What's with this Clico group going after Finance Minister Winston Dookeran as the perpetrator of their money woes?
It is alarming to see such a large group of supposedly educated individuals indulging in this kind of irrationality when so many, even as they sympathised with such people losing their hard-earned money, have pointed out that the ire of this group should be better directed where it's really due, that is, against those who mismanaged their money, and not to Dookeran whose package is as generous as a government can be for a problem which is not of its making.
But this indifference to all rationality and good sense is simply because we are not sufficiently developed and sophisticated as a people to be so motivated in our thinking and are more inclined to surrender to our primal instincts of self-preservation and survival.
In this country, criminals kill without mercy, drivers drive with no care for life and limb, workers strike with no concern for the resulting dislocation and demand 34 per cent when another group has accepted five, all symptoms of the said primal instinct of survival, which is no more clearly manifested in the reaction of this Clico group, where nothing else matters except getting their money back if even it means Dookeran's head, against all logic and good sense.
But as Chaucer said in the Pardoner's Tale, "Radix malorum est cupiditas-The love of money is the root of al evil"-and these policyholders should be aware of the metaphor in the story of the Three Rioters who killed one another because of the love of money, meaning that the policyholders are up in arms against the only source from which relief is likely to come and may simply consume themselves in the process.
Dr Errol Benjamin
Via e-mail