What is Dysfunctional?
According to dictionary.com, dysfunctional means not performing normally as an organ or structure of the body, having a malfunctioning part or element, behaving or acting outside social norms.
This last thought, 'behaving or acting outside social norms', is the focus of our discourse because it is a social discourse that dwells on the things we do daily, the activities we engage in and how we create and use the society we both create and are a part of.
We all are members of the society and so we may be complicit one way or the other in the dysfunctionalities that happen in the society we belong to. Whether directly or indirectly, we all play a role in what happens in the space we inhabit. Through our actions and inactions, we play a part, and our parts contribute either minimally or significantly.
The phrase, If you can't beat them, join them means that, if someone is too strong for you to defeat, it is better to be on the same side as them. Don't we often or sometimes subtly apply this phrase as we are daily confronted with the really overwhelming effects of dysfunctionality in our space?
While we may not be directly involved in acts that are inimical to functionality in our space, our not speaking against such acts leaves us unjustified because it may mean we are in support even if we are not.
According to Edmund Burke, 'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.' Evil thrives and seems winning because its overwhelming voice seems to drown the silent voice of propriety. When we are quiet, we may not be able to justify our silence. We are not in a good place.
A dysfunctional society is one where anything goes. Anything can happen and at any time, too. Negativity is a norm. People behave the way they choose. Citizens act in ways they deem fit and convenient. And oftentimes nobody asks questions because generally such behaviours are taken as normalcy. If anyone acts otherwise, he or she is condemned, and so such persons often have to keep quiet.
Drivers drive the way they choose, driving against traffic. Traders trade on the road, displaying their wares on the road, not even on the road side or culverts. Sidewalks have become shops. People urinate and excrete in gutters and by the roadsides. People spit out phlegm from moving vehicles. They throw litters out of vehicles and it is just okay because nobody is asking questions or holding those who so indulge accountable.
People arrange chairs and benches on public roads designated for vehicles. They pitch tents and canopies, drink and party on the roads. And local government agents collect rates and taxes from them. Governments lay the examples of impunity and the people tag along and expand it in different dimensions to suit themselves.
In a certain district, though belonging in a place referred to as saner clime, we find people homeless and living on the streets. These people defecate and urinate on the roads and pavements which are originally designed to be sidewalks. At least we know from such experience that sleeping under the bridge and in bus stops in insane climes can pass for modesty.
A multinational organization bilks employees who are citizens and nationals of its host country of their wages. The workers' union takes the organization to court and wins the multinational firm at the Supreme Court. Despite the judgement of the Apex Court, the multinational firm proceeds to Labour Court. In what society does that happen? And the Ministry of Labour and productivity of the host country parleys with the multinational firm.
In a dysfunctional society, abnormality becomes the norm and if a few persons with normalcy based on sustained values act, the abnormal label and vilify them. They come down hard on them. The voice of negativity drowns the voice of positivity.
What Causes Dysfunctionality?
From the point of definition, we are able to conjecture a cause. People cannot live and do things outside societal norms if their minds are not first ladden with abnormalities and crookedness. We live in a confused and difficult world today because the heart of men is evil and desperately wicked.
Men and women who are supposed to look to order and maintain sanity seek their own comfort in the midst of the problems of the majority. They feed from the rot and filth of societal dysfunctionality. When men's priorities are driven by lust and selfishness, what we see physically is dysfunctionality.
When we distort history and paint a grim picture about other races and deliberately make our narrative sound like every other is bad and only we are good, we plant the evil seeds of a dysfunctional society.
Jane Elliot is an American diversity educator. She said and I quote: "Any white person who was born, raised and schooled in the United States of America, if you aren't a racist, you are a miracle. Either that or you decided to educate yourself because education in this country is about White's right, brown's alright, black's gotta stand back. Yellow is mellow. But whites, we educate in a way that says that white males have done all the adventures, have made all the inventions, and done all the discoverying, have made all. Everything that is good and has been accomplished according to social studies, which is actually anti-social studies is by white males. It is a lie! But we do that in order to maintain the myth of white superiority. The myth of race has to be maintained at all costs in this country because if white people have to give up the colour of their skin as being something that makes them perfect, what do they have left? If we start teaching the truth about history, if we start teaching about Nile Valley contributions to civilization, it will totally change the way we conduct ourselves in the classroom. It will have to. Columbus didn't discover America! You can't discover a place where people are already living. But we celebrate that every October. It's a lie!"
This is the same fictitious narrative about Mungo Park discoverying River Niger. How could that be when local people were already living there, fishing there and depend on the river for their sustenance? Who paddled Mungo Park's canoe there? Is it not the same fishermen who fished there? They were his tour guide while he was a tourist. These many lies have to be untold. It is totally dysfunctional.
Racism is a different kind of dysfunctionality in the society. With such kind of extreme racist machinations, the narrative is a bestial one and the uninformed accept it, while some who are informed are quiet and refuse to speak against it. Men build and form their perceptions on deliberate lies and falsehood.
When we embrace the value of shortcuts, we price under the table above due process. When we gradually sellout by cutting corners, it becomes like the proverbial little leaven leavening the whole lump.
What is that thing that robs us of the value of decency? The absence of a compelling value of decency leads to abuses. Something underlying within our essence makes us look away from what is right. We accept just anything. It is not liberality. It is just indecency. It is such indecency in living that makes us reject orderliness.
An unhealthy religious orientation does not prevent a life of shortcuts. It accentuates it because religion itself is a shortcut of the ideal. Religion is a corruption of the truth. Being religious is not an antidote to chaos. As a matter of fact, religion breeds it and shall eventually culminate in a chaotic condition. The reason is simple: Religion, being man's own way of seeking the truth goes against the very grain of what it swears to uphold. It is hypocrisy. Religion is only a covering.
When we have a culture that sponsors and promotes such a mindset, we have a foundation that breeds uncleanness and will definitely reap the same fruits. While every religion promotes itself above the other, not one is right. This thinking influences our actions and lead us to the pits of hell. If every religion is right, then which one is wrong?
Religion is not true. The Way, the Truth and the Life, is. This is the Word of Truth, which made all things. While you may argue in favour of western nations as being of this mindset of the Way, Truth and Life, you can see today that they are nothing close and are not immune against dysfunctionality. It may be long but it will definitely be made known in due season as we are already seeing.
Solutions to Dysfunctionality
The antidote to dysfunctionality is having the right mindset. Education is at the core of it. We are the totality of all that we take into our subconscious mind from the conscious and we are the products of the knowledge that is applied and prevails in our community. This becomes the culture we practise. When we carry on with certain practices over time, we evolve, change into them and influence the environment with it, creating a dysfunctional system.
With the right kind of education and the right content within the right context, we can reprogram the mind. We can unlearn the negative things that we have learned. These negative things that produce the dysfunctional society we now live in can be changed to a positive one if we change the narrative, if we change the story, if we change what we teach our children and ourselves through an intentional, deliberate and consistent lifestyle.
Our education informs our minds. Our information fund our thoughts. Our thoughts become our words and actions. When we act consistently over a period, we form habits that are ingrained in us such that we imbibe certain attitudes of the orientation of the information. Our habits are who we are. This is the mindset that bequeaths our perception to us. Now, perception they say is everything. Think about this analogy a little.
The programs that run within us are the products of our formal and informal education. This is the paradigm that has to shift. If the program has caused us to behave dysfunctionally, then it is time to unlearn such a program. It is time to write new programs to fit our new and emerging realities. The only way to save the environment and society that is gradually sliding into chaos is to reprogram the mind. This shift has to happen. Otherwise, we are doomed.
Values of Our Collective Existence
The values we uphold become the life we lead whether consciously or unconsciously. The majority key into these things without asking any questions because the values, negative or positive, have become a part of them. They just express themselves based on what they have been raised on from the homestead. You understand why charity begins at home. The same way wickedness, hate, distrust and all negativity begins from home.
The children may not have been taught this through instruction from the adults in their lives who raised them but these traits have been programmed into them through adult modelling. Children do not just do what we ask them to do or not do, they do what they see us do. We adults are their models.
We fail to often realize that we have a collective existence. We do not realise that we have influences on others and we influence others by our words, our works and actions and the fruit that we bear. Most of the time we are oblivious of these things. We fail to realize that what we do either builds or destroys others. Our works and actions repair or disrepair lives. They become a part of us as we are a part of the ones before us.
It takes one different person to arise and begin to ask questions about our collective existence and why we are living the way we are contrary to and against the manual of Life. The one who gains the courage to challenge the filth of our collective negativity does so at the detriment of his life. Challenging the status quo is at the price of life because it takes life to fix life.
Where one succeeds in changing mindsets, affecting reasoning and perceptions of the majority like great men as Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, audacious philosophers and poets like Rumi, Peter Duenov, Carl Jung and most importantly the Author of Life in his days in the flesh and through His gift of the promise of the Father, we can have a fresh generation of thinkers whose lifestyle separate us from all forms of dysfunctionality.
Until the majority holistically embrace great tenets of life, truth and the way, we will never find this utopia that we so yearn for because all tables are full of vomit and there is hardly one to teach the way of right. Yet, only Life holds the solution to make a dysfunctional system a functional one. With Life, all things are possible.
