Best to admit that our old order is dead, and we have to find a new way forward
The ANC has brought us this far, but we have reached political dead-end
South Africa has reached a kind of political dead-end. We are living through a time when it is clear that the old has come to an end, and we are fearful of the future.
We wonder whether we should embrace an unknown new in a period of great confusion.
When things are so bad, civilised societies rely on their thinkers to make sense of prevailing conditions, and to find light on the dark road ahead. Alas, South Africa is destitute of percipient minds.
What, precisely, is the fundamental psycho-political dynamic that underlies our anxiety today?
Plainly stated, it is the fear of change, driven by a limited understanding of how societies negotiate their forward movement from the old to the new.
At any given time, ceaselessly so, every society undergoes a backward or forward movement in the sciences, arts and politics.
A backward movement manifests the degeneration of a society by regressing from the highest point of its civilisation, the movement towards which point is the work of previous generations.
Such degeneration occurs when the collective conduct of a contemporary generation violently shakes the foundational ideas and values on which the institutional architecture of a civilisation rests. This is when the achievements of the great heroes of old are demolished by the decadence of latter-day philistines and scoundrels.
The complete demolition of established traditions is celebrated by pseudorevolutionaries who are driven by an ungovernable urge to make their own mark on the canvas of history.
The result of such unreflective revolutionary zest is the total destruction of what is old, hoping to make a quantum leap into the blissful heaven of the new.
Very often the masses are excited by the specious promises of self-appointed elites who pose as pavers of the road to a new heaven. This is what the masses were told after Polokwane, that the political changes of the time marked the advent of something great.
The masses invariably realise after they have been ruined that the assault and total demolition of the old is an act of self-destruction.
Now that the masses have been ruined by their readiness to swallow the lies of kleptocratic pseudorevolutionaries, they find themselves totally paralysed by the fear of anything new, even as they are certain that their new-old, which is a product of previous gullibility, is political madness gone wrong.
In the current conjuncture, the fear of anything new has engendered a generalised sense of self-pity and hopelessness among the masses. It has, among the spokespersons of the confused, unleashed an explosion of imprecations against the pseudorevolutionaries who authored our destruction.
But howling gigantic curses will not answer the question: Where to from here? This is the most important political question of our day.
The starting point for those who are politically confused is to acknowledge that they are indeed confused, that they don’t know how to go forward.
The second step is to embrace the right theory of change. Keep in mind that, tantalising as it may be, a total departure from tradition is not progress but regress. Behold all rapturous revolutions across the world, and they will confirm the veracity of this maxim.
The right theory of change is not atavism, it is the right mix of fixity and variability, of tradition and experimentation – what popular parlance calls “continuity and change”.
What is more important is to accept that what is gone is gone. The children who refuse to leave the graveside after burying their father who was a breadwinner are bound to succumb to starvation. It does not matter how violently you sob, the dead will never return.
Having been dragged to a political dead-end by their trusted captain, the ANC, what must the masses of black people do? Fundamentally there are two options.
The first is to behave like the children who refuse to leave their dead father’s graveside. Such people will bang their heads against the wall a few years down the road when black South Africans beg for alms, like Zimbabweans, at our street corners.
The second option is to realise that from where the road ends, the masses can open a new road for themselves.
Note that a dead-end is a point at which a road-maker decided to stop working.