Everybody has a view in this country but how many of these people have a vision? The talking heads on television would tell you they have a vision and a plan about how to go about making people want to live in this country, and not desert it.
They have views. They have an angle on everything in the nine o’clock news and on every recent arrest and every recent piece of legislation. They have views counter to other people’s views. There is such a surfeit of views that entirely unknown people are chosen to babble on about issues such as the country’s finances and its future prospects.
These views are accompanied by considerable verbal diarrhoea. They would tell you that these are the fundamentals they learned about at their campuses. They would quote chapter and verse from the treatise of some expert nobody has ever heard of.
The more brazenly vision-less a nation is, the greater its’ educated prattle on about how education should be saving us. But education has not saved us. The experts on the tube or dispensing viewpoints at the drop of a hat elsewhere, are most often trumpeting-on, either about the obvious, or about numbers and theories that are palpably irrelevant.
CRITIQUE
At the end of the day these people who offer opinions at all times of the day and are referred to as experts are too busy with getting on with their lives to fundamentally change anything about the society we are living in. They are also far too preoccupied with projecting the image that society wants them to project.
It’s not as if philosophers or opinion makers cannot challenge the societies they live in and attack corruption or political gamesmanship. Even Karl Marx did that. But those who so attacked, were also responsible for substantial contributions to society, such as Marx. They did not go on the offensive with the idea of making attack an end in itself but that’s what our experts do.
Thinkers of Marx’s ilk pointed to the flaws, and painstakingly explained how their own vision could set about engineering substantial change. On the other hand, the surfeit of views, as expressed today in this country, could be a mere critique of society and a basic expression of outrage.
That’s what most people harbour. A sense of grievance and a bunch of statistics. This passes off as a vision which it is not. When we got rid of the colonial yoke, nobody went around looking for leadership material. Leaders were supposed to emerge as a matter of course. It has been a long wait. Visions are not constrained by the system or the structure. What most analysts with sundry viewpoints do when they are asked to dispense opinion is to state what they know within the context of the systems within which they operate.
For example, they would say that the Executive Presidency should be abolished and that there has not been the political will to do it. They would then go one step further and say that they would advocate the summary abolition of the Executive Presidency as a cure all for getting rid of corruption and all that ails our society.
It is easy to see that such persons are unable to think beyond the boundaries and structures within which they are hemmed in. Those with a vision, on the other hand, knew how to tear down those structures. This does not mean that these visionaries always went ahead and physically revolted and tore down the massive edifices that represented the social establishment of their day.
It means on the contrary that they knew how to tear down structures with their ideas. Their vision was not to make a modest critique about how the structures are flawed.
Instead, they spoke about how the existing structures could not accommodate new challenges. That is called a vision. A vision as opposed to an everyday critique is what it is. By and large there are no such visionaries in this country, and there have not been any with any degree of visibility.
SOCIETAL
The system perpetuates itself through the narrative advanced by sundry critics who merely criticise just enough for people to let off some steam, and feel good about the fact that there is a simple critique that is permissible.
These critiques have the quality of soliloquies. They are often made to non-critical audiences that are captive. This is why you would find any number of so-called new found political stars and starlets pontificating idly on the tube or some social media platform. They are seldom challenged substantially on anything they say.
Basically, a society that entertains such prophets of the moment is doomed to suffer from a serious lack of self-reflective and constructive vision. The modern communication channels also encourage this type of vapid pontification. Everybody is an expert on social media. Everybody is an expert on anything and everything, which means at the end of the day they are all experts on nothing.
This type of vapidity in politics and social discourse has its roots in the idea that a system will throw up its own remedies. People assure themselves that those who they have paid with taxpayer money to be educated would justify this expense by coming up with ideas that would fix societal ills.
But this transactional expectation is itself a showcasing of a society that is desperately bereft of big ideas. To expect that people would come up with ideas to save society just because they have been educated with taxpayer money is to expect a revolutionary result from a very prosaic idea.
Perhaps politicians do not want to go into specifics. So it is with academics. They prefer that they speak in large abstractions because sometimes it comes within their job description. But it is not the detail of the idea that is at issue here. It is the quality of the idea — or the idea itself — that is missing. Nobody in other words seems to have ideas and whether ideas are fleshed out or not is irrelevant when there are no ideas in the first place. What they have is a tweak on the other person’s idea, and they merely add to a narrative that’s already threadbare with repetition.
There is therefore the ritual fawning over false prophets and other sources of false hopes. Leaders without a vision cannot be expected to deliver except in very narrow, specific areas where they can make some fine adjustments. But that is not the substantive overhaul of the system that the people are expecting.
REFRESHING
People want hope that they can believe in, and to that end they need more than mere answers to the questions of the day. But the ‘visionaries’ of the day have mere answers to the questions of the day. They have nothing else to offer other than answers to interviewers’ questions, as they do not in the main have any original idea to call their own.
The routine has become very predictable indeed. Interviewers call up their subjects and ask them questions about what they consider to be the issues of the day. Answers, depending on how they are rated by the media, are given variable prominence. There is no room for anything out of this boring box, and neither is any public personality interested in asking themselves any probing questions so that they would have anything refreshing to say.
None of this can pass off for a vision. This cannot so much as pass for a plan, let alone a vision. But it is what is offered by the visionaries of our day. They could call it a vision, and so could their promoters and their party faithful or their admirers.
But a vision it is not. At best it is a bundle of answers to a bunch of questions that are often not even very artfully put. To answer the question what happened to our visionaries, you would have to find us some in the first place. Those who are mere suppliers of fodder for TV, need not apply.
