'You're the reason our kids are so ugly'

By Festus L. Brotherson, Jr.
Guyana Chronicle
October 3, 1999


PART I of II `On trust among humans in societal and personal relationships (culled from a lecture series on human nature, the state and society).

The human is a social animal. The species cannot survive except in a structured community with other humans.

One analyst found that we are all prompted to action by the pulls of twin instincts, viz., survival and pre-eminence (or quest for power).

Another broke both down into needs. The survival needs included the food, safety and social, while the pre-eminence ones were self-esteem, loftier success and actualisation.

Although these needs are common to all humans, they do not routinely aid the development of more harmonious ties between individuals. Precisely because individuals do need each other, their relations quickly become very complicated.

Many examples are common lovers' quarrels. Women sometimes swear "all men are dogs," and offended men retort "it takes a bitch to say that." Ugh! This difficulty with harmonious relations occurs too because, in building romantic and friendship ties, each man, woman brings to the emerging relationship already held biases, pre-dispositions, beliefs, and morals.

Each person, in meeting the other, brings to that meeting different orientations, different conceptions of reality, different values and priorities and, most importantly, different levels of accomplishments on where he or she stands on the scale of lower and higher level needs of survival and pre-eminence. Each person acts out of self-interest to get what he or she wants. Often, what one wants is not what the other wants. Even subtle gradations make big differences. Conflicts develop as do accusations of selfishness and uncaring behaviour. At times, these are captured in song humorously and insultingly - as in the one called, `You're the reason our kids are so ugly!"

This same problem of conflict among two (or more) individuals is magnified at the state and societal levels. According to Plato, "The state (in a major way) is the individual writ large." Many share this view which is that the state's collectivity of multitudes of individual human needs must have priority over individual human ones. And it is on the state and wider societal levels that human conflicts are much more complex and intense.

Questions thus arise: how can we assure harmonious relationships in the personal ties of lovers since they need each other? How can we ensure relations of harmony among individuals in the larger state and society (most of whom we don't know at all), in that most important of all interests - a smoothly functioning national environment?

Are the answers the same to both questions?

In fact, we can use aspects of the solution for strongly positive personal relationships to help answer questions at the broader national level. In personal relations between lovers, not only is the passage of time and the build up of experiences necessary for better ties between two people who may need each other and actually be in love, but so also are these same factors necessary at the state level for better relations of tolerance among citizens.

In both situations, the pivotal requirement is TRUST. Trust is a bonding of mutual dependency based on the notion that one party will not intentionally do anything to betray or harm the other. It is a bonding that establishes closeness and a letting down of one's guard from the dominance of survival and pre-eminence instincts about one's own selfish needs to the exclusion of the partner involved. In other words, trust means becoming selfless and not just being self-interested all the time. This is very hard for people to do even though they might need each other because we tend to be so thoroughly dominated by the twin pulls of survival and pre-eminence instincts and needs.

Does this mean that the unpleasant aspects of our selfish nature cannot be tamed and kept in check towards building and keeping mutually satisfying relationships by experience, passage of time and trust? Of course not! However, repairs to broken relations do require extraordinary patience, commitment and constant endeavour. In the end, the best of these damaged relations do survive. That usually means their foundations were strong and genuine at the beginning.

In the wider society, trust among individual citizens who mostly do not know one another is also a very important ingredient among the many that contribute to the maintenance of harmony and stability in the state or society. Plato, for example, agrees on trust but goes further to advocate something called "temperance" or contentment found through "functional specificity" in search of true harmony in the souls of individuals, their personal relationships and community and state ties.

Functional specificity requires that each citizen in the state do only one job according to bent, aptitude and ability. And performance must be marked by excellence whether this applies to shoemaking, baking or political leadership.

Strange? Not necessarily - as we shall see. For now, let us think about the following: human society as we know it would collapse without TRUST - especially trusting those whom we do not know! In other words, just as how trust is important in lovers' relations, so too is it even more necessary among individuals in the state.

How is Guyana doing on both fronts?

Of Shrinks, Ombudsmen and Trust

(Part II of II On trust among humans in societal and personal relationships)

Part I recap:

1. People NEED personal trusting relationships, but that need complicates the result between friends, lovers and spouses;

2. Trusting relationships are NEEDED in the state and society among people who do not even know one another in order to build a peaceable environment and good government;

3. Are problems and solutions similar?

The human is a social being incapable of doing everything for himself or herself. This creates a need for trust in personal, friendly and more loving relationships. So too does this feature of human nature make it necessary that ordinary citizens, who do not even know one another, trust each other - often with their lives - in state and societal relationships.

There is no alternative. It is the nature of the beast.

But trusting anyone is a major step almost contrary to human nature which is dominated by self-serving survival and pre-eminence (or quest-for-power) instincts. This further complicates building trust.

However, aspects of the solution for harmonious personal relations can help advance better civil ties among citizens.

First, though, let us demonstrate how the need for wider trust is compelling and how failure can be even more catastrophic at the state level. As individuals and as citizens, we need facilities for public health (e.g., garbage, sewage disposal and water supply systems), electricity supply, telephone and banking services, roads, repair works to manufactured goods such as automobiles. Since we cannot provide them for ourselves and since everybody else needs them as well, we have to trust others in the state and society to provide them for us competently, efficiently, effectively and above all honestly.

We have to TRUST.

It is here that government is responsible for making sure that multiple collective human needs take precedence over the narrower ones of individuals.

Imagine the chaos that would occur if whenever most of us depressed a light switch, some short circuit or damage occurred. Or, whenever we drank tap water widespread poisoning occurred. And whenever we started our cars, they failed to work; or picked up the telephone and there was no dial tone. Okay, okay, forget the obvious jokes about current affairs in Guyana where these occurrences are, er, not infrequent (smile)! The point demonstrated is that lack of trust develops. This produces not only ineffective government but also, ultimately, rampant distrust.

This can be further deepened by persistent poverty, inadequate salaries and other marginal recompense that have been shown universally to trigger vanishing skills and declining motivational levels to perform excellently by those responsible - by those whom we are supposed to trust! They explain also people continuing to vote with their feet for foreign lands because they believe that their basic needs for living like decent human being cannot be met in the their state and society. This is compounded when such needs are also unmet in personal relationships.

As in personal relationships, the destruction of trust in state and society wreaks havoc. The use of organised and random force is increased for compliance. Social ostracism deepens. Emotional instabilities and other psychoses become commonplace just as in personal relationships. In the latter, it is unusual for trust to be won back easily.

In state and society, it is even rarer - especially in the Third World. Governments fall to military coups and other means because the breakdown of trust and the rise of distrust manifest themselves in ineffective governance and creates gridlock-type dysfunctioning and other pathologies that kill efficacy; the latter being that critical sense among people that their opinions matter in statecraft.

In more stable democracies, efforts are routinely made to ensure that leaders make the right decisions and not violate people's trust by acting out of narrow self-interest for personal ambitions. These include encouraging people's input into the decision and policymaking state apparatuses. Also, accountability channels are usually opened and maintained. In the U.S.A., the General Accounting Office (GAO) and Congressional Oversight Committees are examples. In Guyana, we have an Auditor-General.

In relations between distrustful lovers and in wider broken state and societal relations among citizens, the solution to the problem of violated trust is a common one. So too is the preventive measure to ensure that trust is never damaged beyond repair. It is communication and compromise. Amplified, lovers have to communicate and be willing to compromise in order to make their relationships work. Similarly, there must be in the wider society avenues that facilitate communication among the people and the ability for them to make compromises over differences. At this wider level, these avenues include an unfettered but responsible press, opinion polls, Ombudsmen, and regular free and fair elections to continuously legitimise the process.

At the level of personal relations, they include non-violent airing of grievances (`quarrels'), seeing `shrinks' or social workers and, importantly, the willingness to forgive transgressions. Here, judgments have to be made about sincerity. It is the same at the state level. The airing of grievances is important.

Shrinks, Ombudsmen and trust are related in a peaceful society. In Guyana's case, a Truth Commission might also be useful.


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Guyana: Land of Six Peoples