Who will watch the SA watchdogs, our leaders?

“Morality does not resonate well if your stomach is empty” — Thought Leader commentator, Ian Shaw on my blog, “On the idea of evil and Zuma”

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” famously says the Roman poet Juvenal, “who will guard the guards?” more commonly rendered as who will watch the watchers? South Africa and the world are going through a watershed and the correct leaders are urgently needed and in turn need to be responsibly watched. Subsequently, of late I have been blogging quite a bit on evil and its collocations: corruption, lack of remorse, irresponsibility among political leadership and getting away with wrongdoing.

I have realised, in this time of global crisis and South Africa’s new presidency, the importance of creating awareness of evil, and for us to become alert to the possibility that we are not always aware of it. Morals can slide unnoticeably, one’s guard drops, and then, perhaps, we are back to learning from history again as we collectively do a post-mortem of the same mistakes. That’s if we bother to do a post-mortem.

Siobhan, a Thought Leadership commentator wrote at length on the subject of evil in her response to my recent blog, “On the idea of evil and Zuma”. I thought it would be a great pity for such a good essay to be buried in the commentary box under a blog. Therefore, I am putting her entire article here in this blog, with my comments in italics.

Readers need to know that in my blog I used a simple definition of evil with which Siobhan and others disagreed, which is as follows: “Evil people cannot tell right from wrong or good from bad”. I still believe that, but admit now it is way too simplistic and I have since amplified the definition. Simple sayings risk being too generalising. I have tried, in my last blog, this definition: “Evil people cannot tell right from wrong, or, if they can, they do what is wrong anyway and often with enjoyment”. I am still not happy with this definition. I realised why when another commentator, Mark, responded to the “On the idea of evil” blog, saying that intent is crucial to the definition of evil: “Rod, what is lacking from your description of evil is ‘intent’. In modern day jurisprudence, intent is the basis for conviction, with some crimes being totally based on the intent to perpetrate an evil act. The intent to check if a knife is sharp is not the same as the intent to kill a child. A rational person would cut the apple first, rather than seek out a child to try it out on. If this went to court, the man in question would be interred in an insane asylum”. I invite readers to correct my definition, or improve it and perhaps include the concept of intention and conscience.

Some questions I would like readers to bear in mind as they read Siobhan’s piece: do evil people know they are evil? Or have they justified or denied it? Why are we often fascinated by evil? Is evil immanent in all of us? Are people like Mugabe evil, or just amoral? Over to Siobhan.

“I beg to differ with Rod’s definition of evil.

“I think genuine evil requires that one KNOW the difference between right and wrong yet still CHOOSE to do wrong. There is an important difference between the amoral person and the truly evil person. I don’t know if I agree with the distinction between an amoral and ‘the truly evil person’, unless you clarify/develop this further. Why do you have to use the intensifier ‘truly’? An amoral person does wrong things all the time and is therefore a candidate for evil. Perhaps we can talk about degrees of evil, like degrees of alcoholism. Apartheid was a great evil, but Nazi Germany inflicted a greater evil. Another commentator, The Idiot, commented on amorality and intent, responding, I assume to you, commentator Mark and myself: ‘Intention, and thus subjective existence, cannot account for the difference between amoral and immoral. But that subjective existence is rooted in the objective existence of civil society. A child does not choose his society — he is formed by it. I think we need to think very carefully and deeply about this fact as we try for a simple definition of evil. One cannot blame a child for the collective shortcomings of parents and other forces in society, since he cannot consciously shape his world at birth. It is not a requirement for evil to be intended. Eichmann was convinced he did his duty, he could not even think of the people whom he put on transport, as people. The inability to grasp that the paperwork he dealt with were actually real people, is evil in itself’ [end of The Idiot’s quote].

“In her analysis of Adolf Eichmann, Hanna Arendt coined the term ‘the banality of evil’. She was referring to a gradual process of desensitization to pain and suffering of others and a process of rationalisation by which the perpetrator (in this case the Nazi) JUSTIFIES the ‘evil’ act as acceptable and creates a ‘category’ of humans who by virtue of their existence ‘deserve’ to suffer and die.

“Unfortunately, there are too many concepts involved in the examination of the question of evil to go into here (definitions of ‘good’, ‘moral’, ‘evil’, plus mental states like awareness of the significance of a particular action, the ability to discern one’s own motives, etc.) Agreed, that is why I want an apothegm or a one-paragraph statement defining evil as a practical template to use to test human behaviour (woof! Ambitious!), particularly OUR politicians’ actions. I think my wish to find an aphorism that is just one or two sentences was too ambitious.

“Hanna, the Nazi, is a special case (She is the Nazi war criminal character in the movie The Reader which I discuss in my blog ‘On the idea of evil and Zuma’). She is illiterate. Her inability to read is related to her inability to think as an individual. Her identity is derived from her membership in the Nazi party, not from her individual nature. She is living at the basest level of human evolution, the satisfaction of ‘animal’ appetites: food, water, sleep, sex. She has no ‘interior’ life. She is ‘sleepwalking’ through life doing what she must to just keep living. She lacks the ability to identify with her victims because she has no conscience. Agreed. Superb insights! But she is fumbling her way towards being able to think. Even near the end of the movie and when she was much younger, she preferred romances to be read to her and loved humorous writing. She was prudish about DH Lawrence but loved buckets of sex. This made her character endearing. She is a biological automaton, as you suggest. But at the end of the movie she could have left prison and had a secure home and job but preferred to commit suicide in prison. She was able, I assume, to process the thought that she cannot cope with the outside world after twenty-odd years in prison. She may have been an ‘animal’ as you say, but Michael’s grief at her death is poignant, even the prison warden was moved by her death.

“In order to be genuinely evil, one must have had a conscience and extinguished it to accommodate one’s basest nature. All humans are capable of evil. Most choose not to commit evil acts most of the time. But there are also a percentage of humans who lack the capacity to develop a conscience. Such people are mentally ill and usually incurable.

“Those who lack the capacity to develop a conscience become psychopaths, those who lie, cheat, steal, kill without mercy because it gets them ‘high’ on their power to inflict suffering. They are pathologically indifferent to others but this indifference can be selective. Think of Hitler and his dog, Blondie.

“By ignoring the individual conscience and sublimating it to the WILL of the COLLECTIVE (any ‘ism’, take your pick), the individual avoids responsibility. Which is why you are soon going to be talking about the case of Zuma, whom we all need to be watching and assessing carefully, unlike the Zimbabweans as Mugabe and his goons destroyed that country while her citizens did next to nothing and the SA leadership did nothing. That is what makes Collectives so dangerous: no one takes responsibility for his or her actions but everything is justified by the ‘collective’. That is Totalitarianism. It appeals to those who — regardless of intellect or education — value Power over everything else. If they cannot wield individual power they become bullies as members of gangs, i.e., Collectives. Usually, however, one member of the dominant Collective builds a personal power base through cronyism and patronage. Such a person becomes a DICTATOR who rules through FEAR. He is paranoid himself and makes his followers paranoid so he can keep them under his control. He wields total power over them and is merciless to ‘defectors’.

“True evil requires Intention. I may sound like a pedantic teacher now but perhaps you should just say ‘evil’ instead of ‘true evil’. However, your habit of adding intensifiers to the noun evil suggests that you implicitly agree with levels of evil. One must contemplate doing evil and choose to do it. Usually, this is followed immediately by a form of psychological Denial. ‘What I do is for the good of…(insert any group, or patriotism, or religion, or any other ‘ism’). ‘The end justifies any means I use to achieve it.’

“The antithesis of the end justifying the means is the democratic rule of law and the individual conscience. Both set limits on what is acceptable in the pursuit of any personal or collective goal. Hence, the ‘Geneva Conventions’ in wartime, though honoured more in theory than in the breach.

“The central question is whether one can be ‘unconsciously’ evil. Agreed. Our unconscious behaviour at both the individual and collective level can be our own worst enemy, our worst nightmare. Hence I want to promote awareness of evil and unresolved unconscious behaviour, especially with regard to our public servants. Can anyone truly be completely ignorant of his/her motives and intentions? Is it possible to inflict pain and suffering on others–or to ignore their plight — without knowing at some level of the psyche that what we are doing is ‘evil’? Can you answer these questions please, or try to? Or are you scared to? Don’t you like what you might see in the collective mirror?

“Psychologists tell us that those who are ‘unconsciously’evil are mentally/emotionally ill and not fully responsible for their actions. Perhaps.

“But if indifference is cultivated, if one engages in deliberate Denialism, that is a different matter. Intention and motive are central to human behaviour. If one believes that one is ‘outside’ of or ‘above’ the law by virtue of having once been a ‘victim’ oneself, anything can be justified.

“In SA, we see this pattern daily. Any ‘struggle hero’ is exempt from the law in the eyes of the ‘Collective’.

“Which brings us to Mr. Zuma. As a ‘struggle hero’ is he ‘entitled’ to use his position of influence — and now power — to enrich himself? Is he going to just enrich himself or serve the people or a bit of both? Time will tell. Hence I believe these blogs on evil are most pertinent.

“As a ‘struggle hero’ is he ‘entitled’ to break a few laws with impunity? Definitely not. The list of those who do break a few laws in SA is getting a bit long.

“Are all ‘struggle heroes’ exempt from the law?

“If the answer is ‘yes’, where do we draw the line? Hence my desire to create a template and increase public awareness of unconscious behaviour and the deepening acceptance of corruption and irresponsibility as a norm Perhaps ‘resignation to’ instead of ‘acceptance of’.

“How far may a ‘struggle hero’ go in enriching himself and his cronies? As far as Mugabe has gone? As far as Sese Seki went? As far as Jerry Taylor went? As far as Idi Amin went?

“Corruption goes way beyond money. The ‘corrupted’ conscience justifies anything by rationalising it as ‘compensation’ for my earlier ‘sacrifices’, real or imagined…

“Illiteracy and ignorance are not excuses for evil. Huge numbers of people in all cultures and historical eras were illiterate and ignorant but lived moral lives.

“The ‘peasant mind’ is not incapable of recognising evil acts, it just doesn’t bother to think about it. The interior doors of the mind are closed to matters of morality, aesthetics, value and meaning but those doors can be opened (unless there is such limited intellect that ‘concepts’ like right and wrong, tyranny and democracy, cannot be understood at any level).

“Does Mr. Zuma understand the difference between moral/ethical conduct and corrupt conduct? Does he understand the difference between his personal desires and the public good? Does he take personal responsibility for his actions or does he hide behind the collective?

“History will be the judge”. Yet again, of one thing we can be certain as South Africa goes through this watershed, history will be the judge.