s legendary corrupt politics, it makes sense for the Igbos to get their own share. Nevertheless, what we have here is not government but the activities of antisocial personalities, criminals who belong in prisons, not the halls of power.

In 1999, the outgoing military strong man, General Abdul Salami single handedly wrote a constitution and imposed it on Nigerians. Nigerians elected their present government on the basis of that illegitimate constitution. The President, Obasanjo, is on public record, stating that he had not even seen the constriction that he was elected on.

Let us not pretend naiveté. There is no universally agreed upon constitution in Nigeria. Constitutions are written by the people or by the people’s representatives. Constitutions are not given to the people by some one else but by themselves. Even if the constitution given to a people is good, as long as they themselves did not write it, it is illegal. Thus the present government in Nigeria, in so far that it governs under an undemocratically reached constitution, is an illegal government.

Nevertheless, let us evaluate how policies are made in the present political dispensation in Nigeria and see if interest groups play a role in it. The 1999 constitution copied America’s presidential system. There is an executive president, a bicameral legislature and a supposedly independent judiciary. We shall examine these institutions in future lectures.

When the present crop of politicians were elected to office, they descended on America to learn how the American government works. They supposedly observed Congressional committee systems and how laws are made in America.

In the new system, Bills are introduced in the House of Representative and Senate as in America. They are routed to committees by the Speaker/Senate President. As in America, these committees are supposed to hold public hearings, hear testimonies in support or against Bills before voting them out of committee to the full House.

It is here that we witness true Nigerians at work. These committees are not really arenas for debating the merit or lack of it of Bills but occasion for collecting bribes. In fact, even government ministries have to bribe committee members to have their budgets passed. The former minister of education, Professor Fabian Osuji said that he was compelled to bribe committee chairpersons before they could approve his department’s budget. He claims that all government ministers do the same.

Nigerian parliamentary committees apparently are designed to collect bribes from those wishing to see public policies reflect their interests. How to be a Nigerian, as Peter Pan, pointed out, is to bribe persons in power.

Ethnic groups seem to have organized into powerful interest groups and try to influence the Obasanjo government. Obasanjo being a realistic man knows that he must engage in a balancing act. He must share the national wealth among the various ethnic groups, if he wishes not thrown out of office, worse, killed.

The federal government essentially appropriates oil revenue from where oil is mined and divides that money among the various ethnic groups. Nigeria has 36 states. Most of these states cannot support themselves. They have no independent source of revenue. Indeed, most of the citizens of these states do not even pay taxes. They look to the Federal government to obtain revenue with which to even pay their civil (evil) servants.

The primary function of the Abuja central government seems to obtain oil revenue, the loot, and share it among the states. The ethnic groups that are judged more powerful than others obtain greater share of this national booty.

Ethnic groups like Arewa,, Ohaneze, Odua etc seem to have some pull on the central government. It is doubtful, however, that these groups are real interest groups, as we understand interest groups in the West. They have not accepted the inviolable reality of the political entity called Nigeria and work under its parameters. Instead, they seem to be out to grab whatever they could from the national treasury and in the main time work for the demise of the polity.

An interesting phenomenon, however, is emerging in Nigeria. The leaders of the various ethnic groups in Nigeria are increasingly intermarrying among themselves. Thus we have Hausa leaders marrying Igbo women and vice versa. It seems that these so-called elites are building intertwined relationships among themselves.

Though these associations currently serve pernicious purposes: better enable the elites steal from Nigeria, still they have some positive aspects to them. This practice is creating a sense of one Nigeria among the rulers of Nigeria.

CONCLUSION

Interest groups politics characterize American politics. This type of politics is less developed in Europe, although it is becoming increasingly so. European politics is increasingly becoming like American politics, with less powerful political parties and more roles for interest groups.

In my next lecture, I will focus on political parties and show, among other things, how they are very strong in Europe and weak in America. America’s weak political parties play a role in America developing powerful interest groups. Where political parties are strong, interest groups tend to be weak. Europe tended to have powerful political parties and weak interest groups. Europe is changing and becoming more and more like America, with weak political parties and strong interest groups.

Nigeria and African countries neither have strong political parties nor weak interest groups. Nigeria and African countries are not yet democratic and those political institutions that play keys roles in Western democracies are weak in them. What we have in Nigeria is the politics of ethnic groups.

Nigeria’s politics is dominated by ethnic leaders. If a fellow manages to convince his ethnic group that he looks after their interests, they tend to see him as a candidate for national office. Even if the chap has zero policy propositions his group, nevertheless, present him as a viable candidate for national office. In this light, Governor Orji Kalu, who has no recognizable positive agenda of what he wants to accomplish for Nigeria, positions himself as Igbo leader and expects Igbos to put him forward as their candidate for the “Igbo turn at the national presidency”. This man overseers a state, Abia, where streams flow where roads are supposed to be. If the best that Igbos can produce is this nonentity, they are, indeed, in trouble.

It is clear that interest group politics is on the ascendancy in Nigeria. Should Nigeria become a true democracy, interest group politics would probably become more important in Nigeria than it is at the present. Thus, even though it is really inappropriate to talk about interest groups politics in Nigeria, I found it necessary to add the topic to my lecture series on Nigeria at age 45.

One is not sure whether interest group politics is the best way for Nigeria to go. As we have seen, the well organized elements in America get their wishes reflected in national policies whereas the weak don’t. The issues that concern the poor seldom make it into America’s national agenda; this is largely because the poor do not have access to the media. Only wealthy interest groups have money to buy access to the media, a media that influence what is placed on the national agenda for political discourse and action. Whether this is good or not for democracy remains to be seen. Nigeria ought to be careful in permitting self serving interest groups to inordinately influence public policies.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 10, 2005

Lecture 7, Political Parties in Nigeria, on October 12.

Here is the list of “ The Ozodi Thomas Osuji Lectures on the 45 anniversary of Nigeria’s Independence”.

Introduction: Why Study Politics?
Nigeria’s Political Culture
Nigeria’s Political Socialization
Political Ideologies and Nigeria
Nigeria and Capitalist Political Economy
Nigeria and Interest Groups
Nigeria’s Political Parties
The Media and Nigeria
Public Opinion and Public Policy making in Nigeria
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in Nigeria
Nigeria’s Legislature
Nigeria’s Presidency
Nigeria’s Judiciary
Nigeria’s Bureaucracy
Nigeria’s International Relations
Nigeria and International Organizations (examples: UN, World Court, IMF, World Bank etc.)
Extralegal Gov. The Nigerian Military
Extralegal Gov. Nigeria’s Religions
Nigeria’s Leadership Issues
Introduction to Business in Nigeria
Introduction to Marketing in Nigeria
Introduction to Public Finance in Nigeria
Introduction to Business Finance in Nigeria
Introductions to Business Productions/Operations In Nigeria
Introduction to Human Resources in Nigeria
Introduction to Labor Relations in Nigeria
Introduction to Organizational Psychology In Nigeria
Customer Care in Nigeria
E-Commerce in Nigeria
Summing Up: Professional Management of the Public Sector in Nigeria.

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October 09, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures #5: Nigeria and the Capitalist Political Economy

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- Politics and economics go together. Because of their intertwined nature, some observers believe that they should be studied as if they are one subject, political economy. Indeed, Karl Marx tended to approach the two subjects as one and wrote about them as one subject. Many socialist thinkers still talk about the subject as their ancient mentor, Marx, did.

There is no denying that the two fields, politics and economics are related. Persons who want to do a good job managing their economy are certainly well advised to not only understand politics but economics.

One of the misfortunes of African politics is that the first generation African leaders often did not know what politics was all about and certainly did not understand economics. Those of them with some understanding of economics did so in an academic manner. They had training at British schools on economics. Such training was academic and did not prepare them to grapple with real life economic issues.

The type of economics that is germane to the administration of modern organizations is applied economics, finance: business and public finance, accounting, marketing and so on. (Because of the saliency of those subjects, I will devote the month of December to eight lectures on them.)

A leader must understand the nature of the economy. Yesterday, we talked about the communist economy. In today’s lecture, we shall talk about the capitalist economy in general and specifically how that economy, though still incipient, is operating in Nigeria.

The capitalist economy is very broad and complex. We shall not be able to cover the entire field in a one hour lecture. What I will do is highlight how that economy operates in fact, not in abstraction. We are not going to talk about academic macro and micro economics and econometrics, but real world economics.

Most people agree that the nature of capitalist economics is captured in Adam Smith’s book, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. All serious public managers ought to read that book, as well as other salient books on economics, particularly John Maynard Keynes’.

Adam Smith wrote his book as if it is an exercise in philosophy. His goal, apparently, was to make an argument for the type of economics that he believed is most productive in the human polity. Apparently, he was trying to show the shortcoming of other systems of economics, particularly the dominant economic system of this time, mercantilism.

Mr. Smith proceeded thus. Human beings seem motivated to grandstand as socially serving persons. They like to see themselves as motivated by social interests in doing whatever they do. Their self-talk would like to convince them that they are serving the common interests of all mankind. This is particularly so for Christian Europeans who were brought up to obey the Jesus dictum of loving other people as one loves ones self. They would like to think that they obey Jesus Christ and love their neighbors as they love themselves. This is their conscious self presentation, but deep down is another reality, what Sigmund Freud later called ID drives to look after their self interests. Edward Wilson, in Sociobiology, in fact, argues that human beings inherited selfish genes and do whatever they do from selfish motivation.

Mr. Smith said that even if men were consciously good (they are not, Thomas Hobbes told us) and were motivated to work for social interests, that empirical evidence shows that they tend not to work very hard when they do so. People tend to work hardest when they are working for their self interest, Mr. Smith said.

In the former USSR, the leaders tried to get the people to work hard on behalf of public interests; the people did not. The Russian worker was the most unproductive and inefficient worker in the developed world. His productivity was less than a half of the capitalist American worker. Why so? Mr. Smith tells us that it is because the communist worker was forced to work for public good, as defined by the soviet Apparatchiki, but not for his own good.

A man is willing to put in fourteen hour days doing his own business, but the moment he is hired to work for a public bureaucracy, he hardly works two hours during the day. It takes ten bureaucrats to change a light bulb, and even then they do such a poor job of it; you may have to hire a private business person to correct the mistake that those self styled ten experts on how to change light bulbs made.

Upon the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, American businesses set up shops over there. They found to their chagrin that they could not rely on the local workers. Those communist trained workers were so inefficient that they had to be retrained to do their job well. Moreover, they were used to being bossy bureaucrats and being in positions where they commanded the customer rather than served him. They were sullen workers who did not gladly and smilingly serve customers. Doing something for customers was like they were doing them a favor rather than serving them, as they should. To the present, Eastern German workers are less productive than their fellow country men in Western Germany. In fact, German businesses often prefer to hire non-German workers than the inefficient ex-communist East German workers. A communist worker is as good as an unproductive worker.

Human beings, Mr. Smith observed, are motivated by self interests and work hardest when they work for themselves. This seems an empirical fact. No person who observes human beings, in fact, rather than merely speculate about them in the abstract, as idealistic communists tend to do, contradicts the fact that people are self interest motivated and work hardest when they work for themselves.

This would seem a negative comment on human nature, but Mr. Smith said that therein lays economic advantages; advantages he wants the capitalist to exploit, which exploiting has transformed the world into a very productive place.

The capitalist economy is the most productive economy known to man; it is, in fact, the best thing that has happened to human beings since the beginning of human history. Since the Bourgeoisie revolution, a revolution that Marx derided, humanity has improved its standard of living by hundreds of times. No other economic system has shown comparative value.

How so? In a capitalist economy, each individual seeks to optimize his own advantages. He works hard to do so.

Being a rational person, the individual recognizes that other persons are doing what he is doing, trying to optimize their selfish goals. He has to deal with other persons who are doing what he is doing. To relate to other people, he must show them that he has something good for them. A man is useless to other people unless he has what they want. An employee is useless to a particular employer unless he has the skills to do what he desires done, and does it better than other employees. It is what the worker can do that is hired by the employer, not his person. The moment the employee is unable to do the job, the employer is unable to produce what he is in the business of producing, hence would not make profit and would be out of business. Therefore, to survive, the employer fires the unproductive employee and hires a productive one.

In a capitalist economy, it is assumed that all persons are selfish and are serving their self interests. In this realistic light, A is a selfish person and B is a selfish person. They enter into a selfish relationship. Each must do what the other wants for their relationship to be mutually advantageous. In the economy, the producer, aka supplier of goods and services, must produce what the people, aka market, will buy. The people will demand what serves their selfish interests. The rational buyer will buy only what serves his good, not what the producer tells him is good for him.

Secondly, people being selfish and rational they want to buy goods and services very cheaply. If one can buy things cheaply, one saves money. The rational person prefers to save than waste his hard earned money.

If two sellers of the same goods present themselves to the rational buyer, the chances are that he would buy from the seller selling his goods and services cheaply. The rational person demands that goods and services be cheap.

These consumer behaviors and producers responses to them lead to the allocation of resources in the economy to where there is demand for them. Producers will produce what there is a market for it. In doing so, they allocate resources to where there is demand for it.

Since the producer must sell his goods cheaply to sell and make profit he is motivated to produce his goods and services in the most efficient manner. He is motivated to find ways to reduce the cost of labor and capital in his production. He seeks ways to increase worker productivity and the productivity he obtains from his capital equipment. He struggles to buy the best machines and other equipments he needs to produce his goods and or services, so as to produce them cheaply and therefore sell cheaper than his competitors.

The cumulative effect of these behaviors is that in capitalist markets, resources are not only allocated to where there is demand for them but tending to be utilized more efficiently. As far as the consumer is concerned, prices tend to be cheaper in capitalist markets.

(In basic economics courses, students are taught the principle of supply and demand; the nature of equilibrium price, that price that buyers are willing to pay and sellers are willing to sell; which is generally the break even price, a price that if goods and services are sold, the business person makes some profit so as to stay in business. We shall not get into school economics here; we are at the present interested in economic philosophy.)

In capitalist markets, Adam Smith tells us, and experience verifies his claim, people pursue their self interests. The blind forces of the market compel both buyer and seller to behave in such a manner that without intending to be of service to each other they end up being of service to each other. Business men are not motivated to help the consumer but they must, nevertheless, do so if they are to sell to him, make profits and stay in business. Consider Microsoft’s Bill Gates. As a capitalist seller, he wants to sell his computer operating software. He is a selfish man. If he could, he would sell his windows operating system $1000 each. But in the nature of the capitalist market, the consumer wants to buy that operating system as cheaply as he could, say $80. Now what? Bill Gates tries to accommodate the consumer or else he will not sell his goods. The forces of demand and supply interact and determine the eventual price (about $100).

One must, however, comment that this apparent equilibrium price seems a result of Bill Gates astute marketing skills. The man is a marketing genius. Apparently, he managed to keep out other producers of the type of software he sells. If other manufacturers of similar software could produce similar products and come into the market and sell them, it is conceivable for the price of that product to come down to $10 or less. (I think that ten dollars is going to be the eventual price of Windows. This would make a laptop computer no more than $100 in price. That way, poor Nigerians could buy them, as they should. Any one without access to computers is deprived of access to the information superhighway.)

Compare and contrast what happens in a capitalist marker, where selfishness rules, and what happens in a communist market, where supposedly altruism rules. Marx had talked sweet talk of “from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs”. In pursuit of that utopia, communist governments set up central planning committees to plan how goods and services are to be produced and utilized in their polity. They decided, up front, how many medical doctors they want and train them, how many cars they want and produce them.

The human mind is so fallible that no amount of planning takes into consideration all the exigencies there is. By the time the central planning committee had planned for ten doctors and those doctors are minted, may be what is now needed is twenty or ten doctors? By the time that the planned number of cars are produced, may be the population has increased so that there is not enough cars around? No one can anticipate all possible contingencies that can intervene between planning and the realities of the market.

This was what happened in Russia. It literally took five years for a Russian worker’s turn to reach the end of the list before he could buy a car, or rent an apartment. He stood on line for four hours a day trying to buy the world’s most tasteless bread. Soviet economics not only was inefficient but produced the worst quality goods. The very communist leaders who indulged in central planning came to the West to buy high quality goods and services. Indeed, the moment the Soviet Union fell, Russians abandoned their shoddy goods and services and bought well made Western products.

Russian factories closed down, for the shoddy goods they were producing could not compete with the top of the line goods now coming in from Western Europe. In fact, Western business men had to buy the unproductive Russian factories and modernize them to get them to produce buyable goods.

REGULATED CAPITALIST ECONOMY

No one operating from the perspective of reason thinks that communism, socialism and other such nonsense are useful alternatives to the capitalist economy. Be that as it may, capitalism is not an unmitigated gift. As we all know, when people compete, there will be winners and losers. If you get a dozen boys and place them on their marks and asks them to get set and go, the fact is that some will win and others will lose.

In a competitive capitalist market, there will be winners and there will be losers. We see the winners in America making millions of dollars, yearly. We see losers in America making less than ten thousand dollars, yearly. We see this very clearly in New Orleans, Louisiana, where black folks did not even have access to transportation hence could not get out of hurricane Katrina’s way. Some of them died because of this fact.

Obviously, human conscience cannot tolerate this type of situation where some live in multi million dollar mansions and many live in the shacks of inner city New Orleans. So what to do? The economy must deviate from Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s classical laissez faire economics and find ways to give some handouts to the losers of society.

In much of the Western world, we now have social and economic safety nets for those unable to make it in the highly competitive capitalist economy. We have old age pensions for those whose savings are not enough to provide them with income when they retire from work. We have unemployment payments that help unemployed people as they look for jobs. We even have welfare money for those who are too poor and for some reasons are unable to work.

Capitalist economies must find ways to help the losers in competition for the allocation of goods and services. This helping of the losers is actually not a sentimental proposition. If the losers are not helped, being capable of antisocial behaviors, they could steal and or even kill the winners. If a polity does not help the poor, the poor could organize and make life difficult for the winners in society.

A callous government is bound to be deposed by society’s losers. Imagine the youngster with limited education that nevertheless can join the military and train to go kill for his country. Now if upon discharge from the military he is unable to find a job, because he lacks skills to compete in the work place, what do you do with him? Allow him to roam the streets unemployed? If you do, how about his skills at killing, what prevents him from killing you?

America recruits high school kids who are hardly able to read and write and trains them in its military. They go kill for Uncle Sam. Then they come home and find that they do not have the skills to compete with Asians kids in the economy. They remain unemployed. Many of them commit crimes. Rational leaders make money available for these folks to go learn employable skills. After the Second World War, the Korean War, and Vietnam War, America made funds available for GIs to go obtain market skills.

We now live in a very complex environment were everything is connected to everything else. Primitive capitalism cannot be allowed to operate unchecked. We know that if a factory emits pollutants into the air that we all could die from the poison it is feeding us. Therefore, we all are invested in what the factory puts into the air. We want manufacturers regulated.

We live in regulated capitalist economy. This is the way it should be, for if what A does affects B, B is invested in making sure that A does it in such a manner that he is not negatively affected.

If a pharmaceutical company produces and sells medications that make children to be born without arms (thalidomide), society is interested in making sure that it produces less harmful medications. Hence we regulate the pharmaceutical companies and make sure that the medications they sell are tested and ascertained to do what they claim to do and are not dangerous to the public’s health.

MIXED ECONOMY

Capitalist economies tend to go through periods of inflation (high prices), depression (low prices) and many things in-between. These economies have boom and burst cycles. Depressions can hit the economy so that manufacturers are unable to sell their goods because the price people are willing to pay for them are too low. At such low prices the producers would not be able to cover their manufacturing costs hence would go out of business. When producers are unable to sell and close shop they lay off workers.

Depression means high unemployment. The depression of 1929 produced over 25% unemployment in the American economy. The multiplier effect of this high number of unemployed is intolerable for the rest of the economy. Unemployed persons are not able to pay their rents and mortgages and the owners of those houses would have less money to repair them. Unemployed persons do not have money to buy from stores and stores lay off workers and close shop. Unemployed persons have no money to save at local banks and banks close shop. Simply stated, during depression the economy collapses.

So what to do about it? Allow the economy to go through its cycles and eventually correct itself? That was the view of laisez faire economists and President Hoover during the great depression. Unfortunately, in the meantime folks were suffering and shuffling from one city to another seeking jobs and food. It would seem callous to tolerate that kind of human suffering.

Let it be said, however, that if let alone that eventually capitalist economies tend to correct themselves. Without the New Deal policies of FDR, the American economy would have eventually rebounded. It may have taken longer, nevertheless the economy would have smoothed itself out, and it always does.

John Maynard Keynes came up with a methodology to intervene in the capitalist economy when its cycles seem to produce intolerable sufferings for the people. He suggested that governments engage in Taxation policies, fiscal policies and monetary policies. Let me briefly explain these measures.

Taxation means taking money from citizens. The money the individual pays in taxes he does not have available to spend as he sees fit. If the economy is in recession, small depression, the government could reduce taxes for citizens. This results in their having more money to spend. They spend that money and, hopefully, it stimulates the economy, increases demand and increased demand leads to increased supply of goods and services and resultant vibrant economy.

Conversely, when there is inflation, high prices, government could increase taxes. This would result in less money available to people to spend. They would buy less and would haggle for lower prices before they bought goods and services. The result would be lower prices of goods and services. Lower prices would reduce inflationary trends in the economy.

Governments use taxation policies to accomplish many goals, including encouraging producers to spend money on new equipment so as to improve productivity. Arthur Lafer suggested that if Taxes are cut, especially for producers, that they would have money available to improve their businesses, hence generate employment. This supply side economics is derided by liberals who point out that all that producers did with their tax cuts was use that money to buy luxury cars, Yachts and mansions. May be. Luxury goods are manufactured and sold hence increase economic activities. Supply side economics has not been proven as the parody liberals make of it.

Governments do engage in fiscal policies. By this is meant that they attempt to stimulate depressed economies by spending money that they may not have. They may borrow money from those who have them (via selling bonds) and using that money to engage in public spending that, hopefully, increases the level of economic activity. Government may build roads, bridges, tunnels, rail roads and so on. These public projects would stimulate the local economy where they are built. The multiplier effect, now of the positive variety, kicks in and improves the economy. If people are employed building roads, they have money to spend. They buy goods and services and pay their rents. That means that those providing those types of services would be in business. The economy takes off.

Governments do engage in monetary policies. This entails having the central banks increase or decrease their prime interest rates (the interest they charge commercial banks and businesses that borrow from them). Low interest rates means that commercial banks can borrow more money and have more money to lend to businesses and to individuals. Businesses borrow at lower rates and improve their business activities.

Conversely, if the economy is experiencing inflation, central banks could raise the prime interest rates. This means that borrowing becomes expensive and people stop buying some of the frivolous things they ordinarily would like to buy. People need food, clothing and shelter. Many of the other things they buy are luxuries that they could do without. When there is money crunch they would not, for example, buy Rolls Royce cars, perhaps, Volkswagens or even bicycles would do.

These days, practically all governments intervene in the economy and regulate it. No governments lets the economy operate by itself without some helping hands. The United States government, as I write, owes over eight trillion dollars it borrowed from those who had that money (mostly Asians). Americans used that money to meet their financial obligations.

Governments borrow money via selling bonds. (Private businesses obtain money via selling stocks.) In the long run, say thirty years, they have to repay the principal sums that they borrowed. In the short run, they pay annual interests on the money they borrowed (say 5%...what is 5% of eight trillion dollars? The US government pays billions of dollars annually for its debt finance. At the rate it is going, it is only a matter of time and the economy collapses. Asian countries cannot go on forever supporting American workers and paying for the American government to fight wars that it does not have money to fund; when governments are unable to repay their debts, they may ask to refinance them or to be forgiven them, as the Nigerian government is currently negotiating with the World Bank, IMF and its European groups of lenders).

NIGERIA’S ECONOMY

Nigeria’s economy is at the primitive levels of capitalist development. We might say that Nigeria is where Britain was in the mid 1700s when it was beginning the industrialization process, and that she is where the USA and Germany were in the 1830s when they began to industrialize.

The Nigerian economy is like what Karl Marx described in his Der Capital, primitive capital accumulation stage of development.

Factories are beginning to be built in Nigeria but working conditions are very poor. Folks thank their God that they obtain any kind of job at all and do not complain about their working conditions. We must remember that in the United States it was not long ago that folks worked 14 hour days in inhumane conditions. Children, as young as twelve, were worked in America’s coal mines for twelve hours a day; those children inhaled coal dust into their lungs and died early of assorted lung diseases. The American life span at the beginning of the twentieth century was 42 years (about today’s Nigeria life span). It was only in the 1930s that America began to improve the working conditions of the people; prior to the Wagner Act, the American workers condition was akin to third world countries current conditions.

The relevant point is that we should not be too harsh on the Nigeria for; after all, it is only beginning taking the first baby steps up the industrialization ladder, steps that the West had already taken. Nigeria cannot run before it can walk, it has to go through the steps Western countries did to become industrialized and developed. (Stalin tried to bypass those necessary steps through brutal means.)

SUBSISTENCE VERSUS MONEY ECONOMY

The Nigerian economy is moving from subsistence economy to money economy. This further compounds the country’s problems. Until the twentieth, the country did not have a monetary economy. Folks, more or less, engaged in bartering of goods and services.

(Even the trading with European slave buyers was not done with currency but with other goods. The slave buyer would give Nigerians, say, alcohol in exchange for Nigerian slaves. Not long ago, digging in my village, folks saw empty bottles of expensive French wines, manufactured in the eighteenth century. Apparently, our folks sold their brothers for French wine. They also sold their people for guns, clothes, swords and other knick knack.)

In traditional Nigerian societies, folks produced their farm products, took them to their local markets and exchanged them for products they needed. This economic system is called bartering. This was largely what obtained in Nigeria until the nineteenth century. At some point in the nineteenth century, folks used cowry shells as means of exchange but those not withstanding Nigeria was not a monetary economy until the British came on the scene in 1914.

This is not the place to write Nigeria’s economic history. Suffice it to say that the British aimed at stopping slavery trade in Nigeria and encouraged Nigerians to sell palm oil, Palm kernel, groundnuts, cotton etc instead of selling themselves. The Royal Niger Company bought these slave replacement goods from Nigerians and sold to Nigerians British products like soaps, clothes, knives etc. Later, during the colonial era, the British began to mine minerals, such as tin at Joss and coal at Enugu, and to buy cash crops like cocoa and coffee.

The British colonial administration set up marketing boards that essentially bought the products of Nigeria’s farmers (such as palm oil, cocoa, groundnuts, etc) and sold those in Britain and other parts of the world. Those Marketing Boards generated quite a bit of revenue for Nigeria, so much so that at independence, Nigeria actually had trade surpluses and was able to feed itself through its local produce. (Now, Nigeria sells oil and uses that money to import food and cannot feed itself through its local farm produces.)

Nigeria gained her independence in 1960. Since then, haphazard efforts have been made to diversify the economy, from selling mostly farm and mined products to manufactured products.

During the post 1973 oil boom (as a result of the OPEC oil embargo that led to increased oil prices and making of profits) Nigeria made half hearted efforts to begin the processes of industrialization.

Arrangements were made with Western and East European countries to establish factories in Nigeria. Peugeot motor company and Volkswagen cars, for example, began to assemble their cars in Nigeria. Indeed, an effort was made to establish an iron and steal industry in Nigeria. (Apparently, Western countries refused to build this mill and Russia agreed to do so. Russian technology, relative to Western technology, is backwards. The Mill’s products could not compete with the more efficient Western iron and steal. The Mill closed shop. At present, efforts are made to resurrect it by having Indians manage it.)

Nigeria made efforts to start all sorts of industries: oil refineries were built, pharmaceutical factories were built, textile factories were built etc.

Unfortunately, as long as Nigeria had quick access to oil revenue it did not see any need to develop good work habits. Oil money funds the various governments in Nigeria (up to 80%). The infant industries were allowed to die. Nigerians build a factory with much fanfare and a few years later it closes its doors. Nigerians build things but they do not maintain them.

Just about every thing built in Nigeria has broken down. We build airports and seem unable to maintain them and in a few months they breakdown. The toilets in the fancy airports are not useable a few months after the airports are opened. The country is a giant mess.

This giant mess calls for persons with managerial skills and who are dedicated to work and productivity to come in and fix things. Unless Nigeria figures out a way to change her present devil may care attitude towards work and productivity, when the oil money runs dry, as it is bound to, someday, Nigeria becomes another failed African country. When that happens, millions of Nigerians will try to leave the country and come to the West. In the West, they do menial jobs and, for all intents and purposes, are no different from those African slaves that came to America during slave times.

Like most third world countries, upon independence, Nigeria embraced the moribund theories of socialism and planned aspects of her economy. Five year plans were made to build this and to build that. The government established what it called Parastatals, government corporations that supposedly were expected to operate on business lines and make profits. Examples are the Nigerian electrical power corporation, the Nigerian railway corporation, the Nigerian telephone corporation, the Nigerian airways corporation, and the Nigerian coal corporation.

These so-called corporations not only do not make profit but depend on getting government subsidy to stay afloat. They provide the worst services known to man. The Nigerian electricity corporation manages to provide Lagosians with only a few hours of electricity on a typical day. Light comes and goes at any time so that you cannot count on continuous electrify. (Imagine what this means to manufacturers in lost revenue.)

To get access to what electricity there is one has to bribe public officials. Do you want to have electricity and water in your house? You have to pay a certain amount of bribe to the respective authorities. Even then you still would not count on having the water and electricity.

The saddest part of corruption in Nigeria is that the people drink from streams and ingest assorted germs and die early death. When villagers levy themselves and collect money and go to government agencies to come build wells or pipe born waters for them, they have to bribe these agencies’ officials that sometimes it takes years before they could get their wells built. In the meantime, the villages keep dying from the impure water they drink.

Does this unacceptable situation bother Nigerian public officials? Do Nigerian public officials have conscience or are they antisocial persons lacking in guilt and remorse? The fact that Nigerians do not feel concerned enough to build wells and give their people pipe born water and electricity and have to take bribes from those who collected money to build their own wells makes them inhumane. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the same spirit that led Nigerians to sell their brothers and sisters into slavery is still operating in contemporary Nigerians.

These people are evil persons. There is no other way to put it. Beating around the bush is a waste of time. People who are not committed enough to help their own people are worse than savages.

During the heydays of romance with socialism, the Nigerian government undertook many projects. Those subsequently died. These days, the government is trying to revive those projects. At the present it is selling off its boondoggles to private businesses. Nigeria recently privatized its electricity corporation. The idea is to see if a private company would give Nigerians electricity for a whole day without the power going out. We shall see.

As I pointed out elsewhere, Nigerians, indeed Africans, seem to have a sickness of the soul. Their sickness began when they sold their people into slavery. They sold their people and do not feel guilty from doing so. To the present, all that they do is blame the white man for buying their people. It is always the white man’s fault.

True, white persons should not have bought African slaves and should not have abused Africans in the Americas. But that is beside the point. When one points two accusatory fingers at other people, three point right back at one. Africans are, at least, 75% responsible for the evil of slavery. They must accept that responsibility and seek ways to make amends to African Americans.

We must ask African Americans to forgive us our past evil behavior. This apology must be followed with some kind of financial restitution, say giving 1% of Nigeria/Africa’s annual GDP to African Americans, for a generation, 35 years.

Sinners must make amend for their sins, otherwise they cannot change. Africans must make amends for their evil past and resolve to become good persons.

I do not believe that any thing will work out well for Africans until they apologize for slavery. It is when they do so that they can then resolve to care for their people.

At present, Nigerian leaders are nothing more than slave traders still selling their brothers to the highest European bidder. They make profits and live well while their brothers starve. They are beneath contempt. They are despicable, really. No wonder many sensitive Nigerians run away from Nigerians and do not want anything to do with Nigerians. Who wants to relate to corrupt persons, to criminals, to hard hearted persons who throw lavish parties for the few haves, while the many are sleeping in shacks in the shanty towns of Lagos?

These people do not deserve other persons respect. At any rate, few persons respects them. Despite adorning their bodies with ridiculous Indian manufactured lace/ clothes, they are still seen as nothing. They are nothing. Literally, they are nothing.

No serious economic thinker outside Nigeria even knows that Nigeria exists. When world economic calculations are made, Nigeria is not part of the equation. The Nigerian economy is nothing to be reckoned with.

Every one knows that only oil keeps things afloat in Nigeria and as soon as the West discovers alternatives to oil, Nigeria becomes another failed African state, a basket case.

We cannot give up on Nigeria. It is because one has not given up that one does ones best to reach out to Nigerians and see whether they can be rescued from the hell they assigned themselves. We must do what we can to develop managerial skills in Nigerians and encourage them to become ethical and moral persons. When this happens, Nigerians would begin to manage their country’s economy as they ought to do, professionally.

CONCLUSION

In this lecture, I have, hopefully, delineated the salient characteristics of the capitalist political economy.

Nigeria has no choice but to develop a mixed economy. It behooves all Nigerians to understand how this economy works.

Not all of us can become experts on the capitalist economy. My goal is very limited, to enable folks to understand the basic nature of the economy. If folks are interested in advanced understanding of the economy they should go seek such knowledge out.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 8, 2005

Lecture 6 is on October 10: Interest groups politics in Nigeria/the politics of ethnic groups

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October 08, 2005

Ozodi Osuji Lectures on Nigeria's Politics #4: Nigeria and Political Ideologies

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- An ideology is not a science. It is a belief system. An ideology is composed of ideas of how some people think that their world ought to be. It is based on a value system and has no basis in empirical reality. An ideology is like a religion that individuals embrace as true and it enables them to organize and make sense of their world. It is by no means objective in the sense that its postulations can be verified in a controlled scientific experiment.

The scientific methodological approach to phenomena requires that a thesis or proposition be verifiable and replicable in a controlled experiment. Any school child can walk into his Chemistry Laboratory, mix two elements, oxygen and hydrogen, apply heat and obtain water. This is a fact and is replicable anywhere in the world. That is science. This is not empty debate as to what is true or not, but acceptance of self evident facts. Political ideologies are not science, they are based on beliefs.

In the extant world, there are many ideologies but the main ones are: communism, socialism, capitalism, fascism, corporatism, mercantilism, liberalism and conservatism. I will briefly explain these competing ideologies, with particular reference to communism.

Communism came into being as a reaction to primitive capitalism. If you recall, the industrial revolution began in Britain around 1746. By this is meant the system of bringing many workers together to work in a factory rather than have them work in their own shops as crafts men. Men and women were brought together and fitted to the world of machines and thereby optimized the advantages of large scale economies.

This process began in the Midlands of Britain (Birmingham and Manchester). Men with money built factories and hired workers to work in them. The factory owners had a tendency to work their employees several hours a day. It was reported that some worked their employees for up to sixteen or more hours a day, six days a week. Moreover, they did not pay them well. The working conditions were very poor. The average factory worker died before he or she reached age forty. Simply stated, factory workers lived in squalor.

Naturally, men of goodwill decried the apparent exploitation of the emergent factory workers. These persons agitated for improved working conditions for the workers. Literary persons like Charles Dickens wrote about the appalling living conditions of the urban proletariats of England. Those of a more activist frame of mind took to the streets protesting against what they saw as the exploitation of the workers. In time, these bleeding hearted, do good persons were called utopian communists. They comprised of men like Charles Fourier and Joseph Proudhon in France and Robert Owen in Britain. (Owen eventually migrated to America and started a commune in Indiana. In his commune, he gave his workers some say so in the management of their work. His commune fell.)

Industrialization began in Germany around the same time it began in America, in the 1830s. Karl Marx, a middle class German Jew, studied Hegel’s’ philosophy. It should be recalled that Hegel (see Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind) was motivated to have a strong German state. Hegel was a German nationalist who decried the divisions he saw in his father land, divisions that made the country easy prey to the well organized nations of France, Russia, Austria and England. He was in the same mode as Niccolo Machiavelli when the later wrote the Prince. Machiavelli had urged the Duke of Florence to, if necessary, use guile and force to unify Italy, so as to prevent her from been subjugated by foreign powers (France, Austria and Spain).

Hegel argued that history is characterized by the march of ideas, and that the ultimate idea is the nation-state (the united volk). The nation-state, as he saw it, is the culmination of historical development. What this German nationalist was really trying to accomplish was for a German prince to use guile and or force to unify the several kingdoms that constituted the Germany of his time. Hegel was telling the prince that dares to take up this challenge that he would be in accord with the forces of history; that, in effect, history would approve his behavior.

Ultimately, this was exactly what Otto Von Bismarck did for his Kaiser Wilhelm of Prussia: use guile and iron fist to unify Germany by 1870. Bismarck immediately attacked Louis Napoleon’s France and humiliated her. This was Germany’s coming out party. Germany joined the big boys’ league, the great powers of Europe. Since Germany had not participated in the scramble for foreign colonies, Bismarck called for a conference at Berlin (1882-84) to extract some colonies from the other European powers who at this time ruled the world. At that conference, the modern map of Africa was drawn. Germany was given Togoland, Cameroon, Tangayika, Burundi, South-West Africa (where it proceeded to massacre the various African tribes, especially the Heroros.)

Karl Marx, a Christianized Jew studied Hegelian philosophy. He completed his doctoral dissertation but, as a Jew in anti Semitic Germany, found it near impossible to obtain a teaching job at a German university. Unable to secure a job with what he studied, he tried his hands are journalism. For a while, he worked as a reporter for a New York City, USA newspaper. Marx failed at journalism and turned his attention to social activism.

In time, Marx joined forces with Frederick Engel, a German whose father owned factories. The clever Marx had Engel support him financially. Marx subsequently embarked on writing pamphlets and tracks opinionating on every subject under the sun. He fancied himself an expert on political economy even though he did not study economics.

The failed revolution of 1848 gave the opportunistic Marx an opportunity to give a self serving interpretation to what was essentially a failed attempt by German nationalists to persuade the rulers of Germany to unify during their conference in Frankfurt. The Princes of Germany used force to disperse the agitators for a unified Germany. The clever Marx saw the failure of the revolution as an opportunity to call for workers of the world to unify and overthrow their so-called oppressors. Thus, he penned the infamous track, Communist Manifesto. In it, he argued that the workers were oppressed by the factory owners, the bourgeoisie, and called on them to expropriate the expropriators. Marx argued that the workers oppression could only end if they took possession of the means of production and managed it by themselves.

Apparently, this utopian/idealist dreamer forgot that it takes a different type of mental outlook to be an entrepreneur.

Business skills are acquired, indeed are a culture that you either have, or you do not. If you give workers businesses to run you have essentially sentenced such businesses to death. It takes a few persons who understand how to run things to do so, not idle talking socialists. One of the reasons why African Americans are going nowhere is their lack of entrepreneurial skills. Asians come to America with business skills and in a few years take over the shops in the black community while the brothers talk communism. See the writings of Thomas Sowell.

As a result of his increasing agitations against the powers that were in Germany, Marx was driven out of Germany. He made a brief stop in France, but fearing that the long arms of German authorities could easily reach him in France, he sought to put a great distance between him and them by fleeing to Britain. He settled at London. He made the London Library his second home. Engel was left the responsibility of feeding him.

Marx wrote unreadable dissertations on such topics as “capital accumulation’ “Labor added value” and such high sounding but irrelevant subjects. It was in London that Marx produced his seminal work, Der Capital. In it, he claimed that he stood Hegel, his old mentor, on his head.

How so? Whereas Hegel argued that the rise of the nation-state was the goal of history (see the treaty of Westphalia, 1648, the end of the religious wards and the rise of the modern nation-state), Marx argued that communism, his workers paradise, was the goal of history. He employed the Hegelian notion of thesis, antithesis and synthesis (dialectical materialism, he called it) to make his case. As he saw it, society began in primitive communalism, where all people co-owned all property. This is not an empirical fact, just the product of Marx’s imagination. That imaginary but pristine world gave way to what Marx called slave society. In the later, a few used the many to secure pleasure for themselves and generally to enrich themselves. Slave society, in turn, gave way to feudal society where aristocrats used the semi slave serfs to procure good living for themselves while the serfs toiled in the fields for them. The later, in turn, gave way to what Marx called the bourgeoisie class (middle class).

In each of these social orders, the implicit contradictions in it, Marx contends, led to conflicts. Thesis, what is, the accepted social order, was challenged by its opposite, antithesis. The ruling elements were resented by those they ruled and both parties fought each other. The result is a synthesis of the warring parties in a new social order.

The new society, synthesis, in turn, produced its own paradox and contradictions and the two struggled until a new synthesis was formed. Ultimately, there emerged the bourgeois class whose contradictions would lead to the rise of the workers paradise, ala Marx. It should be observed that according to the world invented by Marx, each of these succeeding social orders was an improvement on preceding ones, hence to be encouraged. The Bourgeoisie was advancement on the aristocrats who rule Europe. As Marx saw it, where the Bourgeoisie had not come into being, they were to be encouraged to do so, for they were a necessary precondition for the rise of the proletariat class.

Russia was not industrialized and was composed of Bowyers and their peasant servants. It was not until 1862 that slavery was ended in Russia. In this regard, Marx did not expect Russians to initiate the communist revolution. He had expected the workers revolution to first occur in England, where the industrial revolution began. Some observers have, indeed, argued that Marx was probably a racist; that he imbibed the Germanic race’s tendency to look down on the Slavic race and looked down on the Slavic population of Eastern Europe and did not expect any thing good to come out of them?

Marx implied that once the workers overthrew the bourgeois class, the factory owners, that there would no longer be conflicts in society, and that the struggle for a different social order would end.

(This Marxian fantasy reminds one of Francis Fakuyama’ fantasy upon the end of Soviet Communism; Fakuyama thought that the emergence of America as the sole superpower meant the end of history; that there would be no more struggles for power and America and what she represented would not be challenged by rival ideologies and last forever and forever. He had not reckoned with the rise of ethnicity and what Samuel Huntington called the clash of civilizations; America is presently knocked around by emergent China.)

How is the triumph of communism to end history? Marx believed that economic inequality in society would be eliminated. He believed strongly in economic determinism of everything else. His pseudo science, dialectic materialism, was supposed to account for every thing in history. (That fantasy did not take into consideration the more powerful idea of ethnicity; communists talk of class but men do not go to war for class but for their nations; see what happened in eastern Europe, the emergence of ethnic struggles. Yugoslavia, Czchokoslavia, USSR etc all fell prey to ethnic power struggles. In Nigeria and other parts of Africa ethnicity rules.)

In Marx’s fantasy land, property and wealth would be shared equally: “from each according to his abilities and to each given his needs”. Marx waxed so sentimental that one wonders what planet he came from. As he saw, it people are so good that they would work and share their wealth. That is correct; a Bill Gates would put in sixteen hour work days and share his resultant wealth with socialists who probably work less than six hour days. (Charles Darwin, a more realistic thinker told us that life is characterized by struggle where the fittest survived and the weak died off. Herbert Spencer reinforced that realistic view by showing us how the robber barons of North America used skill and guile to build great industrial empires. Social Darwinism is the truth that no one wants to talk about. See Edward Wilson, on Social biology and Selfish Genes.)

The productive elements of society, in Marx’s fantasy world, would support the lazy elements who run around calling themselves radicals while doing nothing to contribute to what Adam Smith called the wealth of nations. Marx wrote poetry, not hard nosed science of human nature. Indeed, he visualized a scenario where people worked very minimally, but, instead, read poetry, contemplated flowers and the sunset and somehow still had their food. This is a never- never land; the stuff of fiction. This man was a dreamer, a neurotic idealist living in the world of fantasy, not the real world where man has to work for his daily bread. (The good book, the Bible tells us that man has to earn his bread by the sweat of his labors and that children are born through women’s labor pain. This remains reality and no wishful thinking by a confused socialist would wish it away.)

To the political realist, Marx wrote pure nonsense. In my opinion, Marx is not different from a foolish child talking utopian gabled gook. Read Thomas Moore’s Utopia and you have read Marx’s convoluted rubbish. In the real world, people have to work hard and the most competitive elements of society generate more wealth than lazy socialists.

Communism, Marxism, or whatever it is called, means the sharing of wealth and the public ownership of the means of production. Marx visualized a situation where the workers spontaneously rose up and took over the factories where they worked.

Marx was so foolish that he did not even reckon with human tendency to fear. Those who study leadership know that the run of the mill human being is ruled by fear. He is afraid of harm and death. If you have credible means of coercion and are unafraid to punish, even kill a few persons, the masses will tow your line. Human beings are cowards, through and through. They talk loud but if you shoot and kill a few of them, as any leader that truly wants to accomplish serious objectives must do, people will panic, run and eventually obey you. Hitler knew this fact and did not hesitate killing those who opposed him.

Marx did not recognize that his angelic workers are governed by fear and cannot mount a credible revolution. It always takes the fearless type, the heroic character, the type willing to die for what they believe in to organize and lead the so-called workers of the world.

The masses are too afraid to accomplish Marx’s utopian goal. So, V.I. Lenin, a tough Russian, proposed to form a communist political party and use it as a vanguard to organize the masses. His idea was to use the political party, an elite group of dedicated revolutionaries, to bring about the communist revolution that Marx had expected the workers to bring about by themselves. As Lenin saw it, if you left the workers alone, the most that they can develop is what he called trade union consciousness, but would never see that the imperialists were oppressing them. In America, the transnational corporations exploit the rest of the world and give illiterate American workers middle class living standards hence buy their loyalty and support in oppressing the rest of the world. How can an American factory worker who cannot read or write his name but drives a Hummer see himself as oppressed by the ruling classes? He is more likely to fancy himself special, even a superior white racist. (Generally, American university graduates cannot compete with High school graduates in Asia. That is how broken the educational system in America is. The situation is even worse among African Americans; their high school graduates often cannot fill out job application forms.)

Lenin imagined that in time that the party would give power to the masses and wither away. Seventy four years later (1917-1991) the Bolshevik party was still ruling Russia on behalf of the masses, the masses that are forever thought not ready to govern themselves.

Lenin and his coconspirators formed the Bolshevik party. I do not have the time and space to document the history of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Suffice it to say that these criminals took advantage of the sufferings brought about by the First World War to take over power in Russia. These amoral criminals proceeded to murder the Czar and established the reign of terror in what became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR.

(Communists tend to be amoral and antisocial personalities; they tend to lack well developed moral conscience and do not feel remorse for their hurtful activities. As Dostoyevsky observed in Brothers Karamazov, if you take away God from social discourse, as socialists do, every behavior becomes permissible. Socialists, in Nietzsche’s terms, see God as dead and give themselves the permission to do whatever they want.)

Lenin died in 1924, and his lieutenants, Stalin and Trotsky, battled it out for power and control. Over time, the cold blooded murderer and thief, Stalin won the battle for power. Trotsky ran to Mexico where he was eventually axed to death by Stalin’s agents.

The paranoid personality called Stalin imagined that there were people everywhere out to kill him and killed them before they could kill him. This monster killed more people than Adolf Hitler did. In the 1930s alone, Stalin liquidated the kulaks, small farmers, the Russian military officer class and any one else who could challenge his paranoid rule. He established a totalitarian, authoritarian, dictatorial, monolithic and terrorist state. He instilled fear into every person’s mind and used intimidation and death to get the people to obey his criminal rule.

Communism is the ideology that workers ought to own the means to production. How exactly are workers supposed to do so? In a typical work place, there are differences in the level of information available to the workers. Engineers know more than assembly line workers. Managers know more than engineers and so on. So how can this motley of different information units own and manage their means of production?

In the real world, those who know more will always tell those who know less what to do. Joseph Schumpeter made this point so well that one does not need to repeat it here. There can never be equality in the work place, as long as different workers possess different levels of information. Those who understand business and public finance will always tell those who don’t what to do with their money. This is so in capitalist and socialist economies. Accountants are needed in all economies.

Industrial democracy or participatory democracy is a wish of the wisp. If we need to build bridges we need to listen to the opinions of civil engineers, not the idle opinions of foolish socialist. We are entering a highly scientific and technological world, a world that will increasingly be ruled by technocrats, those with technical skills, not idle talking socialists.

SOCIALISM VERSUS COMMUNISM

Socialism, as opposed to communism is construed as the acceptance that workers could come to political power through democratic means, rather than seize power through violent uprising, as Marx and Lenin wanted. In reality, socialism is disguised dictatorship. Wherever these criminals come to power, society not only becomes less productive, but people are killed. These murderers take away the incentive for people to work hard by taking people’s hard earned income and giving it to the lazy bums that call themselves the leaders of socialist societies. (They do not even help the workers on whose behalf they talk shop. Russian communist leaders sent their children to the best schools in the land and lived in Dachas while the average Russian lived like a third world person and stood in line for four hours a day to buy a loaf of bread.)

Wherever there is central planning where a few bureaucrats propose to determine how the economy should work disaster occurs. As Adam Smith tells us, the forces of the market are always the best way to allocate resources in society. Where there is demand, supply follows and that way, resources are allocated to where they are needed.

Men do evil when they propose to do well but do well when they pursue their self interests. This is because in pursuing their self interests they must produce what other rational self interest seeking persons would buy, thus, willy-nilly, the blind forces of the capitalist market makes sure that every person’s self interests are served.

The last paragraph segues to the free enterprise economy. I will be very brief here for we shall devote our next lecture to capitalist political economy. The free enterprise ideology is embodied in Adam Smith’s political economy (Wealth of Nations). The forces of the market work to distribute goods and services to where they are demanded.

Prior to the free enterprise economic system was the mercantilist system. Here, the state looked after its interests in domestic and international trade. It tried to stifle the development of industries in other countries so as to make those countries dependent on its own industries. Britain, for example, tried to prevent America from becoming industrialized. In doing so, it hoped to keep America a market for its industries. Britain also tried to prevent America from trading/buying goods from other countries, even if those goods could be bought cheaper. This system obviously was not good for Americans and largely contributed to their resentment of Britain hence the war of 1776. (Milton Freidman has a wonderful book on America’s economic history, from colonial times to Alexander Hamilton’s management of the initial post revolutionary economy, to America’s industrialization efforts and so on. This book is a must read for all students of the American economy.)

Mercantilism is inefficient and leads to poverty. Free competition leads to efficiency in the production of goods and services. If you produced your goods and or services cheaply, you sold them at a lower price and made profits. The buyer is a rational person and would always prefer cheaper to higher priced goods and services. Therefore, the person who produces inefficiently hence has higher production costs and must sell high would be pushed out of the market by the cheap producing person. Thus, in a free enterprise system, all producers seek ways to reduce their cost of production, increase efficiency and the result is cheaper goods and services, and more efficient allocation of goods and services in the economy.

Corporatism is a form of mercantilism. An excellent example is Japan and Nazi Germany. Here, the state and industry colludes and work hand in hand to target industries to be developed and pours money into them. The goal is be able to out compete other countries. Usually, corporative states resort to dumping their goods in other economies and in so doing control the market. Japan did this and used to have favorable balance of trade Vis a Vis the USA. Corporatism generally goes hand in hand with fascist governments.

In fascism, there is a belief that most people are idiotic and do not know what is good for them. One person or a group of persons (Oligarchs) assume to know what is good for the people. He/they seize the government and proceed to superimpose their ideas of how things ought to be on the nation. Usually, fascists believe in strong nations and wars and see individuals as mere appendages to the state. People are to be used at wars for the greater glory of the nation. Nazis n Germany and Fascists in Italy saw their subjects as existing for the good of the state. The fuehrer prince, Hitler, decided to go to war and people were coerced and used to accomplish the goals of the state. (Communists like Stalin did the same; they transformed the masses into instruments for accomplishing their communism dreams; they, too, had no respect for the individual’s right; indeed, they killed the individual if in their psychotic judgment he was not useful to their course.)

Liberals and conservatives are the dominant political ideologies in the extant Western world. They are the mainstream and accepted political ideologies in Western Europe and North America.

Liberals believe that the state could be used for good, to serve the masses interests. They crave big government and want to tax the rich and use that money to provide services for the poor. The negative side of liberalism is that they want to use the power of the state to impose their views on how society ought to be on the people. In today’s America and much of the Western world, liberals and their lesbian feminists and homosexual perverts would like to utilize the state to impose their depraved life styles on the good Christian people. They think that they know what is good for the people. They see religious people as simpletons who believe in superstitions written in scriptures. They discount the Bible and think that they know what is good for all people and what is good for them is to shove homosexuality down their throats. In fact, a liberal superintendent of the New York school district, without consulting parents, who, to his mind, know not what is good for them, went ahead and printed books telling students that it is normal for two lesbian women to raise children. These people are normalizing deviancy and soon will force people to embrace their bestiality as healthy life styles.

If liberals are allowed to run amuck they would take away the people’s civil liberties and civil rights and initiate the rule of perverts and pedophiles. They would impose their godless conception of society on all of society. And we all know where that leads: decline of the empire. Rome declined when homosexual criminals imposed their defiance of nature on society. These animals that defy nature and insist on doing the incredible always contract diseases, Aids being the least of them. These folks have a death wish, their godless lives lead to existential depression and they want to take all members of society with them in their self destructive life styles.

Conservatives are in favor of limited government. (See the writings of John Locke, Edmund Burke, and John Stuart Mill etc.) They fear big governments and believe that big governments invariably lead to tyranny. Big government means large bureaucracies. We know that bureaucracies tend to attract brain dead persons. These unproductive elements of society would like to tell people how to live their lives. Ten bureaucrats who cannot change a light bulb would like to tell the productive elements of society how to produce goods and services. Where these despicable persons rule productivity dies. (See Max Weber’s writing on the nature of the bureaucracy.) Conservatives want free enterprise economy. Conservatives want people to have God in their lives. They understand that without God morality would breakdown. An amoral society is an anarchic society, a Hobessian world where all is at war with each other and the result is life becoming nasty, brutish and short. (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.)

Society generally swings from the left to the right of the political spectrum and right to left. As long as centrists and moderates rule we seem safe. But when right wing, or left wing ideologues take over control of society, disaster strikes.

IDEOLOGY IN NIGERIA’S POLITICS

I believe that I have given us a summary of the various political ideologies competing for people’s allegiance. These ideologies seem to exist in every polity. Wherever you go in the world, you can plot people on this ideological spectrum. Some people are on the left and some are on the right, but a preponderance of the people tend to be in the center of the ideological continuum (hence centrist, moderates).

The average human being is not a socialist or a fascist, left wing or right wing, the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum but a mix of both. Most politicians address the centrist individual for they know that that is where the votes are.

Nigeria and most African countries are not characterized by ideological politics. Whereas there are a few campus radicals, there really are no well defined socialists or fascists in Nigeria. Indeed, there are no well defined liberals and conservatives in Nigeria.

Most Nigerians are still at what Abraham Maslow would consider the lower levels in his hierarchy of needs schema. Maslow has five levels on his hierarchy of needs: from lower to top: physiological, safety, self esteem, social esteem, and self actualization. As Maslow sees it, human beings have to meet their lower order needs before they can aspire after higher ones; they have to have food, clothes and shelter before they worry about safety, then after that self esteem and social respect and finally a desire to actualize their innate potentials. As long as people are hungry, they tend to concentrate on seeking ways to obtain their food. Those who are hungry have little or no time to worry about ideological politics. Ideological politics is for well fed professional middle class persons.

With less than one percent of her population as truly middle class, Nigerians are at Maslow’s lower levels in the hierarchy of needs. They, therefore, don’t tend to worry much about ideological politics. They just want to obtain their food, clothes and house and be able to pay their children’s school fees.

Nigerians will vote for any politician who promises them the means to meet their material needs. Though many Nigerian politicians do not, in fact, deliver on their promises to the masses, but as long as they have money to bribe key persons who can deliver the votes, they tend to be elected into political offices.

Nigeria’s tribal nature confounds its politics. People are most likely to vote for persons from their ethnic groups than for others. They seldom worry about political candidates ideological affiliations. What seems to matter most to them is a candidate’s ethnic affiliation.

Igbos will likely vote for Igbo candidates even if those candidates stand for nothing, other than steal from the national treasury and give some crumbs to their fellow towns men, not to all Igbos. The same goes for Hausas and Yorubas. What we have in Nigeria is the politics of ethnic groups, not ideological politics.

For our present purposes, there is little ideological politics in Nigeria. True, on college campuses, well fed children of the middle class make noises about poorly understood Marxism, nevertheless, they are preoccupied with figuring out ways to secure jobs. They know that the chances are slim that they would secure good jobs. Nigeria is awash with unemployed college graduates. The struggle is to secure a job and keep it. Nigerians keep quiet just so that they keep their jobs.

Whereas there is little or no ideological politics taking place in Nigeria, Nigerians being human beings still fall into the above outlined ideological states. The individual Nigerian, therefore, ought to know what his political ideology is and, hopefully, obtain a more detailed education in it. My goal in this lecture is to summarize the various ideologies, not to provide detailed education on them. We cannot do that in the one hour time frame we set for each of the twenty lectures in this series.

CONCLUSION

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As John Maynard Keynes demonstrated, the capitalist economy has built in boom and burst cycles. There are periods of inflation, depression and recession. To prevent these from occurring, we now manage the capitalist economy. We use many instruments to regulate and guide the economy: Taxation, monetary policy and fiscal policy. Briefly, taxation is used to increase or reduce the quantity of money in circulation; government spending is used to stimulate stagnant economies or cool down over heated ones; the central bank’s raising or lowering of prime interest rates are used to reduce or increase the level of money in circulation hence curb inflation and or reduce depression etc.

We do regulate what the private sector does, such as employ the Environment Protection Agency to decide on acceptable levels of emission factories are permitted to emit into the air. What we have is a regulated capitalist economy, not lassie faire economy. This mixed economy seems the best that we can do.

In my judgment, Nigeria and African countries ought to embrace mixed economies. There really is no better alternative. The alternatives of socialism and communism are unproductive and lead to dead ends. Socialism does not lead to increased productivity anywhere it has been practiced. What it does is give authority to power hungry folks. These monsters proceed to enslave every body in society. They cannot be permitted to tell us, free men and women, what to do with our lives.

A mixed economy, not unmitigated capitalism, is the right solution to Africa’s economic problems. I believe that every person has a right to free medical health and free education, from elementary to technical colleges and universities. I believe that public utilities like electricity, water, transportation, and so on ought to be publicly subsidized. But beyond these select areas of the economy, I believe that the state should hands off the economy. Let the individual swim or sink. (Of course, we should provide him a few safety nets, but not too much, so as not to discourage his competitive spirit. Unemployment payments and Old age pension are good safety net for folks. Old age pension should begin at age 70. Nobody, repeat, nobody should be paid welfare money. That nonsense is what encourages defiant, unruly women to destroy monogamous marriages and have children out of wedlock.)

There is competition in nature. A few will win and many will lose, such is life, cest la vie. In sports, not all of us will be Tiger Wood or Michael Johnson. In academics, not all students have the intellect to be outstanding students, no matter what we may wish. Intelligence is a product of the interaction of our inherited genetic make ups and our social environments. All we can do is provide every child with equal opportunity to compete but not equal outcomes.

We ought to live with reality without harkening to the empty promises of socialism, communism, Marxism and other such yesteryears ideas.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 7, 2005

Lecture 5, on October 9, is on capitalist political economy.

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October 07, 2005

Osuji Lectures #3: Nigeria's Political Socialization

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- CULTURE: Yesterday, we talked about political culture. Today, we shall talk about political socialization. The two, culture and socialization tend to go together and, indeed, in some textbooks are often treated as one subject. Human beings are socialized to their groups’ cultures.

Socialization is the purview of several disciplines including psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis and political psychology. Every human group has a culture, an accepted pattern of behaviors that they have found useful in their efforts to adapt to their world and try to give those patterns of behaviors to their children.

Culture is neither good nor bad but is that which enables a group to survive the challenges of their world. It is time tested mechanisms for coping with the exigencies thrown up by a particular environment.

One culture is not better than another for what enables one people to survive in one environment may not enable another to survive elsewhere.

This is a critical point and needs stressing. What, for example, enables those living in the cold sub artic world may not enable those living in the hot tropical world to adapt to their world. The behavior patterns developed by Europeans in their efforts to adapt to their world may not be adaptive to what the tropical environment requires. Consider: it takes clothing to adapt to the cold north. Without wearing clothes human beings would simply die off in Scandinavia. Furthermore, it takes well insulated housing to survive in the cold north. In the tropics neither clothing nor brick castles are required to adapt to the hot environment. As a matter of fact, it would seem inappropriate to wear three piece suits in Nigeria and or to live in brick houses.

When people from Europe came into contact with people in Africa, in the tropics, what struck them was how scantily dressed Africans were and how they lived in grass huts. They extrapolated from this observation and concluded that Africans were primitive. To them, Africans lacked ability to develop science and technology. The Europeans fancied themselves smarter than Africans because they were clothed in elaborate attire and lived in castles.

Now if we approached the situation with our thinking hats on, we would reach different conclusions. It is adaptive to hot climates for people to be semi nude and for them to live in grass houses. It is not rational to wear elaborate clothing in the tropics or to live in Versailles like palaces in the tropics. As a matter of fact, it seems down right foolish to do in Africa what is adaptive in Europe.

Please notice that during the summer months in Europe, that folks go practically nude. The beaches of Spain and Portugal witness less clothed persons than the Massai and other seeming nude Africans.

If Europeans had lived in Africa, they would have had exactly the same culture that Africans have, including being scantily clothed and live in grass houses. By the same token, if Africans had lived in Europe they would have developed the same culture Europeans have. Actually Africans already lived in Europe and developed the culture Europeans have. Europeans, as well as all human beings are Africans; they are emigrated from Africa.

The environment determines how people adapt to it. Culture is that which adapts to the realities of the environment and not an abstract phenomenon. You do what your world asks of you to do to survive in it, not what you think that you should do, but what you have to do.

Every culture adapts to the realities of its physical and social environment. It is because cultures are mechanisms that adapted to the realities of specific environments that we cannot judge one culture as better, as or worse than other cultures. We have to study each culture on its own terms and, in so far that we are to judge it, evaluate to what extent it enables its people to adapt to their world.

This realization of the specificity of culture, in academia, gave rise to the idea of multi-culturalism. We now know that all cultures are adaptations to specific worlds and are not good or bad and ought to be studied on their own terms.

Human beings come from diverse cultural backgrounds. To understand why they do what they do you have to understand the cultures that they come from. You have to study each and every human group’s culture to understand why its members do what they do. You cannot expect persons from one culture to behave like persons from other cultures. In fact, it is silly to expect a person from cold Alaska to behave in the same manner as a person from Mediterranean California.

As in most things human beings do, however, there is always a danger of taking good things to the absurd. The idea of cultural relativism can be so carried to its logical conclusion that we rationalize foolishness. Consider. In some cultures there was really little or no respect for women. Women were second class citizens. Women were to be seen and not heard from. In India, girls were married off as young as age twelve; indeed, when a man died it was often expected for his widow to be burned in her husband’s funeral pyre. This was Hindu culture. If the idea of cultural relativism is carried to its logical conclusion, it follows that Indians ought to be marrying off their ten year old girls to 60 year old pedophiles from Arabia (it was recently reported in the press that rich Arab men came to India to find young brides) and burning their widows?

Culture is not a static phenomenon. Culture is always dynamic and is always changing. Groups of human beings are always finding better ways of adapting to their environments. What was considered adaptive yesterday could be improved today.

Culture change is generally accelerated when different cultures come together. When different cultures meet, they learn from each other how each does the same thing and both diffuse to one another and learn.

In fact, those groups of human beings that were cut off from interaction with other groups tended to remain stagnant relative to those groups that came into contact with different groups and learned from them. Progressive groups are generally those groups that are frequently coming into contact with other groups, learning from them and making changes. Trading people are generally more progressive people for they are in touch with different groups and learn from them and improve on their own cultures.

Cosmopolitan groups as the Jews are who they are because they are literally everywhere in the world and learning from every group.

Isolated groups, those cut off from the larger world, tend to be characterized by the presence of yesterday’s science and technology.

Within Africa, those groups that eschew commingling with the outside world, such as the Pygmies of the Ituru forest of the Congo, the Massai of Kenya, the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, the Dinka of Sudan etc tend to retain their cultures but are generally living in a world that others consider appropriate in the twenty first century. They live in the past, not the present world. Like the dodo bird that did not adapt to its changed environments, these African groups are probably headed towards extinction. At present, they are museum pieces for Western anthropologists to study and understand how human beings everywhere lived ten thousand years ago (not how they live today).

African groups that embraced cultural dynamism, even though they came into contact with Europeans in less than a hundred years ago, are now found all over the world. The Igbos came into active contact with Europeans around the beginning of the twentieth century and are today found in the best universities of the world. This is because of their acceptance of change as a necessity. You do not sit around trying to maintain your past; you let your past go and accept the present and future. Nostalgia for the past is a waste of time for the past is gone forever. The present is all there is, the future is a hope.

SOCIALIZATION

Human beings are cultural animals. They have no choice to be cultural or not, they have to be; they have to figure out ways to adapt to their world and pass those ways to their children. Every human group passes to their children what they believe would enable them adapt to their world. The means of passing culture from one generation to another is called socialization.

Those children who are properly raised internalizes their group’s culture and behave accordingly. Normal adults are normal to the extent that they have incorporated the norms of their group and exhibit them in their behaviors.

Norms are accepted patterns of behavior. Behavior is normal because the group approves it as such. Behavior is abnormal because a group of human beings say that it is so. Generally, human groups judge behavior that enables them to survive as normal and those that lead to their demise as abnormal. Normalcy or deviancy is a social construct; it is a society that defines what is normal and what is not.

Heterosexuality enables people to procreate children, replace themselves and survive. Homosexuality does not lead to procreation and, in fact, it leads to contracting all sorts of viral and bacterial diseases. Thus, in most human societies, homosexuality is defined as defiant sexual behaviors.

(Today, radical feminists are bent on deconstructing extant culture because men constructed it, patriarchy, and these radical deconstructionists want every thing done by men to go; they want to reconstruct society in women’s image. They want to impose their death courting behaviors on society. They want to do it through political correctness, through censoring speech that does not agree with their views of reality. These nihilists now have the right to define the abnormal as normal; they normalize deviancy and, indeed, make normalcy deviancy. Generally, these groups are oppositional defiant with high dose of antisocial traits. Without modern medicine homosexuals would self destroy; it is medications that kill the germs that they contract every time they engage in their unhygienic sexual behaviors. Just about every lesbian has Herpes of the mouth. Gay men are filled with innumerable diseases the least of which is HIV. These behaviors are a product of godlessness and reflect existential depression. These people are on a fast track to self destruction and like all sadists would like to drag the rest of society with them)

Every human group socializes its young into internalizing its culture. It hopes that if it succeeds that its offspring would do what enables it to survive. If a group’s norms are maladaptive to the requirements of the present environment and it socializes its children to interiorize that culture, and they do so and exhibit it in their behaviors, they would die off. Consider alcoholics. If they habituate their children with alcoholism, the children become both physiologically and psychologically addicted to alcohol at a very early age. Such children destroy their bodies with alcohol and die young. American Indians are essentially self destroying through this means. The reservations are cesspools of alcoholism where twelve year old children are already drunks.

Whereas, in the main, culture enables a people to survive, dysfunctional and pathological cultures hasten people’s death.

Every year, some human groups die off. Currently there are many endangered groups in Africa. If history remains constant, in five hundred years, some of these groups would have become extinct. They would die off because of their inability to do what adapts to the changing environment we all live on. Unless, of course, we help these people to become realistic and embrace change, they might become dinosaurs. Dinkas, Massai, Twa, and Bushmen seem on a fast track to extinction.

(Many American Indian tribes die out every year; at the rate they are disappearing, it is doubtful that they would be around in the next few hundred years. What is left of them would disappear into other people’s gene pools.)

Children are very vulnerable. Children under age 12 would literally die if adults do not take care of them.

Children know that they rely on adults to survive. Therefore, children strive to please their parents and guardians and do what they are told to do. Except with the exception of a few oppositional defiant and or conduct disordered children (the five percent of the population that go on to become criminals and fill our jails and prisons), most children learn what their significant others ask them to learn.

As Sigmund Freud and his Psychoanalysts see it, the normal child, by age six, has begun developing what they call the superego. The superego is the repository of social values, beliefs and norms. The normal child internalizes his society’s dos and don’ts and that becomes his superego, his conscience telling him to do certain things and not others; indeed, punishing him when he does not behave as his society approves. (The normal child, person feels guilty, remorse, if he does not behave as his group asks him to behave; the anti social child does not feel guilt upon doping bad things; in fact, beginning in childhood he seems to enjoy doing bad things; hurting other people apparently satisfies his sadistic trait.)

As Freud sees it, we are born with what he calls ID, raw instincts to do as we like. Freud believes that we have instinct to seek food, sex (pleasure) and aggression. The average male would like to have sex with all the women around him. But society tells him to restrict his sexual behavior to one woman. He feels frustrated but nevertheless must abide by social rules or he is punished.

Freud believes that another part of the psyche, the EGO balances the drives of the ID and the punitive SUPEREGO. Thus, in our heads are id, ego and superego. These three forces are said to be at war in our psyche, thinking, and minds.

The normal person balances them; the neurotic tends to have over blown superego, to the extent that he is paralyzed by guilt feeling from the smallest wrong doing, he even feels guilty for being alive, the neurotic is the over socialized child.

On the other hand, is the child who is under socialized; he has raw id and a weak superego. This is the child most likely to steal. He is generally from chaotic families, from dysfunctional families, from poor families, from the ghettos, from backgrounds where no body supervises him and he grows up feeling that every behavior is permissible. He engages in antisocial behaviors, is arrested and locked up at Juvenile detention centers, usually at around age fourteen. Thereafter, his life is in and out of jails.

Sociologists emphasize the social forces that enhance learning or deter it. For example, children from middle class homes tend to learn appropriate behaviors, whereas children from poor homes seldom do so. Sociologists look at the economic and social forces responsible for this differential learning.

Developmental psychologists, those psychologists who specialize in child development, tell us that the first six years of a child’s life is the most critical. If a child has not learned appropriate social behaviors by age twelve, they tell us that it is often too late to help him. Personality, the individual’s habitual pattern of responding to his environment, is formed by age twelve. People are generally at age 70 who they were at age 13, the onset of adolescence. It takes trauma to the brain and or conversion to religion for people to really change their personalities.

Aware that we need to work hard to socialize children before it is too late, most human societies try their best to get their children to internalize their norms. Most societies know that if there is a failure in getting a child to be normal by age twelve that it may be too late to rectify the situation. Very few persons bother trying to change adults.

All human beings intervene to help children learn appropriate behaviors, for they know that they are still amenable to change but ignore adults, for they know that it is too late to try changing adults. (If you see a ten year old boy drinking beer you want to stop him from doing so; but if you see a forty year old man drinking, you say, oh well, he has a right to destroy his liver and brains with alcohol and leave him alone.)

The normal human being internalizes his group’s norms and his group’s culture. He behaves appropriately; what is appropriate is defined by the group. (The oppositional defiant child, who is in a power struggle with society, immediately asks you: “who defines what’s appropriate and who gave him the right to do so?” He defies what any one tells him is appropriate. The antisocial child goes further than the ODD child and shows his defiance of social rules by stealing what society asks him not to steal. )

THE AGENTS OF SOCIALIZATION

The agents of socialization are families, peer groups, schools, churches, work places and associations the individual voluntarily join.

Every human child is born by a woman and is (usually) raised in families. Each family is a social unit and socializes children to behave in a certain manner. Children are positively reinforced, rewarded when they behave as their parents asked them to. Reward could be simply being hugged, praised, given something etc. A child is rewarded when he does as asked and punished when he does not. Punishment could mean being ignored, whipped, told to go take a time out, go to ones room, not getting the toy one wants etc.

The family’s system of rewards and punishments generally suffices to produce a normal child. However, underlying it all is love. If a child is loved he would do anything to please the parents, he would do what they ask him to do. But if a child feels not loved by his parents he would refuse to do what they ask him to do. In families where love is lacking antisocial children are often produced.

The peer group is the second most important socialization agent. Human beings, beginning in childhood, want to be liked and accepted by their peer groups. A child would emotionally shrivel up if his cohorts reject him. In fact, teenagers would do any thing to get their peers to accept them. Even saying that one does not care whether others like one or not is really the desperate effort of a person who feels rejected to tell himself that he does not care; it is like a scared child whistling in the dark, pretending to be bold.

Children crave other children’s approval. If the peer group is reasonably law and order oriented and approve appropriate behaviors in its members, this helps a child to learn appropriate behaviors. Boy’s scouts and similar groups are positive social groups.

Unfortunate children who were raised in crime infested neighborhoods are early in life exposed to antisocial behaviors. They see youth gangs roaming around instead of being at school or reading their books; they see these street toughs as powerful young persons, as role models to be admired and want to be like them. They join them and those become their surrogate families and socialize them into criminal activities.

Gang members approve the child when he steals, curse people and generally uses bad language. They tell them that it is being tough to use four letter worlds. In fact some of these children have so limited a vocabulary that all they know are the curse words that they spill out. The child exposed to this tragedy does as other children do: imitate his peers, except that what he is imitating to get his peers attention might lead him to trouble. Sadly, some of his peers might be the first to end his life, put a bullet in his head.

Next to peer groups are schools in socializing children. In just about everywhere in the world, it is now mandatory for all children to be at school from age six onwards. Those from good families are seldom out of school until their mid twenties when they obtain terminal professional degrees (PhD, MD, JD, and MBA). It seems that childhood is now prolonged and extended to age 28, when the professional to be is usually done with formal education (informal education continues for life).

Schools teach the three Rs, as well as appropriate social behaviors. Schools teach acceptance of the group’s political culture.

In America, for example, by the time a child is done with high school he has literally been programmed to go out there and kill for America. America’s schools are nothing but boot camps for indoctrinating children to serve the empire. Very little learning is actually taking place in these schools.

Every society attempts to get its children to accept its political culture. You are taught about the political system and told what your civic duties are. In Britain, you are taught to respect the Queen and other aristocrats, to keep quiet when your superiors talk etc. In Japan, you are taught to respect your family and when called upon, to die for the emperor and nation. In Nigeria, you are left to fend for yourself; you quickly learn that nobody cares for you and do not care for any one else but yourself. Nigerians indifference to their children is mind bugling. How exactly do they expect their children to work for the good of the nation, do they care? What we have here is really foolishness. You have to care for your young if you want them to support the polity.

Churches teach particular approaches to phenomena. Christians teach about Jesus Christ and see him as their conduit to God. Muslims teach about Mohammed and see him as the seal of the prophets. Hindus teach about Krishna and see him as God incarnated in human form, the ideal human being. Buddhists teach about the Buddha and the need to transcend ones ego. There are all kinds of religions out there. They are all instruments of socialization; they civilize human beings.

A human being who does not belong to a religion is often the most dangerous human being on earth. Socialists, communists and atheists who believe that there is no God easily steal and kill and rationalize their behavior. As Dostoyevsky observed in his novel, Brothers Karamazov, if there is no God, no absolute morality, all behaviors are permissible.

Adult conservative thinkers know that if there were no religions that we would have to invent one. Machiavelli is right in saying that if there is no God we have to invent one and socialize the masses into believing in him. It is the fear of God’s punishment that keeps the masses in line, obeying the laws of the land.

It is irrelevant to argue whether God is a social construct and our projection. We do not know for sure that God does not, in fact, exist. What we do know for fact is that man is capable of heinous crimes and that we must seek every means possible to civilize him and make him respect the lives of other people.

The work place is a means of socialization. To get and retain a job you must constantly please your bosses and coworkers. If your behavior is inappropriate you are fired. If you are sacked, you do not have money to buy the necessities of living. To be able to meet your material needs you need a job and to have a job you strive to do as your bosses ask you to do. The work place is a means of socializing people, making sure that they behave appropriately. A man who has no job is a dangerous man for he could engage in anti social behaviors. We must, therefore, provide all citizens with jobs.

(The rulers of Nigeria are an interesting bunch. They do not strive to provide young Nigerians with jobs. They do not care. We know that a person is most likely to become a criminal between the ages of fourteen and twenty four. Thus, rational societies either keep these age groups in school or at work. If you leave them roaming the streets, as they do in Nigeria, what do you expect? Guess? They may engage in criminal activities. This has nothing to do with race; it is a world wide phenomenon. If this is so, how come we do not provide our young people with schooling and work? We are self centered and care only for our selves? Okay. Those young persons are increasingly urban and not rural persons bound by tribal taboos; they are increasingly emancipated from religions induced fear of God. They are increasingly having access to guns. Guess who they will use those weapons on? Guess again? They would use them on the adults that ignored their welfare. If we do not care for our young, why should they preserve our life? Please do not talk about God punishing them for their criminal activities for you your self is evil for not helping our young persons. If our leaders do not care for our young, our young will eventually harm or kill them. They are better dead, anyway.)

The final agent of socialization is the associations’ people join. If the individual joins groups, participates in their activities and obeys their rules, he is most likely to learn to play by the rules of the game. For example, those Nigerians who participate in naija politics learn to play by its rules. They are less likely to engage in shady business (419). It is always those persons who avoid others, who hide and do their evil in the dark. These types of Nigerians are responsible for screwing Americans. I am talking about credit card racketeers.

NIGERIA’S POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION

The above description of the phenomenon is applicable everywhere in the world.

Every culture tries to socialize its children into accepting its specific politics and political ideology (we shall deal with political ideology next week). People every where get their children to accept their politics.

Children whose parents are conservatives are socialized to be conservatives; those whose parents are liberals, by osmosis, imbibe their parent’s liberal ideology. As adults people behave like their parents did, politically.

Let us briefly look at the main Nigerian groups. Igbos are republican democrats. They trend to socialize their children to accept their political ideology. Igbo children are told that they are on their own and must work for what they want out of life. They are discouraged from depending on other people to help them. Therefore, they tend to belong to conservative parties. (In America, such as the Republican Party in America; in Europe such as the British Conservative party and the German Christian Democratic party).

Hausas are Muslims. They believe that it is their duty to care for their unfortunate brothers and sisters. Rich Hausas give generously to the unfortunate around them. This generous attitude to life naturally disposes them to become liberals. Thus, Hausas are more likely to be found in American Democratic type parties. As we shall see when we talk of political ideologies, liberals want to use government to improve the lives of the poor. Those who care for the poor will naturally want big government and use it to help their brothers.

Yorubas are the most cosmopolitan Nigerians; they are exposed to the competing ideologies and different Yorubas choose differently. Thus, you are likely to find genuine Yoruba socialists, capitalists and any other belief on the ideological spectrum.

All societies socialize their people to accept certain politics and behave as such. It is when people behave as their group expects of them that their polity survive. In America, for example, the system socializes people to support a republican- capitalist-democracy. If you support that system, the system rewards you. If not, the system punishes you. The system’s gatekeepers have their watchful eyes on every body. If you are known to be against the system, you might as well leave the country. You are simply not going to obtain a good job in God’s own country if you are a known communist. The velvet dictator keeps trouble makers out of the avenues where they could make trouble and do damage. You may be allowed to run around the ghetto and talk socialism but the moment you actually try to do something about it, off you go to jail. Campus socialist talk is permitted but to, in fact, be a socialist revolutionary and try to implant Marxian ideology is repressed.

To obtain a good job, your background is carefully scrutinized, including having an FBI check done on you. Simply stated, the establishment keeps out trouble makers and keeps in system supportive fellows.

Nor is this an American phenomenon. All countries do the same thing. The rulers of Nigeria keep out any one likely to make trouble for them. They certainly would not give jobs to a person who insists on not giving bribes. And if you manage to secure a good job in Nigeria and refuse to play their corruption game, the powers that be would not invite you to their inner sanctum, where policies are made. You would be ostracized and marginalized.

Every political system socializes its citizens to endorse it. Fascistic political systems like Hitler’s Nazi Germany consciously went about indoctrinating every child into accepting its ideology and punishing those who refused to buy into the system. In more refined societies like the USA, the system does not resort to brutal indoctrination of children but does it more subtly. School children begin the day by singing allegiance to the political system. If you write papers that indicate that you support the system you are rewarded, if opposed to the system you are made an outsider. Communistic Russia and Maoist China, like fascists, overtly indoctrinated the people into their ideology.

This is just the ways it is. The business of science is to study reality as it is, and not necessarily to change it. The question is not whether what political systems do is good or bad; science merely tells you about what they do. It is up to you to decide what you do with that information.

It does not matter whether a system is communist, socialist, capitalist or Christian; they are all indoctrinating their citizens. To know what is going on is to be wiser. Some one is always trying to get you to accept their world view. All you can do is clarify what your own world view is. Know what your politics is. As long as you are genuinely convinced that your politics is the correct one no one should rebuke you. You cannot ask a human being not to be truthfully to his honest beliefs.

In this light, if socialism or capitalism makes sense to you, go for it. But do not go for it to please your peer groups, to get them to like and approve you. Go for your conviction.

CONCLUSION

Nigerian political leaders, like political leaders everywhere in the world, attempt to socialize their children into their politics.

Each ethnic group, overtly or covertly, tell its young people that they ought to place their ethnic group’s interests ahead of the nation’s interests.

Nigeria is a sick polity and needs healing. It does not need to die. I personally like to live in a multi ethnic society. I do not like to live in a mono ethnic society. I believe that we learn most when we are exposed to people from different backgrounds. Diversity is the spice of life. We must keep Nigeria one but seek ways to make her a healthier polity. We must socialize our children to work for an all Nigerians serving government.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

[email protected]

October 6, 2005

Lecture 4 will be on Nigeria’s Political Ideologies, on October 10.

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October 06, 2005

Osuji Lectures #2: Nigeria's Political Culture

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- Wherever human beings are found, they not only live in groups but have collective patterns of behaviors. Human beings everywhere develop collective approaches to phenomena.

Human beings ask existential questions like: who are we, why are we here and what are we doing here? They individually and collectively respond to those questions. Their individual and collective responses to those ontological and epistemological questions become part of their religious and philosophical culture.

Human beings live on a tough physical environment. Their physical environment does not give them their food and other means of survival. They have to struggle to obtain their food, clothes and shelter. Nature does not provide them with free food. Manna does not fall from heaven; once, it was claimed to have fallen from heaven but those who ate it died before they reached the Promised Land they were heading towards. Human beings survive through the sweat of their brow.

In their efforts to extract sustenance from their impersonal physical environment, they develop some working understanding of how the physical environment works. This understanding of how the physical environment works is called science and the approaches to adapting to the environment is called technology. Every human group has a scientific and technological culture.

Science and technology may be rudimentary in primitive societies but they do exist in them, nevertheless. They have to exist in them for human beings are distinguished from other animals by their scientific and technological nature. The best that our closest animal relatives, Chimpanzees, can do is employ sticks to ferret out ants from anthills; it is because of this primitive technology that they are said to be closer to human beings in evolution; indeed, Chimpanzees are, genetically, 97% the same as human beings.

Human beings ask why questions (science) and device techniques (how questions) to adapt to their world. The answers to their why and how questions constitutes their scientific and technological culture.

Human beings live in groups, society. They tend to have interpersonal and social conflicts. Wherever human beings live, they have issues with one another. Sometimes these issues lead to wars. Human beings, since the dawn of history, have always had wars (and probably will always have wars?).

Because they have interpersonal and social differences, human beings everywhere seek ways to get along with each others. They develop patterns of behaviors that enable them to reduce conflicts and increase social harmony. Over time, all human groups developed norms of accepted behaviors.

Norm is that behavior which is socially accepted (which, hopefully, contributes to social harmony). Some norms are mere socially accepted mores, whereas others are codified as rules of group behavior. Where societies are highly developed, rules of behaviors tend to be further codified as laws (enacted in constitutions or enacted by legislatures).

There are several kinds of laws: written and unwritten, common, constitutional, statutory, administrative, criminal, contracts, torts, equity, family, admiralty law and so on. For our present purposes, the salient point is that all human societies have legal cultures that attempt to make sure that people get along with each other and punish those who transgress the laws, those who negatively affect other persons.

Culture is an omnibus term. It is global and inclusive of everything human beings do that enables them to adapt to their world. Whatever enables people to survive on planet earth is part of their culture. In this light, culture is that behavior that enables a group to adapt to its physical and social world and enables it to survive. There are many things that enable people to survive, including religion, philosophy, science, technology, laws etc. This means that the term culture is all encompassing, too broad to be useful in social analysis.

Nevertheless, during the late 19th and 20th centuries, a field of study that specifically studied culture emerged in the academic horizon. It was called Ethnography or cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropologists descended on what they called primitive societies in Africa, Asia and Latin America and studied everything done in those societies under the rubric of culture.

The societies studied by cultural anthropologists were preliterate and did not have bodies of written literature about their approaches to phenomena. As the racist historian, Trevor Roper said, Africa does not have written culture and, as such, is the purview of anthropologists, meaning that what is known about them is written by Western anthropologists rather than by their own scholars. In effect, Trevor Roper was saying that Anthropologists study primitive societies whereas historians study civilized societies.

Western cultural anthropologists wrote about primitive societies (which in generous times they called traditional societies). Essentially, they told us about their religions, philosophies, science, technology and social institutions.

Whereas in the West itself specific disciplines studied each aspect of what anthropologists told us about primitive societies, in African countries anthropologists were know it all and told us all about those societies. Thus, whereas in the West we had theologians writing about their people’s religions, philosophers writing about their people’s systems of wisdom, physical scientists writing about physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics, historians writing about their people’s history, economists writing about their countries economic performances, in Africa, a single white boy who studied anthropology wrote about everything about the society he studied. Thus, for example, if he studied Igbo society, as Ottenberg of the University of Washington, Seattle did, he became an acclaimed expert on everything Igbo.

Anthropologists knew so much that, in fact, they knew nothing about the societies they supposedly studied. How could they know something about those societies? Consider: these so-called anthropologists were usually graduate students who were required to go do one year of field studies in primitive societies. They then came back and wrote about their findings and are awarded the doctorate degree. Subsequently, they obtained teaching positions at Western universities. Only one year of stay in Africa made these persons experts on every thing African! Of course, they knew next to nothing about African cultures. Reading the material written by these so-called experts on Africa is actually a waste of time; most of them simply did not know what they were talking about.

Consider complex Yoruba religious practices. It would take a life time of studies to begin to understand these practices. But a white boy would spend a year of field studies at Ile-Ife, return to his university at Berkeley, California, writes a book on Yoruba culture, and inclusive of Yoruba religion and such a book would be considered an authority on everything Yoruba. These foreign experts reduced people’s complex lives and practices to the parameters of their infant discipline.

By the 1950s, political science had emerged from philosophy as a separate field of study. The field began to build its own body of literature. It looked into cultural anthropology and borrowed the concept of culture from it. However, it recognized that culture is inclusive of everything a group of human beings do and that to study culture per se is to study everything the people did to adapt to their environment. The term culture is too broad and had to be divided up into several areas: thus, there is religious culture, farming culture, child rearing culture, schooling culture, medical culture, and culture for everything else a group of people do.

Political scientists zeroed in on a group’s political culture, that is, on how each group of human beings governed themselves. Political culture is those aspects of culture that relate to a group’s political behavior. It answers such questions as: how do these people govern themselves? How do they select their leaders? How do they train their leaders; indeed, how do they train every member to behave politically?

Human beings live in human polities (polity is a fancy name for organized society). They have conflicts. They have mechanisms for resolving their conflicts before they end up shooting each other in their efforts at conflict resolution.

Every known human society practices politics. Politics is the effort to govern a group of human beings, to make the laws that govern them (legislation) and execute those laws (executive organ of government), adjudicate conflicts on the bases of laid down laws (judiciary) and implement the laws and policies made by the governing bodies (bureaucracy).

Every society has a specific manner of going about its politics; its legislating, executing, adjudicating and implementing of laws. Every society trains its people to practice politics in a certain manner (Political socialization).

The sum of political practices of a group is its political culture. Societies differ in their political cultures.

In the early 1960s, emergent political scientists like Gabriel Almond, Verber and James Coleman (one of my mentors at the University of California) spanned the globe studying different society’s political cultures. The body of literature they produced now constitute the corpus of political culture. These political scientists would go to a country and, instead of studying its global culture limited their studies to an aspect of it, its political behavior. (The field later gave rise to comparative politics.)

Essentially, political scientists learned from anthropologists and recognized the shortcoming of a single anthropologist becoming an expert on every thing about a people. Perhaps, it is possible to be an expert on a small segment of a people’s culture but not all of it. No one can fully understand Yoruba religions much less all of Yoruba culture. Political scientists delimited themselves to studying political culture, rather than the entirety of a people’s culture. This is a wise decision; their studies, though reductive and stereotyping tend to be more useful than anthropological reductionism.

The political scientists who studied political culture really did not add much to our understanding of politics, but gave us insights into psychological and sociological aspects of politics. Thus, for example, in the Civil Culture, we learn something about the psychological and sociological behaviors of those they studied. We learned that Americans are individualistic in their general psychological make up, as well as in their attitude to politics and that they pursue liberty, equality, democracy and civic duty and individual responsibility. . This is a stereotype of Americans, of course, for there are Americans who are not individualistic, who are, in fact, every bit as collectivistic as so-called un-individuated primitive persons in Africa. But let us humor political scientists and talk as if there are group characters.

In this stereotypical light, Americans individualistic political culture is characterized by expectation that their governments do certain things for them but not everything. They have limited government and do not expect their rulers to become surrogate parents who take good care of them. They want to take care of themselves. They do not want their government to tell them what to do. They do not want their government to tell them what type of religion they should practice, what kind of school they should attend, whether they should carry guns or not. Simply stated, Americans are said to be individualistic and want their government to only do those things that the individual cannot do for himself and leave the individual to do for himself what he can do for himself.

Generally, people need to organize to defend themselves, to fight wars. Thus, individualistic Americans accept that it is a proper function for their government to provide them with national security. They are willing to pay for a strong military and for internal security measures (such as a strong police, judicial and penal systems). But beyond these accepted roles for government, Americans do not want to pay for their government to perform other functions. They do not think that it is the function of government to engage in social engineering that changes peoples behaviors. They do not think that it is the proper function of government to provide their people with education, (it took pulling of teeth for America to provide K through 12 grade education for free to its citizens; in fact, some die hard conservatives still believe that the government should butt out of education and leave it in private hands; these people send their children to private schools, for they do not liberal public school teachers telling young minds, as they want to do, that homosexuality, abortion on demand, free sex, out of wedlock bearing of children and so on, is okay; a government that provides everything for every body is a government that tells everybody what to do; beware of big governments, conservatives wail) medical health insurance, welfare money etc. Simply stated, the American political culture defines certain roles for the government and the individual. Study of American political culture shows these dynamics, the push and pull of government’s efforts to do certain things and citizens opposition to it. For example, the conservative government of George Bush would like to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wide Life Reserve in Alaska, but liberals and their environmental lobby oppose such drilling. The result is standstill. This is American government at work, no dictatorial government telling the people what to do. Should government over step the line drawn for it, Thomas Jefferson tells the people that they should form a posse and chase the now criminals out of office. (A government is legitimate to the extent that it operates within laws.) As conservative Americans would have it, citizens ought to keep their guns so that they can, at any moment, form a militia and chase out their leaders from office, should they go beyond what they are required to do. Liberals, on the other hand, always wanting to expand the role of government, do not want citizens to posses governs, they want to pass legislation taking guns away from the people, and should they succeed, it is goodbye to freedoms and welcome to the dictatorship of do-gooders. Soviet type monolithic totalitarianism hovers around liberal policies, conservatives say.

A study of Japanese political culture shows a different set of approaches to politics. The Japanese, as well as the Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and related Asians, were socialized to what is roughly called the Confucian culture. Confucius lived about 2500 years ago, and laid down acceptable behaviors for the people. Asians, by and large, behave in accordance with Confucian norms.

Among other things, Confucius demands respect for authority, particularly the authority of the head of the family and the head of the state, the emperor of China, the emperor of Japan etc. Thus, Asians were brought up to see their lives as meant to serve their families and emperors. A Japanese man would literally die from shame should he be unable to provide for his family (he may commit suicide should he loose social face from inability to provide for his family). He is brought up to lay down his life for his emperor. A Japanese soldier would literally do whatever his leaders asked him to do, including flying suicide planes into American war ships (Kamikaze) and in the process die. He dare not disobey what authority told him to do. This makes Japanese society authoritarian and well ordered.

Compare and contrast the Japanese to Nigerians lack of devotion to serving their nation, Nigerians interest is in serving only their individual bellies hence corruption in Nigeria. The Japanese lives to serve his society and would literally jump into fire and stay there and die should his leaders ask him to do so. His culture would reject him should he place his life ahead of the society’s goals. (It is said that a finger that sticks out is harmed down in Japan).

Oriental cultures tended to train for social conformism. People were rigorously brought up to adhere to Confucian rules of etiquette and disobeying them brought swift social punishment.

Asians contact with other cultures, particularly with the West has changed much of Asian cultures; nowadays, they seldom commit suicide, hara-kiri, when they loose social face. Nevertheless, it is a useful assertion, albeit it over simplistic, to state that whereas the West is individualistic that the Orient is group Oriented. We are talking about group stereotypes here, not necessarily reality.

Political scientists studied the various European countries political cultures. The British tend to be somewhat similar to Americans in their civic culture, with the exception that they tend to serve their king or queen and will die fighting for the king and England. (Americans will die fighting for republican democracy and freedom to be individualistic.)

The Italian tends to be exuberant in his behavior and tends to be lackadaisical about following orders and routines. It took Mussolini all he could to make Italian trains run on time…Italian are back to running on Italian time, that is, late. This lackadaisicalness is reflected in Italian government. The Italian government is not a serious force to be reckoned with. The Italian military, for example, is a joke as far as disciplined fighting is concerned. Fire a gun into the air and these so-called soldiers surrender in mass.

One the other hand, is the iron disciplined German military that will obey their officers command and keep coming at the enemy, even as the enemy keeps mowing them down. The exploits of the German army at the Western Front, during the First World War, at Verdun, is a study in military disciple. Nigerians ought to study German military discipline and see if they could discipline their unruly military. Germans carry their individual and military discipline to their government. The trains run on time in Germany. If a train is scheduled to be there at 1PM it is bound to be there at 1PM. This is a well ordered polity for you. The government performs what it is expected to perform. The German government works because it reflects a German culture that is disciplined and obeys the laws.

The Russian government, unlike the German government, traditionally is chaotic; it reflects a chaotic Russian culture. Russia is almost always unprepared for anything and is almost always caught off Guard. Adolf Hitler wrote a book, Mein Kampf, in 1925, delineating his plan to kill ALL Russians and take over their land. He believed that they were subhuman beings and unintelligent. At the same time, 1923, the American Congress passed a law preventing Russians from immigrating to America because they were allegedly unintelligent. Despite these hand writings on the wall, Russia did not prepare for war with the West. It behaved as Hitler said that she would behave: unprepared to fight hence easily defeated.

In 1941, Hitler launched operation Barbarossa and literally walked, unopposed, to the outskirts of Moscow. At that point, Russians gave up their Vodka and realized that Hitler meant business and was about to wipe them off from the surface of the earth. Where he conquered, Hitler killed off the Slavs. He killed 25 million of them and was bent on killing off the rest of them. Russians finally got out of the fumes of alcohol and discarded communism and rallied around mother Russia’s flag. They fought and died like men. The retaking of Stalingrad was their finest hour during the war. They gradually pushed the Huns back to Berlin and eventually defeated them.

Russians seem disorganized and are always taken by surprise but in the teeth of time always manage to fight back and defeat their enemies. Napoleon over ran Moscow with little difficulty but mother Russia fought back and extracted its freedom from the lion’s teeth.

It does not take much political precocity to recognize that a disciplined army, today, could easily defeat Russia. However, at that juncture, Russians would stop being bloody drunks and fight like driven monsters and chase the invading army out of their country, even if it means for all Russians to die at the battle field. It would be nice if Russians were disciplined and not have to regain their freedom in the last moments. If America attacked Russia, she probably could easily defeat her, but Russians. If their history holds constant, would come back and probably defeat America? Do not toy with Russians, they may be drunk and foolish but when push comes to shove they know what to do and do it well. Russians are semi Asiatic and semi European. They are difficult for a Western scholar to understand. Consider their seeming preference for Oriental dictatorships but at the same time quaffing under such yoke, whereas the oriental is fatalistic and adjusts to his murderous dictatorial leaders. Iraqis are currently yearning for a murderous Saddam Hussein type to rule them.

Political scientists studied various people’s political cultures and showed us how those cultures affect their practice of politics. We know that Germans have a disciplined culture and that that is carried over to their government, that the Russians are chaotic and that that is carried over their government, that the Italians are lackadaisical and that that is carried over their government, that the English are extremely tactful and cunning and while giving you the impression of being friendly towards you are scheming to cut your throat. The Englishman looks gentle and civilized but in fact is the most blood thirsty human being on earth. John Bull looks after Albion’s interests and no other persons interests; that the Americans are playful but have their eyes on the almighty dollar, profit, and will also cut your throat to make a dollar; that the Nipponese (Japanese) are disciplined and will fight to death for their country and that this is carried over to a disciplined government in Tokyo.

NIGERIA’S MULTIETHNIC POLITICAL CULTURES

Now that you, hopefully, have a general understanding of what political culture is, let us see what it is like in Nigeria. In our introductory lecture, we alluded to how Nigeria came into being and the fact that she is composed of many tribes, aka ethnic groups. Let us pick up from where we stopped. Nigeria is a conglomeration of several tribes, some as different from each other as night is from day.

Given the many ethnic groups in Nigeria, it is impossible to talk about a unified Nigerian political culture.

From what we know about human history, it would probably take at least a thousand years of common experience for the disparate groups in Nigeria to develop a unified perception of phenomena. What we have in Nigeria are particularistic, not universalistic approach to phenomena. This cultural diversity is the bane of Nigeria’s politics.

Were the rulers of Nigeria serious leaders of men, the first order of business they would have undertaken would have been seeking ways to encourage the development of a unified culture. For example, they would have being encouraging Nigerians to marry out side their tribal groups. This would commingle the people’s cultures and bring about some needed uniformity. Other means of generating common culture include forcing all Nigerians to serve in the military and while in the military be stationed in areas other than their tribal areas. Attending the same schools also helps to reduce tribal identification.

Instead of doing what must be done to create a sense of nationhood, the self indulgent leaders of Nigeria increase ethnic identification. And if they continue stressing their tribal roots they would go the way of the Balkans (Yugoslavia) and devolve into their separate ways and become banana republics. If Nigeria breaks up, each of the emergent little countries would become the play thing of big powers like the United States and China. It is in our African self interests to have large geographic republics. Preserving Nigeria is a must, though we need to figure out a way to structure the Federation along realistic lines.

At present, there is no unified Nigeria political culture. What exists are different group’s political cultures. I will spend some time talking about these tribe’s political cultures.

The Hausas are said to be the largest ethnic group in Nigeria. (Please note the tentative nature of that statement; it is because Nigeria’s census figures are not reliable; like everything else in Nigeria, census are rigged, inflating figures for certain tribes, so as to give them the right to rule the Kleptocracy.)

Hausa is really not a tribe. Hausa is a language. The language evolved from the commingling of Arabic and African languages. In essence, Hausa is a Creole language, sort of like Pidgin English. The language is a mixture of several African tribes’ languages and Arabic. It is spoken not only in Nigeria but in other Sahel African countries, such as Niger, Chad, Mali, Upper Volta, Ghana, northern Cameroons, even Senegal and Gambia.

In the context of Nigeria, many of the tribes living in Northern Nigeria, while retaining their indigenous tribal languages, speak Hausa language. Hausa language and Islam is what gives these apparently different peoples a common identity. Apart from their common language and religion, the man from Sokoto is different from the man from Kano or Bornu, Nupe etc.

Hausa people have had almost a thousand years of exposure to Islam and, therefore, share the culture of Islam. They worship Allah, in a certain manner, looking towards Mecca for their religious guidance. (Mohammed was a shrewd politician and had all his followers bow to Mecca while praying; he also had them chant their prayers in Arabic; the idea was to get them beholden to the rulers of Mecca; whoever controls the politics of Mecca controls Muslims around the world; at present, it is the Wahabis and the progeny of King Saud that rule the Holy Land and consequently rule the Islamic world; the Shiites seem not to accept the leadership of the Wahabis who are Sunnis.)

Hausa land developed a political structure that is reminiscent of Feudal France and England. It had a Sultan (king) and emirs (big chiefs, English Dukes) and sheiks (small chiefs, sort of Earls) and other minor functionaries.

In 1804, the Fulanis under Othman Dan Fodio took over the control of the Hausa states. The Fulanis rule that empire to the present. The Sokoto Caliphate, its Caliph, the Sultan of Sokoto, its prince (Saduana) and emirs essentially control Hausa land.

Hausa land has a feudal political structure. What this means in real terms is that the people tend to obey their feudal lords. Like the English man, before the bourgeois revolution that threw out the Aristocracy in England and gave leadership to common folks in England, the Hausa man tends to unquestioningly obey his feudal overlord. Indeed, he is very capable of fighting to death for his lord.

On the whole, Hausas tend to make better soldiers than other Nigerians because they formed the habit of obedience to leaders. One needs to be obedient to be a good soldier. ( Igbos make the worst soldiers in Nigeria, but they do not know it. They lack a sense of loyalty to any king or government. They tend to be too questioning of authority. To be a good soldier, you have to accept a role as a cog in a big wheel and not question authority. If Igbos had developed to Feudal level, perhaps they would have had obedience and loyalty and defeated the Nigerians during the civil war? It is difficult to unite Igbos into a coherent fighting force. They need a draconian leader to whip them into a fighting unit, not the present noise making rabble they seem to be. In Anambra state, practically every Tom Dick and Harry challenges the government and thumbs his nose at organized authority and gets away with it. The result is chaos and anarchy. If the Igbos had social discipline a man like Chris Uba who opposes the legitimate government of a state would be cooling his heels in prison.)

If we adopt Marxist analysis (dialectic materialism), societies evolve from primitive individualism to slave states to feudal states, to bourgeois individualism and finally to enlightened communism. Each of these states, according to Marxists, is advancement over others. Igbos were at what one might call pre feudal state. Every Igbo person looks after his self interests and does not have a concept of subjugating his life to the nation. Igbo land did not have a nation state before the white men came to the scene. As Peter Eke delineated, even the idea of Igboness is a post colonial phenomenon. It was during the colonial era, when the Igbos went to other parts of Nigeria and were treated as if they belonged to a common group that they began to see themselves as a unified group. Moreover, their pride and arrogance tended to cause other groups to hate and even persecute them. On several occasions, they were killed in northern Nigeria. These persecutions added to their sense of being a unified people.

But Igbo unity is only skin deep. To the present, there is deep cleavage in Igbo land. The Onitsha man fancies himself superior to the Owerri man and the Owerri man considers the Onitsha not even an Igbo, as an alien, a Bini man masquerading as an Igbo man. It is only to other Nigerians that there seem a unified Igbo. In actual fact, what we have are Igbo clans: Owerri clan, Onitsha clan, Orlu clan, Okigwe clan, Mbaise clan, Ikwere clan, Ika clan, Wawa clan, Umuoahia clan, Ngwa clan etc.

If Biafra had succeeded in separating from Nigeria, Igbo land, I speculate that it would have become like Somalia where, though, the people speak the same language the various clans fight each other. As far as I know, Owerri people do not like Onitsha leadership and would have declared war on the Onitsha dominated Biafra.

It is being in Nigeria and the impact of other tribes that give Igbos their fragile sense of oneness. If they separated from Nigeria and are a nation, their internal cleavage would tear then asunder. This is one other reason why we must preserve the political unit called Nigeria.

With regards to Igbo political culture, it tends to be undisciplined and, if you like the truth: Igbo individualism seem of the undisciplined variety. It is not the type of individualism found among white Americans. White Americans will fight for America and die for America. Igbos fight for their individual selves, not for the whole.

I know that I am essentially attacking Igbo pride, but as a social scientist, I am obligated to state the truth and only the truth and may God help me. Any one who trusts Igbo to help him trusts the wind; the Igbo will place his interests ahead of yours; in fact he will sell you off to the rulers of Nigeria. The Igbo, despite all his talk about Igbo unity, has no well defined sense of social interests. His culture did not socialize him to sacrifice and if necessary die for the group.

This is not just a personal opinion but the universal observation of those who have paid attention to Igbos. The British rulers of Nigeria admired Hausas for they saw them as politically sophisticated and saw Igbos as lacking even the basic rudiments of social organization. In 1929, for example, the British colonial administration tried to tax Igbos so as to be able to fund local government and Igbo women went on a war path.

Question: how on earth do you expect to fund government unless you tax the people? The Igbos were not used to centralized governments and the need for taxation to fund them. To the present, Igbos expect to get from the government but not to fund it. They do not seem to realize that government is a necessary evil that we must have for our security and therefore must tax ourselves to fund it.

If the oil revenue with which the mushroom governments in Nigeria are funded dries up and the people for the first time are compelled to, in fact, fund their governments with their taxes, one expects the silly governments to break apart and chaos to reign everywhere. Of course, anarchy can be prevented if we develop leaders in Nigerian, men who insist that the people pay taxes and throw any one who does not pay at least 20% of his annual income in taxes into jail.

Government is exercise of coercion not child play. Government is using force to get the people to do what ordinarily they would not want to do. Government is not opportunity to satisfy our narcissistic egos desire for social admiration but an opportunity to use power and authority, military, if necessary, to beat the people into behaving socially appropriately The Hausas understand the proper role of government as necessary evil force whereas Igbos tend to see government as opportunity to get another Ozo title, to be very important persons. No, government is a means of shaping up the people, making them become socially interested rather than behaving in only self interested manner.

Yoruba political culture is akin to Hausa political culture. The Yorubas developed feudal states, although not as sophisticated as that of the Hausas. They did not have a Yoruba wide political structure, as the Hausa-Fulani Caliphate did. What obtained in Yoruba land was a situation where each of the Yoruba clans had its own king, Oba, and ruled itself through its centralized political structure: the Oba, his bureaucracy, army and prime minister, the Balogun. They had fairly well organized clan structures at Lagos, Oyo, Ife, Ogbomosho, Abeokuta, Ilorin (before the Fulani Caliphate absorbed it) and so on.

The Yorubas had clan armies and indeed fought each other. This is not the place to talk about the Yoruba wars. What we need to extrapolate from Yoruba political development is that the Yorubas had a more sophisticated approach to government. They learned to obey their Obas and to fight for him and die for him. This is better than to live only for ones self. More importantly, the Yoruba learned to negotiate among the various clans. The Oba of Ife had to negotiate with the Oba of, say Abeokuta, and the result is development of sophisticated diplomatic skills. Of all the Nigerian groups, the Yorubas are, perhaps, the most tactful and diplomatic. They ought to be given priority in selecting Nigeria’s diplomats.

If one is not sentimental, but dispassionate, one would seldom select Igbos for diplomatic jobs. If Igbos are given such positions, given their tendency to pride and tactless talking, they would probably generate conflict for Nigeria.

(There is an Onitsha Igbo chap in Naija politics, an apparent paranoid personality, who thinks it funny to call people names. Every time he opens his uncivilized mouth strings of abusive words flow from it. Apparently, he thinks that this primitive behavior is being tough. If such an uncultured man is given political power, he would stimulate war in a minute. Yet this brother does not seem to recognize how unsuited he is to governance and talk as if he knows all there is to know about politics; it is the familiar case of an empty vessel making a great deal of noise.)

Yoruba political culture is acceptance of law and order and acceptance of properly elected leaders. The Yoruba respects proper authority and will fight illegitimate authority. The Igbo will support any person in power irrespective of how he got to be in power.

The Edos are pretty much like the Hausa and Yorubas in their political development. They had an Oba of Benin. They had developed a feudal social structure that controlled Edoland for over five hundred years. Therefore, the Edos understand the need for obedience to properly constituted authority.

Nigeria has many tribes and each of them has its own culture and a political variant of that culture. Those who are interested in tribal politics can go to each tribe and study their cultures and political culture. I am not invested in tribal politics. I am only interested in Nigerian politics, and, indeed, in Pan African politics. I am a Pan Africanists. Folks like Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Steve Biko etc are my heroes. Eventually, all of Africa will unite into an African federation, with each ethnic group forming a state in it, but with every effort made to develop a unified African culture that transcends tribal politics.

Nigeria came into being in 1914. That means that it has been in existence for 91 years. All that 91 years has not been for nothing. The various ethnic groups, willy-nilly, are mingling and developing a Pan Nigerian culture. Whether we know it or not, a unified Nigerian political culture is, in fact, emerging, though still incipient. This is good and one hopes that the process could be accelerated.

POLITICAL CORRUPTION

The ugly side of the emergent Pan Nigerian political culture is the rise of corruption. Nigeria’s politics is such that each tribe seem to enter into national politics with an eye to getting something for its tribal members (each politician first gets something for himself). Nigeria is a free for all arenas for stealing from the national treasury. To be a politician in Nigeria is synonymous with being a criminal. This is unpalatable but there is no other way of putting it. People seem to go into politics in Nigeria to become rich and to become very important persons.

Apparently, no one has told these folks that one ought to go into politics to serve the public good. A good leader is a person who does not care for his personal interests but dedicates his life to serving the public. He may end up poor. But the public love him for what he does for them. When such a leader dies his people cry, in fact, they become depressed.

On the contrary, when Nigerian leaders die, the people feel good riddance; indeed, they spill into the streets jubilating. When Abacha died, Nigerians literally were overwhelmed with joy.

Compare and contrast that with what happened when Kennedy died. Americans, left and right, democrats and conservatives, became literally depressed. The entire country mourned the young president who looked Krushov in the eye (although he was clearly afraid of the noising making, boisterous Russian bear) and the later blinked (1962 Cuban Nuclear show off).

Kennedy, like his fellow Americans, felt humiliated that Russia had beat America to space by putting Yuri Gagarin into orbit and told his people that before the end of this decade (1960s) that America not only would be in space but on the moon. He mobilized resources, capital and human, to accomplish his goals and objectives. That is real leadership at work: setting goals and working towards them like driven men.

When such leaders die the country mourn their passing. But when the cho-chop criminal-leaders of Nigeria die, the people rejoice.

Olusegun Obasanjo bought a private jet for himself and cruises to every corner of the globe, while his people starve. The average Nigerian makes a dollar a day. The average Nigerian eats, pardon my French, shit, while Obasanjo fancies himself an important leader and stays in $2500 dollars a night hotel rooms. Nigeria has developed a political culture of corruption.

Elsewhere, I tried to explain the origin of the culture of corruption in Nigeria. I looked at several causal factors, such as the creation of Warrant chiefs in Alaigbo; this artificial construct was imposed on a people without a history of governance by chiefs and how the so-called chiefs became corrupt. These so called chiefs were among the most corrupt Nigerians.

The Nigerians of yesteryears who sold their people into slavery were corrupt and evil human beings. One hopes that those ancestors of us who sold our brothers into slavery burn in hell forever and ever (assuming that there is hell, they cannot be forgiven their crimes against humanity).

The roots of corruption in Nigeria is very deep. This lecture is not the place for me to look at this phenomenon in detail. Let us just say that Nigeria has a culture of corruption. Nothings gets done in Nigeria without some one bribing someone. The police are nothing but Toll booth agents collecting tolls for their private use.

Clearly, we have to figure out a way to deal with corruption in Nigeria. How about draconian laws? How about arresting any official who misspent a penny and putting him in jail for, at least, twenty years; and while in jail, make him work to feed himself; society should not feed garbage. How about using these criminals to do some dangerous public works? How about chopping off heads of corrupt public officials? Where did our sentimentality about life come from, after all we are a people that sold our brothers into slavery and can hardly be considered a loving people?

During the French revolution, to wash the past away, the nobility were put to the guillotine. Marie Antoinette and her effete husband watered the grass of France liberty with their blood. That is the way it ought to be in Nigeria. Decapitate the heads of all corrupt officials.

CONCLUSION

Nigeria has multi political cultures. We have alluded to some of those. We have also alluded to the emergent national political culture, albeit it a negative one, the culture of corruption.

Despite her problems, Nigerians must be held together at all costs. The alternative, the various tribes ruling themselves, would be chaos. Our task is to find a way to make Nigeria work, not to destroy her, for she remains Africa’s best hope.

If things are put together in Nigeria, she will be second to none in the world. The intellect locked up in Nigerians is so great that were Nigerians to be given good political leadership, no country in the world, repeat, no country, would out compete them.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

[email protected]

If you are a student, read all 20 lectures, read the attached bibliography and responded to the twenty essay questions at the end of the last lecture, you can grade yourself. Give yourself 5 credit hours for the Course: Introduction to Nigerian Politics.

October 5, 2005

Next Lecture: October 7; Topic: Nigeria’s Political Socialization

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October 05, 2005

Science of Thinking, Page 2

Continued from "Science of Thinking," by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- The human self concept says that one is separated from other people, and is self created. It is the individual, you, me, who invented your/my self concept. George Kelly tells us that personality, aka self concept, is a self construct. The human child, building on his biosocial experiences and the experiences of all human beings around him is responsible for inventing his self concept.

SELF-CONCEPT VERSUS REAL SELF

As far as I can see, it is me who constructed my self concept. Of course, I built on my inherited biological constitution and my social experience. I made my separated self. So did you. Each of us made his empirical self.

Schucman argues that the empirical self we made for ourselves were made as replacement selves; that we use them to substitute for our real selves. To her, our real self is unified spirit, which she gave a Christian name, Christ, and the Son of God. The son of God is holy, that is, unified with his father and all his brothers. But that unified son of God, that holy self, was replaced with an unholy self, a separated self, the ego self concept. To live on earth is to have an unholy self, a separated ego self. (Whole self, is contracted to holy self; separated self is unholy self.)

The ego is the earthly self, a dream self, a dream figure housed in body. To Schuman, the ego and its body do not exist. As she sees it, space, time and matter are non-existent, and are, at best, dream existent; they exist in dreams, but do not exist in spirit.

Schucman rearticulated the truth found in Hinduism and Buddhism. Her book contains the perennial wisdom of mankind. She christologised Hinduism. She stated the truth and nothing but the truth and God helped her. (I reached the same conclusions as Schucman did before I head about her book and its thesis. I eventually read her book and essentially agree with its thesis.)

The only problem with Schuman’s book is that it is written in Christian language and some of us choose not to do anything with formal religion. Religion tends to compound fear by teaching folks to fear God. Misguided religion teaches its adherents to worship an imaginary, all powerful God. That made up God (it is human beings who invent whatever idea they have of God; God is our individual and social constructs) is used to restrict freedom of thinking.

Religionists try to restrict their thinking to the parameters approved by their religion. Already those who call themselves students of A Course in Miracles try to limit their views to what Schuman said. Indeed, they have already evolved a pope, a chap who scarcely has understood what his mentor wrote but who now has taken it upon himself to approve what folk’s say. This man set himself up to decide whether folk’s interpretation of the Course is in line with what the book teaches or not. This is sad, very sad, indeed.

Religion tends to lead to conformity hence stifle the generation of new ideas and lead to social stasis. Therefore, the individual is best served to be outside the confines of organized religion and think his way to his real self. Thereafter, he should gather with like minded persons to share ideas about their true self. We do that at Science of Thinking Institutes around the world. (We call it institute because it is a school where we learn and teach about the real self and how to think correctly, not a place to propagate useless dogmas.)

The salient point in Schucman’s theological thinking is that she recognized what Buddha before her did, that this world came into being and is sustained by desire and wishes.

We wish to be on earth. We wish to live in separated forms. Matter, space and time enable us to seem to live as separated selves. I am over here, probably thousands of miles apart from you. That distance separating us is space. It takes time for either of us to get to one another. We do not seem joined. We seem to have separated selves. We see ourselves in bodies and bodies give us a sense of boundaries. I am in my body and you are in your body, so we seem separated from each other.

Schucman correctly sees our world as an illusion; she teaches that in reality we are connected to one another, that there is no space and gap between us; that there is no space, time and matter and that to the extent that we see space, time and matter that we are in the world of Illusion. Indeed, seeing, perception, itself is part of the illusion of this world. In unified state, there is no other person to see, there is no seeing in heaven. Heaven is characterized by knowing.

The lady theologian, the best that America has produced, is correct. We are joined. This is a fact, not conjecture. I know so from direct experience, not speculation. However, I am not here to tell you about my experience of union. I am here to help you experience union, so that you would know about it without merely speculating about it. To help you appreciate this truth, consider that at night we dream and see the entire world we see during the day. In our nightly dreams, we see space, time and matter. As long as we are in that world of dreams, it seems external to us. Then we wake up in the morning and that world is nowhere to be seen. We recognize that the dream world was made up by our thinking.

We think in images. Our thinking imaged the world we saw in our dreams and that world is not real.

In our dreams at night, we see mountains and those obstruct our movement pretty much as the mountains we see in our day world obstruct our movements. But when we wake up in the morning we recognize that the mountains that were obstacles to us in our dreams were not there, in fact. The question, then, is whether our day mountains are, in fact, real obstacles? Of course, if they are believed as real, as we believe our dream mountains as real, they act as actual obstacles. But suppose one knows that our day living is also a dream, would the mountains in ones life still obstruct ones activities? Jesus did not see the mountains we see on earth as such. Thus, he could walk through closed doors, for he did not see obstacles. He walked on water because he believed that there was no water where we see water. The man said that with faith we can move mountains, meaning that if we believe in spirit and deny the reality of this world that we can get through where we had hitherto seem mountains and obstacles.

Our day world, Schucman tells us, is also a dream world, this time, a collective dream world. We all share the dream we call our day life. Because it is a shared dream, it seems permanent.

When a dream is shared, it seems to last long. Thus, each of us lives in the world for a hundred years or so, and those one hundred years seems continuous. The world seems to last billions of years because it is shared by human beings, animals, trees and stars, everything.

When each of us dies, he exits the world’s dream. The world no longer exists for him. (Consider the old philosophical saw: if a tree falls and there is no human being around to observe it fall, did a tree fall? Was sound made? George Berkeley, in his Dialogues, suggests that the world may be in our thinking. This is solipsism. Quantum Mechanics- physicists like Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and Pauli suggest that the observer affects what he observes, that the external world may not be independent of our thinking.)

REINCARNATION

In as much as the wish that led to this world’s seeming existence, the wish for separated self is still there, Schuman says that the individual will be reborn on earth. This is akin to Oriental concept of reincarnation, except that one is merely having different dreams, none of which is real; one is not born in body or die; one merely has dreams in which one seems born in body, in a place called earth and dies and comes back to it.

As Schucman sees it, people come to the world, over and over again, until they recognize that the world is not real, is a dream, and is a response to their wish for separated self. When they give up the desire to have separated self, they return to the awareness of unified self and no longer return to the world of apparent separation. (Buddha called this phenomenon the breaking of the wheel of rebirth. The illuminated person is no longer reborn on earth.)

Schucman and her mentor, Jesus, teach a path to remembering the unified self. Their part is the path of love and forgiveness. They teach that in eternity that we are unified. Union is love. Love is that which glues everything together. God is love. God is unified with all things. The Son of God, in his true essence, is love, for he is joined to all his brothers, to all creation and to creation’s creator, God.

Our world is a place of separation. To separate from union is to attack and seem to split it into fragments. As Schuman sees it, we seem to have attacked, split union into infinite fragments and each of us identifies with a fragment and see other fragments as apart from us. To separate from others is to attack, hence to hate them.

To hate other people is to hate ones self since, in truth, all people are unified with one. To live on earth is to hate ones real self. Out of mutual self hatred we attack and do evil things to one another.

Jesus and Schucman attempts to reverse the nature of the world; they teach love and forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook the empirical world and what is done in it; to see it as dream and ignore the dream. Jesus was killed and overlooked those who killed him and remembered that he is unified with them.

Schucman asks you to overlook those who seem to do evil things to you, for they do it in your dream. If you are a black person and whites discriminate against you, if you are a woman and men rape you etc, Schucman asks you to forgive those people. Why? It is because they have not, in fact, done what you see them do to you. They seem to have done those things in our mutual dream of self attack. They are still as God created them: innocent, holy, sinless and guiltless. So are you despite what you seem to have done on earth, in the dream.

As Schucman sees it, it is when you overlook other people’s apparent evil that you can overlook your own apparent evil; when you forgive other people, you forgive yourself. But as long as you bear grievances against other people’s attacks on you, you must think that what you yourself did in the world is real, that you have committed crimes, and is a sinner.

Believing you a sinner and guilty, you want to be punished, for guilt calls for punishment. You and those who believe in guilt, all people, want to be punished. To separate from God, as we all did, to be on earth, makes us feel like we did something wrong hence feel like we are sinners. To be human is to feel guilty and to expect punishment from the person one sinned against, the person one separated from, God and other people. We all expect God and other people to punish us.

(Christians call the act of separation from God Original Sin, and believe that we are born in sin and live in sin and are punished for our sin. They symbolize this separation in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eating the forbidden fruit is metaphor for disobeying God, separating from God, and because of that separation and sin we are punished with suffering and death. The wages of sin, Judaism, the antecedent of Christianity, teaches is death.)

We, as separated egos, invent a God that has nothing better to do with his time than to place us in his hell and satisfy his sadistic nature by watching us burn forever and ever.

But when we forgive others their evils, we forgive our own evils. In doing so, we overcome the world of dreams and awaken in the world of unified spirit, our real home.

Schucman restated the eternal truth in her Christological language. One cannot really add anything better to what she said. The only problem with her methodological approach to awakening to our real self is that it is religious and one is not a religious person. I am a scientist and express the perennial wisdom of mankind in scientific language.

If you like religion, then read Schucman or Hinduism or Buddhism. We are all saying the same things. But if religion makes you angry, as it made me, and then consider my secular representation of what is found in the world’s religions.

Religion is any attempt to reconnect people to their source, to help them remember their true nature. I want to accomplish religious goals through rational thinking.

As I see it, everything is a result of our thinking. I like the word thinking. I do not like the world mind. Mind tends to be deified and reified as if it is a person and worshiped. We say my mind as if mind exists apart from us. Mind is abstraction for the act of thinking.

There is thinking in the universe. The universe is a thinking universe. All things think, in different forms, of course.

We are part of a thinking universe. Everything thinks along with us. As Schucman recognized, we think in images. We see a world that represents our thinking. First, we think and our thinking is simultaneously shown in images. This is a fact, not conjecture. The external world we see is the simultaneous representation of our collective thinking.

When we die, that is, stop thinking in terms of this world, separated thinking, the external world is no longer there for us to see. Of course, we do not die. We merely exit this world and go to other modes of thinking.

Different modes of thinking show us their own different worlds. What folks report seeing in near death experiences is a world produced by that mode of thinking. As long as you choose to believe it as real, it seems real, and, in fact, is as real as our present world. But like our present world, the near death world, what Orientals call the astral world, is a fantasy and a dream and does not last forever.

What, in fact, exists forever is the world of union, the world of God, what Christians call heaven, Hindus call Brahmaloka and Igbos call Elegwe. That world is a world of connected light, a world where everything is joined to everything else, a world where there is no space and gap between people, a world where there are no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, a unified world. That is the real world. It exists and is our real home. We are foreigners in our present world of separation. (Don’t you feel like an alien here? I do.)

Unified state is the only world that is real. All you have to do to find out whether this is true or false is deny our present world, and deny the separated self you have invented for you, and with which you replace the unified self that is your real self.

The condition for experiencing heaven is that you give up the world of perception. If you consider that price too much to pay, well, you are not yet ready to return to your real home and real self. Keep on dreaming. Dreaming is allowed. God does not stop you from dreaming. Indeed, he is in the dream with you and is guiding you.

By all means stay in the journey without a distance, a journey to nowhere. (Everywhere is already in God and you, as part of God, is already in God and can, therefore, go nowhere that you are not already in; there is no place apart from you, so there is no distance to go to.) Like the prodigal son, you are on a journey to see if you can be independent from your father; at first, you seem to succeed, but eventually you learn that you cannot and return to your father and home, unified state. When you return home, heaven will throw a party for you and rejoice, for God’s seeming dead son is resurrected from death, the lost sheep is found. Dream on, my friend, for dreams are permitted. You have the freedom to dream, no one, not even God can prevent you from dreaming. What you are not allowed to do is permanently change your nature; you can dream of separation but you cannot make yourself permanently separated from God. You are always as God created you, unified with him and all creation. All you can do is dream that you are separated from God and your real self, that dream does not alter the reality of our unified spirit self. (Ndi muoso na edu anyi nu uwa.)

It is very difficult to negate this empirical world, to give up ones self concept and self image. As noted, one feels terrorized and, in fact, constructs psychotic and or neurotic self concepts and self images and identifies with those rather than face selflessness. The death of the self, as we know it, is very terrifying.

Western psychology, as superficial as ever, defines psychosis as this or that. But psychosis is really an invention of a more deluded false self and false world when the individual recognizes that his earthly self and world are false.

Insanity is efforts to make our world seem real when it is recognized as not real. To do so, the insane person must vaguely recognize that our world is not real. Thus, insane persons are closer to heaven, to God, more than we tend to realize. Of course, they are not in God, heaven; they are afraid to meet the condition of heaven, God, their real selves: give up their earthly selves.

Neurosis, which I can speak from direct experience, is a product of being closer to God, to the real self and to heaven. The neurotic is aware that our world is unreal. He is aware that his body and ego self is unreal. Because of this vague awareness, he hates and rejects his body and ego. He then uses his thinking to construct an ideal body and ideal ego self for himself and for other people. He aspires after becoming his ideal body and ego and world. His life is motivated by an obsessive compulsive effort to seem his ideal perfect selves.

By age six, I was aware that I hated my body and self. I used my thinking to image a better body and self. At age twelve, a man from my area came back from America and had PhD. My father treated him like he was God. I resolved that he must be very important and wanted to be as important as him, to be respected as my father respect him. Subsequently, I did not relax until I had PhD. Then I realized that that degree did not change me. I still felt as worthless as ever. Still desiring social worth, I sought a high position in society. I worked hard for it. A few years after leaving college, I was the executive director of a mental health agency. Still, I felt as worthless as ever. I then dropped out of the rat race to seek alternatives to social worth. In my late thirties, I immersed myself in the study of Hinduism, Buddhism, new age religions and traditional Christian religions.

Neurosis is a product of the individual’s awareness of his existential worthlessness and valuelessness. This is a correct self assessment. The problem is what one does with that fact.

The neurotic attempts to construct a better self and a better world. He does not succeed.

The psychotic seems to succeed and live in his imaginary ideal world. The neurotic knows that he is still living in his imperfect world and is unhappy with that world and is unhappy with himself. He is Henry Thoreau’s man who lives a life of quiet desperation.

Western psychology talks shop about neurosis but do not cure it. I have practiced most of the psychotherapies that purport to heal neurosis: Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian; Fromm, Horney; Ellis rational emotive therapy, Beck’s cognitive behavior therapy, Skinner’s behavior therapy, neuroscience’s medications, and so on and so on. None of these works. They merely address the symptom not the disease itself.

What heals neurosis, as well as other mental disorders, is change of thinking. One must change ones pattern of thinking.

Living is thinking. The universe is a thinking universe. The neurotic must give up desiring to be perfect and ideal on this world’s terms. He must eventually give up his self altogether and accept a different self, a different world, one that is not a product of his separated thinking, but is a product of his unified thinking.

THINKING PRODUCES HEAVEN AND EARTH

Like this present world, our mutual thinking is responsible for producing what people call heaven. Please note this fact.

Our collective separated thinking produced our present world; our collective unified thinking produced heaven.

To heal your neurosis, psychosis and normalcy is to stop thinking in a separated manner, individualized in neurosis and collectivized in normalcy, but to think in a unified manner.

Go into meditation, stop ego based thinking, tune out this world, exit it and return to the world of union.

Our real thinking, unified thinking, produced heaven…but because that world is unified and knows so, it is permanent, changeless, eternal and immortal…this does not mean that it is static; thinking still goes on in heaven and that thinking adds to heaven; heaven is forever expanding, for our thinking is creating new things that are added to heaven hence expand it. Heaven is perfect peace and happiness. These are facts, not conjectures.

HEALED HEALER

Each psychotherapeutic method is first meant for the person who propounded it, and eventually for those like him. The therapist is a sick person. His sickness is his separation from his real self. If his therapy is any use, it must first heal him. Having healed him, he knows from experience that it is useful and then extends his therapeutic approach to other people.

Alfred Adler was a neurotic. He felt inferior and compensated with superior feeling. His individual psychology helped him reduce but not eliminate his inordinate sense of inferiority. Karen Horney felt worthless and aspired after becoming an ideal woman. She studied medicine, at a time few women were admitted to medical school. But despite becoming a supposedly prestigious medical doctor, she still felt worthless. Her psychoanalysis somewhat helped her reduce her intolerable sense of worthlessness. Unfortunately, she died before she fully understood the Zen Buddhism she was beginning to explore. If she had succeeded, she would have healed her neurosis. Sigmund Freud was a neurotic. His psychoanalysis, apparently, did not heal his neurotic anxiety, for he died a very anxious person suffering from all sorts of phobias. Since his therapy could not heal him, it could not heal pother people.

Skinner and behaviorists were empty vessels making a great deal of noise. True, we do learn a great deal of things. Our whole educational system is based on learning. Nevertheless, it is infantile reductionism to claim that all we are is learned and that you could modify people through classical and operant conditioning. You can practice positive and negative reinforcements all you want; you can not change neurosis until you change the neurotic’s pattern of thinking.

I have scrutinized extant Western psychotherapies, psychological and pharmacological, only cognitive behavior therapies seem useful. Aaron Back’s Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Albert Ellis Rational Emotive Therapy seem useful. Both enable folks to understand their thinking patterns, and where there are bad thinking patterns, help them correct them. Ellis wants to reorient people’s thinking to a more positive and adaptive pattern.

For example, the neurotic bedevils his life with lots of “should not’s” and Ellis helps him to understand that morality is a social construct and that there is nothing wrong with many behaviors per se. If a behavior does not harm other people, Ellis urges you to engage in it. Do not say that you should not engrave in it just because someone said that you should not. Consider sex. There is nothing wrong with it. If two adults consent to have sex, that is their business. What other people think is not relevant. (However, it is always wrong to have sex with children, for they cannot legitimately give their consent. On a personal level, it is wrong to engage in homosexual activity. Homosexuality is a defiant behavior, defiance of natural sexuality; it is based on power struggle, an effort to seem powerful by defying the obvious. However, I am not motivated to crusade against homosexuality; I am just stating what seems self-evident to me. I know that if you oppose homosexuals they will be defiant and doubly engage in their absurd behavior, so one will simply keep quiet over this insane behavior.)

Each psychotherapy is meant for the person who fashioned it and to the extent that it is good must first heal him. Helen Schucman noted that the atonement is first for the atonement worker. It is for the healer to first heal himself before he can pretend ability to heal other people.

What we mostly have in the world are unhealed healers. We see neurotics who have not healed their own neurosis pretend to be therapists and or ministers of God. To be separated from God and his creation is to be sick. To unify with God and his creation is to be healed.

If you are joined with God and all creation, you are healed and can heal those who feel separated from God and people. But until you unify with God and all creation you are an unhealed person and has no business trying to heal any one; you cannot heal any one, any way. All the unhealed therapists and ministers making noises about their ability to heal people are frauds.

Unfortunately, Schucman did not adhere to her own advice and did not heal herself with her spiritual psychotherapy. Clearly, she did not let go of her ego. She continued to live from her ego and, as such, experienced fear. She died an anxious and depressed neurotic woman. Yet, if she had attempted to practice her theology she could have become what she called one of the saviors of the world (what Orientals call an avatar, Buddha vista). It is a pity that she chose to retain her over blown ego and instead of identify with her unified self. In unified self she would have found the peace and joy that eluded her all her life on earth.

I am not really interested in criticizing other persons. I am interested in me and what helps me heal my own neurosis. Science of thinking is first meant for me. If it heals my neurosis, then it can heal other persons’ neurosis.

The question is whether my methodological approach to human beings has healed my anxiety? Am I still a fearful person or have I found freedom from fear?

I have found freedom from fear. Of course, I still have some residual fear. I still live in the ego, I still wish to be a separated self hence am on earth, in the dream of separation. As such, I still feel some fear. Fear is, after all, a means of protecting the separated self.

My approach has healed me and I recommend it to other people. I give to other people what I found useful to me. I give to other people what I have first given to me.

I found Western psychology and psychotherapy useful in a limited sense. I studied Oriental spiritual psychotherapies and found them more useful. I am not an Oriental person. I am me.

What works for other people may not work for me. I am not looking to be any ones disciple for the sake of being a disciple but to seeing what works for me. I am not interested in religious mumbo jumbo. I am interested in what works and helps me overcome my ego and anxiety.

I am not seeking escape from this world and do not want to live in a cave as an enlightened person. I want to be in the world of space, time and matter, but do so with appropriate thinking, thinking that give me and those around me peace and happiness.

Beginning in childhood, at least by age six, I found me and the empirical world imperfect. I found other people and social institutions not good enough. I rejected these so-called realities. I then invented ideal forms of them. I tried to make my ideals replace these so-called realities.

The mental cannot replace the physical. Much as I wished to have a healthy body, my actual body remained weak…a cup of coffee, for example, spoils my whole day, that is how sensitive my body is.

I leant that my fantasy self and fantasy world are not going to come into being. I gave them up.

On the other hand, I still do not like the so-called normal world. I am a very moral person. I do not have conscious awareness of stealing since I became an adult. On the other hand, I see normal persons stealing. The so-called normal person I see out there seems amoral; he seems more like an animal, really. I see normal racists who discriminate against other people. Simply stated, I loathe normal persons and do not want to be like them.

So what to do? I looked into spirituality and through rigorous experimentation found out that there is a different way of thinking that produces peace and happiness.

I came to understand that it was me who tried to make the world I see around me ideal, but that the world itself is not this or that, but is neutral. It was me who made other people seem Ideal.

Let me illustrate this phenomenon. Self hating and self rejecting black persons often think that to be ideal is to be white like. Such neurotic black persons make white persons seem ideal like. Having idealized whites, such blacks want to be like them. Some such neurotic Black men, for example, think that white women are ideal and or are better than black women. It is them that give white women prestige hence desire them.

Since it is one who made what is desired seem desirable, one can also make it not desirable. One can deconstruct ones earlier construction of certain women as ideal persons hence not desire them. The individual gives other things worth and desire them. He can choose to see things as worthless and not desire them. For example, a man may choose to see women as not desirable and not desire them. He withdraws the value he had hitherto given to women. This is what Arthur Schopenhauer did, not see women as even worth a second of his time and women see him as a misogynist, a hater of women.

Feminist women who imagine that all men live to do is desire to have sex with them actually do not realize that sex is a function of desire and that men can choose not to desire women and the very presence of women becomes oppressive to such men.

This is what mystics do. A human being can choose to change his thinking and change his behaviors. He can choose to not have negative, or for that matter positive judgment. He can choose not to experience shame and guilt. (I used to feel shame over sex until a woman told me that she has absolutely no shame over sex. To her, sex is a natural thing, an itch that she satisfies when she wants to; to her, sex is neither good nor bad, but just is; she does not attach morality to her sexuality. She is a realistic woman.)

We must learn to correct our thinking. Science of Mind attempted to accomplish this end but did it from a religious perspective. New thought religions like Unity Church and A Course in miracles try to correct human thinking from a metaphysical perspective. Cognitive behavior therapy attempts to correct people’s thinking from the perspective of reason. I build on these antecedents to produce a science and technology of correct thinking patterns.

INCORRECT AND CORRECTED THINKING

Experience has taught me that all that man is, despite his body, is thinking machine. We are always, thinking, conscious of it or not. Even what we call emotions are really products of thinking, thinking that we are not conscious of. Consider the emotions of fear and sex; they would seem outside the realm of thinking, but upon further scrutiny are really produced by thinking. In fear the individual has perceived a threat to his physical and or psychological survival. He has made an evaluation that his life is threatened. He then tells his body to pour out the neuro-chemicals that stimulate his body into behaving in the rapid manner it does in fear, with the goal of making him do what he has to do to survive. Thus, he runs faster or fights more efficiently. The goal is his survival and he survives. This whole response is based on thinking and not feeling. Sex would seem like a purely physical response, but upon closer examination is a result of thinking. It is thinking that desires a particular sex object. A man sees a woman, likes her and thinks of her in a sexual manner. His thinking arouses his body. It is his thinking that aroused his body. If he did not desire sex, he would not have his body aroused. Body responds to thinking.

All of human existence is thinking. Therefore, we must pay attention to our thinking. Where our thinking is disordered, we have mental disorder. (I prefer the term thinking disorder, not chemical imbalance or brain disorder, as neuroscientists, who reduce us to animals, would like us to accept.)

Mental health is thinking health, or ordered thinking. Mental disorder is disordered thinking. Bad thinking leads the body to respond in a certain manner. We then make the mistake of focusing only on what is going on in the body and think that body determined thinking.

Where there is thinking disorder we have to correct it. Corrected thinking patterns are what mental health are all about? In corrected thinking one sees ones self as one with all people and accepts that all people are joined and unified. Corrected thinking means loving every person around one.

When a person loves and forgives all people, he tends to feel lighter. Life becomes a thing of joy. One laughs a lot and is almost always humorous, finding the absurd activities we engage in playful, and not take them too seriously. Laugh, life is not that serious.(My mother used to tell me to laugh. She would sneak behind me and say, Laugh, Tom, laugh, life is not all that bad. I was tense and serious, always wondering what life is all about. She is correct.)

This world is a dream; we ought to make it a happy dream. The world is a drama of our mutual construction; we ought to kick back, have fun seeing the play we wrote enacted before our eyes. What is a play but something meant to entertain?

EXTENDING AND PROJECTING

At night we sleep and dream and the world we see is produced by our thinking. This is obvious enough. What is not always obvious is that our day world is also produced by our thinking.

Unlike night dreams, which are produced by single individuals, our day world is produced by all of us, including all animals, trees, and everything in being. The world is our collective dream. The world represents our collective thinking.

We think and project our thoughts out and see them as the world. The world is the out picturing of our collective thinking.

We deny that we did the thinking that produced the empirical world. Indeed, we see the external events in the world as things happening to us against our will. In reality, the things happening to us are things that we did to our selves, for our thinking produce them.

If another person attacks you, your thinking produced the person attacking you; simultaneously, the person attacking you produced you to be attacked by him; it is a mutual dream, after all.

The issue here is denial. We deny ownership of the events in our world and see ourselves as victims unto whom good and bad things happen to, when, in fact, those things are produced by our thoughts.

In extending, on the other hand, we take ownership for the world we produce. In heaven, we are thinking. Our thinking, this time called creative thinking or extending thinking, produces what we experience. Heaven is not the boring place we tend to think that it is. It is an exciting place. Our minds, unified and working in tandem, as they work in the temporal world, produce the events in heaven.

Unlike on earth where we deny responsibility for what we produced, in heaven, we accept that we produced what we experience.

Heaven is not static. Heaven is always expanding. (Expanding to where, you ask? Our thoughts create where the universe expands to.)

Heaven’s thoughts are unified and, therefore, produce additions to what already exist. Heaven is permanent, changeless and eternal, we merely add to the permanent and what is added becomes part of the permanent universe.

Even our miscorrelations on earth have some good aspects to them. Whatever we invent in this world with love is purified and saved and added to heaven. For example, the good music produced by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart etc are saved and are heard in heaven. Whatever you value in this world, if it is loving, you will experience in heaven.

A PROMISE TO MY FATHER AND ANCESTORS

My father is like me. My grand father is like me. I did not see my great grandfather, but I hear that he was like me. We all lived pained existence. We all rejected our problematic bodies and our world and used our thinking to imagine better bodies, selves and world and pursued them.

My grandfather and father were neurotic. They wanted to become ideal. At all times, they had an ideal self image in their minds and used the standards of that ideal self to judge their real self, to judge their wives and to judge their children.

We, the children, are imperfect and, therefore, could not live up to father’s expectations. He was frustrated with us because we were not angels.

White racists like to say that all black persons are criminals. My father would literal die rather than take a penny that does not belong to him. He would have experienced heart attack if any of his children stole something. He wanted us to be morally perfect.

Of course, we were not morally perfect. At age eight, I remember stealing a few pennies from my grandfather’s room and spending it on candies. However, I felt so ashamed of myself that the very next day I went to confession (we are Catholics) and confessed my sin and was given penance…pick up trash from the Church yard, and return the said amount of money from my allowances. I do not remember engaging in another stealing episode during my childhood.

The point is that my family is motivated to become ideal, perfect persons. In pursuing our ideal self images, we felt uncomfortable with our real selves. We could not live with our imperfect human nature. We lived in fear for if you desire to be perfect, you must experience fear of not being perfect.

Father is a very handsome man. But he felt like he was ugly. I am not too bad looking, either. But I have always seen myself as not good enough. Why? Because I have always posited an ideal self concept and ideal self image and used them to judge my actual self and found it not good enough. Simply stated, we pursue idealism and could not tolerate the real world.

I promised my father that I would study and understand why we lived in fear. I could not relax until I have found the answer. In searching for the answer to our problem, I studied philosophy, psychology, Oriental religions and new age religions. I learnt a lot from all these. But, ultimately, I found the answer by thinking about what works for me, not other people.

I have fulfilled my promise to my father and ancestors. I have found out why we are unhappy. Our self rejection began in heaven. In heaven, all human beings reject the unified self and seek separated self. In heaven, the children of God opposes the will of their father. Their father wills that all things be unified. To be unified, all things must be the same, equal and be in spirit. We sought special-ness, inequality and differences. To seem to gratify our desires, we seem to separate from unified state.

By opposing the will of heaven, everything we made opposes us. Everything in our world opposes every thing else.

We rejected union and on earth must reject every thing we made. Thus, despite seeming handsome we reject our bodies. Despite having good egos, we reject our egos. We seek ideal bodies and ideal egos. In doing so, we live in fear.

My mother is more self accepting than my father. She is, as the world sees these things, a normal woman. Nevertheless, like all human beings, she has her fears and anxieties from desire of separation and rejection of our unified self. On the whole, mother adapted to the world better than father.

Mother was aware of the futility of this world and dealt with it by taking refuge in ceaseless work. She escaped into work and worked fourteen hours a day. She could not stand a moment of idealness. If she had free time, she cooked or cleaned up, but could not be idle. Was she to have idle time, she would be forced to think and in doing so appreciate our human existential nothingness hence feel depressed and unhappy? Work was her way of coping with our meaningless and purposeless world.

DISCUSSION

This world is not our real home. We are aliens in this world. Our real home is unified spirit.

No one can ever feel at home in a slaughterhouse, this world. We are all yearning for our lost home. We are all depressed by the loss of our loving, unified home.

I love somber music, such as by Bach etc. I found solace in funeral music (This seemed macabre to those around me.) But I know why I found joy in sorrow.

This world was not my home. I feel like an orphan in this world. I am lost in this world. Somber music is symbolic of how I feel in this world.

Celestine Ukwu and Rex Lawson’s sorrowful music appealed to me for they were singing about the human condition, our sense of loss being in an unloving world. (Both men died untimely deaths and returned to their real homes, the homes they missed so much and sang about in their sorrowful songs. My fellow thinkers, I hope that you have found the peace and joy that eluded you in this world.)

I contracted a job to do and have done it. Ancestors, grandfather, Father, I have now understood why you were unhappy in our world.

My goal is to prevent other members of the family from living the tortured existence you did and to help make people happy.

Father I love you and you know it. I know that you love me, too. You are the most loving person in the world and I know it. Despite your criticisms, based on your expectation for us to be perfect, and fear that we would not be perfect, I knew that you love us. You sacrificed your life for us, working fourteen hour days, six days a week, to provide for us. Thank you, my dear fellow man. We love you. Rest well in your heavenly peace, you deserve that peace and joy.

I have done what I contracted to do and when I have spread that message to the world, shown the world how to live in peace and happiness, I will gladly lay down my worthless body and ego and join you in the peace and joy of our father, Chukwu.

Father and mother I love you two. Please forgive me for not being there when you died. I had to do what I had to do, learn about the nature and cause of human suffering and find antidote to it. Until I found the answer, I could not do anything else. My drama is part of the hero’s journey. Until the hero obtains what he is looking for, he can experience no peace and joy. But having found it, his duty is to teach it to the world, as I am now doing. And when his part in awakening God’s sleeping children is done, he leaves the abode of dreams and returns to live among the awake.

CONCLUSION

When we look at ourselves what we see is body. It would seem that our body determines our thinking. Indeed, neuroscience suggests that thinking is epiphenomenal, that thinking is produced by the configurations of particles, atoms and elements in our brains. That is not true. Thinking is apart from body.

Body is obviously there, we can see it. It is like a car with which we drive from place to place in the world of space, time and matter. But there is a driver. The driver determines what the car does. Nevertheless, the health, or lack of it, of a car affects how it performs. If the car is not well maintained, it would not run well. Therefore, we have to take good care of our cars.

By the same token, we have to take good care of our bodies. Good food and medications are necessary for taking good care of our bodies. We have to study the nature of our bodies. Every human being ought to study the physical sciences, at least, up to bachelor’s degree level.

We live in matter and must understand how matter works and design technologies to take advantage of how it works. No one should deny the temporary reality of matter, his body.

However, we must recognize that we are thinking agents. There is something in us that we might call spirit. Spirit is non-material. Spirit has mind, that is, it thinks. It thinks through whatever it manifests in.

For our present purposes, spirit thinks through our bodies. Spirit is love, and wants to love through our bodies. Bodies are temporary instruments of love.

Love your self and love all persons in your world.

Thinking can be well ordered or disordered. Try to think in an ordered manner. This means loving and forgiving all persons, including you.

A mentally healthy person is a person who thinks correctly, that is, lovingly and forgivingly, and does work that contributes to social welfare.

At Science of Thinking Institutes we teach people to think in a well ordered manner hence live loving, peaceful and happy lives. We help to generate and maintain peace and harmony in our world.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Africa Institute Seattle

600-1 Avenue, Suite 325

Seattle, WA 98104

(206) 464-9004

[email protected]

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Science of Thinking

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- I had meant to share the attached piece before the series on Nigeria politics. I forgot. Here it is. Do with it as you like; it summarizes my approach to phenomena. In the meantime, I will continue with the planned series on Nigeria’s Politics with political culture on

Thursday and political socialization on Friday. As noted, the series will run for two months and end on November 30. In December, I will do a series on business administration, what I call “Portable MBA in Ghana must go bag”. It will comprise of no more than 8 write ups on business/corporate finance, public finance, Basic Accounting…journals, accounts payable/receivable, budges, reading financial statements etc… IPO’s, Stocks, Bonds, Marketing, business operations, managing human resources and labor unions etc. I do this because some of you folks might wind up in leadership positions. A leader needs to understand money management. Our first republic leaders had no clue on how to manage money, they just talked ill understood English. That would bring the year to a close. In 2006, I will do a series on Africa’s political economy, one a week, on each African country, for 52 weeks. Please learn to share whatever gifts God gave you. What you share multiples, what you hoard diminishes. I am off to do my regular jugging. Please jog at least three times a week, one hour at a time. Also work out in gyms. Swim regularly; where possible, ride a bicycle instead of driving a car. Simply stated, try to be physically healthy. Eat sparingly, and refuse to gain weight. No smoking of cigarettes. No drugs. If you must drink alcohol, limit it to the absolute minimum. Many well to do Nigerians eat like fools and die of heart attacks, strokes etc and folks attribute their self induced death to juju. Good luck, fellow compatriots.

SCIENCE OF THINKING

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Science is a methodological approach to phenomena that insists only on facts. Every proposition must be demonstrably true for it to qualify as scientific. The moment an idea is not verifiable, it is no longer a scientific idea. Science does not deal with beliefs but with self-evident facts.

I am interested in self-evident facts. The moment you ask me to believe something or accept something on faith you have lost me.

I am interested in the science of thinking. That is, I am interested in demonstrable facts about how human beings think. This should be the mission of psychology.

When I was a young person, I found Western psychology fascinating. But now that I am an adult, I find Western Psychology not useful in explaining the issues that I want explained. Frustrated, I turned to Oriental systems of understanding human nature for help. I find Oriental ideas more adult than Western psychology, and will, therefore, begin this discourse on thinking by evaluating some Oriental ideas.

Of all the oriental thinkers that I have studied, I found Buddha the most interesting. Let me, therefore, begin this inquiry by examining some postulations on the nature of human beings attributed to Buddha. We shall dispense with the mythology that surrounds Buddha. (An example of such mythologies is the fairy tale that Gautama was a prince and did not know suffering until he was age twenty eight, when he happened outside the gates of his palace and, for the first time, saw sick human beings etc. No human being gets to be twenty eight years old without having been sick and seen or heard about death. During the time Buddha lived, 2500 years ago, there was no anti bacterial vaccine like penicillin, so people were dropping dead right and left from assorted diseases and seldom lived beyond forty. Buddha did experience suffering, sickness and death. We shall not concern ourselves with the infantile mythology that those who did not even bother to understand what Buddha taught spawn around him.)

What is germane in Buddha’s life is his philosophy, not the mythology his existence is clothed in. Is that philosophy true and useful? First of all, what is it?

Gautama Sakayamuni was a young man who was disturbed by the nature of being on earth and searched for answers that would enable him to tolerate the real world. As a Hindu, he naturally looked into the various Hindu paths to understanding human nature. He tried ascetics, austerities and Tantra and nothing seemed to provide him with the answers that he was looking for. He became frustrated and resolved to either find the answers or die. He did not want any thing to do with this world on its own terms. Thus, he sat down by a Bo tree and told himself that he would not get up until he found the answers he was searching for. He tried to meditate.

In his meditative frame of mind, his ego, which his followers gave a cute name, Mara, tried to convince him why this world is worth his while. He was told about all the nubile damsels that could be his if only he wanted to live in this world. The kingdoms of the world are for the taking by any one who resolves to do so. But Gautama had seen through tinsel town and would not be swayed. He rejected the offerings of the ego and its world.

Gautama’s temptation reminds us of Jesus temptation. Before Jesus began his ministry, he went into the desert and fasted for forty days. During that time, his ego, which his followers christened as Satan, tempted him to change his thinking and accept living on the egos terms. Satan, his ego, took him to the highest point in Jerusalem and showed him the kingdoms of this world and told him that the world is for his taking if he decides to bow to the ego, live in terms of the ego and pursue the things of flesh. He told his ego that man does not live by bread alone but by the word of God, by truth. He wanted to live only on the basis of truth, which is union with his father, God, and all his brothers in creation. He won.

Gautama, too, won, for he was not tempted to give up his search for union. Gautama was not to exchange the paltry things of this world for the wealth of God. He was not about to exchange the valueless, this world, for the valuable, spirit. He just sat there and refused to budge. Ultimately, he escaped from the world of separation and entered the world of union. He experienced peace and happiness, the peace of God that St Paul said passes human, ego understanding. Having ascertained that there is a better world, Gautama came back to teach his people about the truth he experienced and how to live in our separated world without much suffering and pain.

Buddha postulated that to be a human being is to suffer. As he saw it, human existence is characterized by pain and suffering.

(Is this proposition true or not true? It is true, so I will accept it.)

Buddha then goes on to explain why human beings do suffer. As he sees it, we suffer because we do have Desire. As long as people have desire they would suffer.

(Is this proposition true? Do we suffer because of desire? The answer is yes. If one desires something, has a wish for something, one runs the risk of not obtaining it. When one does not get what one desires, one tends to feel disappointed and frustrated. To be disappointed is to suffer. Therefore, this proposition is true.)

Buddha proceeded to say that the only way to eliminate suffering is to give up desiring things. No desire, no disappointment and suffering.

(Is this proposition correct? Yes, it is correct. If you do not desire any thing, you would not be disappointed by not getting anything.)

Buddha recognized that to live on earth is to have desire. If one gave up all desire one would not be on planet earth. For example, to live in body one must desire to do so. If one did not desire to live in body one would not take the trouble to do what it takes to procure ones food. Survival in physical form requires a wish to live in this world. If a person gave up all desire to live on earth he would not do what survival requires of him and would die. To live in body requires food. To have food means to work for it. It takes effort to acquire food, clothing and shelter, absolute necessities for survival on earth. That is to say that no desire at all means physical death.

Buddha was not a nihilist who hates existence on death. He was not preaching suicide. If he had insisted on total cessation of desire he would have, in effect, been teaching suicide and would be a nihilist, an escapist from his world. He would be negating life on earth. His philosophy would be the philosophy of death and, therefore, of no relevance to those who want to live on planet earth. So what is the next best thing to do? Buddha taught DETACHMENT.

In effect, he said, go ahead and desire the things that make your survival in this world possible, but do so with detachment. Recognize that the chances are that you may not get what you desire, or that if you get them, that they may not last long. The things of this world are fleeting; do not become over attached to them. Recognize things fickle nature; they are here today and gone tomorrow.

If you do not get what you desire you should put your disappointment in perspective and not allow yourself to be over bothered by it. Life on earth is such that one cannot always get what one wants. Take life on earth on its own terms. Whether you like it or not, people will die. Those who are born in flesh and live in flesh must die, for flesh is composed of matter and whatever is composed of matter must eventually become decomposed. Matter is composed of elements, atoms and particles. These are held together by chemical bonds that weaken and break hence what they hold together, our bodies, decompose. Your parents will die. Your desire for them to live forever would not prevent them from dying. Your desire for there to be no hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, volcanoes, bacteria, virus, plagues etc would not prevent those natural phenomena from occurring.

Life is such that what we desire we do not always get, and those we do mange to get do not last long. Just learn to take things in stride. You win some and lose some and such is life, cest la vie.

Clearly, Buddha’s teaching of detachment is a very useful approach to tolerating the pain that is inherent in our existence on earth. Life on earth is pain, and then you die. That is the truth and there is no sugar coating that reality; accept it and be detached to the fleeting glories of this world. The world is transitory and ephemeral; things are here today and gone tomorrow, so do not be attached to any thing, so that you do not feel disappointed when you lose things.

Detachment has another connotation; here it means not taking credit or blame for ones actions. An individual sees himself as a conduit through which life operates and does good or bad things. He does not take responsibility for the good he does, for if he does so, he must equally take responsibility for the bad he does. If you take credit for your good works, you must take blame for your inevitable bad works. If you can do good work, you can do bad work. If there is pleasure there must be pain. If you seek pleasure you must get its opposite, pain. Therefore, do not take responsibility for one or the other. Be detached from the fruit of your action. Do your best but do not be attached to the result of your action. All that matters is that you did your best, as you understood best to be. You are not in the business of assigning credit or blame.

This proposition of Buddha is, most rational persons would agree, valid. One who wants to have emotional equanimity must be detached to the events of this world. He must not permit himself to be overly attached to anything. If one is overly attached, one feels frustrated if one does not obtain what one desired, but if one desires things with detachment, not getting them does not produce much psychological suffering and pain. This teaching of Buddha makes him one of the world’s greatest psychologists.

(Alas, to achieve anything substantial in this world, one must be attached to what one wants to accomplish and must feel disappointed if one does not attain it. Feeling psychological pain is inevitable for great achievers, for it takes great passion and enthusiasm to achiever anything worthwhile. Excessive detachment leads to lack of enthusiasm and poor productivity. University professors are, on the whole, not known for their great contribution to human evolution because they are emotionally detached and objective; they are seldom emotionally passionate about anything. It takes passion that borders on the irrational to make a difference in the world, as we know it.)

The above four propositions constitute the core of Buddha’s teaching; they are called the four noble truths. Buddha subsequently elaborated on what is generally called the eight paths to correct living. These are really not original with Buddha. He merely elaborated on the universally recognized need to be truthful in ones speech, to be kind to other people, to love other people, to have compassion for other people, to forgive other people, to be generous with other people, to not say negative things about other people, to not backbite other people, to be trust worthy etc. These statements are found in just about every religion of the world and are not specific to Buddhism and, therefore, we shall not see them as Buddha’s major contribution to truthful living.

Buddha founded a monastic order for his key followers to live in. The monks were required to renounce pride and shame (those two go together, a proud person is always a person prone to feeling shame) and live simple existence.

The prideful ego is very difficult to do away with. Nevertheless, pride must be given up, for as long as a human being is proud he can not know peace of mind. The proud must suffer psychological pain. The proud person is actually in jail and hell, a prison and hell of his own making, but does not know it.

The ego is like a raging bull that requires constant effort to subdue it. One way to subdue the ego’s pride is to constantly and consciously humiliate it. To accomplish this end, Buddha insisted that monks beg for their food. They are to take a bowl and stand by the street side and beg for food. And they are to ask for only the food they need, now, not for tomorrow. When hungry, go beg for food, but do not beg for food to support you tomorrow. Such behavior is bound to make the person feel unimportant and small. Imagine a proud person begging for his food! Human pride feels attacked by the very notion of begging. The proud individual would feel great shame from asking lowly people for his daily bread.

That is exactly the point. Buddha knew that human beings are very proud and wanted them to overcome their pride through begging and simple living.

Human beings, particularly vain and narcissistic ones, like to bedeck themselves in fancy clothing and, like coxcombs and peacocks, trot around as very important persons, desiring other people to admire them. Buddha dealt with that attribute of human vanity by insisting that his monks wear a uniform, the saffron robes they wear. If necessary, they should walk around without shoes or wear simple sandals, but nothing fancy and expensive.

Buddha’s goal is to attack, belittle, degrade, humiliate, insult and bring down the individual’s prideful ego. As long as the individual is arrogant and haughty, he cannot know his real self, a self that is the same and coequal with other selves. Moreover, as long as the individual is proud he would be prone to anger and would not know inner peace and joy. A proud person is forever feeling that other people’s behaviors that do not treat him as a very dignified and important person denigrate his pride and reacts with anger. Anger is designed to make other people take him seriously, to see him as a very important person, to rehabilitate his belittled ego. The proud person’s emotions are up and down, yoyo, never stable; one moment, when he feels respected by other people, he is happy and the next moment, when he feels belittled by other people, he is sad, anxious or angry.

To be peaceful one must subdue ones ego and do away with pride in the self.

The other aspect of Buddhism that is useful is his insistence on meditation. Buddha was a Hindu. Hindus have been practicing mediation for as long as any one can remember. Buddha, therefore, did not invent meditation. All that Buddha accomplished is give different names to familiar Hindu names.

Let us briefly review what Hindus do in meditation and then add on to it what Buddha contributed to it. To understand Hindu meditation it is necessary to understand Hindu story of creation.

Hinduism believes that, in truth there is only one self. That self is called Brahman. Brahman is one yet is infinite in numbers. Each part of Brahman is called Atman. In eternity are Brahman and his Atmans. Brahman and Atman are joined as one self, literally, so that Atman is Brahman. Somehow, Brahman/Atman desired to experience himself as divided and not unified. Brahman, as it were, wanted to experience his opposite self.

Unified Brahman wanted to experience the world of multiplicity. He could not do so in his real nature. So he invented Maya, a magical portion, and cast that spell on himself and went to sleep. In his sleep, he dreamed that his infinite parts, Atmans, are separated from him and are no longer parts of his unified one self.

Our world is the dream of Brahman. The world is Maya; an illusion for it takes the unreal as real. Reality is union, unreality is separated things. In the world, we see ourselves as separated from each other and as not each other; we are, therefore, in Maya, in illusion, in a dream; we are ignorant of our truth, which is union.

The first part of the dream of the world is to see oneself as separated from other people. The second part of the dream is to see ones self as unified with other people. We come to separate but eventually must see ourselves as unified to be able to end the game.

The purpose of our existence on earth is twofold: first, to forget our unified nature; second, to remember our unified nature; we must remember that we are unified as one self, and are no other person but Atman who is Brahman.

The game is set up to first make us feel separated from each other and later to make us feel unified with each other. The Yogas taught by Patanjali (Jnana, Bhakti, Karma, Raja, Tantra…each appealing to different persons: Jnana to thinkers, Bhakti to worshipers, Karma to doers, raja to meditators, Tantra to sensual persons) are helpful means for remembering our real self. Meditation is the most immediately helpful means of remembering ones true self hence it is called the royal yoga, the king of the Yogas.

In meditation, Hindus try to transcend their separated selves, egos (Ahankara) so as to remember their real self, the unified self (Jivatman). They try to stop thinking and tune out the chattering separated self, the ego. If they can break out of the ego (Moksha) and enter Samadhi (world of stillness, world of no opposites, no separation, world of union) they would come to know that they and Brahman are the same.

This break through from separation to union is variously called self realization, enlightenment, illumination and awakening. The self realized person, called Avatar, knows that he, all creation and Brahman are the same. He is said to be awakened from the dream of Brahman; he has discarded the spell of Maya and overcame the ignorance that hitherto led him to think that he was separated from other persons. The enlightened person now knows the truth that he is unified with all people. (These ideas on Hinduism are culled from the various Hindu Holy books, scripture: Veda, Upanishad, Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Behavad Gita; and from the writing of Vivekananda, M. Gospel of Ramakrishna and so on.)

Buddha built on his inherited Hinduism and added to it. He said that to be human is to have a thinking aspect.

All of us do think. You do think and I do think. Something in us, let us call it what Hinduism calls it, ego, the separated self, the I in us, thinks. That thinking aspect of us is always thinking. It is thinking when we are awake as well as when we are sleeping. To be a human being is to think. Human beings are thinking animals (hence the study of thinking is really what psychology ought to be all about).

Thinking includes trying to understand the world one lives in. Unfortunately, the information available to the individual, all of us, at any point in time, is limited. Therefore, think as much as one likes, there are simply many things that one does not understand. For example, at this very moment, I do not understand the nature of the stars. Of course, I have studied some physics and appreciate what physicists say about the nature of the atom (electron, proton, neutron etc…Hinduism believes that matter is composed of three Gunas: satva, raja and tama and that the dominating one determines the individual’s character, if satva, cool headed; if raja, active and if tamas, dull; the three social class are said the reflect inheritance of these elements with the Brahmins being more satva, the Kastriyas being more raja and the lower classes and untouchables being tamas; apparently those who have worked out their sansaras from past lives evolve to the higher classes) and how nuclear fission is taking place in the stars hence producing the stars’ energy and light. But what cosmology knows about the stars is only a beginning.

Simply stated, there are many things about the stars and the world that the individual does not understand. Whatever the individual says about phenomena is based in incomplete information and is largely speculative. Conjecture is not truth.

Because there are many things one does not understand, one must, therefore, keep quiet and not pretend to know what one does not know.

On the other hand, the human ego wants to know, and when it does not know, it confabulates and fills itself with conjectures. The ego often pretends that its speculations are facts.

What is salient is that the ego, the human current self, wants to know everything and that it does not know all things.

Who am I? The ego asks that question and wants to know. Truth? I do not know who I am. (Do you know who you are?) My ego often pretends to know who I am, when, in fact, it does not know. The ego gives me the stuff that I studied in Western psychology, the stuff of adolescents, and that, for a while, made me feel like I have understood human nature. When I attained age thirty-something, I realized that Western Psychology is for adolescents, not for adults. Western psychology did not help me to understand myself.

Buddha advises me to not pretend to know what I do not know. He asks me to simply acknowledge the truth of not knowing many things. Buddhism teaches the individual to accept that he does not know who he is, who other people are, what the world is all about and what anything means.

Buddhism teaches the individual to empty his mind of all the gibberish that he normally takes as truth and simply remain open to truth. Tell yourself that you do not know who you are, who other people are and what any thing is or means. Deny your egos spurious information on what is true and what is not true. You do not know what the truth is. If you studied the physical science, deny that it is the truth; science merely studies material phenomena and that is not the truth we are talking about.

Meditation is the active denial of the truth that our egos provide us. In meditation, one tells ones self that one does not know any thing for certain. One decides not to listen to the half-truth and lies that ones ego tells one are the truth. One negates the chattering of ones ego. In effect, one struggles to stop thinking altogether. Just stop thinking and remain quiet.

It is very difficult to stop thinking. As noted, something in us thinks at all times. Therefore, the effort to stop thinking is a Herculean task. Actually, no human being can ever stop thinking; all that he can do is go from one mode of thinking to another.

There is ego separated thinking, the mode we currently engage in; there is unified thinking, the mode that exists in eternity. One must stop the one to be able to engage in the other; one cannot engage in both modes of thinking at the same time. You are either in our world of separation or you are in the unified world of heaven, but not both. Actually, you are always in heaven, unified state, but think that you are on earth, in separated state.

Most of us find it near impossible to stop our egos from thinking. In fact, when you attempt stopping thinking, the ego redoubles its efforts and presents silly ideas to your mind to think about. It is as if your ego is afraid to stop thinking. It is as if it believes that if you stopped thinking that you would die.

The ego thinks that were you to stop thinking that you would no longer exist. As Rene Descartes told us: cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. To be a human being is to think. To stop thinking is to cease being a human being.

I have tried meditation for years and find it almost impossible to attain inner silence. I have attained stillness only momentarily before my obsessive-compulsive thinking swings into motion thinking about everything on earth.

In fact, if one comes to meditation unguided by an experienced teacher, one is most likely to panic when one succeeds in stopping thinking and ones ego seems to die and only void exists where one had thought that one had a self. I recommend that if you want to take meditation seriously, that you find a teacher who knows what he is talking about. I recommend a Hindu swami or a Zen Roshi as possible teachers. I had a Hindu swami (equivalent to Christian pastor, minister) for my guide.

The human self is a concept. My idea of whom I think I am, that you are and what the world is are exactly those, ideas. Concepts are not facts. Concepts are ego-based ideas and do not have tangible reality. Therefore, my self-concept, my ego, is, as Buddha correctly stated: smokes and does not exist.

Let me repeat: the human personality, the ego, the self-concept is non-existent. It merely seems to exist. When it is believed in, it seems to exist. When the ego is believed and defended it seems real to one, but when it is denied it, in fact, does not exist.

If one is suddenly confronted with the fact that ones valued self concept and self image is a smoke and does not exist, in fact, one struggles to make it seem to exist. Psychosis is nothing but a futile attempt to make the non-existent self seem to exist.

The psychotic person, as R. D. Laing (see his Politics of Experience) correctly observed, is more advanced than the so-called normal human being. The psychotic has reached a state where he recognizes that his so-called self concept does not exist. But instead of accepting that fact, he struggles, rather mightily, to convince himself that he exists. He invents a more outrageous ego self-concept and defends it. Now he believes that he is a very important man or woman, that he is the king or queen of the world. He or she clings to a grandiose self-concept that even normal persons can see that it is not real but is a delusion. The psychotic’s self concept is deluded and that deluded, false self, tries talking and seeing hence his experience of hallucinations.

(R.D. Laing made the mistake of thinking that the psychotic is a mystic. No, the psychotic has come near enough to understanding the truth of our selflessness but is unwilling to give up his false, separated self, the ego, and accept his selfless self, the unified self. The mystic, on the other hand, is a person who has reached where the psychotic and neurotic are, and voluntarily gives up his ego self and accepted his selfless self, which is unified self. The mystic died to the separated self to be reborn in unified self. He has relinquished his separated false self and accepted his real self, unified self. R.D. Laing, unlike the run of the mill Western psychiatrist, came very close to understanding human nature but failed. Western psychology is adolescent stuff but occasionally a Western psychologist comes close to real knowledge. Laing was one such psychologist. But he did not quite succeed and does not teach real psychology, as we are teaching here.)

The psychotic and the neurotic are at the gates of knowledge of their true self but stopped. The normal person has not even begun making efforts to know his real self. As it were, the normal person is like cattle, grazing grass, oblivious of his true self. Evolutionally, the normal person is less developed; he is behind the neurotic and psychotic. The effort to become enlightened is for neurotics, not for normal persons. Normal persons need normal religions, the stuff of Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, and Bhakti etc. Those who are at the verge of self realization will not be satisfied with normal religions and will seek real religion, connection to their source.

Whereas we all can appreciate that the neurotic and psychotic self is false, what is not always apparent is that the normal self is also false. The normal self is as much a delusion as psychotic self. In fact, the seeing and talking engaged in by normal selves is as hallucinatory as those engaged in by psychotics. This world is our mutual hallucination and delusion. The world is a shared delusion and shared hallucination. The world does not, in fact, exist. It exists only as in a dream. It seems to exist because all of us think that it exists. It is a shared dream.

The psychotic engages in unshared delusion and hallucination, as all persons do when they sleep and dream. The psychotic invented a private fantasy world and lives in it, not sharing it with other persons. On the other hand, our day world is a shared dream, a hallucination and delusion that we all buy into and share. Our sharing it makes it seem real to us. But it is not real; it is as unreal as the psychotic’s fantasies.

Buddha discovered the unreality of our so-called normal world. In meditation, Buddha denied his ego and it’s chattering and tried to keep quiet. At some point, he succeeded and attained inner silence. Momentarily, he escaped from this world and entered a realm of no space, time and matter. He entered the world of union; a world where there is no you and I, no subject and object, no seer and seen. In that world, there is only one self; one self with infinite parts.

Christians call that self-God. But that self has no name. It is nameless. To name something means that one has understood it. No one on earth can understand the real self. It is beyond concepts. Moreover, to name something is to define it; what is defined is limited. The real self is limitless and, therefore, cannot be defined.

The real self is one self and at the same time infinite selves. One self extends itself into infinite selves. The real self is its self and at the same times all its infinite selves.

If you like, one God extends himself into infinite children. God is himself and also his infinite children. There is no space and gap between God and his children or between one child of God and another. Where God ends and his Son begin is nowhere and where one son of God ends and another begins is nowhere. There is one self that is simultaneously infinite selves.

Buddha called this experience of union Nirvana. Hinduism calls it Samadhi. Zen Buddhism calls it Satori. Christian mysticism calls it mystical union. Helen Schucman calls it Holy Instant. Call it what you like, it has no name. It is ineffable. No human being can describe it in words. Words do not apply to it. Words, speech and language are meant to adapt to the world of separation, the world of you and I. The world of union transcends words. There is literally only one self in that world, so there is no other person to talk to. Yet, there are infinite selves in that world, but all of them know themselves as the same self. They are joined. They know what each other are thinking. They know everything about each other for they are each other. They are immortal and eternal. They have no beginning and no end. They have always existed as one self that is simultaneously infinite selves.

Buddha, in effect, became illuminated to his real self, enlightened to the truth of our unified self and awakened from the dream that he is separated from his real self; he overcame Maya, self forgetfulness, and now knows who he is, unified self. Put differently, Buddha stopped his identification with the separated self, the ego-self, and momentarily returned to our real self, the shared one self and its one mind. In that brief moment, he knew his true self.

While in the state of union, Buddha made a decision to return to the world of separation, so as to come teach those who think that they are separated from other persons that they are, in fact, unified. (The decision to return to earth to become a teacher of God, teacher of union and teacher of love is called Buddha vista in Mahayana Buddhism. Buddhism has two main threads, Theravada and Mahayana.)

Our empirical experience on earth teaches us that we live in body. Body, matter, cannot unify. The world of union, therefore, must not be in body. Although the world of union cannot be described in earthly categories, but for the sake of analogy, we can say that it is a world of spirit, if, by spirit, we mean the opposite of matter. One must worn you not to allow your ego to tell you what spirit is, or is not. Let us just say that the world that Buddha experienced is not a world of space, time and matter; that it is the opposite of our world. Our world is the world of separation; our world’s opposite is the world of union. Buddha experienced union.

Nothing in our world applies to the world of union. Our world is a world of form, that world is a world of formlessness. Heaven, if you insist on calling it that, is the opposite of our world, just as our world is the opposite of heaven. Heaven is unified and our world is separated.

Buddha, in fact, did experience union. How do I know that he did? I practiced meditation and found it impossible to stop thinking. Then I succeeded and stopped thinking. I cannot tell you what happened for I cannot describe it. Even if I could describe it, you would not be able to understand it. There is nothing in our world that would prepare you to understand our real self and our real home, unified state.

Let us proceed with the fact that Buddha taught meditation. His goal was to enable people to transcend their separated ego selves and, hopefully, attain the awareness of their real self: a unified spirit self. Very few of those who meditate, in fact, attain the awareness of real self. This is so because to attain it requires giving up our present ego identification. As already observed, to give up the ego tends to make us feel that we are dead. We tend to think that if we give up our self-concepts, our personalities that we die and stop existing. We do not want to die, so we cling to our separated self-concepts.

Please notice that nothing said so far about Buddhism has any thing to with moralism. One does not have to be religious or moral to relate to what Buddha taught. One merely has to study it, think about it and then try to meditate. It does not matter whether one is a murderer or a saint, if one denies ones ego self one attains awareness of ones unified self. This is a fact, not a conjecture. Buddhism is not a religion. It is a science. It can be studied in a dispassionate and objective manner and verified. Any one can understand Buddhism, practice it and experience his real self.

Because Buddhism is amenable to rational approach and scientific verification, it qualifies as a science. That is why I am beginning this discourse on thinking with a summary of what Buddhism is.

However, I am not a Buddhist. As already observed, I do not accept the East or West; I am only interested in self-evident truth. I am a scientist. I want to understand things as they are, not as people tell me that they are, or how I want them to be. Having understood things as they are, I design a technology to adapt to them.

I want to understand how human beings think and having done so, design a technology, a psychotherapy, to help them think more rationally and scientifically so as to optimize healthy thinking. Healthy thinking, appropriate thinking and corrected thinking patterns lead to peace and happiness.

Science of thinking is aimed at enabling people to experience peace and happiness while in this world. If your thinking makes you feel at peace with yourself, with other people and with the world, it is healthy thinking. If not, please consider alternative thinking patterns, ones that give you peace and joy.

To feel peaceful and happy, you must live in harmony with all human beings. To live in harmony with all people you must love and forgive all people.

Each of us wants to be loved by other people…to be joined by other people…therefore, do unto others as you want them to do to you, love them, that is, join them.

Love is the most important variable in the world. Love your real self, love other people’s real selves and love God. But make sure that you know what the real self that you are loving is. Loving the separated ego self housed in body is not love of the real self. To love the ego is, in fact, to attack and hate the real self. The real self is spirit and those who love it love spirit, not body.

(This does not mean that you should hate your body. You must accept your body and uses it to love other people, to love those spirits who, like you, have the delusion that they are in bodies. Body is a means of loving the children of God experiencing themselves in matter. Body itself is nothing; it does not, in fact, exist. At best, body is neutral and can be used to love or hate. Body was made to hate with, to deny unified spirit and affirm separated self. Now use what was made for hate to love, what was meant to separate with to unify with. When body is used to love your real self and other people’s real selves, it becomes holy. Love (joining) makes our bodies a temple for the dwelling of the children of God and their God.)

SOME BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

The ego likes to talk about itself. Talking about itself makes it seem to exist. The ego wants other people to pay attention to it. It thrives on getting attention from other egos. If the ego did not obtain other people’s attention it would seem non-existent. It would panic and seek neurotic attention. The ego does everything to get other people to pay attention to it.

In certain instances, paranoid ego, the ego might attack other people, or in mild forms of attack, criticize them, so that they would attack and or criticize it and, in so doing, it obtains negative attention. Negative attention, apparently, is better than no attention at all. Human beings fear being ignored by other human beings, for to be ignored, not paid attention to, makes them feel non-existent.

In other instances, borderline ego, the ego might hurt itself and in so doing get other people to pity it and pay attention to it. The borderline personality, a type of ego self-concept, hurts its owner’s body, so as to convince itself that it is alive and to get other people to acknowledge its aliveness.

The normal person competes and obtains what his society laid down as condition for obtaining social attention. He does compete at school, spots, work etc and gets attention from those activities. He, therefore, feels like he exists, for other people are validating his existence. The normal person is an ego that successfully adapts to the exigencies of this world; he is at home in this world. This world is the home of the normal ego; he does not feel like an alien here.

(If you feel like an alien in this world, like you are an orphan despite love from other people, from your parents and spouse, you are a neurotic and are beginning the awakening process. Science of thinking is meant for you, not for normal egos. Normal egos are fast sleep and cannot be disturbed yet. When they are ready to wake up, they would project tigers into their dreams and those tigers would chase them and they run and in running awaken from the slumber that is called this world. We set events up, events that in grappling with them we awaken from this world. If you like this world, brother, sleep tight. It is not yet your time to awaken. But if you find this world nauseating, as I did from the get go of my sojourn on earth, you are a candidate for science of thinking.)

My ego would like to talk about itself and in so doing obtain other people’s affirmation of its existence.

Like all human beings, I have an ego and my ego craves attention. (If you do not have an ego you cannot be on earth; if you are reading this material, are on planet earth, you have an ego, a separated self.) Writing biographical notes, therefore, is enjoyed by my ego for it gives it attention. Be that as it may, let me proceed and make some observations about me, for without that information about me, you would not understand why I am where I am.

I was born with some biological disorders: spondylolysis, Mitral Valve Prolapse and an over sensitive body. I totally feel weak. I am almost always in pain. The cumulative effect of these is that I developed a self-concept that says that I am an inferior person. I feel inferior.

As Alfred Adler pointed out, no human being likes to feel inferior. Why? It is because it takes power to survive in our world. All inferior feeling persons must reject that feeling and compensate with superiority feeling. Thus, I restituted with superiority feeling. Of course, I know that I am not superior to any body. I am not even superior to my dog (I love dogs). I am not superior to trees, animals and anything in existence. The rational part of me knows that my body is just a variety of trees, animals and other biological objects. (The same atoms in me are in animals, trees, and mountains.) Nevertheless, I tended to seek superiority. That desire for superiority motivated me and was responsible for my neurotic behaviors.

There are biological and social reasons for my inferiority feeling. I have already alluded to my biological deficits. My social deficits are also real. I am black. In our contemporary world, to be black is to be construed as nothing. Racism and discrimination are alive. All black children grow up feeling that they are second-class persons. I am not different from other black children and felt socially marginalized. This contributed to my sense of inferiority.

All said, I feel inferior and compensate with desire for superiority. Alfred Adler explained this phenomenon very well. Karen Horney also helps explain it. I pursue ideal self and ideal every thing. As Horney observed, to pursue ideal self entails rejecting ones real self. Horney calls such a person a neurotic person. That is the case with me.

The neurotic hates his real self, and, in fact, rejects it and wants to become an ideal alternative to it. If he is black, he may fancy that to be white is to be ideal and seek to be white like. Later on, he discovers that whites are not that different from blacks and despairs.

For our present purposes, neurotics are persons who deny their real selves and seek to become ideal selves. They know that they are not their ideal selves. But they keep trying to become their ideal selves.

Neurotics are different from psychotics in that psychotics, in fact, believe that they are their ideal selves. In believing that they are already their ideal selves, psychotics reduce their anxiety (but feel anxious when their ideal selves are threatened and their hated real selves are about to be exposed).

The neurotic feels anxious most of the time. This is because he wants to become an ideal self and knows that he is not that ideal self. Anxiety inheres in the effort to become an ideal self and fear of not becoming it.

The neurotic defends an ideal self and is afraid of not becoming it hence always has what Horney calls free-floating anxiety. He lives in perpetual fear. As long as the individual desires to be an ideal ego, self-concept, he must fear not becoming it hence must live in fear.

The normal person is a bit like the neurotic hence has a bit of fear and anxiety. Normalcy is a concept, a model of the adjusted human being. No human being is totally adapted to the exigencies of this world. What we are talking about is relative normalcy, neurosis and psychosis. Every person is a bit of all three; it is all a question of degrees, with some being more normal than neurotic and some being more neurotic than normal. Only about two percent of the population is psychotic (schizophrenic, manic-depressive, deluded). The average human being is mostly normal and sometimes neurotic (self hating and desiring to be ideal).

I hated my body and wanted to become a different body. I rejected my physical self and wanted to become an ideal, mentally constructed physical self. I lived in anxiety state most of the time.

As I am is the way my father, grandfather and some other relatives are. As long as we inherited problematic bodies and live in a racist world, we have to feel inferior and restitute with pursuit of ideal selves. Neurosis runs in my family. On the other hand, no one in my family is psychotic. I have done a retrospective analysis of members of my family going back to hundreds of years and none was psychotic.

Biology is personality. The individual’s personality reflects his inherited body. My family members inherit problematic bodies and develop the neurotic personalities they have. As long as they have their bodies they must have the personalities they have. I expect my children, those who inherited my genes, body, to develop my type of personality or variations of it.

The function of science is to study phenomenon as it is, not as one wants it to become. In this light, as long as my family members inherited the bodies that they have, they must have the problematic personalities they have. Biology is fate. It behooves me to study my family members’ bodies and see how it correlates with certain personality types.

You must study your inherited body to understand your personality. Do not kid yourself with the nonsense that only sociological factors shaped you. Your body shaped you more than your social experience did. I estimate that the individual’s inherited genes, bodies, are responsible for at least 75% of his personality and intelligence, with social experience accounting for no more than 25%.

Normal persons tend to have inherited healthy bodies. This seems good except that they seem closer to animals. We do not need to be emotional and sentimental over this matter. Average persons tend to have gross bodies that make it very difficult for them to do high-level thinking.

(Actually there is no such thing as body; body is a picture in a dream; the thinker projects his ego self into a body and identifies with it. The body reflects the thinker. Body and thinker are one and the same self. If the thinker is bright his body will reflect it, if he is dull his body will reflect it. Simply stated, ego thinking is body and body is ego thinking; ego is body and body is ego. The thinker that is synonymous with body is the ego thinker. There is another thinking self, one that is not ego or body. The real self is unified spirit; it denies itself and identifies with ego and body. The real self is spirit; the ego self is symbolized in body. The real self exists forever and ever; the ego self is a dream self and does not survive physical death.)

As a teenager, I found myself in a war situation. I was exposed to killing and dying. I saw dead and rotting human beings lying all over the place. The cumulative effect of seeing dead and smelling bodies is that it solidified my earlier belief that the human body is nothing. Thus, when I see a person, I am not enchanted by his or her body. If I see a person I easily visualize his body rotting. If I see a beautiful woman I imagine her gorgeous body in various states of decomposition. This makes her body repulsive to me. You get the point.

I am very idealistic. My idealism is rooted in my wish for a different body. My idealism is, of course, fantasy, a futile wishing that human beings be what they are, in fact, not, ideal.

I wanted the people I see around me to be more than their future rotting bodies. I was looking for something beautiful, for, to me, the human body seemed ugly.

My neurotic idealism is a product of my awareness of the nothingness of the human body and my desires to replace it with a fantasy ideal body/self.

The neurotic is keenly aware of the valueless ness of the human body. He wants to replace it with an imaginary valuable body. The neurotic is keenly aware that the human body is worthless and wants to replace it with what seems to him a worthwhile body.

Alas, the worthwhile body he imagines is nonexistent. (The Igbos say: no matter how much you wash the anus with soup that it would still smell of feces. Interpretation: no matter how much value you give to the human body, it is still going to rut and smell to high heaven. In other words, the human body is nothing; it will ultimately die and decay, no matter how much you try to make it last long. Our ego existence is an exercise in nothingness.)

Please pay attention to my interpretation of neurosis for it is not the way Western psychology does. As noted, Western psychology is adolescent. Africans are an ancient people and have a more mature view of phenomena than our brothers from Europe. To the Igbos, for example, the world is nothing and only spirit matters. Therefore you must quest after spiritual things and not delude yourself with the belief that you would find meaning in the things of flesh. Flesh is going to rut; it is ephemeral and transitory; so seek what is permanent and that is spirit. (In Igbo: umunam ihen ke Chukwu ru anyi aka)

Western psychology is adolescent. But man is not always an adolescent. As St. Paul said: when we grow up, we give up the things that we had found interesting during our childhood. As adults, we must seek to understand our world in an adult manner. In my own search, I saw Oriental philosophies more adult than occidental ones. But alas, Oriental explanations are steeped in religion and mysticism. I am interested in science, not religion.

DESIRE, FEAR AND FREEDOM FROM FEAR

Buddha talked about desire/wishing as the cause of suffering. He was obviously correct. But let me look at desire in a different light. Let me show the correlation of desire and fear. If you desire something you must have fear. You fear not getting what you desire; you fear not obtaining what you wish for.

If you have no desires, no wishes then you would not have fear. Freedom from fear lies in having no desires and no wishes.

In her book, A Course in Miracles, Helen Schucman pointed out that human beings have two main emotions (Energy in motion): love and fear. As she sees it, God created love and we invented fear. We cannot change what God created, for whatever God created is permanent, but we can change what we made. We made fear and can unmake it (in her words, “undo” it). Schucman’s book is perhaps the best western rendition of Buddhism and Hinduism in Christological terms. Arthur Schopenhauer tried accomplishing the same end in philosophical language. (See Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea.)

Schucman is correct in stating that we invented fear and that God created love. Fear is an instrument of separation; whereas love is an instrument of union. Love unifies, fear separates. The moment you want to separate from someone you begin to fear him or her. If you are married and want to separate from your spouse you immediately think that he could harm you. The thought of separation from him seems wicked, evil and sinful, and that makes you fearful. It is the thought of separation that produced fear.

Fear is used to maintain the proposed separation. Now afraid that he would harm you, you run and hide from him. In doing so, fear enables you to separate and stay away from him. Fear cannot exist where there is no desire for separation, no thought of separation.

Are you a very fearful person? If the answer is yes, you desire this and that. This may not be how you have looked at fear. Indeed, it was not how I looked at it before. I looked at it from a biological perspective and concentrated on understanding the biochemistry of fear: how the body reacts when under fear and the neuro-chemicals involved in that reaction, such as adrenalin, which stimulated the workings of the body, made the heart pound, lungs work rapidly, bringing in more oxygen into the body, the heart pump faster and blood carries oxygen to all parts of the body, the body releasing sugar which is also carried by the blood to the muscles, preparing them for increased activity in fear’s fight-flight response. In fear there is rapid activity of the nervous system as messages are sent to, processed in the brain and feedback sent back to the muscles, telling them how to respond to perceived threat that elicited the fear response. Complex chemical and electrical reactions take place inside and between nerves to facilitate the movement of information from one nerve to another at the synapse. Several neurotransmitters are involved, such as serotonin, neuropiniphrine, dopamine etc; electrical ions interact with each other, such as magnesium, calcium, sulfur, Phosphor, sodium etc. The biophysics and biochemistry of fear obviously are useful understanding but do not lead to cessation of fear. Moreover, such understanding has led neuroscience and psychiatry to take recourse to treating fear and anxiety with anxiolytic medications such as Valium, Librium, Xanax etc and these have adverse side effects, symptoms of which are similar to the effects of alcohol addiction.

It was only recently that I recognized that to experience fear that one must have desires and wishes and that if one did not have desires and wishes that one would not experience fear.

One always have desires hence must have some fear. To be alive in body, on earth, one must have a desire to be so. As Buddha observed, twenty-five hundred years ago, there is always desire in people’s lives. In as much as people must have desires to be human beings, they must fear not getting what they desired for, thus, there will always be fear in their lives.

What we can do is to understand the correlation between desire and fear and resolve to eliminate unnecessary desires, reduce desires to the very minimum, so as to reduce ones level of fear. As Buddha recommended, one then develops detachment to the remaining desire, so as to not allow ones self to experience unnecessary fear and anxiety.

I saw myself, other people, social institutions and the world as imperfect and desired to change them. This makes me an idealist.

Let me explain how this phenomenon worked. I am walking down the road and I see a tree, an animal, a person, a house, a car, social institutions, anything and everything. I immediately grasped these things imperfections. I then thought about their possible more perfect forms. I have always done this. In so far as memory goes, I remember engaged in this idealistic thinking at age six, when I began formal schooling; I used to imagine how I, the other pupils, teachers, school building etc could be made perfect.

I engage in this sort of idealistic thinking from the moment I wake up in the morning to the moment I go to sleep at night. In my sleep, I continue with idealistic thinking. My dreams continue the process of wishing for an ideal self and ideal world.

This pattern of thinking is called neurotic by Karen Horney. (See her Neurosis and Human Growth.) The neurotic is a person who hates and rejects his body, his real self, other people’s real bodies and selves and wishes for their ideal forms. He does so obsessively and compulsively. (In terms of diagnosis, I do not have any Psychiatric disorders. However, on Axis 1, I would rule out Generalized Anxiety disorder and Dysthymia; on Axis 11, Avoidant and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorders; on Axis 111, Spondylolysis, Mitral Valve Prolapse and hypersensitive body; on Axis 1V, Normal psychosocial stressors; on Axis V, good social skills.)

Desiring for ideal states, wishing that I be different from what I am and that people be different from what they are, and that the world be different from it is; positing forever changing perfect images of how the self and things ought to become meant that I was invested in the outcome I desired. I lived in fear of not attaining what I desired, the ideal self concept, ideal self image, ideal other people, ideal social institutions, ideal world, ideal this or that. I, in effect, lived in perpetual anxiety.

Now, suppose that I did not desire ideals, did not desire for things to become perfect then what would happen? I would no longer experience excessive fear.

If you do not have idealistic goals you would reduce your fears by a large measure. You would still have some fears for, as noted, you must have the desire to live in body to be on earth, and, in as much as, you wish to be on earth, which means to be separated from unified state, aka heaven, you must experience existential fear, what we might call normal fear.

Helen Schucman provided the best method for eliminating fears that I know of. Although her book is written in religious mumbo jumbo, it actually contains profound insight into human psychology. I would rate her as a science of thinking expert. She recognized that everything in this world is produced by thinking and that we can change our thinking to obtain different results. In fact, the objective of her book is to correct our disordered thinking, to help us go from separation based thinking to unified thinking. In her view, such corrected thinking, undertaken with the aid of the Holy Spirit, is what miracle is all about. Such corrected thinking, from hate to love and forgiveness, would transform our world into a happy dream, real world, and bring it to the gate of heaven; and finally, make the will of God, love, replace the wishes of God’s Son and bring about the much hoped for Kingdom of God into our world. Our world would be transformed into what Christian eschatologists call New Jerusalem, New Israel, and what I call a New World, the world at its best. Love would at last prevail on earth, as warriors beat their swords into plowshares and lions lie side by side with sheep, not devouring them. This is a world that must come into being before we leave the world of separation and return to the awareness of living in the unified spirit world.

SCHUCMAN’S MYTHOLOGY

Let us, in a nutshell, review Schuman’s story of creation. I say story of creation because it is not factual but metaphorical. In actual fact, physics tells us that the universe began fifteen billion years ago, in a Big Bang. It is hypothesized that all matter and energy was originally in a ball the size of an atom. Somehow, that hot ball exploded and spilled out its guts. The Big Bang invented space, time and matter. Subsequently, particles were invented and those united to form atoms. Atoms, in time, changed forms to become the various elements on the Chemical table. The elements combined to form biological life forms. Simply stated, people evolved to where they are today through a long chain of events. Stories of creation by religionists are, therefore, an attempt to explicate the unknown in human terms.

Briefly, Schuman pointed out that the temporal world came into being as a result of our desire and wishes to be separated from God. In her view, in eternity, heaven, everything is one. There is God and his extensions, his creations, his children. God and his extensions are one. Brahman and his extensions, Atman, are the same.

God and his joined children are spirit, unified spirit. They are the same and are equal. However, God created his children, God’s children did not create God, though they are imbued with the creative spirit of God and do create their own children. We create with the creative power of God in us, but not with our own powers. In effect, we are co-creators with God and not solo creators.

God is more powerful than his children since the children can do nothing without the power of God, their father.

As Schucman sees it, the children of God resented the fact that their father, although of the same essence as them, is greater than them; they resented that he created them and they did not create him. They desired to create their father and create themselves. This desire is impossible of gratification in reality, since the whole will always produce the parts and the parts do not produce the whole.

Unable to gratify their impossible wishes, the children of God decided to separate from him, to go invent a world where they seem to have invented reality, that is, invented God, themselves and each other. As it were, they cast Maya on themselves and went to sleep and in their sleep, dream this world. In that dream, this world, the children of God use their creative thinking to invent self concepts for themselves.

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October 04, 2005

The Ozodi Thomas Osuji Lectures on Nigeria's Politics #1: Introduction, Why Study Politics?

by Ozodi Osuji, Ph.D. --- (1) INTRODUCTION: WHY STUDY POLITICS? I will begin this first of twenty lectures on Nigeria’s politics by focusing on politics in general and not specifically on Nigeria’s politics. I will respond to these questions: what is politics and why do we need to study it?

It is very difficult to define what politics is or is not. Perhaps, the best way to approach the subject is to examine human beings. What is human nature? Perhaps, human beings cannot be defined? To define something is to limit it; human beings seem limitless hence cannot be defined?

Be that as it may, we can describe human behavior. Empirical evidence shows that wherever human beings live that they live in social groups. The human society could be as small as the family unit, the kindred unit, the village, the town, a tribe, a nation, a continent and, indeed, the entire world.

Aristotle (The Politics of Aristotle) called Human beings social animals because wherever they are found they live in social settings. It is doubtful that a person who does not live in society and interact with other human beings can be considered a human being. A person who does not interact with other human beings probably would not speak since speech is a social phenomenon; without other people to talk to, one cannot speak. It seems correct to assert that to be a human being is to live in society and participate in social activities.

Observations show that wherever there are two or more persons living together, sharing the same space that they tend to have conflicts. They have conflicts because each person is an individual and tends to be different from other persons. Whereas all human beings have certain characteristics in common, nevertheless, each of them is unique. Each human being has different conceptions of what phenomena is or is not. His beliefs, values and political ideology tend to be different from other persons. What one human being may see as important may not be seen as such by other persons.

The English logical positivist school (examples: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, George Berkeley, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham) asserts that each human being tends to be primarily interested in his personal survival. Whereas a well socialized person internalizes the value of working for social interests, it seems that when push comes to shove that every human being will place his self interests ahead of other persons’ interests.

Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan), in fact, argued that each human being is inherently selfish. Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) agrees with Hobbes negative view of human nature. As Hobbes sees it, in the state of nature, that is, in pre-civil society, human beings only looked after their personal interests. Each person did whatever he could do to survive. Where necessary, the individual tried to use other people to enable him to procure the means for his personal survival hence slavery and feudalism existed in most primitive human societies. The physical environment is impersonal and seems not to care whether human beings survived or not. An earthquake, volcano, flood, tsunami, hurricane, tornado, plague, bacteria, virus and other natural forces destroy human beings as if they do not matter.

It is difficult to extract a good living from our impersonal environment, therefore, those human beings who could exploit other people and use their labor to procure pleasurable living for themselves do so.

In the state of nature, each person was primarily interested in his personal survival. As a result, people were constantly engaged in war and conflict was the order of living. As Hobbes sees it, the powerful tried to use the weak to earn a living.

Much of what is called arts is produced by those classes that did not directly work for their daily bread, hence had the luxury to contemplate beauty. To have the freedom and time to concentrate on the finer things of life, someone else had to work to support artists and intellectuals. Those working to make sure that idle artists and intellectuals produce their beauty are slaves, in today’s categories, proletariats.

Indeed, the powerful often killed the weak and took their property. Powerful Europeans came to the Americas beginning in 1492 and subsequently killed weak Indians or relegated them to reservations and took over their lands. Naturally, the weak does not like been killed or having their property taken over by the powerful. Thus, the weak often banded together and fought with the powerful. The cumulative effect is that human existence was characterized by war and conflict; life was nasty, brutish and short. Insecurity reigned in the state of nature. Each person could be killed and or enslaved at any time by his neighbor.

Hobbes believes that this perpetual insecurity apparently tasked the emotional well being of human beings. They simply could no longer take it and did not want to live that way any, longer. They, therefore, decided to give up aspects of their natural freedom to do as they liked and form civil society.

Civil society, ip so facto means delegating power and authority to a few persons to rule the many. It means having a few make the laws that govern the many. Simply stated, to live in organized society is to agree to reduce ones freedom to do as one likes. It is only in the wild, in the state of nature that human beings have license to do as they please. In organized society they, by definition, live under laws and that means that their freedom is abridged. The law and its enforcement agents could arrest and punish law breakers. This is the price people have to pay to obtain some measure of security, for the alternative, anarchy and chaos, life in the state of nature is perpetual insecurity.

As Hobbes sees it, human beings every where formed governments to rule them because they want to obtain social security? They selected some from among them and gave them the power and authority to make laws and enforce those laws. This may entail selecting a chief (king) and authorizing him and his agents to make laws, hire law enforcement agents (police, judges, prison wardens) and make sure that all persons obey the laws of the land or else be arrested, tried in a court of law, and if found guilty, punished (sent to jail or killed, as in capital punishment).

Why do we have governments and laws? Thomas Hobbes says that it is because we have conflicts, that if left alone that in pursuit of personal interests, we do harm each other and that we need governments to reduce our conflicts and make sure that we do not harm and or kill one another.

Hobbes made certain assumptions. He assumed that human beings lived in a state of nature before civil society. He further assumed that human beings are self interest oriented and harm each other in pursuit of their self interest. Finally, he assumed that we need government to restrain us from harming each other. These assumptions have not necessarily been verified as true; nor are there ways to verify them since human beings always live in society. We have no way of ascertaining that human beings ever lived alone in the jungle and then later came together to form civil societies. As Aristotle told us, man is always a social animal. We cannot prove or disprove Hobbes assumptions and shall accept them as working hypotheses on the origin of society.

Hobbes assumed that man is self interested and that if unchecked would kill or enslave other people. To prevent this from happening, Hobbes recommended a strong government. In fact, he wanted society to be ruled by an absolute monarch who is given the power to arrest, jail and or kill law breakers. Hobbes believed that man is so self centered by nature that he needed an absolute ruler to make him obey the laws that serve common interests. If government is not draconian, Hobbes believed that given the evil nature of human beings, that they would not obey the laws.

As Hobbes sees it, human beings are driven to live at all costs and fear death and can only be made to obey laws if laws threaten to kill him. Charles Darwin (Origin of Species) and Herbert Spencer (Ethics) seem to validate Hobbes dim view that man is motivated by desire for survival and fear death.

Because human beings are driven by desire to live and fear death, government is made possible. If people did not desire to live and feared death, government would not be possible. How? Government is that social force that is given the power of coercion, the right to arrest, jail and kill people. People want to live and necessarily fear that agent that could take away their freedom by placing them in jail, and worse, kill them, hence they obey government. People, Hobbes believes, obey the laws of the land, not because they are good but because of their invested self interest in not being jailed or killed by society. That is to say that law is obeyed for pragmatic reasons, not out of the goodness of the human heart, as idealistic religionists would tell us. To Hobbes and conservative thinkers, if any society takes away the forces of law and order anarchy would reign in society; supposedly church going persons would pillage their neighbors’ properties. (The recent hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, USA, has shown us how hitherto law abiding persons, in the absence of the police, loot their neighbors’ properties. Hobbes advices having the hangman around if we plan to obtain law and order in society.)

Hobbes wanted government to optimize power by treating the people draconically. Consider Nigeria. Crime is rampant. Hobbes would say that this situation is because the government in Nigeria is sentimental about human nature. If the government is realistic about human nature, recognizes that people are by nature self interest oriented and would steal if not punished, that the government would vigorously go after criminals. As Hobbes sees it, the Nigerian government should arrest, incarcerate and or kill all corrupt officials and criminals.

The Monarchs of England built the London Tower and English criminals were arrested, tried and quartered, literally. In the London of Hobbes time, heads were chopped off daily at the Tower. You committed a crime and you were arrested and punished in the most severe manner. No sentimental approach to criminals, no sociological understanding of why some one took bribes, you simple cut off his head. (Later, English criminals were shipped off to America and much later, to Australia.)

Hobbes would say that if Nigerians vigorously went after criminals and made a sport of killing them in the public square, that given the cowardly nature of human beings, their fear of death, that within a few years Nigerians would be transformed into law abiding citizens. But as it is, the Obasanjo’s government talk empty talk of fighting corruption and not walk it. The joke of a government at Abuja talk about its anti corruption measures, yet few high profile Nigerians have gone to jail or had their heads chopped off. It takes British authorities to arrest a corrupt Nigerian governor and hold him in custody.

Hobbes wanted the monarch and government to be given absolute power and authority to corral people into obeying the laws of the land. Absolute power may seem advantageous in taming wild people but experience shows that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If you give the ruler unchecked power, given what we know about human beings, it tends to go to his head and he uses it to defend his vanity. Human beings are vain, proud and narcissistic. If they have absolute powers, they tend to use it to punish those who do not respect their imaginary dignity. Joseph Stalin, the little paranoid personality that ruled Russia, wanted all Russians to see him as god and any one who dared question his divinity was arrested and killed. The man terrorized the entire Russian population and killed more people than the other paranoid character, Adolf Hitler did.

Giving rulers absolute power is problematic. Therefore, John Locke (Second Essay on Government) reasoned that since it is the people that constituted government and gave it power to govern them, that they have a right to give it only certain powers and reserve others to themselves. He argued for limited government. In effect, the people should write a constitution and give certain powers to their rulers and reserve the rest to themselves. A limited government has the authority to do certain things but not every thing.

For example, the United States government is a limited government; it can do certain things but is prevented from doing others. The United States government is prevented from intervening in religion; it cannot tell people what religion to belong to, or prevent people from belonging to religions of their choice. By contrast, the communist government of Lenin and Stalin had absolute powers. Operating under the socialist delusion that it knows for certain that God does not exist, these misguided communists banned religion. Actually, they made their political ideology a new religion, with themselves as the saints of that pseudo religion. No human beings know whether God exists or not and therefore no government has a right to interfere in peoples religious activities.

Locke is a useful check on Hobbes’ dangerous absolutism. But Locke did not go far enough. The Frenchman, Charles Montesquieu recognized that human beings are inherently power drunk and if given the opportunity would be tyrannical. He recommendaed that we not place the power of governance in one hand but, instead, spread it into many hands. Government naturally performs three functions: legislative, executive and judiciary. Montesquieu argued that these three functions should be reposed in three branches of government.

Moreover, Montesquieu recommended that we encourage the three branches of government and their personnel to be in adversarial relationships. The persons in the three branches of government must jealously protect their tuffs and fight encroachment on them. Montesquieu believed that it is this competition for shared power that prevents tyranny in society. If the president is fought by the legislators and the judiciary zealously makes sure that all political actors play by the rules of the game, constitution, Montesquieu believes that we would be able to have democracy. If not, we would not have democracy.

When the founders of the American polity met at Philadelphia in 1787 to write their constitution (actually, they were not sent to write a new constitution, but to improve on their problematic Articles of Confederation) they took the writings of Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu to heart. They structured a government that is limited in its scope of powers and gave powers to different sets of actors; each encouraged to fight the others. The result is the relative democracy that exists in America.

The idea of democracy is today taken for granted. It was not always so. Europe used to be ruled by kings who believed that they derived their right to govern from God. As they saw it, God selected the Pope of the Catholic Church to be his vicar on earth. The Pope, in turn, chose the monarchs to be God’s Stewarts. The European kings ruled by what was called the Divine Right of Kings; they had self arrogated authority to rule and not account to the people why they did what they did. Thus king Louis the fourteen taxed Frenchmen into penury to build his Versailles Palace and other frivolous chateaus. Marie Antoinette ate cake for breakfast while Frenchmen starved. The French Monarchs believed that God put them on earth to rule and put the people on earth to serve them and to do so while starving.

It took the neurotic philosopher, Jean Jacque Rousseau to thunder against the idea of divine right of kings. In his seminal work, Social Contract (1760) Rousseau argued that not only is there no God, that no God gave kings the right to rule Frenchmen. Whereas the other French enlightenment thinker, Voltaire merely sparred with the king of France, Rousseau saw the king as illegitimate. As he saw it, only the people have the right to select their rulers. The people’s General Will is what gives rulers the authority to rule them, not some made up divine right of kings.

Rousseau launched a frontal attack on the kings of Europe and, as would be expected, they tried to protect their illegitimate right to rule by judging him a law breaker. They chased Rousseau from place to place. Those who insist on the truth never know peace in a world that seems to subsist on falsity.

(Cowardly Nigerians expect there to be good government in their country. When their criminal rulers’ fire shots into the air they, like terrified rats, scamper; they run to the safety of America, from whence they make idle noises about their corrupt leaders. If Nigerians were real men, they would stay at home and fight the criminal gang that seized Nigeria’s government and if necessary get arrested, jailed and or killed. Such is the price for freedom. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill observed that freedom requires willingness to die rather than see governments abridge it. Indeed, he had contempt for Africans for he saw them as not capable of democracy because they are too afraid of death hence tolerate bad governments rather than fight and die for freedom. Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, made similar points about how Liberty requires eternal vigilance.)

Rousseau stimulated the French revolution of 1789; a revolution that changed the face of Europe forever and ever. Indeed, he indirectly stimulated the American Revolution, although the American Revolution is really not a radical revolution; it was a conservative revolution; one class of ruling class white persons replaced another. The rulers of post independence America did not even extend the vote to all white Americans, not to talk about black persons. The 1787 American constitution did not consider black persons as human beings. Thomas Jefferson did not include blacks in his declaration (of Independence) that all men were created equal by their creator. To him, Africans were animals, no different from horses to be used to produce wealth for him to live in pleasure. The man owned over 600 slaves and did not give any of them freedom, even as he waxed eloquently about human freedom. (Madison, Hamilton and Jay, the writers of the Federalist Papers, America’s political philosophy that explained why they chose the type of government they did, were in support of slavery.)

I have, hopefully, established that human beings live in groups and that they are individuated and have different values and, as such, tend to have conflicts, and that conflicts demand resolution, and that government is a mechanism for resolving conflicts in the polity. It seems necessary to have government in society. That taken for granted, the next question is the nature of that government.

Essentially, there are two approaches to the discourse on the nature of government; one is idealistic and the other is realistic. Idealism tends not to take empiricism, that is, historical experience of human beings on planet earth, into consideration but, instead, use imagination to visualize how human beings ought to be ruled. Plato (Republic) was an idealistic political thinker. He used pure mentation (deductive reasoning) to come up with how governments ought to be. He wanted society ruled by philosopher Kings. He outlined how to train and select such wise rulers. In his view, not every person can rule, so we ought to select the best from among us and have them rule us. Pericles oration tells us who these philosopher kings ought to: victorious generals.

Aristotle, on the other hand, is, more or less, an empirical observer of human nature. He can be called the first political scientist if, by that, we mean a person who, in an unsentimental manner, observes politics, as it is practiced, not as it should be practiced. Instead of using ideational thinking to decide who should rule society, the social scientist observes real human beings at work in ruling themselves, and on that basis, decides who would rule.

As Aristotle sees it, people have different natures. Some are natural soldiers, others are artisans, and others are merchants. Each person is good at doing certain things, not other things. To Aristotle, each person ought to go do well what he has natural aptitude in doing. The soldier type ought to join the military and fight wars for his nation and be rewarded with glories (including the medals with which they decorate their chests). The merchant type ought to trade and generate wealth for his nation. The artists (which would include intellectuals) should contemplate their navels and provide society with beauty. Wole Soyinka, a gifted artist, should write lovely plays that amuse people but not wade into politics, an arena he probably knows very little about. Being a wordsmith is not the same thing as leading oppositional human beings. It takes guts and ability to spill blood to govern unruly human beings.

Politics, as Aristotle sees it, is not for sentimental intellectuals who talk idealistic rut, but for hard nosed, tough skinned persons, men capable of making decisions to send their young men to war, to go kill and get killed. The politician type is the type of person who is not squeamish from the sight of blood, death and dying. Ruling men is not a task for women, Aristotle says, but for hard boiled men who would look at fields of death and dying and drink their wine and not lose sleep. The ruler, as Aristotle sees it, ought to be retired military generals.

Aristotle has useful insights into politics, for clearly not every person is qualified to rule. One of the saddest aspects of African politics is the tendency for Africans to equate education with ability to govern. Thus, Nigerians are over impressed by the term doctor and place sentimental children with doctorate degrees in governance. Every fool who calls himself Doctor is deemed capable of ruling the human polity. No, most leaders, in fact, tend to be average students and seldom waste their time pursuing more than a modicum of education (say master degree).

Politics is not a house wife’s fairy tales. Politics is the jostling for power and control of a polity. Politics is war by peaceful means. Actually, politics is violence and, as in all wars, the strongest win and rule the weak.

Machiavelli (The Prince) recognized the nature of politics and in a clear headed manner delineated it. Politicians are soldiers fighting for victory. They are generals leading their men at battle and the stronger ones win over the weaker ones and rule them.

Politics, Harold Laswell tells us is the art of deciding who gets what in society. People pay taxes and politicians decide how to spend that money. Politicians decide who to give the people’s money and who not to give it to. Invariably, the more powerful, those willing to go to war and fight for their own share of public good, get more share of public wealth, whereas sentimental persons, cowards who are afraid of fighting and dying, get very little. The streets in rich neighborhoods are usually well maintained, whereas the streets in poor neighborhoods are not. If bureaucrats do not maintain the streets where the powerful live, they are sacked from public employment.

In America, white folks get the greatest share of public goods whereas Indians get the least. Blacks get something to the extent that they overcome the fear that made them tolerate slavery and go fight and die for a fair share of the wealth of the nation. In Nigeria, the more warrior like Hausa tribes naturally rule the country and get more public spending in their areas whereas those tribes, like the Ijaws, that merely talk and when guns are fired into their midst’s and a few persons killed, beg for their lives or like rats scamper into their burrows and hide, instead of stand up like men and fight and die for what they believe in, get the least. Simply stated, politics is war by every means and the strong win over the weak.

As far as I know, no human group exists without some politics. Even in the most primitive societies where there were no formal structures for political activities some form of political activity took place. Structural functionalist scholars have gone to primitive societies and studied how they governed themselves. In these societies, there does not exist formal structures for governance, structures as we know them in the West, such as legislatures, executives and judiciary. Nevertheless, those governmental functions were being performed in these preliterate societies.

Igbo society, for example, did not have formal structures for governing itself. Yet, cultural anthropologists tell us that within their villages and towns those governmental functions were performed. Whereas there was no Igbo king, legislature and court system, the Igbo Oha, Amala, (public) gathered and made laws (legislation), executed those laws and judged law breakers and punished the guilty ones. A society does not have to have formal institutions for governing to perform the usual roles of government.

DIRECT AND INDIRECT DEMOCRACY

Talking about the Igbos brings up the difference between participatory democracy and representative democracy. Igbo society was pretty much like Athens (Greece) of old. All Igbo males above age fifteen gathered in their village green (square). Women and slaves were excluded. This gathering made laws (legislative function), executed them, (executive function) sometimes by delegating that function to a few of them to accomplish for them and judged (judicial function) those who disobeyed the laws of the village and punished them. This is participatory or direct democracy. It is pretty much what obtained in Ancient Athens.

Male Athenians gathered at the Acropolis and made their laws, executed and adjudicated them. Like the Igbos, they excluded women and slaves from governance. Aristotle made an unfortunate argument that women and slaves were not qualified to participate in governance.

Slaves tend to live in fear. It takes fear to accept other men telling one what to do. Slaves so want to live that they permit other men to abuse them rather than fight back and insist on freedom, and if not, die, rather than live as slaves. Instead, slaves live as other men’s chattels, beasts of labor. On the whole, slaves tend not to be courageous and insist on the truth and fight for the truth. They are habituated to kowtowing to other people’s will.

In America, African slaves allowed sadistic white persons to tell them what to do, instead of fight and die rather than live as second class persons. Such persons do not tend to make good candidates for high political office.

Society ought to be ruled by courageous persons, not cowardly slaves. On this account, Aristotle ruled out timid slaves and women from participation in politics. Igbos did the same.

The Igbo admire bold persons and the moment you are seen as cowardly, you are discounted in Igbo society. The opinion of a coward is not even listened to in Igbo Oha gathering; only real men, courageous men, are listened to. Given their society’s insistence on courage, Igbo males try to seem bold, even if they are quaking with fear.

It is clear that direct democracy, as practiced in Athens and Alaigbo, is possible only in small populations living in a small geographic area. It is simply impossible to have millions of people scattered in a large geographic area, gather and discuss issues and make decisions. Therefore, as society became large other ways of governing were discovered.

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY

Representative democracy has replaced direct democracy. In my opinion, John Stuart Mill wrote the best books on the nature of representative democracy. The salient argument for this attenuated democracy is that it is impossible for all persons in a modern polity to gather as a legislature and make laws that govern them. They need to select their representatives and delegate authority to them to make laws and policies on their behalf. This is simply a reality of modern politics.

However, this reality raises a different set of questions. Should representatives vote their conscience or should they vote as they think that those who they represent would like them to vote? This is a very serious question. Edmund Burke probably wrote the best books on this subject.

Consider the dilemma confronting an American legislator. Most small town American whites are racists. They would like legislation disenfranchising black persons. So how should a white legislator in Congress vote on issues before him? Should he vote his conscience (assuming that he is not a racist) or should he vote as his electors would want him to vote? If pure democracy is allowed to govern his voting, he should vote for racist laws. This is what Southern democrats used to do in America. If these folks voted their conscience and supported civil rights bills, they were not reelected two years later, when a general election was held in the country.

There really is no simple solution to the problems raised by representative democracy. In the real world, legislators manage to combine their conscience and their people’s wishes. One supposes that they have to do so, for, after all politics is the art of the possible. Politics entails bargaining, compromising and trading off in making public policies that takes several peoples public opinions into consideration.

In real life politics, one cannot get only ones opinion, wishes enacted into public policy; public policy must reflect the consensus of all opinions in a polity. Failing to compromise, to give and take, horse trade, those who lose feel angry and may resort to violence (if they have courage…there is always war hovering at the gates of the legislature).

To the extent a politician is able to maneuver around this subject, doing what he thinks is right and what the people want done, he is considered a good statesman.

Consider Nigeria. There are obviously good politicians in Nigeria. These men probably hate corruption. But Nigerian politics is a free for all game to loot the national treasury. The politicians at Abuja essentially gather to share the oil revenue that accrues to the country. Each politician tries to get something for his constituency (ethnic group). To do so, he must join the merry go round and participate in taking and giving bribery. If he refuses to do so, he probably would not get any thing done.

The recently disgraced minister of education, Fabian Osuji (not a relation of mine, thank God) said that he bribed legislators because that was the only way he could get them to approve projects for his ministry. His desire to accomplish goals he set for his ministry, he said, left him no choice but to join the thieving crowd that govern Nigeria. The man saw himself as a victim. As he sees it, he did not do what other politicians in Nigeria do not do. Indeed, he wonders why he was selected to be made an example. Good question, Mr. Osuji.

The man has a point. Nevertheless, he does not have to join the thieving crowd at Abuja; he could have stayed teaching his zoology at his university.

The salient point is that politicians are placed in a dilemma and must combine doing what they think is right and what is expedient. This is the nature of politics. Politics is not for boys’ scouts or Vienna boys choir singing hosanna to their deaf gods; politics is an arena where real men divvy up the national wealth, decide who gets much and who gets little. In real politics, those who control the means of coercion and do not hesitate using it to get what they want generally get the most of the national wealth. The military, for example, in most polities get most of their budgetary requests because, if politicians do not give it to them, they might as well be looking for different careers, assuming that they remain alive. (The US Defense Department eats up a substantial part of the American national budget while poor blacks in the ghettos get sent to jail.)

Politics is inevitable in the human polity. We do not have a choice as to whether to have politics or not. We must have politics. That which is inevitable in the polity must, therefore, be studied and understood. We must understand the nature of politics, how it operates and, if possible, improves it. One may not like politics and consider politicians as crooks, the fact is that in a modern polity, we can only have a representative democracy or rule by a few (oligarchy) or rule by one person (dictatorship). It, therefore, behooves us all to understand the nature of politics. Avoiding politics will not make it go away.

Some one(s) must decide who gets what in a polity, so we might as well pay attention to the activities of that Leviathan. Therefore, we must have political scientists studying the activities of politicians. What is inevitable must be studied, understood and hopefully properly managed.

NIGERIA’S POLITICS

So far, I have talked about politics in the generic sense. Let me therefore make a few introductory comments on Nigerian politics.

Nigeria is a unique country. It is unique because it is an artificial country. It is not an organic community in the sense that it grew up gradually. Nigerians do not have a history of shared experiences that unified them, and make them believe that they are the same people. Nigeria was invented by foreign persons.

Briefly, Nigeria came into being in 1914. Prior to that date, there was no entity called Nigeria? The country came into being as a result of historical accidents.

In 1492, Europeans (Christopher Columbus) discovered America and subsequently settled there. Somehow, they needed slaves to work their land. Somehow they believed that Africans were most adapted to working as slaves in their new lands. Thus, they came to the West Coast of Africa and bought slaves from the Africans.

I do not know exactly when the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade began, but it is safe to speculate that it was in the 1500s? It was at that time that the Portuguese and Spanish were settling Mexico and South America. The British settled in North America later, 1607 (at James Town, Virginia).

Slave trade led Europeans to establish slave ports along the coasts of West Africa. They did not go inland but stayed at the seaports and had native Africans bring slaves to them. Apparently, Interior Africans captured and or bought each other and marched them to the coast and sold them to Europeans. The Europeans transported these persons to the Americas and sold them into slavery.

Portugal and Spain fell as important powers in the 1600s. Other Europeans countries replaced them as the major sea powers, hence became slaving powers. For a while, it was the Dutch that controlled the slave trade. Then the English and French got into the business and began buying slaves from West Africa. This sordid business brought the English and French into Africa, at least, to coastal Africa.

Man may be evil but there are always some who refuse to be so. Thus, a few Europeans decried the practice of slavery. In England, the anti slavery movement was led by men like William Wilberforce. These groups eventually managed to get the British Parliament to outlaw slavery in 1807.

Outlawing slavery in Britain did not bring an end to slavery. The trade continued. To really do something about stopping it, English naval ships began prowling the coast of West Africa, intervening, boarding and searching ships to make sure that they were not carrying slaves. If slaves were on-board, they were freed and taken to Freetown, Sierra Leone. This situation continued for a while but did not really stop the trade.

Finally, the British decided to directly intervene in Africa to stop slavery at its source, to prevent African slavers from selling their own people. Thus, by the mid 19th century, they began landing their military personnel at several West African ports. In 1851, for example, they landed at Lagos and used force to remove the Oba (King) that insisted on slavery. Oba Kosoko was replaced by another one, who promised not to sell his people (which promise he broke and kept the trade alive).

This cat and mouse game lasted for a while and, ultimately, led the British to decide to establish protectorates in West Africa. Initially, Britain chattered royal companies to trade with African people and essentially governs them. For example, she chattered the Royal Niger Company of Sir George Goldie. This company traded along the River Niger and its Delta. It traded in what was then considered slave replacement goods: palm oil, palm kennel and so on. That company encouraged Africans who hitherto sold their people to now sell non human commodities. The Royal Niger Company essentially was the government that ruled southern Nigeria until 1906 when the British decided to exercise direct governing of the protectorate. Britain also established a protectorate of Northern Nigeria.

(Question: Why didn’t Nigerians actively play a role in the fight to abolish the transatlantic slave trade? Indeed, why did many of them fight to continue that trade? Frederick Lugard and his West African Frontier Army stormed Arochukwu in 1902 to stop the Aros three hundred years…1600-1900… practice of selling their fellow Igbos through the hoax they called the long juju, a racket for capturing and selling Igbos into slavery. It was subsequent to the defeat of the criminals of Arochukwu that the British marched into the interior of Alaigbo, such as Owerri; this is the so-called pacification of the lower Niger country. We shall pick up this issue in a later lecture, for its implication is far ranging. Contemporary Africans are still selling their brothers in the form of corruption and by not caring for the welfare of every person in the polity. Contemporary Nigerians seem as self centered and callous as their slave selling ancestors.)

In 1914, the two protectorates were amalgamated to form what is now called Nigeria. A former employee of the Royal Niger Company, Frederick Lugard was made the first Governor General of Nigeria.

We shall be commenting on aspects of Nigerian politics as our lecture series progresses. For now, the critical point is that Britain conglomerated different Nigerian tribes into one country in 1914. In effect, Britain invented an artificial country. The problem is how to govern these different tribes: Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Efik, Edo, Ijaw, Tivi, Ishikiri, Urobo, Bornu, Nupe, Kanuri and so on and so on. How do you govern people who not only have different cultures but had no historical experience to give them a sense of nationhood? This is a big task.

The British used military and bureaucratic force to hold together the disparate peoples of Nigeria.

In 1939, Adolf Hitler launched his war against Eastern Europe, bent on killing off all Slavic people, whom he deemed inferior and taking over their land. Britain and France, for any number of reasons, intervened and declared war on Hitler. Even though Hitler wanted his fellow Germanic people (the English and French are actually more Germanic than Germans) to help him clobber Eastern Europeans, Britain and France chose to fight the little corporal and his murderous Nazi gang. Hitler then unleashed his rage on those two countries and but for the intervention of the United States would have easily conquered them.

When the war ended in 1945, Hitler was dead, Britain and France and their American allies won. But Europeans were so weakened that they could no longer militarily control their foreign colonies. The only way Britain could effectively rule Nigerians was if the United States of America, its then liberator and benefactor, agreed to fund its colonial adventurism. America made it clear that it was not interested in helping European powers maintain their empires. Thus, Europeans grudgingly gave Africans independence. In 1960, Nigeria was given independence.

Now ruling its self and not having a foreign power to blame, blaming who united the different tribes, Nigerians fell in among themselves. The 1960s was a period of one political disaster after another. The country slouched from one self inflicted wound to another. The rulers of post independent Nigeria were late comers to the game of leadership. In fact, they were novices and did not know a thing about governing modern polities and economies. What they seemed to know how to do was steal from the national treasury.

The Military scattered the thieving politicians and took over power on January 15, 1966. The military ruled, with a brief interregnum between 1979-1984, until 1999.

We shall get to the specifics of military rule in different lectures. For now, the salient point is that Nigeria is composed of different ethnic groups and that how to govern these people is the key problem of Nigerian politics.

How do you rule different ethnic groups, each of whom has different concepts of what the appropriate function of government is? The Igbos want a democratic government, the Hausas are used to feudal political arrangements, the Yorubas are adapted to sophisticated diplomatic relationships between different Yoruba kingdoms hence are more able to take advantage of the chaos that is Nigeria. In subsequent lectures, I will examine the problem of governance in Nigeria.

CONCLUSION

I hope that I have made the point that politics is inevitable in the human polity and that we cannot run away from it, ugly as it sometimes seems. Our job is to find a way to govern Nigeria, so that every Nigerian benefits. Whereas in the nature of things, some persons will always get more than others, yet good statesmanship finds ways to make sure that all members of the polity also benefit. Failure to share the national wealth, in such a manner that all persons in the polity benefits, often lead to the fall of nations. We all want Nigeria to survive, but for it to survive it must engage in realistic political behavior.

*These lectures are presented as Ozodi Thomas Osuji’s contribution to the celebration of Nigeria’s 45th birthday. Each week, two or three lectures, each one hour long, and about ten pages long, will be presented, for a total of 20 lectures. The topics to be covered include: Nigeria’s Politics, Nigeria’s Political Culture, Nigeria’s Political Socialization, Nigeria’s Political Ideologies, Nigeria’s Political Economy, Nigeria’s Political Parties, Nigeria’s Political Recruitment, Nigeria’s Interest Groups, Nigeria’s Legislature, Nigeria’s Presidency, Nigeria’s Judiciary, Nigeria’s Bureaucracy, Nigeria’s Public Opinion, Nigeria’s Public Policy, Nigeria’s Civil Rights, Nigeria’s Civil Liberties, Nigeria’s State and Local Governments, Nigeria’s International Politics, Nigeria’s International Organizations, Nigeria and Africa’s Politics, Nigeria and Transnational Corporations, Nigeria’s Extralegal Governmental Structures: the Military, Churches. Each lecture will not be cluttered with references but a bibliography on Nigeria’s politics will be provided with the last lecture on November 30, 2005. These lectures will eventually be edited and published by the publishing wing of Africa Institute Seattle.

October 4, 2005

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Africa Institute Seattle

600-1 Avenue, Suite 325

Seattle, WA 98104

(206) 464-9004

[email protected]

[email protected]

www.africainstituteseattle.org

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September 26, 2005

Idealism, Realism, and Christianity

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- Broadly speaking, there are two types of persons: realistic and idealistic. The realistic person sees himself as he is, sees other people as they are and sees the world as it is, all imperfect, and has no illusions about them and accepts them as they are. He accepts himself, other people and the world as they are, not as he wants them to be. He adapts himself to what is, not what he wants to come into being. Because he adapts to reality he tends to be at ease in the world and is psychologically normal (not healthy, but normal; very few human beings ever attain mental health). On the other end of the human spectrum is the idealistic person.

This person, beginning in childhood, certainly by age six, sees himself as he is, sees other people as they are, sees social institutions as they are and sees the empirical world as it is and does not like them. He rejects what is and uses his thinking and imagination to construct ideal alternatives to them and wants his ideals to replace the imperfect world he sees with his own two eyes. The idealistic person struggles to make his ideals come into being. He works very hard to replace reality with his ideal forms of it. Generally, he gravitates to social philosophies that promise to change people, change social institutions and change the world. In our age, he gravitates to socialism.

The social idealist works to transform what he sees as imperfect man and his social institutions into their perfect alternatives. His desire for alternative reality is what drives him, what gives him motivation to work hard. Generally, in his mid thirties, the idealist gradually realizes that his ideals are not going to replace the real world. No matter what he does, human beings will remain imperfect and screw each other. There always will be the poor and the rich, the weak and the powerful and there will always be injustice in this world.

Those social philosophies that began out trying to transform human beings, such as socialism, tend to end up becoming the most oppressive schemes perpetuated by human beings on one another. Just think of the murderous rages of Soviet and Chinese communists. Wherever communism and similar utopias has been tried, the result is almost always the same: oppression of the masses in the name of a better future, a future that never comes into being.

I was an idealist. I wanted to change myself, change other people, change social institutions and change the world. I was a utopian socialist. By my mid thirties, however, I realized that I was living in the world of illusion. I recognized that human beings are not going to be changed into angels. I became a neoconservative.

As a convert to the philosophy of limited government, I went overboard and did not believe that government should be used to improve people. (See John Locke, Second Treaty on Government; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution.) I did not like any kind of social engineering at all. I saw unlimited government that does everything for the people as potentially tyrannical. I wanted each individual to help himself. To the extent that other people should help the individual, I believed that it ought to be done by private persons, not by the government. I believed in volunteerism and philanthropy, provided it is not done by the government. I feared big government more than I feared death. Simply stated, I moved from left wing Democratic Party member to right wing Republican Party member. Milton Freidman, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher became my heroes.

My goal here is not to talk about political ideology but to talk about the psychology of idealists and realists.

The realist is generally born with a relatively healthy body. His body, though not perfectly healthy nevertheless enables him to successfully adapt to his physical and social world without much pain and suffering. Given the cooperation of his body, he accepts his body as it is, accepts other people’s bodies as they are and accepts society and social institutions as they are and, ultimately, accepts the world as it is. He is not at war with his body and world and is not motivated to change them. He lives with the world he sees.

The normal realist is competitive and competes at play, school and work. He tends to make a decent living. In our capitalist world, other people have needs and demand supplies that meet those needs. If one supplies them what they need to survive with, they buy it from one. It is a pragmatic world. You must give other people what they need to survive with for them to give you their money. If you have nothing to sell to people they have nothing to buy from you. Thus, you end up poor, suffer and die.

The world is a dog eat dog world, Charles Darwin said and Herbert Spencer said amen. In his Ethics, Spencer argued that we live in a world where the fittest survive and the weakest die. If you have what it takes to survive you survive, if not, you suffer and die. Life on earth is pain and then you die.

The normal person adapts to the exigencies of the tough world we live on and does not cry over spilled milk. He competes and his talents give him what he could get from the world. The best competitors generally wind up getting more than the average. Those who cannot compete generally wind up at the bottom of the social totem pole. Cest la vie, such is life, don’t cry over it; crying will not change anything.

The majority of human beings are realistic. Though one has not done an actual counting, one would say that nine out of ten people, that is, ninety percent of the people, are realistic hence normal human beings. On the other hand, about one out of ten, ten percent of the people are not realistic. These are idealistic persons.

Why are some persons extremely idealistic? I think that it has something to do with their biological make up. Those who are not physically strong, who, for any number of reasons, feel inferior tend to be those who yearn for an ideal world.

I saw myself as very weak and inferior. I was almost always in pain. I inherited two medical disorders, Spondilolysis and Mitral Valve Prolapse. The cumulative effect of these biological disorders is that my body felt pained. The slightest exercise made my heart feel like it was about to fall out of its thoracic cavity. Generally, I avoided physical exercises and much of social activities. I lived in my own world.

I felt inferior and used my imagination to visualize myself superior at the games other children played that I could not participate in. In elementary school, I vividly remember watching Cassius Clay defeat Sony Listen to become the heavy weight champion of the world. Thereafter, I used to daydream that I were like him, even better than him. I imagined myself wining Olympic gold medals in various sports that I did not even participate in. I have been a dreamer all my life, always wishing for things to be better than they are.

In North America, I was thrown into the mix of the peculiar institution, racism and wished for ways to make that society less racist. I dreamed of how to transform the United Nations, give it strong teeth so that it would bring about a different and better world.

Nothing real was satisfactory to me. Only the imaginary ideal beckoned me. In my mid thirties, though essentially an agnostic, I decided to explore spirituality. I gravitated from Hinduism to Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, Sufism, Islam, Christian mysticism, and finally African religions. I studied emergent African religious syncretism, such as Aladura in Nigeria. These contemporary religions exist in most parts of black Africa albeit with different names. These religions are variations of Black American Pentecostal Christianity. In it, folks do away with any pretense of reason and immerse themselves in emotionalism; they hope that yelling to their idea of God would give them whatever they asked for. Of course, their God, which is merely their idea of what God is, and not what God in fact is, does not deliver to them what they asked for. Despite their prayers Africans live in poverty.

The real world was not good enough for me and I was yearning for an ideal world. Why so? I think that because my body pained me, I hated and rejected it, and used my imagination to visualize an ideal body, which I wanted to replace it with. In time, I generalized and used my thinking and imagination to seek an ideal self, and, ultimately, to wish that people and the world were different from the way they are.

If I see a person, I immediately appraised his personality. The chances are (9:1) that he is a normal person and is probably average in intelligence (IQ from 85-115). Such persons do not interest me. The average person seems dull; he is, more or less, like an unconscious cow grazing grass in a pasture, satisfied with life. What excited me is gifted humanity.

I once taught Sunday school at a Unity Church, and came into contact with a ten year old boy who knew more physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics than many PhDs in those fields. This boy would lecture me on what Einstein actually wrote in his Special and General Relativity Theory. He explained quantum mechanics and did the most complicated mathematics? (He went to Harvard University.)

In the meantime, I go about wishing that every body was like my gifted prodigy. Alas, I know that most people are simply average, some above average (IQ120-130) and that only a handful of people are gifted (IQ over 132). If only wishes were horses beggars would ride them.

I wish for human beings to be ideal in every form: in their physical forms, in their social behaviors and in their intellectual productions. As it were, I was wishing for Plato’s archetypes of man and being. (See Plato’s Republic and Phoebe.)

Idealists are perpetually disappointed and frustrated because they are never satisfied by reality. One the other hand, realists who accept reality as it is, satisfactorily live with it. In fact, some realists do not even seem to see imperfections in the world. They simply see the world as good and even give thanks to their God for the world that sickens some of us idealists.

A fellow told me that he gives thanks to God for creating him and blessing him with living in this world. I asked him: what world are you grateful for? He said this world. I proceeded to tell him about the evils of this world: the fact that natural forces like earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, tornadoes, virus, bacteria, germs, plagues etc are at this very moment destroying innocent people and asked why a God that created such a world should be praised? To me, such a God seemed like a monster to be damned.

(I was, of course, pulling the fellow’s leg. As Arthur Schopenhauer reminds us, the world and God may be our ideas. Whatever we think that God is, or is not, is our conception. If God is good or bad, that is our conception. Thus, when Nietzsche said that God is dead, what he was really saying is that God, as invented by his Christian Europe, is dead. It is not the real God that is dead. For one thing, we have not established that God exists or not. If you are interested in such philosophical discourse, see the writings of Descartes, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Berkeley, Hume, Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau and others.)

The chap insisted on telling me how beautiful life is. I asked how? He talked about his loving wife. The chap did not seem to realize that the things of flesh that normal folks consider interesting are often nauseating to idealists. He probably finds sex pleasurable whereas the idealist finds it animalistic, ridiculous and repulsive. Idealists reject the physical world and use their imaginations to invent an alternative to it, one that is not physical, and want to live in it. Alas, the mental cannot replace the physical world we live in.

God is a social construct. This does not mean that God does not exist; it means that whatever we say about him is our idea of him, and since information available to us is limited, our idea of God may not be correct.

My idea of God is that he is the whole and that we are his parts. I conceptualize God as a joined, non-physical being.

Man, I think, separated from God (which is non-material, aka spirit) and identified with a false self, the ego.

Our real self is unified spirit. We are still in unified spirit but seem to sleep and dream that we are separated from it. In our dream, this world, we see ourselves as separated selves living in bodies. We see boundaries between us and other people. We live in the world of space, time and matter.

To adapt to the world of space, time and matter, each of us constructs a separated, self concept/personality for himself. The separated self is the ego self. (In reality, ego is Latin for self, the I.)

On earth, each of us has an ego, an I, a separated self. That is what it means to be a human being.

Our real self, on the other hand, is not separated from God (the whole). The real self is not in form (body) and is not in space and time. The real self is timeless, immortal and changeless.

Nobody on earth is conscious of his real self. If one were conscious of the unified spirit self one would not be on earth.

It takes identification with the separated ego to be in an ego place, our world. If you are on earth you are an ego. The ego is a false self, a dream self, a dream figure used to seem to exist in a dream world.

While on earth, one has the option of forming a realistic ego or an idealistic ego. Both realistic and idealistic egos are false selves; both are dream selves, Maya, illusion. However, the realistic ego is an ego that shares the paradigm of reality provided by the individual’s culture. The normal person shares his people’s illusions. (The term normal is derived from norm, common practice; it means that the normal person lives as most people in his world live and that he embraces the rules of his society.)

The realistic person, who is the normal person, has a shared world view. He has a shared ego. He shares the dreams of his people; he participates in his people’s shared world view.

When a dream is shared by many persons, it seems real and permanent. The day dreams of this world, our world, seem to last billions of years hence seem permanent. It seems permanent because all of us share it. The world is our collective dream; it is our mutual participation in the world’s dream that make it seem permanent and real to us.

When a dream is not shared with other people its transitory nature becomes apparent. When the individual goes to sleep at night and dreams, his dream is not shared with other people. It is a solo dream. Because it is not shared, it is impermanent and ephemeral.

An unshared dream does not seem real and is quickly forgotten by the dreamer. When one wakes up in the morning, one recognizes that the dream world one had seen during ones sleep, a world that had seemed real, was not real and one lets it go.

We do not let go our day life, which is equally a dream, because all of us share it and that makes it seem permanent and real.

Those who recognize the illusoriness of the day world, and let it go, reawaken to their true self, the unified spirit self.

Idealism is the individual’s wishes for an ideal world. It is his dreams of how the world ought to be. It is an individual dream, and like the dream at night, is an unshared dream. Because idealism is an unshared dream, it is transitory and ephemeral. More importantly, it is not going to come into being, for a dream must be shared by many people for it to seem real.

If you have a goal, dream, and can get many people to be enthusiastic in realizing it, you can work together with them and realize it. But if your goal is not shared by other people, you are not going to realize it. An unshared goal is never realized.

In effect, idealism, or unshared dream, is a fantasy, an illusion, a fiction and is never going to be realized.

When a dream is shared it becomes realistic and is probably going to be realized in the context of society. Nevertheless, the shared dream, realism, is still a dream, not reality. It is only because it is shared that it seems real.

The realistic ego and its shared goals, our world, seem real but in the end is an illusion.

Neurotics and psychotics have idealistic, unshared dreams, fantasies of how they want the world to become.

Normal persons have shared dreams, hence are realistic and their dreams will come into being.

Normal persons have normal egos. Their normal egos share normal reality. They engage in society and politics and dance their ego dances. Politics is the abode of normal egos operating within the paradigm of reality the group accepts as real. Reality is a social construct. Several persons in a group mutually agree that something is real and it seems real to them. It is their consensus that that thing is real that makes it seem real to them. But what they agree is real is not necessarily real. Americans, for example, agree that it is proper to discriminate against black persons, and do so. They design their laws to marginalize black persons. That is their reality. But their truth is untruth to black persons.

The idealistic person, the neurotic, somehow does not want to engage in his group’s constructed reality. He deconstructs his group’s constructions of reality and constructs an alternative reality for himself. His constructions are not shared by other people. Nobody dreams his dream with him hence he is alone in his imaginary world. He, therefore, is tempted to return to his group’s socially constructed reality.

Thus, those of us who embraced socialism gave it up and returned to the self centered but socially accepted reality that we should not care for other persons. In doing so, we seem normal. But in becoming normal, we merely become like cows and quietly graze grass in the awful pasture that is called planet earth. The death of our youthful idealism makes something in us die.

(There must be an alternative to heartless neo-conservatism; if it is not changed, America is finished; give or take, a few decades and the spirit of America is dead and America becomes a dead empire and joins the rest of normal humanity: cows grazing grass while the people suffer. This alternative is Christ centered, social service oriented living. This is not socialism, but capitalism with a compassionate face. We are really our brothers’ keepers.)

PSYCHOLOGY VERSUS POLITICS

Psychology studies the individual’s ego and observes how it dances with other egos. Where the individual’s ego is weak, hopefully, psychotherapy (applied psychology) strengthens and enables it to dance well with other egos. But once the individual enters the arena of politics, he is now in the egos world. He is dancing with other people, within the context of shared reality. He is not going to change other egos. His idealism, his unshared dreams, is not going to change other people’s dreams.

In politics, one juxtaposes ones ego, dream, with other egos, dreams, and competes with all people. Generally, the most powerful egos get more rewards than weaker egos. (See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan and Machiavelli, The Prince.)

Politics is the arena of power struggles; struggles to determine which egos get more than other egos. We live in a world of scarce resources: some get more and others less. (See Harold Laswell.)

Politics is of the ego and by the ego and cannot be any thing different from ego dances. If you cannot take ego dances, then get out of politics and go become a hermit, live in a cave and contemplate your navel.

B If you transcended your ego, you would escape from the world of separation and return to the world of union. There is no politics in the world of union, heaven, for there is only one person in it, God. God is simultaneously himself and his infinite children. In heaven only God’s will prevail, for there are no separated persons to disagree with his will. In heaven, there are no disagreements and conflicts requiring politics to resolve them. Politics exist where there are differences and inequality hence conflicts requiring politics to resolve them. On earth where people seem different and have different interests there will be politics to resolve their inevitable conflicts. There is no politics in heaven. (So do satisfy your desire for politics while you are on earth, the arena of separation, differences and inequality. When you reawaken to heaven, the arena of sameness, equality and mutual interests, you would obey the will of God, which is your will, for you and God are one self. There is no ego in heaven hence no conflicts to be resolved by political activities.)

From the perspective of real politics, idealism is childishness. The idealistic person is like a child who dreams of how the world ought to be and wants to impose his infantile dreams on normal persons. He is not going to succeed.

However, every once in a while, a realistic idealist comes along and accepts the use of force and uses it in an unsentimental manner to impose his wishes on society. He usually lasts for a while before he is thrown out by more normal egos. Adolf Hitler, an idealistic neurotic, was exposed to war during the First World War. He saw death and dying and understood that the human body is no better than the bodies of animals and trees. Man is just a variety of biological life. Put a bullet into a fellow’s head and his proud ego and body rots and smells just like dead animals do. Human beings are shit waiting to happen.

Because of his exposure to the human reality of nothingness, Hitler no longer hesitated in killing people to get his wishes met. Thus, he used guile and force to rise to political power. People’s death meant nothing to him. This is the ultimate in political realism. Hitler used force to impose his ideology on the people. He lasted twelve years before normal egos banded together and used his own means, force, to destroy him. With his demise, they returned to living in normal ego realism, shared power, not power given to a single egotist.

Soviet communism lasted seventy years before normal egos knocked it out. Americans, the quintessential “normalist” egos, worked with the other “normal nations” to destroy Soviet socialist idealists.

(America is currently indulging in infantile idealism, the idea that she is superior to other nations. These other people tolerate her fantasy for a while but will sooner or later band together to destroy narcissistic America. China is probably going to become the next economic, political and military superpower. It seems like the game is over for Europe and North America. It seems Asia’s time to shine. Africa sleeps, of course.)

ALTERNATIVE TO REALISM AND IDEALISM: CHRIST LIVING

Normal realism and neurotic idealism are both dreams and will not last. What will last is egoless realism. Here, people recognize that they are not their egos and that they are not normal, neurotic or psychotic egos. They are the children of God. They are Christ. They are unified; they are the same and equal.

In Christ living, people love and forgive one another their wrongs. They work towards a world of sameness, equality and shared wealth. This is not socialism but Christ realism. People are still different, have different talents and are rewarded according to their abilities but use their abilities to voluntarily serve other people. Go ahead and make billions of dollars, but use that money to improve the human condition. However, it must be emphasized that Christian living does not mean that our world is going to be heaven, approximate heaven, yes, be heaven, no.

Heaven is unified spirit. In Heaven there is only one will, the will of God, which God and his Son, us, share. God’s will is the will of his son, for his son is him, literally. God’s son is an extension of him and the extender and the extended are the same. There is no you and I, no subject and object, no seer and seen, all are literally one self and one mind. The earth cannot be heaven.

On earth, we live in the world of separation, space time and matter. We must, ip so facto, be different from one another. There is inherent inequality on earth. Some are tall and others short, some intelligent others morons. That is the nature of the world. The world is the opposite of heaven.

Here on earth we have to have politics. We have to build roads and must award contracts to some persons to construct the roads. In deciding who gets the contracts to build the road there is potential for corruption. Therefore, we must have laws to punish criminals. The point is that politics is inevitable in our world.

Any one who wants to avoid politics, the art and science of deciding that gets what, when and why (Harold Laswell) is not living on planet earth. He has negated the world and escaped into a never-never land.

I am not interested in a negating and escapist metaphysics. I am seeking ways to adapt to this world as realistically as is possible, not to negate it. I am an ego, as every human being is, and am fully in the world of ego politics. I say bring it on, politics and economics, that is.

CONCLUSION

Psychology studies the human mind. Its proper name is the science of mind. However, since mind is the name for the act of thinking, Psychology is best called the science of thinking.

Psychologists are preoccupied with understanding how people think and behave. In that sense, they believe that thinking, mind, is crucial in what people do. If this line of thinking is taken to its logical conclusion, psychology degenerates into Psychological idealism. Here, one thinks that only thinking determines the individual’s life.

Psychological idealism resembles spiritual idealism. Spiritual idealism reduces human beings to their spiritual thinking and believes that spirit produces matter, space and time. In fact, some spiritual idealists believe that matter does not exist. The extreme of this religious idealism is represented by Helen Schucman’s A Course in miracles. To her, thinking, which she deified and called mind, determines reality. Every thing is an idea in our minds. The external world we see is a picture projected out by our minds. We think in images and project those images out and see them as our day world, pretty much as we seem to do at night when we sleep and dream. The world is in our thinking/mind. This is solipsism.

Schucman denies empiricism. Her students deny the external world and concentrate on trying to improve their thinking, hoping that their improved thinking would bring about a change in their life’s circumstances. Many of these folks, in fact, ignore politics and economics; some go as far as to not even read the daily newspapers and or watch the news on television. As it were, they tuned out the external world and concentrate on the internal world.

Alas, a hurricane occurs at the Golf Coast of America and wipes out New Orleans. Obviously no one should ignore the external world. As long as we are on earth, the human body is real. If you eat a certain type of food, say drink coffee, the acid in it would corrode your gums and you lose your teeth. Your thinking alone cannot prevent this biological reality. The nature and state of the car one is driving affects how fast one can drive it.

The individual’s body affects his thinking, mind. Denying the temporary reality of matter, space and time is psychotic idealism.

I end by transmuting the famous view by AA groups, that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, to our present area of interest, idealism. If the individual continues on being idealistic: dreaming, wishing and working for unrealistic and impossible goals, he will continue to receive poor results; in fact, he will get nowhere in this world. Poverty is the lot of sentimental idealists.

The idealist posits idealistic goals, places them outside him and pursues them. He is always working to becoming something that he is not, ideal, to attaining ideal pictures that are outside him. Such persons cannot win the goals they set for themselves for those goals are outside them and are impossible of attainment. Only inside goals are attainable.

The only inside goal there is is that one must accept is ones real self, the unified spirit that we are all parts of.

One needs do nothing to be ones real self. One only does something to be who one is not, ideal. One resolves to be ones real self and one is it for it is always who one is, whether acknowledged or not. The real self is not in form and is unified. This is called the philosophy of being. Most Oriental religions teach it.

To obtain positive results, ones goals must be realistic, that is, they must be shared by other persons in ones group. However, whereas social realism is better than idealism, it is not the best that human beings can be. Human beings are at their best when they embrace their true self, the unified spirit self, the Christ self. In that mode, they work for the common good of all mankind; they practice love and forgiveness. These people, though still a handful in the extant world, receive the best results from life, for they are in alignment with the forces of truth in the universe.

WHO IS THIS ESSAY FOR?

Many persons out there do not have interest in psychological and metaphysical matters. Normal folks are like cow and just want to peacefully graze grass unbothered by the macabre world they live in. Ours is a world where animals, man included, must kill other animals to survive. One supposes that there are a few persons out there who find such a world repulsive enough to be interested in real serious thinking? If so, one hopes that they find my essays helpful. But in the end, I write for me.

When I was a child, people around me called me Agu, tiger. That moniker symbolized their perception of my stubbornness and willfulness. I insisted on the truth and only the truth. No social pressure ever made me give my ground. I am still a tiger fighting for the truth. But I have learned that Odumodu (lion) kills tigers.

There is a force that knows more than our ego mentation understands. That force is nameless though it may be named God. All of us must surrender our ego wishes to God’s will.

God wills that our nature is eternally unified, holy, same and equal. God requires us to love and forgive one another. If we obey God’s will: accept our oneness, love and forgive one another and work for common interests, we experience peace, happiness and material abundance.

Those who obey the will of God, a higher power than their paltry ego power, are peaceful and smile all the time. They have accepted and live in reality. They have crucified their egos, given up their false selves and voluntarily permitted their real selves, Christ, to resurrect in them. They now live as their creator created them, unified self, not as they had made of themselves, separated ego selves.

Bartholomew (Nwa Adeem), I now understand why you were always smiling while I was tensely and humorlessly preoccupied with asking why questions. You knew the truth and laughed at those of us who took fantasy as truth. You knew that to pursue egoism is to pursue chimera and live in futility. You knew that those who accepted the will of God, love, as their will, and live it are blessed and know joy and peace, the gifts of God. Sleep tight in God, my cousin and friend.

With this material I end my self chosen task of giving folks psychological insights into themselves. I return to political and economic analysis of issues relating to Africa. I live in the real world; in that world, politics and economics are necessary for adaptation to it. Psychology merely improves people’s egos, their self structures, self concepts and personalities. With improved egos/personalities they then, hopefully, participate more effectively and productively in politics. I am not an escapist and do not encourage any one to escape from our imperfect world into contemplating their egos forever and ever. Psychological idealism is a disease. I teach Management of the real world. From time to time, I will share knowledge of leadership and management with my African brothers.

Cheers,

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

600-1 Avenue, Suite 325

Seattle, WA 98104

(206) 464-9004

[email protected]

Posted by Administrator at 08:43 PM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2005

Sadomasochism and America's Future, Part II

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle Washington) --- What does abuse of jailed black youngsters mean? It hardens them, and makes them disenchanted with their country. They become disengaged from their society, and live on the fringes of it. They become potential soldiers, awaiting a strong leader to mobilize, and organize them against the state.

So many young African Americans are disenfranchised and angry at their society that when a sustained push is made on that polity, it would find out that it has few friends defending it. (It is the poor that join the army and fight to defend the rich, it was the poor Germans that joined the Roman army and defended the Roman patricians in their gilded palaces, just as today, it is poor whites and blacks, that join the American military, and defend the rich neo-conservative whites who talk big about war, but when push comes to shove, chicken, and run into National Guards, where they hide out the war, and then come to power, and use other peoples children to fight their reckless wars.)

In the international scene, the all-powerful sole superpower is alienating just about every person, even its hitherto European allies. The arrogance of white America is incredible; in fact, it borders on the psychotic. Here are people, who on individual level, are no better than other persons, but for historical accident, cannot really compete with folks from many parts of the world. But as the arrogant superpower, they feel justified in telling you what to do. You humor them, and pretend to go along with their idiocy, bidding your time until you feel able to fight back. The world is currently humoring Americans, and they think that they are respected. Sooner or latter, they would find out that many people consider them as clowns masquerading as supermen.

In the meantime, the clowns are spending themselves into bankruptcy, trying to seem powerful. They practically devote half of their annual budget to military matters, while ignoring what matters most, health insurance and education for their people. To finance their overseas military adventurism, they engage in deficit financing, and borrow heavily from other countries particularly Japan and Germany. Should their creditors decide to call in their debts, the empire would collapse?

As for the weapons of mass destruction that America is accumulating and trying to prevent others from having, that too is a misguided effort. History shows that every weapon, ever developed by man sooner or later, becomes available to all men. By the time this century is over, all countries will probably have weapons of mass destruction, despite America’s efforts to check their spread?

America’s efforts to check the spreading of weapons of mass destruction is done out of its self-interests not global interests. It wants to be the only one having such weapons so as to be able to intimidate others into doing what it wants done. It wants to enjoy the terrorist’s rights to intimidate other folks, but those folks know what it is doing, and humor it, until they are ready to stand up to it.

The final delusion is the belief that if America possesses anti ballistic missiles defenses that it would be able to intercept other countries missile attacks on it in mid air, hence prevent them from harming America. If we assume that it is possible to develop anti ballistic missiles, history shows that in a short order, other countries would do the same, and we will be back to square one.

(Americans would like to think that they are mature and able to handle nuclear weapons, and that others are not adult enough to have the responsibility of possessing nuclear weapons. Good God. Let it just be stated that many non-Americans consider Americans a childish breed of humanity. Field Marshal Montgomery spoke for all of us when he said that we tolerate the newest barbarians, out of pragmatic necessity, not respect.)

In the not too distant future, all countries that desire them will have nuclear weapons. Those of them that hate America, like Arab Moslems, would not hesitate using them on America. Arabs are angry at America for supporting Israel, in its wars with Palestinians.

Americans know that its detractors would not hesitate using those weapons on it. That is why they are currently trying to either bribe or cajole North Korea and Iran into relinquishing their nuclear programs.

(The rational alternative course of action is for all countries, including America, to mutually agree to destroy all weapons of mass destruction. As long as one country has the weapons to clubber others, they cannot feel secure until they are able to match her. Political realists of the balance of power school tell us that much. These same realists also tell us that once the genie is out of the bottle, that you cannot put it back. Nuclear weapons are here to stay. All we can do is, like men, prepare to die at any moment, rather than pretend that we can wish away what can destroy us. Death is inevitable, and no one should fear it. We must still live our lives as if death is not around the corner. That is the warrior’s philosophy: live fully, aware that one could die, at any moment.)

America has a delightful delusion. It, in fact, expects those it abuses to see it as innocent and respect it. Indeed, it expects them to see their intolerable fate as their own faults, rather than the fault of their abusers. Thus, Americans abuse blacks, deny them jobs, tell them that they are an inferior people and actually believe that blacks would accept this nonsense, and blame themselves for their unenviable state in America.

Why are you, a black American, unemployed? It is because you are an unintelligent black person, whites hope that blacks would tell themselves. Their whole propaganda machine is aimed at convincing blacks that it is their faults that they are poor in America. Something must be wrong with them if they cannot make it in God’s (or is it Devil’s) own country, in the land of equal opportunity?

(There is equal opportunity in America, all right; it is for white persons. Asians are often cited as making it in America, hence evidence that there is equal opportunity in America. A closer look, however, shows that Asians are denied access to political positions. They make it in technical professions like medicine, engineering, accounting etc, but should they dare aim to break into political and managerial arenas, where decisions are made regarding what Harold Lasswell calls who gets what, when and why, they are discriminated against, as much as blacks are. When the so-called model minority asks his master to share power, he suddenly becomes not so model, any more.)

Any body discriminated against knows who is discriminating, hence abusing him. Every unemployed black man in America knows why he is unemployed, racism and discrimination. Of course, in the nature of things his own specific character plays some role in his situation, but in the final analysis, it is the social structure that determines an individual's life chances. (Many black persons have personalities that refuse to kowtow to America’s social order. The oppositional defiant type may choose to stay out of America’s corporate and bureaucratic structure.)

These days, white folks would like to believe that discrimination is a thing of the past. As they see it, America is now heaven on earth. In so far that black folks are unable to secure jobs they would like you to believe that it is because of their faults. On the other hand, if you listen to black folks, they talk about what the “man” does to them. They talk about walking into rooms where they are invited for interviews and notice changes in the interviewers' faces upon recognizing that the candidate is a black person. Those of them with African or different sounding names, tell you that white employers see their names and throw away their letters of applications, without bothering to find out whether they are qualified or not.

I am familiar with the university scene; so let me tell you about it. Universities will before hand decide that they want one black person around, and go hire one. Having satisfied their need for a token black they find ways not to hire other blacks. They, in fact, would go out of their way to invite black candidates for interviews, but hire white ones, so as to tell the various affirmative action monitoring bodies, that they made vigorous efforts to find qualified black persons, but could not find any. They compile phony statistics on their efforts and submit them to their funding agencies, and hope that they have satisfied the rules of the game, and do not need to hire blacks.

As they see it, blacks are seldom intelligent enough to teach at white universities. In fact, many of them believe that the presence of black faculty lowers the perception of their school as academically rigorous. They believe that white students and their parents would not come to schools where there are too many black instructors, for they would think that such schools are not up to par with those with overwhelming white faculty. (Interestingly, the supposedly rigorous and qualified white faculty graduate students who are essentially functioning at high school levels.)

White America does whatever it could to damage black folks’ self-esteem, and self-confidence. They have so rejected black Americans that the latter came to believe that they are not good enough and doubt themselves. The racist society has damaged the Negro. But the smart black person knows better than to listen to the feedback he receives from insane white racists, and finds ways to convince himself that he is not the problem, but the solution. The problem is with the racist apes he is dealing with.

There is no doubt that America has made some headways towards ameliorating gross racism, but to say that racism is a thing of the past, is to beg the issue. At any rate, most black persons know when they are been discriminated. Even the “ass kissing Uncle Tom types”, the so-called black conservatives (what are these fools conserving, are they conserving the society that oppresses them?) know that they are living in a racist society. These sambos get on TV, or write in newspapers about America the paradise, but in the privacy of their homes, talk about the issue of racism.

Actually, some of these conservative brothers are so sick, that they joined their oppressors, and partake in oppressing their own brothers. They are like the Jewish Kapot in nazi concentration camps, who were more oppressive than SS guards. These self-hating Negroes find every opportunity to criticize black persons, and to punish them so as to please their white masters, hoping that the latter would throw some crumbs to them.

(If you are interested in the psychology of oppressed persons, see such writings as Kardiner and Oversay, The Mark of Oppression; Thomas Pittigrew, A Profile of the Negro American; Karon, The Negro Personality; Franklin Frazier, The Negro Middle Class; Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Black Skin White Mask; Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized; Stanley Elkin’s Sambo; Ommanini, Prospero and Caliban, the Psychology of Oppressed People; Kenneth Clark’s studies of Negro children choosing white dolls over black ones; etc.)

Racism and discrimination are alive in the devil’s own country, and we all know it. The sad part of this phenomenon is that, it prevents white folks from coming close enough to black persons, to know them as they are. White folks do not know who black persons are. They have their caricatures of who they think that blacks are. Just read David Duke, and learn that blacks have only one leg or one arm, in addition to been unintelligent. The grandiose god, Duke, believes that he has a right to decide the fate of black people, whether they exist or die. Reading him is like reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and Secret Talks edited by Trevor Roper, as the psychopathic god talks about what he would do with eastern Europeans, once he conquers Russia. He’d kill most of them, keep some alive to serve their supposed masters, Germans, and prevent them from going to school so that they would not challenge their masters. Of course, he’d take over their lands and give it to their superior Aryan race…. the man was so deluded in his grandiosity, that it is a wonder that people followed his leadership at all.

The racist assumes the right to decide for black persons; it never occurs to him that black persons have minds, and can decide things for themselves. Such is the nature of psychosis.

Historically, white America has not cared for black America. In this light, white America is self centered and narcissistic; it uses others for its own good while seeking admiration and attention from those it is exploiting. Like the narcissistic personality they are, white Americans would like black persons to see them as very important persons, indeed, as godlike persons. (Actually the Africans I know of see white Americans as childlike, immature and foolish. But for America’s technology, Americans would learn that they are held in contempt by a great many people out there.)

The great thinkers on the nature of man, Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith, told us that man, is by nature, self-interested, and if he can, uses other people for his own good. In which case, there is no reason why a white person should care for black persons. Whites being self-centered creatures are only obligated to care for themselves. As Edward Wilson in his social biology writes, people have selfish genes, and care for their offspring out of a desire to preserve their selfish genes, not because of their loving nature.

If one posits religion and says that God asks us to care for one another, a cynic could ask: how much does God himself care for people? Where was God when Africans were enslaved and abused in America? Where is God as the powerful abuse and oppress the weak, all over the world? Some skeptics, particularly the atheistic type, feel annoyed at the mere mention of God, and ask that he be taken out of the political discourse.

In Africa itself, African politicians seem not to care for their people’s welfare. In pursuit of personal interests, African leaders steal from the public treasury, and have made a mess of their economies. Man is a self-centered creature, and no rational person needs to be sentimental and deny the obvious.

When I see a white man, and a black man for that matter, I assume that I am seeing a potential criminal sociopath, and I’m fully prepared to deal with his exploitative behaviors. I have no misguided idealistic views of human beings. People, who enslaved one another, cannot be romanticized; they are brutes and must be dealt with draconically.

In rational pragmatic terms, we still must find a way to cooperate with one another, and serve each other’s interests, if society is to exist. I assume that man, black and white, is self-interested in nature. We came into being by attacking and separating from one another. We survive by killing and eating animals, and from taking from each other. The world is a dog-eat-dog place, and those in it must be predatory to survive. However, I go beyond negative perception of man, to say that with effort, he could be rehabilitated, and made to care for society, not just himself?

In the meantime, in America, a black family moves into a white neighborhood, and white folks move out, because they feel that they would be contaminated, and made inferior. They run. They will keep running until there are no more places to run to, and, at that point, would stop and confront the reality that we must all live together, in a shared world.

It is a sign of mental disorder to flee from reality, and into imaginary made up reality. But sooner or later, reality would be confronted, for it does not go away. Reality is that our world is a space ship, and we must coexist in it, or sink it. The world is becoming literally a global village, and there is nowhere to run to, that is not part of that village.

All mankind originated in Africa, and some went elsewhere. Wherever they now are, they are still Africans. In time, even Europe itself would be composed of black and white people. The world belongs to all human beings, and whoever has the illusion, that a certain part of it is to be preserved for himself and those like him, is in for a rude shock. In fact, give or take a few thousand years, and all people would be mixed and brown in color. That is reality, and there is no use fighting it.

The best response to what cannot be changed is to manage it. We can stop and provide university level education to all people, and that way make sure that scientific civilization is encouraged everywhere. Human beings have a tendency to revert to superstitions, therefore, we must make sustained efforts to teach them science: physics, chemistry, biology, etc.

The qualities we used to attribute to the gods are what human being could become, if only they learned to work with one another.

Because white folks segregate themselves from black folks, and consequently, do not know who black persons are, they, in fact, do not appreciate the level of anger and rage harbored in the minds of black persons towards them. As they see it, black persons are like children, always happy and smiling. Well, these folks will wake up one day, and the barbarians in their midst would have taken over their land, as the barbarians took over Rome.

Racism is the Achilles' heal of the American civilization. It will be one of the factors that brings that civilization down. It does not have to be so. One is not a nihilist praying for the downfall of others, to feel good about one’s self. In fact, one prays for the well being of America, provided it changes, and becomes a polity that respects all its citizens.

What is asked of America? She is asked to treat all her citizens equally, and with respect. She is asked to employ people on the basis of merit, not race.

(If racism is taken away from America, black folks probably will dominate many sectors of the American economy, much as they do in sports and music. In the 1950s the color bar came down, and blacks showed that they were good in sports. Currently, blacks are supposedly not good in academics and business. But if the color bar comes down in the Ivory Tower and corporate America, blacks would shine there too.)

Remove racism and discrimination, provide all persons with equal opportunity to find themselves, and hire people on a color-blind basis. That is all any descent society can offer its citizens. No one in his right mind asks to be given preferential treatment. In fact, it is insulting to be made allowances for, and hired on the basis of affirmative action. But know what merit is.

Merit is not having a bunch of white men using their biased values to decide what constitutes merit. Merit means having blacks participate in making employment decisions. You must pause to understand how other people evaluate merit, and not just use your own self-serving idea of merit, to make employment decisions. (This reminds me of what happens in academic publications. White men decide what article is considered worthy of publication. Generally they decide what serves white interests. They shut out what makes sense to black persons, and serves black persons interests. So what exactly is meritorious publication, the trash white academics publish…trash to black minds? Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.)

The sad part of this whole racist business is that, if America decides to dismantle its racist’s institutions and operate on a colorblind basis, it is probably going to be the best country in the world. It is certainly going to be very competitive in the world economy. America is a veritable united nations, with folks from all over the world in it. It can utilize the strengths of the various people in it, in competing with other nations. No other country would come close to a well-integrated America.

(The buzzwords of the day are diversity and multiculturalism. If by these are meant respecting all cultures, please count me out. Many cultures contain superstitious aspects to them. What makes sense is to ascertain what is scientific, and accept it. One is a Universalist, a believer in the scientific method and scientific culture. There is an ascertainable best way of doing something, and that is science. Thou should not kill is science. Thou should love thy neighbor is science. One is not interested in respecting primitive aspects of any one’s culture. If your culture says that women should not go to school, to hell with it. All people, men and women, must be given equal opportunity to go to school, vie for work, and leadership. May the best be hired and lead us. Culture is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Give me a universal scientific culture, not particularistic cultures formed in isolated corners of the world.)

America underestimates black people’s capacities, and does not believe that they are capable of fighting back in a destructive manner. When they see black persons, they visualize primitive persons running around in the equatorial jungles of the Congo. They see Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But these folks are in for a surprise.

I know Africans. I know how vicious and vengeful they can be. In the heart of authentic Africans, is anger at white Americans for enslaving and abusing their brothers. When this African thinks of what white America did to Africans in the Americas, his blood boils and itches for war, for destruction of everything white in sight. But he knows that technologically, the playing fields are not yet even. We have almost a century before Africa catches up with the rest of the world, in the world of science and technology, and at that time, demands will be made for reparation.

Oh yes, believe it or not, Europe and North America must make amends for stealing Africans’ wealth without compensation. Whites must pay reparations for enslaving Africans, and using their labor for free, to build America. You can count on this eventuality, or there would be no peace in the world.

All this can be averted, if Europe and America beg Africans for forgiveness, make amends for their past evils, and embark on not treating Africans in the discriminatory manner they currently do. Past mistakes must be accepted and corrected, for there to be universal peace.

To pretend, that injustice will be ignored forever, is to be like the proverbial ostrich, and hide one’s head in sand. Human nature demands that Africans feel their pride hurt by what Europeans did to them. Their vanity demands assuaging. But at present, their narcissistic rage seems empty, since they cannot yet fight back. But they are laying the foundations for a scientific culture in Africa, and when that takes hold, the world will see what Africans are made of.

Despite the rubbish propagated by white racists, it is doubtful that in a match up with Africans, any other human race would out compete them. Hang around and you will learn.

In a manner of speaking, one actually pities Americans, for they do not know what the future holds for them. They do not understand what is coming at them. Like drunks, they go about their merry ways, unaware that they have set the terms for their destruction.

Look, America relatively did nothing really wrong to Arabs, other than support Israel. So the Arabs are angry with them and want to destroy them. (I am a strong supporter of Israel’s right to exist. Arab aggression must be checked, as they are taught to live and let live. Israel is entitled to live on its ancient lands in the Middle East, and Arabs have to accept that reality, and quit the nonsense of trying to drive Jews into the sea. We all are a part of this world, and no one has a right to say that others should not exist. Every particle and atom is necessary to complete the universe. If it were possible to take one atom away, which is impossible since there is nowhere to take it to that is not part of the universe, the universe would collapse. Jews, blacks and other minority persons have a right to live in this world, for the world belongs to all of us, whether racist Arabs like it or not.)

Imagine what will happen when those white Americans, when the really wronged Africans come at them with vengeance? It would be better that, when this begins to happen, that people were not born and not alive. Armageddon would be nothing compared to the tribulations of the future. The level of anger and vengeful feeling, one sees in Africans towards white America, is so thick that, when it erupts, may God save us all.

(A political realist could suggest that, it would be better if white America used its nuclear weapons in a preemptive manner, and destroyed Africans before the latter showed their rage. Why not go ahead and do it, one asks? You cannot intimidate and hold Africans in hostage with your nuclear weapons. It is better to die, than to live as a second-class citizen. So do it, and let us get it over with, now. One is tired of white stupidity masquerading as civilization. It is either we construct an egalitarian civilization, or this world must be destroyed. Who said so? I did.)

Americans trust in military power to save them, and will do everything in their power to fight back. Then so be it. May what they trust in save them. However, history shows that when push comes to shove, that only those who trust in the power of love, and love, survive. Military power can be checkmated. A nuclearized Africa, as will soon be the case, despite the silliness that Africans are not good at science, will be a match to America.

Delude your self, but if you live long enough, you would be disabused of your delusions about Africans inferiority. Hitler saw the Russians as an inferior people, and the same inferior people destroyed his army, and made the arrogant rat commit suicide in his burrow-bunker. By the same token, the Romans underestimated the barbarians, and the barbarians destroyed them.

Americans keep on attacking black persons, and it never occurs to them that black persons might feel pain and counter attack them. They rest in the illusion that, since black persons are weak militarily, that there is nothing they can do. But they will learn. In fact, America’s actions are preparing Africans to fight back.

Today, America’s arms merchants sell their outdated military weapons to Africans, and encourage one tribe to fight others. Thus, there are wars all over Africa, and American arms producers make profits. The sociopaths actually enjoy selling arms to Africans, to kill themselves with. In their minds, they have killed two birds with one stone, made profits from selling their arms, and dividing and conquering Africans. If you get Africans fighting one another, they would be sapped of strength, and unable to fight their real enemy, whites, they would be too weak, and are easily dominated.

But there is another angle to this situation. Generations of Africans now grow up witnessing wars, and seeing people die all around them. They become immune to the idea of death. They know that, sooner or latter, all human beings would die. They overcome their fear of harm and death, and are able to insist on tolerating life only on the condition of justice. Like Thomas Paine, they would say, give me liberty or give me death.

I grew up during the Biafran war, and as a kid, saw hundreds of dead people strung all over the place, after each battle. Since then, when I see a human being, I see a dead and rotting body. You may paint yourself all you want; you are no more than a whited Sepulchre to me. I do not respect the human body. I know what it is, rotten, smelly garbage. I respect only justice. You cannot impress me with your body. I believe that many Africans are at my stage of evolution. They would not mind destroying bodies, for they know that bodies are no different than trees, vegetables and animals. What matters in human life is what we do, not what our bodies are.

In the meantime, one sees Americans over-valuing their bodies. They strike you as thoughtless children, who are not aware of their existential reality, and the nothingness of the human body.

When I was in college, I used to observe America’s know nothing university professors pretend to be something important. I would visualize their dead bodies and go vomit. To me, they were nothing, period. I am an existentialist, and look at man realistically, not the illusions that America takes as reality. See Sartre, Being and Nothingness.

Africans who have come close to white Americans, and dealt with them for a sustained period of time, generally develop contempt for them. They see them as either amiable fools or irredeemable racists.

The sociopathic African, upon confronting what seems to him racist Americans, takes out his anger at them, by stealing from them. Many of the Nigerians stealing from Americans, the 419 crowd, are in fact engaged in a misguided sort of covert war with those they perceive as their enemies, those who had fattened themselves from their suffering. (See Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.) Be that as it may, one is a law and order type of person, and these criminals ought to be arrested and punished. I would myself send these idiots to prison. In fact, I would shoot and kill them. No one has a right to take what other people worked for. One cannot sanction thievery under any circumstances, and draconian punishment should be meted out to the Nigerian rogues scamming Americans.

For all its problems, America is still a decent country. As a matter of fact, one sees no immediate replacement for America. Europe and Asia are spent political forces, and cannot offer us an alternative to America. Russia is a primitive country, and of no relevance to the current political discourse. I am invested in America’s survival, I just want to improve her, make her a race free country.

In the long run, I know that since mankind began in Africa, that the most mature civilization would sprout in Africa. Africa is where all mankind would come together, and start a truly glorious civilization, where we love one another. As Jesus said during the water to wine miracle, at the wedding at Cana, the best wine is reserved for the last. The best human civilization would come out of Africa, it fits.

In that vein, since Africa is the cradle of mankind, the United Nations must be head quartered in Africa. One sees a future where Nairobi, Kenya is the headquarters of a world government. But this is not going to happen in the next few years. Power politics rules that out.

In time, Africa would correct its present lacking. Africa lacks dedicated leaders. In fact, it can be said that contemporary Africans lack knowledge of modern leadership, management and organizational skills. See, many African leaders are corrupt and make a mess of their countries. But all that would be rectified soon, as true Africans take over the reins of leadership, and drive away the compradors of western colonialism from African leadership positions,

One often wonders whether white people believe in their propaganda that black people are not intelligent? Are these folks merely propagating rubbish, calculated to make black Americans feel inadequate, hence permit whites who are propagated to be intelligent, to rule them? Is it all propaganda or do whites, really believe in the drivel of African unintelligence? If they believe that Africans are unintelligent, obviously, they are insane, and have dug their own graves. Actually, it serves Africans well for white persons to believe that nonsense, so that they would not take Africans seriously, and when push comes to shove, they would be surprised, as the Romans were surprised that those they considered barbarians, Germans sacked them.

If white America must test black Americans, then first teach them the subjects you are testing them on. Moreover, include them in America’s culture, so that they feel part of it, and internalize its parameters, before they are tested on it. You cannot keep black persons apart from white culture, and they form their own sub-cultures and then test them with instruments meant to test folks who adapted to white culture.

In America, American black kids go to crummy secondary schools where they are taught nothing, literally, and then they are tested (SAT) with instruments that assume that they went to real secondary schools. This is an outrage. If you actually had qualified teachers teaching these kids mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and geology-- the subjects that matter in our world, many of them would shine at them. In Los Angeles, a dedicated mathematics teacher got an inner city school to graduate students with almost perfect scores in calculus.

Are whites really unable to see what they are doing to the black population? If so, they are truly evil. They are so deceived that there is no redemption for them. If they do not see their evil, then they are born sociopaths and sadists, as many black psychologists believe, that they are. (The typical educated African believes that white Americans are narcissist and sociopath.)

American whites waste black people’s time. You are educated and they would not offer you jobs. White America does not offer black persons the opportunity to find and demonstrate what they are made of and then turn around and say that black persons have produced nothing significant. This is an outrage.

America is despicable. Consider that its schools deliberately discourage thinking and intellectual pursuits. Its high schools do not reward students who think for them selves. Thinkers necessarily challenge the status quo, and seek better social arrangements. If a student dares challenge the status quo the lackeys of the establishment called psychologists would diagnose him as opposition defiant, and fill him up with psychotropic medications, in a misguided effort to make him conform to the system. America is damaging its young people’s bodies with psycho stimulant medications; those with ADHD are given Ritalin and other amphetamines to so over stimulate them that they do not think. Who knows what the long term, genetic effects of these medications would be?

America’s schools discourage thinking even at the university level. An exception is in the world of technology. America shines in technology, but not in pure sciences…the seminal ideas that underpin science came from Europe.

America’s culture eschews thinking, and if you are the thinking type, you had better know that America would punish you or ignore you. America rewards only practical people. It offers people opportunity to make a good living in the economic arena, but punishes them, if they want to utilize their brains. As it were, America construes people as only animals, and offer them food, but shuts down what truly makes us human, our ability to think.

America has produced only few outstanding philosophers: William James and John Dewey’s Pragmatism.

We are currently undergoing what is called America’s cultural imperialism, whereby American culture dominates other cultures. The interesting thing is that this cultural imperialism is actually shaped by African cultures. The aspects of American culture that people worldwide imitate are black Americans heavily influenced aspect of it: music, sports and entertainment. African Americans heavily shape America’s popular culture.

So much for the nonsense that Africans have contributed nothing to America’s civilization. Actually, if we examine those areas where American whites made significant contributions, we see that there were black men lurking in the background. It is not an exaggeration to say that black Americans contributed to most white-American inventions.

CRITICISM

I do not bear grievances against any one who has harmed black people in the past, but I insist that the person change his harmful ways, and learn to love rather than harm people.

I forgive but do not condone evil. One of the delightful passages in Nietzsche’s writing, is his poking fun at Jesus’ insistence on forgiveness. If you blanketedly forgave evildoers, and did not do anything to correct their behaviors, it follows that murderers should be left free. We would leave rapists to roam our streets, endangering women, and did nothing about it. We would leave the misguided Talibans to oppress women in Afghanistan. If forgiveness were taken to its logical conclusion, we would revert to living in a jungle. Civilization requires us to arrest and punish criminals. However, while incarcerated we can teach criminals appropriate social behaviors.

In this light, I wish America well. In fact, of all extant countries, arguably America is one of the best. Its political structure is probably one of the best in the world. In my writings on African politics, I suggest that we borrow America’s federal structure…center, state, county and towns/cities and appropriate governments. I suggest that Africa become a federation, and that each of its 500 or so tribes become a state. I suggest that we have a president; a legislature and a Supreme Court, modeled on American lines, and at the state level have governor, legislature and judiciary and at the county level, a county administrator, county council and court and at the town level a mayor, city council and magistrate court.

There is a lot to admire in America. As a matter of fact, if its founding fathers were not slaveholders, I would suggest that African children read about them. (As it is, Jefferson, Washington and company are not African role models, for they were oppressors. I often wondered why an obviously intelligent man as Thomas Jefferson had slaves? One can understand if the ordinary soldier boy, George Washington, had slaves, but Jefferson, an intellectual? The man’s voracious reading reminds me of my self. He is, in fact, a kindred spirit. Although I generally do not sees white Americans that seem intelligent, I grudgingly admit that Jefferson seems intelligent. He could even be an Ibo man. Yet I detest him for having other people work to provide for his well-being, while he lived off their sweat. A slave owner cannot be a hero of mankind. Only those who love all of us are our heroes.)

America has a lot to offer mankind and we are grateful to her for it. Just think of the contributions she has made to the world of technology: telegraphs, telephones, electricity, radio, television, automobiles, aeroplanes, VCR, computers, Internet etc.

Americans have contributed more than their fair share to the well being of mankind and we all must respect them for it.

Nevertheless, America has a weakness; a weakness that, if not corrected, will lead to its downfall. No one should quibble about this fact. The way whites treat black persons has all the makings of tragedy. All though whites think that blacks are not intelligent and cannot pull them down, they are about to be exposed to their worst nightmare. They do not know who Africans are.

Africans are an ancient people. They are kind, but they can be vicious. I know that I myself can close my eyes, and destroy the entire world, if it is not a just place. I do not care for an unjust world. At any rate, if you must have an unjust world, it will not be at our expense.

You do not have the right to live off my suffering, and if you insist, you must die, and I would not feel guilty at all from killing you. In fact, I believe that the universe is better off without you. And I do not squeamish upon seeing blood, death and dying. I am not a pacifist. Dead bodies mean nothing to me. Men are born, grow, age and die. The human body is just another variety of biological matter, not that different from animals and trees. That is our fate. All that matters is that within the time frame we are given to live on earth that we live lovingly. Sooner or later, we must die so I am not willing to tolerate injustice, just so that I keep my body alive. As I see it, if you must live, live well or die. I completely agree with Roman Stoic philosophers like Epectatus, Seneca, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius. With Ovid, I say: Carpe Dien, Seize the day. Live fully and then die, and disappear into the nothingness from whence we came. Do not beg to live, but if you live, live well.

America is courting trouble by maltreating black persons. It is risking the rage of black people. It may have trained black Americans to accept their masochistic social conditions, but it cannot train ancient Africans to accept abuse. In a world where weapons of mass destruction will soon be available to all mankind, I think that you had better learn how to be fair to all people. Those who are angry with you, and who want to destroy you, will find a way to accomplish their goal. It is truly sad that the only models of black persons white Americans have are black Americans, those socialized to accept their slavery and second class social status. These white folks are actually not aware that there are black persons who would off with their heads in a minute if they felt insulted by them. My grandfather felt insulted that a British District Officer dared talk, when he was talking, and wanted him punished. Apparently, white America has no idea of who Africans are, at all. It is this unawareness that Africans are men, prideful men, men that would do everything to destroy you, if you degraded them that would bring the American polity down. When this writer felt discriminated against by whites, he felt angry enough to resolve to work for the fall of America. One sufficiently determined person could bring a whole civilization down.

The desire for vengeance keeps people alive. Jesus may talk all he wants about forgiveness, but the fact is that those you humiliate, particularly the type of humiliation black persons have suffered in the hands of white persons, must seek restitution, or there would be no peace in this world. You do not deliberately and consistently insult a people, and pretend that you are a nice person; you are not, and ought to be punished. Although your insulting behavior can be understood as childish… blacks generally see whites as childish… the fact is that in the adult world, if you keep on insulting people, you must be dealt with, to teach you not to do so, ever again. The first lesson one ought to learn about human beings is that they are nothing seeking to seem like they are something and therefore that you ought to respect them if you want to be in their good graces. If you do what reminds them of what Alfred Adler called their feelings of inferiority, they will get back at you. They will kill you to prove to themselves that they have existential worth.

The good thing about human nature is that those who perceive you to be fair would never harm you. I would never harm an America that I see as fair to black people.

Africans are an intensely religious people. Many of them are even Christians, if you understand what Christianity means. Christianity is not the nonsense represented by the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches of America. Christianity is any effort to live like Jesus.

Jesus is the fullest manifestation of God (Holy Spirit) on earth. God is unified spirit and love. His manifestation is love and teaches love. Jesus taught people to love one another, and to forgive one another their mistakes…while correcting them.

The Holy Spirit is the spirit of correction. It corrects our mistake of separation from God, and from our real selves. It corrects our hatreds and teaches us to love one another.

Jesus, having fully identified with the Holy Spirit, teaches love and forgiveness, and Africans readily accept this aspect of Christianity.

Africans practice love and forgiveness and correction of mistakes. They have loved their white brothers and, more or less, forgiven their sins of enslaving them…after all they, too, played a role in it. Africans sold their brothers, and their brothers' fears disposed them to tolerate sadomasochistic relationship with white folks.

Africans have reached the end of their tolerance for pain. From now on, whites must give up their sadistic, socipathic nature, and learn to love, rather than exploit, and abuse black people. If they refuse to learn this lesson, well, will they take the consequences of their behaviors? An evil world has no business existing, not for another day. May a loving America survive, but may a sadistic, sociopathic America perish, now.

(Some white psychologists would like to prove that black people are born sociopaths. Look who is calling names? Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Groups that killed Indians, stole their land, and enslaved Africans, and show no remorse for their crime against humanity, by any ones definition, qualify as anti social personalities. It is the kettle calling the pot black. )

Currently we live in the age of Arab terrorism. On September 11, 01 Moslem Arab terrorists attacked and killed thousands of Americans. Since then, Americans are understandably paranoid. They do not take any one’s loyalty for granted. Like the clinically paranoid personality, they are suspicious, guarded and scan their environment, looking for danger. Any one perceived to be anti American is arrested and jailed, and denied due legal process, to defend his self. Indeed, he may be tortured and killed as the events that transpired at the Abu Ghraib prison attest.

These days, many people are self-censored; apparently, they do not want legal hassles. For what it is worth, let it be said that this writer is willing to fight for America against the Islamicists. For all its problems, America is at this point in time the best country on earth; indeed, she is still the best hope for mankind. I want to change America but not destroy it.

Arabs enslaved Africans, and currently are killing them in Sudan, and Mauritania. In the past, they killed Africans in North Africa to take it over and call it their home. North Africa is what the name says: the home of black people, for the name Africa means the home of black people (Latin Aferi is black, and the Romans saw blacks living in North Africa, hence called it the home of black people).

One is not a supporter of Islamic terrorism and its theocratic goals. One does not want to return to primitive, seventh century Arabia. One wants to work towards a just world, where all people, black, white, Arabs etc. live.

REPRESSED GUILT AND DEPRESSION

Americans are human beings? Normal human beings do feel guilty when they commit crimes. As human beings, Americans must feel guilty for the evil they have consistently visited on Africans. However, like the sociopath, they deny their guilt and shove it into their unconscious. They use facile rationalizations to excuse their apparent evil towards Africans. When that guilt tries to surface, a flunky psychologist comes up with spurious evidence showing that blacks are not quiet human hence justifying abuse of them. That way whites feel good about themselves, despite living in an evil society.

But repressed guilt is still there. Sooner or later, the repressed guilt will come out. At that point, I expect a substantial number of white Americans to become depressed. Their psychiatrists would then fill their bodies with serotonine reuptake blockers, the so-called anti depressants, happy pills…Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft. Those merely give temporary pleasure, and postpone awareness of guilt.

Sooner or later, America must confront its evil, and experience its masked depression. That depression would be good for it. In the Paranoid Process, and Psychotherapy for Paranoia, William Messner pointed out that, among other things, paranoia is an attempt to deny an underlying depression.

The paranoid feels guilty and evil from his actions (identification with the ego and lack of love for other people) but denies and masks it with his obsessive compulsive seeking of grandiose power and social importance. Paranoid America compulsively seeks power and fame. When she stops seeking power and fame, she recognizes her underlying depression.

When the paranoid person, America, accepts his underlying sense of nothingness, and accepts that worth and meaning is found only in love, for all mankind, he becomes healed. A healthy human being must accept our existential reality, our apparent lack of special-ness, power and importance.

Man is an animal that knows himself as nothing, and seeks to seem something important. When one accepts existential reality, one overcomes depression, and paranoia. Interestingly, when one accepts human existential reality, nothingness, and one is ready for redemption, deliverance and salvation from the prison and bondage of the ego.

When man recognizes that he is not in control of any thing, and that what religious people call God, is in charge of his world, he becomes humble, and attains inner peace and joy.

For our present purposes American whites feel guilty for the evil they visited on Africans, deny it with facile rationalizations, but sooner or later they must acknowledge their evil, and ask for forgiveness. They must go through their repressed depression, if they are to become a civilized group.

A truly civilized people love and work for the good of all humanity, instead of exploit people for their selfish goals.

It is always useful for one to see how other people perceive one. Man is not an island, he is a social being. He is how he sees himself, and how other people see him, combined. It would help Americans to see how Africans see them. This catalogue of American shortcomings could become an opportunity for Americans to start making amends for their past evil, hence become truly human. At present, they strike one as over fed children contemptible creatures that one tolerates because they control the world economy, and have the military power to make one humor them, by telling them that one obeys them.

One obeys only reason, not people.

The rule of sadomasochism must come to an end. We need a new world order, one based on love. We need the type of society true Christianity advocates for, a love-based society, a society where we love ourselves and each other, and doing to others how we want them to do to us.

REFERENCES

Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution. In Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler. Ed Henry Stein. San Francisco, CA: Alfred Adler Institute, 2003.

American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Washington DC. APA Press, 1994.

Jeremy Bentham. The Economic Writings of Jeremy Bentham. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Eric Fromm. Escape from Freedom New York: Morrow/Avon, 1994.

Man For Himself. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York; Henry Holt and Company, 1992.

Edward Gibbons. The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire. New York: Random House, 2003.

Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf. New York: CPA Books, 2002.

Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan. New York: Broadview Press, 2002.

David Hume. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Harold Lasswell. Psychotherapy and Politics. New York: Textbook Publishers, 2003.

Harold Lasswell. Politics: Who Gets What, When and How. New York: Peter Smith Publisher, 1990.

John Locke. Two Treatises of Government. New York: Nuvision Publications, 2004.

Nicolo Machievelli. The Prince. New York: Sagebrush Educational Resources, 2003.

Karl Marx. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Nuvision Publications, 2003.

William Messner. The Paranoid Process. New York: Aaron Aronson Publishers, 1980.

------ Psychotherapy and the Paranoid Process. New York: Aaron Aronson Publishers, 1994.

John Stuart Mill. Principles of Political Economy. New York: Prometheus, 2003.

John Stuart. Mill. On Liberty. New Heaven, Con.: Yale University Press, 2003.

Ozodi T. Osuji, Real-Self Psychology. Real Self Center, Seattle, 2004.

Thomas Paine. Common Sense. New York: Broadway Press, 2004.

Jean Jacques Rousseau. Social Contract. New York: Dover Publications, 2004.

Adam Smith. Wealth of Nations. New York: Penguin Group, 2004.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

Africa Institute, Seattle

600-1 Avenue, Suite 325

Seattle, Washington 98104

www.africainstituteseattle.org

[email protected]

(206) 464-9004

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Sadomasochism and America's Future, Part I

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle Washington) --- ABSTRACT: This essay points out the symbiotic relationship between white and black America, with whites playing the dominant role, and expecting blacks to play the subservient role. It claims that the system is based on human fearfulness, with the weak fearing harm by the strong. The relationship of white and black America is sadomasochistic. The essay argues that if this sociopolitical structure is not altered, in favor of equalitarian relationship, that, sooner or later, the oppressed black persons would break free from the fear that makes them tolerate white abuse, and lunch a relentless attack on those that abuse them. At that juncture, America, like past empires based on oppression, would fall.

Part two of the essay provided information on religions, and the role they play in maintaining extant societies. Religion is generally distorted and manipulated by the leaders of society to help them maintain their chosen social structure, but true religion is pursuit of knowledge of who we are.

INTRODUCTION

One has always wondered why great empires decline. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, India, Arab Moslem Caliphates, Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire, Attila the Hun’s Empire, France, Britain, Russia etc. were once great empires that today are shadows of their former selves. What happened to bring those great empires down?

I believe that past empires had Achilles heals that inevitably brought them down. Built into their greatness was the seed for their destruction.

In Greek tragedy, the hero’s character has something in it that propels him to greatness, and, yet must drag him down. The tragic hero is blinded, and unable to see his character flaw, and change it. If he was able to see his weakness, and changed it, he would not rise to greatness, and would not fall, and would not be considered a tragic hero. As the Greeks see it, life is interesting precisely because we are all like the tragic hero living a charmed life with built in traits that must bring about our ruin, and yet we do not see them. Character foibles in us, that other people easily see, we do not see, because, as it were, the gods blind us to them. Apparently, the gods want us to rise to the top, and then fall. It seems human beings are an amusement for the gods? If we did not rise and fall we would be like the gods, and the gods would loose the source of their fun and hilarity?

As an outsider, an African, I see Americans character weaknesses, vividly, but apparently, Americans do not see them. It seems that they are blinded to these apparent weaknesses. As it were, they must have those weaknesses, if they are to rise to the apogee of world civilization, and then collapse. If they did not have their character weaknesses, they would not become the world’s sole and arrogant superpower, and, then, eventually decline. The gods, apparently, destined that America rise to the zenith of power, and collapse, so that they would not miss their scheduled laughter? The gods must have their humor at our expense?

Apparently, Americans cannot change their character weaknesses, for if they were to change them, they would not achieve great things; they would be ordinary, and the ordinary is of no importance to history. The tragic hero is fated to achieve his greatness, and America, a tragic hero, must achieve its greatness. America must have its rendezvous with destiny. In this light, one is not naively trying to change Americans; one merely observes them, as one sees them.

It is very difficult for Americans to imagine their country not very powerful. That is human nature. But we are, however, dealing with reality, and that reality is that great powers come and go. History does not respect our pride and vanity. Indeed, it is our hubris that guarantees that we must do what trips us, and brings our fall. Only yesterday, the Soviet Union was a colossal world power. She had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over. No body could have imagined that that other superpower could collapse in a matter of days. Despite her ability to destroy the world, today, Russia is in the dumps, and does not matter in world power politics, although she still pretends to matter. C’est la vie, Gorbachov said, and rode into the sunset, taking his defunct communist empire with him.

Past empires died for some reasons. We shall explore two of those reasons here. They died, inter alia, because they were built on fear and sadomasochism.

America, like past empires, is built on fear and sadomasochism, and, if it does not change that situation, it, too, must die. America’s massed nuclear weapons would not be able to save it, as similar weapons did not save Russia.

(If America hopes that her possession of weapons of mass destruction would make other people kowtow her line, well, we got news for her; the possession of those weapons does not cow any body with courage in his soul. In fact, they arouse defiance in the truly courageous human being. The truly courageous person lives with a simple motto: give me social justice, or give me death; life is not worth living, if it is to be lived in an unjust environment.)

The universe does not make excuses for our weaknesses, and behaviors predicated on them. The universe has implicit in it the rule that our behaviors have consequences, good or bad. If we do certain bad things, we must receive certain bad consequences. Empires built on fear and sadomasochism are required by the universe to fall. There is no compromise here. If you think that there is compromise, then where are past empires, today? America must change its ways, or join the have-been empires of the past. In fact, if it does not change its ways, its fall would be sudden, and more spectacular than the collapse of the Soviet Union. It could all happen in a month, as was the case of the other evil empire, the Soviet Empire. Just one attack by Arab terrorists, and the American economy was shook to its foundations, and has not really recovered yet. Imagine what would happen, if there were sustained and relentless attacks on America?

Erich Fromm, in his various writings, particularly Escape from Freedom, Man for Himself, and Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, elaborated on the nature of sadomasochism. He is useful background reading. However, I will focus on my own understanding of what sadomasochism means.

FEAR

To be human is to be fearful. In fact, fear is one of the two emotions that best characterize human beings. The other is love. Fear separates us, and love unifies us.

One cannot be a human being without being fearful. If you were not fearful, or if fearful, and could overcome your fear you would escape from humanity and, as it were, return to the abode of the gods. Human beings are fearful and the gods are fearless.

(I employ the term gods, not because I believe in them, but because I am writing in the tradition of Greek tragedy. The Greeks believed in many gods. See Homer’s Odyssey, and Iliad and Sophocles tragedies.)

We are fearful because it is fear that keeps us alive in human form. Fear maintains our physical lives on earth.

We live in bodies. Our bodies are vulnerable to attack, pain, injury and, ultimately, death. If a person shoots your body with a bullet, he injures, and inflicts pain on it. If the bullet enters certain parts of your body, say the heart, and or brain, the chances are that you would die.

The human body can be inflicted pain on, harmed and destroyed. Therefore, to stay alive, the body devised a means of alerting itself to that which could cause it pain, harm, and death. The human body devised fear as a signal, alerting it to environmental threats to its integrity and existence, and compels it to take measures that protect it. Fear keeps people alive in bodies.

Love makes them peaceful and happy.

For fear to perform its function of enabling us to defend ourselves against environmental attack it must work in an involuntary manner. When threatened, you do not stop, and ask what you should do; fear takes over, and makes you do what you have done to survive.

A person points a gun at you, and threatens to kill you. Without thinking about it, your body releases adrenaline, a neuro-exciter, and it stimulates the workings of most of your biological processes. Your heart pounds very fast; your body releases stored energy, and blood rushes it to all parts of your body, giving them strength to fight or run from whatever is threatening you. Your stomach either reduces or stops digesting food, so as to rush blood to where it is needed, the muscles, for example, to prepare them to fight back, or flee from the danger confronting you. Your lungs breathe faster, and drag in more oxygen into your body, and blood rushes that oxygen to all parts of your body, enabling them to have the energy they need to respond to the perceived attack. Your nervous system works very fast sending messages to the brain and the brain interprets them and gives feedback on how you should respond, and that information is rushed to your muscles. The brain asks stored information in its memory bank whether you have the capability to successfully deal with the present danger or to run from it? If your past experiences believe that you can fight back it asks you to stay and fight, and if not, it compels you to run, hence the involuntary fight-flight response of fear.

The purpose of fear is to enable us take measures to protect our biological life. What currently serves our survival needs could be running from an attacker, or fighting it. If one misjudges what is an appropriate response to perceived danger, and do the wrong thing, one is harmed, and may even be killed, but if one judges correctly, one lives to see another d

Fear has survival value for all animals, human beings included. Those animals with deficient fear response mechanism seldom do what they have to do to defend them, and die. There are children who are born with deficient pain/fear response mechanism, do not feel much pain and fear, and, therefore, do not take adequate measures to protect themselves. They generally die young. If fire burns you, and you do not feel pain, and consequently develop healthy avoidance of fire, you would be badly burned, and die from fire-induced injury.

Given our paradoxical world, that which is useful to us, generally, is also detrimental to us. Fear is a two edged sword. It enables us to survive, but implicit in it is our tendency to tolerate social oppression. Because human beings are fearful, they tend to anticipate what could harm and or kill them, and avoid them. And where they cannot avoid danger, they do what they have to do to survive despite it, and that includes permitting stronger persons to lord it over them.

All human beings can harm or kill other human beings. If I want to, I can harm or kill you, and you can harm or kill me, if you want to. Man is a threat to other men. Because we are a threat to each other, we naturally fear each other. We take actions to protect ourselves from each other. As Thomas Hobbes pointed out in his seminal work, Leviathan, government was instituted largely to protect us from each other’s potential threats. In the state of nature, apparently, human beings were predators and killed each other at will, and or used each other to procure their welfare. Hobbes observed that in nature, human life was “nasty, brutish and short”.

To protect ourselves, we anticipate that our fellow human beings can injure us. Some human beings do, in fact, take advantage of the fact that human beings can harm and or kill one another. They threaten other people, exploit them for their own good, and, indeed, kill them if they do not do as they are told to do.

SADISM

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (1994) noted in its sections on personality disorders, that antisocial personalities enjoy exploiting, harming and even killing their fellow human beings. These people do not have conscience and enjoy hurting other people. They have no remorse and guilt feeling from exploiting, hurting and or killing people. Indeed, it gives them a sense of power and sadistic joy to use and or harm other people.

MASOCHISM

The average human being wants to live. He so desperately wants to live in body that when threatened by sociopaths would readily do what they are told to do. Terrorists know this fact. They randomly kill a few persons, and make the rest of the people feel that they, too, could be randomly killed. The people, therefore, feel fear. Feeling fearful, they do what the terrorist asks them to do. Thus, terrorists intimidate, and control people by manipulating their tendency to fear.

(How would you respond if a mugger pointed a gun at you, and demanded your money, or he killed you? Ninety nine percent of human beings probably would feel fear, and, to live, give their money to the thug. The run of humanity is bloody cowardly. Perhaps, only one percent would defy fear, and do what is honorable, fight for justice, and, if necessary, die in the process? There are not too many courageous people out there. The average human being is a lily livered coward, and knows it. Because they are cowards begging to exist in bodies, whoever has a sadistic will to power can get them to do what ordinarily they would not like to do. Hitler, a sadist who enjoyed killing people, got them to do, as he wanted them to do. Sadists exercise power over masochists.)

Because the average human being is fearful, and would kowtow to the demands of sadists, sadists manipulate them. Sadistic and criminal politicians exploit human tendency to fear. They arrange social relationships in such a manner that sadistic persons rule the fearful persons around them.

(Most leaders of human societies tend to have elevated sociopathy in their personality profiles. Politicians, judges, soldiers, policemen, prison wardens, bureaucrats, businessmen etc tend to be narcissistic and or antisocial in personality structures. They feel special, and desire admiration from other people; they feel justified in exploiting other people, whom they perceive to be inferior to them; they feel entitled to the best things in life.)

SADOMASOCHISM

In my observation, all extant human societies are arranged in a manner that those who are less afraid to harm, and or kill rule those who are afraid of harm and death. Those who do not mind killing a few persons, every now and then, rule those who are squeamish of blood. All human societies are organized sadomasochistically. (This is obviously an assertion. Refute it, if you can.)

In the Prince, Machievalli advised rulers to deliberately and randomly jail, and or kill a few people, every now and then, so as to instill the fear of harm and death in them, and, thereby, get them to obey them. Machievelli observes that most people obey the laws of the land out of fear, not because those laws have any shred of justice in them. He advised leaders to instill fear and respect for them, in the people, if they want to be obeyed.

My observations of human societies show me that sociopaths rule all human societies, and that all human societies, past and present, are organized on sadomasochistic basis. The sadistic element rules the masochistic elements. This includes contemporary America.

(I am limiting my analysis to America, not because she is different from other societies, but because I chose her as my focus of analysis. Moreover, I believe that America is the last of the great empires based on sadomasochism; after her, we shall enter a new era of human civilization, one based on egalitarianism and love.)

A sadist enjoys harming and killing people. A masochist seems to enjoy being harmed by sadists. As utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Mill tell us, people prefer pleasure to pain. No healthy human being enjoys pain. The masochist is merely submitting to the abuses of the sadist because he wants to avoid infliction of pain, from the latter, not because he likes pain.

For our present purposes, in all human societies are two classes of people, sadists and masochists, and the sadists’ rule the masochists. This is the way it is in Africa, America, Asia, Australia, Europe, and everywhere else human beings live.

Masochists do not relish the pain from the abuses of their sadistic rulers. They tolerate their pain and abuses until they are able to throw out the yoke of the sadists ruling them. It may take hundreds of years, but the human capacity for pain tolerance is limited, and at some point, the abused and oppressed have had enough, and fight for their freedom from pain. When the masses defy fear of harm and death, and fight their rulers, the rulers being sociopath, hence cowards (only the loving is courageous), run, and another social order comes to an end.

In On liberty, John Stuart Mill observed that liberty is obtained only when a significant number of human beings are willing to stand up, and fight for it. As long as the majority of the people are afraid to fight for their freedom and, if necessary, die, they are not ready for freedom, and would be ruled by tyrants. Thomas Paine said: give me liberty, or give me death. If the individual has not embraced this battle cry of freemen, the sadists who rule his society would oppress him.

It usually takes a few eminently courageous persons to mobilize, organize and lead the masses out of their bondage to sociopaths. Spactaccus, a courageous slave, organized his fellow slaves and resisted the Roman yoke. Indeed, it was when the enslaved Germanic elements in the Roman Empire fought back, under Theodosius that that empire of oppression came crashing down. It should be recalled that Rome was divided into two classes, patricians and plebeians, rulers and slaves. The slaves were supposed to tolerate their rulers, and to accept the abuses of their rulers; they were supposed to see this sadomasochistic social relationship as natural, and accept it. (See Edward Gibbons, The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire.)

Nor was Rome unique in its sociopolitical organization. All past empires were organized on a sadomasochistic basis, and lasted for as long as the masses allowed themselves to be abused, and oppressed by their sadistic rulers.

In our own lifetime, we witnessed sadistic communists oppressing the masses of Russia. But at some point, the masses of Russia resisted their sadistic communist oppressors. The picture of Boris Yeltsin on top of a tank, that came to crush the people’s rebellion, is forever imprinted in the minds of freedom loving persons all over the world. Yeltsin is a hero of mankind and will forever be celebrated as a liberator of human beings from the yoke of oppressors. Another heroic picture is the young Chinese man who stood in front of a tank, during the 1989 Tienemein square rebellion against Chinese communist dictators.

Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome, France (Frankish Empire, that is,) Britain, Russia etc were all based on a sadomasochistic social model. In England, a brutal criminal gang that called themselves kings, dukes, earls, counts and what not, oppressed the masses with an iron fist. The English, beginning with the magna carter, 1215 AD, gradually gained their freedom from the thugs who ruled them.

(The thugs who dominated European politics called themselves aristocrats, and claimed to rule by the authority of God, the idea of divine right of kings. It took Jean Jacque Rousseau’s Social Contract, and John Locke’s Second Treaty on Government, to point out that only the people’s general will legitimizes all political authority and power over them.)

I will not write the specific history of past empires here (though, as a history enthusiast, I am familiar with most countries’ histories). The relevant point I wish to make is that all past empires were predicated on oppression of the many by the few, and that that oppression was based on human tendency to fear, and the fact that the fearful generally permit the fearless to tell them what to do.

The thesis of this essay is that all past and extant political arrangements are based on sadomasochistic arrangements.

Do you have any problems with my thesis? If you can refute it, I would gladly change it. I do not, however, want an emotional refutation. I deal in the world of facts, not sentiments. I am a political realist, not an idealist with a namby-pamby view of history, and human nature. The only difference between me and such political realists as, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Pareto, Joseph Shumpeter and Henry Kissinger is that I believe and, in fact, know that human nature can be changed. I believe that it is possible to have a non-sadomasochistic government. I believe that it is possible to have a non-fear based government. I believe that it is possible to have governments that sought ways to reduce fear in people, rather than increase and exploit it. I know that the future organization of the world is going to be more humane and not oppressive. In this positive light, America is the last of the sadomasochistic empires of the world. We are entering a glorious era in human history, one where we are truly “our brother’s keeper” (Bible) and “from each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs” (Karl Marx).

AMERICA’ SADOMASOCHISTIC POLITY

America’s government and society are based on fear and sadomasochism. This is a fact, and not a conjecture. America must change this form of socio-political organization, or experience the fate of other societies organized along this primitive pattern of social organization. America has no choice, but to change; if she does not change she would be passed over by history.

The American people and government that I observe is one where government and ruling is based on the assumption that the people are a fearful bunch. The rulers assume, perhaps unconsciously, but mostly consciously, that the people are so afraid of harm and death, that if you threatened to arrest, harm or kill them that they would do as you asked them to do. By and large, this assumption is correct, for human beings are, in the main, cowards.

America’s government would last as long as the masses are fearful and easily intimidated. But should a significant number of Americans refuse to be intimidated, that is, become less fearful, and do not mind dying, America’s rulers would loose their grip on the masses. America controls its citizens, black and white, with fear and intimidation. As it were, America’s rulers are really terrorists. This is also how it is all over the world, so Americans are not unique, in this regard.

The point, however, is that when the people overcome their fear, and refuse to be intimidated, their rulers would no longer have control over them. At that point, the only appropriate government, one that fearless people would accept, is a Christ like government, a government that works for the well-being of all people, and sells its policies through persuasion, not intimidation.

One is not wishing America ill. In fact, I am one of those curious Africans that believe that America has offered the world a lot and wish her well. When Arab-Moslem terrorists attacked America on September 11, 04, I wished to join the American military and go fight them. What America represents, though unfulfilled, is still the best hope for mankind. Democracy and economic well being for all are worthy goals that all men of goodwill ought to aspire to.

Nevertheless, I am a student of history and human nature, and know that history does not countenance our weaknesses. If you refuse to change your weakness, and continue doing what would bring you down, you must be brought down. That is all there is to it.

The universe may not seem just to you, but it is just. The universe gives us chance to change and improve ourselves, and if we refuse to do so, it simply moves on, with or without us. It would be unfair for the universe to sanction sadomasochism forever. If it did, it would be an unfair universe. An unfair universe ought to be destroyed, now, not tomorrow.

The universe exists forever precisely because it is logical and gives us opportunities to make mistakes, and learn from our mistakes, and change. It gives empires opportunities to learn that oppression and abuse of human beings is not right, and if they keep doing so, it gets them to fall, and raises new empires from their ashes.

The Universe, through its most developed human beings like Buddha and Jesus Christ, insist that justice requires human beings to “do unto others how they want to be done to”.

What do you want other persons to do to you? If you are sane, you want to be loved by all people. Only the insane wants other people to inflict pain on him. Therefore, love other people. As Alfred Adler said, do only what serves social interests, not just your private interests. America must learn to serve all peoples interests, or die. It has no choice in the matter. The universe does not make excuses for America’s stupidity.

Now, let me show you why I know that America is based on fear and sadomasochism.

Let us see how America treats African Americans. Please feel free to let me know that my cataloguing of white America’s evil towards black people is wrong.

In 1492, Spaniards, under the Italian, Christopher Columbus, came to the Americas. The British, under the Italian, John Cabot, made forays to New Foundland in 1497, and Sir Walter Raleigh visited the Carolinas in the 1580s, but for all practical purposes, the British experiment in North America began in 1607, when they settled at James Town, Virginia. Twelve years latter, in 1619 the first African slaves were brought to Jamestown. Thus, in 1619 began the history of sadomasochistic relationship between whites and blacks in British North America.

Britain in 1619 was not more developed than some African empires were (Ghana, Mali, Songhai, etc.). Nevertheless, for some reasons, the British assumed that they were superior to the slaves they brought to the Americas. In the Americas, in general, not just in British America, white persons assumed that they were superior to black persons. They came up with all sorts of rationalizations, pseudo theology, and later pseudo science, to justify this silly view.

Based on their self-serving belief that they were superior to black people, white folks proceeded to arrange a social structure where blacks are abused by whites. They constructed a sadomasochistic society, where whites acted out the role of sadists, and Africans acted out the role of masochists.

Africans acted the masochistic role, not because they enjoyed pain and abuse but because like all human beings, they were prone to fear of pain, and when a determined group of sadists employed force on them, they went along with them.

Africans were enslaved, abused and oppressed in every way imaginable by white Americans.

Laws were made mandating that white folks abuse black folks, at will, and for black folks to accept this situation as the natural order of things. If black folks did not acquiesce to abuse, they were physically abused, and often killed. Given their natural fearfulness…as pointed out, the run of the mill human being, black or white, is prone to fear…black folks permitted white folks to abuse them.

White America and black America formed a sadomasochistic relationship. Whites became sadists and apparently seemed to enjoy abusing black folks. Black folks, fearing harm and death, allowed white folks to abuse them, hence acted, as masochists do, seem to enjoy abuse. Whites and blacks formed a symbiotic relationship, with whites assumed superior, and blacks assumed inferior.

(In the Dred Scott ruling, 1857, the Chief Justice of the American Supreme Court, Roger Taney, made it clear that he assumed white superiority over blacks, when he said that: “black persons have no rights that a white man should respect”. Some Nigerian criminals have turned Mr. Taney’s self serving rationalization on its head, and say that white America has no laws that black men should obey, hence justify their criminal activities on that ground. I know Nigerians who do not consider white Americans as human beings. They ask: how can a slave dealer, a discriminator, be a human being? He is either evil or an animal, and, as such, ought to be used, and discarded. Whites may not know that there are Africans who would like to use them as slaves, and will do so in the future, White America amuses itself with its notion of racial superiority when, in fact, those Africans who have lived with them tend to consider them inferior persons. Of course, all criminals are wrong, and ought to be arrested, and punished. But the point is that we can employ rationalizations to suit whatever we want rationalized. )

America has gone through some cosmetic restructuring; it has ameliorated the gross aspects of slavery. Nevertheless, racial discrimination, de facto and not necessarily de jure, is still the order of things in America. Many white folks simply assume that it is their god given right to discriminate against black folks. Like their forefathers, they have rationalizations for their abuse of black folks.

White America acted like terrorists and, for all practical purposes, is like a terrorist towards black Americans. Like the terrorist, they understood that human beings are prone to fear, and that if you randomly killed a few of them, and threatened to kill them all, that you would arouse fear in them, and in the process intimidate them into doing whatever you want them to do. White America randomly arrested, punished and killed black Americans, and intimidated the rest of them into obeying their unjust laws. They controlled black persons by terror, by manipulating fear. The Ku Klaus Klan, indeed, the entire American justice system, deliberately intimidated black Americans, and controlled them by instilling fear of harm and imprisonment and death in them. If black folks stepped out of line, they were apprehended, tried in white kangaroo courts, and sent to jails. Today, one out of every four young black male under age twenty-four is either in prison and or is supervised by parole and probation folks. America has the largest percentage of her population, mostly black persons, in jails compared to other countries in the world. (Once you have been in prison, your right to participate in politics, to vote, is taken way. Thus, some black conspiracy theorists argue that white America deliberately sends blacks to prisons, as a ruse for disenfranchising them, preventing them from participating in politics. Such persons see black prisoners as political prisoners, hence, a priori, pardon them, and would restore their citizen rights to vote and take part in politics.)

When you see black Americans you see fear written all over their faces. They are an intimidated and terrorized people. White persons terrorized them. White sadists and terrorists have, in essence, destroyed the life of black persons, and rendered them eternal slaves. (Until those of them who were not subjected to slavery show them what it means to be a free spirit, to be men, to be assertive and self confident human beings who look you in the face and ask you to do your worst, and are willing to die fighting for freedom, rather than live as fear controlled slaves. To live in fear, as black Americans do, is to live in hell, to be living dead. These people need to be resurrected from the grave that white sadists have relegated them to.)

Those who make sure that their fellow human beings live in fear cannot be called civilized persons. They are savages. White America is composed of sadistic, sociopath, and criminal personalities. These people used gun and intimidation to enslave Africans, and to expropriate Indian lands. They then turned around and told the rest of the world that the reason black persons and other minorities do not do well in America is because they are unintelligent. That is to say that they told lies and did so boldly.

The reason black persons are not making it in America is because a bunch of amoral psychopaths intimidated them. Those living in perpetual fear do not perform at their best.

White Americans are liars. If truth is said, they are contemptible specimen of humanity.

We are being moralistic, and should not be, but merely address ourselves to facts. In factual terms, those who abuse others are primitive human beings.

Truly civilized human beings do not rule by fear, but strive to reduce the fear that binds people; they do what they can to reduce fear in all people, knowing that those who live fearlessly tend to be more productive.

(No human being can live without fear; to have absolutely no fear is to die to individuality. It is fear that maintains the individual’s body, and keeps his ego self concept in place; if one completely lets go of all fear, one dies to the body, and ego, and returns to undifferentiated state, what religious persons call heaven and god. We are not interested in retuning to heaven yet. We must first make our separated, individuated world a loving place, before we leave it, and return to wherever we came from.)

RATIONALIZATIONS USED TO JUSTIFY RACISM

Now, let us examine some of the rationalizations on which discrimination is based. The father of these rationalizations is the belief that black people are less intelligent than white folks.

To provide evidence for the assumption that black folks are inferior to white folks, some white psychologists, pseudo scientists, really, cite the differential scores by the races on their intelligence tests. They claim that on their intelligence tests, that, on the average, black folks score fifteen points less than whites. (85:100). The main IQ testing instruments employed in North America are the Weshler Intelligence Scales for Children and Adults, and the Stanford Binnet Tests.

(Some black folks score at the highest level, 132 and above, on these tests, but this fact is not made known to the public. What the public is told is that black folks, on the average, score low on these tests, and most whites, even those with lower than average scores on the tests, the mentally retarded types, IQ under 70, assume that they score higher than all black persons. The IQ propaganda is aimed at planting the impression in the minds of white folks that all black persons are not intelligent; hence dispose them to discriminate against black folks. By the way, in syllogism, if you can show that one black person has superior IQ, you cannot make a categorical statement that all black persons are unintelligent. One does not, however, expect brain dead racist psychologists to be logical persons.)

It should be noted that Oriental persons, on the average, score fifteen points more than White persons. (115:100).

(How do you explain this differences…the average Asian score is more like the above average white score…the above average score is 115-130. Are Orientals genetically superior to white persons, or is the difference explained with such variables as the fact that Orientals tend to be disciplined, and study very hard, and possess a culture that is rational, and encourages thinking? Hinduism and Buddhism are decidedly rational philosophies that encourage the development of thinking faculty in their adherents. It is interesting to watch white psychologists use the factors they reject in explaining why blacks score lower than whites, culture, to explain the differences between Asian and White persons.)

White racists also claim that black persons, on the average, do not do well at white schools, as reflected in their poor graduation rates from high schools and colleges.

It is true that, generally, black persons do not do well at American schools; they do poorly at such tests as SAT. The writers of the “Bell Curve” have made this point. (Also see the writings of Arthur Jensen, the great educational psychologist who is so intelligent that if you showed him the map of the world, he would not point out where Africa is. This is correct, and not made up. The ignorance of the average American is such that few of them are technically educated. It should also be noted that most of the distinguished scientists at America’s universities are foreigners. America imported its brilliant people, Europeans, and increasingly Asians were responsible for most of the Nobel prizes Americans won. America tends to produce less intelligent persons, although these empty headed morons masquerade as psychologists testing other persons’ intelligence. One ought to be intelligent before one tests others intelligence. I will give it to you straight: I seldom run into a white American who seems intelligent. I am yet to see an American that I would place ahead of any Ibo person. Given the choice, the average Ibo person would like another African to be his children’s teachers, not white Americans. To him, white Americans are not intelligent enough.)

Let us begin our refutation of racist propaganda by asking basic questions: who constructed the tests, on whose bases black persons are deemed unintelligent? White folks did?

Let us then ask: can tests constructed by black folks be used to test white folk’s intelligence? If not, why not?

Could it be because testing requires unequal power relationships? Adults test children, teachers test students. Colonizers test the colonized. The tester assumes his superior relationship with the tested.

Now, where is it written in nature that white folks are superior to black folks, and ought to be testing them? Shall we say that the fact that white folks test black folks is symbolic of the current unequal relationship between them?

The powerful decides what constitutes intelligence and tests the weak and when the weak becomes powerful, he defines what constitutes intelligence, and tests other weak folks.

What constitutes intelligence anyway? Is ability to do well in technical matters the only indicator of intelligence? It is obvious that white Americans are very good at technical matters. Does intelligence include the skills necessary to adapt to the steaming forests of the tropics? Should we say that the fact that the average African child knows more about the medicinal properties of leaves in his world, than the average American chemist and pharmacist does a sign of intelligence?

Intelligence is that which enables a people to adapt to the exigencies of their world. Africans adapted to their world. They survived, meaning that they must have done something intelligent to do so. Obviously Africans have to learn new adaptation skills, what is necessary to cope with the scientific and technological world they now live in. Unfortunately, it takes centuries to change traditional cultures into scientific cultures.

Of course every society needs to test its people. The real question is who tests whom? That question is answered by power and politics. It is only when black persons test themselves or are tested by their friends, would it be said that they are genuinely tested.

If ones enemy tests one, what do you expect? That he should tell one that one is good enough? One can imagine a world where people are each other’s friends, and persons from other races can then test others. But as things currently stand, and whites are hostile towards blacks, for whites to test blacks, is an outrage that only a mad man could fail to see.

Adam Smith, in his seminal work, Wealth of Nations, pointed out that human beings are motivated by self-interests, and that this makes for efficient economic activities. Now, if people are self-interested and their self-interests guide their behaviors, since when have white folks relinquished their self-interests, and work for black persons interests? If white folks work for white interests, why would it not be in their self-interests to claim that black persons are not intelligent? If they could get black people to accept the foolish thesis that they are unintelligent, they would transform them into perfect slaves. They would make black folks to feel so inferior that they would willingly permit white folks to lord it over them, to oppress and abuse them.

(Is it possible to persuade another human being to accept his inferiority? Racists do try to do so, but do they succeed? They do not succeed although the powerless, out of fear of punishment, harm and death, may seem to go along with the inferiority drivel. If one can accept ones inferiority to others, one has made a judgment that one can also be superior to other persons. It is not left to human beings to decide their worth. Their creator made that decision for them. All people are equal, the same and one. This is a fact, not conjecture. Indeed, genetic studies show that all people originated in Africa, and are 99.9% the same. It is left to science challenged pseudo-psychologists to manipulate their made up data, and to tell us that people are different. People are not different. In fact the term race is a misnomer; I employ it to humor childish American psychologists. In my world, only physical scientists, physicists, chemists, biologists, and mathematicians are credible persons, not some air headed so-called psychologist ideology as science.)

Rational economics suggest that it is in the self-interests of white folks to tell black persons that they are inferior, hence to dominate them. Therefore, no white psychologist could ever pretend to make an objective statement on the subject of intelligence, unless he has changed human nature, from self-interested to loving. The last time I looked, I did not see one loving white psychologist, I saw self-interested psychopathic psychologists. (The psychological profile of psychologists is narcissistic cum antisocial personality. The psychopathic psychologist is now the savior of mankind, savior, indeed.)

In the political world, the powerful makes the laws that the weak obey, and in America this means that whites make the laws that black persons obey. This is political realism. Still, we could ask: why should black persons obey laws that they did not participate in making? It is fear of harm and death that makes black persons obey white American laws.

In a democratic society, all persons participate in making the laws that govern the polity hence see them as their laws, and obey them.

Obviously, every society must have laws, for without laws, there could not be civilized society. Lawbreakers must be arrested and punished; that is the requirement of social order. Black Americans who disobey American laws ought to be apprehended and punished. If they want to change those laws, they ought to participate in the polity, and change the laws but as long as they live in society, they must obey laws.

When black persons become truly free in America, they would participate in the making of America’s laws, and all things being equal will influence those laws to serve their interests, hence obey them, as their own laws. In the meantime, black Americans are obeying laws that are, by and large, not their own laws, and that is an unnatural situation that must be corrected.

The wonder is that most of them obey these unnatural laws, at all. The natural thing to do is for the oppressed individual to disobey laws that he did not participate in making and do not represent his interests. One marvels at the low level of sociopathy in black America, for all things considered, they ought to be breaking more of the alien laws they live under. Black Americans are a lawful people, contrary to the white psychopathic psychologists trying to make them out as sociopaths.

FEAR AND POOR PERFORMANCE ON TESTS

Why do black Americans do poorly at ridiculously easy American schools, and so-called IQ tests? To answer that question, let us examine the role of fear in learning, and testing situations.

How did you feel when you were afraid? Would you say that you would do as well at examinations when you are afraid, as you would do, when you are secure? What does your experience tell you?

Here is the empirical, observable and verifiable fact on how human beings perform under fear. If one were afraid, one would do less well at schools and examinations. An anxious child does not perform at his potential level.

Fear overwhelms the brain, and makes the cortical part of it, the rational part of it, to either stop or work in a reduced manner, and accentuates the rapid working of the involuntary part of the brain. During fear response, the hypothalamus takes over, and does what one needs to do to for one to survive. In fear, the animal part of man takes over and the intellectual part is reduced. In fear, one is functioning more as an animal than as a human being.

Fear and anxiety reduces the individual’s learning by at least fifteen percent, and reduces his performance on examinations by the same percent, if not more.

Do you agree with this assertion or not? All you have to do is examine your own performance, when secure and when insecure, to know that the assertion is rooted in empirical facts. Every parent and teacher worthy of those terms, know that children and students do poorly when they are in a state of heightened fear, hence they try to reassure them, make them feel secure before they are expected to learn, and or take examinations.

Now, what is the state of the black American in America? He is permanently attacked by his environment, and made to live in a state of perpetual fear. White racists, at any point, could attack him; he knows it, and his white oppressors know it.

White policemen randomly stop black motorists, and if no one is looking, physically abuse them, and write false reports about their abuse, and blame their victims. (Of course, this is not the America that America presents to the world to see. America presents itself as heaven on earth but black folks experience it as hell itself. Black folks live in tension and die from cardiovascular diseases induced in them by the Satan that is in charge of their hell.)

Black Americans live in heightened state of fear and anxiety. Their brains are constantly overwhelmed by those neurochemicals/neurotransmitters (adrenalin, noripiniphrine etc) associated with fear response. They are in a perpetual state of fight-flight response. Their oppressive white brothers perpetually make them insecure. They are abused and abused persons live in fear.

Teachers will tell you that pupils abused by their significant others, seldom do well at school, even if their measurable IQ is superior.

Living in fear, the brains of black Americans are functioning at survival modes. Therefore they do not do well in intellectual functions. They do not do well in American schools, not because these schools are difficult, but because of their state of mind.

Black Americans generally live in the lower strata of American society. Whereas, a few of them could be said to have made it into the middle class, the overwhelming majority of them are poor. In his book, the Negro Middle Class, Franklin Frazer doubts that there is a genuine black middle class; what passes for black middle class are caught in efforts to seem important, dressing in gaudy clothes, driving expensive cars and consuming other conspicuous goods that make them seem socially important, while not really devoting their energy and time being productive, as the true middle class does. The Negro was so convinced by his white masters that he is nothing, that he devotes most of his energy trying to show to any one willing to look that he is somebody, and has less time to working hard, as middle class professionals are supposed to do.

Generally, poor persons do not do well at intellectual activities. Let us recall what Abraham Maslow said on this subject. Maslow posited what he called hierarchy of needs. They are physiological, safety, social belonging, esteem and self-actualization. He believes that those needs are primary, and that the lower ones must be met before higher ones are pursued. The individual must satisfy his need for physical survival (food, clothes, shelter etc.) before he seeks security, and then social belongingness and so on. It is when lower order needs are met, that the individual is able to free his energy to pursue self-realization. According to Maslow, self-actualizing persons, that is, persons doing what they truly enjoy doing, and what is congruent with their nature, tend to be the most productive persons in any society.

Those with their basic needs met have the luxury to ask: who am I, and what should I be doing with my life? As Maslow sees it, it is those who are seeking to realize their real selves that tend to be successful at intellectual activities and at school.

Empirical evidence everywhere shows that children from middle class homes, whose basic needs are met, tend to do better at school than children from the lower classes, who often come to school hungry, and in tattered clothes. Black Americans and most African persons have not met their basic needs and are seldom trying to actualize their true selves; they are caught in struggles to merely survive at the physical level, to exist as mere animals do.

The point is that to the extent that black Americans do not do well at American schools and examinations, and so-called IQ tests, it is because they live in a state of fear and poverty, and not because the schools and examinations are particularly demanding.

In Africa itself, people live in fear. Imagine what Africa was like during one thousand years (900-1900 AD) of slavery: five hundred years of Arab slave trade and five hundred years of European slave trade. A person, particularly a child, leaves his home to go play with other children and he is apprehended, and kidnapped by lurking slave traders, and sold, never to see his family again. People must have lived in intense fear. This level of fear induces paranoid suspiciousness, and must have made Africa a hellish place to live. Can any one perform intellectual functions in this heightened state of fear, anxiety, paranoia and depression?

Walter Rodney, in his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, emphasized the economic aspect of what European slavery did to Africa. However, he merely made a on the subject. Europe and Arabia underdeveloped Africa by inducing fear in the population, hence stifled the people’s creativity. These criminal sociopaths retarded Africa’s development, by at least one thousand years.

Masochists (in contemporary psychiatric nomenclature, dependent personalities) do not do as well as the sadists they are involved in a symbiotic relationship with. Any teacher can tell you that the shy, dependent, avoidant child seldom does as well at school as the secure and out going child, even if the introverted child is more intelligent than the extroverted child. Despite their seeming bravados, black Americans are really anxious persons hence do not do well at ridiculously easy American schools. (This writer found his American college, the University of California, less challenging than his African secondary school.)

DISCUSSION

American society, like all societies, is organized along sadomasochistic lines. Those it oppresses and abuses resent America. Black folks resent their white abusers. In the present, the abusers are very powerful and can pretty much get away with their abuses. Nevertheless, the abusers are resented. Sooner or latter, the abused will stand up and fight their abusers. This may happen at any moment, now, or in the next thousand years.

We should recall what happened when Los Angeles policemen beat Rodney King senseless, and a racist white jury acquitted them. The oppressed black folks went on riot. Of course the forces of law and order, quickly restored order. The point is that there is suppressed rage in the hearts of the abused, and sooner or latter it would burst out. Sometimes, when this happens, no amount of brute force can repress it. It is at such junctures that sadomasochistic empires come crumbling down. A house built on a foundation of fear, and force, not love, is a shaky house, a house of cards really, and when a determined force pushes it, may fall.

The powerful often are tempted to believe that the weak cannot overthrow them. The almighty Roman Empire, and its supposed invincible army, could not imagine a situation where the primitive barbarians, Germans, whom they enslaved and used as cheap labor, overthrow them. But the barbarians and their rag tagged army, did overthrow the Roman Empire. By the same token, the sole superpower cannot imagine other persons challenging it. But challenge it, others must.

As a matter of fact, America may be in an advanced state of decay, but does not know it. Some observers of its moral degeneration conclude that America is moribund; that it is a house of cards, and when pushed, would easily collapse? This possibility seems impossible to Americans, but those who study history, know that the seeming impossible is always possible.

At present, the rulers of America believe that they are doing what they have to do to prevent those they abuse from fighting back. They quickly arrest, try and jail black persons, who commit minor crimes, such as possessing drugs. Their psychologists cavalierly diagnose those blacks convicted of minor crimes antisocial personalities. But the fact is that the legacy of slavery and racism forces some black persons to engage in criminal activities.

I do not approve antisocial behaviors, but the fact is that those who are discriminated against, and are unable to secure employment, are tempted to resort to stealing, to procure their physical survival. Poverty plays a large role in criminal activity, as attested to by the criminals in the white population. Lower class whites tend to engage in as much criminal activities as lower class blacks. It should also be noted that when Italians came to America, and were discriminated against (they were called wogs because of their darker color), some of them resorted to criminal activities, via the Mafia.

(Talking about culture and IQ scores, Southern and Eastern Europeans tended to do poorly on American IQ tests that Congress banned their coming to America in 1924. It was believed that they were inferior stock and would lower the quality of traditional white Americans who came from Germanic stock…the English, French, Scandinavian etc are Germanic…Eventually, these non-Germanic whites acquired the Northern European culture of America, and, today, do as well as Northern Europeans in so-called IQ tests.)

America’s justice is such that blacks are more easily clamped into jails than white persons who committed similar crimes. There are racist judges out there who, upon seeing a black face in their courtroom, throw the books at him. America’s jails are filled with young African Americans. Some believe that this is not an accident but calculated effort to control black persons, to marginalize them for those jailed looses political rights and could no longer participate in the political process, where, as Harold Lasswell tells us, who gets what and when, is determined.

America is spending much of its scarce resources housing black Americans in jails, rather than providing them with education. Jails are built in just about every town in America rather than schools. It costs a few thousand dollars to educate a child but over fifty thousand dollars a year to house an inmate in jail.

Jails are one of the greatest growth industries in America. In fact, America now has the dubious honor of having more of its citizens in jail, than any other country in the world.

In a rational society, all young people ought to have at least a university level education in the physical and technical sciences, paid by society. A rational society provides all of its citizens with universal health insurance, but in America upwards of 45 million persons, many of them are black Americans, do not have health insurance coverage. Instead of spending money to train and heal its citizens, America spends it keeping them at jails.

It is not inconceivable for the country to go bankrupt doing what America currently is doing. America is penny wise and pound-foolish.

Now, what happens to those who have gone to jails? At jails they are abused, and sometimes raped by sadistic jail security guards. (Homosexual and pedophilic perverts are currently working hard to impose their life styles on Western society and getting people to accept their behavior as normal. A similar situation existed before the fall of Greece, and Rome, and other sadomasochistic empires. Political correctness dictates that no one say that these bizarre sexual practices are wrong. Well, Africans consider them wrong. African villages told folks with these particular forms of defying reality (God) to leave their villages, and never return.)

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

Africa Institute, Seattle

600-1 Avenue, Suite 325

Seattle, Washington 98104

www.africainstituteseattle.org

[email protected]

(206) 464-9004

dint

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September 08, 2005

Why we Must Confederate African Countries, Part II

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, washington) --- We do not have to deny some of the inherent problems of confederal governments, but with good effort, confederations can be made to work, after all they work in Switzerland. At any rate, it seems the only alternative that would avert Africans penchant for mutual mayhem.

THE SOCIAL- PSYCHOLOGICAL BENEFITS OF CONFEDERATION

Each ethnic group in Africa is very distinct. It evolved over the past thousands of years and developed a unique culture, a particularistic way of approaching phenomena. Obviously, culture, like everything else in this world, is adaptable and must evolve and adapt to changes in its environment for it to enable the people survive changes in their environment. Anthropologists tell us that when different cultures come into contact with each other, that they diffuse to one another and the result is borrowing from one another and changes in the manner each approaches reality. (Reality, itself, is unknown and is largely a product of individual and social constructs of it hence can be deconstructed and reconstructed on a different and, hopefully, better footing.)

African cultures were until recently isolated from each other and from the rest of the world. They have now come into close contact with each other and with the cultures of the rest of the world. They are now incorporating aspects of other cultures. In the long run, they will adapt, that is, change and become different from what they currently are.

Nevertheless, each culture tends to remain unique despite accepting influences from other cultures. This particularistic aspect of culture is not necessarily bad. Total cultural universalism when we do not know what is ultimately good for mankind may not be the answer. Until science comes up with a verifiable universal scientific culture for all mankind, we are best served encouraging each ethnic group to retain aspects of its culture.

Consider the peoples of Nigeria. The Igbo is very individualistic, democratic and republican. He is free enterprise oriented. Igbo culture is very much like the culture of Ancient Greek city states. If you have read of Athens during the age of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the classical age, you pretty much have read about Igbo culture.

In traditional Igbo societies, the entire town made up the ruling elements. All adult males over age 15 gathered to rule their town. They discussed matters arising and voted on them. They then delegated to a few the executory function of implementing their decisions.

The Freeborn of the town, Diala, gathered as Oha (also called Amala) and made decisions regarding their town’s governance. The Oha acted as legislature, executive and judiciary of the town. This way Igbo ruled itself like the Ancient Greeks did, without resorting to the auspices of kings, dukes, earls, counts, marquis, squires and the other Germanic governing elements which the English superimposed on the Igbos. (Unfortunately, like the ancient Greeks, Igbos did not permit women and slaves to participate in governance. Obviously, every person must now be permitted to make inputs in how society is governed.)

In the economic sphere, all Igbo strove to make a living independently. Each person is encouraged to do his best and procure a living for himself and his family. Farming and trading were encouraged. Dependency on other persons to support one was discouraged.

The cumulative effect of these social practices was that every Igbo child felt empowered and recognized that his life was in his own hands, not other people’s hands and that he must support himself. Every Igbo child was encouraged to be competitive and goes out there and competes for what he wanted out of life. He did not ask for handouts from other people, but asked for equal opportunity to compete. He knows that in every race some will win and others lose. He accepted unfettered competition and always strove to do his best, and when he lost, congratulated the winners and ground his teeth. In this life, there are always winners and losers. The best that we can do is tax winners and use that money to help losers. The Igbo are realistic and reconcile themselves to reality without undue emotionalism and sentimentalism. Cest la vie, such is life.

This magnificent Igbo culture only recently came into contact with Western civilization. In less than a century of contact, Igbo families routinely send their children to universities. This is an outstanding achievement and the culture that made this possible ought to be preserved. (The Igbos believe that there is no better culture in the world than theirs. Given what their belief makes them accomplish: be one of the most achievement oriented peoples in the world, we should permit them their belief, even if it is a myth.)

There is no doubt that if given the opportunity, if the Igbo is allowed to be Igbo, Alaigbo would compete with the best in the world. In the economic sphere, if the Igbos are let loose and unhampered by the burden of having to adapt to other Nigerians restrictive ways of lives, they would be at the apogee of world economic attainment.

If let loose, in fifty years, the Igbos would be second to none in the world. But, at present, they are shackled with the necessity of conforming to their neighbors’ cultures, some of whom eschew competition and expect handouts from life.

Every people are entitled to their culture. If some people like to sit around and ask God to send them food and or beg for food on the streets, that is their prerogative. The Igbo knows that God helps those who help themselves. If you want to eat, you go work for your food. The Igbo wants the opportunity to earn his living the old fashioned way: earn it legitimately. He must, therefore, be given the opportunity to be himself, rather than be handicapped by shiftless cultures that expect external others to fend for them.

The Igbo has internal locus of authority and knows that only him ought to do what he needs to do to survive. He and his Chi (personal God) are responsible for his fate in this world. He does not depend on other people to help him survive. Of course, where necessary, the Igbo cooperates with other people for their mutual survival, but he does not lose sight of the fact that his survival is in his own hands, not other people’s hands.

In Nigeria, we have a situation where the Moslem North wants to impose the Moslem legal system, Sharia, on the rest of the people. If we recall, Mohammed (570-622 AD) and his disciples evolved a certain legal system, the Sharia.

This legal system evolved in Arabia and is obviously rooted in Arab culture. This legal system is predicated on feudal Arabia of the seventh century. If so, one might ask: how reasonable is it to impose what evolved in Arabia fourteen hundred years ago on present African societies?

African societies ought to be governed by African legal systems. Of course, Africans must borrow from other lands. They currently borrow from the British Common law system (and aspects of continental European Napoleonic codes). In the long run, a uniquely African legal system that synthesizes European, African and other legal systems would come into being in Africa.

If the Moslems in Northern Nigeria want to embrace a seventh century Arab legal system, if they are so unaware of the evolving nature of social institutions, the fact that every thing adapts to changes in its environment, if the Northerners want to go back to practicing what was probably functional in seventh century Arabia, but not today, that is their prerogative. They are free to impose Sharia law on themselves.

One submits that the North does not have the right to impose Sharia on other Nigerians. And if they attempted to do so, they ought to be resisted. The Igbos ought to go to war rather than permit themselves to be hobbled by Arabia’s jurisprudence. It is better to die fighting than to live as a slave to other people’s archaic world views.

ANTIDOTE TO CORRUPTION IN AFRICA

Without beating around the bush, most African leaders are criminals. The real question is: why are African leaders criminal? One has given this problem quiet a bit of thinking. Is stealing in the genes of black men, as some white racists would like us to believe? If black men are born with criminal genes, what shall we make of white men, men who killed Indians, stole their lands and at present steal from all over the world and live off other people’s suffering?

If Africans are born with criminal genes, white folks are born as murderers and plunderers. Let us dispense with the nonsense that people are born with a predilection to criminal activity. Criminal activity is learned. It is circumstances that determine whether people steal or not.

Africans are corrupt because of circumstances, not because of their genes. One believes that whereas many factors contribute to Africans current tendency to stealing, that the issue of ethnic identification plays a critical role in it.

In so-called national politics, each ethnic group sees national wealth as a cake from which it takes and gives to its own people. The idea is to please the members of ones ethnic group, rather than serve national interests. Let us be specific rather than abstract.

Nigeria obtains most of its money from selling oil. Oil comes mostly from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The various ethnic groups in Nigeria come together to get their own share of the money coming from the Ijaw area of Nigeria.

Here is what is happening in Nigeria. The Hausa, Fulani and Yoruba and others steal the resources that come from Ijawland. These criminals gather at Abuja and devise means to steal Ijaw wealth and cart it to their home lands. They use Ijaw resources to go develop their own areas, while ignoring the needs of Ijawland.

Having accustomed themselves to stealing from Ijawland, they generalize their thieving habits to stealing from their own people, too. As it were, it seems that thieving is now in Nigerians’ blood.

Nigeria is the most corrupt country in the world. One gets nothing done in Nigeria without one bribing some one. Even to collect supposedly free forms from government offices requires one to bribe the dispensing clerk. If you do not bribe some one in Nigeria, you simply would not get any thing done.

Nigerians are so corrupt that they are beyond being angry at. One treats them as one treats children, that is, not expect them to behave like adults and do the right thing. They are to be taught the right way to live on planet earth, for they have forgotten it. They are in darkness and need some one to show them the light of love, mutual caring and service to one another.

Those who want to stop corruption in Nigeria cannot do so for as long as the various ethnic groups in Nigeria collude with one another to steal from Ijawland. The only way to stop corruption in Nigeria is to permit each ethnic group to have total control of the resources that come from its lands. Let the Ijaw have 100% control over their oil resources.

If each ethnic group runs its affairs, those without natural resources would work very hard to come up with the money to fund their governments. Igbos are good business men. They would find ways to come up with the money to fund their governments.

More importantly, if each ethnic group in Nigeria funded its governments by itself, it would pay attention to how its money is spent by its public officials. It would audit its accounting books and where a penny is missing punish culprits in the most draconian manner. Any public official who stole a penny and or took bribes ought to be sent to twenty years jail, with hard labor; he ought to work to feed him self; the public does not have to feed him, a detritus of mankind.

One believes that the only way to stop corruption in Africa is to permit each ethnic group to be a state, to rule itself and to have total control over its resources. The added advantage of this system is that it would force Nigerians to work harder. At present, the people do not have to work to get the money to fund their governments. They sit around doing nothing to get the money to fund the central government. All they do is figure out ways to optimize stealing the oil money that comes from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. In the process, they develop stealing skills and are lazy. If we compel these lazy bums to go work and seek productive ways to fund their state governments and developmental activities, they would develop the habit of industry and, for a change, become admirable human beings, rather than the contemptible and despicable animals, they currently seem to be.

Nigeria has practically abandoned exploration of its other resources, such as Coal, Zinc, Bauxite, Palm oil, Palm kernel, Cocoa, Coffee, and Rubber. It did so in pursuit of oil money. Those other resources used to be explored, exported and generated sufficient income to feed most Nigerians. But now, most Nigerians have their eyes set on stealing Ijaw oil money and are unwilling to develop the resources that nature reposed in their neck of the wood. If we permit the Ijaw sole ownership of their oil money, other Nigerians, because of economic necessity, would return to developing the resources in their states hence making the economy more diversified and stable. When people’s backs are against the wall and their survival is at stake, they tend to work hardest. Let go of Ijaw oil money and let the threat of suffering compel other Nigerians to work hard. If they do, soon, they would have more wealth than oil ever promised them. Little Biafra had its back against the wall and invented incredible technologies that no African nation has replicated. Necessity is the mother of inventions. Let Ijaws have their oil; the rest of the people will survive.

Like every thing in this world, there are downsides to having each ethnic group control its resources. The ethnic groups that have lots of natural resources would become rich. We know what wealth does to people. One has observed what happened to Alaskans as a result of wealth. If you recall, Oil was discovered in Alaska in the late 1950s and 60s. In 1974/75 the Alaska Oil Pipe line was built from the North slopes to Valdez. Oil was piped from Prudhoe Bay to Prince Williams Sound and ships carried it to the lower forty eight states. Suddenly, Alaska was awash with money.

Alaskans did away with individual income taxes. They funded their government through oil revenue. Indeed, the government saved enough of that oil revenue (at the time of this writing, estimated at $28 billion) and each year shared the profits accruing to investments made with that fund. Generally, each year, every Alaskan receives anywhere from one to two thousand dollars in dividend. This is in addition to having just about everything done for him for free by his government: free education, free medical insurance (for persons under 21) and so on. The result of all this generosity is that Alaskans tend to be lackadaisical. As far as one knows, they are not noted for their industry and contribution to America’s science, technology and business.

The situation is even worse with Alaska Natives. Alaska has about 650, 000 people. Natives (Yupik, Inuit, Athabaska, Klinkit, Haida, Aleuts etc) are about 80, 000. African Americans and Asians are about the same in number as the natives. The rest of the population is Caucasians.

In the early 1970s, the United States Congress entered into what is now called Alaska Native Land Settlement with the various native tribes. Essentially, the natives were given about 10% of the land of Alaska, and the other 90% are left to the Federal and State governments.

If you recall, Russia came to Alaska in 1746 (under Captain Bering). Russia considered Alaska part of mother Russia. (Sitka was its capital). As a result of the impoverishment inflicted on Russia by the Crimean war, Russia needed money and approached the United States government to buy Alaska. Seward, the then secretary of State, bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. He paid ten million dollars for a piece of real estate almost twice the size of Nigeria. Many Americans were opposed to the Secretary buying what they called a “chunk of snow”; Seward’s folly, the purchase was called.

The United States government bought Alaska from Russia and owned it. All the land of Alaska, the great land, belonged to the United States government and was managed by the US department of Interior.

As a result of the Alaska Native Land Settlement Act, Alaska Natives were given parts of Alaska. This means that the resources coming from those lands are given to the natives.

The natives were untrained in capitalist ways. So, the federal government set up native corporations to run the affairs of the various natives for them. These corporations are run by white professional managers. They make profits for the natives, and each year, share these among the natives. During this observer’s last year at the University of Alaska, each Cook Inlet native (Anchorage area) got about fifty thousand dollars from this pot of money. The result is that the natives do not have to work. They have free money coming to them annually.

What do you think that they do with all that money? They waste it in riotous living, particularly on alcohol. Three months after receiving their cheeks in September, most of them are flat broke. Many of them die from alcohol induced diseases. Their life span is 42, in a society where whites routinely live to be 78 years.

What is the point? It is that if you give people free money that they might self destruct and or become lazy. The Ijaw might experience the fate of Alaska natives.

As they say, to be pre-warned is to be saved. The Ijaw can learn from Alaskans and invest their money for the raining day when oil runs out, as it must. They do not have to squander their oil resources in reckless living.

THE ABURI ACCORD

In 1966, as a result of the pogrom that they were experiencing in other parts of Nigeria, Igbos fled to their Igbo homeland. The military governor of Alaigbo, Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu, apparently, believed that Igbos were no longer safe in Nigeria. He sought a different political arrangement with the Nigerians. The Ghanaian head of state, General Ankrah, invited the head of the Nigerian government and all concerned in the dispute to a series of meetings at Aburi, Ghana.

Apparently, some sort of accord was reached by the parties in dispute. One has not read this accord and cannot attest to what it specified. However, the Igbo leader, Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu, seemed to have told his people that the accord specified a confederation form of government for Nigeria. He later said that the Federal authorities reneged on this agreement by creating twelve states (dividing the then Eastern region into three states) under the banner of federalism. For this and other reasons, Ojukwu went ahead and declared his region separated from Nigeria.

Today, the battle cry of many Igbos is “On Aburi we stand”. They seem to believe that confederation is the best form of government for Nigeria.

This observer is generally not swayed by mass sentiments. He goes with what seems self evidently true to him. In his observation, confederation seems the best type of political arrangement for Nigeria.

Nigeria has a choice to make, a choice of which of the three main forms of extant governments to choose from. The three forms of governments are unitary, federal and confederal. (Monarchy/Aristocracy is no longer a serious option.)

Of the alternatives, confederation seems the only realistic option. Why so? Unitary form of government tends to suit a homogeneous society. England and France seem to do well by this form of government. These people are, more or less, homogenous. However, as we have already pointed out, the unity of Britain may be skin deep. The Scottish, Welsh and Irish elements, Celts as opposed to German English, are agitating for some form of autonomy. We have not heard the last word on the political structure of Britain.

Nigeria has a heterogeneous population and unitary form of government is out of the question for her. Aguiyi Ironsi, apparently, toyed with that idea and it so enraged Northern Nigerians that they decided to eliminate him before he imposed that form of government on them.

At present, Nigeria toys with federalism, although what it has, in fact, is better called Centralism. The federal government controls all the resources of the country and doles out whatever it wants to the mini states it created.

Nigeria currently has 36 states, few of which can function independently. To function, these so-called states need handouts from the central government. The central government steals oil money from the Niger Delta and shares it with the thievish governors of the so-called states. The governors and the leaders at the central level are in cohorts with each other to steal and divide the loot they got from Ijawland.

For our present purposes, we do not have federalism in Nigeria, if by that we mean what obtains in the United States of America.

Federalism has not worked and will not work in Nigeria. Whoever governs the central government of Nigeria uses force to terrorize the periphery to go along with his wishes.

On paper, Nigeria emulates a badly misunderstood American form of government. It has a president, a legislature and an independent judiciary, all structured along the lines of the United States constitution. One wonders what idiots did this copying of America. America herself knew that she was different from her mother country, Britain, and constructed a government that suited her needs.

Nigeria is unique and cannot function properly with a political structure that works well in America. Nor does the American system work well for all Americans. The American political system was designed to work for white Americans. African Americans and Indians are marginalized persons in the American polity. When the latter are finally incorporated into the polity, as eventually they must, for there to be peace in the land, America must have another constitutional conference to work out a different political system, one that takes into consideration the interests of non-whites.

We are not at present focusing on America; we are talking about Nigeria and Africa. Why should Nigerian leaders copy something just because it works in America? What works in America is not guaranteed to work in Africa, for Africa is different from America.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE TO RESTRUCTURE AFRICAN COUNTRIES

If Africans were a rational people, they would have reconfigured the polities they inherited from their former colonial masters. They all know that the polities they inherited from their European masters are flawed and are the causes of their present problems. They all know that each country is a conglomeration of disparate people, some of whom do not want to be in the same country with others. They all know that it takes force to hold these restive people together; hence they have dictators all over Africa. They all know that for there to be democratic governments in Africa that they must restructure their present artificial polities.

But they have not done what they ought to have done, fifty years after obtaining independence from Europe. Instead of solving their problems, they kill each other in senseless wars to protect the territorial integrity of their artificial countries.

In as much as there is a failure of will and leadership in Africa to do what needs to be done to bring about stability in Africa, one is calling for an international conference, organized by the United Nations, at which African countries are restructured.

There are about four hundred legitimate ethnic groups/tribes in Africa (I named them all in a different paper). Each of these ethnic groups ought to be made a state, within confederations.

This international conference to restructure Africa must be held soon, if possible, tomorrow. It is the only way that the world would reduce Africans mismanagement of their continent and their tendency to killing each other. Failure to do this, Africans will continue making a mess of their continent and the world would continue seeing starving Africans.

Starving Africans means Africans who struggle to go live in the Western world. To avoid these people inundating other parts of the world, the world must help them do the right thing.

Failure to hold this conference and correct the mess that is Africa is tantamount to writing Africa off and permitting Africans to needlessly suffer and die. The death of Africans will be in our heads if we do not work to make sure that Africans restructure their countries and learn responsible self governance.

CONCLUION

African countries were hastily put together by European nations. With the exception of a few of them, most African countries are not natural countries. They are composed of many ethnic groups, many of whom do not get along with one another. In most cases, some ethnic groups grab power and use that power to subjugate members of other ethnic groups to their wishes. This is terrorism.

Countries like Nigeria, Congo and Sudan are terrorist states where a few armed persons use force to intimidate other ethnic groups into kowtowing to their undemocratic wishes. These terrorist leaders are not invested in managing their countries well but in being dictators who tell every body else what to do.

The world knows what is going in Africa and looks away. It is not right to look away as criminals who call themselves leaders in Nigeria, Congo or Sudan destroy the people’s spirit and mismanage their countries economy. The world ought to have reached a state of development where we all understand that we are all one and that what we permit to happen to our brothers we have permitted to happen to us. If we permit the continued hijacking and mismanagement of Africa by brutal criminals, we encourage criminal behavior in Africa. For example, by permitting criminal governments to exist in Nigeria, we encourage Nigerians to become criminals. In time, Nigerians bring their criminality to the Western world.

Nigerian criminals are currently swindling Americans and Europeans. These Nigerians are heartless and will take any one for a ride, without the slightest qualms of conscience, remorse and guilt feeling.

We permitted these groups of Africans to revert to animal status and escape from civilization. We did so by looking away as the Hausa-Fulani-Yoruba clique appropriate power and use it to oppress and abuse other groups in Nigeria. As long as these thieves maintain enough order for us to obtain our oil from Nigeria, we look away and do not do something about their criminal activities. A poor Nigerian becomes a politician and within a year has multi million dollar mansions all over the world. He diverts the national treasury to his pockets, while Nigerians live like dogs in the various shanty towns that stand in place of cities.

One does not think that the world ought to look away as crime is committed in any part of the world. The suffering of any human being is our collective suffering. In a general system, what happens in any part of it affects all parts of it and all must adjust to it. The evil we have permitted in Africa is affecting decent people in all parts of the world.

We must, therefore, intervene in Africa and help to restructure it and for the first time help these people have realistic governments that are designed to address their issues, not ignore them.

The key problem of Africa is the fact that different ethnic groups were lumped together against their wishes. The solution to this problem is to fragmentalize African countries and permit each ethnic group to govern itself. This was done in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. It could be done in Africa. If done, since Africa has about 400 legitimate ethnic groups (not the thousands we are told, the idiots who band around the number thousands count dialects as separate languages) we would have four hundred nations in Africa.

Clearly, 400 nations, some of whom are too small and are not politically and economically viable, are too many countries in one continent. The next best alternative is to make each ethnic group as autonomous as is possible and then group many of them into confederations where they willingly delegate the performance of certain functions to a central government. But under no circumstances is the central government to ride roughshod over the constituting states.

In this paper, one outlined how such a confederation could be structured. One suggested that, first: we transform current African countries into confederations and later work for regional confederations, such as West Africa Confederation, East Africa Confederation, South Africa Confederation, and Central Africa Confederation. By the middle of this century, Africa ought to have no more than four confederations and by the end of this century; she ought to have become one confederation.

In the future, it is possible for all of Africa to become one true federation. But in the present, what Africa needs are confederations.

This goal the world must help Africans achieve. Failure to do so amounts to abnegating our collective responsibilities to help each other be our best.

One believes that Africans are corrupt because the world permitted them to be so. Consider Nigeria. The world looks away as members of other ethnic groups steal the revenue from a certain part of the country, the Ijaw area, and share that wealth among themselves. In doing so, Nigerians learn that it is not worthwhile to work hard and manage their affairs well. They seek short cuts to becoming wealthy.

Today, most Nigerians have become lazy and have forgotten that people in a developing country ought to work, at least, twelve hour days, to pull themselves up. When the West was being developed, folks worked more than twelve hour days.

The Hausa, Fulani and Yoruba must learn to fund their governments and develop their regions with resources from their regions and not be like locust and descend on the Niger Delta to rub it clean.

It is the function of the international community to help put Africa right, after all the international community of the nineteenth century created modern Africa at the 1884 Berlin conference. At that conference, a resurgent Germany and her iron chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck got the other powers to divide Africa among themselves. They arbitrarily fixed Africa’s current national boundaries.

We need a similar international conference to re-fix the boundaries of Africa, to correct the mess we made. This is a duty and obligation that the rest of the world owes Africans. Left alone, Africans have proven incapable of doing the right thing; they must be helped by the international community to do the right thing: restructure their countries and have each ethnic group constitute a state in confederated countries.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD(UCLA)

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Why we Must Confederate African Countries, Part I

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, washington) --- HAMLET: What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? ~~~~ Hamlet, II, ii

Human beings are ratiocinative creatures. It, therefore, confounds one that they see problems and ignore them until they explode in their faces. This is a tragic flaw in the human character. They fail to take proactive and affirmative actions to address problems that are so palpable that one could literally touch them.

African countries are problematic countries. They are artificial social constructs. None of them is an organic community. They are all artificial entities put together by European colonial powers. Those powers constructed these countries for their own good. The motivations and behaviors of Europeans are understandable.

It is not for other persons to do what is good for one, but what is good for them. Europeans had a right to construct African countries that served their interests. It was in their interests for African countries to be weak. You make your enemy weak so as to better control him.

What is not understandable is why Africans have not reconstructed their countries so as to serve their African interests. Instead, they merely complain about what Europe did wrong in constructing the countries they inherited from Europe. Why not stop complaining and fix the problems you see? What are Africans, children or adults? Children see problems and complain about them. Adults accept the problems that existence gives them and solve them, or, at least, struggle to solve them.

Those who struggle to solve their problems develop a feeling of empowerment; those who refuse to address their issues feel depowered.

Instead of bellyaching about what Europeans did wrong, Africans ought to correct the mistakes they perceive in Africa. African countries are like powder kegs waiting for someone to light a fuse on them and they explode. When any of them explodes, people are killed and the international community wrings its hands in wonder, asking why Africans cannot seem to do anything right; why can’t they seem to govern themselves well?

There have been ethnic cleansings in Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leon, Ivory Coast, Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda and in other African countries. We shall continue having these problems until we decide to behave rationally and call for a conference, pretty much like the 1884 Berlin Conference that fixed Africa’s current boundaries, and reconfigure African countries, this time, on a realistic footing that would no longer generate future conflicts.

Extant African countries were put together by European countries. These Europeans did not consult Africans but arbitrarily congregated disparate people into political conglomerations that served their imperial goals.

Let us use Nigeria as an example in our effort to explicate the problems with contemporary African countries.

In 1460, Prince Henry the Navigator built a navigation school at Lagos, Portugal. He gathered sailors and had them explore the coast of Africa. By 1487, history tells us that the first Portuguese (hence Europeans) sailed to Nigerian ports. They visited the King, Oba, of Benin. They reported that the city of Benin was comparable to what they had in Europe at that time.

For our present purposes, the salient point is that it was in the late 1400s that Europeans came into sustained contact with Africans.

Christopher Columbus visited the Americas in 1492 and, thereafter, the Transatlantic Slave Trade began. The Portuguese established slaving ports on the Coast of West Africa and arranged for coastal Africans to sell them Africans, whom they took to the new world and used to work in their plantations.

It should be observed, however, that prior to the Trans Atlantic Slave trade that Africans were already selling themselves to Arabs. History books tell us that as early as the tenth century of our common era, Africans were already selling themselves into Arab slavery. In fact, the earliest West African empires, such as Ghana, Mali and Songhai, were little more than slaving syndicates for capturing and selling Africans to Moslem Arabs. We are told that the leaders of these so-called empires (such as Askia Mohammed and Sony Ali) took thousands of slaves with them when they visited Mecca for their hajj and sold them to Arabs.

(It is safe to assume that slavery had existed for at least five hundred years in Africa before the Europeans came to the scene. Africans sold each other into slavery for, at least, a thousand years: between 900 and 1900 AD. As such, Africans developed a slaving culture and a slaving mentality. This mentality contributes to their present anti social behaviors: they do not identify with their people and, instead, see them as slaves to be sold. Today, the international community prohibits slavery; otherwise, Africans would still be selling each other. Now, they sell each other in other ways. They exploit each other. For example, they pocket the monies that would have gone into helping their fellow Africans live decently. The contemporary African has as much a callous heart as his slave selling ancestors. He needs psychological surgery to teach him that the best lived life is one that devotes itself to serving fellow human beings. Africans have a sickness of the soul and until this sickness is accepted and healed, it is doubtful that they can effectively and decently govern themselves.)

The Portuguese established a slave port at Lagos (Nigeria) in 1529. In time, Portugal, as a seafaring power, declined and was replaced by other seafaring nations, first, by the Spanish. The Spanish, in turn, fell and was replaced by the Dutch, who, in turn, were replaced by the French and English. In the meantime, whichever European power was on ascendancy used the slaving ports established by the Portuguese on the coast of West Africa, to buy African slaves.

Slavery eventually elicited opposition to it. In England, William Wilberforce led the fight to outlaw slavery. In 1807, the British House of Commons outlawed slave trade. But, for all intents and purposes, the trade continued to flourish. The British Royal Navy was, therefore, mandated to patrol the Guinea Coast, West Africa, and board and search ships in those sea lanes and ascertain that they were not involved in slave trading. British war ships searched many ships and freed many slaves. Some of the freed slaves were settled at Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Ultimately, Britain recognized that it was not enough to intercede on the high seas and free slaves but that she had to go to the source of slaves and do something about selling Africans into slavery. Thus, in the mid 1800s British war ships began making calls on West African coastal cities, trying to work out arrangement with local African chiefs that would stop them from selling their people into slavery. In 1851, the British Navy landed at Lagos and tried to negotiate with the city’s king, Oba Kosoko, to stop buying and selling slaves. The Oba refused. The British, therefore, intervened militarily and removed the Oba from office and replaced him with another king who agreed to stop the horrible trading in human beings. This arrangement eventually required the British to maintain military presence at Lagos, to make sure that slavery was not going on under the cover of darkness.

The British did the same at other West African port cities. In Nigeria, they intervened at Calaba and Bonny, notorious slave ports. The cumulative effect of these interventions is the British decision to maintain permanent presence on the Coast of West Africa, to prevent slave trading. (It is interesting that many coastal African peoples fought tooth and nail to maintain slave trade. One would think that Africans would have taken the initiative to fight slavery, but, no, others did so and they resisted the effort to stop them from selling their own people. They are still selling their own people, albeit in different forms. These people’s characters were so distorted by slavery that to the present they hardly know the difference between right and wrong. Consider corruption. It is wrong to engage in corruption. But these people do so no matter what any one tells them about it. Watching Nigerian policemen taking bribes from motorists makes them seem like despicable animals.)

Britain attempted to replace trading in slaves with trading in other goods. British business men were encouraged to trade with Africans in goods other than slaves. The idea was to give hitherto African slave traders alternative sources of income.

In Britain, the Royal Niger Company (later called United African Company, UAC) was charted by the House of Commons and encouraged to trade along the River Niger and its delta tributaries, buying local produce like Palm oil and Palm kernel from Africans.

Coastal Africans learnt to go into the interior to buy palm oil and palm kernel, rather than buy slaves and traded these for European goods at the various factories that the Royal Niger Company set up along the Niger and its creeks.

The Royal Niger Company, more or less, became a government and ruled the communities where it traded. Professors Kenneth Dike and Ajayi have written splendid books on the activities of Sir George Goldie and his Royal Niger Company; we need not rehash what those outstanding African scholars said.

The activities of other European countries in West Africa, particularly the French, led the British to decide to intervene and directly govern the area that the Royal Niger Company governed. Thus, in 1906 the British government declared a protectorate over what it called Oil Rivers. An employee of the Royal Niger Company, Frederick Lugard, was hired to run the area. His girl friend came up with the name, Nigeria, and the oil rivers was changed to Southern Nigeria. The British made similar arrangements with the Sultan of Sokoto and his emirs (Sultan is Turkish for chief and Emir is Arabic for the German word, chief) of the Northern part of what is now called Nigeria and formed the protectorate of Northern Nigeria.

In 1914, Lugard united the Southern and Northern protectorates into what became Nigeria. Lugard became the first Governor General of Nigeria and appointed lieutenant Governors to help him govern the southern and northern parts of Nigeria.

Later, Nigeria was divided into three regions: North, East and West and lieutenant governors were appointed for each region. The deputy governors reported to the Governor General, who, in turn, reported to the colonial secretary at Whitehall, London. The colonial secretary, in turn, reported to the foreign secretary, who was part of the cabinet led by the British Prime Minister.

INDIRECT RULE SYSTEM

Lugard studied the pattern of governance in Northern Nigeria and was impressed by what he saw. He decided to rule Northern Nigeria through the already established rulers of Northern Nigeria. Thus, he told the Sultan of Sokoto and his emirs (each Hausa town had an emir, a chief, that helped the Fulanis rule their conquered Hausa states…the Fulani chieftain, Othman Dan Fodio, conquered Hausaland in 1804) what to do and they, in turn, got their people to do it. This system was called the indirect rule. Essentially, Lugard, assisted by a secretariat of colonial administrators stationed at the colonial capital, Lagos, told his lieutenant Governors, stationed at Kaduna, Enugu and Ibadan, what to do, and the lieutenant governors, in turn, told their district commissioners/officers what to do and these told emirs of their districts what to do, and the emirs got their people to do what their British overlords asked them to do. In effect, Lugard ruled Nigerians through Nigerian chiefs. The advantage of this system was that it saved cost and manpower for the colonial administration. With a handful of British colonial administrators, Britain governed Nigeria.

Lugard easily replicated the system he had established in the North in Western Nigeria. In Western Nigeria, there were already existing chiefs, Obas. Lugard, his lieutenant governor and district commissioners ruled the Yorubas through the obas.

In the East, particularly in Alaigbo, the going was a bit more difficult. There were no preexisting chiefs through whom Lugard and his assistants could rule the Igbos. Lugard proceeded to invent warrant chiefs for the Igbos. He appointed chiefs among people who, traditionally, were democratic and republican and had no chiefs. (Igbo ama eze; today, some phony Igbos disregard their history and run around calling themselves chiefs.)

Lugard attempted ruling Alaigbo through his artificially invented chiefs and had a difficult time of it.

Like every thing else in this world, there are always exceptions to a general rule. Some Igbos had chiefs. Those Igbos who bordered non-Igbo people, apparently, were influenced by their neighbors and had chiefs. Igbos in Onitsha, Asaba and Abo were close to Edo people. Edos had chiefs, the chief of whom was the Oba of Benin. Thus, these Igbo towns had Obis, such as the Obi of Onitsha.

Before we get carried away talking about the “great institution of kingship in Onitsha”, however, it should be remembered that until recently, Onitsha was just a town of no more than a few hundred people. We are talking about a minor chief. For all practical purposes, therefore, Igbos had no chiefs.

Lugard retired and his successors made minor changes to the system of governance that he established in Nigeria. Nigeria had many constitutional changes, such as Arthur Richards, McPherson and so on. Suffice it to say, however, that no major changes were made to the system of governance established by Lugard until Nigeria gained her independence from Britain in 1960.

The Littleton/Lancaster House constitution that gave Nigeria Independence retained the British form of government for Nigeria, a parliamentary system with the party winning the majority at elections forming the government and its leader becoming the prime minister and its sub leaders given cabinet positions. The first independent government of Nigeria was led by the Northern People’s Congress (political party) and the Prime Minister was Sir Abubaka Tafawa Balewa.

In 1966, the Balewa government was overthrown by a military coup. The coup leader was an Igbo, Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu. Nzeogwu was quickly arrested and jailed and the most senior military officer took over governing Nigeria.

Major General Johnson Thomas Umunna Aguiyi Ironsi became the first military ruler of Nigeria. He was an Igbo. Aguiyi Ironsi toyed with the idea of giving Nigeria a unitary form of government.

In August of 1966, there was a counter coup and Ironsi was murdered and Major Yakubu Gowon, a Christian Northerner, became the head of government.

In the meantime, Igbos all over Nigeria were massacred. It is reported that over two million Igbos were killed. What was left of the Igbos in other parts of Nigeria ran to their Igbo homeland. The governor of the then Eastern region, Lt. Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, in 1967 declared his region the Republic of Biafra.

The Federal authorities engaged in what they called a police action to quell Ojukwu’s secession. That police action lasted 30 months. In the process, it is reported that three million Igbo people were killed.

In January 1970, the Federal forces, under General Olusegun Obasano, Nigeria’s present President, received the unconditional surrender of the Biafran armed forces at Owerri. Ojukwu had fled the country and his second in command, General Efiong, had the onerous task of surrendering to the victorious Nigerian forces.

In 1975, while out of the country, Gowon was replaced by General Mutala Mohammed in a bloodless coup. Mutala ruled with Obasanjo as his second in command. An attempted military coup by Major Danjuma killed Mutala and Obasanjo became the head of government of Nigeria.

Obasanjo wrote a constitution for Nigeria and handed power over to an elected civilian government in 1979.

Alhaji Shehu Shagari became the first executive President of Nigeria in 1979. Four years later, Shagari won re-election. His government was allegedly characterized by corruption and graft, and General Buhari, on that account, overthrew it.

Buhari, by most accounts, was a man of probity. So far, no one has accused him of corruption. Nevertheless, he was replaced by General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida.

Babangida, the maradona of Nigerian politics, handed power to a civilian, who was quickly dispatched by General Sani Abacha.

Abacha allegedly instituted the most corrupt government in Nigeria. He died while in office and his assistant, General Abdul Salami replaced him.

Abdul Salami wrote a constitution for Nigeria in 1999. That year, an election was held and Obasanjo and his People’s Democratic Party won the election. Obasanjo became the president of Nigeria. Obasanjo is still in office (September, 2005).

The purpose of this paper is not to provide the reader with a thorough history of Nigeria. The paper’s goal is to reflect on the type of government that suits Nigeria and other countries in Africa. If the reader is interested in a more detailed history of Nigeria, he or she should read books on Nigeria’s history.

THE MULTI ETHNIC REALITY OF NIGERIA

What is the reality of Nigeria? It is that it is an artificial country. Nigeria was put together by the British. The British did not consult the people living in Nigeria before they forcefully agglomerated them into one political entity.

Nigeria is composed of Hausas (Hausa is actually not a tribe; it is a Creole language, mix of Arab and African, spoken by those Northern tribes that had accepted Islam as their religion, and who were greatly influenced by Arab culture; they tend to have a unified, Moslem based worldview, and, for all practical purposes, may as well be considered an ethnic group), Yorubas, Igbos, Ijaws, Edos, Efiks, Urobos, Isikiris, Tivis, Kanuris, Fulanis, Bornu and many minor tribes.

These tribes, ethnic groups, call them what you like, are different from one another. They were forced to live with one another against their will. This, then, is the major problem of Nigeria. Different groups of human beings were forced against their will to live in the same country.

Generally, some of these tribes detest others. However, for some reasons, they are compelled to live together. As noted, in 1967 the Igbos seceded from Nigeria. The Gowon led Hausa-Fulani government at Lagos went to war with Biafra and successfully defeated it. Why did the Hausa-Fulani and their Yoruba ally go to war with the Igbos? Was it for their love of the Igbos?

Biafra encompassed the Niger Delta region, the region that produced most of the oil that provided the revenue with which Nigeria survived. Therefore, Biafra had to be defeated so that the Hausas, Fulanis and Yorubas (the triple alliance that fought the war with the Igbos) would have access to oil revenue.

The Nigerian civil war was, in effect, an economic war. The people from the North and West needed to get their hands on Niger Delta oil and had to defeat the Igbos so as to do so.

Today, revenue from oil supplies over 90% of the money that funds the Nigerian federal government, the Hausa and Yoruba governments and some other governments in Nigeria.

The men from the North and West essentially keep Nigeria together for economic reasons: they need to get their hands on the oil revenue that comes from the Niger Delta. They could care less for the Ijaw who live in the Delta. They, of course, in a Machiavellian vein manipulate the Ijaw and tell them that their neighbors, the Igbos, would like to take over their oil. Thus, the Ijaw, who are, in fact, a mix of Igbos and themselves, see the Igbos as their mortal enemies and then run to the Hausas to protect them. The Hausas protect them alright.

Money from Ijawland’s oil is used to develop Northern and other parts of Nigeria, while Ijawland is ignored. Ijawland is so devastated by oil drilling and burning of gas that it literally looks like denuded moonscape.

What we have in Nigeria is a collection of odd bedfellows who, for the sake of oil money, agree to tolerate each other. These people hate one another with passion but know enough to realize that they need the oil revenue from certain parts of Nigeria. Thus, like honorable thieves, they agree to get along with one another, provided that they share the loot from Ijawland.

There is no doubt whatsoever that what holds that strange country called Nigeria together is oil money. If there was no oil in Biafra, Northerners would have gladly seceded from Nigeria and not give a hoot for Igboland. It has been reported that the original intention of the August 1966 counter coup was to secede the North from the rest of Nigeria. Apparently, the coup plotters wised up to the fact that they needed revenue from the Niger Delta, changed their minds and decided to keep Nigeria one.

As long as these strange fellows have oil money to share, they would probably continue to agree to be in the same country. But when that oil runs dry, Nigeria probably would disintegrate. Nigeria probably will not last a second longer than oil lasts.

We have established that the political entity called Nigeria is the invention of Britain. We have further established that the British put together different people who did not want to live together and forced them to live together.

The various ethnic groups are radically different from each other, some as night is from day. The Hausas are Moslem. The Igbos are Christian. The Hausa had established a feudal political structure before the British came to their land. The Hausas seem to have adjusted to their feudal social structure. On the other hand, the Igbos are very individualistic, democratic and republican in orientation. Before the advent of the Europeans in Alaigbo, Igbos did not have kings ruling them. The Igbos do not like the Hausa feudal social- political structure.

How can these two very different people coexist in the same political arrangement? They cannot do so without conflict. The Igbo detests what he sees as the Hausa feudal system of governance and the Hausa does so regarding Igbo republicanism. The result is conflict between the two groups. So far, this conflict is masked by the preponderance of power that the Hausas have.

The Hausas control the Nigerian military (with second fiddle role performed by the Yoruba). For practical purposes, the Hausa-Fulani-Yoruba military axis overwhelm the Igbo with their superior military power and, in effect, terrorize them into going along with the pseudo political entity called Nigeria.

The Igbos are a terrorized people. The men from the North and West use military power to intimidate the Igbos into going along with the government of Nigeria. Without force holding them down, the Igbos would break away from Nigeria, today.

(One may ask whether it is right to terrorize a group of people? Hasn’t human civilization gotten to a point where terrorism is no longer tolerated as instrument of governance? If terrorism is wrong, why does the rest of the world keep quiet while a group of human beings are intimidated with brutal force? Moslem terrorism in Europe and North America is fought by the West. Why does the West permit Moslem terrorism in Nigeria?)

One is searching for a political arrangement that gives all Nigerians freedom to be themselves and not intimidated persons.

In Ones view, it is necessary for the various ethnic groups that exist in Nigeria to come together in a national conference and renegotiate the parameters of their continued existence as a nation. In all likelihood, they would choose a confederation, not total divorce from each other.

Let us restate the obvious. The various ethnic groups in Nigeria are different from one another. Each of them ought to be allowed to develop along its natural lines. No one ethnic group should impose its worldview on the others. Each group ought to have the opportunity to pursue its destiny, without others interfering in it.

At present, the various ethnic groups are forced to live together. The more powerful ones impose their values on others and these others silently resent being imposed on. A sort of Carthaginian peace prevails in Nigeria. But we all know that such peace does not last forever.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a mask for Russian empire, comprised of sixteen republics. In 1991, those sixteen groups separated from Russia. Within today’s Russia Federation are many ethnic groups, these suppressed by the Russian people. Some of these ethnic groups are agitating for freedom. Chechnya is fighting for independence. By and by, the various ethnic groups in Russia will obtain a measure of independence from Russia. Until Russia has the foresight to give some independence to these people, it must remain an unstable empire.

In Yugoslavia, President Tito used iron hand to hold six different nations together. These nations: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo-Albania etc are now running their own governments, but not before Yugoslavia had under went political and military convulsions.

Czechoslovakia saw the hand writing on the wall and peacefully separated into its two component parts, Czech and Slovakia republics.

The English used force to unify the disparate people that lived on Britain. The various Celtic groups were forced to accept the ruler ship of the English (Germans). But, today, the suppressed groups are agitating for a measure of Independence. The Welch, the Scotts and the Irish are asking for independence. Tony Blair, the astute British Prime Minister, has read the hand writing on the wall and realized that you cannot suppress a people forever and ever hence devolved the government and gave the Welch and Scotts a measure of independence.

After over a thousand years of being subjugated, the Celts of Britain are today resurrecting their “dead languages and cultures”. This goes to show that you simply cannot suppress a people forever.

In the United States of America, the Anglo Saxon elements employed superior force to displace the Indians and relegated them to reservations. In these ghettos, the Indians are given alcohol to drink themselves to untimely death. Genocide is being perpetrated against Native Americans, and the world keeps silent.

Nevertheless, if what we know of history remains constant, American Indians will some day come to their own. In the not too distant future, the various Indian tribes will probably rise up and become self governing entities.

THE MERITS OF CONFEDERATION

We have posited that Nigeria and most contemporary African countries are artificial social constructs. We have established that these countries essentially constitute forced marriages. Like in all such social arrangements, those in them itch to get out. In most cases, they are held together by brute force. In the case of Nigeria, military force is used to terrorize the Igbos into staying in a political arrangement that they detest.

What is the alternative to terrorist African states? Is total divorce called for in Nigeria?

The various ethnic groups in Nigeria are often too small and weak to go it alone. Independently, most of them are not viable political and or economic entities. Somehow, they need each other to survive.

The real question is not dissolving Nigeria but finding a better form of association for the current strange bed fellows called Nigerians. Since these people need each other and yet do not get along with each other, one believes that the best workable political arrangement for them is a confederation.

We need to retain the fiction called Nigeria but reorganize and make it realistic to its multi-ethnic composition.

Each of the twenty ethnic groups in Nigeria ought to become a state, a state in the real sense of that term; a state that rules itself. The various states then should cooperate with each other in a confederation of states called Nigeria.

The states should delegate certain functions to the central government, such as foreign affairs and military control. But beyond the specific areas given to the central government, each of the constituent states ought to govern itself in every other way, including having 100% control of its resources.

(The Ijaw ought to have 100% control of the oil revenue that comes from her area. Ijaw indigenes, like every one else, should pay income taxes to the confederal government. The confederal government ought to be able to impose no more than 25% tax on the individual’s annual income, and use such revenue to fund its activities.)

There should be the following states in the Confederation of Nigeria: Hausa State, Yoruba State, Igbo State, Edo State, Efik State, Ijaw State, Tivi State, Kanuri State, Bornu State. The minor tribes should be grouped into states. The total number of states in Nigeria should not exceed twenty.

The critical requirement is that each of the major ethnic groups constitutes a state and has the opportunity to govern its affairs, unimpeded by other ethnic groups.

Each state must include all those who speak a unique language, different dialects not withstanding. Alaigbo State, for example, must stretch from Ikwerre (Egwuocha/Port Harcourt) to Abo, from Arochukwu to Ida/Nsuka, with its capital at Owerri, the Igbo heartland.

One visualizes the state structure to be as follows: a unicameral legislature (not bicameral legislature, to reduce cost and avoid duplication of functions), not to exceed fifty elected legislators, who serve fiver year terms, not to exceed six terms, for a total of 30 years; a Premier selected from the dominant party in the state legislature, who is the chief executive officer of the state; a governor who is the nominal head of the state and signs bills passed by the legislature into law, an independent judiciary (High Court of seven judges, headed by the state chief judge, district courts, and town courts).

The state political structure is replicated at the district level: A district council of nine members, a district executive, elected for a five year term, two term limits, who heads the executive branch; a district court with district judge of first instance.

Finally, a town/city government: town/city council of seven members and a mayor heading the executive branch and a town magistrate court.

Each state is to have no more than fifty districts (and district governments).

The states would be responsible for delivering education and health services to their citizens. Each state must provide all its citizens with free six year primary education, free six year secondary education, free four year university education for at least one third of the graduating students from secondary schools and free four years of technical education for all the other graduates of secondary schools. Graduate education should be for the top ten percent of university graduates (a two year masters’ degree program and another three years for the doctor of science degree program for the top two percent of graduate students.)

Towns/cities are to be required to provide preschool education for children from age two to five…here working women drop off their children in the morning and pick them up after work, with such centers remaining open from six in the morning to seven in the evening. The town must find the resources, through property and sales taxes and licensing fees etc to fund this and other services.

Each state is to obtain its revenue independently from the confederal government. It is to tax its citizens and seek other revenue streams with which it funds its activities. Under no circumstances is a state to be financially dependent on the central government.

The confederal government is to be composed of a legislature (at least two delegates from each state, not to exceed overall 100 legislators for the country), legislators serve five year terms, not to exceed six terms, 30 years altogether; a prime minister elected by the legislators from among themselves; who serves a term of five years, but not to exceed two terms, ten years; an elected but nominal president who serves one term of ten years, the president must be of retirement age, a 70 year old national achiever, say, the best scientist in the country; an independent judiciary with the usual three tiers: Supreme Court of not more than thirteen justices, one of whom is the chief justice, appellate courts of three judges and district courts of single judges; each state having at least one district court, and a group of states constituting an appellate area.

What one visualizes for Nigeria is a situation where each of the ethnic groups in it is essentially governing itself while delegating certain powers to the national government. This arrangement would give each ethnic group sufficient sense of independence and leg room to be itself. This system will work for Nigeria.

In fact, it is the only system that will work for Nigeria. Not only will it work for Nigeria, it will work for other multiethnic countries in Africa. One advocates that multi ethnic countries in Africa adopt confederal systems of government. African countries, in fact, do not have any choice but to do this.

If in the future Africans freely choose to become federations with strong central governments, rather than confederations with weak central governments, that are welcome. In the present, confederating the present African countries seem the only way to avert some groups dominating others, and those dominated resenting it, with the result being intermittent civil wars in Africa.

DISADVANTAGES OF CONFEDERATIONS

Whereas confederal government seems the best government for extant African countries, this type of government tends to have inherent weaknesses. It is because of its weaknesses that the United States of America gave it up. It should be recalled that after its war of independence, America first adopted a confederal constitution (Articles of Confederation) and later found that system unworkable. Essentially, the Articles of Confederation made the central government too weak and the states too strong. The states did not have to accept direction from the center. There was no president or judiciary; congress was not even standing but met occasionally. This arrangement was particularly detrimental to the country’s military so that enemies easily walked all over America.

In light of the inherent problems in confederations, one made some changes in them by insisting on a standing national legislature, nominal president, executive prime minister, unified military command at the central level and the center’s control of foreign relations.

Each state must have control of its own police force (the central government must have its own police and additionally a secret police).

We do not have to deny some of the inherent problems of confederal governments, but with good effort, confederations can be made to work, after all they work in Switzerland. At any rate, it seems the only alternative that would avert Africans penchant for mutual mayhem.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD(UCLA)

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September 02, 2005

The World is our Idea: So, let us Make it Better, Part II

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- When you return your thinking, mind, to the condition that God created it (unified), not what you have made of it (separated), you have reconciled the ego and Christ, the earth and heaven. You have resurrected from death (ego is metaphoric death). You are reborn in God.

THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST TO THE WORLD

Initially, God created you as Christ, unified spirit, and you died when you identified with separated ego, and came to this world. Now, you have permitted the ego, the spirit of separation and rebellion, in you to die. You have permitted Christ to be reborn in you. Christ has come a second time to you. You are now living in New Jerusalem, New Israel; you are now at heaven’s gate, helping those of your brothers and sisters still sleeping to awaken and join you. When all children of God resurrect from death (ego state), the world ends.

Christ comes back to the world one at a time. Christ is reborn in each of us when one jettisons the separated ego and reawakens to one’s unified self. Christ will not come to the world from the cloud, as folks believe, but come to us, one person at a time, when that person knows that he is the unified son of God and lives as such, loving and forgiving all people.

LAST JUDGMENT
Each of us must perform the last judgment on the world. This means that each of us must make a decision to let go of the separated ego self and re-embrace his unified self. When a son of God lets go of the ego and its world, he has passed the last judgment on the world, he has overcome the world and moves on to a different world. The last judgment is not going to be done at the same time for all of us, but one at a time, when each of us let go of the ego and accepts his real self, the Christ self, when he replaces hate with love, anger with forgiveness.

THE END OF THE WORLD

How will the world end? The world ends when all people have resumed living as their real selves. Each person experiences the Holy Instant at a time and when all have done so, all children of God would be at heaven’s gate. They would be living in the real world and having a happy dream. Then, suddenly, the gate of heaven opens and all of us know that we are one with God and with each other. We disappear into God and he disappears into us, each not to be lost but to be expanded. There will still be individual us, but now we all know ourselves as unified with God and all people. We all suddenly experience the material universe seems to disappear and experience our selves as unified spirit.

Where would the material universe disappear to? The world of separation will disappear to where it came from, which is nowhere. As Dr Schucman sees it, the material universe does not exist and has never existed for a second. It exists as in a dream. If the dreamer awakens from his dream, the world that had seemed real to him seems to disappear. It did not disappear, for it had not existed.

(Dr Schucman’s eschatology, of course, is different from what physics tells us. According to the present conjecture of physics, the world came into being fifteen billion years ago, in a big bang. The world is expected to end in either a Fiery End or Big Chill. We are told that our sun has enough energy to last four more billion years, after which it would burn itself out. First it expands into a supernova and incorporates its nine planets and then bursts, shatters into smithereens and dust is spread in space. Perhaps, out of that star dust new stars and planets are formed? But, ultimately, science expects the material universe to end in either a fiery end, where every thing collapses into every thing else, or cold end where the galaxies, stars and planets speed off too far away from each other and die cold deaths. I happen to accept the scientific conjecture of the fate of the universe. If so, what do I make of Dr. Schucmna’s poetry? My mind is capable of simultaneously holding ideas and reality. Her poetry, somehow appeals to me, while I have my eyes fixed on the reality of science.)

Jesus became aware that this world is a dream. He was attacked and killed. He did not defend himself. He forgave those who seemed to have killed him. He loved his murderers. But since there was no world and his murderers were mere dream figures, figures produced by his sleeping, dreaming mind, in forgiving and loving his seeming murderers, he merely loved himself. In loving all people, Jesus experienced perfect love for all people hence perfect love for him self.

The experience of perfect love, perfect union, made Jesus return to the awareness of unified spirit, God, heaven. As it were, this world disappeared from his awareness and he continues to live in spirit.

But since he knows that the rest of us are still in sleep and dream this world, Jesus, undertook to return to this world to help us awaken from our own sleep. If we pray to him, ask him to help us, Dr Schucman says that he will do so.

Where is Jesus? Dr Schucman says that he is unified with our true self. Christ is one and simultaneously infinite in numbers.

Jesus, the separated ego, has died and Christ the unified self lives in us. In our own true self, Christ, Jesus Christ lives.

Thus, Jesus Christ is where each of us is, as part of our true, unified self. Ask him to guide you in lieu of asking the Holy Spirit to guide you and he would do so.

Jesus so completely identified with the Holy Spirit that he now deputizes for him. Jesus is not God but he acts on behalf of God.

When you let go of your separated self, ego, and embrace Christ, via perfect love and forgiveness, you, too, will act for God.

SALVATION

What are salvation, healing, redemption, and deliverance? All these terms mean one thing: to return to the awareness of ones true self, which is unified self. One is unified with God and all people. To know so, one must love and forgive at all times. The saved child of God loves at all times and forgives all those who seem to have wronged him.

What is his reward? The saved child of God lives in peace and happiness. To the extent that you love and forgive all people, to that extent do you experience peace and joy?

Do you feel peaceful and happy? If you do, then you are a loving person. If not, you do not love other people, you do not forgive other people; you do bear grudges and grievances and seek vengeance and revenge for the wrongs done to you.

You do not forgive other people, and since all people are you, this means that you do not forgive yourself.

If you do not forgive other people, hence do not forgive yourself, you do not feel peaceful and happy (for, as you do unto others, you do to you…if you judge others, you must judge yourself, if you hate others, you must hate yourself, if you do not forgive others, you do not forgive yourself, for others are you, literally, and what you do to them, you do to you, and what you do to you, you do to them…blame other people means blame yourself; blame yourself means blame other people; so, neither blame yourself nor other people; forgive your self and others their mistakes).

SIN, PUNISHMENT AND INNOCENCE

The unforgiving mind thinks that he is a sinner and that other people are sinners. For what one thinks of ones self is what one thinks of other people. He then denies that he sees himself as a sinner and projects his self-view to other people and sees them as sinners and wants them punished. He wants God to punish others but God knows that he is all people hence to punish any one is to punish himself. God does not punish other people hence does not punish himself. Without waiting for God to punish sinners, which he will not do, we, egos, undertake to punish them for him. We punish them and since they are us, we punish our self.

Are you a sinner? If you did separate from God, then, you are a sinner. But separation is impossible. The Son of God cannot separate from his father; he cannot disobey God’s will. He merely dreams that his wishes had replaced his father’s will.

Reality remains as God created it: unified. We have not separated from God. Because we have not separated from God, we have not sinned. All the seemingly evil we do on earth are done in a dream. What is done in a dream has not been done. Therefore, we are innocent.

We have not done what we see ourselves do on earth, in the dream. White folks, on earth, in the dream of separation, do discriminate against black folks. They do so in the dream. In reality, they have not done so. They remain as God created them, Holy, sinless, guiltless and innocent. Despite black people’s wish that white folks be guilty hence punished by God, they are innocent and will not be punished by God.

Despite your wish that Hitler be guilty and punished, he is not guilty and has not been punished and will not be punished. When you experience Holy Instant, Hitler is there in heaven with all the so-called saints. Hitler merely entered your dream and acted the role of a murderer in it, a role your dream called for him to act. If he seemed to have murdered you, you are immortal and were not murdered by him. Forgive him. Love him. If, in the first place, you had loved him, he would not have called for your love by attacking you.

If you want to prevent future Hitler’s in this world, love all people, for, if you love people, they would not feel unloved, hence would not attack you as a violent call for your love.

DISCUSSION
Is Dr Schucman correct? I leave it to you to decide. I have tried to explicate her philosophy. If you want a more thorough presentation of it then read her book. But I must warn you that she wrote in a convoluted, highfalutin, gabbled gook manner. Her book is written in pretentious Shakespearean verse. Apparently, she read Shakespeare and tried to imitate his style of writing in her own writing.

I did not come to this world to teach what dead white men and women teach, or what oriental religions teach. I am here to teach what seems true to me. I am an African and can only teach what I believe is useful to Africans.

What seems true to me? As of today, what seems true to me is that everything in the seeming external world is my idea. Of course, the external world seems to exist apart from me. I assume that the external world has temporary existence apart from me but that ultimately it does not exist apart from me. In the here and now, I operate as if the external world seems apart from me. I study it in a scientific manner and use technology to adapt to it.

Whereas the world seems apart from me, that world is represented in my mind as ideas. I do not know what the external world is; all I have are ideas of it. The world is what I think that it is; the world is what other people think that it is and what we collectively think that it is.

Each of us is operating in relative ignorance. Society is operating in relative ignorance. Science is still in its infancy. We have only begun to know the truth about the nature of matter and energy.

In the meantime, we have ignorant ideas of what the world is. Each of us acts in accordance with his (ignorant) idea of what other people and the world are.

I see you. I have an idea of who I think that you are. That idea is colored by my past, my history, learning and experiences. My idea of who you are cannot be who you are, in fact. Nevertheless, I react towards you as I see you.

I have an interpretation of who you are and respond to my own interpretation of who I think that you are. That is to say that I am not really responding to your real self but to what I make of you; I am responding to my own projections.

You do the same to me. You see me, you have ideas of who you think that I am and behave towards me accordingly.

All perception is based on interpretation of what seems real. All interpretations are flawed. At best, ones perception is 90% accurate. One is always 10% wrong in ones perception of other people.

Still, one relates to other people in light of ones perception of them. As long as we live in a perceptual world, we seem condemned to false perception and response to each other.

Is there no way out of this dilemma? As long as we live in the world of space, time and matter, past, present and future, we must live in the world of perception. In the world of perception, we must color what we see with our past. We must distort perception. We must respond to other people inappropriately. So what shall we do?

Those who have experienced eternal union, folks like Jesus Christ, say that there is a way to purify our perception, so that we see people, a bit, as they are in fact, but not hundred percent as they are. As long as we are in the world of perception, we can never know people as they are, no matter how much we purify our perception and try to see people correctly. The mere fact that we are perceiving people, that is, interpreting who they are with our past learning, we are distorting who they, in fact, are.

To know people as they are, we have to return to the non-perceptual world, to unified spirit. At present, we are on earth, not in heaven. We are in the world of separation, space, time and matter.

Jesus Christ tells us that if we love and forgive all people, ourselves included, that we shall have purified our perception. Love and forgiveness purify our thinking, mind. Whatever we do out of love and forgiveness, we have made holy. Whatever we do out of hate, we have made separated. (Holy is contraction of the word whole, to be holy is to be whole, that is, unified, returned to our original and true self, unified. To be separated, unholy, not whole, is to live in a false state. Nevertheless, holy, whole also means sanctified, innocent, guiltless and sinless.)

While still in the world of perception, hence still dreaming that we are separated, if we see people as unified with us and love and forgive them all, we would see them a bit correctly, as they are.

In their reality, people are love. Love and forgive them. If you consistently do so, people no longer look ugly in your perception. If you forgive and love a person, he suddenly looks beautiful in your sight. If you hate a person, he looks ugly.

Let us see how this works. In America, white folks generally discriminate against black folks. Aware of discrimination against those who looked like me, I hated white folks. I looked at them with hateful eyes. In those hateful lenses, they seemed ugly to me. As a matter of fact, when I was in my twenties, the life and death of a white person meant nothing to me. I saw whites as criminals and as lower in evolution than animals. Their death elicited no sad emotion from me, not one bit. I saw them as plagues and their death was good riddance.

But I began to practice forgiveness and love. I try to forgive all people, whites and blacks. I forgive racism and discrimination and follow that up with teachings on how to live a non- racist life. In so far that I have forgiven whites their racist behaviors, I tend to see them as human beings. If I am in a totally forgiving mode, a loving mode, all human beings, black and white, look beautiful to me.

Hatred makes the world look ugly; love makes the world look beautiful.

Forgiveness does not mean tolerance of racism. The Holy Spirit is the correction principle. He did not come to the world to perpetuate its mistakes, but to correct them. He is here to reinvent the world, to show us how to live a more beautiful life.

The Holy Spirit asks us to love and forgive one another. What this means is that the Holy Spirit asks the racist to love his fellow human beings. As a person who identifies with the Holy Spirit, one must teach racists to love and not hate any one.

The teacher of love does not condone hatred. He insists on love and where he sees non-loving behaviors, such as racist behaviors, he teaches those involved to become loving persons.

A good teacher models his teaching. If you value love, be a loving person. If you live a loving life, the hateful racist would learn from your peaceful and joyful life style and love other people. When we all love one another, the world becomes a lovely and happy dream.

FEAR VERSUS LOVE BASED THINKING AND BEHAVING

Dr Schucman made a clear distinction between what she called fear versus loved based thinking and behaving. She said that when we separated from God, from other people and from our real self, we developed fear. We developed fear of punishment. We believed that we did something bad and that God and other people, those we separated from, are after us, trying to catch us and punish us. To live on earth, which is to be separated from God, therefore, is to live in fear. To be human, the lady doctor tells us, is to be fearful. She says that to be human is to be fearful, feel guilty and expect punishment from God and other people.

Do you feel fearful and guilty and expect punishment?

The lady doctor tells us that there are only two emotions, love and fear. She said that God made the emotion of love and that we, human beings, made the emotion of fear. Love is the emotion that unifies; fear is the emotion that separates. We do separate from those we fear. If you feel that some one is endangering your life, you do fear him and separate from him. In that sense, fear is a means of maintaining separation. On the other hand, if one feels that other people support one’s life, one does move towards them. We unify with those who love us and those we love; thus, love is union making. God being union, the affect he made is love and the ego being separation, the affect it made is fear.

Please note that Dr Schucman gave a different interpretation to the origin of fear. Normally, we tend to see fear as a biological mechanism evolved by all animal organisms to alert them to danger that could harm and or destroy them. All animals, with the exception of a few, do feel fearful when they perceive threat to their lives and respond with fight or flight, to save their lives. Fear has biological markers, such as fast heart rate, rapid breathing, taut muscles, and rapid movements in the nervous system, quick thinking and so on. Despite these seeming verifiers that fear is biological in origin, Dr Schucman tells us that fear is psychological in origin, and that it is caused by our sense of wrong doing, and guilt. To her, the act of separation from God is tantamount to Catholicism’s idea of Original sin. As Catholics see it, we sinned against God and live in sin. That existential sin is rooted in the allegorical act of disobedience of Adam and Eve in the mythical Garden of Eden. Schucman gives a different interpretation to the original sin: separation from God. As long as we live in separation, that is, on earth, we live in sin (a sin that has not been committed, since, at no time, she tells us, are we separated from God.)

Dr Schucman tells us that the emotion that we are operating under shapes how we think and behave, that if we are in love we think loving thoughts, that is, unifying thoughts, and that if we are in fear, that we think fear based thoughts, which are separating thoughts.

It is self evident that we tend to think in a certain manner when we are under the influence in fear. When one is afraid, one imagines all sorts of horrible things happening to one. One exaggerates all the bad things that could harm and or destroy one. If you are afraid of your boss, you imagine that he or she is going to fire you from your job; if you are afraid of your teacher, you image that she is going to give you bad grades; if you are afraid of your spouse; you imagine that she is going to leave you. Fear produces uncertainty in human beings.

What fear makes people think are, generally speaking, unreal thought? However, if people persist in their fearful thinking, they tend to generate what they fear. For example, if you feel that your boss will fire you from your job, though he was not thinking about doing so, you will eventually do something that would make him fire you. Fear of your boss makes you put a distance between the two of you and not relate well to him, hence make him not to trust you. Not trusting you, he may find it easy to fire you from your job. (You fear your boss and coworkers because you do not like the job you are currently doing; you want to be fired from that job and will be fired. You want other people to fire you, so that you would gratify your desire to feel like a victim unto whom others do bad things. If you had courage, you would quit the job that you hate and go seek and do a job that you truly love doing and do it well, so that nobody would sack you from it.)

Fear produces what is feared. Perhaps, it does so by generating some sort of negative energy that communicates to other people that you want to experience what you are afraid of? If you fear punishment, you will eventually be punished, so that you experience what you fear.

Apparently, what you fear is what you want to experience. Think about that: if you fear discrimination, you want to experience discrimination; if you fear rape, you want to experience rape and if you fear failure, you want to experience failure.

The universe gives you the opportunity to experience what you fear. Why? So that you learn that even if what you fear happened that it would not destroy you. Discrimination does not weaken black people, in fact, it makes them stronger human beings; rape makes women see men for what they are, fear driven little boys exercising powerless power over women; failure makes one learn that one can only fail if one accepts permanent failure; as long as one has not given up, one is not a failure.

In my experience, exaggerated fear is generally found in those who believe that they are in charge of their lives and are in control of their environment. Those who do not believe in a higher power being in charge of their lives tend to be more fearful than those who believe in God protecting them. The fact of the matter is that the physical and social environments are so vast and powerful that no human being understands them, much less has control over them. Therefore, to believe that one has control over the environment is an illusion and generates fear, for deep down one understands that one does not understand even one percent of the contingencies of life affecting one, for good or bad, and has no control over any thing. If one leaves control to God, does ones best and accepts uncertainty and ambiguity one tends to experience less fear. This behavior does not mean that, in fact, God exists. To science, God is an illusion (See Freud’s Future of an Illusion.)

In my experience, human beings tend to attempt using religion as magical wand with which they try solving the problems of this world. Magical thinking is thinking that attempts to solve the problems of this world in a superstitious and unrealistic manner. Scientific thinking, on the other hand, tries to understand problems, as they are, and solve them realistically, with technologies.

I have noticed that some of the folks who call themselves Students of A Course in Miracles, who adopt Dr Schucman’s philosophy, tend to use the Course as magical tool to make life bend to their ego wishes. Their egos attempt to use the book and its ideas to control the world. Of course, the world is objective and has its laws independent of the individual’s wishes; hence, magical thinking does not yield the desired results.

If you want to be rich, you have to earn it the old fashioned way: work for it (or, if you are the antisocial, criminal type, steal it). You cannot become rich by merely wishing to be rich and sitting around and asking the Holy Spirit to give you money. Life does not work that way. To sit around doing nothing and expecting the good things of this life to drop into your laps is the best recipe to become poor. Expecting God to help one is magical thinking and paralyzes those who do so; what works is helping ones self and trusting that a higher power is working with one (even if that belief is an illusion, it gives one psychological security).

Most prayers to God are magical efforts to control the environment and predict the future; it does not work. Only science and technology works.

In society, we know that other people can harm us. Therefore, we construct laws and governments to enforce them. Laws and governments are what protect us from each other’s depredations. America, for example, is a law and ordered society. Most Americans obey the laws their leaders make. They, therefore, feel safe and secure. Their laws protect them. On the other hand, many Africans do not obey their laws; and, therefore, do not feel secure.

Of course, there are limits to the protection offered by law and order. To believe that the civil authorities totally protect one is magical thinking. The fact is that if a murderer wants to murder one, he can do so, despite the protection of the legal authorities. If terrorists are bent on sacrificing their lives to their crazy gods and strap bombs around them and walk into crowded rooms and blow themselves up, they will kill those around them. Simply stated, this life of ours has contingencies that are beyond our control and beyond the control of law and order authorities. Therefore, one must find a way to trust in a higher power to protect one and, in the meantime, resign one’s self to the fact that in our world seeming random acts of violence and kindness do occur; one is not in charge of the world.

THE EGO IS NOTHING AND WITHOUT BELIEF IN IT NOTHING IS HAPPENING

Dr Schucman says that the sense of separated I, the ego, is nothing and that it does not even exist. The self that we currently think that we are, she says, is a dream self. A dream self is not a real self. As she sees it, our sense of self, the separated ego, does not exist in reality but in a dream setting.

The ego is a self that must be believed to be real to seem real. If it is believed as real and defended (with the various ego defense mechanisms that psychoanalysis described, and with fear and guilt) it seems real to one. But if it is not believed, it does not seem real. In fact, if we totally withdraw belief in it and do not defend it, when it is attacked, become forgiving and defenseless, the ego disappears into the nothingness from whence it was conjured from.

If you do not identify with the ego, nothing is happening to you. Consider. If you identify with a proud ego, for example, you might feel insulted by other people’s disrespectful behaviors. On the other hand, if you are not a proud ego, what other people do to humiliate you could only make you laugh. White folks, for example, seem invested in degrading black people. If a black man is proud, he feels humiliatable by white folks. But if he is not proud, he is merely amused by the efforts of white egos to reduce black egos to second class citizenship.

The mature black ego sees the dance of white and black Americans with detachment. In this dance, whites act as sadists and blacks act as masochists; the one inflicts pain and humiliation on the other and the other accepts it.

If a black person jettisons his ego he can get out of the vicious dance of white and black in America.

What is the point? It is only if one identifies with the ego that one experiences the slings and arrows of this world. In fact, if one lets go of the desire to live in body as a separated self, as Buddha corrected noted twenty five hundred years ago, one would not even feel fear. It is desire to live as a separated self that produces all the sufferings of this world. If one gives up desire or desire with detachment, and not be invested in what is desired, one tends to be less affected by disappointments and suffer less.

IDEALISTIC REALIST

I am an idealistic realist; a person who simultaneously accepts the philosophy of idealism and materialism. I am not interested in escaping into some wooly metaphysics. I have my feet solidly planted on this earth. I do not escape from the exigencies of this world into some imaginary ideal world.

Nevertheless, I think that there is a better world. But I will cross that bridge when I get to it. In the meantime, I want to improve the known world, our world.

What does this means in reality? Most things in the world seem, at least, temporarily, out there. But in as much as my response to them is dependent on my perception, my idea of what the things I perceive means, I can change my ideas about everything out there.

I can change my ideas about you. If hitherto I see you as bad, I can choose to see you as good. If I choose to see you as good and respond to you accordingly, I contribute to a peaceful and joyous world. For example, I was raised to see Hausas and Fulanis as bad, for, during the 1960s, they killed my people, the Igbos. I have changed my mind about them. I choose to see them as good persons, but persons, who, like me, can and do make mistakes. I choose to believe that they can learn from their mistakes. I have forgiven them. This means that I Love them.

In return, I ask them to love all Nigerians. If we all love and forgive one another, we contribute to peace and happiness in Nigeria.

What is the point? The point is that in as much as the world is my idea, my perception of it, my conception of it, my interpretation of it, I can choose to have a different idea of what the world means to me. I can change my ideas of who I am, who other people are and what the world means. I can choose to love and forgive all people. Where I had chosen hate and anger, I can now choose forgiveness and love.

I take the consequences of my choice. An unforgiving attitude results in mutual attacks, tension, conflicts and wars. A forgiving and loving approach to people results in a peaceful and happy world.

A SERVICE ORIENTATION TO LIFE

Choosing love means doing something to help a suffering world. A loving person does not stand by and see other people suffer; he seeks ways to alleviate their suffering. I choose a life of service to all human beings.

There is a pay off from serving all people. In serving all people, I feel peaceful and happy and indeed wealthy.

How do I serve people? One serves people with the talents that the universe has given one. I do not have money to give any one. What do I have? I have knowledge of human nature. I serve people by teaching them the right way to live. The right way to live is to love and forgive all. I serve people by teaching people to love and forgive all people.

I do so through my writing and my actions towards every human being I come into contact with.

I know that most people try to live out of their false ego, separated selves. People are normal, neurotic or psychotic, all of which means that they are not healthy, as Karen Horney said; they are not healthy because they are trying to live out of their false, ideal separated selves.

The ego self is the selfish self. I teach people that to be peaceful and happy that they must let go of their identification with the ego, separated self and identify with the Christ unified self.

Our real self is the unified self, who is spirit. Christ is love. To identify with the real self, hence with Christ is to love all people and teach them to love all people. This is my job, my function. I came to the world to teach love, forgiveness and union. I came here to show us how to live out of Christ, unified spirit hence transform our world into a peaceful, happy and materially abundant place.

CHANGING THE IDEAS PEOPLE HAVE IN THEIR MINDS

I began my life on earth with a tremendous desire to change other people. My desire to change the world is, of course, rooted in my desire to change myself. To desire to change one’s self, one must see one’s self as bad; to desire to change other people, one must see them as not good. I saw myself, all people and the world as deficient and wanted to change them and make them better than they are.

Now, I have learnt that the world is a pattern of thinking. Each age of this world is characterized by a pattern of thinking.

When we change the world’s pattern of thinking, we have, in effect, changed the world. To change the world’s pattern of thinking is to change its paradigm of what is real and what is not. For example, people used to believe that the world is flat; that was changed to belief that the world is round. That change in conception of the world resulted in changed behaviors, the consequence of which is our exploration of the world.

The individual cannot change other people’s patterns of thinking. That is to say that the individual cannot change the world. What the individual can do is change his own pattern of thinking (and behave accordingly).

When the individual changes his pattern of thinking and behaves accordingly, he models his changed thinking/behaving for other people to see and evaluate its consequences. If his changed pattern of thinking and behaving produces peace and joy for him and those around him, other people will see it and imitate it. If not, they would ignore him. If you model peace, people will learn from you.

The only way you can change the world is by changing your thinking and behavior. You cannot literally change the six billion people on this earth.

Change of thinking and behavior is a choice that each of us must make. You cannot choose for other people and cannot force them to choose, as you want them to choose. You choose for yourself and if what you choose is good for you and the world, the world will choose it. Therefore, work to change your thinking and behavior and stop trying to change other people’s thinking and behaviors. Not even God will change people; he gives them the answers and permits them the freedom to decide when they would choose to receive the answers that he has already given them.

What is the answer to all our problems? Love and forgiveness. What is love? Union. Union is peace and happiness.

CONCLUSION

As we look around, we see things happening to us. Our empirical perception tells us that we are passive agents and that what we do not want to experience happens to us. Science seems to reinforce this view and tells us that we are the victims of random events.

Interestingly, having told us that we are victims of the world, scientists proceed to manipulate that world and transform it to their liking. They study how matter and energy works and develop a technology with which they literally make the world obey their wishes. Here then is the paradox of living: if we are victims of the world, how come scientists are able to do the things they do? Would it not be better to see human beings as co-creators with the world, as acting on the world and as the world acting on them, not in an either or manner, but both?

In my experience, those people who see themselves as victims of circumstances tend to amount to nothing in this world. They tend to be pathetic people, complaining about their fate and blaming every body but themselves. If it is not their parents’ fault that they are poor, then it is the fault of other people. If they are black folks’ they blame white folks for their fate. All these behaviors depower them and make them not efficacious.

In my experience, those persons who tend to be fully alive are those who take their lives into their own hands and go do what they want to do. These people do not see themselves as victims of any one else. They do not ignore the fact that the external environment has impact on them. A tsunami wipes out thousands of people alright. Still, these people go do what they want to do to make their lives worthwhile. They give themselves goals and work affirmatively and proactively towards attaining their goals. In pursuing their goals, the universe works with them and helps them to accomplish them.

As I see it, people on earth are metaphorically dead. To live in ego state is to be metaphorically dead, to live as a false ego-self. True living is characterized by love and forgiveness. To the extent that a person loves all people and dedicates himself to serving the world, he is beginning to awaken from the death that is this world.

In so far that I am doing what I think is useful to other people, I feel alive, and to the extent that I am serving only my ego, I feel dead. The choice is mine to make. I can chose to start the awakening process, by which I do not mean escaping into any religious or metaphysical mumbo jumbo, but any effort to serve all people.

I can change my perception of all human beings, from seeing them as separated from me to seeing them as unified with me and to loving them all.

Corrected perception means seeing all people as the same and coequal with me.

Salvation means making endeavor to do that which serves all peoples interests. To me, that is what it means to be alive.

In the end, the individual can change his concept of who he is, who other people are and what the world means to him. If he does so and follows his changed cognitions with changed behaviors, he is a changed person. However, one must observe that there is a limit as to how much a person can change. The human personality, for example, is obviously influenced by the individual’s inherited body. Changing how one thinks about his body helps but one is not likely to change one’s personality intoto until one has changed one’s body. If one inherited a sensitive body that makes for introversion, one may try and become somewhat extroverted, but one is not going to be a thrill seeking, introspection lacking extrovert. Body is a limit. What one can do is change limiting thinking to possibilities thinking and accepts the limitations imposed by physical reality.

Thus, I commit myself to writing about the nature of the real self and publishing on it (in Real Self Magazine) and organizing Real Self Fellowships where all people are enabled to live through their real selves, hence find peace, joy and abundance.

Finally, I recognize that the human mind, the ego, is like a raging bull. It pulls one in all directions, compelling one to think about this and that, to do this and do that. One must tame the raging bull and compel it to go in the direction that one wants to go, and not go to all over the place that it wants one to go to. One must discipline ones thinking, limit it to a few subjects at a time and think them through. Ultimately, one must learn to not only control one’s thinking but to shut off thinking, altogether. In Buddhist terms, one must learn to make one’s mind empty; emptied of all conceptual thinking and just be a void for a while. In an open mind, a mind emptied of all presuppositions and preconceptions of what truth is, a mind that accepts that, in the final analysis, that neither it nor other human beings know what the truth is and stays quiet and asks truth to reveal itself to one, that mind feels quiet and peaceful. Peace and happiness are synonymous. A peaceful mind is a joyous mind. In a quiet mind, the truth of union, whatever that is, dawns.

PS: Even though I am sharing this material with other folk, one should make no mistake about it, it is primarily for me. My goal is selfish. But make sure that you understand what selfishness means. True self includes other people; a truly selfish action serves all people’s real interests.

I write to clarify reality for me. If other people have a need to learn what I am trying to learn (we teach what we need to learn), they can benefit from reading my materials.

I would not feel a bit disappointed if nobody else reads my writings. This is because I understand that folks are at different levels of psychological and spiritual development and will read only what they need to read, not what any other person wants them to read.

As I survey Africans, most of them are not proactively and affirmatively pursuing goals of their own setting. They merely pursue goals set for them by others, particularly by Western civilization. Because they are pursuing other people’s goals, they really do not know where they are going. Things happen to them against their wishes. Circumstances not of their makings push them along They do not have ideas of what types of jobs they want to do and simply accept any kind of job that they can make a living from and survive with. Their goals are to put food on the table and physically survive. Since they are mostly doing jobs that their minds are not in, they do not do them well; they do half assed jobs. More importantly, they are wasting their times, energies and lives.

One cannot get somewhere unless one knows where one is going to. You cannot accomplish goals unless you have goals to accomplish. It is time that Africans paused and examined their minds, knew who they are, identified their real selves and the jobs that suit their real selves and dedicated their lives to doing them. If they do, as Abraham Maslow tells us, they would begin to actualize their potentials and become productive human beings, not the present unproductive consumers of Western ideas and products that they seem to be.

FOR FURTHER READING

Adler, Alfred, (1999) The Neurotic Constitution New York: International Library of Psychology, Routledge.

Berkeley, George. Dialogues.

Campbell, Joseph. (1973) Myths to live By. New York: Bantam Books.

Freud, Sigmund. (1961) The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed Ernest Jones. New York: Lionel Trilling and Steven.

Horney, Karen. (1991) Neurosis and Human Growth. New York: W. W. Norton.

Hume, David. The Philosophical Works of David Hume. Ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose.

Jung, Carl, G. (2001) Basic Writings of C.G. Jung. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Kelley, George. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: W. W. Norton.

Laing, R. D. (1964) The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. New York: Penguin.

Maslow, Abraham. (1970) Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea.

Schucman, Helen. (1976) A Course in Miracles. Tiburon, CA. Foundation for Inner Peace.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Seattle, Washington

[email protected]

Posted by Administrator at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2005

The World is our Idea: So, let us Make it Better, Part I

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- Not long ago, I woke up thinking that every thing that I think that I know, or that people, in general, think that they know is an idea. Everything is an idea in my mind and in the minds of other people. The world itself is an idea in my (your) mind.

I think that I have a self. You probably think that you have a self. We think that we have selves. (Descartes said: cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore, I am.)

The self is not a self-evident reality. The self is not something that any of us can touch and ascertain. The self is intangible; the self is an idea, a concept we individually and collectively have of our selves. As a concept, it is not self evidently true or false.

As an idea, the self is whatever the individual says that it is. Some persons, apparently, have positive self-views and behave accordingly. On the other hand, some people have negative opinions of their selves and behave according.

External perception of the individual is not the easiest way to ascertain what he thinks of himself. One can look very handsome and have negative self esteem, whereas one can, as the world sees these things, look ugly and have a very positive self-esteem.

Psychologists tell us that the self esteem, the individual’s opinion of who he is, is a product of his past experiences; that how he was raised, loving or not, and what type of feedback he has received from his environment, supportive or not, affect his self evaluation.

There are two levels of conceptualizing the self, the individual and social level. The individual has an idea of what his self means to him. The society he lives in also has an idea of the individual’s self. Sometimes, the social constructed self and the individual constructed self agree. When there is congruence between whom the individual thinks that he is and what his society thinks that he is, he is, more or less, said to be normal. On the other hand, if who the individual thinks that he is, is not what other people in his society think that he is, he is said to be abnormal. For example, the neurotic would like to think that he is a very important person; the psychotic believes that he is already a very important person. The people around these two see them as ordinary human beings. Thus, there is a disconnect between the individual’s self-perception and social perception of him in mental disorders.

The human personality is an idea, a concept. The concept of personality is derived from persona, Latin for mask. The idea is that each of us has a persona, a social self that he wears in interacting with other people. That social self plays the roles that society expects of him: child, schoolboy, worker, father, mother etc. The social self, the persona, the mask each of us wears in society, however, may not be all there is to the individual. The self may be more than meets the eyes. Some persons, for example, believe that the real self, as opposed to the social self, is a spiritual being. Beneath the mask of personality is a different, albeit unknown, self, Carl Jung tells us.

George Kelly tells us that personality is an idea, a concept, and a mental construct. He believes that each human child takes from his inherited biological constitution and social experiences and uses both variables to construct a personality for himself.

For our present purposes, the salient point is that personality is a product of the individual’s thinking. Personality and self are ideas in our thinking, aka our minds. (Mind is concretization of thinking. I have a mind means that I do think. There is no such thing as mind outside our thinking.)

Each of us has idea of what the self and the world are. He tends to behave in accordance with his conception of his self, other selves and the world.

Is the world in our thinking or is it outside us? Let us see. Science seems to believe that the world is out there and that it can be perceived by our five senses: seen, heard from, smelled, felt and touched. To science, the world of space, time and matter are external to the individual human being. All of us can see a tree out there; we can touch and study it. Therefore, the tree seems outside us.

The belief that the world is outside us and that it is composed of matter is called materialism. Science is predicated on material monism. (See English Empiricists and French Logical Positivists, such as David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Saint Simon and August Comte.)

On the other hand, some observers hold that the world seems inside the perceiver of the world. Consider the old philosophical question: if a tree falls and there is no human being around to perceive it fall, did a tree fall? It seems that it takes human beings to perceive the existence of trees, their falling and the sound they make? George Berkeley, in his Dialogues, suggested that the external world might, in fact, be an idea in our minds. The view that the seeming external world may be in our minds is called solipsism.

The philosophy that the world is our idea is called idealism, or idealistic monism. (See German Idealistic philosophers like Emmanuel Kant, George Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, even Leibniz and Nietzsche.)

If the world is an idea in our minds, one may legitimately ask: how come it seems outside us? We do see a world that seems external to us. Berkeley did not convince this reader that the world is inside his mind.

What Berkeley did not resolve, some contemporary new age religionists believe that they have done. Professor Helen Schucman of Columbia University, New York City, in her book, A Course in Miracles, argues that the seeming external world is an idea in our minds; she claims that we think and project our thoughts out, and see them as the world we see as external to us. She used the dream analogy to explicate her thesis. At night, we sleep and dream. In our dreams, we see a world that seems external to us. Each of us sees himself, other people, trees, animals, stars and planets in his dream world. In our dreams, we see a world that looks like the world we see during the day. But when we wake up from our sleeping and dreaming, that seeming external world disappears. Where has the dream world gone?

Dr Schucman pointed out that the seeming external world of our dreams is our thinking (she said that we think in images) projected out and experienced as if it is outside us. She proceeded to argue that what we call our wake living, daytime, is also our thinking in pictorial form, projected out and made to seem real. The world, the lady clinical psychologist claims, is an outward picture of thoughts in our minds. The world we see as outside us, this amazing psychologist cum theologian claims, is a pictorial representation of our thinking. The world is made of ideas in our minds; ideas that we projected out and see as if they are objective things outside us.

As Dr Schucman sees it, the world we seem to live in is a dream in each of our minds. As it were, the collective us dreams the world and each of us is a part of that collective self and contributes to it. Each person, as it were, has his or her dream, which is a part of the collective dream of mankind.

Put differently, the seeming objective world is in our minds. We think the world, deny that it is the product of our thinking, dissociate from it and project it out.

Because the world is our individual and collective thinking/dreaming, Dr Schucman argues that each of us is responsible for the world and for what happens to him. As she sees it, each of us is dreaming what is happening to him.

If the individual sees other people discriminate against him, he is in a dream where he thinks that discrimination is possible and dreams himself being discriminated against. He projects out a seeming real world, and in that world projects out people who seem to be discriminating against him. In other words, what one sees other people and the world do to one, one, in real terms, did to one. It is one who, in ones dream, projects the world out and places dream figures (people) in the roles one sees in one’s dream.

The implication of Dr Schucman’s philosophy (or is it rationalization for evil?) is that if whites discriminate against a black man, he is the one who did so to himself. The black man dreams that discrimination is possible, projects out those he calls white persons and places them in roles where they discriminate against him. As long as he is asleep, the dream world seems real to him. In our world, a dream ala Dr Schucman, it would seem like white people are discriminating against the black man. But it is the black man that is dreaming that he is discriminated against. He is doing it all to himself. No external person is doing anything to him.

As Dr Schucman sees it, if it were possible for what the individual does not want to experience to happen to him, the world would be unfair. To her, an unfair world is a world without God. As she sees it, God’s existence requires that there be justice in the world, for God is justice itself. Justice, God, requires that nothing the individual does not want to experience happen to him. Dr Schucman says that there are no accidents and randomness in the world.

Science, on the other hand, posits that every thing in this world is a product of accidence and chance. In the empirical world we do see what seems like accidence does occur. A chap could be relaxing in his house and a car being chased by the police badges into his house and kills him. (This is an actual case that I witnessed at Los Angeles, California.) To science, there does not seem planning and design in nature. There does not seem justice in this world. If justice existed, how come Westerners are well fed while Africans are starving? If God existed and is just, why does he permit African-American children to grow up malnourished hence find easy American schools difficult to do well at?

Obviously, religion and science operate on different premises. Dr Schucman is operating on a religious paradigm. Let us grant her audience and complete reviewing her theology before we criticize it.

Dr Schucman argues that the individual is the one who dreams whatever he sees happen to him in his world. To her, the fact that the individual experiences only what he wants to experience proves that there is justice. In God’s universe, she claims that nothing God’s children do not want to experience can happen to them.

In Dr Schucman’s view, the world is a game, a trick we perform on ourselves. We attack ourselves and project our self-attack unto what seems like other people attacking us. The dreamer wants to be discriminated against and projects out a world that seems to discriminate against him. As long as he is sleeping and the world of dreams seems external to him, he necessarily believes that other people are discriminating against him. But he is the one discriminating against him. Nobody else is discriminating against him. The world is the individual’s dream.

The world is a dream of self-attack. The individual wants to attack his self and projects out a world that seems to attack him. He experiences this attack in his own preferred ways, such as being discriminated against, being raped, not being loved etc. Either way, the individual does something to himself but do so through seeming other people. He then forgets that he did everything that seems to happen to him and sees other people doing them to him. He feels like he is a victim of other people’s uncalled for attacks and justifies being afraid of other people and being angry with them.

If you are a woman, and in your dream, a man rapes you, you feel like you are a victim of the rapist; you feel justifiably angry with him. You want him arrested and jailed, even killed for inflicting pain on you. Then you wake up from your dream, and realize that the man who raped you in your dream was a dream man, and not a real man. It was only a dream rape. You quickly forget the dream.

Dr Schucman claims that our day living is like our dreams at night. The man who rapes you during the day is exactly like the man who does so in your dream at night. In both cases, you project out the rapist. It is a dream rape. Nothing, in fact, has happened to you; you have never been raped in your day or night dreams. You merely dream that you have been raped.

If you are a black person, despite seeing white persons discriminate against you, nobody has, in fact, discriminated against you. You merely dreamed that white folks, your dream figures, discriminated against you.

As long as you are in the dream, and believe that the dream is real, you feel angry with those who seem to be doing something bad to you. But when you wake up from your dream of self-attack, you recognize that no one did any wrong to you.

Dr Schucman claims that one is caught in a world of one’s making. To her, this world is not real: we made it up. She said that literally, not figuratively we, the children of God, invent the world we live in.

What we made we can unmake; but if we were not the ones who made the world we would not be able to get out of. If we were victims of this world, we would, indeed, be stuck. To her, thank God that we invented the world and can, therefore, reinvent it, change and transform it into a better world.

She says that there are three ways to approach this world. The first is real, the second is semi real and the third is false. We are already engaged in the third option: our present ego ways. The ego is the self that adapts to the realities of this world and perpetuates it on its own terms. Whenever the individual sees himself as different from other people, as not the same with all people and as not equal with all people and whenever he works for his self interest only and not social interests, he is in ego state; he is perpetuating this world.

Since the world is a dream, the individual can resolve to awaken from it, right now, and do so and walk away from it. Dr Schucman did not quite explain how one is to accomplish this goal, but one supposes that it means rejecting this world and its attractions, giving up the ego and its body and dying to the world? Since she inveighs against suicide, one supposes that she means some sort of spiritual overcoming of this world of woes. Let us just say that she was vague in explaining how to accomplish this first option. All that can be made of what she said is that she says that our real self is unified spirit and that when we awaken from the dream of this world, we return to the awareness of ourselves as immortal, unified spirit.

The second approach to the dream, the world, is to stay in it and make it a lovely dream. Dr Schucman elaborated on this option; in fact, her book can be seen as effort to expatiate on this manner of attaining salvation.

According to this path to deliverance, one still dreams, but dreams with love and forgiveness. How is this done? One loves all the people one sees in the world. And since despite ones apparent love for all people some would seem to do bad things to one (one did that bad things to one and projects them out to others. One also did all the good things one sees other persons do to one, one did so through them), one should forgive them. One should forgive those who seem to do bad things to one.

In Dr Schucman’s views, there are only two permitted ways to respond to other people: love them or see their unloving acts as calls for one to love them. If other people do bad things to you, forgive them.

To forgive is the true meaning of love. If you truly love people, you must not only love them when they do good things to you, but must also love them when they do bad things to you. To forgive is to love.

All attacks on you by other people are calls to you, by them, to forgive them, hence to love them. Attack is a call for love when love is perceived as missing.

If some one attacks you, discriminates against you, does bad things to you, he or she must have perceived you to have not loved him and to have done bad things to him. He then attacks you to give you the choice of doing one of two things: one, counter attacks him and perpetuates the egos world, or forgives hence love him and in the process transcend the egos world.

Other people’s attacks on you give you the opportunity to choose forgiveness/love. Choose again, hitherto you chose attack and hate hence are in this world, now choose love and escape from this world and return to unified state.

To be in this world, you had chosen attack, now, choose differently, choose love over hate. If attacked, choose forgiveness, that is, love the attacker. If a white man discriminates against you, forgive him, that is, love him.

Since the attacker you see attack you is you, you projected out, dissociated from, denied as you, when you forgive him, you have forgiven you your self attack. When you love the person who does bad things to you, since he is you, you, in effect, have loved you. The people you see love you and generally do good things to you is you projected out as another person. In effect, you love you through seeming loving other persons, just as you hate your through seeming hateful other persons.

What is the benefit of forgiving other people? If you forgive other people, since they are you projected out in your dream of separation, you, in effect, forgive yourself. Since forgiveness is love, you, in effect, love yourself.

Love is union. In forgiving other people, in loving other people, you unify with them. You form union with those you forgive/love.

In earthly union, you return to semblance of your heavenly unified state, your natural state before the genesis of this world.

When we all love and forgive one another, Dr Schucman claims that we transform our world into what she called a happy dream. She has other metaphors for her idea of a loving world, such as gate of heaven and real world.

Heaven’s gate is not heaven; it is a world that approximates heaven’s reality, but not totally so. Heaven is perfect union. In our world we are separated. At heaven’s gate we are still separated but now we are using our seeming separated selves to love one another. That which was designed to separate with, ego and body, are now used to love with, to unify with.

The resultant world is said to be a happy world, a world where the will of God is obeyed, rather than the wishes of the ego. That world is said to be more peaceful and happy, though not quiet like the perfect peace and joy of heaven.

Heaven requires perfect union, which requires an end to separation. We cannot perfectly unify as long as we are in bodies. Perfect union requires us to shed our bodies and be spirit. Heaven is formless, for only the formless, spirit, can unify.

ORIGINAL SIN: THE FALL FROM GRACE

Let us examine Dr Schucman’s mythology of the origin of the empirical world. As Dr Schucman sees it, originally (and still so), we are unified spirit. In her view, there is God. God is spirit. God is creative. God creates his children. One God extends his one self to his children. Thus, there are in heaven God and his children. But all of them are unified and know themselves as sharing one self and one mind. Heaven is composed of God and his infinite children, all of whom are one literal self. If you like, you can visualize this reality as one God manifesting in infinite parts, children, all of whom are him, and he them. God is simultaneously himself and his creation.

God gives his children his creative self.

The child of God is exactly like God; he is spirit and is creative. He creates his own children. Creation has no beginning and no end. There was never a time when God did not exist. Since, by definition, God is a father, without his children he would not be a father. God has always had children. In effect, the children of God have existed for as long as God has existed. God and his children are of the same age, which is forever.

But there is one attribute of God that his children do not have. God created his children. God’s children did not create God and did not create themselves. Though each of us is creative and do help in creating other children of God, we do so with the creative power of God in us. We do not create by ourselves, but by the power of God in us.

Dr Schuman believes that the children of God resented the fact that God created them and that they did not create themselves or create God. They wished that they created God and themselves. Since it is impossible for the son to be his own father, the Son of God, as it were, became insane and imagined a world where he seemed to have created himself, created his brothers and created God. As it were, he cast a magical spell on himself, forgot about his unified nature and seemed to sleep and dream that he is separated from God, his brothers and his real self.

The dream of the Son of God, all of us, is this empirical world. In that dream, this world, each of us invents a self-concept for himself, and invents concepts for other people, and they do so for him and for themselves.

The invention of the self-concept, the separated ego self, as Dr Schulman sees it, is tantamount to self-creation. The self concept, the ego, is a replacement self, a substitute self; we use the ego self to hide our real self.

Our real self is unified self, also called Christ self. We replace that real self with a false self, the separated, ego self.

To Dr Schucman, in forming a separated self for one’s self and for other people, one lives in delusion, psychosis, insanity, and madness.

What is madness? It is the belief that one created ones self, the separated ego self housed in body.

What is sanity? It is the knowledge that God created one, and created one holy, that is, unified self.

One is not God but the mad person believes that he is God, for he has done what only God does, create him, by creating himself, create other people and create the world, not in reality but in fantasy.

In our dreams, at night, we create other people and the world and assign roles to our dream persons to play for us, so as to enable us, to achieve whatever dream objective we seek. The day world, Dr Schucman tells us is exactly like the night’s dream world.

In so far that there are differences in the two, it is that in night dreams each of us individually invented his dream world and is the king that assigns roles to all his dream figures. But in the day dream, our world, we dream it collectively and collectively assign roles to all the people in the world.

The day world (dream) lasts longer than the night world (dream) because the day dream is a shared dream, whereas the night dream is not a shared dream. An unshared dream does not last long; only shared dreams lasts long. Our world is a shared dream and lasts longer than our nightly unshared individual dreams. Heaven is shared experience hence lasts forever. Heaven is permanent and changeless.

As it were, we are now the authors of reality, the creators of our world; we are, it seems to us, as powerful as God.

The world, dream, is a symbol of the Son of God killing his father, usurping his throne and sitting on it. The world means that we have created ourselves. God is no longer the creator of reality, now we are. We are now as powerful as God.

As Dr Schucman sees it, each of us came to this world to play god, to create himself, create other people and create God. This is insanity. The world is an insane place. In sanity, in reality, God created us.

Reality is unified. The world created by God is a unified, spirit world. We invented the opposite of God’s unified world, our separated world.

We invented space (separation) time and matter. We use matter to invent bodies for each of us. We now seem to live in bodies. (But at no time do we live in bodies, Dr Schucman reassures us.)

Bodies are calculated to give each of us a sense that he is separated from other people and that he is not other people. Body gives us boundary from one another.

By the same token, space and time give us boundaries. I am over here at Seattle, and you are a long distance from me (space- time interval) and live in a different body, hence we seem separated from each other.

As Dr Schucman sees it, this entire world is designed to give us the illusion that we are separated from God and from each other.

What is the purpose of the empirical world? The world is designed to give us the appearance that we are separated from each other and from God. The world is a means of separation, is used to maintain separation and make it seem real.

Dr Schuman believes that none of this whole song and dance is real. To her, we have not separated from God and from each other. We do not live in our world of space, time and matter. We are still in the world of unified spirit.

While in unified spirit, we imagine ourselves in this world. The world is a dream in the mind of the children of God.

As it were, you are right now in unified spirit, with God and all of us, and seem to be sleeping and dreaming this separated world. All of us do the same. In your dream, you assign roles to all God’s children to play for you and they assign roles to you to play for them.

The Son of God, Dr Schucman says, cannot disobey the will of his father. No human being can disobey God. All we can do is wish that we had different wills from God. We then dream out our wishes. Wishes and the fantasies designed to gratify them are not real. The world is a fantasy, a wish, and a dream. The world does not negate the existence of God, his unified spirit and unified mind.

Nevertheless, the separated world can obscure the awareness of God’s unified world. As it were, our world is like a veil with which we prevent ourselves from seeing God’s world. The world is a cloud that covers the light of God. The world is a block that prevents us from seeing the face of Christ in each other.

God is love. Love is union. We always live in love, in union. While inside love, in union with each other, we do not know that we are in the presence of love, that we are unified with each other. In love, we dream hate. In union, we dream separation. Dream is not reality.

Dr Schucman proposes to enable us awaken to God’s unified reality. How is that done? Since God is love, to return to the awareness of God, we must love each other. Since we do attack each other, and love requires forgiveness, we must forgive each other. Dr Schucman teaches that we must love and forgive each other. She says that when we do so, that we have met the condition for the awareness of God.

God is love and knows only love. When you love/forgive, you have met the condition for knowing God.

HOLY INSTANT

Dr Schucman says that if you love and forgive at all times, that every now and then that you would experience what she called the Holy Instant. Here, you experience yourself as one with God and with all people. As it were, you temporarily return to heaven and experience your self as unified with God and all people. Since only the formless spirit can unify, you experience yourself as formless, unified spirit. You literally feel as if you are one with all creation and its creator. In that state, you feel immortal and eternal, not born and do not die. In it you know everything (not things concerning the separated world, but heavenly, spiritual world). In it, you do not see space and gap between you and other people. In it, there is no subject and object, no seer and seen, no I and thou. All are literally one shared self. You literally feel like God is in you and that you are in God; that you are in all people and that they are in you. Where God ends and his children begin is nowhere.

Of course, one cannot be in Holy Instant for long, for if one does so, one exits from this world of separation. Thus, one returns to the awareness of separation, space, time and matter. One, again, sees people who seem apart from one. However, now one knows that separation is an illusion and that union is reality. One loves and forgives all people, for one knows that all people are part of one and in loving them all one loves ones real self.

If one has attained this state, what Roman Catholicism calls mystical union, Hinduism calls Samadhi, Buddhism calls Nirvana and Zen Buddhism calls Satori, one has re-established direct communication link with God. God reveals himself to one. (The Holy Spirit is the bridge linking the temporal and permanent worlds; he is the voice for God, telling us about God and our true nature; he is our comforter in distress.)

As Dr Schucman sees it, God is always communicating with all of us. But, in as much, as we believe in separation, space and time, we seem separated from God and do not hear his voice. But when we believe ourselves unified with God, meet the conditions of heaven, love and forgive each other, we have reestablished our channel of communication with God. We talk directly to God and God talks to them. This type of relationship with God, Dr Schucman says, is like our original relationship with God and one another and is called communion. In eternity, we commune with God and each other.

In communion, we know ourselves to have one spirit self and one mind and know exactly what each other is thinking and respond to each other. In eternity, all minds are joined and respond to the thoughts in other minds.

Visualize a giant computer. All of us are tuned to it. When each of us thinks something, all of us know what he is thinking, as he knows what we are thinking; we respond to him, as he responds to us.

This spiritual state is still taking place in the world of space, time and matter, but not in a conscious manner. We are still tuned to each others thinking and respond to each other but we are not conscious of doing so. What other people do to you is what you want to experience and your mind sends out a call, a signal and other minds respond to you and do so to you.

If you want to experience discrimination, you make that request, send that signal out into the universal ego mind, computer, and other people, apparently, those who want to experience discriminating against other children of God, come to your world and discriminate against you. You then see yourself as a victim and blame them. Seeing yourself as a victim, you attack them. They, then, see themselves as victims and defend themselves by counter attacking you. The result is our world of mutual attacks and wars.

Dr Schucman tells us that you did to you, through other people, what you see other people do to you. She asks you to love those who did bad things to you. To love them is to forgive them.

When you forgive and love other people, you have loved and forgiven your self. In doing so, you feel at peace and experience joy. You are now at the metaphoric gate of heaven, experiencing the world as a happy dream; you now live in the real world. Occasionally, you experience the Holy Instant. You are now a teacher of love, a teacher of union, a teacher of forgiveness, all of which means that you are a teacher of God. A teacher of God is a teacher of peace and love.

HOLY SPIRIT

As Dr Schucman sees it, when the children of God separated from him and seem to sleep and dream this world, God came to the world with them. God, as it were, entered his children’s dream as the Holy Spirit.

Thus, there now seems three Gods. God the father (who remains in heaven as the transcendental God), God the Son (the real you, the unified Christ you, the sleeping you that dreams this world) and God the Holy Spirit.

DEATH AND RESURRECTION

When the real you, Christ, unified spirit, went to sleep, as it were, Christ has metaphorically died. To be in this world is to be metaphorically dead. Look around you; all the people in this world, yourself included, are metaphorically dead. (Each person is at different stages in waking up from death, in returning to his real self, unified spirit.)

As long as the Son of God seems dead, is sleeping and dreaming that he is in this world, God, as the Holy Spirit, the immanent God, entered his mind and tries to resurrect him.

In our mind is the ego. The ego is the dreaming self, the self that sees itself as separated from God and his children. The ego mind is now where the Christ mind is supposed to be.

The Christ mind knows himself as the Son of God and as unified with God and all God’s children. The Christ mind in us is sleeping and forgets about his union with all creation and its creator.

God, as the Holy Spirit, enters our mind and occupies the place the Christ mind ought to be. Thus, now in our sleeping minds are (1) our unified mind, the mind we share with God and each other, (2) the Holy Spirit ( or, right mind) and (3) the Ego or wrong mind.

The ego asks us to separate from God and from one another, and to defend ourselves when other people attack us. Defense leads to separation, as much as attack does.

The Holy Spirit asks us to forgive, hence love one another. Forgiveness and love leads to the awareness of union. In effect, the Holy Spirit reminds us of our condition in heaven, unified.

God talks to his sleeping children through the Holy Spirit.

When you listen to the message of the Holy Spirit, God, and love and forgive at all times, you experience the Holy Instant. Subsequently, you no longer need the Holy Spirit to mediate between you and God. You have reawakened to your Christ status. Jesus Christ did so. Jesus has resumed communing with God and all of us, in a direct manner, without the auspices of the Holy Spirit or other awakened children of God.

When you return your thinking, mind, to the condition that God created it (unified), not what you have made of it (separated), you have reconciled the ego and Christ, the earth and heaven. You have resurrected from death (ego is metaphoric death). You are reborn in God.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Seattle, Washington

[email protected]

Posted by Administrator at 08:51 PM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2005

Addressing Cleavages in Alaigbo

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington) --- If you do not seek the truth, the truth will seek you, for only the truth will make you free. Therefore, there is no use denying the truth. We must state the truth at all times. The truth that we want to state here is the truth that there are divisions in Alaigbo. Other Nigerians may see a homogenous group called Igbos, but within that group there are cleavages. We ought to address those divisions without denying them.

I prefer to write in essay form. This enables me to inject my personal experiences hence make my writing relevant to people like me. If I write in a detached, abstract manner, I tend to write what seems not germane to real people. I will, therefore, personalize this essay. I am from Owerri area. I will write as an Owerri Igbo, an Owerri man looking at Igbo problems.

When I was growing up in the 1960s/70s, my father, a very observant Igbo man, told me a lot about our people. Among the things he told me was that the people from Owerri, Mbaise, Orlu, Okigwe, Ngwa (Aba), Umuahia, Bende and Egwuocha (Ikwerre, Port Harcourt) are the core Igbos. To him, those are the real Igbos. People from Onitsha, Asaba, Abo, Enugu, Nsukka etc, he believed, are peripheral Igbos. To father, these other people bordered non-Igbos hence their cultures tended to be adulterated by the peoples they are close to. The Onitsha, Asaba and Abo, he said, are influenced by Edo and Urhobo cultures and tend to behave like those people rather than behave like the core Igbo people. Enugu people (Wawa, as they then were called) are close to Otukpo and Tivi people and are influenced by those non-Igbo people.

Simply stated, to father and his generation, the Owerri Igbos (roughly those in the old Owerri province) are the real Igbos; the others are aliens in their midst.

My father, Johnson, and his fellow Owerri people, used to call Onitsha Igbos (encompassing the old Onitsha province and inclusive of Asaba and Abo people) Ndinjekebe. (Honestly, I do not know what that term means).

Onitsha people called the core Igbo people Onyeigbo (Igbo people). Apparently, Onitsha people called the core Igbos what they did as a way of putting them down. To them, apparently, the real Igbo people are uncivilized and primitive. They imagined themselves more advanced than the core Igbo people.

Why this apparent sense of superiority found in Onitcha Igbo? First, it is because they believe that they came from Benin and that the Edo are a more advanced people than Igbos. Second, it is because white men and Christian missionaries first came to their land and built Christian schools before they came to the core Igbo area.

History books tell us that by the1850s the Church Missionary Society (Anglican) had established missionary outposts at Onitsha and environ and built schools there. Christian missionaries did not penetrate the core Igbo area until around 1906 (in the heels of Lord Frederick Lugard’s pacification of the Long Juju of Arochukwu in 1902)). In effect, Onitsha people had fifty years leg up in acquiring Western type education to core Igbos. In fact, when my father was at elementary school, in the 1930s, his teachers were mostly Onitcha and Ijaw people (The Christians had also established schools in Ijaw land before doing so in the core Igbo area, hence the earliest Christians and teachers in the former Eastern Nigeria used to be Ijaw and or Onitsha people.)

For our present purpose, Onitsha people had a preponderance of educated Igbos and, therefore, dominated the former Eastern Nigerian politics. Apparently, it got into their heads that they are superior to core Igbo people. To the present, Onitsha people tend to feel superciliously superior to core Igbo people.

Onitsha people have stereotypical views of Owerri people. For example, they see Owerri people as lazy (Onye ntala ugba, nguru mme…all I want out of life is to eat ugba and drink wine; I do not care for other things in life; I am a carefree and good for nothing, jolly fellow) and see Owerri women as prone to prostitution.

Upon completing my doctoral dissertation at the University of California, and offered a lecturer-ship position at the University of Jos, I toyed with whether to stay in Nigeria. I had learned research methodology and while at Owerri town, suddenly decided to do an impromptu empirical research on where the prostitutes in the city came from. I walked into the various brothels at Owerri…they called themselves hotels but were, in fact, filled with rooms where whores plied their trade. “Money for hand, back na for ground”, they said. I interviewed all the prostitutes in the three hotels that I visited. Not one of the harlots in these representative whorehouses of Nigeria is from Owerri. Guess where they came from? They came mostly from the Onitsha area! I am not making this up; this is a fact.

I did the same research at Lagos. There is a part of Olodi and Isaleko where prostitutes live. I visited them. Here, the women were mostly from the Middle Belt region of Nigeria. The few Igbos among them were mostly from the Onitsha area.

I stayed with a friend at Victoria Island. In the evenings, to while away time, I used to go to the Federal Palace Hotel. I listened to the mostly American music played by the Hotel’s band. As I walked to the Hotel, I noticed that prostitutes lined up the short distance leading from Awolowo Road to the Hotel grounds. I donned my blue jeans and T shirt and looked as if I was a black American tourist and went to hobnob with the women. I took this particular veneer because the sisters were there to turn tricks with Westerners, persons with serious money, not with poor fellow Nigerians, so I had to look and talk like an American for them to talk to me. I did this for a few nights. The women came from all over Nigeria. They were mostly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight (my cohort; so, I interacted well with them). I did not see a single Owerri woman among them. This is a fact, not fiction.

In terms of doing rigorous empirical research, I believe that my sampling is statistically representative of the women involved in the prostitution trade in Nigeria. At any rate, I satisfied myself that the notion that Owerri women are “Ashawo” are fictions in the minds of Njikebe people.

If truth be told, I have not seen one single Owerri prostitute in my life. If they existed, and all things being equal, they must exist, I have not seen them. To the best of my knowledge, no woman from my town, Umuohiagu, is a prostitute. I am not saying that there are no Owerri whores, in the nature of things, there must be a few Owerri street workers. I am saying that the stereotype that Owerri women are loose is just a fiction in the minds of Onitsha people.

And it cuts both ways. My father’s generation believed that Onitsha people are prone to criminal behaviors. My father used to tell me that at Lagos, where we lived, if an Igbo is ever caught as a thief that the chances were that he was an Onitsha person. As if to bear him out, most of the Igbos engaged in 419 criminal activities tend to come from Onitsha area. I dare say that no Owerri person is involved in this dastardly behavior.

Obviously, not all Onitsha people are engaged in criminal behavior. The point is that Owerri people tend to stereotype Onitsha people as mostly interested in money and that they believe that Onitcha folks would stoop low to get it.

Owerri people tend to be less inclined to trading and tend to be law abiding persons. Since they are not obsessed about making money, they tend to accept decent jobs and do them to the best of their abilities and not seek ways to steal from their employers. Owerri people say that if you give an Ontisha person a job, that he would seek ways to rob you down. This is obviously a negative stereotype. But, as they say, in every stereotype there is an element of truth, albeit exaggerated.

Alaigbo has divisions and we had better address them and not sweep them under the rug. An issue must be brought out into the open, studied and, as much as is possible, understood and solved.

Are there differences between the various Igbo clans? Igbo culture is surprisingly uniform in all Alaigbo. We all have similar names, though pronounced differently in different parts of Igboland. For example, Nwachukwu in Owerri and Wachukwu in Ngwa; Nwamu in Owerri and Wami in Ikwerri. The Igbos have the same names for their four market days of the week: Ore, Afo, Eke and Nkwo. In short, most cultural practices across Igboland are the same.

In so far that there seem some differences among the Igbos, they are superficial. For example, the people along the Niger River were accustomed to trading on the river. They traded with non-Igbos and brought non-Igbo produced goods into Igboland and sold them to the interior Igbos. This is not unique to these people. All over the world, riverside people tend to be trading people. (On the negative side, these trading Igbos engaged in slave trade. They bought and sold Igbo slaves. They were responsible for selling Igbos to the non-Igbos who then sold them to the Europeans at the Atlantic seaboards. In effect, these people honed their so-called trading skills by selling their own very Igbo people. This is a shame.)

Those Igbos in the harshest part of Igbo land, where agricultural productivity is the least possible, also tended to survive by trading. Thus, people from Orlu, by necessity, tend to be good traders.

Conversely, those Igbos who live in the most fertile part of Igboland, places where land is more abundant, such as the Abakaliki and Owerri people, tend to be less inclined to trading. Until recently, they tended to be farmers and very good ones, too.

In the first phase of the Igbo modern era, it happened that luck favored those Igbos who traditionally were good at trading. They, more or less, became fairly wealthy relative to the more sedentary Igbos. Apparently, their meager wealth got into their heads and swelled their pride to the point where folks from Onitsha area felt superior to persons from Owerri area, the very people who produced the food that kept them alive.

As already noted, Christian missionaries first pitched their tent in the Onitcha area. Therefore, Onitcha folks tended to be more educated in Western ways than Owerri folks. The first phase of Igbo governance was, therefore, dominated by the ‘educated Onitcha folks”. Apparently, this consequence of historical accidence got into their heads and some of them fancied themselves better than Owerri folks.

My father’s generation sorely resented Onitcha folks feeling superior to them. Father used to say: How dare these fake Igbos (Onitsha Igbo) feel better than real Igbos (Owerri Igbos). As a realistic man, however, he appreciated the reasons why the Onitsha felt as they did: they were ahead of the Owerri in matters Western. Thus, father and his fellow Owerrians resolved to have all their children attend universities and they did.

The Igbo from Umuahia, Bende, Abriba, Abam and Ngwa tend to be more marshal in spirit than other Igbos. This marshal spirit is probably rooted in the traditional role of these people during the slave trade. For five hundred years, these people acted as soldiers for the notorious slave traders, the Aro. The Aro spanned Igboland, buying slaves and selling them to the Efik and Ijaw, who, in turn, sold them to the Europeans stationed at the Atlantic coasts.

My grand father, Osuji, told us how Aro people terrorized his people during slave times. These people, he said, pretended to be priest-judges and stationed agents in the various Igbo towns and bid folks to bring their cases to them. Those they found guilty, they claimed to have sent to jail. In this case, jail meant taking them to Arochukwu, and selling them into slavery. The Aro also fomented wars between Igbo villages and captives were sold into slavery.

The Aro had the Abriba and Abam as their soldiers, escorting them as they traveled all over Igboland, capturing and selling Igbos into slavery.

(The Aro must apologize to all Igbo. Until they do so, Igbo will not forgive them their crime. The Aro may pretend that all is well in the land, but all is not well in the land. You see, the sins of fathers are visited unto their children, unto the tenth generation. Aro crimes against Igbo still rancors in the minds of Owerri Igbo, to the present. People from my area, in fact, hate the Aro more than they hate the so-called detractors of the Igbos, the Hausas.)

In one of his writings, Chinua Achebe, without proof, claimed that the Equiano (see Equiano’s interesting autobiography) was an Igbo boy. In his autobiography, Equiano narrated how he went out to play and was captured by slave traders and sold into slavery. If, indeed, he was an “Eboe”, it is Aro and Abam folks that captured and sold the ten year old boy into slavery. These slave traders were hard hearted, evil persons. They made life hellish for their fellow Igbos. Just imagine what life must have been like in slave time Igboland: a kid goes out to play and he was captured and sold into slavery. Igbo villages were constantly at war with each other, so as to capture slaves to be sold. Life must have been nasty, brutish, and short. It was a Hobbesian world. It must have been a paranoid world where no one could afford to trust other people. As I speculated elsewhere, this probably accounts for the high level of paranoia found in Igbos. I am yet to see an Igbo man whose level of paranoia is not above average. All human beings have traits of paranoia, but some more so than others.

And why is it necessary for the Aro, Abam and Onitcha to own their past crimes? Shouldn’t we let the past be the past? If the past did not repeat itself in the present we would not have to study history. The fact is that people, in the present, are influenced by their past. Aro, Abam and Onitcha people are still as hard hearted as their forefathers. They, in different forms, are still selling Igbos into modern forms of slavery. It is truly amazing these Africans. They have such a short memory. They went about enslaving our people and somehow think that we have forgotten what they did. No, every person in my town still remembers, with horror, the activities of the Aro. We are as angry as hell at the Aro for kidding and enslaving our people.

These evil souls must, therefore, do some serious soul searching, accept their past mistakes, and resolve to change. Until they do so, those of us who were their victims must be skeptical of their motives. We must watch out lest these evil souls sell us into slavery, as they sold our brothers in the past, and show no remorse for their sins. All that these evil folks do is blame the white man for slavery and hope, in their infantile thinking, that that would divert attention from their own heinous role in the sin of slavery. Blaming whites cannot absolve Africans of their role in selling their fellow Africans. Both Africans and Europeans were equally responsible for the crime against humanity called transatlantic slavery and both must make amends for their crimes by paying reparations to African Americans. (All the African countries involved in slavery must give One percent of their annual GDP to Africans in the Americas; additionally, they must offer these people automatic dual citizenship should they choose to live in Africa. A sinner must make amends for his sins; Africans sinned by selling their brethren; they must ask for forgiveness and make some reparations to those they sold; until they do so, nothing is going to work out well for Africa.)

There is a tendency for the Onitcha Igbo to take the Owerri Igbo for granted. Thus, we have a situation where Onitcha Igbo form organizations that purportedly champion Igbo interests and expect the Owerri Igbo to fall in line and support them. What we know of human nature is that each individual is out to maximize his self interests and that it is the rare human being who transcends his ego self interests and works on behalf of social interests. Thus, all things being equal, the organizations that folks from Onitcha area form serve their interests and not all Igbo interests.

If one surveys organizations in Alaigbo that purport to speak for all Igbos, what one sees is that they were mainly formed by folks from the Onitcha area and that they speak for Onitcha interests. This was the case in the past. Nnamdi Azikiwe and his NCNC were irrelevant to Owerri people. One cannot point to a single project that the NCNC did for Owerri people.

The government of the then Eastern Nigeria, for all practical purposes, exploited Owerri people and did nothing for them. Azikiwe built a university, the so-called University of Nigeria Nsukka. Now, if he was a sensible person, he would have built that school in the center of Igboland, which would have been Owerri. (Owerri is the natural capital of Alaigbo and must be so.)

The decision to declare Biafra an independent state was largely an Nnewi-Onitcha people’s decision. Owerri people were not consulted. Interestingly, when the war of words turned into a shooting war, it was Owerri people that formed the majority of the foot soldiers of the Biafran army. Onitcha people hid out the war in rear battalions. In effect, Owerri people were exploited during that war.

As would be expected, Owerri people resent being taken for granted by people who do not even consider themselves real Igbos. In his autobiography, My Odyssey, Nnamdi Azikiwe, struggled mightily to convince the reader that his ancestors came from the royal family of Benin. His unspoken assumption was that the Bini were superior to the Igbos.

If Azikiwe had any kind of intelligence in his brains, he would have struggled to show that his folks came from Igboland, even if they did not. In this case, they came from Igboland and did not come from Benin. He was just a confused man. Azikiwe was an extrovert and, as such, not expected to be very bright. But, nevertheless, he ought to have reflected on what he had to say before he said it. If he was thoughtful, he would not have rooted his heritage in Benin.

Consider the English. They came from Germany. But they do not go about telling the world that they came from Germany; they tell us that they are proud Britons, even though the term Briton applies to the original Celts that the Romans found in the Island that they named Britannia. Consider the French. They are mostly Frankish Germans, but they do not go about telling the world that they are Germans; they simply say that they are French men. Consider the ruling classes of America, they are mostly English/German but they do not tell the world that they are so, but take pride in telling the world that they are Americans.

Here we had an Igbo man who, instead of instilling pride in Igbos by affirming his Igbo heritage, claimed to be an Edo man. And for this crime, Azikiwe is not my hero. My hero must be a proud Igboman.

Currently, some misguided Ikwerri Igbos claim not to be Igbos. These people who are close to Owerri and whose Igbo dialect many Owerri people speak have allowed themselves to be deceived by the Hausa-Fulani-Yoruba rulers of Nigeria. The black colonialists who misgovern Nigeria would like to divide and conquer Igboland, and if they can persuade the Rivers Igbos that they are not Igbos, they would have sowed the seed of disharmony in Alaigbo and, in the process, control the Igbos. The Ikwerri Igbo is as Igbo as the Owerri Igbo. In fact, when, in the future, we do a more thorough historical study of the Igbos, we may find out that the Ikwerri came from the Igbo heartland. I certainly feel more kinship with the Ikwerri than I feel with the Onitcha Igbo.

And while on this subject, it is doubtful if the Ijaw and Efik people are not related to Igbos. During the five hundred years of slave times, Igbo slaves were sold to the Europeans at Efik and Ijaw Seaports. In the process, a massive number of Igbos was brought to these, apparently, non-Igbo areas. The result was heavy mixing between Igbos and these people.

One doubts that there is an Efik or Ijaw person who is not a mix of his people and Igbos. At any rate, when one talks to any of them, one feels kindred spirit, as if one is talking to a fellow Igbo. I have never felt that an Ijaw or Efik person is different from persons from Owerri. I see them as my own very people.

Please note that in parts of Owerri, we call God Obasi, as the Efiks do. This shows how intermingled our two peoples and cultures are.

In terms of evolution, one does not believe that the Ijaw separated from the Igbo, or the Igbo from the Ijaw, whichever is the case, long ago. The two people are so similar in both their biological make-ups and cultural ways that, perhaps, they were the same people, say one thousand years ago? The other Nigerians, such as the Yorubas, seem to have separated from the Igbos long ago, say two thousand years. The Igbo and Yoruba languages, both of which I speak, do not seem related; but the Igbo and Ijaw languages seem much related and sound alike to me. When I hear Ijaw people speaking, it is like I hear Igbos speaking a different dialect. Simply stated, Igbos feel one with the Ijaws. No Igbo person can discriminate against Ijaws, despite the lies put out by the Machiavellian rulers of contemporary Nigeria; those who aim to divide a united Igbo-Ijaw people.

There appears to be lack of understanding of practices unique to certain parts of Igboland. For example, my last name is Osuji. Some Igbos from Wawaland actually assume that to be called Osuji means that one is an Osu. A chap in one of the Internet Chat rooms that I visit, who, apparent was angry at me proceeded to tell his chat room buddies about the subordinate nature of the Osus in Igbo society. His intention, obviously, was to put me down, to get folks to see me as an outcaste hence not pay attention to what I was saying.

I recall that I have had this problem before. At a different occasion, an Onitcha Igbo person had implied that Osuji is an Osu name.

In Owerri, the name Osuji or Njoku symbolizes a child dedicated to God. He is, in fact, like the biblical Samuel. He is generally selected to be the high priest of the people. In my own case, my people have always been the high priest of Amadioha. Osuji’s are diala, free born. In my village, Umuorisha-Umuohiagu, we are the first, Opara, of the village. We are the first among equals. When the Oha, Amala, gather to deal with an issue, no one can talk before the Osujis talk.

Unfortunately, we do have Osus in our town and they are relegated to a specific village, Amuuga. Some of us are working to end the second class treatment meted out to the Osus.

The critical point here is that some Igbos assume that just because ones name has the prefix Osu in it that one is an Osu; these folks ought to educate themselves on Igbo culture before they alienate more people than is necessary. The Igbos are known for their thoughtless talking and tendency to alienate other Nigerians with their careless speech. They tend to encore the wrath of other Nigerians because of their intemperate speech. Folks ought to think before they talk, better still, they ought to research a subject before they talk about it. As for the wa-wa boy who sought to denigrate this Diala by calling him an Osu, one would think that if he had any brains in his idiot head that he would be ashamed that the Igbos have Osus and work to end it, rather than seek to put some one down by associating him with the Osu phenomenon. That ape ought to go back to school, and this time, make sure that he learns something useful, rather than merely see certificates as something that confers prestige on his inferior feeling ego-body.

The salient point, however, is how much the Igbos from what I call the Onitcha area do not understand the practices of the Owerri Igbo. There seems a disconnection between these two Igbo clans. These two sets of Igbos must, therefore, make a vigorous effort to understand each other, rather than alienate each other. If they insist on insulting each other, the other groups in Nigeria can, in fact, exploit their differences. The clever and diplomatic Yoruba can manipulate the weaknesses he sees in the Igbos.

IGBO CHARACTER FLAW

And that brings us to a character structure in the Igbos that they must address, right away. The Igbos, at the individual and group levels, tend to feel superciliously better than other persons.

The individual Igbo often imagines that he is better than other Igbos. Igbos from certain clans tend to imagine themselves superior to those from other clans. As already noted, the Onitcha Igbo often fancies himself superior to the Owerri Igbo, whereas the Owerri Igbo considers the Onitcha Igbo a criminal.

Collectively, the Igbos tend to feel superior to non-Igbos.

I was born and grew up at Lagos. During my growing up days, the Igbos around me impressed on my mind that we were better than the Yorubas and Hausas. In fact, they taught us that we should always look down on other Nigerians.

I went to school and found both Yoruba and Hausa kids beat us Igbo kids. We were told that we were better than others, but, in actual fact, those others seemed better than us. We developed cognitive dissonance. So, how do you resolve the dissonance?

There is nothing to reconcile. All people are the same and equal. No group is superior to others. Whites and blacks, Igbos, Yorubas and Hausas are all the same. There is no such thing as a superior human being. Inferiority and superiority are deluded mental states.

I have given why Igbos find it necessary to look down on other Nigerians serious thinking. If objectivity were the criteria for judging the groups in Nigeria, some are, in fact, more advanced than the Igbos.

The Hausas, Yorubas and Edos had fairly sophisticated societies with centralized political structures. The Igbos were stuck at a more primitive social organization. Each Igbo town was, more or less, independent of others. There was no Igbo superstructure for governing all Igbo land.

To political science, the Igbos are considered at the base of social organization, a primitive people, whereas the Hausas and Yorubas are considered at the feudal level of political organization.

In material culture, the Hausa and Yoruba have accomplished more than the Igbos. Look at the mosques in Northern Nigeria and the cities that existed in Yourubaland before the white men came to their necks of the wood. The Igbos lived in thatched huts, essentially primitive housing. So why are these essentially primitive (mercifully called preliterate by condescending anthropologists) people arrogant and feeling better than their neighbors?

I speak as an Igbo. I am not in denial. I suffer from all the shortcomings of the Igbos. I am not seeing something in me, denying and projecting it to others. There is no transference relationship going on here. I have had years of psychoanalysis done on me.

As an Igbo, I feel superior to other people. Consider. I came from what one might call a working class background. But when I came to America, I immediately assessed my white school mates and, somehow, felt that they were inferior to me. That is correct; I have never seen a white person that I felt is the equal of the Igbos. I tended to look down on whites.

There then is a paradox. The mere fact that I am in America, going to their schools, implies that they are superior to me, at least in material culture. But there I was feeling superior to them. I used to condescend towards whites and, at best, tolerate them, as one tolerates children, with amusement.

I remember taking a philosophy course and the professor walked in, a woman. I said to myself, what does this Otu Ocha know about philosophy? How can a woman understand my beloved philosophy? I love philosophy and have done so since I was fourteen and my father gave me Will Durant’s History of Philosophy, as my birthday gift. If you get me going on any of the philosophers, from Plato to Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Locke, David Hume (my alter ego), George Berkeley, Hegel, Schopenhauer (my fellow pessimist), Jean Jacque Rousseau, Nietzsche, William James, Henry Bergson, you cannot stop me from talking. Well, here was a woman to teach my beloved philosophy and I simply concluded that a woman cannot do so and immediately left the classroom and dropped the course. I took it when a man taught it. What is the point? I had all the Igbo prejudices, including feeling superior to other people and to women in particular.

So why do Igbos feel superior to other people? Elsewhere, I employed Alfred Adler’s individual psychology in explaining the Igbo character problem. However, I am fully aware of the limitations of Adler’s rationalistic psychology; life cannot be reduced to pure reason. I am trained in both Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell’s views on mythology and understand that there are dark forces in our unconscious minds that our rational science is not able to understand.

Be that as it may, I believe that Igbos tend to feel inordinately inferior to other people and compensate with imaginary sense of superiority to them. I do not exactly know why Igbos feel inferior to other groups and have a need to restitute with infantile sense of superiority. I have, elsewhere, speculated on some putative reasons why the Igbos feel inadequate, as they are, such as their lacking developed complex political organizations.

Lord Lugard, it should be recalled, had absolute contempt for the Igbos, for he thought that, of all the Nigerian tribes, they were the least civilized. He admired the Hausas most, for they had attained feudal social political organization.

If pride did not blind Igbos to political reality, they would see that of all the groups in Nigeria, that the Hausa have had the most experience in governing large polities. As such, the Igbos ought to learn a thing or two from the Hausas on how to govern polities. Clearly, the Igbos are late comers to the art and science of governing large political structures, and can be said to be the least experienced group in Nigeria in doing so. Misguided pride aside, one sees Hausas as the better rulers of Nigeria. One believes that Igbos have a lot to learn about government before they can do a good job of it. At present, Igbos tend to see government and political positions as from which they gratify their childish narcissism and seem socially important. In fact, very few Igbos understands the negative nature of government. Government is an instrument for suppressing people and for making essentially selfish human beings behaves in a social serving manner. Government is a means of controlling the people and in the process reducing their natural freedom to do as they pleased. Government is exercise of the power of coercion and necessarily must jail and or kill some persons, if it serves social interests to do so. (If you are interested on this subject, see the writings of political theorists, such as Nicollo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, Jean Jacque Rousseau, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Edmund Burke, Pareto, Joseph Schumpeter, Seneca, Cicero, Marcus Aureoles and other political realists.)

All that we need to know is that the Igbos are not superior to other tribes in Nigeria. No one human being is superior to other human beings. Whereas some persons seem more talented in certain areas of human endeavor, the fact is that all human beings are the same and equal. To desire that one be superior to other persons is to be neurotic, a mild mental disorder; to believe that one is already superior to other people is to be psychotic (delusion disorder, if accompanied with hallucinations is schizophrenia, paranoid type).

We do not need to flog a nonsensical belief. No one is better than other people. Therefore, the Igbos must make a vigorous effort to see all other Nigerians as the same and coequal with them. The Igbos must learn to respect other Nigerians.

In particular, the Igbos must stop their annoying tendency to look down on the Hausas. I can tell you from direct experience that some of the brightest Nigerians I know are Hausas. The best Nigerian mathematician I know of is a Hausa person.

Obviously the Igbos have strengths. They tend to work hard and are very industrious. In the few years that they have become acquainted with Western civilization, they have made a lot of progress acquiring its indices, albeit at the superficial level. As already indicated, many Igbos now have university education. This is a phenomenal achievement, even by American standards.

However, having university education does not mean that one has understood the spirit of the West. For one to understand the spirit of the West, one must study Western philosophy, psychology and religion. Very few Igbos have done so and generally exhibit superficial understanding of what the West is all about. Even when they call themselves medical doctors, engineers etc they are no more than primitive folks in western clothing. Unless you have personally gone through the tortured intellectual journey that the West went through, had your own dark ages, renaissance, reformation, enlightenment, romanticism and finally got to your own age of scientism, you are not operating in the Western paradigm of reality. You are a tribal man in Western uniform.

Whereas no one should excuse man’s inhumanity to man, I sense that Igbo arrogance contributes to other Nigerians tendency to persecute them. Consider that the Igbos used to call Hausas Nnama, cattle, and generally disrespected Hausas. How would you like to be so disrespected? Be honest? You would feel so angry that you would want to beat up the person putting you down.

Obviously, many factors contributed to the various pogroms and genocides that were perpetrated against the Igbos, but one factor contributing to it is Igbos childish pride. The Igbos, therefore, must give up their neurotic and or psychotic feeling of superiority to other people and see all human beings, men and women, as the same. If they do, I believe that they would generate less hatred, anger and persecution towards them. Of course, other Nigerians ought to refrain from killing Igbos. No one has a right to kill other human beings, no matter their character flaws. The Igbos are a hard working but intemperate people. Other Nigerian ought to make allowances for Igbo lack of diplomacy and take advantage of their industry.

CONCLUSION

What have I said in this rambling and disjointed essay? I have said that there are divisions in Igboland, serious ones, and that it serves all Igbos well for them to bring them out into the open and explore ways to fix them. Placing serious issues on the back burner and pretending that all Igbo see things with uniform lenses is being like the proverbial ostrich, and hide ones head in the sand. We have serious issues in Alaigbo and must address them.

To begin with, we ought to address our infantile tendency to look down on other Nigerians and, indeed, on each other and learn to see all God’s children as the same and equal. We ought to give up the neurosis of wanting to seem superior to other human beings.

We ought to appreciate the strength that lies in our diversity. The traders of Igboland are obviously useful. The less trading oriented Igbo are equally useful. Each compliments the other. There is no use looking down on each other.

The Onitcha Igbo must give up the delusion that he has the right to speak for all Igbos. Some of us Owerri folks do not take seriously any thing said by Onticha people. That is the sad fact. Igbos must consult each other before they speak for each other. If you want to form an organization on behalf of all Igbos, please find out what Ndigbo from all parts of Alaigbo feel about it; do not pretend that just because you are Igbo that other Igbos would accept your leadership. There is diversity in Igboland, as there is every where else in this world.

Finally, there is serious cleavage between Owerri and Onitsha Igbo. This division must be worked out; no one should pretend that the two respect each other. They don’t.

Some Owerri folks look at the political comedy and tragedy going on in Anambra state, Ngige and Obi’s song and dance, shake their heads and say: what else do you expect from criminals? This is sad, indeed.

It is about time that all Igbos sat down in their own Igbo national political reform conference and looked at the issues that divide them and sought solutions that unify them.

All Igbo must work for one Igbo nation, a nation that stretches from Port Harcourt (in present Rivers State) to Abo (in present Deltas State). One Alaigbo nation, indivisible and united.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji,PhD

Seattle, Washington

Posted by Administrator at 12:57 PM | Comments (2)

August 23, 2005

Can Africans Govern Themselves Well?

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington) --- African countries began gaining their independence from their European colonial masters in the 1950s. In effect, Africans have been trying to govern themselves for fifty years. This seems sufficient amount of time to assess how well Africans are doing. Are Africans doing a good job governing themselves?

As one looks at the African continent, what one sees is unmitigated disaster. With the possible exception of South Africa (which, in as much as its economy is managed by Caucasians, is not an African economy), all of black Africa is badly governed. No black African country is likely to win praises for excellence in governance.

If we go beyond Africa to other black governed countries, such as the Caribbean, we see the same pattern of misgovernance repeated. None of the black Caribbean countries can be said to be well governed. They, like African countries, are economic basket cases. Haiti, for example, is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. If Haiti managed its tourism industry well, that alone could make its citizens well off, materially.

This unpalatable situation raises a necessary question: can Africans and descendants of Africans elsewhere in the world govern themselves well? This is a question that must be asked. Indeed, many non-Africans are already asking this question and we, Africans, might as well ask it, and attempt to answer it, as objectively as is possible.

There is no use denying facts. The fact is that Africans, so far, have proven themselves incapable of governing modern polities and economies and that begs the question as to whether they can ever govern themselves well? Human beings tend to judge how well people will do in the future based on how they did in the past. If, in the past, Africans were unable to govern themselves well, people are right in wondering whether they could do a better job in the future.

This question is by no means racist. It does not invite White persons to come govern Africa, as racists who doubt Africans ability to govern themselves would like to be the case. Africa has had a history of been governed by whites and they did not do a better job of it than Africans are currently doing. The question is not bringing back whites to govern Africans but how to help Africans govern themselves well.

There is no use citing the bugaboo of neo-colonialism. That excuse is old and tired. Perhaps, it was tenable in the 1960s and 1970s, immediately after Africans obtained their independence from their former colonial masters, but fifty years later, it would be begging the issue to cite that excuse.

Asians were colonized by Europeans. They, too, were, apparently, subjected to neocolonialism. If the argument of neocolonialism holds water, how come Asians have extricated themselves from its shackles?

The neocolonial argument holds that the Metropolis, the West, would like to keep the Periphery, non-Western parts of the world, underdeveloped; that it is in the interest of the Metropolis to keep the Periphery a plantation economy, providing the factories of the Metropolis with raw materials; and that the West forms a compact with the leaders of the non-West, a Comprador class, and pay them to hold their people down and essentially transform them into peasants, if not slaves, supplying the West with raw materials with which it runs its industries. The West then turns around and sells the finished goods it had manufactured from the raw materials bought cheaply from non-Western countries to the non-West, at exorbitant prices, hence keeping them poor.

Assuming that the neocolonial, dependency, argument has some merit in it (why would the non-West want to be kept poor, one asks) the fact is that Asian countries have extricated themselves from that arrangement and today are the world’s fastest growing economies.

If Asians can liberate themselves from the Western economic strangle hold, one assumes that Africans can do the same? Or is it the case that Africans are less intelligent than Asians hence cannot understand that they are being exploited by the West, and, if they did understand their dependent relationship with the West, cannot figure out a way to emancipate themselves from those bent on oppressing them?

The neocolonialist argument seem irrelevant to the understanding of Africans seeming inability to govern themselves well. Moreover, we know that it is immature to blame other people for one’s problems. Psychologists tell us that there are essentially two types of persons: those with internal locus of authority and those with external locus of authority. Those with internal locus of control see themselves as in charge of what happens to them in their lives and take responsibility for their successes and failures, whereas those with external locus of control see the external environment as in control of their lives and blame it when something goes wrong in their lives. Empirical evidence shows that those who believe that they are responsible for their fate tend to feel empowered and tend to be successful persons, whereas those who see themselves as feathers in the wind, blown about by forces outside their control, tend to feel powerless and tend to be failures in life. For too long, Africans saw themselves as at the mercy of external forces and were failures. Their equally depowered friends like Walter Rodney (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa ) tell them that they are little children whose fate is in the hands of adult white people, external persons who did to them whatever they wanted, and that they had no efficacy to do anything about it other than complain about it. It is about time we saw ourselves as totally responsible for our fate. I believe that when we do so, develop internal locus of control we shall become successful in managing our affairs. Children complain about the hands fate dealt them; adults quietly make the most of their fate. As they say, if life gives you lemon, make lemonade.

I have carefully observed Africans, in Africa and in the Americas, and believe, sadly, that given their current individual psychologies they seem incapable of governing themselves. Unless they make drastic and sustained efforts to change their personalities; they seem unsuited to ruling themselves.

This is a sad thing to say about one’s own people, but one must be truthful to one’s perception. Perhaps, one is projecting ones negative self assessment, ones self doubt and lack of self confidence, ones belief that one cannot govern, to ones fellow Africans? Perhaps, one is so discouraged that one believes that one is not fit for leadership positions and attribute what one sees in one to one’s fellow Africans? Perception is projection. What the individual sees as out there is usually colored by what is in him. There is no such thing as a totally objective perception of other people. We always see with our past, our history and learning. In that light, one is probably externalizing aspects of what one sees in one to others? Be that as it may, one is convinced that contemporary Africans, until they are modified, are not fit to govern themselves. If their personalities remain as they are, we continue to witness badly governed African states. We shall continue to witness failed African states. If the best that Africa can do is produce egotistical and vain leaders like Abacha, Mobutu and Mugabe, one sees no light at the end of the tunnel.

Only the truth can make human beings free. Denial of the truth does not help any one; denial masks the problem, it does not solve it. We must state the truth of Africans as we see them, rather than pretend that what we see is not there. And if what we see is not there, we stand to be corrected. Correction requires that Africans govern themselves as other people do, decently and without corruption.

As I see it, until Africans change their apparent warped personalities, the world can throw all the money it wants at them, they are not going to govern Africa well. It would pay the world better dividends if it insisted that Africans become true adults and not the current emotionally retarded children they seem to be.

Psychology posits developmental stages that all children go through before they attain adulthood, emotionally, that is. One can be chronologically an adult but emotionally a child. See Erick Erickson’s schema in his seminal book, Childhood and Society. Also see Sigmund Freud’s views on children’s emotional development.

All children, at some point, between birth and age twelve, are totally narcissistic. Freud called this phenomenon primary narcissism. Here, children see themselves as the center of the universe. They believe that other people, particularly those that Harry Stack Sullivan called the children’s “Significant others” (parents, siblings, peers, teachers etc) exist to serve them.

Let me repeat: at some point, before age twelve, all children, black, white and Asian, believe that they are the center of the world and expect to get attention without earning it. This stage of psychological development has been called by many names. For our present purpose, we shall call it the narcissistic stage of child development. Every child goes through the narcissistic stage in his development and believes that he is very special and that he ought to be admired by all the people around him; that he should be admired for just being who he is, not because of what he does for the people.

Most human beings out grow this narcissistic stage of development. The normal adult human being gets to a point where he recognizes that he must do something for other people, for them to pay him attention. It is children who expect to obtain attention without earning it. In the adult world, one must do something, and do it well, for other people to pay attention to one. For example, in sports, one must be an outstanding player for society to pay attention to one.

Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are good at their games; most people see them as special in their fields and admire them. They obtain attention based on their actual performances in the field of play, not because of merely being human beings. In the world of work, the outstanding worker is rewarded with promotions and financial reinforcements. Simply stated, in the adult world, social recognition is predicated on performance of certain tasks for the people, doing for the people what they need done gets one their attention.

In the real world, adults do not strive to obtain attention from other adults without first doing something useful for them. It is emotionally regressed adults that seek to obtain other people’s attention without first doing something for them.

Psychologists tell us that whereas most people outgrow their childhood narcissistic stages, that some persons get stuck there. These people develop what is called narcissistic personality disorder.

The narcissistic personality disordered person believes that, as he is, that he is special. He does not believe that he has to do anything to earn other people’s admiration. He simply believes that other people ought to admire him, even if he is not doing anything useful for them. Indeed, he so believes himself special and superior to other people, that he justifies exploiting other people for his own good. He tends to use people to get what he wants out of life and then discard them, like pieces of scrap iron. On the job, he apple polishes and pretends to like coworkers and bosses, but the moment he gets what he wants through them, gets promoted, he behaves towards them as if he does not even know them. He often marries women who seem beautiful, not because he loves them, but to get other men to admire him for having such beautiful women around him, parlor trophies. The narcissist feels that he is justified in using other people because he is superior to them. The narcissist is self centered and could care less for other human beings welfare; he merely uses other people to procure his own survival. Narcissism is a primitive ego state, a pre civilized ego state, and hence it is found in all children before they are civilized.

Often, narcissism coexists with anti social personality disorder. The anti social personality disordered person feels that the world owes him a living. He has a sense of entitlement. He feels entitled to take from other people what he needs to survive with. He does not believe that he ought to work for his living. He wants other people to work for him and support him or else he takes from them. He finds it easy to steal from other people, even to kill them, so as to get what he needs to survive with. He does not feel guilty or remorseful from hurting other people, in fact, he enjoys doing so. The antisocial personality is a self centered person. In fact, he is so self centered that he is willing to harm and or kill other people, if in doing so he serves his interests. Think of the highway rubber who kills people, takes their money and goes to enjoy his animalistic existence with the money he had stolen.

(If you are familiar with the Nigerian political scene, you probably will agree that I have described the typical Nigerian politician. He is narcissistic and or antisocial in personality structure: he is self centered and does not give a hoot for public interest; he steals from the public treasury, takes bribes and is corrupt; he feels special, seeks admiration from the people and wants to be seen as a very important person, an Oga, but does not want to do anything for the people to gain their admiration. In many instances, Nigerian politicians do not hesitate killing their opponents and do not feel guilty or remorseful from doing so. The typical Nigerian politician is a criminal personality. What we have in Nigeria are criminals in governments.)

Despite his outward seeming smoothness, the narcissistic personality has deep rooted sense of inferiority. (See the writings of Kohut, Kernberg, Masterson and Alice Miller.) He feels inadequate and inferior. Nevertheless, he tended to have had childhood success at school, play and work. His early childhood success gives him the impression that, somehow, he is special.

The inferior feeling school boy who, nevertheless, makes good grades in his school examinations is likely to see the other students who are making poor grades as inferior to him. Thus, over time, such a child compensates with a fictional sense of superiority to other children.

The narcissistic personality generally has a history of social success (at play, school and work) and that enables him to compensate with imaginary sense of superiority to other people. In most cases, he was pampered by his parents and seen as special and that reinforces his sense of omnipotence.

The narcissist generally goes far in life. He is found in the professions, governments, military and the business world. When he meets with a serious setback, for example, a professional failure he tends to become devastated. However, failure and depression is therapeutic for him, for they enable him to recognize that he is not special and that he is not superior to any one. It is at this point that the narcissist begins to grow up, to accept the fact that he is like all human beings, imperfect. When he accepts his equality and sameness with all people and resolves to work for attention, he is finally an adult, emotionally speaking.

Unfortunately, many narcissists never attain adult emotional status. In fact, some of them regress to antisocial personality level of development, the most infantile level of development there is.

The antisocial personality is more like an animal than a human being. Consider: the thief does not expect other people to steal from him. If you take from him, take what he had stolen from other people, he feels angry at you. That is, he does not want other people to do unto him as he does to them. The cardinal characteristic of an emotional adult is acceptance of the Jesus Christ articulated philosophy that other people should do to one as one does to them, and since one wants them to love one, one loves them.

What is good for the goose is good for the gander. If you steal from others, you should expect to be stolen from. In which case, you would have chaos all around you, instead of a well organized society to live in. As Thomas Hobbes noted, life would become nasty, brutish and short for all persons.

The thief expects other people to be law abiding and then gives himself the permission to sneak behind their backs and steal from them. In as much as they are not also thieves and stealing from him, he expects to live in a fairly well ordered society.

Nigerians come to America. They appreciate the American honor system, the well ordered nature of American society. They want Americans to keep it so. In keeping it so, they sneak behind the backs of Americans and steal from them, such as their credit cards rackets. But if Americans were to be suspicious and protect their properties, Nigerian thieves would not be able to steal from them. The thief counts on the good nature of the person he steals from. That is what makes the thief a coward and a detritus of mankind. A bold person ought to confront people frontally, amano amano.

(Initially, the criminals in Nigerian governments stole their people’s monies and banked them in the Western world. They then turned their country into a lawless jungle. Finding their country unlivable, they are now running to the West. They want to take advantage of the well ordered system that obtains in the West. Alas, they have brought their amoral, thieving ways to America. They are engaging in every criminal activity known to man, the least of which is 419. One just wishes that the law enforcement authorities in America would be draconian with them, quickly apprehend these uncivilized animals; try and send them to long term jails, and when they have served their sentences, repatriate them to their chaotic country. America must not permit these people to turn its well organized society into the lawless bedlam that is Nigeria.).

If one engages in adult thinking, one would recognize that social order is maintained when all of us respect each others’ properties. The antisocial personality is about five years old, emotionally and does not think in adult terms. He thinks that he is tough and smart by cheating and stealing from people, not recognizing that if other people choose to do as he did, that the social fabric would break down and we revert to a state of anarchy, as is apparently the case in Nigeria. Nigeria is lawless, without government performing its function of enforcing law and order and punishing corrupt people.

Most Nigerian leaders, African leaders and indeed black leaders tend to be narcissistic personality disordered persons. Some of them are outright antisocial personalities. They seek public office for the attention such offices give to them, not because of what they intend to do for their people. The Nigerian politician wants to be the president of Nigeria because that office gratifies his need for infantile narcissism, his desire to be in the lime light and be seen by most people as a very important person; not because he has a burning agenda that he sees political position enabling him to realize.

African politicians, like human beings everywhere, suffer from the other personality and mental disorders: paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, borderline, histrionic, avoidant, obsessive-compulsive, dependent, passive aggressive, schizophrenia, mania, delusion, depression etc, but the two elaborated in this essay, narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders, seem the most pronounced ones in them.

Consider Nigeria’s President, Olusegun Obasanjo. He runs around the world, fancying himself a great leader. But his country has over fifty percent unemployment rate. If he truly cared for his people, he would stay home and seek ways to provide them with jobs. He would hang his head low with shame, for a man who cannot provide jobs for his people is not a leader.

If Nigeria’s president wanted the office of the presidency to do something for Nigeria, the least he could have done is give all Nigerians electricity and pipe borne water. The total annual electrical output of Nigeria’s Electric Power Authority, NEPA, is less than is necessary to power the Seattle Metropolitan area (Washington, USA) in a year. Nigeria cannot produce as much electricity for a country of 130 million people as is produced for an area containing less than 2 million persons, in the USA. Yet Nigerian politicians are sitting on billions of oil revenue.

(Nigerians steal most of this oil money and squander it. They even borrow money from world monetary institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, presumably to fund developmental projects for their people. However, they squander such money. They then beg those institutions to forgive them their debt. These criminals run around pretending to be leaders. But we all know that if Nigeria’s oil revenue dries up tomorrow Nigeria will become another failed African state. Indeed, Nigeria’s failure will be very spectacular and would drag many West African countries down with it. We know all this and keep quiet. Well, I will keep quiet no more.)

Apparently, the leaders of Nigeria could not estimate how much power their entire country needs and set about providing it. Obasanjo probably does not have a clue as to how much electricity Nigeria needs. His goal, apparently, is to be the most important person in Nigeria. His job description is to run around the world spending Nigeria’s meager resources in his ceaseless traveling. The head of state of a banana republic possessing his own jet, while the Prime Minister of England flies commercial is a caricature of a human being.

I have observed many African politicians and sadly have not seen a single one that seemed to me to be an adult, emotionally. What I saw were children who are invested in getting attention from other people. This phenomenon does not end with politicians. The typical Nigerian middle class person is primarily interested in your calling him: professor (which, to his infantile mind means a prestigious person, rather than what it means, French for teacher), Doctor (which, to his infantile mind means that he is important, rather than what it means, some one who dedicated his life to the search for knowledge to improve the human condition) , Chief, (which, to his infantile mind means that he is important, rather than what it means, a leader of a primitive German war band), Alhaji (which, to his infantile mind means that he is a very important person, rather than what it means, in fact, a person who has fulfilled the Islamic religious obligation of going to Mecca, Hajj); being called engineer (substitute with whatever profession he imagines that he is…this practice is not done in the West, in the West, people are simply called Mr., without identifying their occupation, but in the context of Nigeria, the individual’s profession has to be stated to make him seem important).

One should not equivocate on this matter. Nigerians, Africans, black Americans are driven by vanity. They seek public office for ego reasons, not because of what they want to do for their people. In as much as their motivation is to gratify their arrested emotional needs, they cannot make good leaders.

Those who have paid attention to the personality structure of African Americans came to the same conclusions, though they tended to attribute these people’s apparent stunted lifestyles to the effect of slavery and racism on them. See Oversay and Kardiner, The Mark of Oppression; Thomas Pittigrew, A Profile of the African American; Karon, The Negro Personality; Franklin Frazier, The Negro Middle Class; Franz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks; Omanini, Prospero and Caliban, The Psychology of Colonized People and Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized. Each of these observers concluded that the Negro is infantile in his emotional organization, seeks attention from other people, tends to be fearful and pleases other people rather than stick to the truth, as he perceives it to be. Stanley Elkins called such perpetually laughing and jiving Negroes Sambo. These folks spend their meager money trying to look important in three piece suits, expensive cars etc rather than go do work that produces something for the economy. The Negro professor, for example, makes sure that he looks very important, though he has written nothing to make him a real professor: a person who propagates knowledge.

I am not motivated to seek excuses for any one. What I see is what I see. I see Africans, African Americans and black people, all over the world, who place their egos above social interest, who seek public offices to seem prestigious persons and who do not seem to understand what political offices are for: to serve people. I see people who do not understand that maturity and emotional health, in fact, requires one to be humble. A truly mature person does not feel special and superior to other people. He knows himself as the same and equal with all people. He seeks ways to serve other people and not seek credit for it. He gives praise and glory to God for every thing he does. He knows that by his own power that he can do nothing; that the child of God is powerless to do anything by himself and does whatever he does with the power of his father in him.

Humility, not vanity, is the sign of emotional maturity. Can you say that Nigerian, African and black leaders are humble? They are arrogant do nothing so-called leaders.

I was once in the British House of Commons, during the questions and answers period, for the British Prime Minister. This man, on the spot, could tell how many children are in British elementary schools, secondary schools, technical schools, universities; he could tell how many students passed the GCE OL in the past year, what schools produced the best results; he could cite the number of hospital admissions in the entire country during the past year, what diseases they were treated for and talked about the problems with the national health system; in short, this man had the data and statistics of every aspect of his country’s activities in his finger tips. He is clearly a policy wonk and enjoys the process of making and implementing public policies. Above all, he takes responsibility for how his country’s economy is doing and if unemployment rises he takes blame for it. There is a leader for you. He is leading his people, working for them. He was not in office to be seen as mister important chief thief of his country.

By contrast, ask the Nigerian head of state how many pupils are in elementary schools in his country and the idiot would not know. You see, he is in office, not to help the people but to gratify his narcissistic desire to be important, to be admired as the chief idiot of an idiot country.

I would like to see each African leader tell us what he has done for his people in any given year.

Let me recapitulate what I have said. I have said that Africans, at home and in the Diaspora, have personality disorders that prevent them from becoming good leaders and that until they change their distorted personalities that they are not going to be able to govern their countries well. This is a serious assertion for one to make.

The critical thing to do is get Africans to become adults, emotionally. Adults are persons who care for their fellow human beings and who consciously set out to serve the public, rather than their self interests only. An adult sees a problem that needs to be solved and goes about solving it, irrespective of what is in it for him.

The best lived life is one dedicated to serving the common good. Pursuit of social interest is the best indicator of mental health, Alfred Adler tells us and my experience testifies as correct.

Some say that this infantile vanity in Africans is due to colonialism and racism. On the other hand, since the problem exists in Africans, at home and abroad, could it be said to be genetic? (Narcissism is found in all human populations. That is why we have religion and other philosophies to help ameliorate swollen human egos. In so far that pursuit of vanity and childish pride is genetic; it is in all human beings.)

What is salient is that irrespective of its cause, vanity can be eradicated. Africans can be taught to care for their fellow Africans and stop being brutes that see their brothers suffering and do not give a hoot about it. Africans can be taught to learn to negate their vanity and dedicate their lives to serving the public good. Some of us have transformed ourselves from self seeking persons to social serving persons hence most Africans can be made to serve the common good.

PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

The surprising thing is that the problems of Africa are not as complicated as some people think that they are. In fact, Africa’s problems are very simple. Simple problems require simple solutions, not the complex ones Africans often seek.

Each African country was put together by European powers. The Europeans, understandably, did not come to Africa to serve Africans’ interests, but theirs. Once we understand that Europeans have no business serving African interests, we would not waste our time and energy blaming them for our African problems. We should seek solutions to our African problems.

Each African country was hastily put together by foreign powers. The various tribes/nations put into specific countries were not asked for their consent before they were associated with other tribes. In some of these artificial countries, some tribes dominate other tribes. Consider Nigeria. Here, the Hausa-Fulani-Yoruba political alliance dominates the other tribes. Obviously, this situation cannot last forever, and if the current black colonialists expect it to last forever, they are lacking in understanding of human nature.

Human beings are characterized by their desire for freedom. For a while, you can restrict their freedom, but, sooner or later, the caged bird will fly away. So what do you do in a multiethnic country? You make each tribe a state and have them join a federation. Thus, in Nigeria, there must be a Hausa state, a Yoruba state, an Igbo state, an Ijaw state, an Efik state, an Edo state, an Urobo/Ishikiri state, a Tivi state etc. The smaller tribes can be bundled into groups of states. Altogether, we would have about twenty economically viable states in a federation of Nigeria. Each state would govern itself, manage its economic resources, and pay taxes to the central government and delegate foreign and military policy making powers to the Central government. See the Constitution of the United States of America.

Now, what is so difficult about accomplishing this very simple and inevitable goal? It must be done, sooner or later, so why haven’t the so-called rulers of Nigeria done it? They want to slough from crisis to crisis. When they grow up and become realistic adults, they must do what they have to do, have each tribe rule itself.

What goes for Nigeria goes for all multi tribal African countries. Each of them must become a true federation, with each tribe becoming a state in it.

African countries are very backward. What to do? Provide universal free and compulsory education to all African children: six years of elementary schooling, six years of secondary schooling, and four years of university for 33% of the best secondary school graduates, four years of technical education for 50% of the next best secondary school graduates etc.

Africans are afflicted by untreated diseases. Provide all Africans with free, that is, publicly paid, health insurance. Each state should be responsible for providing its people with free education and medical treatment. (Beyond those two areas, the private sector can pretty much be left to take care of the other aspects of the economy, with the government regulating it, as it is done in the United States of America.)

Africa is the least industrialized economy in the world. Embark on a serious industrialization program, so that in fifty years, Africa will be as industrialized as Western countries.

Embark on a policy of developing the infrastructures necessary for a modern economy. (I have developed these ideas elsewhere.)

Where will Africans obtain the resources to accomplish these seeming grandiose goals? We shall get them from Africa. We sit on enormous resources and do not know how to exploit and develop them. With good leadership and management training, we can transform Africa into a well governed place in ten years.

I advocate that All African governments build leadership and management schools, equivalent to USA Master in Business Administration schools, in every major city and require all persons who want to go into politics to first attend these schools. For example, if one is already a lawyer, one still attends the leadership and management school, for two years, to learn the basics of leadership, finance, public and business; accounting; marketing; human resources, etc. Politicians must learn what leadership is all about. To lead means positing goals that are deemed good for the public and seeking resources to accomplish them. Before a person goes into politics, he or she must write a 250 pages book describing what he plans to accomplish while in office, and how he intends to do so, where he would obtain the human and capital resources to do so etc.

With iron fisted resolution and commitment, African problems are not so difficult to solve. Instead of addressing their problems, what we see are Africans who behave like five year olds, feeling special and seeking admiration from every person around them, while doing nothing for them. We must put an end to this disease of the black race, this infantile narcissism.

AFRICANS CAN GOVERN THEMSELVES WELL

When Africans give up their current over investment in narcissism, pride and vanity and learn that the most rewarding life is one dedicated to serving the public good, they will make excellent leaders and governors of their continent. They will go from being under socialized persons in three piece suites to socialized persons in Khaki pants and rolled up sleeves working for the development of their countries.

When a human being devotes him self to serving the common good of humanity, he obtains the gifts of God: peace, happiness and material abundance. But when a human being is self centered and vain, as most African leaders currently are, he does not receive the gifts that God has already given his children, waiting for them to receive it, when they love and serve one another.

In this essay, I deliberately avoided engaging in excessive causal analysis and explanation for why things are the way they are in Africa. I did so because Africa has, for too long, had many people concentrating on pointing out why it is not doing well what it ought to be doing. I did not want to provide yet another excuse for Africa’s misgovernance. Yet there are explanations for Africa’s problems.

My perception of Africans is that until recently they lived in what Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) called the state of nature, a less organized society. In the state of nature, man is an egotist and took from other men what he needed to survive, without caring for their welfare. Contemporary African leaders take from their countries what they need to gratify their egos, but do not care for the people’s welfare.

It is such variables as religion and philosophy that civilize man’s ego. By civilize, I mean made to live in a city, made to share the same living space with other people and to care for other people. Africa was unfortunate in that it did not have cities and thus was not civilized; the people were not made to cooperate with one another and to serve one another.

Of all the factors that civilize human beings, religion is probably the most effective in doing so. Christianity came to Africa only recently, no more than two hundred years ago. (I am aware of the few exceptions, such as in Ethiopia and the Congo.) It usually takes up to five hundred years before a world religion like Christianity shrinks the ego of primitive persons. It certainly took that long before Christianity began to civilize Europeans. Even then, Europeans are by no means totally civilized, they are somewhere between civilized and barbarian. Nevertheless, Christianity prepared European rulers to serve their people. With the demise of religion in the West, Westerners are reverting to primitive egoism and the result would be the end of Western civilization.

Africans are self seeking and self serving and not social serving. Even when they claim to be Christians, Africans really do not know what Christianity means. They tend to see Christianity as magical wand that enhances their egos. They really do not know that the real mission of Christianity is to teach people to (1) serve their fellow human beings, (2) love their fellow human beings, (3) forgive all people the wrongs they do to one another (4) and, ultimately, enable human beings to altogether eliminate their egos.

Human beings must give up that which they proudly identify with, their separated ego, selves, for them to see the face of Christ and return to being with their father. No person who lives in the ego is aware of heaven, that is, formless unified state. The ego is what we came to earth to experience and is what keeps us in this world of separation, space, time and matter. To return to our permanent home, formless unified spirit, we must give up our attachment to the ego and the bodies that house it.

The ultimate goal of all true religions, such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism is to enable human beings to overcome the world, which means to overcome their identification with separated ego, selves and return to unified spirit self. These religions help human beings to be “selfless”. At present, each human being believes that he has a separated self and defends it; true religion enables him to realize that his real self is part of a unified self, one self, God, that is, simultaneously itself and infinite selves, human beings.

We shall not try to explain the nature of unified self; it is ineffable. For our present purpose, let us just say that Africans have un-socialized egos hence their seeming devotion to seeking attention from other people, rather than serving other people. Hopefully, by the end of this century, Africans would have had sufficient exposure to the civilizing effects of Christianity (and other philosophies that show human beings how to live a service oriented life style) and begin to shrink their primitive and untamed egos.

In time, Africans will learn to devote their lives to the service of other people hence form good governments. As I pointed out in a different essay, Africa’s current nation states are artificial constructs put together by the West to serve Western interests. In time, these artificial countries will be deconstructed and reconstructed to serve African interests. I visualize a Pan African Federation with four hundred states (there are four hundred tribes in Africa, I counted and named them in a different paper), each state composed of one tribe; all of them in one federated country along the line of the United States of America. We shall, before the end of this century, attain Kwame Nkrumah’s goal of having one United Africa Federation (UAF).

In the meantime, my function is to keep reminding them to serve people and see governmental positions as from which they serve rather than stroke their narcissistic egos. The narcissistic ego is an un-socialized ego, a primitive ego that adapted to life in the jungle, but not in the city. City living, that is, civilized living, entails shrinking ones ego and putting it to social service, rather than only self service.

PS: My brother, Ejike Kingsley Osuji, never ceases pointing out that I tend to make global generalizations about Nigerians. He says that there are upright and outstanding Nigerians in every field of human endeavor. I must confess that there was a time when I categorically dismissed most Nigerian as crooks and wanted nothing to do with them. I would not hire them for the organizations that I was fortunate to run. But, I have since learned that there are Nigerians who are as selfless and dedicated to public service as mother Teresa. In this essay, I made generalizations about Africans’ proclivity to vanity. Obviously, there are selfless and social serving Africans. To these selfless Africans, I ask for forgiveness. I thank those Africans that recognize the truth of Spinoza’s teaching that: virtue is its own reward.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

Africa Institute, Seattle

600-1 Avenue, Suite 325

Seattle, Washington 98104

(206) 464-9004

[email protected]

[email protected]

www.africainstituteseattle.org

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August 22, 2005

Africans (Nigerians) and Addiction to mood-Altering Drugs

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, Washington)--- Human beings are prone to addictions to mood altering agents like food, alcohol, drugs and sex. Africans are human beings. Therefore, Africans are prone to the addictions that human beings are prone to.

Whereas the issue of addictions is squarely addressed in the Western world, it is seldom mentioned in Africa. It is as if Africans are not prone to addictions. This is very unfortunate, for Africans are as addicted to drugs as other races of mankind.

Take a casual walk along the streets of Lagos, Nigeria. You see men with very fat bellies. Some of these people look like they are pregnant and like they are about to give birth to twins.

In a misguided way, many of these people actually believe that their fat tummies are symbols of their living the good life. They, in fact, think that having grossed fat all over their bodies mean that they are wealthy persons. Indeed, they expect people to see them as very important persons from the fact of their fatness. To be an “oga”, big man, in Nigeria, one must be fat.

This is sad, very sad. Fat means that they are sick. In fact, they are reducing their life span by being fat. The estimated life span of Nigerians is 46 years (and 78 years for white Americans).

These people eat like there is no tomorrow, become fat and clog their arteries with fat. They usually die from cardiovascular diseases (heart attacks and strokes). And when they die from these preventable diseases, their people believe that they died from magic spell cast on them by their enemies.

The average Nigerian is about five feet, eight inches tall. This means that he should not weigh more than one hundred and sixty pounds. In order not to weigh more than his normal weight, the individual must eat the right food and engage in physical exercises. There are four food groups: protein, carbohydrate, fats and minerals. The individual is supposed to balance food from the four groups in his daily diet, so as to stay fit.

The individual needs to exercise regularly. There are three types of exercises: cardiovascular, strength and flexibility. To meet these exercise requirements, the individual needs to run five miles, at least, three times a week, or for an hour each time; play tennis, swim, ride bicycles, work out in gyms with weights and generally engage in other forms of exercises.

It is an unusual sight to see Nigerians jogging. It is even more unusual to see Nigerians eating balanced meals. Generally, they eat as if they have never heard that overeating leads to fat, which leads to diseases. When you go to their houses or to their parties, they just eat, eat and eat, as if they live to eat and not eat to live.

Alcohol is a serious problem with many Nigerians. They drink palm wine, beer, Western wine, whisky, gin and other hard liquor, as if no one has told them that those are, in fact, drugs that are not good for their bodies. It makes one sick seeing them downing liquor as if they are unaware of what they are doing to their livers and brains. They develop liver cirrhosis (hence their fat tummies) and deplete their brains of vitamin B hence their sluggish thinking.

The average Nigerian seems addicted to food and alcohol and may not know it. Upon the slightest stress in their lives, they run to food and alcohol to cope with it. It is a well known fact that people use overeating and alcohol to attempt to reduce stress in their lives. Life is very stressful and the individual must seek ways to reduce it, but the best way to do so is through exercises and other healthy lifestyles.

Drugs like marijuana, cocaine, heroine, amphetamines and LSD are not readily available to Nigerians. If they were, one’s guess is that many Nigerians would resort to them, in their efforts to cope with the stressful exigencies of modern urban living. Given their tendency to not want to understand their issues psychologically, it is probable that many Nigerians will be addicted to these more serious drugs. I have never seen a group of people who have refused to gain insight into why they do what they do as Nigerians. Nigerians simply behave like extroverts and do not pause to ask why they do, what they do. Extroverts tend eschew introspection; they tend to engage in drug abuse when tension mounts in their unexamined lives.

I predict that, soon, we shall have more drug abuse in Nigeria than we have in the United States. (It should be noted that in the United States itself that drug abuse is a phenomenon found chiefly among African Americans and white trash, folks less subject to reflecting on their behaviors.)

Nigerians generally find it easy to rationalize their odious behaviors. Those who call themselves big men justify having many wives and many girl friends or visiting prostitutes. I personally know many Nigerian big men who have concubines and mistresses all over Nigeria. If you ask them why they do so, they glibly tell you that African cultures approved polygamy and that they are living according to their African cultures, not the Christian mandated one man-one wife practice. (Polygamy was not as common in traditional African societies, as nostalgic Africans tend to think that it was. I have reviewed my male ancestors, during the past two hundred years, and none of them had more than one wife.) Fela Anikulapo Kuti told himself that lie. In one fell swoop, Fela married tons of wives and HIV and died from it. Apparently, unexamined African cultures kill.

We are no longer living in traditional African societies and what was tenable there is no longer so in our modern urban setting. It is self evident that in our current world, the best marital form is one man-one wife. It is the most hygienic form of sexual activity. Other forms of sexual behavior lend themselves to contracting sexually transmitted diseases like Gonorrhea, Syphilis, Herpes, and HIV.

Alas, HIV is spreading like uncontrolled wild fire in all over Africa, largely because of Africans easy proclivity to casual sex. Let me state, in no equivocal terms: a rational adult must limit his sexual activity to one partner of the opposite sex. I am not interested in engaging in infantile rationalizations as to why folks should not do the right thing.

More to the point, Nigerians who engage in sex with multiple partners may not know it: they have sex addiction. Just as they are addicted to food and alcohol, they are also addicted to sex. They may not even know that there is such a thing as addiction to sex.

Sex, like drugs, is a mood-altering phenomenon. Upon ejaculation/organism, the individual feels his or her body relaxed. His consciousness is momentarily altered. In a word, he feels good. This feeling of pleasure from sex makes sex a potential addictive activity.

When under stress, people do secure momentary release from it by engaging in frequent sexual activity. There are people who have sex three or more times a day. Indeed, some of them do so with different sex partners. These people may not know it; they are using sexual intercourse to obtain reduction of their anxiety and stress. They are sex addicts.

There are many men who cruise city streets, picking up prostitutes and having sex with them. Some patronize pornography. They buy the cheap smut that litter the streets of Lagos and masturbate while looking at the naked women.

As long as they have the money to pay for it, Nigerian men find willing female merchants of sex. It is said: “money for hand, back na for ground”.

Nigerians are particularly amoral over sexual matters. If you have the money, many women, even students at universities, even married women, are willing to sell their genitals to you. Indeed, if one is in a position of authority, the Nigerian female often initiates sexual activity with one, just so that she gets something from one.

Nigeria is a culture that has gone to hell in a hand basket. No one has shame over sexual matters, any more. The Nigerian office is, more or less, a whorehouse. Female employees are often no more that their bosses sex toys. (This ought to be something for feminists to fight for; after all, men are exploiting those hapless office whores.)

What is sexual addiction? Every time one has sex with a sexual partner that one does not love, one is a sex addict. Sex is healthy if it is between two loving adults, a man and a woman. Sex is healthy when it is engaged in heterosexual marriage situations.

Sex addiction has nothing to do with the frequency of sexual activity. One can have sex once a year and still be a sex addict. The difference is why that sex? Did you have sex with a love-partner or did you have it with a person that you did not care for? If you do not care for your sex partner, you are a sex addict.

A sex addict uses sex to reduce his or her stress. If you have sex indiscriminately with several women, you are using sex to alter your mood, just as a drug addict uses drugs to alter his or her body chemistry, so as to feel momentarily fine, before that wears off and he engages in another crazed effort to find drugs. Sex addicts engage in compulsive efforts to find sexual partners, so as to obtain momentary release from their somatic tension, and then the craving is repeated, over and over again.

Experts on human sexual behavior have told us about what constitutes normal sexual frequency The Mckinsey Report claims that three times a week of sexual activity is the norm for married couples. From my own talking to couples, it seems that Mckinsey was wrong. Couples tell me that they have sex about once a week. Indeed, many say that they do not even do so once a month. Simply stated, there is no such thing as normal sexual frequency; individuals are different. Some seem to have more need for sex than others. Some do not even care for sex at all.

For our present purpose, the salient point is that there is such a thing as addiction to sex and that Nigerians are probably the most sex addicted persons in the world.

WHAT ARE THE CAUSES OF ADDICTION?

Alcoholics Anonymous, in its Big Book, claims that all addictions are caused by self-centeredness. As it sees it, addiction is an ego event. The addict lives for himself only. Moreover, the addict thinks that he is in charge of his life. As it were, the addict has removed God from his life and sees himself as God and, as such, is in control of his life.

AA proposes to teach the addict to embrace a higher power as in charge of his life and to find a way to dedicate his self to serving the community to which he is a part of. The AA Twelve Steps Treatment Program seeks ways to teach the addict that he is egoistic and that he needs to let that ego go and surrender to a higher power. (Please read the AA big book, I do not have the space to review it here.)

Are Nigerians self-centered? What is a Nigerian but a person who does not believe himself connected to other persons, a person who lives mostly for himself? What is a Nigerian but an egotist who thinks that the rest of the world exists to admire and worship his vanity, to see him as a very important person, VIP, even if he contributes nothing relevant to human evolution?

Why do Nigerians go into government? They do so to steal money for themselves but not to serve the public good.

A Nigerian, in fact, would see you as insane if you told him that the best-lived life is one dedicated to serving the common interest of the people.

Sadly, Nigerians claim to be religious persons. They do not know the first thing about religion. To be religious is to see all people as children of one father, God, and, therefore, dedicate one’s self to serving all people’s interests.

Brother Jesus, the most developed human being that has walked this earth asks: “what do you want other people to do to you? You want them to love you”. Therefore, the brother asks you to love other people, as you love yourself. “Do unto others, as you want them to do to you”, the man from Nazareth teaches us. Jesus teaches that love is the sum of all past prophecies, laws and certainly his own gift to mankind, his Gospel.

Would you ask a Nigerian to do unto others, as he wants them to do to him? Love them, serve them? If you need something done for you, would you expect a Nigerian to do it for you?

You must be the most naive human being on earth to expect a Nigerian to render you selfless service; he is not going to do so, unless, of course, you bribe him. And even then, he would do a shoddy work for you.

In as much as we can empirically demonstrate that many Nigerians are egoistic, they are prone to addictive behavior, if that behavior is correlated with self centered egoism.

TREATMENT FOR DRUG ADDICTION

There are many drug treatment programs. However, I find the AA Twelve Steps Program still the best addiction treatment program. If one is addicted to drugs, one probably has either or both psychological or physiological addiction.

In psychological addiction, the craving for drugs is, more or less, in the mind. But in physiological addiction, the craving for drugs is in the body, as well as in the mind. Ones body is habituated to the drug and compels one to have it, just for one to feel normal. Alcohol addicts must drink some alcohol just to prevent their bodies from shaking. They, in fact, experience all sorts of TD and visual hallucinations when they withdraw from alcohol. In deed, alcohol addicts nerves and muscles are so used to alcohol that if they suddenly quit, they could experience cardiac arrest. Therefore, it is usually advisable for drug addicts to check themselves into hospitals, so that medical doctors would monitor their withdrawal from their drugs of choice. Often times, alcohol addicts are given the minor tranquilizers (Librium, Valium etc) to help their bodies cope with withdrawal from alcohol. Serious addicts probably need to be in hospitals, so that physicians may treat whatever medical complications they have. A month of stay in a hospital is often long enough to get the addict’s body to become dry, get rid of his drug of choice from his body.

After stay in a supervised treatment facility, the addict then needs to attend group therapy, sometimes several times a week, for months and years, to enable him become freed from the demon of drugs.

In the context of Nigeria, the first order of business is to get Nigerians to overcome their denial of addiction. The average Nigerian is killing himself with overeating, over drinking, polymorphous perverse sexuality and does not know it. This gross addict will look you in the face and tell you that he does not have an addiction problem. He will tell you that addiction is a white man’s problem, not his.

The shantytowns of Nigeria are teeming with alcohol denizens, frustrated folks consoling themselves for the loss of their traditional cultures with alcohol; folks caught in a society going through what Karl Marx (Der Capital)called “primitive capital accumulation stage of capitalist development”, hence in pain and salving their angst with alcohol.

If one can get Nigerian addicts to acknowledge that they have addiction problems, one has performed ones duty.

In this essay, my goal is to draw attention to the fact that many Nigerians/Africans have addiction issues and that they need to face that fact and go seek treatment.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Africa Institute, Seattle

600-1 Avenue, Suite 325

Seattle, Washington 98104

[email protected]

www.africainstituteseatttle.com

Posted by Administrator at 04:20 PM | Comments (0)

August 20, 2005

A Realistic Educational Policy for African Countries

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. --- (Seatle, Washington) African countries, until recently, were ruled by European countries. By and large, the Europeans did not have the interests of Africans at heart. Europeans came to Africa to make profits. In pursuing their self interested businesses in Africa, the Europeans found it necessary to provide Africans with some sort of education so as to generate cheap source of labor. Thus, they encouraged their Christian missionaries to establish elementary and secondary schools in Africa.

Towards the tail end of colonialism, the Europeans found it necessary to establish a few universities in Africa. Perhaps, they intended to train those who would replace them and, in the process, make sure that they were the types of persons who would look after their self interests, while they were gone? Whatever were their motives, they established universities whose curricula had nothing to do with producing those capable of running modern industrial economies.

The universities the colonial masters bequeathed Africa produced persons trained in the classics (English, Latin, Greek and philosophy), history, political science, anthropology, sociology and other such prestige education that has no relevance to managing a modern industrial economy. It is clear that a modern industrial economy requires persons trained in the physical sciences: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and their applied forms in engineering and business studies (particularly finance, accounting, and marketing).

It would seem apparent that one of the first orders of business for African countries, upon independence, was to restructure the educational system they inherited from their colonial masters. This was not done and in those few instances where something seemed to have been done, Africans looked to America for guidance or copied the failed educational system of America.

Any one with eyes to see observes that K-12 education in the USA is a mess and needs revamping. In America, those not trained in particular subjects teach those subjects to students, persons without training in, say, physics teach physics at high schools. America’s teacher training programs are a shame. They have students go through four years of college, virtually learning only how to teach but not what to teach. These ill prepared students graduate and go pretend to teach students. Clearly, America needs to restructure her teacher training programs, so that prospective teachers first obtain a bachelors degree in one of the sciences, take one year of teaching methods and then go teach the subjects that they were trained in. You cannot have a person not trained in Chemistry teaching it, as is the case in American high schools, today.

On America’s college campuses, the worst students go to teacher education programs. The worst students become teachers. Teachers ought to be drawn from the best students.

Even America’s much vaunted university system: it is reputed to be the best in the world, is falling apart. It, too, needs to be changed and made realistic to modern technological times. Clearly, America’s universities need to emphasize the physical sciences and their applied forms and stop wasting young people’s time by providing them with education with which they are not going to be able to procure jobs. What exactly would a person do with a degree in sociology, anthropology, political science, history, philosophy, English and so on? Usually, graduates in these areas are hired and retrained by employers.

In trying to restructure her educational system, Africa should not look to America. What it should do is ask pertinent questions and answer them correctly.

We live in the age of science and technology. Therefore, educational systems must produce scientists and technologists.

What does this mean in the real world? It means designing an educational system that emphasizes science subjects.

I propose that we have six year elementary schools that are free and compulsory for all African pupils between the ages of six and twelve. These schools must teach science. All other subjects are to be adjunct.

(City Neighborhoods or villages are to provide nursery schools for those under age five. Each neighborhood pays for such nursery centers. Thus, working mothers drop off their children in the morning and pick them up in the evening, after work.)

I propose that we have free and compulsory six year secondary education for all graduates from elementary schools (ages 12-18), and that these schools emphasize the sciences. All students are to be required to take mathematics (arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, statistics, and calculus), physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, English, French and history. Other subjects are to be adjunct and taken by interested students, but not required for graduation.

At the end of secondary schooling, students are tracked to areas of their aptitudes and interests. Whereas all students can manage elementary and secondary education, experience shows that not all of them want to go to universities and or have aptitudes for it. Thus, a realistic educational system plans for one third of secondary school graduates to proceed to universities and makes other arrangements for the other two thirds.

I propose that 33% of all secondary school graduates (roughly those who made As and Bs in their school leaving examination) to proceed to universities. The emphasis at universities must be on the sciences and applied sciences.

At least, 33% of all university graduates ought to be in the applied sciences, and equal number in the physical sciences.

We can afford some redundant education in the social sciences and humanities, provided not too many students are allowed to waste their time in those unemployable areas.

The top ten percent of graduates ought to proceed to graduate schools. These ought to sit for their master’s degree after two years of graduate education, and the top ten percent allowed proceeding to the doctoral program. After another two years, they take the doctoral comprehensive examination and told to leave their university campuses and go get jobs. They are then free to submit their dissertations when they are able to do so. But under no circumstances should a student be permitted to malinger on campus and be a professional student. Considering that all education is paid for by the taxpayers of the country, no one has a right to abuse their generosity. Thus, by age twenty-six, after taking the doctoral examination; the individual goes fend for himself.

The terminal degree should be called Doctor of Science, DSC, not PhD (Doctor of philosophy…we do not need too many unproductive philosophers in a technological society).

The degrees conferred by African universities are to be BSC, MSC and DSC, reflecting the scientific education that we advocate for Africa. (Such degrees as BA, MA etc are, of course, to exist for those wasting their times on non scientific education. As long as we reduce such frivolous education to a minimum, we are doing fine.)

The two thirds of secondary school graduates who did not go to universities are to go to technical schools. By technical schools, one means where students are provided with hands on training in building and repairing things. We need Mechanics, Machinists, Electricians, Masons, Plumbers, carpenters and so on. One is not talking about “academic technicians,” as currently exist in Nigeria’s so-called Poly technical colleges; one is talking about training those who can actually fix things with their hands.

In case you have not noticed, in Africa, we build things and they quickly fall apart for lack of repair. We need those who can fix things more than we need social scientists, humanists and other talkers and not doers.

There is no use reinventing the wheel; we should borrow from those whose technical education system is the best in the world. I suggest that we model our technical education after the German system. Here, all students are provided with two years classroom/work shop training in their area of interests. They are then apprenticed off to where they would obtain practical experience in their areas of training. A mechanic goes to work at a mechanic shop for two year; an electrician goes to work for an electrical company for two years and so on. After two years of hands on experience, students take a national examination in their area of training.

In Africa, this examination is to be hands on, not academic. If students pass it, they are awarded a degree to be called TS, Technical Specialist. Such degrees are to have starting salaries that are the same as those with bachelors in science from universities. This policy emphasizes the importance of technical education. It is technicians that make the economy work.

It would be nice if all young persons were to be provided with education beyond secondary schooling. But in the nature of things, there are those who neither have the interest nor aptitude for more education beyond secondary school. Thus, realistically, at least ten percent of all secondary school graduates will drop out. These will not go to universities or technical colleges. These will enter the job market right after secondary school.

We need persons to perform lower order jobs and it is as well that some persons do not proceed to acquire more complex trainings.

Thus, we are talking about making room for 33% of our secondary school graduates to go to universities, and, at least 50% of secondary school graduates to go to technical schools.

All education: elementary, secondary, technical and university must be paid for by society, by the adult tax payers, that is, by government. It is a human right for society to train its young persons.

When there are wars, society conscripts its young persons into the military and have them go defend the nation and, perhaps, die. The least that society can do for young persons is to provide them with free and compulsory education.

It is the function of modern polities to pay for the education of all its young persons, until the terminal degree (which we expect to be after taking the doctoral comprehensive examination at age twenty six).

DISTRIBUTION OF RESPONSIBILITIES

All over the world, experience shows that education is best delivered in a certain manner. It is the wisdom of mankind that elementary and secondary schooling is best provided by the local government.

I suggest that Local Government Authorities, LGA (Counties/Districts, as they may be called elsewhere) be responsible for providing elementary and secondary education. They are to do so through independent school Boards, headed by a superintendent of education. The school Board, however, is to be appointed by the county council.

The county council is responsible for financing the school system. (Property taxes, sales taxes etc are some of the means of financing local education.)

Technical colleges and universities are best provided by state governments. Thus, each state, in Nigeria, for example, sets up Boards for technical education and University education and those hire superintendents to organize their technical and university education. The state legislature and executive are responsible for funding these education elements.

Each state establishes sufficient technical colleges and universities to accommodate all young persons in need of such education: that is, each state must have enough technical colleges to accommodate at least 50% of its annual secondary school graduates, and sufficient universities to accommodate at least 33% of its annual secondary school graduates and enough graduate schools to accommodate at least 10% of its graduates.

In a country with the population of Nigeria, it is self evident that to implement the type of educational program envisaged here, that the country needs at least 700 technical colleges and 300 universities.

The national government is not to be directly involved in running schools but to provide educational policies and set up examination Boards to examine graduating classes at the elementary and secondary schools.

I recommend that we also have a national Board to examine university students before they graduate for their bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees. This way, we ascertain that students learned something when they claim to have had university education.

Those who pass with all As are to be given first class honors, Bs second class honors, Cs third class honors, and finally, ordinary pass.

FUNDING OF EDUCATION

Those who call themselves realists are probably wondering where we shall obtain the resources to fund this seeming pipe dream.

It is useful to be realistic. But too much realism leads to lack of imagination, vision and creativity.

It is the common experience of mankind that where there is a will to do something, that, somehow, we find a way to do it. If we embrace the policy of educating all Africans, we shall find a way to pay for it.

For one thing, the billions of dollars stolen by African leaders and banked overseas could go a long way in defraying the cost of these educational ventures. The billions of dollars stashed in Europe by such African kleptocrats as Mobutu and Abacha could, for a few years, fund all elementary and secondary education in their respective countries.

How do we fund this seeming grandiose scheme? Taxes. There are individual taxes, corporate taxes, property taxes, sales taxes and other forms of taxes. This is not the place to elaborate on these sources of public revenue. Let us just say that adults ought to tax themselves and use the ensuing revenue to fund their social policies.

Africans, for too long, have been on a free ride, thinking that they could have governments without paying for them. Governments are set up by the people to protect them and to perform certain economic and social functions for them, such as providing all children with education and all citizens with medical insurance. These functions of governments have costs. Those costs are paid for through taxation. Therefore, it is about time Africans are made to pay taxes and those who try not to pay them get arrested and jailed and their properties seized.

It is appropriate for all adults above the age of eighteen to pay at least 25% of their annual incomes in taxes. Adults should also pay other forms of taxes, such as sales, property taxes etc. Altogether it makes sense for each citizen to expect at least 35% of his income to go to funding his various local, state and national governments.

When citizens pay taxes and know that their governments are funded by them, they tend to pay attention to how their political leaders spend their money. They form citizen committees to examine government books and where malfeasance is seen, insist that culprits be sent to jail. It is because, at present, Africans are largely not personally funding their governments that they do not find out how their leaders spend their money. In Nigeria, for example, the various governments obtain over 80% of their revenue from selling oil and the people do not fund their governments. Because the people are not directly funding their governments, they do not pay attention when their political leaders transform the national treasury into their personal bank accounts.

There ought to be laws so that stealing a penny from the public gets the individual ten years in jail. This prison term should be hard labor, that is, the inmate is made to work to feed himself while in prison; the public has no business paying to feed the detritus of humanity.

CONCLUSION

The ideas presented in this essay are meant as starting points in a necessary conversation on what African educational policies ought to be. If you disagree with them, please put your own ideas down on paper. It is about time Africans learned to share their ideas with all interested persons.

We all correct the mistakes in our thinking by having access to other people’s thinking. I say, let us have a vigorous conversation on African educational policies and, ultimately, establish educational systems that respond to African needs. Doing nothing, or doing the wrong things, as is currently the case in much of Africa, is self-defeating.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

Africa Institute, Seattle

600-1 Avenue, Suite 325

Seattle Washington 98104

(206) 464-9004

[email protected]

www.africainstituteseattle.com

Posted by Administrator at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2005

Overcoming the Fear that Holds Africans Down, Part 2

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington)---

THE METAPHYSICS OF FEAR

Sister Helen dwelt at length on fear. She gave fear a metaphysical interpretation. As she sees it, we separated from God and from each other. We feel like we did something wrong. This separation is akin to what the Catholic Church calls the Original Sin. To be on earth, that is, to be separated from God, is an act of sin.

We feel like we sinned against God by separating from him. Since God is our real self, we feel like we sinned against our real self, by denying our true identity as unified spirit and taking on a false identity as separated, ego in bodies. To identify with the human personality is to attack the real self, and whoever attacks his real self has inflicted pain on his self. We cause our self pain by being in ego, separated states.

To be on earth, to feel separated from God and from other people is to feel guilty and sinful.

The guilty expect punishment. We feel like God would punish us for the sin we committed. We fear God’s punishment. To be human is to feel guilty and to fear God’s punishment, Sister Helen said. The person, who feels separated from God, defends his ego personality, feels like he committed a crime and fears punishment. To be human, which is to separate from God, therefore, is to live in GUILT AND FEAR.

Fear is existential, Sister Helen tells us. Fear is not just a biological phenomenon, as biological psychology tells us, but is a metaphysical one.

Punished by God? Let us see. God is not apart from his children. God is in his children. God is his children, for the extender are the extended. God is his children.

God is everywhere and is everywhere. Since everything is God, if God punishes us for our sins, he has punished himself and acknowledged that he himself sinned, for our sins are his sins.

We are now in a philosophical tickle, so pay close attention, my dear friend. (In philosophy, these issues are generally addressed under ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.)

Listen. God extended himself into his son, you. It follows that God is his son, you, for the extender is the extended. What you did, therefore, God did. QED (You cannot refute this statement on rational grounds.)

To sin is to separate from God. Since you are part of God, if you sinned, God sinned. If you separated from God, God separated from himself. QED

Since God is in his son and he is in God, and they are eternally unified, it is impossible for God to separate from his son, from himself. It is impossible for the son of God to separate from God, from his self. Therefore, in truth, separation has not occurred. Even the dream has not happened. QED

Shankara, the seventh Indian sage, having established that the world is a dream, goes on to tell us that the dream has not even occurred, for it would mean that God is dreaming this world.

Shankara’s postulation is that the world does not exist. Sister Helen said that the world existed for a brief second and was over with. When we separated from God and from each other, we but did it for a nanosecond. This would seem to imply that there was a moment when God was not on guard and did not notice what his children were doing. Since, by definition, God knows the past, present and future he must have known what his children were up to. Thus, by logical necessity, God knew that his children were planning on separating from him. In as much as he did not prevent them from doing so, he is partially responsible for their deed!

Nevertheless, Sister Helen tells us that God immediately realized what his children were unto and corrected it. (When the Big Bang occurred, separation occurred. As it were, reality was split into fragments; particles were invented. But immediately, some unknown force reunified the particles into atoms, then the molecules that formed biological life forms. It is as if the fragmentation of reality was reversed. What we are trying to do here, in case you have not noticed, is reconcile physics with metaphysics. In the temporal universe, man is both physics and metaphysics, so we must reconcile both aspects of him.)

When we separated from God, he created the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit immediately corrected our mistake. The Holy Spirit overcame the world. (And Jesus, having totally identified with the Holy Spirit, overcame the world.)

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND HIS FUNCTION IN TIME

God as God is not in this world. God is transcendent. But God has an immanent aspect to him. When we separated from God and seem to live in this world, God entered the world as the immanent God. God remained in his transcendent state while also operating as the immanent God.

Thus God seems to have two aspects, the transcendent God and the immanent God. Actually, since the Son of God is an extension of God, it follows that God seems to be in three places: the transcendent God, aka God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The Catholic Church calls this mystery the Holy Trinity, Triune; One God with three selves: God the father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. According to traditional Christianity, God the Son is Jesus Christ. According to Sister Helen, God the son is each of us.

God the son is not the self that we are currently aware of, but our real self. Currently, we are aware of our separated self, the ego self. But our real self is unified self, aka Christ self, or Son of God, or God the Son.

God placed the Holy Spirit in our “right” minds. The Holy Spirit is where the ego (wrong mind) separated mind is. As long as you think that you sleep and dream, you can dream with the ego mind (wrong mind) or dream with the Holy Spirit’s mind (right mind).To live from the Holy Spirit directed mind, which is to love and forgive and serve all people is to be righteous. (We are now employing traditional Christian concepts; pay attention, you might learn their true meaning.)

(Please do not concretize the term mind. Mind is an abstraction and does not exist as a tangible entity. There is no mind that you can touch or feel. Mind is the process of thinking. The universe thinks through what we call mind. Thinking itself is mind. There is a self, which is spirit, and that self thinks through a mind. God and his children think through their mind. God has a unified mind. We all share that unified mind of God. What this means, in fact, is that God thinks through all of us and that we think through God. God is not independent of us and we are not independent of him. Our thinking is God’s thinking. Conversely, God’s thinking is our thinking. Our ego thinking is the thinking of an insane God, God that thinks that he is not one but is in different places.

Hinduism believes that it is Brahman himself, God, who sleeps and dreams and thinks and lives in this world as all of us. To Hinduism, there is one God, Brahman. He has infinite parts, each part is called Atman. In heaven, Brahman and Atman know themselves as one self. On earth, they forget their unity. Each atman thinks that he is different from others. Each jivatman now sees himself as a separated self, as an ego, called Ahankara.

According to Hinduism, the object of religion is to enable us to remember that we are parts of God, and for us to give up our current identification with separated, ego self and return to the awareness of formless and selfless unity. This is accomplished through practicing one or more of the five Yogas explained by Patanjali.

Each person is different, temperamentally. One follows a yoga, religion, that suits ones temperament. The intellectual follows Jnani Yoga and thinks until he comprehends the nature of unity. The emotional type worships God via Bhakti yoga, the typical religion is Bhakti for over 90% of the people are not intellectuals and cannot really think, they belong to Bhakti Yoga. The active type person, Karma yoga, returns to God via philanthropy; the experimental type person returns to God via meditation, raja yoga, the royal yoga where one tunes out the world and unify with God in Samadhi, or as Buddha called it, Nirvana, and Zen Buddhism calls it Satori; the sensual person returns to God through love of his spouse, Tantra yoga.

Hinduism wants people to break through the veil of ego, Mocksha, and attain the awareness of cosmic union, Samadhi. But to get there, one must work out ones past sins, Sansara.

Hinduism believes in karma, the law of cause and effect, and reincarnation hence that it may take many life times to work out ones salvation.

You are saved when you love and forgive all persons. If saved, when you die, you no longer return to this world but stay close to God and enjoy his presence, in what Hinduism calls Bramaloca, which is equivalent to what Christians call heaven.

I spent three years studying Oriental religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Shintoism; I love to share insights from these amazingly sophisticated philosophies of life. Oriental religions are philosophical, whereas the Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are poetic and appeal to our feelings, not to our thinking. Consider that the Rishis, the founders of Hinduism, speculated that the atom is made of three strands, three Gunas: Satva, Raja and Tamas. Modern physics agree that the atom has three parts, electrons, protons and neutrons. One must raise one’s hat for the ancient Indians; they were the world’s best thinkers. No wonder contemporary Asians are smarter than the rest of us; their ancestors used their minds to figure out the nature of reality and passed that habit of thinking to them. The rest of the world mostly emotes when they think that they are thinking.)

The Holy Spirit’s mind enables you to see all people as one with you and asks you to love them all and to forgive them all. If, for one brief second, you love all people, in that brief second, you awaken from this world. When you love and forgive all people, Sister Helen says that you are saved.

What is salvation, deliverance, redemption, healing, atonement, (all mean the same thing)? To be saved is to know that one is one with all people and love them all and forgive them all and see them as innocent.

We live in a perceptual universe. This means that there is a you, and a non-you. You see yourself as apart from other people. You see yourself as different from other people; indeed, you see yourself as unequal with other people; sometimes seeing you as superior to others and at other times as inferior to others.

There must be separation, differences and inequality for there to be perception. Whenever we look with the eyes of the ego we see a separated world.

Into this perceptual field enters the Holy Spirit. His function is to help you see things differently, to see with unified eyes. He wants you to see union rather than separation, to see all people as part of your one self. When you see all creation as one with you, your seeing is said to be purified. Now, you see with Christ vision and have spiritual sight.

What is a miracle? Is it healing physical diseases? To heal physical diseases presumes that body is real. But Sister Helen told us that body is a figment in a dream and is not real. The real disease is to see ones self as separated from other people. Healing and miracle is to change ones perception, from seeing other people as separated from one to seeing them as unified with one, followed with love and forgiveness for all people.

When we see people as separated from us, our mind is sick. When we see people as unified with us, our mind/ thinking is corrected, healed and purified.

A corrected mind, that is, a loving and forgiving person, has met the condition for returning to God. You are, as it were, now at the gate of heaven, but not in heaven yet. Your life on earth is now characterized by peace and happiness. Life is now a happy dream for you, rather than a nightmarish dream. You love all creation and they all love you in return. You now experience life on earth as if a gentle breeze is carrying you along, effortlessly.

To Sister Helen, when you forgive and love all, you momentarily experience what she called the Holy Instant. In it, the temporal world, the world of separation, disappears and you experience the world of union; you return to eternity, to unified state, to heaven and experience yourself as unified with God and all people.

Then you come back to this world of sin, the world of separation, for sin is separation, a mistake. But now you know that union is real, that love is real, that God is real. You become a teacher of union, a teacher of love and a teacher of God.

No son of God can stay permanently in heaven while his brothers are still in hell, that is, on earth. So when one is enlightened to ones true self, is illuminated of the fact that there is only one self and one mind in the universe, that we are all parts of us, one comes back to the world as an Avatar, Buddhavista, teacher of God etc to help those still believing in the illusion that separation is real, to believe that union is the truth.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

God is everywhere, so if he were to punish any one of us, he would be punishing himself. Only an insane God would punish himself, for to punish is to inflict pain and God does not like to inflict pain on himself. God does not punish you, himself.

God, Sister Helen tells us, is not punitive. God does not punish us, no matter what we do on earth, in the dream that has never been dreamed.

To God his Son, you and I, are always innocent, for we have never done what we think that we did, separate from him. All the seeming evils we do on earth are done in a dream and, as such, have not been done. We are, therefore, always guiltless, innocent and holy. We are forever as God created us, unified with him and with each other.

To be in union is to be sinless. To separate from God is to be sinful. Since we have never separated from God, we are in union hence are sinless. We are forever and ever sinless, guiltless and innocent. (The Holy Spirit tells us that the Son of God, all of us, is forever as his father created him, unified with God and all his brothers hence sinless and innocent. Jesus, who completely identified with the Holy Spirit, teaches us the Holy Spirit’s gospel, that the son of God is forever Holy and sinless.

All teachers of God, all prophets, past, present and future teach one message: that the son of God is holy, innocent and guiltless; that he has not done the evil we see him do on earth. What we do on earth are done in a dream hence have not been done.)

But the part of us that thinks that we separated from God and from each other, the part that wants separation, the ego, the separated I, tells us that we are sinful, guilty and deserve to be punished. God does not punish us. The ego punishes us in behalf of God. Without waiting for God to punish us, the ego punishes us; since we are the ego, we punish each other.

Let me try to explain this metaphysics with real life experience. When I first encountered homosexuals and became aware of what they do, put their penises into other men’s anuses, in my eyes, they seemed less than animals, they had no worth whatsoever. I wanted all of them killed, now, not tomorrow. How could they do such bestial thing? God, where is Hitler to corral them and work them to death. Get rid of garbage. I had absolutely no regard for homosexuals. The female variety, lesbians, seemed like dogs licking each other’s filthy genitals. Get rid of these animals from my sight.

At one point, I had an office mate, a Caucasian male. I did not know about his sexual orientation. One day, he invited me to his house for dinner. As I walked in, he introduced a young man as his lover and kissed him. I soon recognized what was going on and felt like I was in the house of sin, Sodom and Gomorrah, and vomited, right there in his house and subsequently left. The next day, I asked him to move out of my office and he did. I did not want to see him for as long as he lived. He simply was a beast, in my eyes.

Prior to the discovery that he was a gay man, I had respect for him. He is a PhD clinical psychologist, and seemed to have a sharp mind in his head. Now, he seemed like nothing, in my eyes. As you can see, I experienced cognitive dissonance. I still know that he is sharp, so how can I dismiss him as nothing? The individual cannot live with cognitive inconsistency for long. He must reconcile his dissonance, one way or another. I could tell myself that he is crazy, that all homosexuals are insane. But that is not true. He is as sane as sane can be. (He has a touch of narcissism, all homosexuals do; they love their bodies and egos. Narcissism is not psychosis, it is a personality disorder. Just about every human being has a personality disorder, so why should a man living in a glass house, like me, point fingers at this brother?)

I began to think about homosexuality, trying to understand it. Whatever you have understood, you tend to forgive and live with. To understand all is to forgive all.

I found heterosexual sex ridiculous but accepted it for procreation only. Beyond procreation, I had no use for sex. I am asexual.

Being me, I read everything there is to read on homosexuality, that I could lay my hands on.

I had at that point not heard of Sister Helen and her philosophy that the world is a dream.

I had just read Sigmund Freud’s analysis of Judge Shreber’s paranoid schizophrenia. Freud thought that all paranoid persons have latent homosexuality and denied it. He was wrong, paranoid persons feel weak and inadequate and homosexuals remind them of their weakness, hence they tend to fear been seen as homosexual. If you make the mistake of making homosexual proposition to a paranoid man, he could attack you for feminizing him, transforming him into a weak, sexual object. Paranoia is a struggle to seem powerful and important and has nothing to do with sex, as Freud thought.

One fine day, the idea that homosexuality is something that happens in a dream entered my thinking. I said to myself: these folks are in a dream of self forgetfulness. They have forgotten their real self, the unified spirit self and imagine themselves as bodies. They then resolve to enjoy their bodies, if what they do can be considered enjoyment. Their acts are dream acts. It has never happened, just as what is done in a dream has not happened. Since dream acts have not happened they must be overlooked. These thoughts came out of nowhere and entered my mind.

Building on those thoughts, I resolved to overlook what seemed to me an idiotic lifestyle. Now I overlook the behavior of homosexuals. I allow them to have their absurd dream. Each of us is having his own dream; all dreams are not real, so shine them all off. What is done in dreams are not deserving of punishment.

God’s children are a defiant lot. They came to this world out of defiance of their father, and while in it will defy anything, including the proper sexual processes. God wills union and we defy him and seek separation. The world came into being as the opposite of God’s will. Separation is the opposite of union. But union is reality and separation is impossible. Therefore, overlook the absurdities of human behavior and your journey through this world would be characterized by peace, which is the same as happiness.

God will not punish homosexuals for they do what they do in dreams. As it is, they are already punishing themselves by destroying their anuses…as they grow old; they usually have feces dripping out of their anuses and have to wear depends, diapers. (Religionists would say that that is the price they pay for their defiance of nature. Every sin has a cost. The wage of sin is death.

The price of separation, which is sin, is to live in this world; to live in this world is to be dead. To live in the presence of God, that is, to be aware that one is unified with all creation, is to be alive.)

Sister Helen teaches that everything done on earth is like actions in dreams and ought to be overlooked. The Son of God remains as his father created him, holy, sanctified, unified and innocent; he merely dreams that he is unholy, separated and does the seeming evils things he does on earth.

Sister Helen tells us that Brother Jesus recognized that what we do on earth is like things done in a dream, hence are nothing, and overlooked them. He forgave what we do on earth for they are equally nonsensical, they are nothing. The world is not worth defending, so the brother overcame the world by not defending it.

By forgiving the world, by not defending its pathways, he awoke from the dream and, as they say, resurrected from death.

To be on earth is to be metaphorically dead. Jesus was dead when he lived on earth, when he lived in body and ego.

Jesus resurrected from death when he recovered awareness of his spirit self.

Did Jesus physically die and resurrect? What a question! To be on earth is to be dead. But death is impossible, so Jesus merely dreamed that he was on earth and was dead. He awakened from the dream of death. He cast off the veil that hid the face of Christ from his perception. He saw the face of Christ in all his brothers and sisters, that is, recognized all of them as unified with him, and in doing so experienced himself as Christ, the one Son of God. God has only One Son.

Jesus rolled the stone away from the sepulcher and walked away. (This is metaphor for saying that this world is a sepulcher, is our grave, and is a place where the son of God comes to seem dead and buried; that the stone is what prevents us from looking out of that grave we placed our selves in. See Plato’s parable of Cave dwellers.)

Sister Helen said that Jesus, while in this world, recognized that while he thought himself apart from God, which he was always one with God. There is no such thing as separation. Only union is real. Sin, that is, separation, does not exist. Death, that is sin/separation, does not exist. There is no death. It is all a dream.

Consider: in our nightly dreams, we see people die, get buried and rot but when we wake up in the morning, we realize that none of that happened. Nobody died.

We merely dream life and death on earth, Sister Helen tells us. The lady, as it were, was consoling us. You see, human beings fear death. Whoever tells them that death is not real tends to appeal to them.

Alas, the good news lady, Helen, developed cancer and died from it. That would seem to invalidate her philosophy, wouldn’t it?

Did she really die or did she play a trick on us and seem to have cancer and died? Was she ever on earth, in the dream? If so, did her dream require her to have cancer and die in the manner that she did, so as to make those still in the dream dismiss her philosophy as sham, and get on with their ego separated existence? Where are you, unified state or separated state? You must answer this question for your self.

(I know the answer to these questions. I will not tell you. And even if I told you, you would not believe it, for you probably are not ready for it. Struggle to find the ANSWER TO THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE. When you are ready for it, it will dawn on you, on its own accord. But you must meet the condition for truth, love, forgiveness and service to all God’s children, for truth to be revealed to you, by your real self. We have one problem, our belief in separation; there is but one solution to our problem, no matter what hue that problem takes: union. To unify is to love, to forgive and to serve all children of God.)

FEAR PREVENTS US FROM DOING WHAT WE WANT TO DO

In the meantime, people on earth would like to do certain things and shrink from doing them because of fear. Fear of harm and fear of death prevents us from living fully. Ultimately, all fear is rooted in fear of death.

Fear of death is rooted in belief that this life is it and that there is no life after death. One never knows whether there is life after death or not. Therefore, I advice you to put metaphysics aside and simply resolve to do whatever you are afraid of doing.

If you experience fear, go ahead and do what you are afraid of doing. Of course, there is such a thing as rational fear, after all some fear is adaptive to the exigencies of this world. If a car careens towards you, it is appropriate to experience fear and run away from it. The type of fear that we need to eliminate is properly called anxiety.

So you are afraid of talking to other people, lest they reject you, eh? Go ahead and talk to them. Let them reject you. Their rejection of you will not be the end of the world. Actually, the chances are that they would not reject you. Like you, they are seeking other peoples acceptance, they too fear rejection hence do not take the initiative to reach others to make friends. (See Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis’ writing on Cognitive Behavior Therapy. These might help you restructure and reorient your thinking; help you believe in yourself and do whatever you are afraid of doing.)

If you reach out and try to make friends, you would find out that most people are dying to be friendly. I am a black man. I used to believe that white folks want to keep to themselves. So I avoided them and kept to myself and to other black folks. Then I reached out to whites and found that they are like me, seeking friends, but held back by the bugaboo of racism and irrational fear.

If you over look color and gender, you can relate to any human being on earth. Fear prevents people from relating to those from so-called other races. Actually, all human beings belong to one race. The idea of race is a misnomer. Genetically, all people, black and white, are 99.9% the same. Human beings belong to the animal species and can procreate with each other.

Fear holds one back from doing whatever one wants to do. Therefore, I tell you, go do whatever you want to do that fear prevents you from doing. Do it and do it now, not tomorrow.

You will always have some residual fear, for fear protects your body and the ego it houses, and is involuntary; fear is built into the body. My ego and body still react to fear as before, but I have learnt to use my cognition, my mentation, my mind, my thinking to overrule it. Use your mind, which is not body but of spirit, to overcome the fears of your body.

I try to walk my talk. I am a very fearful person. As noted, that fear is in my genes. But I have learned to do whatever I am afraid of doing (which would not lead to my death, of course; there is such a thing as rational fears).

I find that in doing so, I have expanded the horizon of my life. Fear had restricted my life and enslaved me into a small corner of the world.

With resolution to do whatever fear asks me not to do, my world has expanded. The entire planet earth is my home. I am born in Africa but the entire world is my home. I feel at home wherever I go, Europe, North America etc. I refuse to permit some territorially aggressive animal to tell me that any part of this world is not my home. If the birds of the air have a right to fly to wherever they want to, I see no reason why I should not live wherever I feel like living at. My home is everywhere and nowhere in particular.

Fear had given me poverty from not trying to do anything in the competitive world. My effort to overcome fear gave me the freedom and ability to roam the world.

In a manner of speaking, I have overcome fear and the body and ego that it protects. Of course, I still live in body and ego and have some residual fear. Any one who completely overcomes fear cannot live in ego, body and this world. I am in this world but not of it.

Actually, I have always wanted to overcome the ego and its body. At first, I did so neurotically. At an early age, I recognized the meaninglessness and purposeless of this world and rejected it. I hated my sickly and over sensitive body and rejected it. Other people seemed even more nonsensical so I rejected them, too.

I embarked on a neurotic trip to change my body, other people and the world. I wanted to change myself into an ego ideal, my body into a perfect body. I used to run, at least, four times a week, five miles at a time. I Swam, rode my bicycle, weight trained, ate sparingly, all in an effort to make my body as good as it could be. (I still exercise and hate to see fat on my frame. But I now exercise for a different reason, health, not escape into idealistic body.)

I wanted to change myself and the world into ideal forms of them. I saw reality as ugly and wanted to transform it into an ideal form of it.

With middle age, age 40, I learnt that reality is what it is, and that one cannot change it. All you can do is try to understand it, through science, and cope with it, through technology. Therefore, I have given up my youthful idealism. I no longer feel the urge to change man and his society.

I wanted to change society into socialist ideals of it. Now, I know that socialism is a pipe dream.

I accept man as he is, competitive; I accept the capitalist economy as the most realistic adaptation to human nature. I accept democracy and the power plays in it. Power plays are realistic adaptation to man’s impersonal environment.

I accept people as they are, competing for power and wealth, each self centered. I accept the world on its terms.

EXISTENTIAL DEPRESSION AND BEYOND

Acceptance of the world, as it is, initially makes one depressed, for it means accepting the ugliness that is this world. This means accepting one’s imperfect self, accepting other people’s imperfect selves and accepting imperfect social institutions. It means giving up the youthful yearning to transform the self, other selves and the institutions of this world into their ideal forms.

Plato is wrong; there are no ideals out there waiting for us to discover and be them. Our earthly reality is imperfect. This imperfect reality must be accepted and dreams of perfectibility of man given up. What is, is, Katie Bryan, a Canadian mystic, wrote. Accept this world on its own terms and seek to understand it through its own terms, science, and adapt to it through realistic terms, technology.

Give up wishful thinking for ideal states. Give up neurosis and psychosis…those are wishes for ideal states.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Sister Helen gave us a metaphysics that negates this world, is idealistic and escapist. If you followed her recommendations, you would not defend yourself and you would die. She said that you would merely re-awaken in unified state, aka heaven. But you do not know that heaven is real. There in lies the rob. She asks you to make what Kierkegaard called a leap of faith and believe that heaven exists.

She is asking for too much. I do not believe in faith; I accept only self evident propositions that I can verify, following the scientific method. I do not ask you to have faith in the unseen.

I ask you to understand the nature of fear, as delineated by science, and do its opposite. Do whatever fear asks you not to do. Do so and then find out if unified state exists or not.

Do not consciously pursue unified state. As Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth of Nations, those who consciously attempt to serve other people tend to end up not producing wealth and, moreover, tend to become dictatorial; see the former Soviet Union. But when people pursue their self interests, somehow, the blind forces of the market make them produce what the people desire and they wind out serving other people’s interests.

So I ask you to go ahead and do the opposite of whatever fear asks you not to do. If fear tells you not to relate to other people, go ahead and relate to them. If fear tells you not to travel to other parts of the world, defy it and travel to other parts of the world. If fear tells you that you cannot enter any profession, go train for it. Do whatever fear attempts to prevent you from doing and you begin to live fully, happily and in peace. When you live in joy and peace, you are approximating living in union.

Is there another world, other than our present world? If not, why bother reviewing Helen’s metaphysics? Good question. I do not know whether there is another world or not. By nature, I am skeptical, cynical and agnostic. But I have had certain experiences that speak to the existence of another world. Those experiences, unfortunately, are not amenable to scientific verification hence not an acceptable evidence for the existence of another world. Let us then say that one has an open mind in these matters.

I provided a review of metaphysics because I know that man does not live by bread alone. Man searches for meaning in many quarters, one of which is religion. So, I thought it nice to provide some religion. My experience is that to overcome fear, one needs to understand the science of fear. I also think that one needs some hypothesis on metaphysical issues if one is to truly overcome fear.

Human beings have no control over many contingencies that affect their lives and need belief in some sort of God, even if God is an illusion(as Freud said in The Future of an Illusion) to derive a sense of control, albeit fictive control.

Good luck in your effort to understand and over come the fear that prevents you from living fully. I hope that I have been of some use to you? If not, then search elsewhere for help. No other person can save you; only you can save you. What other people can do is show you how they saved themselves and, hopefully, that helps you save yourself. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. As Buddha himself said, 2500 years ago, discover the Buddha in you, not the Buddha that other people tell you exists.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

600-1 Avenue, Suite 325

Seattle, Washington 99104

(206) 464-9004

[email protected]

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In this essay, I consciously chose to expose my own issues. I did so for a reason. Most Africans do not talk about their mental health issues. They do not go to psychotherapists until they decompensate and have to be hospitalized against their will. I have involuntarily placed many of them at Psychiatric Hospitals. They all would like to think that they are psychologically healthy. (There is no such thing as a healthy human being. At best, one is normal, that is, has issues that are not out of control, and is within the norm. Norm means the middle, average; one has issues like the average person but is not healthy. Only extraordinary persons’ like Jesus Christ and Mohammed attained perfect mental health.)

Here are the facts. All middle class Africans and African Americans have mental health issues, ranging from garden verity neurosis, like mine, to serious psychosis (schizophrenia, delusion disorder, mania, depression, organic mental disorders etc). The white man knows this fact and manipulates African leaders’ psychopathologies. Although this is not a clinical/academic paper, let me remind us that the foremost political psychologist of all time, Harold Lasswell, wrote that politics is the arena where individuals act out their personal psychopathologies. Many politicians are sick persons acting out their madness on the political arena. Adolf Hitler felt inordinately inferior and wanted to seem superior and thought that political office would give him that feeling. Political office does not change an inferior feeling person to a superior person. Hitler killed over 50 million persons in his quest for deluded power. African leaders pauperize their people in their misguided quest for narcissistic sense of special-ness. They are not special; they are just ordinary human beings pretending to be special and the sooner they accepted that reality, the better they get on with becoming their people’s servants, not their imaginary masters.

It is psychological sickness to want to be seen as a very important person and to hang unto office for that reason only, as African leaders do. This is called narcissistic personality disorder. Most African leaders have either narcissistic or antisocial personality disorders. (They exploit their people and do not feel guilty and remorseful from doing so.)

It is time the so-called educated African examined his psyche and resolved the inevitable conflicts in it. He is African but he is educated in European ways of life. He experiences cognitive dissonance. He is confused. Africans should learn from me and heal themselves, or continue to be the sick men of the world. Of all people on earth, Africans seem unable to govern themselves; they make a mess of their continent and run to the well ordered societies of the West, where they work as neo-slaves.

An Igbo medical doctor admonished me not to wash my Lenin in public, not to talk about our individual and tribal’ issues in public. That is part of our problem.

A problem must be publicly identified, accepted and solutions sought for it. I wash my Lenin in public to help the superior feeling-inferior feeling Igbo medical doctor to learn the psychological truism that the mark of mental health is perception of one’s self and all human beings, men and women, black and white, as the same and equal, and as worthy of love. We are all members of God’s one family; whoever fancies himself better than other people, as Igbos tend to feel towards other Nigerian groups, and at the individual level, to other Igbos, as the pathetic pathologist, apparently, feels towards me, is a neurotic and is in need of psychotherapy, to help him accept our inherent equality. When a person accepts his equality with all people and works for our common good, he or she tends to feel peaceful and happy.

Peace and joy are the gifts of God. To the extent that you feel peaceful and joyous, you are in the presence of God. If your life or your country’s life is chaotic, as is the case in much of Africa, you have deviated from the presence of God. God is love and those who want to be godly must be loving, forgiving and social interest serving persons.

August 15, 2005

See also, Overcoming the Fear that Holds Africans Down, Part 1

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Overcoming the Fear that Holds Africans Down, Part 1

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji (Seatle, Washington)--- If you are like me, you notice that you are not living fully and that you are not being all that you can be. You wonder what it is that is preventing you from living fully and from being your authentic self. So what is it that prevents you from living fully and from being your real self?

Why is it that some people go out there and do most things that they want to do and, by and large, succeed, whereas you seem to be in a rot, blocked and not moving forward or back, left or right? What is it that makes you live a circumscribed existence, in Abraham Maslow’s terms, not actualizing your potential?

One must do something to realize ones potential. If one is just sitting around and doing nothing, one is not going to realize whatever innate potential one has.

Each of us seems to have aptitudes and interests and is expected to put them to work and, in so doing, enrich the human condition. But something can prevent the individual from doing something to actualize his potential.

In the Bible, Jesus talked in parables, one of which says: a certain rich man was going on a long journey. Before he left, he gathered his servants and gave them talents (money, in those days). He did not tell them what to do with the talents. After some years had elapsed, he came back. He asked the servants to account for how they spent the money he gave them. Some said that they hid theirs under mattresses, not wanting them stolen, so that when the master came back they would give him back his money. Others said that they invested their monies and made profit on them. The master praised those who invested their monies and put them to work, benefiting the community. He rewarded them with more money.

Why give to the rich more wealth? It is because they understand the need for investment, so they had to be given money funds to invest, so that it yields dividends for the entire community. (The Igbos say: ji ye uru, ya abara ndanda.) Those that had not invested their money had it taken away from them and it was given to those who understand that money is to be put to work. Money is useless unless it is put to work, producing fruits for the betterment of the people.

This parable of the Jewish rabbi, Emmanuel Ben Joseph, whom the Greeks called Jesus the Christ, Jesus the anointed Son of God, is meant to instruct us on a critical lesson. The master, the man going on a journey and gathered his servants, is, of course, God. The servants are the children of God. The talents are the mental aptitudes each of us is born with. God gave his children natural aptitudes and interests. He then left them alone on planet earth. Sooner or later, each of us returns to our maker and is asked to account for how he employed his time and energy while in that place called planet earth. Those who, while they were on earth, put their aptitudes to serving humanity are blessed with peace and happiness; those who hid their aptitudes, afraid to use them lest they make mistakes and displease God and man, did not yield results that served human interest, are not blessed with happiness and peace.

Those who refuse to use their abilities to serve humanity tend to reap poverty. They are like those talked about in another parable of Jesus (that Jesus chap was full of Parables). He said that a lamp lit and hid under a bushel is no use to anyone. The purpose of light is to enable people to see. If you hide your light, you are not using it to enable people to see. Your light, then, is as good as darkness and you might as well not have light.

When you have light, it is meant to be used to see in darkness. The world is a dark place and we need light to see in it. If you place your light on a hill top, those in the valley would see their way around. But if you hide your light, no one would see from it.

If you hide a lit lamp under a bushel, it is most likely to make the bushel blow up. Instead of showing the people light, a hidden light creates problems for the people. Africans are hidden light, they create troubles for themselves. Those people who recognize that each of us is a light and use it to show the people the way to live good lives tend to generate abundance in our lives. Those who hide their light, those who do not employ their aptitudes to do good work, live lives of poverty.

Bill Gates gives the world his computing light. He gives the world material abundance. Africans hide their God given talents or use them to seek ways to do each other in, to steal from the public. Each of us is salt. Salt is meant to make food taste better. If one does not add one’s salt to food and the food’s flavor is bland, what use is one’s salt? Jesus said that that salt then must be thrown away, for it is like the fig tree that did not bear fruits and had to be cast off.

Nigerians ingenuity seems to lie in figuring out ways to cheat, not to produce wealth, peace and happiness for their fellow human beings. No, their specialty is to rip people off and feel very important person from doing so.

(Please note that I am consciously stereotyping people. A writer is permitted to use hyperbole to make cogent points. Not all Nigerians are thieves. My secondary school principal, Mr. Ajayi, is a saint, if ever there is a saint in this world. This man took interests in all of us; it did not make any difference to him whether the kids were Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Urhrobo, Edo, Ishikiri etc, and he took care of us, as if we were his own personal children. When any of us got sick, this man personally saw to it that we were given good medical care. He visited our parents. He came to my parent’s house, in the poor parts of town, to talk to my parents about my progress, or lack of it, at school. He was, is, an angel. The point is that there are outstanding Nigerians. Thus, when I make generalized and global negative statements about Nigerians, I hope that the reader puts it in perspective.)

The man Jesus also said (please do not blame me for borrowing from the man, I couldn’t help it, though currently an apostate Christian, I was raised a Christian and my little head was filled with sayings by the man, I spent my childhood reading the bible, over and over and over again, and my little mind practically memorized the damn book) that each of us is like a new wine. He said that a new wine should not be mixed with an old wine or poured into an old wine bottle.

If you mix new wine with old wine, you dilute their tastes: the new is no longer new and the old is not itself. If you pour new wine into a bottle that had contained old wine, the residue of the old wine would distort the taste of the new wine. To have the full flavor of the new wine, you must place it in a new wine bottle.

Clearly the old boy was trying to say something here, for parables are idioms and do not literally mean what they say. Parables are metaphors and figures of speech, they represent something else.

A parable can be interpreted in several ways; moreover, it can be interpreted to suit different situations and that is the beauty of parables. So what was the man from Nazareth, a place, where, hitherto, nothing good comes from (the rejected brick has become the pillar of the temple), trying to say with this parable?

Traditional Christianity interprets the parable to mean that the new wine is Christianity and that the old wine is Judaism. The New Testament and the Old Testament are not supposed to mix, or one dilutes the other. Jesus diverged from Moses. He brought a new wine, a new religion, a religion of love as forgiveness.

Alas, Christians have not learned the import of this parable and are still mixing the teachings of Moses and Jesus. Moses taught punishment for sins; Jesus taught forgiveness for sins. See the story of the woman caught in adultery. Mosaic Law insisted that she be punished, but Jesus forgave her, for those who live in sin, all of us, have no right casting stones at sinner. The entire gospel of Jesus can be summarized as forgiveness. The New Testament is a gospel of forgiveness. Do we do that, do we love and forgive one another our sins or do we punish each other for the wrongs we do?

And a man was going to worship God and remembered that a neighbor had wronged him. Jesus said that the man must first go home and forgive his neighbor before he prayed to God. That is correct; the wronged must forgive the wrong doer before he expects God to hear his prayers.

Of course, God does hear our prayers. In fact, God knows what his children want before they pray for it. He has, in fact, given us all we need to live on earth. But before we can receive the gifts of God, we must do one thing: we must love and forgive each other.

Forgiveness is the condition for receiving God’s grace. And he taught them a prayer: “Father, forgive us our sins FOR WE HAVE FIRST FORGIVEN THOSE WHO SINNED AGAINST US”. Please think about the import of the “Our Lord’s prayer”. It implies that we had entered into a covenant with our creator and the provision of that contract stipulates that he forgive us only when we forgive each other. God is law abiding and as such keeps the provisions of a contract he entered; he does not make compromises. So we must love and forgive one another before he forgives us our own sins.

Jesus taught that the meaning of love is forgiveness. He said: if someone slaps one of your cheeks that you should turn the other one for him to slap too. He said: love your enemies, do not feel grievance for wrongs done to you by others, do not seek vengeance for what others do to you; as a matter of fact, give those who wronged you your last cloak. (See the Sermon on the Mount, the so-called beatitudes.)

And Jesus walked his talk. They can to arrest him. Peter brought out his old and rugged sward and attacked one of the High priest’s police men that came to arrest his master. Jesus looked at him, as one looks at a child who had been taught and did not understand what he was taught. He said: Peter, I brought a different way to solving problems. The old way, grievance, anger and revenge, produces conflicts and wars. Those who live by the sword die by the sword.

Finally, they took him to Pontius Pilate, to the Courts of this world and falsely accused him of doing what he did not do and found him guilty. He was sent to be crucified. Before he died he said: father to forgive them for they know not what they are doing. If they knew that they are love and forgiveness, they would only do that. But they think that they are ego and attack and do that.

Any which way you look at it, Jesus taught love as forgiveness. Do we practice love and forgiveness? A Christian is a person who loves and forgives all people. By this definition, I did not see Christians in my world; hence, at age 14, I parted ways with the Catholic Church of my upbringing. I read Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, fell in love with biology and have not looked back since.

As observed, a parable can be interpreted and is meant to be interpreted in several ways. In this context, the new wine speaks to our individuality. You are a new wine. You are a unique human being. There is no one else in the entire world that is like you. You must bless the world with the talents that you were born with.

You should not try to give the world old, and tired philosophies of how human beings ought to live. You should not repeat old unproductive religions that retard, rather than make for progress. You should give the new to the world.

The new brightens the world. Spring time is the best time of the year for newness is everywhere.

Winter is the worst time of the year, for, in it, things are old, tired, withering and dying, or stagnant, to be reawakened to life in spring.

So do you give the world a new you, do you bless the world with whatever talent nature and nature’s God gave you? If not, what is preventing you from doing so?

To be at peace with yourself and to be happy, you have to give the world something.

Giving is receiving. If you give something to make the world happy, the world will give you something in return to be happy with. Use your talent to enrich people’s lives and you receive from the people what makes you live your life more abundantly.

Generate wealth and you become wealthy. Hide your talent and do not give the people wealth and you live in poverty, as most Africans do. Africa sits on tremendous natural resources yet Africans are poor. Why this abnormally?

Africans, in Africa and in the Diaspora, talk the talk but do not devote themselves to working, at least, twelve hour days, doing something that blesses all Africans. In so far that they try to work, they work negatively. They seek ways to steal from the public treasury. Their expertise lies in bribery and corruption.

Only the discouraged, those in despair, the dispirited, steal and take bribes. Many Africans are so discouraged that they think that the only way to become rich is to steal and pretend to be very important persons. They do not recognize that one can become rich by making it the old fashioned way, working for it. (I believe that colonialism instilled this discouragement, this lack of belief in ourselves as able to make money in the right way; colonialism made Africans feel powerless so that some of us believe that the only way to become rich is to steal from the national treasury. Stealing from the public ought to make a healthy person so ashamed that he would rather die than do so. It is better to give than to take.)

Figure out what people around you need, a product or service, and produce and sell it to them and they would buy it. When they buy it, you make profits. This way, both seller and buyer benefit, and life become a win-win one, a joy.

Steal and you live a life of spiritual poverty, even if you are materially wealthy. I have interacted with so-called rich Nigerians; I would not trade my humble place for theirs. In many instances, they are not as good as my dog, Ebony. They are nothing, refuse, really. At least, my dog gives human beings joy. Nigerian leaders give people poverty.

The man, Jesus, told a lot of parables. Read his parables and bless your life with them. It does not matter whether you are a Christian, an apostate Christian like me, or not, you would benefit from this Jewish rabbi’s extraordinary wisdom. This man articulated the perennial wisdom of mankind like no one else has ever done.

Unfortunately, Jesus did not do one thing: he did not tell us what prevents people from living their lives as fully as they could. He did not do so, not because he could not tell us, but because he had to leave something for those who come after him to do. He just could not be the only one with wisdom; he had to leave something for other teachers of God to teach. Mohammed had to have something to teach and, by all accounts, improved on aspects of the Jewish rabbi’s insights. (I am not a Moslem and cannot speak on matters Islamic. However, let it be noted that I have taken the trouble to read the Koran. In fact, I read it regularly as I read the Bible. I am a strange non-religious person.)

Brother Jesus and all the past teachers of God left us something to teach our fellow human beings.

I have something to teach you. A person teaches only what he needs to learn. I needed to understand my screwed up life. I am Igbo but, in fact, more Yoruba than Igbo; I am black but, in fact, more white than black. I am at home in the world of philosophy and, without thinking about it, can tell you all about Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, Origin, Tatulian, Montana, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Anselem, Martin Luther, Calvin, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, David Hume, George Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Blasé Pascal, Jean Jacque Rousseau, Leibniz, Henry Bergson, Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Bukanin, Trotsky, David Ricardo, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, William James etc. But I am an African. There in lay my confusion. A black man spouting the best of the West but lacking understanding of whatever Africa has contributed to knowledge. (Could someone please write on African philosophy and psychology, so that I can read them?)

I believe that our encounter with the West has created identity confusion in our minds. I believe that, like me, you, too, have problematic aspects to you. Therefore, my mission is to teach you something about your personal psychology, your individual personality.

I spent over twenty years working in the mental health field, working my way to running a few mental health agencies. I became an executive director of a large mental health agency (over 200 staff, mostly whites) at age 34. (I always taught a class or two, each semester, at local state universities, so, I had a foot in academia.) I must have learnt something along the way and want to share what I have learnt.

Nigerians take pride in calling themselves professors. Strictly speaking, they are not professors. A professor is a person who professes what he personally believes to be true and could care less whether he makes a living from doing so or not. Instead, Nigerians tend to think that the term professor, which is French for teacher, is one that gives them prestige. What poor fools. It simply means a person who has conviction and teaches that conviction to other people. A professor has found knowledge, at least, an aspect of it, and teaches it to the world. He says, in effect, this, I believe is the truth; I stake my life on it, I give you my truth; this is my gift to you and to mankind; take it from me, it is good for you.

A person should not be teaching at the university until he believes that what he is teaching is true. Until one can truly profess some thing as truth, one ought not to teach it. Upon completing my doctoral dissertation at UCLA, still in my mid twenties, I obtained a teaching position at California State University, Dominguez. After a while, I decided that my young head had been filled with Western ideas, much of which I did not believe, so I quit my position and sought to work with real people, to understand the mentally ill, as a way of understanding the so-called normal person.

When we have learned the nature of our problems, solved them, in as much as problems are solvable, then, we can share our solution with other people.

I had tremendous fear in my life. You can say that my middle name was fear. I was afraid of everything. I developed a personality characterized by fear, avoidant personality, aka shyness. (Please pay attention, if you are shy or know any one who is shy or have a child who is shy. Nigerians have personality issues but because they do not take the time to study these things, things that make them less productive, they do not understand what is keeping them down.)

All I did, as a kid, is keep to myself and read, I mean read. I must have read most of the books at Lagos Central Library. During holidays, I used to get there in the morning, and leave when it closes at night. I checked out books and read under an electric lamp. I had very few friends, for I was afraid to talk to people; I feared that if they got close enough to me that they would see me as not good enough and reject me.

The avoidant person is full of fear. He uses his imagination to anticipate other people’s rejection. He does not want to be rejected. He believes that as he is, that he is not good, that he is flawed. He thinks that if other people get close to him, that they would appreciate the fact that he is not good enough hence reject him.

To avoid being rejected by other people, the shy child withdraws from other children (and later, adults). He keeps to himself most of the time.

But since in life we must interact with other people, we are social animals, after all, he finds a way to relate to people without really relating to them. He develops a wall around himself. He is emotionally detached from other people. He relates to people from an emotional distance. He is around you, but is really far away from you. He does not let you into his life; he is afraid that if you come too close that you would appreciate his assumed inferior and inadequate self and reject him. Thus, he pushes people away with his well defended ego self.

He keeps to himself, while yearning for social interaction. But, alas, he does not know the first thing about social interaction: you must welcome people into your life. You must invite people to psychologically come into you and get to know you. You must be psychologically naked and let people see you, as you are, not as you pretend to be.

Generally, the shy, avoidant child waits for other people to approach him for friendship. Usually, one or two caring children would do so. Thus, he has one or two friends, those who took the initiative to approach him for friendship. When I was in elementary school, during the 1960s, at Ladi Lak School, Randall Road, Apapa, two boys, Alexander and Chima, used to come and play with me. They were the only friends that I had. I don’t think that many people knew that I even existed, for I hid my self, afraid of people coming too close to me.

In social isolation, the avoidant, shy child, person, uses his fertile imagination to imagine himself an important person. He visualizes himself doing whatever it is he could not do in real life. His fears prevent him from getting into the field of life and playing a part in it, so he sits around imagining himself becoming the best player in whatever field of life he sees people playing.

As a kid, I avoided sports. I would sit by the side lines, imagining how I could be the best player in whatever game I saw other kids playing. I visualized myself an Olympic athlete, winning several gold medals. But the trouble is that to win those medals, one had to participate in sporting activities and demonstrate that one is, in fact, good at them. One cannot win the kudos of life by sitting on the side lines.

I was destined to be a loser in life. And, in fact, I was a loser in life. I wind up poor, not because I do not have what it takes to make it, but because I did not invest my talents, as the big boy told us to do. I was too afraid to get into the arena of play and play fully, play my little heart out.

It takes playing 100% to become a winner at whatever field one is engaged in. If you are half assed in whatever you are doing, you aren’t going to become a winner in it.

Brother Jesus did not quite tell us about what prevents us from playing fully; he did not tell us what prevents us from investing our talents. He merely told us about what happens to those who did not invent their talents: they did not make profits.

Apparently, Jesus has finally done what he did not do. He did it through an American clinical Psychologist. He has now told us what holds us back from being the best that we can be: FEAR.

It is fear that is holding us back from investing fully in life, hence reaping the full benefits of peace and joy, the gifts of God. Helen Schucman, a Jewish Clinical Psychology Professor at Columbia University, New York City, tells us that what is preventing us from living fully is fear.

It is not that most psychologists do not already know that fear holds people back, it is the manner she said it. In her book, A Course in Miracles, she mixed secular and spiritual psychology. Most psychologists tend to dwell only in secular psychology. In fact, many Psychologists would resent it if you associated their field with religion and what they call the “God hypothesis”. To them, God does not exist and should not even be mentioned.

Psychology, as a field of inquiry, feels inferior for it is mainly speculative; its conclusions are difficult to verify. In his seminal essay on the nature of science (scientific methodology) Karl Popper cavalierly dismissed Psychology as nonsense.

In science, an idea, a hypothesis, must be verifiable by any one following the scientific method: observation, experimentation, replication and the idea must be refutable. (You can neither prove nor not prove the God hypothesis; it is not refutable hence not a heuristic subject.)

Behaviorists like B.F Skinner, in fact, rejected Psychoanalysis primarily because it is speculative. Instead, they concentrated on observable aspects of human behavior. Classical and operant conditioning was all that Skinner and company were interested in; they were not interested in knowing why you did what you did, for as they saw it, no human being, in fact, knows why he does what he does.

(Do you know why you do what you do? Are you just guessing or are you sure that your understanding of your motives is correct?)

While academic psychologists were too busy denying the reality of God, Sister Helen came along and claimed that human beings are spiritual beings and that they cannot live, as the old boy himself said, by bread alone. Apparently, man needs the word of God to live fully.

Sister Helen found a way to give fear a spiritual interpretation. However, her efforts tended to be too much on the side of metaphysics and too little on the side of physics. Human beings live in physics, in body. You must, therefore, take into account their bodies, as well as their minds, not in an either or manner, but both. Sister Helen’s thesis, in effect, was problematic. (I have addressed her mistakes in my writings, elsewhere.)

SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION OF FEAR/ANXIETY

All human beings have experienced fear and anxiety. If you have not experienced them, you are probably not alive on planet earth.

Fear is considered objective, whereas anxiety is considered not so. One can be in the safety of ones room and feel all the symptoms of fear; this is called anxiety disorder. In fear, on the other hand, there is an actual cause for it, for example, someone is threatening your life. In my experience, anxiety also has objective cause, though that causal factor is not immediately apparent to the eyes. For example, I was born with two medical disorders, Spondilolysis and Mitral Valve Prolapse. The first produced pain in my body and the second made my heart pound upon the slightest exercise. Those underlying physiological disorders contributed to my apparent anxiety disorder. But since most parents do not even know anything about those medical disorders, their correlation with anxiety, no one knew the cause of my anxiety. I had the worst separation anxiety in the world. At age five, when I began school, I simply refused to stay at school, expecting my mother to be at school with me…she did for almost a month. (Many black children have undiagnosed medical disorders affecting their learning abilities. This probably accounts for their tendency to find ridiculously easy schools difficult. I found American universities so easy, boring, unchallenging, really, that I cannot imagine any one saying that it is difficult to succeed at them.)

There are some children born with fewer propensities to pain hence to fear. Fear is usually a product of pain. Human beings live in body. Body does experience pain. Fear enables them to anticipate whatever could cause them pain. They, then, avoid whatever could cause them pain.

Fear is a means of avoiding pain. Those children who are born with deficient capacity to feel pain (ANHIDROSIS or CIPA, congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis), tend to not anticipate pain with fear and avoid it hence tend to be hurt and die from the injuries they sustain. Such children seldom live to adulthood.

Fear is what keeps us alive in body for it alerts us to what could hurt our bodies and cause us pain and eventually destroy our bodies. Fear is very critical for our physical survival. Without fear, no human being can survive into adulthood.

Unfortunately, or is it fortunately, some children are born with propensity to more pain hence to more fear. I was such a child. The shy child tends to have more pain and fear in his life. This is so due to his inherited body. (If you are interested in the academic literature on this subject, see Professor Jerome Kegan’s efforts at Harvard University. Also see the writings of Professor Isaacs of Oxford University.)

On the other hand, there are children who tend to feel less pain hence less fear. These children tend to develop antisocial personalities. The criminal type, generally, feels less pain and less fear. As a matter of fact, he tends to engage in high risk behaviors in his quest to excite his body, to feel a little fear, for after all fear is sign that one is alive in body. The antisocial criminal seeks thrills, to excite his “dense” body. (Psychotherapy generally aims at instilling some anxiety in criminals. These people have less fear and anxiety hence engages in the incredibly hurtful activities that they engage in; therapy attempts to instill anxiety in them, so as to make them amenable to socialization, to internalizing, interiorizing and introjecting pro-social norms.)

The shy child has an over aroused soma (body) and tends to seek reduction of his somatic excitement. (See the writings of Hans Esynck. He rewrote Carl Jung’s psychoanalytic postulations of introversion and extroversion in behaviorist categories.) The introverted, shy child feels over aroused and seeks somatic calmness, whereas the extroverted, antisocial child tends to feel under aroused and seek thrills to make him feel some fear. The criminal actually enjoys stealing for there is a prospect of him being caught and that makes him feel a little anxiety, which stimulates his seeming over calm body.

Kegan has definitively proved that temperament is inherited. If one is shy, one inherited it, one inherited an easily arousable body; if one is extroverted, and one inherited a less arousable body. Temperament is stable from day one of ones life hence is not a learned variable. If you are shy, you can manage it, but you cannot eliminate it, for your body is easily aroused.

The physical environment is always impersonal. It hurts the human body without regards to our desire to not be hurt. Any number of factors can hurt our bodies. Our bodies, therefore, evolved a mechanism to alert us to whatever could hurt us and give us pain. That mechanism is called fear response.

All animal organisms that survive on planet earth tend to experience fear, some more so than others. Those with less fear tend to be called bold persons; those with more fear tend to be called timid persons.

EXAMPLE OF FEAR RESPONSE

A car nearly runs into you, a mugger points a gun at you, demanding your money, or he kills you. Without thinking about it, your body goes to work, in an involuntary manner, to defend you. Your nervous system urges your adrenal glands to release more adrenalin into your blood stream. That excitatory hormone is released and speeds up the workings of most of your organs.

Your heart pumps faster, sending blood to all parts of your body. Your body releases stored energy (sugar) and your blood carries it to all parts of your body, particularly to your muscles, giving them energy to do additional work, work demanded of them to enable you survive. In fear, even if you are obese, you could run the hundred yards in 10 seconds, an Olympic time; nature does everything to protect your body when it is endangered.

Your lungs beat faster, enabling you to inhale more oxygen into your body. Your body needs that energy to do its additional work. That oxygen is carried to all parts of your body by your blood. Your body uses the released glucose and inhaled oxygen, burns them up fast in doing the additional work it is doing to find a way to defend you when you are under attack. In doing so, your body produces enormous heat.

Too much somatic heat could destroy some of your visceral organs, so your body finds a way for you to exhale that heat. The air you exhale, when in fear, is hot. You also sweat, because blood carries hot carbon dioxide to your skin and tries to get rid of it through the pores in your skin. When a person is in fear, his skin tends to feel hot, for his body is actually eliminating heat.

Your nervous system works very fast, sending messages from all over your body to the central nervous system (spine and brain). The CNS makes decisions as to what you should do in response to the threat to your life. If you could defeat it, out wit the mugger, your brain asks you to call his bluff, to challenge him to a fight and take the damn gun away from him. (Criminals are always cowards, I have already told you that they are merely seeking thrills for they have under aroused bodies; they are not courageous persons; courage lies in overcoming fear and doing what benefits all of humanity. All those Nigerian politicians that steal our monies are, in fact, cowards; if they were courageous, they would, if necessary, go without food to help develop their poor country.)

If your past experience believes that you can defeat the person endangering your life, your brain urges you to stay and fight him. In that case, your fear is transformed into anger. (The same neuro-chemicals are involved in fear and anger response; in fact, the two affects are the same, physiologically. A fearful person tends to be an angry person, for the same physiology under lays both response.)

If you cannot possibly defeat the attacker, your CNS urges you to flee from him (and if you cannot run away, to beg him for your life).

Fear response is characterized by fight or flight. You fight back and remove whatever is threatening your life or you run from it. Either response is done involuntarily; they take place in seconds, when your life is threatened. You do not pause to think about what to do when a car approaches you, you simply run from it…your adrenalin pours itself into your blood stream and the fear response mechanism described above takes over, and in a split second you jump away from the path of the oncoming car. If you fail in doing so, well, you are hurt or killed.

(This essay is meant for the general public. Therefore, I will not go into details on the actual physiology of fear; that would require some courses in biology, physics and chemistry; you would have to understand the nervous system, the electrical system of the body, biophysics/biochemistry, how messages are transmitted from one neuron, synapse, to another; the role of the electrical ions of potassium, calcium, sodium, magnesium, phosphor, nitrogen etc; the nature of neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, neuropiniphrine, GABA, endorphin and so on. I will keep it very simple.)

Now get this fact into your brain. If fear is holding you back from living fully and from doing whatever you want to do, you probably inherited a body that is prone to quick fear response.

I know this truth for I lived in fear from day one of my life. Make a little noise and my body is aroused and goes into fear mode. My heart pounds as if it wants to jump out of its chest cavity, my lungs flap; my nervous system goes fast and I experience the fight-flight response to fear. If I am sleeping and you switch on electrical light, I immediately wake up; that is how attuned to changes in the environment that my body is. Raise your voice, and I jump. (I should point out that some psychologists have speculated that persons who inherited such extreme tendency to fear, who generally tend to have very high IQ…over 130… were those who, in primitive societies, became their people’s shamans and prophets. My philosophical mental, Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, described his body as being as I know my body to be. He struggled to avoid people for their nose making jarred his over sensitive body. He said this almost two hundred years. He helped me understand why I avoided people for their idle charter made my body want to run. When I am with Nigerians and they begin to talk loudly, as they do, I run away. I go read. Reading calms me down. Reading is probably the best way to relax the mind. If you are stressed out, try reading good books. )

I have been fearful from day one of my life. In fact, all persons in my family are fearful. My father was fearful; my grand father was so etc. Our over fearfulness is due to our inherited hyper sensitive body. Since my ancestors were their people’s Amadioha High Priests, I have often wondered whether there was a correlation between their hypersensitive bodies, high intelligence and their social function.

There are advantages and disadvantages to everything in life. Fearful people tend to develop introverted, introspective personalities. Fearless persons tend to develop extroverted personalities.

The introvert thinks a lot and the extrovert thinks less. It is introverts that give us our philosophy and psychology. Extroverts do things and give us our food.

If life gives you lemon, make lemonade with it. If you are born with an over aroused central nervous system, hence compelled to introspect, you might as well read books, think about them and contribute to the world of ideas.

FEARFULNESS AND SELF CONSCIOUSNESS

Human beings are self conscious animals. In fact, what seems to differentiate them from other forms of animal life is their self consciousness. The Canadian Psychiatrist, Richard M. Burke, in his book, Cosmic Consciousness, observed that what differentiates animals from human beings is human beings self consciousness. He seemed to think that that quality makes us spiritual beings. However, he also seemed to think that we must lose that self consciousness to return to our assumed spiritual origin. As it were, we separated from unified spirit and each of us feels conscious of his separated, in Carl Jung’s categories, individuated self. Therein lays the problem of human existence. We must relinquish that sense of separation and its allied self consciousness and return to a state of what Buddha called “no self” to regain awareness of our true self.

In meditation and mystical experience folks claim to have given up awareness of their separated self and regained awareness of unified self, hence entered what they call God state. Hinduism calls it Samadhi, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism calls it Nirvana, Zen Buddhism calls it Satori. Here, the separated self is let go and the individual’s mind is whipped clean of all self concepts. In a mind made void of all conceptual categories, emptied of all ideas of self and meaning, an open mind, the real self, which Buddha thinks is unified, dawns on one’s mind. One feels at peace and is happy. Hinduism calls this experience absolute bliss.

The fearful person tends to be extremely self conscious. What is going on here? Briefly, self consciousness is the awareness of one’s self as different from other selves. Human beings are conscious that they are individuated (See Carl Jung on Individuation) and separated from other people and from the rest of the world. As Eric Fromm pointed out in Escape from Freedom, human beings have a sense of being detached from the world they live in.

It is said that other forms of being feel as if they are one with their environment, whereas human beings feel apart from it. As a matter of fact, we do not know how other forms of life feel, so the statement that animals, for example, do not feel separated from their world is speculative and untenable to science. But the point is well taken, man feels cut off from the rest of being, he feels all alone in the universe.

I believe that self consciousness is an ego variable. To feel self conscious is to see ones self as different from other people, as not the same as other people and as unequal with other people. One either feels superior to other people or feels inferior to other people, or vacillates between the two.

Self consciousness is an effort to make one’s separated self seem real in one’s awareness. Here, one is keenly aware that others are looking at one, that they observe one, evaluate and judge one’s every behavior. The self conscious person feels like he is in a fishbowl, is the center of other people’s attention. He feels like all people are judging his every behavior and deciding whether they are good or bad. Of course, he would like to be judged as good, so he does whatever he could to make him seem good and avoid being seen as bad. (As a child, I was conscious of other people judging me and tried my best to conform to accepted social norms; the prospect of doing the wrong thing hence be negatively judged and possibly rejected filled me with anxiety. Behaviorally, I was a model child and never engaged in anti social behaviors. I dutifully went to confession every Saturday and confessed sins I had not committed.)

There are clinical terms for these issues, such as ideas of reference, ideas of centrality etc. But this is not a paper for mental health professionals, so I will stay away from those terms. If interested in the literatures see David Swanson et al, The Paranoid; William Meisner, Paranoid Process; David Shapiro, Autonomy and the Rigid Character; The American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, relevant sections.) The salient point is that the fearful person, who in extreme form is a shy person, tends to be s a self conscious person. Whereas all human beings are self conscious, shy, fearful persons are extremely self conscious.

Contrary to the general perception that shy person are timid, actually they are very egotistical. They have grandiose self concepts. They secretly feel superior to other people. Their shyness is, in fact, a strategic withdrawal from other people so that their imaginary big self is not exposed as the sham it is. Alfred Adler explicated this phenomenon better than other psychologists. He observed that the shy, neurotic person feels inferior and compensates with a fictional, imaginary superior self concept. He wants to become a very important person. The important self concept and its pictorial form, self image, is not real; it is a conceptual self and does not exist in the real world.

In the objective, real world, all people are the same and are equal. But the neurotic wants to seem better than other persons. He uses his imagination to invent an imaginary big self. However, the neurotic is aware that that self is not real. He then feels that if other people come close to him that they would appreciate that his grandiose self concept is make belief and not real. In a futile effort to protect his imaginary big self and make it seem real, he avoids other people. In effect avoidance behavior is an effort to preserve a false neurotic big self. (Please note that every human being is a bit neurotic. The clinical term for normal persons is normal neurotics. Therefore, in talking about neurotics, we are talking about all human beings. It is all a matter of degrees.)

In psychosis, such as schizophrenia and mania, the individual, in fact, believes that he is his imaginary important self, hence he is insane. The neurotic person, like most Nigerian big men, wants to be seen as an important person but knows that he is not, hence is able to test reality and, as such, is normal. On the other hand, the psychotic person, in fact, believes that he is more important than other persons hence has lost touch with reality. He now lives in his own world. The psychotic actually believes that he is god, Jesus, Napoleon or whatever big self he constructs for himself. Reality is awareness and acceptance that all human beings, man and woman, child and adult, black and white are the same and equal.

The neurotic detests his inferior feeling self and wishes that he were superior but knows that he is not superior to any one else, he is able to distinguish between wishes and facts. The psychotic has lost the ability to distinguish between wishes and facts, hence believes that since he wished that he were superior that, in fact, he is so.

It is impossible for one human being to be superior to other human beings. The same life force, unified spirit, which is the same and equal everywhere, manifests in all people hence all people, in their essence, are equal. Of course, in the temporal universe, there are apparent differences in people; some are black, others white, some tall, others short, some smart, others not so smart etc. But these are appearances and appearances are deceiving. Look beyond human appearances and behold the sameness and equality in all human beings.

For our present purpose, shyness and self consciousness are efforts to defend the separated, ego self. The shy person is attempting to have a big ego and must accept that his ego is the same as other egos. Therapy for the shy person includes shrinking his swollen ego. If your child is shy and avoidant, he or shy has a swollen self concept that needs to be shrunk. The shy child’s approach-avoidant behavior is rooted in his misguided efforts to seem a very important person.

The moment you feel better than other people, you have interfered with relationship, and can no longer relate well to other people. Good relationship requires that people be equal; only the equal can relate well, the unequal have conflicted relationships. Give it up, give up the neurotic and or psychotic wish to be better than other people and relate to all people as your equal friends. All God’s children are equal. (I have developed these ideas in more clinical papers.)

MYTHOLOGY

In the beginning is God. (All metaphysics must have a story of creation, all of them myths; so bear with me as I narrate Sister Helen’s myth of creation; as long as you understand that we are now in the realm of mythology, not science, you are safe; do not always accept what people tell you is the truth, as the literal truth; no human being knows what the truth is. Where objective knowledge ends mythology begins. Lest you are cavalier, myths are necessary for living. Please pay close attention to this myth, for it has an element of truth in it; all useful myths have some metaphoric truth, but not the whole truth in them.)

God is one. God extended himself into his Son. God gave his son his ability to extend himself. The Son of God extended his self into his own son.

There was no time when God did not exist. Since, by definition, God is creative and is always creating his children, there was no time that the children of God did not exist. As it were, the son of God is as old as God, for if there was a time that God did not have a son, since to be God, one must be a father, God did not exist. Creation has no beginning and no end. (We are talking in metaphors, but we are also talking truth, so pay attention and learn.)

Creation begins in God and extends outwards to his Son and to the Son’s children, ad infinitum. In concrete terms, God created your father. Your father has the power to create given to him by God. He created you with that power. He gave you that creative power. You create your own children, who, in turn, will create their own children, ad infinitum.

God is creative and is always creating his children and his children creating their own children. This process has no beginning and no end.

God and his creation are one. God is his creation. God is in his creation. God is in his children. The children of God are in God. The children of God are in each other. Where God ends and his children begin is nowhere. Where one child of God ends and another begins is nowhere. There is no space or gap between God and his children, or between the children. All creation is unified as one. God is in you and you are in God; and you are also in all people, as they are in you. (When you sleep and dream, you project out the entire world. You see a world that seems external to you, yet when you wake up in the morning, that world no longer exists. Why so? Because the entire world is inside you, as you are inside it. You project the seeming external world out and seem to live in it.)

In eternity, aka heaven, there is no you and not you, all are you. One God is himself and simultaneously his infinite creations.

(Do you think that this is fiction? Have you had mystical experience? In mystical union, you suddenly know yourself to be you and simultaneously all people. See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience; Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism. Also see the writings of Catholic, Protestant and Moslem mystics, such as Meister Eckhart, St John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Hilton, Boehm, and Sufi Moslems.)

According to Sister Helen, eternity is unified. There is no you and not you in it; no seer and seen, no subject and object; all are one. All share one self and one mind. All share the self of God and the mind of God. We do whatever we do with the spirit of God in us; without him, we can do nothing. The son of God can do everything with the power of his father in him, but can do nothing without his father’s power. We are nothing without God; but with God we are everything.

Sister Helen said that in this unified state, eternity, she called it (traditional Christianity calls it heaven) entered the spirit of division and rebellion.

Each son of God, each part of God, wanted to separate from God and from others. Why this desire?

Separation is a means and must have an end. So why did we seek separation from God and from each other? Sister Helen said that we resented the fact that God created us and want to create ourselves. We are like God except in one respect. God created us and we did not create God and did not create ourselves.

Each of us does help create other people, our children, but we do so with the creative power of God in us, but not by our own powers. God is the creator and we are the created and we sorely resented this fact.

We wished to create ourselves and to create God. In other words, we wished to replace God. For that to happen, God had to be killed and die. We wished the death of our father. (This desire to create God, create ourselves and create each other Sister Helen called special-ness; I call it narcissism. The world came into being in pursuit of special-ness, in our vain effort to be narcissistic.)

We wished to drive our father out of his creatorship throne, usurp it, and create him and ourselves. (Please remember that we are now in the realm of metaphors, not facts. Nevertheless, we are articulating what, in fact, seemed to have happened. Please pay close attention.)

God is eternal and lives for ever and ever. Therefore, much as we wished to kill him, we cannot kill God. For one thing, God does not have a body that could be destroyed.

God is spirit. Spirit is that which is not in form, in body and in matter.

In eternity, heaven, we are spirit, not bodies hence we are in each other and in God. Spirit is eternal, permanent and changeless and could not be killed by his rebellious sons.

But the wish for self creation is powerful. So what to do? We contrived to tune God out, and, as it were, seem to go to sleep, and in our sleep, dream that we are separated from God and have now created us. We invent our self concepts, our egos, and our personalities as our replacement selves. Our real self, in heaven, is unified self, but our current self, on earth, is separated self. The separated self is a substitute self; the real self is unified spirit.

(Cross reference Hindu story of the origin of this world. See Veda, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Upanishads, Bagavad Gita, Patanjali’s Yoga, Shankara and Ramanuja’s philosophies, Guru Nanak’s writings, The Gospel of Ramakrishna, and Vivekananda’s writing. Hinduism believes that the world is a dream. Western solipsistic philosophers like George Berkeley and Arthur Schopenhauer built on Vedanta, the philosophical aspect of Hinduism; Hinduism has two aspects, the intellectual part, Vedanta, Janna Yoga, and the emotional aspect for the masses, Bhakti Yoga.)

Fifteen billion years ago, we all went insane and attacked each other and attacked God (the Big Bang of physics), and in doing so, seemed to separate from each other. That much attack made the loudest noise you ever heard, the big bang. (Please see Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth. Also see his series on a Hero with Thousand Faces.)

As it were, we shattered unified reality and in nanoseconds invented space. Space gave us separation from each other.

The moment space came into being, time came into being. Draw a line between two separated points and it takes time to go from one point to the other.

If I separated from you, in space, then, it requires time for me to reach you. Space and time came into being almost simultaneously, with space preceding time by nanoseconds.

As soon as space and time were invented, particles had to be invented. Space invented time and matter. Thus, in seconds after the big bang, particles were invented. Quarks, protons, neutrons, electrons etc were invented.

Particles, in time, unified to form atoms. First, hydrogen atoms. In time that atom and its isotopes differentiated into the 104 elements (and counting) in the universe.

The elements, in time, unified into biological organisms; first, into plant life and then into animal life and finally into human beings.

(Are you enjoying this creation mythology? I told you that Sister Helen was the best myth maker of the twentieth century. And that is good for all the old creation myths, like Genesis in the Christian Bible, were invented by men. I say that it is about time we had female myth makers. Right on, Sister Helen, this brother is with you. But he must necessarily correct your problematic aspects. That is his contribution to what Aldus Huxley called the perennial philosophy of mankind.)

As Sister Helen sees it, none of this has actually happened. God and his children are still unified. What seemed to have happened is that the children of God seemed to have fallen, metaphorically, asleep, and are dreaming that they are in a place called this world. But, in fact, they are still in God and are with God.

This may sound spooky to you. When you experience mystical union, all you feel is like you merely awakened from a sleep, momentarily remember that you were in a place called this world, and quickly forget about it; as we tend to forget our dreams. You quickly know yourself to be at your real home, unified state, heaven, call it whatever you like; it has no name. You know yourself to be a part of God and God to be your creator. You know yourself to be immortal. You know everything (excluding information on material things, for matter does not exist in eternity). You know yourself as formless unified spirit.

Sister Helen tells us that our world does not exist and that it is as a mere dream. Good gracious, what does she mean that this apparent solid world is a dream and is not real? It sure seems real to me.

George Berkeley wrote his Dialogues, philosophical solipsism, and claimed that the world is in our minds. Boswell, Dr Johnson’s side kick, told Dr Johnson, the old English wit, about it, and he struck his toe on a rock, felt pain, and said: that is the answer for Berkeley.

A few years ago, I was living at Alaska. I told a bright Yupik Eskimo boy about Sister Helen’s story that our world is a dream and he said, and I quote, “Dr Osuji, if I strike my toes on a rock, I feel pain, so this world is sure real to me”. This thirteen year old boy had never heard of Dr Johnson, yet his response to solipsism was exactly like Johnson’s. This goes to show you that all human beings are the same.

(As an aside, Dr Johnson was so afraid of death that he clung to life and died a miserable death, fighting death. Apparently, he did not want to go to that oblivion which, as an atheist, he preached. He was scared shitless of death. On the other hand, Berkeley, a Catholic Bishop, who believed in God, died gracefully. The atheist that talks volubly that God does not exist is usually afraid to die and go to that finitude that he talks so much about. In an emergency, in the fox hole, the most vocal atheist prays to God.)

God exists. In fact, God is the only thing that exists. Nothing else exists. But your concept of God may not be God, for God is beyond concepts. God is not anything that you can conceptualize or think about. God is ineffable; you cannot understand him with earthly ego, intellectual categories.

God is unified spirit and only those in spirit can understand God. Since you are in body, or think that you are, you cannot understand unified spirit. Moreover, the intellectual categories of this world are meant to help us understand a separated world. For example, language is adaptive to separated people. One is apart from you, so one talks to you. But if people are unified and there are no others to talk to, language is redundant. You cannot understand eternity with our earthly language, for language adapts to the separated realities of this world, not to the unified reality of heaven.

Sister Helen wants you to give up this world, to awaken from the dream of special ness and separation and return to God. She reinterpreted the Gospel of Jesus to tell you what you have to do to awaken from this dream.

Jesus taught people to love one another. He said that true love means forgiving one another. If others do bad things to you, forgive them. He forgave those who destroyed his physical body.

On the other hand, on earth, we invented matter and body and seem to live in it. Matter, body, gives a sense of boundaries, separation. One is in this body and other people are in different bodies, so one must be separated from them. We experience attacks on our bodies as pain. We do not like pain. We fear pain. We defend against attack by either counter attacking those who attacked us or avoiding them. On earth, we survive to the extent that we avoid attack.

If attacked we tend to be defensive. Jesus, on the other hand, tells us not to be defensive. He asks us to be defenseless, to not fight back when attacked. But you think that if you are attacked that you would be killed, so, you defend yourself when attacked by counter attacking the attacker, or if weak, running from the attacker.

Fear is a means of running from attack and anger is a means of counter attacking your attackers. Fear and anger enables you to protect your body hence to survive on earth as a separated self.

Jesus asks you to forgive those who attack you hence to be defenseless to attack. He must be crazy; your earthly ego intellect tells you, for you know that if you do not fight the bully, that he could hurt, even kill you. If you re a boy-child, you quickly learn that if you seem weak that other boys would, for no good reason, come and push you around. You must be assertive to avoid being messed with.

As a shy, quiet boy, I was pushed around a lot. One day, after school…I can just see us at Point road, Apapa… three boys, my class mates, the three stars, as they called themselves, confronted me. Other boys immediately circled us, cheering them to beat that “know it all” Tommy. Well, I suddenly found the strength to fight back. I fought like hell and in fact inflicted a lot of physical harm on the three ten year old boys. They had attacked me in the presence of other boys, to humiliate me and to seem powerful. If I had allowed myself to be pushed around, I would have lost social face. I gained prestige by attacking to kill. (Up to the present, though I seem gentle, if you mess with me, I attack you with such verbal fury that I might, in fact, destroy you.)

Please note that none of the other boys came to my rescue. They just circled us, expecting to have fun from Tommy having the crap beat out of him. The lesson here is that when push comes to shove, no one will come to your rescue. You are all alone in this wide universe. Defend yourself, as much as you could. Ces’t la vie, such is life. Life is, as Charles Darwin told us, and Herbert Spenser popularized in the philosophy of social Darwinism, a struggle where the fittest survive and the weak die. Don’t give me that emotional bull that others are looking after my self interests. That was the lesson I learned in my childhood. (To the present, I tend to look at people with cynical eyes; I expect them to do nothing for my survival. I survive by my own efforts. To me, those masquerading as very important persons are no more than clowns. I do not rely on them for my survival therefore they are superfluous human beings. Why should I see you as a socially important person when you play no role in my survival? No Nigerian, other than my parents, has contributed to my physical survival, so Nigerians seem no more than empty vessels making a whole lot of noise.)

From that moment of whipping three boys, no other kid at my elementary school messed with me.

The salient point is that in our world, you got to defend yourself, to be alive. And here comes a chap called Jesus telling you not to defend yourself. He must be a crazy. See, he did not defend himself and his enemies killed him.

Defenselessness and forgiveness is a recipe for death. So if you want to die, then forgive your enemies.

(By the way, I am engaged in a serious philosophical discourse, so you might as well pay attention. I am trying to tell you that if you practiced true Christianity, which is love and forgiveness, that you would be destroyed by this world. My fellow thinker, Frederick Nietzsche, said as much, in his book, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Christianity had to be practiced in the breech, for people to survive. This accounts for the fact that those who call themselves Christians do not practice it. If they did, they would die off. The question then is whether they should bite the bullet, practice what their master, Jesus, told them to practice and die? Think about it. Stop being emotional and use your freaking mind, for once in your life. If you are a Christian, as Nigerians run around telling us that they are, how come you do not do what Christians are supposed to do: love, forgive and serve all people? How come you only look after your self interests and not public interests? I am yet to see a true Christian in Nigeria or any where else, for that matter.)

If terrorists attacked you, and you want to live in this world, you must defend yourself. If you are defenseless, they will kill you or convert you to their violent religion. Simply stated, forgiveness and defenseless are antithetical to survival in this world.

Nevertheless, Jesus taught that message and Sister Helen rearticulated it. She asks us to forgive those who harm us. As she sees it, they harm us because we harmed them hence we must forgive them.

In her view, nothing could happen to one unless one wants to experience it. One must have attacked other people, for them to attack one. To separate from other people is to have attacked them; it takes attack to split unified reality and thereafter seem apart from other people. Apriori, we have attacked other people, hence are guilty.

The three boys who jumped me believed that I attacked them by being haughty. I was not an innocent boy. I used to consider the boys primitive. They just came to town from their villages and seemed uncivilized; it was like they came from a different planet, culturally speaking.

In the here and now, the fact is that defenselessness leads to physical death. Sister Helen tells you that therein lay your problem: that you believe in death. She said that when you think that you are dead, that all that happens is that you awaken in unified state. To her, there is no death. This world is a dream and when we die in it, we merely awaken from a nightmarish dream.

But you have no way of knowing whether what the Jewish sister is telling you is true or not. Clever religious charlatans and quacks have been known to deceive gullible people; so your ego intellect asks you to defend yourself, which is what most of us do.

See also, Overcoming the Fear that Holds Africans Down, Part 2

Posted by Administrator at 08:53 AM | Comments (0)

August 15, 2005

Africans should Pay Reparations to African Americans, Part 2

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. --- (Seatle, Washington) I believe that Africans are as guilty as white people in causing the suffering of African Americans. As such, both Africans and whites must make reparations to African Americans.

It is estimated that one out of three African Americans came from Nigeria. Many African Americans are Igbos, Yorubas, and Hausas. (My friends and I used to indulge in a game of trying to figure out what tribe a particular African American came from. We would observe their behaviors and match them with the stereotypical behaviors of specific Nigerian tribes. If they are industrious and intemperate, we said Igbo, if they are very clever and diplomatic, we said Yoruba, if they are polished and aristocratic in their bearing, and we said Hausa and so on. Of course, we were mostly wrong for the typical African America is a mixture of the many African tribes that came here, and additionally are mixed with Caucasians and Indians. They are, in fact, a new breed of human beings, not African, not European, but the new human being. They are the vanguard of tomorrow’s mixed humanity. As the means of transportation and communication improves, people from all over the world will relate to each other closely. In the past, distance and culture separated people, but that is no more. With increased proximity will be increased so-called interracial marriages…genetically, there is no such thing as different races, and there is only one human species, from the so-called different races are, genetically, 99.9% the same…. and the result would be a new race of humanity, one that is neither white, nor black. In a thousand years, all people would be mixed and brown in color. This is our future and we might as well not fight it. We should rather provide all children with scientific education, and society with scientific culture, so as not to witness degeneration of the race to primitive forms of existence.)

As I see it, African Americans own as much of Nigeria’s oil wealth as those who claim to be Nigerians. Therefore, Nigeria ought to set aside 1-5% of her oil revenues for African Americans. All African countries ought to do the same. Moreover, all African countries ought to pass laws offering any African American (by which I mean those in both North and South America) who so desires it dual citizenship. If an African American desires it, he retains his American citizenship and passport and seeks, say Nigerian, Ghanaian citizenship and passport.

(African Americans came from Senegal through Namibia, all in West Africa. They did not come from North, South or East Africa, so the policy recommendations proposed here do not apply to those other parts of Africa. One is talking about West Africa, from Senegal to Namibia. However, East Africans do not escape Scott free. They sold themselves to Arab Countries. Take a look at Saudis, for example. Some look blacker than me…for some reasons, my family members tend to be fair in complexion, sometimes as white as Italians…East African countries must make reparations to blacks in the Middle East.)

Africans must make reparations for the abuse we subjected African Americans to. We must do so for a whole number of reasons, including the need to assuage our guilty conscience. As noted, some of us consciously feel guilty when we go to the inner cities of America and see how our American cousins live. I feel personally responsible for Harlem and Watts. I used to go through Watts and Compton, California, on my way to teach at a college in Dominguez Hill, and saw, first hand, how our people are made to live like second class citizens. I am personally responsible for this situation. So are my fellow Africans.

It is time for us to accept responsibility for our past wrong doing and ask our African American brothers to forgive us. I personally ask every African American I see to forgive me. I do not always say it aloud: I sometimes say it as a silent, inner prayer. Every day of my life, I ask God to forgive me for my ancestor’s evil behaviors.

(That evil behavior is preserved in my village. When, as a result of Lugard’s conquest of our world, slavery effectively ended in it, the slaves that had been captured but had not yet been sold were left in our village. To the present, these folks are treated as second class citizens. Being a life long rebel, while visiting our village, from my childhood home of Shanty town, Lagos, invited one of my fellow eight year olds from our Catholic church, Jeremiah where are you, to come to my house and my grand mother told me that we do not associate with “those people”, Osus. The boy was made to go home. To the present, we do not intermingle with them. We do not marry their people. As you may have noticed, my last name is Osuji. That means God’s slave. My ancestors, though Dialas, freeborn, were a positive kind of slaves; we were the priests of our clan. We are like the biblical Samuel; we are dedicated to serving God, to leading the people in spiritual affairs. In Hindu terms, we are the Brahmin class, the highest class in society. I suppose that that accounts for my extraordinary interest in spirituality? Perhaps, after all, I am here to do for our people what my ancestors did for them: provide them with spiritual, aka psychological, guidance? You never know how these things work. How do you account for my studying the major religions of the world, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? I do not know.)

There is no use denying our complicity in the crime against humanity called slavery. I believe that both Africans and white Americans must take ownership of what we did to African Americans. When we do so, we must repent for our sins and make amends. This amends may take the form of monetary reparation to African Americans. However, I am against giving individual persons free monies. If we did so, they would drink themselves to death with it. I want us to set money aside to train every African American child, from elementary to university. This must be done for a generation (35 years).

I think that it is in taking ownership for our past criminal behavior of selling our people that Africans will finally become emotionally grown up. In their present state of denial, they tend to seem very childish. We must tell the universe that we accept our sins against some of God’s children.

I know that there are those who claim that there is no God. I can even make these atheists and agnostics’ arguments for them. But deep down in my soul, I know that God exists.

God tells me that Love is the highest form of being. As brother Jesus said: do unto others, as you want them to do to you. I want to be loved and, therefore, ought to love other people. In as much as we did not love our African American brothers, I believe that we violated God’s moral law.

I believe that one of the reasons why nothing is working out well for Africans is because of our evil behavior in selling our own people, that is, in not loving some of God’s children.

God is merciful. He tells us to forgive one another. Forgiveness is the highest form of Love. I ask my African American brothers and sisters to forgive us Africans, that is, to love us. I ask my fellow Africans to engage in behavior that shows that we love our African American brothers and sisters.

At the individual level, loving our African American cousins’ mean accepting and caring for them. If you are good at science and mathematics, please go the ghetto and teach black children physics, chemistry, biology, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, statistics, calculus etc.

I am a block head when it comes to mathematics, but I am very good at psychology. I do go to jails and prisons to counsel my brothers who are essentially political prisoners. Please do not get me wrong. I do believe in law and order and would punish a criminal in a jiffy. But things are such that in America a black boy is likely to be jailed than a white boy. One out of four black men between ages 14-24 is either in jail or being supervised by parole and probation officers. America annually spends more money to house one African American in jail than she does to educate each African American school child. It spends about $35,000 on each inmate and $6,000 to educate each student, annually. I think that this is an outrage against humanity.

My goal in this essay is not to take issue with white Americans’ abuse of African Americans. I have done that in other essays. Suffice it to say that I believe that if white Americans do not change and make amends for their evil against African Americans that their empire would eventually collapse. Where are Samaria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, France, Britain, Russia, and other hitherto great empires based on exploitation of God’s children?

All empires based on oppression, sooner or latter, fall. If America does not change her ways, her military might will not prevent her from joining the other evil empires. History is littered with fallen evil empires and there is no reason why America should be an exception.

I know that to Americans their present sole super power status is intoxicating and they may not imagine themselves no longer at the apogee of human civilization. But they must ask what happened to the other superpower, the Soviet Union? It took only a small trigger and Stalin’s oppressive house collapsed in a year. America is already a house built on a shaky foundation. It does not take too much perspicacity to appreciate that America’s morality is degenerate. We already have pedophiles and other such bestial creatures in ascendancy in America. Every moral deviancy now wants to be recognized as alternative life style. It is Nero’s decadent Rome all over again. We have been there before, de javu.

If Americans are mesmerized by their possession of weapons of mass destruction, perhaps, they ought to study a little history. History teaches us that no weapon system ever invented by man stays in one group’s possession for ever. The Chinese invented gun powder but Marco Polo brought it to Europe, and with it, Europeans ended the feudal era of bows, arrows and lances. Look around and see who is studying science at American universities. It is mostly third world students. By and large, these folks will go home and develop their own nuclear weapons.

All things being equal, America will, of course, fight tooth and nail to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons; it is in her self interests to do so. If others have those weapons, they could use them on America. Moreover, if only America has those weapons, she enjoys the status of a terrorist and is able to use her weapons to intimidate other people into doing what she wants. American leaders would saber rattle and generate fear in other countries, and out of fear they would obey America.

However, it is precisely because of this unacceptable intimidatory situation that other countries feel compelled to seek to acquire nuclear weapons. No one likes to be bullied by the school yard bully. If history is constant, and it is, by the end of this century, those countries, including African countries that want nuclear weapons will have them, America’s opposition not withstanding.

One is a political realist and knows that the genie cannot be put back into the bottle. All we can do is redesign the international order, so that we can manage the necessary weapons of mass destruction available in our world. The United Nations must be transformed into a real world government, with teeth to punish member nations. We must reduce the present nations’ sovereignty and give law enforcement powers to the United Nations Organization.

America’s culture is so fragile that with a little external and internal push; America will implode under the weight of her moral corruption.

Of course this does not have to happen. America is the first universal country. Indeed, it is my adopted country, and I wish her well. But as a moral agent, I cannot countenance abuse of any of God’s children. As some one said, do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you. The abuse of any human being is my abuse. I look forward to a morally regenerated America and the collapse of a morally degenerate America.

Again, this essay is not directed at Americans but at my fellow Africans. I want my African brothers and sisters to think about the evils our ancestors visited on our American brothers, and think of creative ways to do their best to correct the situation. We must all pitch in to help those whose lives we made hellish. It is really hellish to be a slave and to live in America as the children of slaves, daily reminded of ones second class statuses by racist institutions.

DISCUSSION

In this essay, I am thinking out loud. Nothing written here is written in concrete. I am merely trying to provoke a discussion that I believe needs to take place among Africans.

I believe that there is tension between African Americans and Africans. That tension is rooted in our mutual awareness of our secret past. We Africans harmed African Americans. African Americans know this fact but it does not yet seem necessary for them to bring it to the open. They have one war to fight at a time. Currently, they are fighting a war with Caucasians, to redress the evil the later visited on them. But when their issue with Caucasians is properly disposed of, they would turn their attention to Africans. Sooner or later, African Americans will ask us Africans to make amends for our role in their suffering.

But it must also be remembered that some African Americans, while still in Africa, participated in slavery, until they were enslaved. Many of them went to wars to capture slaves and wound up been captured and sold. Even in the Americas, some of them had their own slaves. One has read about blacks in Virginia who had other black slaves. But then again there were the children who were caught in adult’s stupidity.

There is no use blaming any one for the past. What needs to occur is for us all to take mutual responsibility for the past and make sure that it does not repeat itself.

Long ago, I noticed an interesting phenomenon among Africans in America. Some Africans put a distance between them and African Americans. They saw only the bad in African Americans. They were always harping on what African Americans did wrong.

In my Igbo community, such persons called African Americans Ndiakata (troublesome people).

While putting African Americans down, such persons, nevertheless, did not hesitate marrying them, if only to obtain the almighty green cards. Unfortunately, as soon as they secured their green cards, they divorced their African American wives. They then went home, to Africa, and got themselves what they called their real wives.

These folks used our American sisters to secure permanent status in America. What is new? These people are as callous as their slave selling ancestors; they are merely engaging in modern forms of slavery, using others for their own good. If you use an American woman for green card, you are a practicer of slavery. You should only marry a woman you love and take care of her for the duration of your life on earth.

The tendency to see only the bad in African Americans is the same mental trick employed by white racists. By seeing them as not well, one justifies using them and discarding them. The slave master told himself that Africans are subhuman beings and that enabled him to have good conscience, while he exploited them as slaves. By the same token, when Africans put African Americans down, they rationalize using them to secure green card and discard them after words. That way they do not feel bad for using some of God’s children.

But in as much as Africans are human beings, they do feel guilty. As pointed out, Africans tend to employ projection and denial to get rid of their guilt. As also noted, those who do so tend to be emotionally immature. Hence the Africans’ tendency to give one the impression that he is childish. I am sorry to say it, the average Nigerian comes across as very emotionally warped and stunted, and a child in adult uniform. This is primarily because he over uses denial and projection in his childish efforts to avoid guilt and depression.

For Africans to become emotional adults, they must accept guilt and feel remorse, even depressed, if needs be. We need to put some sadness in those silly, smiling faces of Nigerians. What are these fools laughing about, any way? They are merely trying to avoid examining their evil past and seeing the guilt in their subconscious minds. They must learn to accept guilt, feel sad and become emotional adults.

If they are adults, for example, they would rather die than take bribes. I would feel degraded were somebody to offer me bribes. In fact, I would slap the idiotic face of whoever dared insult me by offering me bribes.

Nigerians do not feel insulted taking bribes or demanding it. What children! I know that Nigerians may feel insulted being called children, but if you behave like one, you must be prepared to be seen as one. If you are corrupt, you are an emotional cripple; that is all there is to it; there are no ifs and buts about it.

One is not naïve. One lives in the real world and sees all the dances of God confused children dance. These dances are not limited to Africans; whites and Asians dance them, too. In this essay, however, I am restricting myself to Africans.

Why did Africans sell their brothers and sisters? They did it because they are human beings. And on that note, let me end by re-presenting the familiar Christian theological view of the human condition, the view that man is sinful, a view that is no longer in vogue in our modern, secular society, but a view that I accept as correct. Make of it what you like. I am not trying to impose my religion on you; I am just sharing with you what I believe.

I believe that all human beings, me included, are born in sin. To be on earth is to be a sinner. To be here one has sinned already.

The Catholic Church has a concept called Original Sin, with which it accounts for our sinful nature.

The Garden of Eden story is a metaphor of man’s descent to sin. According to that creation mythology, God created us and placed us in a place of abundance, a place where all our material needs were met. He, however, asked us not to eat of the fruit of a particular tree.

If we know any thing about God’s children, us, it is that we are defiant. We did what we were told not to do.

We said that the devil made us do it (excuses, rationalizations). Satan made Eve do it and Eve made Adam do it. That way each of them had excuses for disobeying God’s Will.

God does not make compromises. If you disobey his will, you suffer the consequences. Thus we were driven out of the garden of abundance and sent to a world of scarcity, where we could only secure our daily bread through our labor.

Obviously, the biblical Adam and Eve story is a myth. It is a story meant to teach the lesson that we are sinners and account for the origin of sin.

There are other ways of accounting for the presence of sin in our world. Gnosticism presents its own stories. According to one version of it, Lucifer, also called the Demiurge, was an angel that God loved. He felt pride swell in his chest. He envied God’s creatorship of him and wanted to be his own creator. He rebelled against God. The arch angels Gabriel and Michael organized loyal angels to defeat Lucifer and he was driven out of heaven, and came to earth to start his own kingdom.

As Gnosticism sees it, heaven is the kingdom of union. Union is love. Love is light. The earth, on the other hand, is the opposite of heaven. The earth is the kingdom of separation. Separation is hatred. Separation is darkness. To be on earth is to be in darkness. To be in heaven (love, union) is to be in light.

Gnosticism aims at taking people out of this world of darkness (hatred, separation) and back to the world of light (love, union). (See Plotinus for a concise essay on Gnosticism. Also see the Gnostic Gospels, particularly, The Gospel of Thomas.)

Of course, Gnosticism is also a myth of the origin of this world. All stories of creation are exactly that, stories, metaphors for what we do not know.

I have presented my own story of creation in a four volume book called Real Self Psychology. I built on the story of creation presented by an amazing Jewish clinical psychologist called Helen Schucman, in her book called A Course in Miracles. She recast the Gnostic view in psychological categories. (Helen’s book probably will not appeal to Africans. Africans seem not to like psychology; they tend not to analyze their behaviors and feel put off by any effort to give them insight into the etiology of their apparent childish behaviors. In that light, I suspect that many of them will not like this essay. Nevertheless, one must try to reach them, to provide them with insights as to why they do some of the most terrible, horrible things they do while laughing, such as sell each other into slavery, and steal moneys from their governments and squander them while their people suffer in preventable poverty. In the past, I had believed that, perhaps, Africans were at a lower level of evolution and wrote them off. But now, I am resolved to do whatever I could to transform them into moral beings, not just animals who ate and did not bother with others not eating.)

According to Schucman’s mythology, God is one. God extended himself into his Son. The Son extended himself to his own sons. This way, creation has no beginning and no end and is always on going.

There is no space and gap between God and his children. God and his children are unified; they are one. They share one spirit, one self, and one mind. The son of God is in God and God is in his son. Where God ends and his son begin is nowhere. (See St John’s Gospel, Chapter 14. Jesus responded to Phillips question: show us where God is, with, where you see the son, Jesus, you see God, for God and his son is one.)

The son of God resented being created by God and wished to go create him. He could not do so in reality, so he appears to have done so in a dream setting. Our world is said to be a dream. (This is solipsistic and idealistic philosophy ala George Berkeley and Arthur Schopenhauer, Pascal and Leibniz. And Vedanta Hinduism, as articulated by Shankara and Ramanuja.)

In the dream, the children of God invent space, time and matter. They invent self concepts and self images. Each sees himself as apart from other persons, and as housed in body. Each sees space and time between him and others. Each pursues his own self interests at the expense of others.

Helen Schucman’s myth is exactly that, a myth, not a fact. The fact is that none of us understands how we came to be in this world.

Science too presents a mythology of the origin of this world. The current accepted science story of creation is the Big bang fairy tale. According to this nursery tale, fifteen to twenty billion years ago, every thing was one thing, state of Presingularity, which is beyond the categories of contemporary science to understand it.

Somehow, that one thing shattered itself and in a nanosecond invented space, then time and finally particles (quarks, electrons, protons, neutrons etc). These subatomic particles somehow united to form atoms. Given changes in space and time, atoms made changes that led to the 104 and continuing elements on the chemical table.

Somehow, the various elements combined to form biological organisms, first unicellular organism, then multicellular organisms like trees, then animals and, ultimately, human beings. (What a quant fairy tale! This story is as unbelievable as the one found in Genesis, the Christian Bible.)

Physics is fascinating and every person must study it. I cannot see how an individual can be considered educated if he does not have university level understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology. Nevertheless, science does not answer all our questions.

Given the vacuum in our understanding, Meta science purports to provide some useful answers. Alas, metaphysics is mostly speculative and not verifiable. As Karl Popper reminds us, all scientific, all propositions, really, must be verifiable and discard able.

No one understands the origin of our being. Where ignorance prevails speculation exists. We have a need to know and tend to confabulate where our knowledge ends. Here then is my own conjecture…an abbreviation of what took me over 2000 pages to accomplish.

I believe that we separated from our creator. Our Creator has no name. To name something is to limit it. Our creator is limitless. But if it helps you, call him God.

I believe that our separation from God was probably motivated by our desire to go seem to create ourselves and to be special. As it were, each of us wants to play God and pretend that he created himself and created other people.

On earth, we all seek our self interests, often at the expense of others interests, but, sometimes, we cooperate with others and seek mutual interests. Nevertheless, when push comes to shove, human beings are self centered and selfish and will eat and have you starve. I proved this thesis for myself. During the Biafran war, as a very observant child, I saw people struggling for scarce food. In my own family, when mom obtained salt, a very rare commodity indeed, we literally fought for access to it. One would rather have that salt and others not. Thus, I learnt that I was self centered as others were. I am a sinner as others are.

I believe that on earth, we are all sinners. We are born in sin and live in sin. We need to be saved from our sins. It is here that Jesus Christ comes in. He transcended the separated self, the ego, the I, and returned to the spirit of union. As it were, he gave up his sense of self creation and accepted that God created him. He returned to obeying the will of God, and gave up his desire to do his own wishes. In effect, he transcended the world of separation, the egos world we live in. He returned to the original world of Union, which is love, which God created. He overcame the world and returned to heaven.

Jesus Christ is now the mediator between heaven and earth. He is our intercessor. If we call on him, he tells God what we ask of him and brings God’s response to us. He is a bridge between the earth and heaven. He knows the earth, for he was here, and knows heaven, because he is in it.

Jesus is one with the Holy Spirit and with God. When we separated from God, and came to this world, God entered the world, the temporal order, as the Holy Spirit, the spirit of love and union in us. The Holy Spirit asks us to love each other. The ego asks us to fend for only ourselves. Jesus, as part of God and the Holy Spirit, teaches us to love and forgive one another.

The Catholic Church has a concept called the Holy Trinity, Triune, and God in three persons: God the father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

The Church also has the idea that God can be seen in two manners, the transcendental God in heaven and the immanent God on earth. The Holy Spirit is the immanent God. ( If you love Catholic theology, as I do, see the writings of St Augustine, Origin, Tatulian, Montana, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Erasmus, Anselem, and such protestant theologians as Martin Luther, Calvin and so on. )

In our minds are three parts, God the father, God the Holy Spirit and our mind, God the Son’s mind. Each of us is the Son of God, a part of God. We separated from God and transformed our mind into the separated mind, aka ego mind. Where our real mind, son of God’s mind, Christ’s mind was, is now the ego mind, the spirit of rebellion, the desire to separate from God and from each other.

You can cast it this way: on earth, in space and time, each of us has a right mind, and a wrong mind. Our right mind is the mind of God, the Holy Spirit in us. Our wrong mind is the ego mind. To be righteous is to be led by the Holy Spirit and do what he asks us to do, love and forgive all people at all times; to be sinful is to behave from the ego mind, to look after ones selfish interests at the expense of others interests.

In eternity, our true mind is unified mind, the mind shared by God and his son. The One son of God is all of us.

I know that all these are confusing, so you can skip this part of the essay.

To be sinful is to look after only ones self. To be sinless (to approximate it, for no one on earth is completely sinless) is to love all people.

To love is to serve all people. To love is to see common interests and not just self interests. To love is to work for our social interests.

In Nigeria, indeed, in all of Africa, people mostly seek self inertest. In pursuit of their self interests, they sold their brothers and sisters into slavery. My grand parents sold African Americans and used the money they got from the white slave buyers to buy useless but ego serving goods. Our house is filled with those trinkets from yore: swords, guns, beads, empty bottles of expensive French wines (that they drank) etc. These primitive ancestors of mine, and yours, used to adorn their bodies with those useless trinkets and that made them feel important, powerful and worthwhile.

In bodies, we all feel that we are nothing. In ego states we feel like we are worthless. So we do things to make us seem worthy and powerful. Alas, we are never worthy and powerful apart from God. Our real worth lies in God.

The Son of God has worth only in his father, not apart from his father. By himself, the son of God can do nothing, but with the power of God in him he can do every thing.

I am worthless, no matter what I do on earth. I only have worth in God.

We sold our brothers and sisters to obtain useless trinkets to adorn our bodies with. In doing so, we are all sinners. In contemporary Nigeria, folks buy expensive lace to make elaborate attires for themselves and adorn their bodies with gold and imagine that such childishness give them existential worth. They are nothing. In fact, they seem hideous in those archaic robes they wear. (Those clothes are not adaptive to modern industrial life. Suit and other Western type clothing are adaptive to our times. And before you talk nonsense about how the clothes Nigerians wear is traditional and how we ought to be proud of them, let me immediately tell you that they are of Arab origin. What Arabs have discarded we call our own. Japan and China had their national clothes but to modernize had to discard them in favor of Western clothes. You can not work in modern industries with clothes that adapted to feudal eras.)

Our worth is only in God and has nothing to do with our external appearance.

In as much as I do what my ancestors did, seek self interests at the expense of social interests, I am a sinner.

We are saved when we follow the example of Jesus Christ, Mohammed and other messengers of God. We are redeemed from our sins when we give up identifying with the separated ego self and accept the unified Christ self, the son of God who is as God created him, unified with his father and with all his brothers and sisters, as our true self. We are delivered from the hell of living in ego state when we see our brothers and sisters pains as our own, and do something to help them, for in helping them we help ourselves, for they are part of us. God has only one Son, all of us as one spirit, one self and one joined mind. In Christ self we reconcile the ego, and its world with the Son of God as his father created him, earth and heaven.

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Some children of God chose to listen to the Holy Spirit and therefore teach the message of the Holy Spirit. These people are the messengers of God. If you like, they are the prophets of God. (Call them what you like; in reality, like their father, they are nameless for they are limitless.) For our present purpose, Jesus and Mohammed are messengers of God. Listen to any one of them and you will learn the gospel of God.

What is God’s message to us? He asks us to love one another. He teaches us that we must forgive one another, for to forgive is to love. The messengers of God teach love and forgiveness.

Love is union. The messengers of God teach the unity of mankind. We are all one, literally and figuratively.

In the temporal universe. When we love and forgive one another, and serve one another we are saved. More importantly, when we relinquish the delusion that we created ourselves, accept that God created us and worship God through his most Christ like son, Jesus Christ/Mohammed, we are born again.

God created us. We metaphorically died when we separated from him and from each other, left union, heaven, and came to earth and assumed ego, separated status.

We are born again when we return to the awareness that God created us and that we are all members of God’s one family.

When we love and forgive one another, serve one another and accept God as our creator and Jesus/Mohammed as our guide, we are saved. We are on our journey back to God and his unified state, heaven, our real home. We are, as it were, now at the gate of heaven.

Heaven’s gate is not heaven. Heaven is perfect union. Perfect union is spirit. You cannot be in body and be unified. At best, one uses ones body to love other people. On earth, all we can do is approximate heaven, but we cannot be in heaven. Heaven requires formlessness and total love.

(Heaven and hell are not places but states of mind. If you love all people, you are in metaphorical heaven; if you hate people, you are in metaphoric hell. However, there is heaven in the sense that it is existence outside of body, a formless, unified spiritual state. That state is beyond ego, rational explanation; it is ineffable. See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience and Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism.)

We can aim at sinless living, which, in real terms, means loving and forgiving and serving all people. This is our present call and duty.

We have done wrong to our African American brothers and sisters. We are sinners. We must repent of our sins by loving and serving African Americans. We must collectively and individually find ways to help our African American brothers and sisters.

West African governments must seek ways to show African Americans that they are sorry for what our ancestors did wrong, and make some financial reparation to them. The African Union must publicly apologize to African Americans.

At the individual level, each African must bow down before one African American and honestly beg for his forgiveness. You must do it, if you are to be forgiven your sins. If you ignore this advice, well, see how well things are working out for you, and for all Africans. We are the world’s laughing stock. To change our fortune, we must make changes in our lives. We must apologize to those we sinned against. We must stop denying and projecting our guilt out to others. True, white folks are also sinners, but that is not our issue. Our issue is to find our own salvation by correcting our past mistakes and leave white folks to find their own salvation, when they are ready.

Dr. Osuji can be reached at [email protected]
600 First Avenue, Suite 325, Seattle, Washington, USA 98104 ( Phone 206-464-9004)

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Africans should Pay Reparations to African Americans, Part 1

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. --- (Seatle, Washington) Recently, there is talk of White Americans making reparations to African Americans. This talk has exercised the minds of the “talking heads”.

Reparation is based on past injustice and guilt. The demand for whites to pay reparation to blacks is premised on the ground that white folks used black folks as slaves to develop America. Africans were brought to the Americas, north and south, and their labor was used for free by whites to transform a virgin territory into what America is today, a developed corner of the world. It would seem to make sense for those whose labor was appropriated against their will to be compensated.

The whole chatter about white folks making reparation to black folks got me thinking. It occurred to me that it takes two to tango. True, whites bought African slaves and abused them in every way imaginable, but the other part of the equation is, who sold those slaves? There must be sellers for there to be buyers.

I am an African. I would like to believe that my ancestors did not sell their kin into slavery. In pursuit of such denial, I could come up with stories of how white men kidnapped black people and brought them to American slavery. I could come up with all sorts of creative ways to convince myself that my ancestors did not participate in selling their own people. If I can convince myself that my ancestors did not willingly participate in selling their own people, I would not feel ashamed of them and would not feel guilty from their acts. Indeed, I would feel self righteous in blaming white folks for the injustice that they did to my brothers and sisters in America.

I understand the functions of the ego defense mechanisms: repression, suppression, denial, projection, displacement, dissociation, rationalization, sublimation, reaction formation, intellectualization, minimization, avoidance, fantasy, avoidance etc. Human beings employ the various ego defenses to protect their egos, to protect their sense of I, me.

The ego is the sense of me, the separated self. Each of us has a self concept that tells him that he is separate and apart from other persons and from the world. That self concept and its self image (the self in mental image form) feels a need to defend itself.

The separated self sees the entire world arrayed against it and feels powerless and vulnerable. It feels that if it does not defend itself that it could be snuffed out of existence by the exigencies of being. Therefore, the self is perpetually defending itself.

At the physical level, the self defends itself with fear. We all see things about to harm or even destroy us and feel fearful. Fear response is characterized by increased heart pumping, rapid breathing, rapid movements in the nervous system, release of sugar and that sugar carried to the muscles to enable them do what one has to do to protect ones self, run or fight the source of threat. In fear response, the individual feels a powerful urge to fight or flee from whatever he perceives is threatening his physical and or psychological integrity. Fight-flight response to fear is meant to protect the biological organism when its life is threatened and is undertaken involuntarily.

The fight response of fear is anger; anger is the energy that fights back physically or verbally. The flight response is what most people call fear response. Technically, both anger and fear are the same affect hence the well known fact that an angry person is invariably a fearful person. The same neuro-chemicals are involved in anger and fear…adrenalin, neuropiniphrine etc.

Whereas, when the individual feels physically threatened he is most likely to employ fear/anger to respond to it, when he is threatened psychologically he tends to employ the various ego defenses to defend his sense of self. If the ego defenses defended against only attacks on the psychological self, life would be very simple. Life is complex because people employ ego defenses for a whole variety of reasons. One of the things we use the ego defenses to do is defend against guilt feeling.

As Kernberg and Pieget pointed out, human beings are moral animals. When a human being does something that his conscience tells him is wrong, he tends to feel guilty.

Guilt feeling is a negative affect. If the individual felt guilty most of the time, his life would be paralyzed. Therefore, the individual’s ego finds a way to protect him from guilt feeling.

In depression, the individual is immobilized by guilt feeling. Depression is also characterized by feelings of lack of interests in the activities of daily living, such as no desire to eat, play, engage in sports, socialize with other people, go to work, fatigue and a general desire to crawl into bed and stay there all day long. In clinical levels of depression, major depression, there is desire for death; the depressed person is so fed up with his life and living that he could commit suicide.

Nobody likes the noxious affect of depression and its allied guilt feeling.

According to some Psychoanalysts, one way to avoid depression is to deny responsibility for whatever makes one feel guilty.

On the other hand, God and morality denying, materialistic neuroscience tells us that depression is not caused by guilt feeling but by imbalance in the neurotransmitter, serotonin. Contemporary psychiatry treats depression by giving the depressed person serotonin reuptake blockers, such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft; these do have symptom relief effect but do not heal depression.

The fact that despite its ballyhoo, neuroscience and accompanying psycho pharmacotherapy does not heal depression, or any other mental disorder, means that the psychoanalytic view that guilt may be involved in the etiology of depression is still a valid causal proposition in depression; it seems that psychoanalytic perspectives are at least heuristic in our efforts to understand the cause of mental disorders.

People employ the ego defense of denial to convince themselves that they did not do what makes them feel guilty. Additionally, people employ the ego defense of projection to help them get rid of guilt feeling. In projection, the individual projects what he sees in himself that he does not like to other people? He externalizes what he thinks is in him, that he would like to get rid of, to the outer environment. For example, one has desire for sex; one could deny it and project it to others. White men tended to want to have sex with black women. Sex between the races, until recently, was forbidden. White men, therefore, deny their desire for sexual relation with black women and project it to black men. Subsequently, they imagine that all black men exist to do is desire sex with white women. You get the point on how projection works? We shall later argue that Africans feel guilty for their ancestors selling African Americans into slavery, deny it, and project it out by blaming white folks for slavery.

People displace inappropriate affects to other people. For example, when one is made angry by ones boss, and one knows that if one fought back that one could loose ones job, one swallows ones anger and goes home to displace it to ones spouse; ones spouse displaces her own anger to the children and the children displace their anger to the dog. We displace anger to those we perceive as weaker than us, those who cannot fight back and harm us.

People dissociate from their feelings. For example, if a woman is sexually violated, she could dissociate from this traumatic experience by inventing a different self and identify with that new, but false self. By identifying with the different self, she does not feel the pain inflicted on her real self. In dissociative disorder (so-called multiple personality disorder), a sexually traumatized woman, particularly if it took place in childhood, denies her real self and invents different selves, alters, and identify with them. When stress mounts in her life, she flips out from her usual real self and takes on the personality of an alter ego. She talks and behaves as if she is the alter ego she invented for herself. That way she is able to cope with stress.

In reaction formation, a person fights what he sees in himself. For example, if a man likes sex with prostitutes, he may fight prostitution. Similarly, if a man likes pornography, he may champion the banning of pornography. Somehow, he manages to get himself into a position where he sees pornography, so as to judge what is pornographic. In so doing, he sees more smut than the average person and satisfies his prurient interests.

In sublimation, the individual converts what he sees in himself into useful social activities? For example, the artist who likes to see nude women converts that forbidden desire to painting nudes.

In fantasy, the individual uses his imagination to invent ideal worlds and seem to live in them, rather than in the real world. A poor African, for example, could visualize himself as very rich. Many Nigerians, upon coming to America, feel pauperized and engage in silly lying about how their parents are kings and what not. That is, they engage in the ego defense of fantasy. Some of them actually think that their American audience buys the lies that their parents are kings, presidents and governors. If they were such rich folks how come 99% of Africans live in abject poverty, the knowing American smiles at their childish lies?

In rationalization, the individual tries to justify what he sees in himself that he does not like. Instead of owing up his mistakes, he comes up with elaborate justifications for them. If a chap smokes, for example, instead of accepting the fact that he is addicted to smoking, he tells himself that he would quit smoking tomorrow or that smoking does not harm any one.

In intellectualization, the individual uses his intellect to talk about his issues, without actually trying to solve them. For example, if he feels inferior, and compensates with superiority feeling, that is, is neurotic, he talks about it, and may even teach psychology, without making real efforts to overcome his sense of inferiority. (University professors tend to over utilize intellectualization and talk about issues but do nothing about them. Hence professors seldom make good leaders, for they are talkers and not doers. It takes a different type of energy to do something, and not just talk about it in a seminar. The greatest mistake any one could make is making a college professor the leader of a country. Nothing would be accomplished. Only idealistic abstractions would be dwelt on. See Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points to change the world; Congress rightly rejected them as the dreams of an unrealistic, neurotic ex-college president.)

In avoidance, the individual avoids what makes him feel small. For example, the shy child feels that, as he is, that he is not good enough. He feels that if other people get close to him that they would see that he is not good enough and, perhaps, reject him. To prevent being socially rejected, he avoids people or relates to them in a very detached and circumscribed manner. In social isolation he maintains a false sense of importance. Clinically, such persons are said to have avoidant personalities. Avoidant personality disorder tends to run concurrently with dependent personality and obsessive compulsive personality disorder.

(The dependent person feels powerless and wants other people to help and rescue him; he tends to please other people with the hope that they would help him. The obsessive compulsive person tends to obsesses a lot, think as if ideas are intruded into his mind and he must think them through and feels powerless to stop thinking; sometimes he acts compulsively, such as check and recheck his door to make sure that it is locked, his stove, to make sure that it is turned off etc. There are other personality disorders, such as paranoid, schizotypal, schizoid, antisocial, histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, and passive aggressive. Briefly, the paranoid personality is suspicious and feels that other people are always demeaning and humiliating him. The schizoid person does not care much for social company. The schizotypal person is odd and eccentric and believes in what most people in his world do not, such as UFOs. The narcissistic person feels special and, as a result, expects other people to admire him; he tends to exploit other people, use them to get what he wants and then discards them. The antisocial person has no social conscience and does not feel guilty or remorseful upon transgressing other people’s rights. The histrionic personality is overly dramatic and seeks attention as the drama queen and, in general, has shallow affect for other people; think of the woman who marries men for the attention they shower on her but quickly leaves them for other men who give her more attention, loving none of them. The borderline person is dysfunctional in just about every aspect of her functioning and expects to be loved but lacks love for others; when she feels about to be abandoned, she may cut on her self and threaten suicide and hopes to instill guilt in people, and out of guilt they take care of her. The passive aggressive person is unassertive and permits other people to walk all over him and indirectly shows his anger by defeating their goals. Persons with personality disorders essentially live lies about who they are. They want to be who they are not and want other people to collude with them and validate their false, ideal selves as their real selves. Because they are prone to lying about their true identity, they also tend to steal rather easily. Both the narcissist and the paranoid personality have no conscience, are self centered and easily exploit other people and engage in other criminal behaviors. A paranoid member of this forum presents himself as all knowing and wants folks to affirm that false, ideal self of his; he is self centered and lacking in conscience and morality and is probably a thief, too.)

We shall not be able to review all the known ego defense mechanisms. I have reviewed those that are germane to this essay. If interested in these matters, the reader should see American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, forth edition.

When the individual feels guilty, denies and projects it out, he tends to develop paranoia. Every human being has paranoid traits but some have more of it than others. In paranoia, the individual feels like other people are out to harm and or kill him. He is filled with hostility towards others and projects it to other people and sees them as hostile towards him. He tends not to trust other people and is generally suspicious. He anticipates threat from other people. He is almost always guarded and cautious in relating to other people. He scans his world expecting danger and defends himself. Physiologically, he tends to be uptight; emotionally, he tends to be rigid and inflexible. He tends to be argumentative and wants to win all arguments and have others loose. He wants to be right and others wrong. Being right satisfies his desire to be perfect and important, whereas being seen as wrong makes him feel unimportant and weak. Psychoanalytically, the paranoid person feels weak, powerless, inadequate and restitutes with desire for their opposite. He wants to be seen as a very important and powerful person. If you did anything that made him feel inadequate, he feels angry at you. He forever fears being demeaned by other people.

Paranoia does not affect the intellect in a global manner. The individual can be paranoid and still be an outstanding medical doctor, scientist, president of his country and so on. In fact, many of our well known politicians were paranoid personalities, such as President Nixon, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, Sani Abacha etc.

The paranoid personality is a neurotic hence within the normalcy spectrum. Indeed, he seems suited for certain professions, those where being suspicious is an asset. Police Officers, Custom Officers, Immigration Officers, District Attorneys, Judges Etc are some of the professions where a bit of paranoia is required. However, there are disordered levels of paranoia, such as delusional disorder and schizophrenia, paranoid type.

In delusional disorder, the individual believes what is not true as true. He has systematic delusion in one area and not in all areas of his life. I had a Nigerian woman client who had the delusion that she was married to Jesus Christ, yet she was a nurse. (Analytically, the racist conditions of America made her lose self worth and she felt like she was worthless and compensated with psychotic self worth. In Christendom, Jesus is the most important man. If she is married to Jesus, it follows that she is the most important and beautiful woman on earth. Thus, her delusional beliefs serve a function for her: give her imaginary worth. She, therefore, finds it difficult to give up that delusion and her other religious ideas of reference. To give up seeing herself as the bride of Christ is to revisit her racism induced sense of worthlessness, and that self concept is intolerable to her ego. Racism sees all black women as not beautiful and the average black woman’s primary narcissism is attacked and she is angry. She is angry at black men for permitting white men to devalue her. There is tension between black men and women, for black men did not protect their women from white folks’ marginalization of them, hence, as it were, are not real men, if men are those who defend and protect their womenfolk. It is the rare black woman that respects black men. When African women come to America, their hitherto belief that they were beautiful hence sexually desirable to men is attacked by racism. In America, black women are not considered sexually desirable and are merely tolerated. Indeed, neurotic black men often prefer white women to black women, a slap on the faces of black women. The cumulative effect is that African women in America doubt their self worth and develop neurosis, that is, self hatred, with compensatory imaginary ideal self worth. In racist America, all black men are presumed to be inferior, unintelligent and to be nothing, really. They, therefore, feel inferior and restitute with imaginary self worth. See Kardiner and Oversay, The Mark of Oppression; Thomas Pittigrew, A Profile of the Negro American; Karon, The Negro Personality; Franklin Frazier, The Negro Middle Class, Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask; and Kenneth Clark’s studies showing that black children prefer white dolls to black ones, explaining why Michael Jackson’s real problem is that he is ashamed of his blackness and that he wants to be white, that Nigerians’ real problem is that they hate their African-ness and want to be white, hence they ignore developing their black country, and cart its money to the West, to develop the West, their ideal self and ideal home…though they are ashamed to own up this psychopathology in their souls. Every psychologist could easily appreciate Africans self hatred.)

My client has Erotomania. (I have had male black clients who claimed to be Jesus, God, or Zeus…grandiose type of delusion… compensatory self concepts and self images; masks over their racism induced sense of inferiority.)

There are other types of delusions, such as persecutory, grandiose, jealous and somatic. This is not a paper for clinicians; therefore, I will not describe these nosological categories.

In schizophrenia, paranoid type, the individual, in addition to being deluded, has hallucinations. Hallucination may occur in any one of the five senses…olfactory, tactile, visual, and auditory and so on.

In mania there are delusions, such as grandiosity. The manic may claim to be the most important man in his world, or the richest man around, such as tell people that he is Napoleon or Bill Gates; if a woman she may claim to be the most beautiful woman on earth, Cleopatra; is euphoric, and lacks good judgment.

Schizophrenia, delusional disorder and mania are the quintessential mental disorders. They are considered functional mental disorders, for despite the posturing of neuroscience no one has yet demonstrated their biological causation. However, there are instances where injuries and traumas to the brain cause these mental disorders. An accident could cause the individual to behave as if he is schizophrenic, manic or deluded, hence organic mental disorders and or organic personality disorders.

Generally speaking, Africans tend to exhibit more paranoia than depression. This has led some observers to conclude that it is because they tend to over utilize the ego defense mechanisms of denial and projection. As it were, when they see something in them that they do not like, they deny and project it out. When they do something wrong, feel guilty, and since guilt is a noxious affect, they deny and project it out (to whites). In denying and projecting guilt out, they are able to seem happy, hence Nigerians are said to be among the world’s happiest people.

(One wonders why they are happy. Their economy is in shambles, their leaders are mostly rogues. One would think that they ought to be sad. Apparently, they are employing the ego defenses of denial and projection to seem happy, to avoid awareness of their underlying unhappiness.)

Some psychoanalysts believe that those who tend to over employ the defenses of denial and projection tend to be less emotionally developed than those who employ them less. They argue that the depressed person is developmentally more mature than the paranoid person. (For such an argument see William Meissner, The Paranoid Process and also his Psychotherapy and the Paranoid Process. For a pure descriptive approach to paranoia, see David Swanson et al, The Paranoid. For a somewhat psychoanalytic view of paranoia, see David Shapiro, Autonomy and the Rigid Character, also see his Neurotic Styles. If you are really interested in the subject, see Sigmund Freud’s analysis of Judge Shreber’s autobiography. In it, Freud argued that the paranoid person has underlying homosexuality, denies and projects it out.)

Because Africans tend to over utilize the defenses of denial and projection, they are said to be underdeveloped Vis a Vis Caucasians. They are said to be more childlike than adult like.

It should also be noted that Africans tend to over utilize shame than guilt.

In shame, the overriding desire is to avoid social embarrassment. The individual does not avoid doing something because it is in itself wrong, but because he does not want to be shamed by society; he does not want to be rejected by other people. Social approval is his primary goal. On the other hand, in guilt, the individual has a well developed sense of right and wrong, and feels guilty upon doing wrong, irrespective of whether other people are around to disapprove of him or not.

In as much as guilt is predicated on moral principles, and shame on desire to avoid social rejection, those who feel guilty a lot are said to be developmentally adult, whereas those who only feel shame, but not guilt, are said to be more like children.

One should add that anthropologists have mitigated the earlier perception that Africans are childlike persons because they do not feel guilty but shame by reminding us that shame is a learned social variable, that traditional societies, in general, use shame to control people, whereas guilt is a function of acceptance of higher religions, such as Christianity.

Oriental societies, for example, use shame to control people. The Japanese is so afraid of loosing social face that he may commit suicide if he were to loose face in his society. If he is unemployed and is unable to support his family, since in his society, to be seen as a man, one must support ones family, the Japanese who is unable to support his family looses social face and my commit suicide. Suicide is not frowned on in Japanese society; it is often considered an honorable way out. A Japanese soldier would rather commit suicide, Hara Kari, than allow himself to be captured by enemy soldiers. To be captured is to loose face and that is worse than death. By the same token, Japanese soldiers do not think that prisoner of war soldiers deserve respect for, in their view; they ought to have preferred death to capture. They, therefore, tend to maltreat prisoners of war, even starve and work them to death, for they are seen as lesser breed of human beings.

My personal experience teaches me that those who are prone to depression tend to be more emotionally mature than paranoid persons who are seldom depressed. (Paranoia…Greek for being who one is not, taking on a different personality, a mask, persona, is defense against depression. If the paranoid person stopped pretending to be perfect and important he would grasp his existential lot, our meaningless, purposeless and worthless existence and become depressed.)

The depressed person takes responsibility for his actions and the paranoid person does not. The depressed person accepts ownership for doing what makes him feel guilty.

Experience shows that the individual is more likely to change his antisocial behavior, if he takes responsibility for it and feels guilty.

On the other hand, if the individual does not take personal responsibility for his actions and feel guilt, he is not likely to change his untoward social behavior.

I will cite a personal example. I came to America at a very young age. I saw the plight of African Americans. I saw how they were abused by white people. I saw how they were relegated to the worst parts of town, the ghetto. I saw how they were always the last hired and the first fired from their jobs. I saw them trying to do whatever they could to reduce their psychological pains, such as take recourse to alcohol and drugs. Then I began thinking about my ancestor’s contribution to these people’s plight. I did not tell myself lies. I know that our people sold these people into slavery. In as much as we sold them, it occurred to me that we are 50% responsible for the oppressions and abuses they received in America. I became depressed (dysthymic disorder). For years, I was ashamed of myself and my people. I could not respect any African around me, for he reminded me of a slave seller.

Africans tell white folks lies regarding how slaves were kidnapped and sold into slavery by white slave traders. I will tell you the truth. We Africans sold our brothers into slavery. We are responsible for selling our people. We do not need to say that other people made us do it, did it, and that we are innocent.

I am an Igbo, so let me tell you how we did it. (If you are into denial and projection, please do not read any further.)

A segment of the Igbos, the Aros, situated on the borderland between Efiks and Igbos, apparently, entered into treaty with the Efiks to supply them with Igbo slaves. The Efiks at Calaba were at the Atlantic Ocean coast and Portuguese slave traders had established slaving quarters there in the early 1500s. The Aro formed an unholy alliance with the Abam and Abriba…mercenary soldiers… and those roamed Alaigbo, kidnapping slaves and selling them to the Aro, who, in turn, sold them to the Efik, who, in turn, sold them to white men.

The Aro, Abam, Abriba etc were all over Igbo land instigating inter-village wars and losers taken as slaves and sold to the Efiks. These people roamed around and kidnapped little children and sold them into slavery. (See The Interesting Autobiography of Gustavo Olauda Aquiano, an Igbo boy’s account of how he was kidnapped at age twelve, in the 1700s, and sold into slavery.)

Worse, the Aro bastardized religion. They established so-called priest- judges in most Igbo villages. When villagers had problems to solve, they were encouraged to bring them to Aro priests-judges. The judge ruled and the loser was sent to prison, prison alright. The Aro handed him to the Abam, who took him to the Efik, who gave him to, first, the Portuguese, and later, to the Spanish, then the Dutch and later the English.

More important cases, such as disputes over land, required most adult members of the village to troop to Arochukwu, the Aro hometown. Here, the Aro organized their long juju. They dug a long tunnel and whoever was judged to loose a case was put into the tunnel and was said to have been taken by the gods. In actual fact, at the other end of the tunnel were Efik slavers who took him to Calaba and sold him to the Europeans.

When the British stopped slave trading in 1807 and used their war ships to patrol the Guinea coast to prevent slave traders from the Americas from buying slaves from West Africa, the Igbos redirected their slaving business from external to internal. They sold slaves to each other. It got to a point where when important persons died several slaves were buried alive with him. Early Christian missionaries left accounts of how they stopped Onitsha chiefs from being buried with live slaves. That was how degenerate our society became.

When the British decided to take Nigeria over, as a protectorate, they resolved to put a stop to Igbo internal slave trade, and, in 1902, Frederick Lugard and his Hausa solders (West African Frontier Army) stormed Aro long juju and scattered the little cowards who called themselves priests and sold their brothers into slavery. Subsequent to that attack, Lugard marched to Owerri, my home. He pacified them, that is, made them amenable for Christianization.

I should say, with primitive pride, that my great, great grand father, Njoku, led his people in the war to stop Lugard from conquering his people and when it became apparent that Maxim, gun, was superior to their flintlocks, guns, and that the British would conquer them, he, like Achebe’s Okonkwo, in Things fall Apart, took his own life. Njoku died rather than live under British rule. He was the last of the true Africans. The rest of us, through his son, Osuji, are bastards, for on the heels of Lugard’s army were Christian missionaries who built their church and school in our village in 1910, and subsequently our people became Christians and took to going to Western schools.

The point is that it is us, Africans that sold our brothers into slavery. I am an African. I take personal ownership for the sins of my fathers. Therefore, I felt like I personally sold African Americans into slavery. I felt guilty. I became existentially depressed, and for years hated all Africans (myself, that is,) for what we did.

While I was existentially depressed, I looked around me and all I saw were laughing Nigerians. I used to ask them: what are you so happy about? Are you not ashamed that our fathers sold these suffering African Americans? Don’t you feel like hiding your god dammed, hideous face in shame, for what our folks did to this people? They would ask me: what are you talking about? They were totally oblivious to the type of guilt that wracked my young mind. It was at that point that I decided to study psychology, even though my natural bent is biology and I had planned to study medicine. I wanted to understand why Africans sold their brothers and do not feel like they did something wrong, why they smiled when they ought to be crying with shame and guilt.

I believe that the psychoanalytic hypothesis that guilt is denied and projected out, so that a person who did something wrong sees himself as innocent, is a worthwhile hypothesis. I believe that Africans are human beings and, as such, do feel guilty for their wrong behaviors. If they did not feel guilty for their wrong behaviors, they would, indeed, be subhuman beings. I think that they employ denial and projection to seem to get rid of their guilt from selling their people. In so doing, they manage to retain some semblance of self acceptance and a sense of innocence. As it were, they feel innocent, when, in fact, they are guilty. Scratch their surface happiness and you find a clinically depressed people.

I believe that at some point, in the future, that Africans will feel their existential guilt and at that time begin to commit suicide at a higher rate. At present, they seldom commit suicide because, like the paranoid personality, they seldom feel guilty and depressed. Paranoids blame others for their problems hence do not feel devastated by guilt and seldom commit suicide.

It is a well known clinical fact that in psychotherapy the paranoid person must undergo depression if he is to heal. The paranoid person blames other people for all his problems. He points two fingers at other people, not seeing the three that point right back at him, reminding him that he is more responsible for his fate than other people are. In a General Systems environment, all people affect all people. No body is apart from other people. We are all connected to each other and to everything in the universe. Whatever other people do, whatever happens in any part of the universe affects us and we affect them. We are all reacting and adjusting to each other’s behaviors. There is no such thing as absolute independence. We are all interdependent. In this light, other people contribute to our problems, but we contribute more to them than others do.

The paranoid person always blames other people for his problems. In blaming others, and in seeing others as responsible for his failures in life, the paranoid manages to retain a semblance of positive self esteem. He retains imaginary sense of perfection by seeing himself as not responsible for his problems.

In psychotherapy, when the paranoid person is helped to take responsibility for his problems and for his wrong behaviors, he tends to feel guilty and depressed. At this point, he might be overwhelmed by guilt and might even entertain suicidal thoughts. (You must be an experienced therapist before you set out to decompensate the paranoid’s rigid ego compensations, for if you succeed, and do not help him recompensate with a healthier self concept, he might commit suicide. It is probably best if you left him to live in his defenses, even though those make him seem child like in his affect and behaviors, rather than risk suicide in your hands. To deconstruct the human ego and reconstruct it with healthier ego structures should be left to experienced psychotherapists.)

Nevertheless, the paranoid person must undergo depression if he is to heal. He must accept responsibility for his behaviors; take ownership for his mistakes, stop blaming other people for his problems, and feel some guilt. It is only when one feels remorseful for ones bad behaviors that one can change them. As long as one feels not responsible for ones bad behaviors one cannot change them.

With the exception of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, African leaders are essentially thieves. We do not need to quibble or equivocate on this subject.

Question: Do these antisocial African leaders feel guilty for redirecting their people’s money into their personal pockets? Of course not. Why not? Because like paranoid persons they over employ the ego defenses of denial and projection and blame other people for their behaviors. Thus Obasanjo, the president of Nigeria, robs his country clean and has the guts to call for white men to pay him reparation for enslaving Africans. Apparently, in his mind, whites are guilty and Africans are innocent. Suppose he was to accept responsibility for Africans behaviors, he would realize that, in as much as, he is the president of Nigeria, if corruption exists in his government, he is personally responsible for it. If he is responsible for it, he would feel guilty. Feeling remorseful, he would go about doing something to eradicate the ridiculous level of corruption that exists in Nigeria.

(Corruption has gotten to such a state in Nigeria that one would be a fool to trust Nigerians. A few years ago, I was attempting to hire a comptroller to manage my agency’s finances, an accountant, and interviewed several qualified applicants. One was a Nigerian. I agonized whether I should give a fox access to the chicken coop? Caution told me not to hire him and I did not hire him. I could not take risks with my agency’s money by hiring a remorseless Nigerian. He could cook the books and abscond with the agency’s money. Nigerians’ ingenuity lies in figuring out a way to cheat, not to help solve problems. Still, I felt bad for discriminating against him. To make up for it, I searched for Nigerians to hire in other capacities, where they were less likely to do the agency harm, and hired them. I must observe that there was a time that I was ashamed to see myself as a Nigerian. In fact, I hid my Nigerian identity. I did not want to be associated with 419 criminals. All Nigerians, in my eyes, seemed criminals, and I denied my Nigerian-ness. Since I spoke English like African Americans, I “passed” as one. Of course, I had to give that neurosis up. It is neurotic to deny who one is and pretend to be somebody else. A normal person accepts his real self, despite its imperfections. As the Igbos say, one does not deny ones mother just because she is a thief. One works to make her not a thief. And that was exactly what I undertook to do: seek ways to make Nigerians less prone to thievery.)

Psychoanalysis is not the only methodological approach to understanding human behavior. There are other approaches, such as social psychology and biological psychology. This means that there are those who would reject my methodological approach to knowledge; the tools of my analysis hence reject the conclusions based on them. That is to say that if your methodological approach to phenomena is different from mine, that you might dismiss this essay as hogwash. Please go ahead and do so. But I would like to see how you approach the problem I am grappling with. Write it down and do not just talk about it. It is time we Africans developed a body of literature on every subject.

In our time, most human behaviors are reduced to biological causation. Are you schizophrenic (hear voices, is deluded)? If so, you have too much of the neurotransmitter, dopamine, so, here, take the various neuroleoptic medications (such as zyprexa, resperdol, seraqual, millaril, Thorazine, Haldol, Prolixine etc). Are you manic? If so, you have too much of the neurotransmitter neuropiniphrine, so, here is Lithium, Depakote and Tegritol to reduce it. Are you depressed? If so, here are anti depressants to increase your low serotonin. Are you anxious? If so, you have low GABA, so, here, take the various anxioleptics (Valium, Librium, Xanax, and Ativan etc) to boost it up. Are you personality disordered? Here, take psychotropic medications. If you are a child, and have Oppositional Defiance Disorder, ODD, Conduct Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD, Reactive-Attachment Disorder, Asperser’s Disorder, Autism and childhood Anxiety Disorders. Here are the various psycho-stimulants (Ritalin etc) for ADHD. In America, some African children experience anxiety/stress…particularly separation anxiety; their parents should watch out lest white mental health professionals stick them up with unnecessary anti anxiety medications; those medications are addictive and have adverse side effects, effects similar to those of alcohol and heroine.

Briefly, in ODD, the child, usually between age 9 and 18, rebels against authority figures and does not want to listen to them. He is in constant power struggle with adults: his parents and does not want them to tell him or her what to do, and teachers and often drops out of school, so as not to be told what to do by them. In Conduct Disorder, the child is like the antisocial personality and has underdeveloped conscience and easily engages in criminal behaviors. He starts drinking and doing drugs at an early age. He is on his way to stealing and is likely going to wound up in Juvenile Detention Center; later as adult, in jail. He is part of the 2% of the population that recycles through jails…has high rate of recidivism. In ADHD, the child is unable to concentrate and has short attention span. In Asperser’s disorder, the child is unable to attach to other people and is emotionally detached from people. In Autism, the child is emotionally closed off to the world and lives in his own world. Again, this is not a paper for professionals and, as such, I will not go into details explaining these states. See Psychiatric nomenclature for explanation.

Make no mistake about them, psychopharmacotherapy tends to be useful, at least in symptoms reduction; however, they have no track record of permanently healing mental disorders.

Before the age of biological psychiatry we had behaviorism. Pavlov, Watson, Skinner, Bandura, Milgram, Zimbado, Seligman and others ran around telling folks that all behavior was learned. Every behavior is due to classical and operant conditioning. In graduate school, I learned behaviorism. Skinner boasted that his behavior technology could modify, change any behavior, hence that we did not have to take recourse to psychoanalysis. Of course, experience has shown that behaviorism is as vacuous as psychoanalysis. In time, neuroscience, our present god, will be shown to be an emperor without his clothes on. In mental health, we tend to have fads and one must patiently wait for the present fad of biological psychology to exhaust itself and fade away. This, too, must come to pass. Change is the only thing that is permanent in our existence on earth.

The salient point is that one is aware that there are those who vehemently disagree with psychoanalytic methodological approach to understanding human behavior. I respect those people. I myself reject some aspects of Freudian Psychology. Freud’s over emphasis on sex as etiological in Neurosis seems odious to me. I do not buy the notion that our behavior is motivated by sex and aggression (and Thanatos), and that in our heads are warring psyche forces: Id, Ego and Superego, and that the best we can do is struggle to balance them and become normal neurotics and never healthy.

Briefly, Sigmund Freud posited that in our heads are three forces, id, ego and superego. The id comprises of instincts of sex and aggression. These are involuntary. On the other hand, man lives in society. Society cannot permit the free exercise of instinctual desires or there would be chaos.

As Freud sees it, all of us desire to have sex with all of us. He believes that we are polymorphously sexually perverse. Even children are said to desire to have sex with parents of the opposite gender (Oedipal Complex). Society gives us a set of rules that forbid our doing what our natural instinct dispose us to do. Those rules of society are internalized by us as we are growing up. If we fail to behave as society approves for us to behave, it punishes us; it does so for its own good.

In general, the properly socialized adult is said to have introjected his society’s norms and uses them to check his id desires. The interiorized norms are called the superego. The superego checks the id.

But the id insists on having some outlet. As Freud sees it, we developed a third part to our psyche, the ego. The ego is sort of like a referee and balances the demands of the id and strictures of the superego. For example, the Christian ego insists that one have sex only in heterosexual marriage.

In the normal person, Freud believes that the instincts are repressed and driven into what he called the unconscious mind. The desire for sex and aggression are still there, but they are driven out of the conscious mind and hidden in the unconscious mind. From the unconscious mind, they still affect our behaviors. Hence we sometimes behave irrationally despite our best intentions.

Despite the individual’s Christian upbringing that represses extramarital sexuality, every once in a while, he engages in such sex, that is, sex without love attached to it, for the id does not attach love to sex. Only religion does so. By the same token, every once in a while, our aggressive instinct breaks out, and we act out, strike at other people or go to war, for we apparently have instinct for aggression.

Freud believes that the best we can do is redirect our aggression, such as channel it to competitive activities at school, sports and work, but not entirely eliminate it.

Where socialization fails, the individual develops neurosis. In neurosis, the individual’s superego may be too punitive (as in hysterical women, conversion reaction, who over internalized the social stricture against sex and swoon very easily), or there is failure in internalizing social norms. For example, the child may still yearn to have sex with the parent of the opposite sex.

Freud recommends that the neurotic come to him and his disciples for psychoanalysis, lay on his couch, and free associate, say whatever comes to his mind, so as to cathete, get what is in his unconscious to the conscious mind and have Freud analyze it. The individual engages in transference relationship with his analyst and the later helps him resolve his unresolved psyche conflicts. (See Freud, Pleasure Principle; also see Civilization and its Discontents.)

I tend to accept Adler’s views on the origin of neurosis. Adler sees us all as made to feel inferior by the exigencies of being and compensate with superiority, and that the best we can do is redirect our striving for power towards social interests. (See Alfred Adler’s The Neurotic Constitution. Also see Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth, and Carl Rogers, Client Centered Therapy.)

Let us just say that one is aware that many folks out there would disagree with ones causal analysis. That is fine. We must engage in intellectual discourse, for who knows where the truth lies? Knowledge improves through intellectual dialogue.

Dr. Osuji can be reached at [email protected]
600 First Avenue, Suite 325, Seattle, Washington, USA 98104 ( Phone 206-464-9004)

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