The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
One of the most forceful stereotypes of our world is the thinking that tyrants and despots are an African phenomenon. This stereotype belongs to the same family of myths with the assumption that terrorists only come from Asia and the Muslim world. Christopher Hope is correct that in the world that we live in tyrants and despots are “brothers under the skin,” which means that they may be black or white, in Africa or in Europe, but they are the same evil personages that the world will be much happier without.
These personages are artefacts of history and they can appear anywhere anytime. Any society no matter how and what it thinks of itself can find itself with a tyrant and or a despot as a leader. Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States of America is in everything and by all accounts not a lovable person to many. Wherever they are found tyrants believe in power first and in all other things next. They are monopolists of money and power; they hold the mistaken belief that they were destined to be powerful and power naturally and normally belongs to them.
People like Trump wake up in the morning to wonder why people hate them. They live in a false universe of their own where everything they have done and that they are doing is right, even if they have been crooks, renegades, murderers and some other types of monsters. The first passion of a tyrant is a god-complex that makes him look at himself as a chosen deliverer of the people and the nation that cannot be substituted by anyone. The everyday tyrant fancies himself as a messiah that has been chosen to lead society to some promised land somewhere.
Those that stand up to correct him or oppose him are quickly framed as dark forces, the anti-christ that is against God and all other good things. Tyrants are almost always individuals that are out of touch with reality and live in a kind of fools’ paradise where things are more imagined than real. If one watches closely and listens carefully to Donald Trump one is bound to witness the performance of a man that wonders what is wrong with the whole world that is failing to see what a gift he is to humanity.
He lives in a true ‘alternative facts’ world where he daily manufactures his own reality and lives in it. The world that Trump imagined and dreamt of, if it fully came to pass, was a world that was truly nightmarish and scary. Far from it that the present world might be perfect but the world after the imagination of Trump was to be a classist, racist, sexist and xenophobic world where only very few people would have a share of oxygen and sunlight.
The Thing Itself
The philosophers that challenged the divine right of kings and proposed civil government, amongst them Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, critiqued kings as human beings that became actors who performed divinity. In many ways tyrants like Trump and others are actors that perform to the script of power and privilege. They are ordinary water drinkers and bread eaters that walk around pretending to be unique and great individuals. The typical tyrant thinks that he is larger than life and carries himself like that.
When a soothsayer publicly told Julius Caesar to “beware the Ides of March!” he was warning the Roman strongman of his coming demise. Caesar like a true tyrant answered with a sleight of the left hand. He claimed that himself and danger are twins, with himself the elder and most dangerous twin. Delusions of invincibility are the fall of the tyrants. All tyrants wish they were invincible and immortal. Their mistake is to believe their wishes to be truths. Fictions and myths about himself and his power are carried and believed as gospel truths. Flatterers and sycophants hang around him singing his praises and telling him that he is the first and the last.
Instead of seeing through the songs for super and breakfast that the flatters are singing he believes their lies and pays the singers for the music. As he stubbornly clings to the dream of ruling the USA even as voters have rejected him, Trump, is acting like a typical tyrant that holds onto fictions and illusions as facts and reality.
Plato, the one philosopher that hated fiction and illusions, taught that people must learn to know and understand the “thing itself,” not shadows and fictions of it. This means that to know in truth is to grasp the actuality of something and not its impressions. If Trump was an African or Asian leader he would be called by all sorts of names from tyrant to despot, dissident to terrorist. But because he is the President of the USA names are chosen carefully for him.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, in Pretoria: [email protected]
