We can break things with the best of them, South Africans. The public and government have over the past two decades damaged, destroyed, weakened, bankrupted, vandalised, robbed, undermined, mismanaged, collapsed and compromised such a wide range of institutions and ideas that we’ve turned destruction into an art form.
When you excel at something, it is worth understanding why. How have we become so accomplished at ruin?
A good place to start is with intent, and it comes in two forms. First, there is the deliberate and conscious act, undertaken with purpose and a clear outcome in mind. Setting a library on fire, for example, or torching a train carriage.
Second, there is the by-product of disregard, neglect, contempt or incompetence. Examples include ignoring electricity infrastructure for decades or turning the SABC into a lunatic asylum.
One can already see a natural divide. The former is generally the preserve of the public; the latter, government. But the two do come together in one important abstract way: the assault on ideas.
Whether you systematically underfund higher education as a government or destroy its infrastructure as students, both actions help fundamentally to break the ideals and values that underpin the idea and purpose of any university. And many other institutions have an idea, not concrete, at their foundation.
"Right or wrong, it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time," said Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Pride is a liability if you’re in the breaking business. One cannot have any. Implicit to any sense of pride is the acknowledgement of responsibility and self-interest. And we can’t have that.
It is remarkable the degree to which we have managed to strip pride out of our day-to-day behaviour in order to help facilitate our desire to destroy. In its place there’s satisfaction; it feels good.
There are fleeting examples of pride now and then. When the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s library was burnt, its librarians cried. Fools. You would be mad to invest any emotion in our public institutions. They are ephemeral, just bricks and mortar. There are no universal ideals that underpin them, no values to which you can attach. The idea of a university is never debated or defended. It is just a bureaucracy.
When breaking is a national pastime, there is no room for abstractions. It is a practical business.
Thus, disaggregating between these two kinds of intent is helpful really only in a pragmatic sense. The closest the government gets to the former is theft and corruption. The closest the public gets to the latter is neglect and disregard for public amenities. So there is some overlap. But, in general terms, each is an expert in one or the other. In principle, they share a common outcome and we have mastered both.
As wanton destruction is so obvious, there is little to appreciate about it. Although, that said, one can rightfully marvel at the way we go about it. You need look no further than the arms race between, say, armoured cars for cash transits and hijackers or the way in which bank fraud has become more sophisticated. It might be blatant, but it is not obvious.
These particular artists do have a warped sense of pride in their methods. Picasso said once that, "the urge to destroy is also a creative urge". Perhaps vandalism is pride’s final resting place.
Nevertheless, it is the subtler, more surreptitious ways in which we destroy that is worthy of special attention. For here we are as creative and innovative as we are effective. And, there is an argument to be made, more devastating too.
You can arrest someone for vandalism or stop a violent protest and that largely brings to a halt the damage. But rooting out corruption or engendering an attitude of civic responsibility cannot be achieved overnight. Indeed, even agreeing on the nature and extent of the problem can, in and of itself, be enough of an obstacle to prevent remedial action. And so it is in our systems and culture that the real genius is to be found.
The most egregious of these impulses — neglect, incompetence, and short-sightedness — are well known and their effect well documented. The state of our infrastructure, from roads, to railways, to water, is perhaps the best illustration of the slow, corrosive effect this kind of damage can do over time. The genius comes in how well it is hidden.
Anyone can see a pothole. But they cannot put their finger on the precise moment or the exact decision that caused it. It came in the night, while we were doing other things and it belongs to no one. Yet, there it is: the result of systematic, systemic and sustained indifference. It is the hard consequence of a process without shape or form, but a potent one nevertheless.
"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance," said Kurt Vonnegut. Upkeep is laborious, and so difficult to appreciate or measure. It is an act without reward, for all it does is maintain and preserve. When you build something it stands out as new; just as when you demolish something, it vanishes from sight. Then you really can see a difference.
Slow decay is infuriating. But it is the justification for more expeditious destruction. When the road is broken, why not a clinic or a bus? No one broke the road. So, if I burn out a bus, who broke that? Who cares? Not me. We break things in SA. It is what we do.
The impulse towards decay is not just well hidden, it hides itself well, too. We have developed a language all of our own to mask a harsher reality. You will know many of the words well enough: "rejuvenate", "recapitalise", "restructure", "revive", "renew", and so on.
Supplementing that, the euphemistic language of forgiveness; of "amnesties" and "exoneration", "consultation", and "negotiation". The rule of law, like everything else, is just a thing. We have broken that too. Only for some new judgment to breathe life back into it. At least, until we take a sledgehammer to it again. So many ideas and principles have been beaten to a pulp this way.
It’s not just bricks and mortar we destroy, but also ideals, values, and principles. And everyone lends a helping hand.
The system, such as it is, will not allow you to pinpoint any one moment in time because time itself is an endless process of "redress" and "reconstruction", of pardon and absolution.
We never fix anything because it is always broken. We never broke anything because we are always in the business of fixing it. Even "the nation" itself suffers this paradox. Ask yourself, are we a nation or are we in the process of nation-building?
We cannot be a nation; that would necessitate some honest reflection about what we actually look like. In the same way we cannot have a state of the nation address, just a retroactive list of selective, comparative points. They are just helpful phrases, used to facilitate a fragile sense of unity. We are nation builders, constantly striving towards something we cannot define and, therefore, always progressing, always advancing. Never regressing. That is the dream we cling to.
When they aren’t hidden, or in the process of hiding, these impulses display another clever trait. So thoroughly have we inculcated mediocrity into our attitudes and behaviours that we have no meaningful point of comparison. It is a problem exacerbated by our history. Almost instantaneously, on the rare occasion something is found to be broken and its mangled condition agreed on, the point is made: it was worse under apartheid.
So not only are we constantly fixing, constantly progressing, but always we are moving away from Ground Zero. From there things, by definition, can only improve. And, when you do break things, you can break them only partially, for the argument will be made: now there is something to break when before there was nothing.
The real triumph, then, is that we can never completely break SA. Nor would we want to, because then there would be nothing left to break in the first place. To break things, you need to fix things, at least just enough to break them again. Every year we break South African Airways and every year we fix it. So that we can break it again next year. It’s a game of sorts.
George Orwell says in 1984, "The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent."
His novel, 1984, is a brilliant gateway into the mind of the totalitarian. But the agent is the state, acting against the people to keep them ignorant. He never imagined a world where the people, together with the state, unite to destroy their future: a war against no one and without purpose other than against everyone and for the sake of destruction itself.
Take a moment to appreciate how good we have become at it. How little we care. How much we destroy. How completely and utterly we deny our real character. Why are we a nation of builders? It’s because we are a nation of vandals. It’s what we do. Only, by agreement, let’s never talk about it. It’s not who we are.
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