William Shakespeare submits
that “all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players;
they have their exits and entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts”.
In this submission, Shakespeare speaks of the theatrical quality of our social
life as human beings inside the theatre called humanity. In this theatre of humanity,
we wear a variety of masks in order to cover our faces, conceal our real
beings, and project what the scene in the act demands of us as actors. As ‘consummate
actors’ we have learnt through our lifetime, irrespective of age, to extort or elicit
one behaviour or the other from other beings through our acting or posture.
It is interesting that inside
this humanity theatre, we take on acting roles without an assigned script, for
we are both the script, the audience and in most instances the directors of the
drama. In a quest to display our acting prowess, we oftentimes take on the prizes
and burdens that come with our role in the script. The masks we wear are so
expressive and elaborate about what we want the ‘audiences’ we interact with to
see and experience. We wear our masks without any thinking effort; the spontaneity
of our sliding into the masks makes our various selves normality. Our masks
have become so definitive of who we want to project to a level where language
as the carrier of actual messages can be a source of contradiction.
Language as a carrier of
culture and traditions shape the quality of our conversational life. It is a useful tool, when written, to record epochs of our civilizations thus making
available to future generations reference points for what has normed and
standardized our ways of living. We generally moralize through the art of
language and text that records it. The masks we wear have become the second
language that transcends what is said and written, for it is universal for all
to understand without a good command of the lexical demands of the spoken and
written. Because these masks are observable, decodable and the impression they
make is manageable, these masks have grown to be a new area of our humanity
that needs to be marshalled onto a normative terrain, lest its broad
discretionary tarmac might create great peace take-offs that may crush with
established civilisations.
The insatiable appetite of
humans to continually communicate their feelings, whilst not wanting to
compromise relationships has elevated masks as a counterforce to regulate the
inherent human tensions not to contaminate the theatre called humanity. Whereas
these masks seem to have a capacity to conceal inherent realities, they will
always have leaks in a form of gestures, tone of voice, facial expressions and
postures. Only through training and natural hypocrisy will humans succeed in
sustaining the intents of the act they are in the desired scene.
Humanity’s skill to act what
they are not believing in or believing in the act that they have selected for
a particular scene or presence is what constitutes acting in one’s own
interests, notwithstanding the selfishness, generousness or otherwise of the
interests. Since interests are a condition of our diversity, acting to advance one
interest or the other has become the most dominant of acts on almost all
scenes of dramas in the theatre called humanity. It is only the circumcision of
how the functioning of our think space penetration organs, such as societal
brain power, that will make us the bane of inveterate interest-infested humans
in positions that predominate the societal scripts at play; euphemistically
called leadership. Unless we adopt the curiosities that define children, the
masks that are worn in spaces that require us to know the interior of all
intents by those in the act will make us consenting victims to the script the narrative we know not where it is leading us.
In a democracy, these acts are
in most instances attached to themes that would naturally irk humanity.
Humanity’s attachment to what has been defined as the benchmarks of its civilisation is the platform upon which the currency that regulates the trusteeship market,
also called elections, flows. Generic in this market has been the locating of
corruption into the public sector domain, with the private sector being
presented as an unwilling benefactor of this apparent civilization wrecking
act. The prowess with which the antagonistic feelings of collusion are
presented as an inherent dislike for ‘political power’ and ‘superiority’ by the
(private) individual, makes the corruption themed scene the greatest of global
masks through which humanity has become a cheering victim. Beneath the masks,
of course, is the script writers’ intent to be an opiate to an otherwise
unsuspecting audience. In its opiate condition, society would start singing
praises to its demise as a choice-making species.
It is these invisible masks
that we need to think about as we are called to wear the visible masks
occasioned by a much more threatening reason; the coronavirus or COVID19 pandemic.
Like the pandemic of inveterate lying, information manipulation, con artistry, manufactured
deception, and manufactured consent; the psycho-social and emotional costs of the
COVID19 pandemic will be the most consequential in defining human civilization
beyond the human headcounts that are legitimately the focus of our
intervention. The question to ask therefore is, what other masks that are not
physical require our observation, decoding and management as a society?
Conditions such as COVID19 call for extraordinary measures, at the apex of such
is the space of arbitrary decision making that is accorded to all that are in
leadership positions, or rather predominating the societal scripts at play in
this phase of the human act as this rendition argues. The masks of politics,
political economy, social relief, justice, and equality need unpacking to
triangulate the masks that we are also wearing as a society.
The mask of politics
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