The problem of evil

Written not long after Mcebisi Jonas's revelation that he had been offered the post of Finance ministers by the Guptas.

......................................................

Recent revelations about the extent of corruption in our government have plunged the country into a disconsolate state of shock. We are still staggering as though in a drunken stupor of disbelief at the sheer audacity of it all.

For a long time many of us have known that something is rotten in our beloved country, but to this extent?

This has forced me to revisit the vexing problem of evil in the world that has tormented humanity for time-immemorial.

Ubiquitous evidence has long convinced many of us of its existence, the meaning of it all is nevertheless often lost amid the gnawing sting of the accompanying disillusionment that can shake us to the core.

Its latest incarnation has materialised, not for the first time, with brazen impudence from the highest office in the land. The presumptive chief custodian of the values enshrined in our blood-wrought constitution, has been placed at the centre of unthinkably treasonous acts of corruption.

Even those who have tellingly come to expect the worst from our President are struggling to regain their equilibrium in the aftermath of yet another episode of disgraceful revelations from a presidency, the likes of which we hope we will never witness again.

From a comfortable distance, the problem of evil is clear cut. After all, we all know who the bad guys are, right? Jacob Zuma, Osama Bin Laden, Thabo Mbeki, Donald Trump, black people, white people, America, China, Japan, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, ISIS. You can fill in the blanks according to the political, ethnic, national, religious or ideological corner from which you look at the world.

A closer look at the problem betrays a deceptive complexity.

Seeking to stem a potential avalanche of further sordid revelations, one of Zuma’s trusted cohorts is quoted as having issued a thinly veiled threat to those who might be tempted to divulge further damning specifics: “All of us there in the NEC have our smallanyana skeletons and we don’t want to take out all skeletons out because hell will break loose.”

Our anger is entirely justified at the sheer audacity of one evidently so entangled in the despicable web of graft, that she would brazenly defend what is so clearly indefensible.

After we recover from our indignation, a deeper reflection on these words attributed to one of the leaders of the ANC women's league, suddenly carry a gnawing ring of truth.

I found myself wondering thus: who among us has completely dispensed with the problem of evil that exists within our own hearts?

I will be the first to acknowledge that my advancement in age has coincided with the difficult reckoning with the problem of evil that lodges much closer to home. Such that I’ve come to see my biggest problem not as the evil I see all around me, but the evil that stubbornly seeks, not always unsuccessfully, to cling to me, despite my best intentions and efforts to do otherwise.

Those who are honest may agree with the famous Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who once opined, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

The problem, it seems, is that our acutely well-developed capacity to identify evil in its many grim manifestations, is inordinately effective in recognising it in others, rather than in ourselves. It is thus inadvertently allowed free reign to wreak its havoc on others with devastating stealth, even as we remain entirely innocent in our own eyes.

As we all well know it is always the other party's fault.

Our "righteous" indignation with the evil around us and the world at large continues while the evil closer to home is either excused, trivialised or remains unknown to us[1]. This explains why your sin is always a little worse than mine.

---

[1] President Zuma's alleged misdemeanours deserve every bit of the outrage they have attracted and much more.  It is no hypocrisy for us to hope he will one day have his day in court to account for much what has been attributed to him. This is because of the stewardship we have entrusted to him as the president of our nation and the seriousness of the claims of its betrayal. Sadly, his words and actions, as yet, betray a man with scarcely a tinge of remorse or concern about the meaning and implication of these claims, let alone the damage to the integrity of the office and the impact on the poorest in the country. Thus far, his main problem seems to be those who rightly require due accountability from him. It is hardly a compliment that he is the inspiration for this reflective piece, which explores the problem of evil in the world in general. Far from exonerating him, this piece seeks to highlight the pervasiveness of evil in the world and that, most ominously, this problem implicates all of us.