The Criminal as paymaster of our judges
For the criminal pays a judge who is fully committed to a system of rearing youngsters whose chief content is criminality.
The recent self-ingratiation by our judges reminds me of statements by two sardonic philosophers. The one marvels that the law forbids us to do only what civilisation trains us to do. The other quips that the criminal is the paymaster of the chief justice.
For, without the robber, nobody would need the whole paraphernalia of what we know grandiloquently as the judiciary. The question is stark: Do you know any human institution ever since the dawn of civilisation more stupid than the law?
Why try to erect a roadblock against precisely what our entire upbringing teaches us to aspire to?
For the criminal pays a judge who is fully committed to a system of rearing youngsters whose chief content is criminality. Our judges merely prove it by dredging an already unfathomable gap between affluence and poverty, thus only intensifying crime.
For, despite the moral fulminations from the pulpit, all our "growing-up" platforms - including the classroom, the media, the political dais and chez les parents - have one overriding message for us.
"Success" is the whole purpose of education. Even the pulpiteers - those who make the greatest noise about goodness, altruism and moral strength - affirm, in the same breath, that education is the path to an individual's career success.
Yes, success is always an individualist concept. Each individual must reap into his own basket. Each must pass an exam at a certain level to be slotted into a career pigeonhole. A career, that is, that life process in which an individual makes "a living". "Success" is the amount of wealth that one accumulates in one's career.
Thus individualised as to goal, education directly unleashes individuals to grab wealth with absolute absence of qualm. In our capital, for instance, we chase after one another with about as much loving kindness as between cheetahs and gazelles in the Nairobi National Park.
Education is directly responsible for the fact that all of us think only thoughts linked to how to take money out of one another: the corporate and ministerial schemer as much as the police roue; the "donor community" as much as the street conman; the transnational televangelist as much as the commuter vehicle preacher; the owners of Boeing as much as the most mannerless matatu operator.
Education thus trains us for mental conformity at the lowest moral level. The nip and tuck with which we run lucre makes ours a hideous uniformity of minds, sanctified by the official legitimacy of tenure, appropriation and exchange: a recipe for jealousy, covetousness, hardheartednes, callousness, rapacity, graft -- every form of cruelty and inhumanity.
It is truly parlous. For -- as we know from David Yallop's In God's Name – this usuriousness is now the raison d'efre even of "mine fat.her's house" in which (the Vicar of Christ nevertheless reminds us) the Christ once violently confronted money changers.
The final outcome of the Enlightenment -- with all its promises of tolerance, liberty, equality, fraternity, civility and compassion -- is a "globalisation" and "aid" system which condemns millions of Third World human beings to slow death every year.
The most depraved Robber Barons and their Billy Grahams are the ones who deafen our ears the most with cries of "democracy" and "the free world" even as they rape the Middle East to gorge themselves with other people's oil. La noblesse oblige.
Thus the kernel of the liberal constitution -- with it courts of law -- is not to annihilate but only to manage this depravity, deprivation and cut-throat competition and the violence, crime and anarchy which are its unavoidable by-products.
Law is the juridical expression of the violence and criminality endemic in our econo-intellectual basis of production and ourm ethico-educational superstructure of thought. We know it because, as we seek to mystify the Bench by ingratiating members with fat perks -- claiming that we are only lubricating the wheels of "justice" -- crime soars precisely because we only succeed in widening the income gap between the chief Justice and the hawker.
Fifth Columnist Files is a series that republishes articles from veteran journalist Philip Ochieng’s Sunday Nation column
