BC's February 2012 edition

Let us quote Freud even though it is not fashionable to do so these days. He says, and I paraphrase here, that man uses his unconscious aspect of the mind (quite a powerful tool according to him) to repress whatever he does not like. Meaning, we unconsciously suppress our undesirable desires, truths we don't like, facts we disagree with, and even people we like to hate but dare not.

Good intentions, to Freud, meant nothing in the scheme of things. I agree with this since the road to hell is paved with nothing more than just that: good intentions. What humans feel and experience matters, whether acted upon or not, since it invariably affects their psychological and mental health.

Basically, if we take Freud seriously, he is saying that if we do not find someone to repress us, we do it to ourselves. Herein lays the rub as far as I am concerned. With the Arab Spring completing its first year (while events have not slacked nor come to full fruition), and other nations taking up the cue and demonstrating against whatever they do not like (Occupy Wall Street and other movements), might one ask the question: Is humanity finally sick of repression, be it psychological or political?

Freud would answer no to that question, simply because he believes the mechanism is in our genes and cannot be altered. We suppress our emotions, work on suppressing others and subjugating them to our own power, and keep the pressure up internally and externally to achieve nothing more than the satisfaction of a gene found in us by a quirk of nature. This is a dangerous conclusion since it leads to personal and public tyranny.

We know a lot about tyranny in this part of the world. We almost breathe it daily. We take it to heights never reached by human endeavor. While a politician in the West would impeach another for adultery while he is doing exactly the same thing at the same time, we have people here hording billions (more than the budgets of certain small countries) when they are well over eighty and still ask for more of the people. The first is reprehensible on every count, the latter is mind-boggling. How on earth are you going to spend this money and when? 

What is worse, you see them publically praying and supplicating themselves to the Almighty without a hint of guilt or even irony. When I see such things I simply wonder how they manage to sleep at night. Do they go the way Michael Jackson did with the help of dangerous medication? Well, if that is the case, the unfortunate entertainer (through his earned money which equals some of theirs) did not manage it right. He should have taken advice from our people around here especially when he had spent some time in this area running away from one thing or another.

Freud might give some solace to academically inclined minds with his analysis, but the facts we deal with here far outreach his genius. When human dignity is trampled, Justice is corrupt and no longer a refuge, economic parity is a slogan never put to practice, and finally our unquenchable intention of harming others with or without reason, the outcome of our lot is pretty much determined.

From day to day we live on verbal sedatives that come in the guise of promises of 'reform, 'inshalla,' 'give me another chance and I'll make it right,' 'one needs more than thirty years to implement change,' and so on. You wake up the next day, next week, next year, next decade, and you find that you are still where you are, if not a bit regressed in progress.

Finally, you are left with the earnest hope that while sauntering blithely the face of this earth, the earth has not changed texture when you go 'sleep with your fathers'.