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The Call to Sacrifice - Part 2: Understanding its Psychology By Chanda Chisala The Post newspaper recently wrote an editorial in which they enthusiastically supported president Mwanawasa for his recent disclosure that he would once again ask the people of Zambia to “sacrifice” even after the nation reaches the HIPC completion point with the IMF for debt reduction.The fact that this particular decision impressed the Post should be cause for concern to any Zambian who actually understands the psychology of the Post newspaper’s openly declared and very dangerously peddled Marxist philosophy. Any person who understands even slightly what it means to be civilised should know that in a civilised state, the government should never ask its people to sacrifice anything, and especially not their rightful reward for their work. Such was the language of nations that pursued the evil philosophies of domineering state paternalism in the past. The psychological goal of such a philosophy is always to gain control over private lives and to exercise power over their individual consciousnesses for the sake of a “higher purpose” – something supposedly “higher” than their own individual lives. This is the epitome of evil and the ultimate consummation of an immoral system. I have no doubt in my mind that Mwanawasa does not consciously have such an ulterior aim himself, but he should know the inherent meaning and motivation of the philosophy underlying his policy and why it should be applauded by any self-confessed Marxist. A civilised nation always respects the privacy of individuals and their right to own their own lives, including their property and the fruit of all their labour. As a consequence, all civilised societies respect the force of contracts signed between individuals or between government and individuals. Contracts, like money itself, are (legally) real property and to disregard contracts is to disregard private property – it is to disregard the life of the individual, in short. And every aspect of a contract is binding, including the time stated for its fulfilment. Thus if a government has signed contracts to “reward” someone with his pension benefits at a certain, specified time, it is extremely evil, deceitful and immoral for the government to ask him to sacrifice his benefits once the time comes for him to take his money. The government itself should be the one to “sacrifice” by getting rid of some of its property in order to fulfil such a contract. This is a common sense rule: when one person owes another person money, it is right for the borrower to be the one to “sacrifice” some of his other property when the time comes for payment, and wrong for him to demand the lender (or the one owed money) to sacrifice his right to be paid. In a civilised society, the tendency is always towards respect for contracts and the role of government is simply to act as the legal agency that enforces and protects such contracts, not to be the one to break them. This argument even covers those workers who have not necessarily signed a contract with the government yet but who were expecting to sign one for salary increments – they were verbally assured and there was even some sort of MOU towards the same. Besides, the fact is that government has already agreed that these people get unrealistically low wages for their work, and the fact that they are even asking them to “sacrifice” means the government admits that their wages are indeed unfairly and extremely low, even in our poor economy. Government knows these people cannot survive on such low amounts of money (in exchange for their work), which is why the government should choose the option of sacrificing itself instead. There is nothing in their agreement with the IMF that forbids them from sacrificing themselves through “self-liquidation”, and yet they are only seeing the option of demanding sacrifice from others as the only viable one.The historical root (politically) of this habitual call to sacrifice is Marxist philosophy. In Marxism, an individual (and his needs) is always considered to be not as important as the society or as the nation he belongs to. The individual exists for the sake of the state and he should be willing to sacrifice his own needs and if necessary his own life for the sake of the state or society. This is obviously an insidiously evil philosophy because it subjects the life of man to an ethereal concept (society) that is not even necessarily existent, metaphysically. It is the same kind of philosophy that makes fundamentalist leaders of certain religions to ask individuals to sacrifice their lives for the sake of “the greater good” while they themselves continue hiding in mountains or small holes because they cannot bear the same pain of sacrifice. This ultimately comes from the ancient philosophy of collectivism – the exaltation of society or some other collectively held ideal over a person’s own individual life. The contra philosophy is individualism, which gives a man the ultimate and sovereign right to his own life, his own property, his own happiness, his dreams – and the government exists only to protect those rights. Nations that have chosen the individualist way have always been the most successful, prosperous and happy whereas those that have pursued the collectivist way have only established evil regimes that seek to thwart the human spirit through direct or indirect suppression. Collectivist societies always hate free, individualistic societies because they fear that their people might start getting attracted to their happiness and successes and start demanding freedom to control their own lives as well. The Post newspaper openly and proudly supports the state of Cuba, for example, a nation in which people are forced to sacrifice their personal desires, goals and wishes for the sake of the state (the higher good, or “the revolution” as Fidel Castro calls it!). Like Castro, the Post also labels the opposite philosophy of allowing individuals to seek their own desires freely as “consumerism” and condemns the United States as the most “consumerist” society in the world. And yet they evade the fact that this “consumerist” society is also the most prosperous nation in the world, not only because human spirits that are free to pursue their desires are more self-confident, but also because such a culture always leads to opportunities for limitless innovations and inventions in the society (to satisfy that same endless ‘consumerism’). This is a fact that history itself has even gotten tired of demonstrating, but blind intellectuals remain fixated on their pet philosophies, undeterred by reality itself. When asked why such individualistic societies prosper so much, they are trained to thoughtlessly respond with, “they only prosper by oppressing other people”. They have to say this even though it doesn’t make sense because if they say anything else it will confirm the merits of individualism. Somehow, they expect a sane human being to accept that all the software innovations at Microsoft, for instance, came up because of “oppressing other people”. Google was invented because of “racist imperialism” and “neo-colonialism” of Africa’s resources! In conclusion, I will repeat my suggestion for economic resuscitation to the republican president: liquidate (or “sacrifice”) the government. Cut the number of ministries to a very, very small number (making sure you at least keep a “Ministry of National Security” and perhaps a general administration ministry with different departments for various licensing functions, etc). Then sell off the defunct ministry buildings in every town, sell off the government houses, sell off the cars, the computers, furniture and so on. Add on the money saved from the budgeted daily running costs and you have a whole lot of money – then pay off all these newly laid-off workers, the old pensioners and the business suppliers you owe the money: in short, honour your contracts to the individual. Exalt the individual. This will create an environment that is ripe for investment (it doesn’t work to just beg people to invest in a nation without fulfilling the logical requirements for attracting investment), a recovery of employment levels, and still more revenues for government. The government’s expenditures will be radically reduced, and this will have the other logical effects of increased capital availability, lower interest rates and so on. You will even be more able to reduce taxes to make production costs even lower. Even if you do not reduce taxes immediately, these measures alone will definitely change the economy for the better because they will put money back in the hands of the people, where it rightly belongs, and they will be able to save more, etc. (Mister Michael Sata’s plan, apparently, is just to reduce the taxes without telling us exactly how his great deficit will be contained since he has no revealed plans of how he will also cut down on expenditure – he obviously doesn’t know what he’s taking about since his plan lacks a cohesive logical context). The point is that the easy route of asking people to sacrifice is not sustainable and it is ultimately disastrous; it is surprising that the IMF has not realised or stated this. You cannot treat people like slaves of the state or any other higher purpose and expect to prosper. The only way they can “contribute” to the development of the state is if they are immediately given what rightly belongs to them in the process, not by sacrificing their lives for the state. The struggle for political independence might have been won by people sacrificing their lives, but the struggle for economic freedom has to be won differently. The government has to respect property rights, and individual lives, and it has to stop all intrusions into their lives, their business environment (privatise), their contracts and their personal desires (consumerist or not). The only real legitimate job of government is to protect individuals in a free society (national security) so that they can pursue their dreams and ambitions without worrying about those with a Marxist bent who might want to control their spirits or those without morals who might want to destroy them or steal their property – the enemies of freedom and productivity. The richest nations of the world are those that have come closest to this ideal, even if no nation has yet perfected it. Indeed there are always elements within every single nation of the world (including the most successful) who still push for the domineering collectivist agenda due to their prurient desire to impose their mental experiments and beliefs on everyone – or even simply due to their sincere ignorance. A government that gathers enough courage and intellectual fortitude to ignore such normally militant but irrational voices is always the one that succeeds the most in creating in its people a sense of self-confidence, pride and individual freedom. Without this happy and confident state of consciousness - this exciting sense of possibility - the people can have no mental capacity to create real wealth, even if the nation qualifies for debt reduction under the IMF programmes. It is better for a nation to wilfully remain in debt than to destroy its own spirit of individual freedom and power. Read also Sacrifice Part 1 | To comment on this article, go to ARTICLES COMMENTS FORUM. Back to Zambia Online |