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HUBRIS, or the sin of extreme pride or self-confidence, besets those who over-estimate their competence, accomplishments and significance.
It reached its most extreme and typical form in the person of Icarus, the figure in Greek mythology who attempted to escape from Crete by means of wings constructed by his father, the master craftsman Daedalus. In the face of all evidence to the contrary, Icarus persuaded himself that he could fly between the dampness of the sea and the heat of the sun on wings made of feathers and wax.
Of course, hubris is not confined to patients on the psychiatrist’s couch or individuals who have allowed the arrogance of power to overwhelm their common sense. Countries and their governments, too, experience bouts of what we have come to call exceptionalism, the belief that they are so extraordinary and superior that they are exempt from the judgement or counsel of their peers.
Much of the trauma and disillusionment that currently afflict South Africa may be traced to the mid-1990s, when our relatively peaceful transition from a racial oligarchy to constitutional democracy attracted the respect – and even awe – of a world that had expected an ethnic conflagration after decades of isolation, conflict and global opprobrium.
Perhaps inevitably, that transformation from pariah to hero went to our heads, instilling a conviction that South Africa and her people were uniquely exemplary and had been promoted to an international role of special moral authority and political importance.
That belief lingers to this day. Like Icarus, we defy the evidence and continue to believe that the world still stands in awe of our achievements and institutions, that we hold our society to the very highest standards, and that all humankind listens with admiration to our every utterance of opinion.
Witness, for example, the sense of self-importance that results in our constant insistence that South African politicians are distinctively equipped to assist in the resolution of the intractable problems of the Middle East.
The truth, however, is more sobering. The world no longer hangs on to our every word or looks to us for leadership, and South Africa has become what it always really was – a middle-ranking nation battling with the all-too-human quandaries of poverty, feeble economic growth, exasperating political leadership and mediocre standards of public life.
And as virtually every comparative index of performance demonstrates, we are falling ever further behind the rest of the world in the quality of our education, the independence of our democratic institutions and the integrity of our freedoms.
I often get the impression that some of our leaders actually revel in our descent into mediocrity, that our refusal to adopt excellence as our sole benchmark is regarded as a noble and revolutionary defiance of the capitalist West and its self-righteous disapproval of corruption, economic profligacy and bad governance.
There seems to be a conviction that South Africa has the space to snub the Western democracies and their standards at every turn, because the regimes of Russia, Cuba and China will always somehow come to our rescue.
But the most damaged victims of this cult of mediocrity are not the historical colonialists and the capitalists, but the homeless, unemployed and hungry whose welfare we claim to champion. Unless we develop a greater humility in the face of our national problems and begin to realise that we need the material assistance of the outside world far more than it needs our pontificating advice, we shall never attain that prosperity, economic growth and social stability that are essential if we are to educate our young, provide them with jobs and lift them out of generations of poverty.
Too often, South Africa offers the impression of living in a hermetically sealed universe in which the lessons of history, the experience of others and the desirable standards of a liberal society do not apply.
Facile clichés used to conceal continuing failure
Nor is it good enough to fall back on words and slogans that have been stripped of all meaning and reduced to facile clichés by over-use or wilful abuse. Often they are used not to illuminate, educate and guide, but to conceal our continuing failure to replace the national pastime of braggadocio with the difficult, but necessary, sacrifices and compromises that will be necessary to build a better society for all our citizens.
We have failed dismally to match the expectations (including our own) of those who wished us well in 1994. If we are to regain that high opinion, we simply have to rediscover that South Africa desperately needs the well–meant guidance, centuries-old experience and practical support of the outside world, that we are not an exceptional people able to survive solely on a diet of exaggerated and smug self-regard, and that our redemption lies in an acknowledgement of our dignified ordinariness.
For as long as we allow our own narcissism and obsession with self-aggrandisement to dominate our relationship with the global community and to distort our image of ourselves, we shall deny our country the opportunity to turn away from our present path and embark anew on a course that takes account of what we really are, and not what our wild imaginings wish us to be.
Icarus, intoxicated by what he believed was his successful defiance of gravity and reason, soared too close to the sun which, predictably, melted the wax that affixed the feathers to his arms. By the time he realised that he was flapping only his bare arms, he had tumbled to his death in the ocean below, the victim of his own unrealistic fantasies.
South Africa hovers only metres above its own Icarian Sea, but unlike him, we have the skills, the imagination and the resourcefulness to arrest our decline into failure. We dare not squander what may be our last chance to emerge from the darkness of our deluded faith in our exceptionalism.
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* This guest post is from Tamra Capstick-Dale, managing director of Corporate Image. Opinions expressed are her own.
