Knowledge Is Power

We can accept that food shouldn't be taken for granted and it is a sin to waste it, because there are millions starving all over the world. That moral line of thought isn't difficult. But what about education? I would liken it to food, and I would never take a chance to learn for granted, because out there, millions of people, particularly children, are denied this valuable chance to learn.

In any case, this story about Babar Ali, the youngest schoolmaster (at 16 years old), and his little unofficial school in India should make the idea a little more salient and heartfelt.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8299780.stm


To me, education and knowledge is so important because it liberates people. Enslavement of a people can only happen unchallenged when a population is illiterate and unenlightened. This dates back to past millenia, as language was only propagated exclusively among political elites so that everyone else could be easily utilised as unquestioning slaves. Without the access to language and knowledge, people are relegated to animals as their awareness is undeveloped and they can only rely on instinct and other people, which is dangerous because it then allows powerful men to elicit tyrannious acts at their whims and fancies. Only through an enlightened voice can an idea spread through communication, poetry, music, art and revolution, and only then will a tyrant begin to fear his people.

When idealistic liberals see utopia as the perfect society run by many rational men and a minimal state, this is the realistic beauty of the idea that everyone can think for themselves so that a whimsically intervening tyrant isn't necessary, unfortunately undermined by the reality that human nature doesn't often quite meet the cut because we are still quite flawed. A part of the problem lies with governments who do want their people to be muted, apathetic, fragmented and powerless, because traditionally, government is about power monopoly and consolidation and they thus rationally fear liberty.

And from what I've seen in articles like the Babar Ali story and other accounts of civil society in suppressed African and Middle Eastern countries is that people do thirst desperately for knowledge, sometimes even at the expense of their own safety. We have it here in affluent Singapore as a birth right.

What Babar Ali shows us indeed is that we can be the change we want to see. Let knowledge be the light, and seek it as much as we want to be free.

Sink Or Swim

Sub-saharan African (SSA) politics tells us a contemporary tale of why the virtues of political liberty and freedom are still pretty much an idealist's dream. In spite of a successful campaign in bringing mulitparty and parliamentary politics to Africa (relative to Middle East instances such as Iraq and Afghanistan), many SSA states still run under dictatorships wearing the legitimized garbs of democracy and the rule of law.

Many SSA people still see the state as the ultimate prize for which they can attain resources to ensure the safety of their kin and ethnicity. One can't build a nation based on ideology as long as nobody cares enough beyond basic survival, as lives are still led in poverty. In the end, people only vote based on ethnicity because that is the only thing they are willing to trust in other to have their own interests secured. This has obviously resulted in many of the civil and ethnic clashes that are still pervasive today and hindering progress in the development of national cohesion in SSA.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a microcosmic representation of many other social situations that can occur on a day to day basis, and as long as each individual perceives the losses to be great when the opportunity to gain from killing or stealing comes by, one can't depend on people to choose to act in goodwill. We are after all wired to act most conservatively when outcomes are presented to us in terms of losses, and these people in SSA have much to lose.

Only when the basic infrastructure of an educated civil society that doesn't have to grapple with the burdens of poverty is established can there be the hope that a stable democracy that upholds rights of liberty and freedom can run on its own.