05 January 2001, 825 words
There are many factors which create a society. Three of the most important elements are trust, language, and sex. Therefore, the greatest danger to social cohesion are hypocrisy, illiteracy and ugly women.
All of these factors are connected, of course. Consider Muslim societies. Muslims like to boast that Islam provides the perfect guide to the perfect society. In saying this, they somehow manage to ignore the rather glaring fact that every Islamic country in the world is in a mess socially, politically and economically. When this is pointed out to them, they either say the leaders aren't really following the Qu'ran or, more often, that nobody's raping women in the streets.
The latter statement is true: the rapes usually happen behind closed doors or in prison (in the former case, the women can't report it because, if it's their husband who raped them, they'll be jailed for making wasting police time and, if it's not their husband, they'll be jailed for fornicating).
In my view, the basic reason Islamic societies don't work is that the old men who run these countries insist on the women wearing chadors. The inevitable result is economic chaos, totalitarian politics, widespread corruption, and bad restaurants.
You see, when a woman wears a garment that covers her from face to foot, she has little reason to make herself beautiful. Why pluck your eyebrows or watch your diet or brush your hair, if the only person who's going to see you is your farting husband? And when women don't make themselves look attractive, men have no reason to work hard, fight for political rights, be ethical, or cook. Male psychology is not complex: we only do all those things to impress the chicks.
(Even when a man stabs another man, he is always looking out of the corner of his eye to see which sexy woman is watching how macho he is, whereas the man being stabbed is even more embarrassed if there's an attractive woman around to see him being killed.)
This also explains why a society of cowed women - in both senses - is always an illiterate society. In a culture where men don't need to woo women, nobody has to be intellectually eloquent. Men are not motivated to converse intelligently to a wife whom God says has to give them sex anyway. All they have to do is grunt at her and later - usually, about three minutes later - just grunt. So illiteracy and religion often go together, even in non-theocratic countries.
In Trinidad and Tobago, for example, I see this graffiti written on the back of the seat on the ECS bus: "Blessed the Lord." Signs outside gospel tents proclaim that "Jesus love you." A newspaper ad addresses "Dear Religious Followers and Other". The people who write these phrases cannot be having good sex: even the language of love needs proper grammar.
So this is why clerics try to debase both sex and language: because these are devices of power. And, in all backward societies, clerics use religion as a means of wielding political power rather than promoting spiritual values. Since the vast majority of Trinidad's religious leaders fall into this category - whether using their influence to prevent the legalization of abortion, the banning of capital punishment, or the outlawing of marriage for 12- and 14-year-old girls - the institution of religion is basically a hypocritical one.
Given that religion intrudes on politics, this inevitably leads to an undermining of the first element of social relations: trust. And, without trust, people can get neither great sex nor bank loans. So hypocrisy even affects the economy. Banks begin to look askance on honest citizens, preferring to lend a hundred million dollars to people whose entire history shows they're a bad risk. If you is honest, the loan officers assume, you can't never be rich (and who's to say they're wrong?)
Hypocrisy naturally also infects the body politic, which is a fancy term invented by people who don't have the body beautiful and so have to find other ways of getting attention.
Thus you hear talk about "two different cultures with two different morals", even though the person spouting this coded racism embraces the exact same moral values as the group she is badtalking: disregard for rule of law, self-promotion disguised by the rhetoric of social activism, and envy for females who get invited to glitzy social events just by breathing deeply.
But that is what happens when you live in a hypocritocracy, instead of a democracy. So, bearing in mind what I said at the start of this column, the trouble with our society is pretty obvious. Our political leaders spend their lives defending causes they don't believe in (until they get into office and gain the power to hang people and play golf); our business leaders hardly read books (preferring to get their ideas at cocktail parties); and all our leaders have diabetes (draw your own conclusions).
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh