The PPP’s untergang: Deconstructing the concept of evil--Freddie Kissoon

MAY 18, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER FEATURES / COLUMNISTS, FREDDIE KISSOON

This is what I wrote at the end of my Friday, May 15, 2015 column; “What went on in Guyana from 1999 to May 2015 was a Faustian journey into the pits of evil.” The word “evil” has a banal meaning. This is because for centuries people have used it in the ordinary sense of the word. If the coffee lady steals the milk and takes it home, we call her evil. If a man likes to cheat when gambling, we call him evil. Evil as a concept in philosophy then lost its meaning a long, long time ago among the ordinary folk. But it remains a central topic in philosophy and this goes back centuries and centuries ago. One can exaggerate a bit and say philosophy is the study of the origins and existence of evil. It was after the Holocaust that the Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, student of the deep thinker, Martin Heidegger (whose book on the nature of human existence, “Being and Time” remains for me the best book on philosophy; tragically, Heidegger was a supporter of the Nazi Government) rescued the philosophical meaning of “evil.’ She invented the concept, “banality of evil.” (See my column of Wednesday, October 8, 2014, “Can you apply the Arendtian concept of the banality of evil to the PPP?”)

Here is as extract from that article, “Arendt broke with the existing tradition of the definition of evil by arguing that evil acts are not confined to violent people, psychopaths, sadists, cunning, aggressive leaders”. Arendt contended that the most innocuous, self-effacing, quiet, normal person can commit unspeakable evil. In philosophical discourses on evil, the emphasis has always been on its origins. Three great philosophers have pontificated on the birth of evil. Hegel felt it came with the march of history, meaning that it is dialectically connected to time. Nietzsche argued it came into being because we invented terms to suit our purpose in life that had no bearing to the real world. Freud saw evil as inherent but argued its displacement came naturally through sublimation.

Modern day scholars posit that evil’s origin is essentially bound up with religion and mythology. Here is where Hegel meets the sociologists. What Hegel actually meant is that through the passage of time, evil emerges through an agency; that agency would be mythology but Hegel didn’t say that. The connection between the birth of evil and mythology can also be gleamed in Nietzsche if we accept his morality arguments. Interestingly enough, you can connect Nietzsche with Freud. If as Nietzsche argued that we invented moral categories for convenient reasons then this ties in with Freud’s theory that we invented religion to control the evil that resides in our subconscious. In deconstructing the meaning of evil, the concept of mythology and agency are indispensable. To understand the existence of evil in the PPP that in the end caused its untergang (love this German word that means downfall), then mythology is methodologically unavoidable. Whether it was Cheddi Jagan or Ralph Ramkarran or Roger Luncheon or Gail Teixeira through to the younger generation of Priya Manickchand to even the youngest in Charles Ramson Jr, they all were victims of the mythology that the PPP was born with and that Cheddi and Janet Jagan stamped on the physiology of the PPP with indelible ink. The Burnham regime ended up as a far less dictatorial entity than the PPP because the PNC was not born into a mythological culture. The PNC’s birth was based on mundane realities in realpolitik. Herein lies the difference between Burnham’s authoritarianism and the PPP’s tyranny.

Much to the amazement of the world, the PPP became a sadistic dictatorship billions of miles worse than what occurred in Guyana in the seventies because of the culture and cult of mythology that the PPP was born with. In other words, the PPP had to end up evil. Here is where analysts will have a golden moment in assessing the future existence of the PPP. I like what Carl Greenidge told me and Dr. David Hinds at the New Amsterdam rally of the APNU-AFC during the 2015 election campaign. The conversation had gone way past midnight and because we were standing; bracing on David’s car, my feet were killing me but it was enthralling. Carl Greenidge was lamenting the resort to crude tribalist instincts by Jagdeo in the campaign and as we touched on the young leaders in the PPP, he said they were not politically and attitudinally different from the older generation of leaders in the PPP. This explains why an Irfaan Ally, Priya Manickchand, Charles Ramson Jr. and others are the reincarnation of Rohee, Teixeira and Luncheon.