Kevin Baldeosingh
Adolf Hitler ordered the murders of six million Jews because he wanted the best for his nation Germany.
This is a fact–not that the attempted genocide of Jews benefited Germany, but that this is what Hitler believed. Researchers who have studied the records of dictators and other sociopaths have found that, far from seeing themselves as monsters, they perceive themselves as paragons of virtue. In their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) social psychologists Carol Tavris and Eliot Aronson cite journalist Riccardo Orizio who interviewed seven dictators, including Ugandan president Idi Amin, Haiti president Jean Claude Duvalier and Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic.
"Every one of them claimed that everything they did–torturing or murdering their opponents, blocking free elections, starving their citizens, looting their nation's wealth, launching genocidal wars–was done for the good of their country," Tavris and Aronson wrote. "The alternative, they said, was chaos, anarchy, and bloodshed. Far from seeing themselves as despots, they saw themselves as self-sacrificing patriots."
This illustrates the most egregious aspect of the canonisation of late former prime minister Patrick Manning over the past two weeks. Even in calling for a more balanced appraisal of the man, one newspaper columnist concluded that "The one thing his detractors can never take from him is his purity of heart in doing what he thought best for the people of this country." But how can that columnist, or anyone else who's not a mind-reader, know what Mr Manning's motives were for anything he did? Especially if he himself might not have.
Now let me emphasise I am not saying that there is any equivalence at all between Mr Manning and history's dictators. That, as a matter of empirical record, would be a patently absurd assertion. But, if these individuals can justify their clear atrocities, imagine how much easier it would have been for Mr Manning to claim the best of intentions for any policies or decisions he made as prime minister. Yet, also as a matter of empirical record, there is no public policy he instituted which cannot be just as validly interpreted as driven for the benefit of himself as a politician, for the political party he led, or for the party's financiers. Disproving this would require pointing to any policy he instituted which was not populist or which offended the values of the masses. And, on the obverse side, what Maha Sabha leader and child marriage supporter Sat Maharaj perceives as Manning's racism could equally well be accounted for by political strategy.
So asserting that Manning was sincere is irrelevant to judging whether his actions benefited the country or otherwise. After all, don't all of us always believe we have best of intentions? Even if we are doing something destructive, like slandering another person or undermining them professionally, don't we convince ourselves that we are doing so for the greater good or just because the person deserves to be treated in this way?
Indeed, our sense of rightness, as journalist Kathryn Schulz notes in her book Being Wrong, is even more encompassing: "A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds, when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient."
This tendency is naturally exacerbated when people feel they are favoured by an all-powerful being, and Patrick Manning not only emphasised his religious beliefs publicly but let these convictions influence public policy. Journalist Robert Wright in his book The Moral Animal, observes that "the feeling of moral 'rightness' is something natural selection created so that people would employ it selfishly. Morality, you could almost say, was designed to be misused by its own definition...Chronically, subjecting ourselves to a true and bracing moral scrutiny, and adjusting our behaviour accordingly, is not something we are designed for."
Nor is this tendency confined to religious believers. Tavris and Aronson explain, "Once people have a prejudice, just as once they have a political ideology, they do not easily drop it, even if the evidence indisputably contradicts a core justification for it...Most people will put a lot of mental energy into preserving their prejudice rather than having to change it." This is why socialists like trade union leaders can never be persuaded that their anti-capitalist policy prescriptions harm workers, or gender feminists that their pedagogical beliefs undermines effective learning for both boys and girls
The overblown accolades heaped on Mr Manning's dead head has highlighted the fundamentally self-deluded nature of our society, if not our outright hypocrisy. If the praises being bruited now bore any relation to opinions expressed about him or his policies when he was alive, including statements made by PNM-mites, that would be less so. But this national penchant for feel-good shibboleths and pleasant hypocrisies undermines all attempts to make our society stable, prosperous and progressive.
Kevin Baldeosingh is a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a history textbook.