How institutional loyalty and the desire to avoid responsibility can undermine moral judgment.
Aaron Gono
As I was noticing the Masvingo Rural District Council destroying structures and houses at Nemamwa Growth Point, I only took a long breath inside and outside.
That was the only antidote, the full council meeting reached at. “Destroy this structures and they won’t get any reprieve from anywhere. We are the champions.’ That conscience is what the heading of article will try to analyse.
The heading above was derived from the “PHILOSOPHY ARCHIVES” and much of what the writer was putting into practice was copied from Hannah Arendt (23/10/26).
“No one has the right to obey.” – Hannah Arendt (1961- Jerusalem Court at the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Nazi war criminals were notorious for seeking sympathy from prosecutors by simply defending themselves as “simply following orders.” And she found him guilty of “thoughtlessness.”
She later explained what she meant by thinking. It is not a technical skill but an internal conversation, what Socrates called the dialogue between “me and myself.” To think is to ask, before acting:
Can I live with this? Whom am I if I do it?”
That conscience has left many public office bearers in this country, from the police, to politicians, church leaders, medical practitioners etc. Everything is being commodified, getting a birth, passport, entry into nursing school, army, police, etc, must be greased. No wonder we have officers who lean on walls during duty, drinking alcohol and chewing gum in uniform.
The last weeks we had turbulence coming from Gutu District Rural Council accused by 4.2 Infantry Battalion (Chinemukutu) of Gutu, accusing it of giving stands on its shooting range, near Chatsworth township. The area is a wetland, and I asked myself “what sort of settlement is this council trying to establish in that wilderness? The area is only good for tobacco farming and cattle ranching. But the whole Gutu councilors and its engineer agreed to put up a settlement there.
Luck enough the alert military commanders at Chinemukutu didn’t want people to lose more on a dead donkey. They made noise. And that’s what we expect from leaders. “They didn’t obey, they didn’t stop thinking,” as our councilors always do. That is what Arendt call ” bureaucracy:
“the rule of Nobody”
Each person handles a small piece. The one who signs the form didn’t make the policy. The one who made the policy was following directives. The one who gave the directive was responding to circumstances. Ask who is responsible, and the answer drifts away like smoke. Everyone is a cog and cogs don’t have conscience.”
The council give people stands in wetlands or undesignated areas, and next they come destroying those structures. They don’t prosecute people who give land to those people. Good example is an area in Chitungwiza that separates Zengeza 3 and 4. It is a wetland, where we drank water when we were growing up in Zengeza 3. The water was ever potable, cold and quenched our thirsty. Now it has houses that submerge during the rainy season.
Churches and industries are built in wetlands under our watch in Chitungwiza. Who is fooling who? Next time you hire yellow machines to destroy those buildings. Nemamwa in Masvingo Rural, which is always trending annually, is facing the hammer from yellow machines. These people were given those stands under dubious ‘ house cooperatives.” You saw people erecting those structures, you didn’t stop them, because you were somehow benefitting from the proceeds of crime.
“Everyone is a cog, and cogs do not have conscience.” Milgram identified what he called the agentic state: when we see ourselves as instruments carrying out another’s wishes, we stop feeling responsible for the results.
“The disappearance of a sense of responsibility,” he wrote,” is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority. “And also Orwell saw the trick is his essay Politics and the English language, where he observed that political language:
“is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. “
We are destroying or moving this so and so, so that our cities look smart. Who allowed “shanty towns” in the first place? Someone or others were benefitting from it. Hijacking of public ablution facilities at Mbare Musika, by gangs. Closing of Rufaro beer outlets, was caused by an unstoppable issuances of bottle stores at every corner by the city fathers. The public is not blind but it lacks the know how of stopping building of parks in wetlands.
Upton Sinclair captured the incentive problem bluntly: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” How can our councilors understand the damage they are doing to our wetlands and putting ghost settlements in secluded areas “when their salaries depend upon their not understanding it? The moment they are promised their allowances and Germany sedans, everything will be cast in stone.
By destroying those structures “they are simply doing their jobs. No conscience and no guilty minds.
Group think is what makes the current counilorships in the country help destroy our country. They think saying “no” to offer bottle stores and filling stations licences in hundreds will leave them out of the grave train. That is “where obedience replaces conscience.” That sense of being left out and not belonging is a cancer in our cities and rural councils.
“Until the philosophy
Which hold one race superior
And another inferior
Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned…….”
