IS OUR ‘SOCIAL CONTRACT’ INTACT?
“EVERY time (he) walks into a room, we all feel a little bigger, we all want to stand up, we all want to cheer, because we’d like to be like (him) on our best day.”
Great line – by a US president, about a South African.
But deifying people isn’t helpful. It’s actually about the potential in each of us, in that room Bill Clinton described.
The famous South African’s other great skill was getting people to work better, together.
This is essential – for we live in a social world. (Except that guy in the cave on the hill.)
Society’s had its challenges. In the year 1651, Thomas Hobbes looked at the chaos in England and was bleak. Individual human lives were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.
With no political order and law, everyone seemed to have unlimited freedoms, including the “right to all things” and thus the freedom to plunder, rape and murder. An endless “war of all against all”.
Hobbes suggested a social contract, in which rational individuals voluntarily gave up certain freedoms, for the benefit of political order, especially the state’s duty to protect the individual’s remaining rights (explains Wiki).
That’s the foundation of almost every democratic country on Earth, today.
So, in South Africa, in January 2019, how healthy is our “social contract”? Looking at our levels of “plunder, rape and murder” – and the state’s failure to protect basic rights – our “social contract” appears to be in tatters.
It’s an extremely dangerous space for any society and ours has been that way for the longest time.
There are only really two directions we can take: a worsening “war of all against all”, or painstakingly putting Humpty Dumpty together again – the basic agreements in our “social contract”. Each role and responsibility is practical, explicit and clear.
Our most urgent and intractable challenges – our safety, economy, housing, education – all have multiple roleplayers and yet South Africans’ levels of mutual accountability, over each duty and task, are spectacularly low.
Why? Because if the country’s population were to be tested on our 100 most crucial “roles and responsibilities”, our national pass rate would be close to zero.
Test yourself.
Test 1: What are the five core duties of:
Your ward councillor? SAPS sector commander? School Governing Body chair? Provincial police commissioner? President?
Test 2: How do you hold each of them to account?
Test 3: What are your own “roles and responsibilities”, in partnership with each of them?
Did you pass, or fail the test? If South African society is to progress, the basic contract between us and the authorities will have to be re-understood.
By all 60 million of us. Fast.
With no political order and law, everyone seemed to have unlimited freedoms, including the ‘right to all things’ and thus the freedom to plunder, rape and murder. An endless ‘war of all against all’.