Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Another
dollop of false consciousness
You may recall – or didn’t need me to tell you in the
first place – that when people, mistakenly, believe something to be true when
it isn’t and the evidence suggests it isn’t, they are suffering under an
illusion we call ‘false consciousness’.
Once it is ingrained it is hard to shift. Like creationism. Like the
place of patriarchy in current world religions. Like the world ending on the 21st
December 2012. (Although, for several thousand people it must have been their
death knell!).
When you come up against it personally it certainly
raises a sense of the surreal, sometimes the tragically absurd. Like you are
Alice and this is a bleak Wonderland
Talking with a man who has a very good and expanding brain
the other day, someone who in four or so years has left his village to become
literate, bilingual, an ace photographer, adept at IT and a senior manager in a
clothing factory, I came away disconcerted. Despite my protestations and
careful arguments based on concrete evidence and even biblical or moral
evidence (he is an avid Christian) I could not shake his belief in female
circumcision, in women not being the equal of men and that God is behind every
act in a person’s life from the great to the small. My suggestions that the
world should be – and often is – otherwise, was greeted with cackling laughter,
as though I was the greatest stand up comic of all time. There was no way in to
unseat his moral universe.
Openness to evidence and a critical consciousness are
all we have to counter such resolute beliefs in the indefensible. And they have
to be taught from birth whether it
is to the young of Ghana’s many tribes, or Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus or
the communists of North Korea and China. Once such consciousness is properly
released and matured, it cannot be put back in the locked box of social
conditioning.
But the powerful know this, from the corrupt democracies
of the west to the corrupt dictatorships of the East. Heavily proscribed education that imposes the authority of
the state and the inviolability of the curriculum is always the prize tool of
social engineering, whether in faith or secular schools.
For a riveting and mind-expanding read on the moral mess we call life, read: www.azimuthtrilogy.com
All my published work can be found on www.chronometerpublications.me
Labels: False Consciousness
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