Put in simple English that means: if there’s a boot in your face, it belongs to somebody on the step just above you. Of course, he’s only acting under orders and threats from someone higher up. That person is the one really responsible for grinding your face, but he doesn’t want to get his boots dirty by doing the job himself.
So don’t waste too much energy blaming the guy who’s got his boot in your face. Don’t tell him what a #@$*! he is; that won’t help. And if you start shouting imaginative abuse about his parentage, you run the risk of turning a momentary confrontation into a life-long feud.
Remember that he’s only one step higher than you in the pecking order, which means there is a whole chain of booted feet and vulnerable faces right up to the Number One Villain and your immediate tormentor is almost as low on the ladder as you are, so he lives under the same threat as you do. Insulting and angering him isn’t just a waste of breath; it creates more conflict where we should be trying to open his eyes to his situation and show him we should be allies against Number One.
If he does the same to the guy whose boot is poised over his face, we’ve started a process that is the opposite of the “trickle-down” you’ve heard development economists talking about. “Trickle down” means that if we patiently watch while our betters gorge themselves on T-bone steak and dessert smothered with ice cream, all washed down with exotic imported booze, then our waiting will eventually be rewarded by some of the good things off the chefs’ table trickling down to us. Nobody’s ever seen it happen, but who can contradict a PhD in economics?
On the other hand, “trickle up” peace-making has been proved to work by people like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, although it is hard labour.
The people who profit by getting us to fight each other know that they need to put a distance between us and their enemies. The distance can be measured in kilometres, as when an ordinary young man is told to drop bombs from 10km above people he has no personal quarrel with. Or it can be the psychological distance between us and people who are different.
Normal people don’t enjoy hurting others. That is why every Evil Empire there has ever been needed to persuade ordinary decent people to do some very evil deeds. It starts with telling us that “they aren’t like us” because they eat disgusting things like snails and frogs. It develops by telling us they don’t share our moral values. In the end the bosses have got a lot of decent ordinary people believing that if they don’t kill, maim or drive away the “enemy” he’ll do something much worse to them or their wives and children.
Even then, fighters have to go through drills and rituals to make them able to do inhuman things. That’s why they use all the slogan shouting, war cries, war drums and less subtle methods like booze and mbanje. The idea is to make their soldiers less than human so than can do deeds which are less than human.
The answer is: take every opportunity to look your potential enemy in the eyes to show you recognise he is human. That makes it a lot more difficult for him to dehumanise us. Once we accept each other as human, then we can turn together to persuade the next guy up the ladder of command. We don’t need to convert the big villain; long before that, we’ll have turned so many of his minions that nobody will obey his evil orders. That doesn’t only make him think, it prevents him doing harm while he thinks.
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis