A couple of weeks ago, Dr Varma Deyalsingh, secretary of the psychiatrists' association, was reported in the T&T Guardian as blaming management for driving workers to despair, hopelessness, sadness and what not. Anyone who's ever worked in a government office, or tried to access any government service, will know exactly what he means.
Madness is one of the legacies of our postcolonial condition. UWI's Prof Gerard Hutchinson has done research on this which establishes that the proportion of Caribbean immigrants with mental problems was several times more (per capita) than the native population of the UK.
The T&T Guardian (August 14, 1968), reported British psychiatrists' noticing this rise in mental illness among West Indian immigrants to the UK. Causes included poor living conditions, unstable parents, too-large families, and the general hostility which pervaded their lives.
Clearly, this remains the fate of many Trinidadians in Trinidad today, if we are less than astute in identifying the consequences. This is at least part of the reason for the ongoing collapse of civic life in the brutishness on the roads, in schools, and public places and Parliament.
But it's only part of the insanity equation. There's another reason why conditions that create craziness persist, and why the more incomes rise, and the visible signs of progress abound, chaos increases. The reason is the dominance of the psychopathic or sociopathic personality in the country's institutions.
The British and American ambassadors posted here around independence, Norman Costar and Edward Moline, noted the father of the nation, Eric Williams's mania and volatility. So did many of his colleagues, like Errol Mahabir and Patrick Solomon, and many non-PNMites, who compared him to Hitler. This isn't mauvais langue. He's long gone, but Williams's personality lives on in every government clerk and guard who routinely uses his power to frustrate you.
But Trini sociopathy didn't start there. LE Brathwaite's remarkable 1953 study, Social Stratification in Trinidad, identified the middle-class sociopathic personality. He was a compulsive, sadistic individualist; selfish, obsessed with his own advancement, contemptuous of the weak. Vidia Naipaul's Mimic Men showed this personality in motion. And Caribbean post-independence politics provided endless real-life simulations.
The dominance and success of the personality isn't local. In an interesting new book, Confessions of a Sociopath, ME Thomas (a pseudonym), a US lawyer and law professor, ascribes her success in life to being a sociopath (see SociopathWorld.com). Her sociopathy urges manifested in a hatred of people who disagreed with her, being vindictive and exacting revenge on them, and others, and generally lying, scheming, and manipulating people and circumstances for her own advantage.
If this sounds too familiar, sociopathy isn't a static condition. There are varying degrees, and many successful people have a few of its traits. The need to dominate, ruthlessness, and an overriding urge to succeed are traits of successful politicians, doctors, soldiers and many professionals, like journalists.
But the person on the extreme end of the spectrum is distinct from the merely super-ambitious. Anyone who's worked in the media in T&T in the last 20 years could name this person. And not just in the media. In almost every industry I've worked in–education, the civil service, the private sector–the personality dominates, and is responsible for the epic failures of all those institutions.
The reason sociopaths can wreak this havoc has to do with what separates a civilised society from ours: the absence of real culture which restrains and channels sociopathic urges. Sociopaths abroad in law, politics, finance, and the protective services are constrained by rigid rules and customs, and mostly function effectively. Here, give 'em some power, they go buck wild.
The problem here is that, despite all the crazed screaming about local "tradition" and "cult-yere," there is really no culture. And the refusal to acknowledge this ensures there will be none anytime soon to restrain the brutishness of our collective nature. From the person who opens a bar or an illegal business and destroys the mental life of a residential neighbourhood; insane drivers; those who ignore environmental laws and destroy watersheds for quarrying–all the way to the person who kills someone to settle a score, large or small.
These are all manifestations of the sociopathic urge, unconstrained by law or culture.In fact, you could say T&T now constitutes a perfect environment for sociopaths to thrive and flourish. This owes much to the Carnival, whose act of "masking" is celebrated as a good thing.
Wrong. Masking (according to Philip Zimbardo et al) allows the creation of malevolent personalities which enable people to do things they wouldn't do in real life–violence, murder, unprotected sex, rape. Insist that this is your national culture, and look around you for the consequences.
The remarkable thing about T&T is that even when confronted with these facts, and evidence, the country (or a very vocal part of it) wrings itself into contortions to find justifications for its self-destruction (another trait of the psychopath). And things have got so bad, the self-awareness that recognises sociopathy as something bad, rather than business as usual, is virtually absent from our culture. Look at the Government. Look at the Opposition. The cops. The EMA.
It's not that we're all sociopaths. But a small number of brutes can ruin a whole country because they're devious and brutish in ways the rest can't fathom.In advanced countries, the better urges are recognised and promoted, and there is an ongoing dialogue between right and wrong, which acts as a corrective. The absence of this native moral machinery is what Froude and Trollope meant when they came here and saw "no people in the true sense of the word." And we keep proving them right.