Skip to main content

Thinking about thinkers during an election season.

South Africa is entering the intensive phases of its election season. The ultimate prize of politics, government, is at stake. The outcomes of elections have constantly reconfigured social and political networks. Depending on the reach, strength, and resilience of the ruling class or establishment, the matrices of power in a society never remain the same after an election. The cognitive elite, or thinkers, are often the early victims or beneficiaries of post-election changes. They are equally influencers of cognitive trajectories society might embrace through their collusion or intervention, including belligerence. To this end, caution is necessary for thinkers during this phase of national selection of public representation. 

 

The 2024 national and provincial elections are poised to be the most consequential in defining South Africa's democratic and political order. The hegemonic hold of the governing ANC has been under intense pressure since the historic 1994 democratic breakthrough. It has become essential to consider what cautions thinkers should familiarise themselves with. Thinkers are persons who have a well-developed faculty of thinking. They are conceptual, independent, reflective, and open-minded. They are not necessarily academically qualified but are scholarly because they pursue a deeper meaning of issues. 

 

During elections, thinking spaces risk being befallen by outward and inner catastrophes due to their positions in the wake of election manifestos, which promise a better way of advancing the fragile constitutional and democratic order. This condition is often characterised as cognitive collusion or connivance by those with advanced faculties of thought to rescue society from the tyranny of majorities whose true north represents the convergence of catastrophe points. 

 

The outward dimension of such catastrophe is evident in the collapsing public infrastructure, service delivery dysfunctions, leadership challenges, and worrying economic indicators. Thinkers often choose between giving all the good reasons why society has dysfunctions or pointing out the farce that political electioneering can proffer to an otherwise intellectually unvaccinated herd of voters. 


The inner devastation is less manifest but might be worse or more endangering than we think. It is the absorption or co-option of most thinkers into state machinery as its human organs of state who might have forsaken their 'conscience of reason' character for 'public power'. Flirting with the coercive power of the state, an opiate to thinkers as we have seen under Hitler's Nazi Germany and potentially Netanyahu's Israel, redefines thinkers during an election or high-stakes regime change moments. Their relationship with power and those that pay the most taxes is often recalibrated to align with a funded narrative of social transformation. The euphoria of being a thinker in an era where everything about society is potentially up for review, including rewriting templates of human coexistence, chokes the capability to pause and ask 'what works and what doesn't.

 

Thinkers who are expected to propagate reliance on tried and tested systems and procedures in many fields can easily find themselves eagerly believing the dominant electioneering rhetoric and propaganda. In this mode, they tend to forsake their standards of critical thinking at the altar of being politically correct. The worst occurs when thinkers, while not believing or agreeing with chosen paths or doctrines by the political party they support, yet find it (intellectually) prudent to pretend belief and not be deceived. The greatest crime against humanity disasters has been found to have happened in societies where the intellectual rigour amongst the cognitive elite was at comparatively admirable levels. 

 

When those expected to point out the incorrectness of certain conduct in the name of attracting voter support do not stand up and shout not in our name, society will cruise into a morally ruinous election contest. Parties that emerge as the best in rationalising the correctness of their nonsense easily become the sensible ones that society votes for. Instead of refusing the intellectual concessions political party loyalty- a proven adversary of intellectual freedom- extorts, thinkers should insist on their freedom of expression and conscience. 


The apartheid experience is reason enough for thinkers to continually review the political or ideological curtains they might have volunteered themselves into or are herded towards. This includes the ability of thinkers to readmit into their midst those who made or perceived to have made the sacrifice of the intellect. Amongst thinkers, political party manifestos during an election should be the currency with which their best thinking is facilitated to give society the most significant and valuable thinking. 


Thinking in this phase of our national development should come from a place where it gives us a clear conscious view of our opinions, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing what is good for us as a human species, and the energy to agitate for appropriate paths continually. Thinkers are always encouraged to be human nodes characterised simply by loyalty to the idea of truth. Anything outside this will be a compact with their suicide. CUT!!!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The revolution can't breathe; it is incomplete.

Only some political revolutions get to be completed. Because all revolutions end up with a settlement by elites and incumbents, they have become an outcome of historical moment-defined interests and less about the actual revolution. This settlement often involves a power-sharing agreement among the ruling elites and the incumbent government, which may not fully address the revolutionary goals. When the new power relations change, the new shape they take almost always comes with new challenges. As the quest for political power surpasses that of pursuing social and economic justice, alliances formed on the principles of a national revolution suffocate.    The ANC-led tripartite alliance's National Democratic Revolution is incomplete. The transfer of the totality of the power it sought to achieve still needs to be completed. While political power is arguably transferred, the checks and balances which the settlement has entrenched in the constitutional order have made the transfer...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Ngcaweni and Mathebula conversation. On criticism as Love and disagreeing respectfully.

Busani Ngcaweni wrote about criticism and Love as a rendition to comrades and Comrades. His rendition triggered a rejoinder amplification of its validity by introducing  a dimension of disagreeing respectfully. This is a developing conversation and could trigger other rejoinders. The decision to think about issues is an event. Thinking is a process in a continuum of idea generation. Enjoy our first grins and bites; see our teeth. Busani Ngcaweni writes,   I have realised that criticism is neither hatred, dislike, embarrassment, nor disapproval. Instead, it is an expression of Love, hope, and elevated expectation—hope that others can surpass our own limitations and expectation that humanity might achieve greater heights through others.   It is often through others that we project what we aspire to refine and overcome. When I criticise you, I do not declare my superiority but believe you can exceed my efforts and improve.   Thus, when we engage in critici...
Post a Comment
Read more

The ANC succession era begins.

  The journey towards the 16th of December 2027 ANC National Elective Conference begins in December 2024 at the four influential regions of Limpopo Province. With a 74% outcome at the 2024 National and Provincial elections, which might have arguably saved the ANC from garnering the 40% saving grace outcome, Limpopo is poised to dictate the cadence of who ultimately succeeds Cyril Ramaphosa, the outgoing ANC President.  The ANC faces one of its existential resilience-defining sub-national conferences since announcing its inarguably illusive and ambitious renewal programme. Never has it faced a conference with weakened national voter support, an emboldened opposition complex that now has a potential alternative to itself in the MK Party-led progressive caucus and an ascending substrate of the liberal order defending influential leaders within its ranks. The ideological contest between the left and right within the ANC threatens the disintegration of its electora...
Post a Comment
Read more