René B. Azurin
"God is dead" is such a famous line from Nietzsche that
I remember it from my college days. I thus found it
familiar when his character in a new film, When
Nietzsche Wept (by Pinchas Perry), bellows this line
and is then challenged, "But if God is dead, then
everything is permitted, no morals, no rules; without
God, who will organize our society?" I thought the
inverse of that question more appropriate today: if
those who govern our society act as if there are no
morals and no rules, does that mean that God is dead?
These aren't exactly Christmasy thoughts I know and
Perry's film is not quite what one should be watching on
Christmas eve. Still, the day before, I also received an
email from a friend who reacted to a recent column of mine
on corruption, should we still celebrate Christmas with so
many thieves around? My perhaps too flippant answer:
notwithstanding the proliferation of bandidos, we still
have to enjoy our existence. I am not sure that the unhappy
Nietzsche (who died poor and mad in 1900 after having laid
the foundation for the existentialists) would have approved
of that answer.
It is, obviously, difficult for the 3.8 million Filipinos
who find hunger part of their experience to enjoy their
existence even in the absence of news that our political
leaders use the people's money to annually lavish on
themselves billions and billions in pork barrel funds,
intelligence funds, social funds, contingency funds, and
whatever-else discretionary funds. But, news of such
looting by the people who run our society – like, just
recently, the casual pocketing of P500,000 gift bags and
P200,000 Christmas bonuses – undoubtedly make the
experience of scrounging for food infinitely more difficult
to bear. The disparity is just too grotesque. To
deliberately choose to steal from the people after they
had elected you to a position of power in the hope that
you could make their lives better and the society fairer
is perhaps more than moral callousness. It could be moral
bereftness.
One might wonder how morally bereft people get to govern
societies but another Friedrich, the economist Friedrich Hayek,
writing in 1944, already gave us an answer. In his perceptive
book The Road to Serfdom, Hayek wrote that "the political
ideals of a people… are as much the effect as the cause of the
political institutions under which it lives." That implies that
the morals that lead to such acts of public banditry are the
consequence of institutionalized characteristics of our political
system such as the poorly constrained power of our highest public
officials, the huge discretion given to them, and an extremely
weak and ineffective justice system. Let us admit: our political
ideals have been so compromised that we all tolerate politico
bandits when we should be demanding that they be put in jail and
ostracizing them until they make restitution. Instead, we even
celebrate them and don't bother to ask, why have you become so
rich after assuming a public office that pays so little? We have
become manhid to corruption.
In his book The Joyful Wisdom, Nietzsche has his madman running
around the marketplace announcing the death of God and crying
that "We have killed him!" Of course, we understand that
Nietzsche is referring to man's idea of God, the idea that
there is a supernatural being who cares about – and presides
over – man's affairs. Killing the God idea with science and
philosophy allowed the development of Nietzsche's concept of
the "Superman" who feels exempt from all systems of morality
and beyond any structure of law. The desire to prove that he was
one of them (some of us might recall) is what drove Raskolnikov
in Dostoevesky's classic Crime and Punishment to rob and murder.
I remember that this Nietzschean notion was also the hidden theme
of a late 80s film by Woody Allen (in my opinion, by the way, the
greatest film auteur of our times) called Crimes and Misdemeanors.
In it, one of the two main protagonists, after committing a murder
and suffering through several conscience-stricken weeks when "he
imagines that God is watching his every move", – he relates this
all later in the guise of describing a movie script – wakes up
one morning and finds that "the sun is shining, his family is
around him, (and) mysteriously the crisis has lifted." In his tale,
"he prospers, the killing gets attributed to another person… he's
scot free, his life is completely back to normal, back to his
protected world of wealth and privilege." (In other words, he
succeeds where Raskolnikov did not.) Defending such an ending, he
insists, "this is reality!"
To be free of conscience would certainly be liberating for thieves
and murderers. So, perhaps, that is what they are, these bandidos
masquerading as public officials: supermen not bound by conventional
morality and the strictures that restrain the rest of us ordinary
citizens. Creatures who plunder because they do not feel that this
is wrong and that there is any God to punish them anyway.
The answer Perry implies to the question posed in his film is that,
if God is dead and there are no rules, no organized society is
possible. Well, certainly, at least not one based on justice and
fairness.
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