07 June 2001, 820 words
Basdeo Panday is the outstanding leader in Trinidad and Tobago today. Which probably doesn't say much about the quality of leaders this country has to offer.
Panday's success has been attributed to his cunning and charisma. The charisma is invested in his acerbic humour and informal manner, and the cunning in his ability to deceive others about his true intentions. But Panday, since becoming Prime Minister, has six times stated publicly that his highest value is truth. (I've been keeping count.) Since he has done several things which completely contradict views he preached in his pre-Prime Ministerial days - on the parasitic oligarchy, government accountability, democratic practice - it seems an easy conclusion that Basdeo Panday is this country's leading hypocrite.
But I no longer think it's that simple. A hypocrite, in the commonly understood sense, is someone who professes beliefs or opinions which they CONSCIOUSLY know they don't believe. But, when Panday says that his highest value is truth, I suspect he really believes himself.
It is a weird fact about human culture that the most effective leaders are often persons who are very good at fooling themselves. There is, as usual, an evolutionary logic behind this. The argument runs like this. Human reproductive success requires human social success. Social success requires success in reciprocity relationships, where you give something and get something in return. But success in reciprocity relationships comes from getting a bit more than you give.
Comparative ethnography confirms the reproductive root of this evolved mechanism. "High-ranking men are deferred to, have a greater voice in group decisions, usually have a greater share of the group's resources, and always have more wives, more lovers, and more affairs with other men's wives," notes psycholinguist Steven Pinker.
Now in order to get more than you give, you have to be good at fooling others. But a mutant who was especially good at fooling others, because he would get more resources and more mates, would out-reproduce everyone else. The net result would be a population of deceivers. Such a population would either have no reciprocity and so their deceptiveness would provide no selective advantage, or they would evolve to be good at detecting deceivers.
The latter is, in fact, what happened. And we evolved a further strategy: we fool ourselves in order to fool others. This is because those who perceive themselves as altruists, when they are not, will be better at exploiting other people through deceptive means. (This is why Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, although his principles are as flexible as boiled spaghetti, will not succeed Panday. The essence of effective self-deception is to believe firmly in your own altruism. Ramesh, however, knows only too well what he wants.)
But it is not only leaders who fool themselves: it is also their followers. So the question is, why should human beings cooperate in their own domination? The answer is that sometimes such cooperation is the most effective strategy for the person being dominated. There is in psychoanalysis a condition called 'identification'. This is when, in order to mitigate painful thoughts and feelings, people accept as their own the demands of someone who is exploiting or abusing them. We see this in both personal and political situations: with abused women, and with the sycophantic homage to Basdeo Panday in the recent UNC election.
Such a response is not necessarily irrational or self-destructive because, in a situation where the leader wields considerable power, identification can gain influence for an otherwise weak individual. (Can you say Rupert Griffith?) "Within a group, identification with a powerful leader offers substantial advantages, even if it means accepting exploitation and humiliation at times," note psychiatrists Randolph Nesse and Alan Lloyd in a paper titled 'The Evolution of Psychodynamic Mechanisms'.
This is why the question about who has balls in Panday's circle is essentially irrelevant. But we also need to remember that, even with a maximum leader, the relationships of power are always complex. In his book Human Universals, anthropologist Donald Brown notes that no leader ever has complete power lodged in himself alone. There is never complete democracy nor complete autocracy, so all societies have a de facto oligarchy. But no leader rules primarily through aggression. In even primitive human societies, the leader is often the man who is most skilled at forming alliances and at reconciliation.
It is for this reason that leading a multi-racial, multi-ethnic society is a more difficult task than leading more homogeneous ones. But that makes it more, not less, important to find common ground (an argument that Kamal Persad and Devant Maharaj and others of that ilk will never grasp). This ground can be ideological, or national, or just rational. The pillars we set in it must be secularism, rule of law, and democracy. We cannot change human nature; all we can do is build institutions that contain our worse aspects, and support our best.
Copyright©2001 Kevin Baldeosingh