Opinion: Despite facing headwinds in the courts, the eagle must fly

Zeno of Citium of ancient Greece (334 – 262 BC) taught that virtue was the highest good. Virtue was based on knowledge. And knowledge meant knowing that you did not know.

The wisest man, accordingly, knew that he knew absolutely nothing. Those who knew that they knew nothing lived in harmony with divine reason, which was also known as Fate.

Fate governed nature and the steps and missteps of individuals and whole societies alike. Put differently, Fate is divine Reason. Like the wind, it blows where it will, when it wills. It governs pain and pleasure, both for those who deserve and those who don’t.

Such are my reflections on this day when the Political Parties Tribunal invalidated my office as Secretary General of a political party. They said that I was appointed to a non-existent vacancy.

The holder, they said, had not resigned. He was only “coerced to resign” in exchange for being nominated to the National Assembly.

The logic beats me. Yet, have I not distinguished myself for “preaching” in these columns the need to respect the law? The good old Socrates (470 – 399 BC) famously said that even bad laws must be obeyed.

Decisions of courts and tribunals must be obeyed, no matter how defective we consider them to be. In Socratic thought, the order is larger than the person giving it. While you do not agree with the order, you still take it home.

The essence of this Socratic attitude is the fact that the person granting the order possibly knows something that we don’t know. Hence, we must subordinate our feelings to reason.

Reason dictates that if we don’t agree with the order, we could seek to overturn it by securing a contrary order from a superior forum, hence the notion and practice of appeals.

Conversely, you are tempted to accept and move on. For, the court process leaves you feeling like a fraudster. When they say you have occupied someone’s office illegally, they are basically saying you have been an imposter. If you were reared and schooled in the right environment, you feel dirty – defiled. You want to be cleansed. The feeling of dirt is intensified by gleeful epithets against you in the social media.

Our country is full of raw hate. We seem to have lost all capacity for reasoned argument – including public arguments on decisions of courts and tribunals. Like I wrote last week, we operate mostly at the inferior level of lowly thoughts that are adrenaline driven.

And so in moments of adversity, you must stoically reckon with gleeful insolence from toes you have previously stepped on. Yet, we must never surrender.

Am I about to stop stepping on sensitive toes? Will I throw in the towel? Perish the thought.

There is a sense in which political party activity seeks to clip your wings. You are tempted to withhold info on unholy things because it would not look right to say them.

While we must continue to carefully place such things on the weighing scales of conscience and collective responsibility in political coalitions, we must remain faithful to conscience. Despite confronting the headwinds of invective and court action, the eagle must fly.

I will not tone down. Regardless that the blows are from tribunals, political competitors, or from the social media, a political commentator must remain unbowed.

LIBIDINOUS CRESCENDO

The candour must begin by wondering about the idiom and comportment of those who sit in judgment against us. Where it is not icy cold, both the idiom and comportment tend to betray gay self-indulgence that easily borders on the orgasmic.

As you watch and listen to him, you cannot help feeling that the honorable judge is deriving wordily pleasure in his performance. The final hammer descends with a libidinous crescendo, “And so it is thus ordered!” Where it does not look orgasmic, it teases you with spite. Yet, Sigmund Freud told us that all pleasure has orgasmic and spiteful elements.

Do court orders –regardless that it is by subconscious occurrence – bear a doze of pleasure? When the referee on the football pitch magisterially flashes out the red card, does it get back into his pocket with an element of repressed pleasure and self-satisfaction?

In 1931, George Orwell wrote a famous essay on the hanging of a prisoner. There is a certain sense of gleeful satisfaction in the hanging troupe after the condemned man’s life has ended.

Yet in another essay, “Shooting an elephant,” the killer of a rogue jumbo wrestles with his conscience as the gentle giant fights for his life after absorbing bullets. The orgasmic satisfaction witnessed in “A hanging” is absent in “Shooting an elephant.”

But in Albert Camus’ The Outsider, we encounter a people who derive pleasure from witnessing hangings. They religiously keep their appointments with the hangings. In the same volume, elderly persons living in a home of the aged derive pleasure in going every morning to “have a look at the dead.”

Human celebration of victory has sometimes tended to border on necrophilia. So late in life, I have no prior experience of being personally the subject of court action. Even now, there is a sense in which I have only been vicariously before a tribunal, for it was never really about me. Yet, there is a certain personally felt deadness in the whole experience.

I admit to a sense of mortifying humiliation in defeat. And I cannot help wondering, “Maybe I would also be feeling gleeful, had it turned out differently.”

For, the contradictions of life are such that for the same reason a widow wails over the body of her husband who was killed in war, another woman celebrates the decoration of her husband – who killed the other man – as a war hero. Such is divine harmony and reason.