Mental Freedom for the Ordinary Ghanaian. Part I.

By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo

Attorney and Counselor at Law

Most of the problems that we encounter as a nation could be attributed to our spiritual vulnerabilities. And when I speak of this, I am making no reference to our understanding of God and our communication with him (We cannot understand God, let alone communicate with him). I am talking about the original Hellenistic meaning of “psyche” which refers to the center of our thinking and how we apply this in the solution of our socio-cultural and political problems. If viewed in this term, we will understand that on any ordinary day, Ghanaians are too vulnerable and spiritually weak: we are ready to believe in so many things without thinking too hard about them. Like our children, we are acculturated not to ask too many questions. Rather, we are trained to define our logic and reasoning by dint of our partisan posture, religious orientation and or ethnic origin. Thus what is right or proper is defined in terms of these constructs, not in terms of some ultimate truths.

Our version of the ultimate truth is the truth within our faiths, within our party or within our ethnic origin: the truth that has been construed for us by others we are trained to accept as the godfathers of our mores and ethos. Our educational system has not enabled us to develop the kind of analytical methods that will make us question old-age assumptions and faiths and beliefs and ethnic insecurities. For this reason, the state of mind that will enable us to be original and creative appears lost to us. We appropriate as our own all partisan ideologies without questioning their deeper-level wisdom and use for our circumstances. But if one begins with an ideological construct, one’s capacity to think will be distorted toward justifying mere ideological goals, and our intellectual processes will evolve only for the purposes of whole-sale acceptance of the ideological aims, and we will become nothing more than the vessel for the permanent propagation of these ideological goals. Thinking in partisan or ideological terms therefore becomes an obstacle for original and practical ideations. What is more, it shackles up the brain and makes it unable to adapt and advance to resolve novel situations.

Our ideological proclivities and partisan predilections also underlie our vulnerability in believing the religious lies that are daily peddled to take from us our money, time and resources. We have been made to cultivate our wholesale faith in a book that was written thousands of years ago by people who were neither our kin nor kith, and whose relationship with their god initially proscribed our ancestors who were then deemed as gentiles or infidels or savages or bondsmen. So in this case, we are one place removed from the origins of the faith, and are hand-me down followers of the creed of our salvation. And in accepting and advancing what has been handed down to us as our faith, we are not required to ask any questions. We are to cede the grounds of any vigorous intellectual debate to a higher power, which is wielded on God’s behalf by his so-called deputies, whose messages from the divine are simply self-serving and self-centered, and glibly articulated to meet their selfish interests. And in our acceptance of these messages from these deputies of God, we are two-places removed from the source of the faith. And so we have become mere chalices for the ingestion and imbibition of a faith which openly spurns and obnubilates our own thinking and creative capacities.

Finally, we have not been able to get our psyche away from our ethnicity and skin color. These have come to take a pride of place in how we reason and also accept reasoning from other sources. I have encountered many self-abnegating comments that have consistently traduced the status of a Blacks to the level of a beasts while extolling Whites and ascribing the best of human qualities and inventions to them. Likewise, educated minds have often ascribed sinister motives and interpreted views according to a person’s ethnic or language group origins. Often, we do not pause to evaluate the prima facie merits of the propounded views from our adversaries. Rather, our posture has been to impose a generic albeit intellectually ethnic coloration to all ideas and views advanced by a person from the outside.

Thus our thinking and worldviews are shaped and circumscribed by our partisan, religious and ethnic origins, but not by any independent and objective inquiries into the ultimate truth. In other words, truth is what has been parceled out to us by the perceptively superior thinkers within our partisan or religious or ethnic factions. That is why the essences of practical education and scholarship are lost upon our minds. We are a people still operating with a medieval herd mentality while living within a time of great enlightenment and radical interrogation of old assumptions. And to us, the greatest threat posed to the society is from a person thinking differently, from the person who dares to disagree with the generally approved facts and conclusions. That is why we are not able to cross the boundaries of the older systems of thinking in order to develop our own original viewpoints. We are captives of settled ideologies, religious philosophies and ethnic propensities that do not originate from our own independent reasoning but that have been parceled and handed down to us to be parceled and handed down to our children and our children’s children. Sometimes we call this ideology, sometimes we call this faith and sometimes we call this our ethnic superiority or peculiarities. But they all operate in the same intellectual plane of utter bankruptcy. And unfortunately, they are the only things that unite us and inform the platform of our thinking. And these also explain our inability as a people to develop original philosophies and create new things or initiate new views.

Thus, we are in an ideological, religious and ethnic life imprisonment, where original truths are of no value to us, and where whatever we regard as valuable and exceptional are those things the forebears repeated to us, and which we have kept in our mental caves since time immemorial. But such mental bondage is far more egregious than physical bondage, because mental slaves are oblivious of their conditions and will do nothing about them. But with physical slavery, even a beast will fight it and overcome it if possible. What we have going for us as a people is nothing like physical slavery. It is mental enslavement of gargantuan proportions bequeathed to us by those we have come to regard as right and righteous for all time, for all places, and for all actions.

Plato spoke of a group of people who were born chained to a cave and gazing at distorted shadows spread across a wall all their lives……until one of them broke loose and escaped to the outside world. When he returned to debunk the illusions his fellows were accepting, the rest of the group regarded him as insane. This is the posture of our own people who are trapped by these ideological, religious and ethnic assumptions that have long been rejected by those who know better. They have only contempt for the outsider’s views.

And this posture accounts for why our people have found little use for our educated scholars and so-called scientists and engineers. These are all chained to those old and archaic assumptions they came to meet, and nothing of the new revelations will enable them to free themselves from their mental caves. This then is the daunting challenge of our times, and the fact that the task appears impossible does not mean that we should not attempt to accomplish it. In the coming future, our task belongs to the struggle to gain psychological/spiritual freedom for the intellectually entombed, and what we do and write must be guided to supplant these age-old vulnerabilities, and to impose on posterity a mind that is free from all austerities…… a kind of generative tabular rasa upon which will be inscribed the original thinking and the creative propositions that will help tackle all challenges of this new era.

Samuel Adjei Sarfo, JD, MA, BA, etc. is an Attorney and Counselor at Law, a Teacher of Lore, Certified High School English Educator, Researcher and Scholar. He can be reached at sarfoadjei@yahoo.com