Igbos are an achievement oriented people. They tend to admire and respect the person who appears successful and disrespect and ignore the person who appears to be a failure.

In his book, Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe shows us how the Igbos disrespected Okonkwo’s father because he was not materially successful. He was an artist and enjoyed music and playing. He was not motivated by money and high social status. (That is, he was a healthy person.)  Because he was not financially successful he was ignored by his people; he was seen as a never do well, and a social nobody by his achievement oriented Igbo people. On the other hand, Okonkwo desired to be accepted as a very important person by his Igbo people. Therefore, he worked hard and became financially successful.  To do so, he had to suppress the soft side of him, his artistic side. Because he was successful, Okonkwo was admired by his achievement oriented Igbo people. Okonkwo developed his hard side and permitted his soft side to atrophy. In psychological language, Okonkwo developed a narcissistic cum paranoid character structure. (He was narcissistic because he was consumed by the desire to obtain social admiration and prestige and to be considered special; he was paranoid because he lived in fear, perpetually afraid that other people would do bad things to him. The man was perpetually stressed, rigid and inflexible and did not know a moment of joy in his neurotic existence.)

The larger point made by Achebe is that a society that is success and achievement oriented and suppresses artistic qualities in its people is likely to produce character disordered, status seeking unhappy persons.

In contemporary Nigeria, Igbos pursuit of achievement and disregard for failing persons means that they do not have love for real human beings; they do not love themselves, and they do not love other people.  They are like Americans: they flock to winners and ignore losers. Like Americans, emotionally, they are immature and childish. The white American is probably the most childish human being there is on planet earth.

Mature persons understand the primacy of love and love/accept both the successful and unsuccessful person.  Carl Rogers teaches us that mature, healthy and happy persons accept all human beings in an unconditionally positive manner and in the process contribute to the making of healthy, happy persons. On the other hand, neurotic persons posit idealized conditions that must be met before they accept themselves and other people. They use their minds to construct ideals and posit those as standards that people must live up to before they are accepted. In the process, conditionally accepting neurotics produce neurotic people, people who do not accept themselves as they are, people who wait until they are perfect before they would accept themselves.  Since no human being ever becomes perfect, people who do not accept themselves until they are perfect are people who are perpetually unhappy. A person must accept himself as he is, imperfect and all, to be happy and contented.

Igbo society is perhaps the most neurotic society on planet earth; it accepts only successful persons and rejects those it considers failures; in the process it produces massive neurotics. Upon seeing you, the average Igbo man compulsively checks you out; evaluates you, and if he thinks that you are successful, whatever that means, he admires you, and pragmatically wants to be close to you, so as to use you to become successful. But if he thinks that you are a failure, whatever that is, he disrespects and avoids you. He actually thinks that such opportunistic behavior is normal; he does not know that it is pathological, neurotic. He does not know that what constitutes healthy behavior is to accept all people as they are, without any pre-conditions that they ought to live up to before you accept them.

This neurotic approach to human beings is magnified in Igbo families. We just read of a weird situation where an Igbo professor at an American university actually put hot pepper into his child’s penis, all in a misguided effort to make him succeed.  Actually, a lot more is going on here: the man is probably a pedophile and wanted to have an incestuous relation with his son. Why would he be touching his child’s penis if his motivation was not perverted sex?  He is probably a pedophile who denied his disorder and projected it into doing the dastardly thing he did.

In Igbo society, children are judged good or bad and those who live up to what their parents consider achieving behaviors are accepted and others are either ignored or rejected. Karen Horney, in her seminal book, Neurosis and Human Growth, teaches us that neurosis emanates from child socializations where parents expect their children to meet certain ideal standards before they are accepted. All children want to be accepted by their parents. Intuitively, children know that their lives depend on their significant others providing for them. No child under age twelve can survive by his own efforts. Because they rely on adults to survive, children would do any thing to please the adults in their lives, including denying their real selves and pretending to be ideal selves, if the adults in their lives insist on accepting ideal selves.

If parents insist only in accepting children when they meet certain conditions, children would use their minds to invent certain idealistic mental constructs of who they want to become and pretend to be them and present them to other people to accept. In doing so, they experience neurotic anxiety when they do not meet those mental constructs.  The neurotic lives with free floating anxiety because he is always trying to become a perfect person and is afraid of being his real self.

A normal person behaves in accordance with his real self; a neurotic person behaves in accordance with his ideal self, an imaginary, fictional superior self that does not exist in fact.  Indeed, well adjusted neurotics take pride in being their ideal selves and boast that they are their ideal selves.

Generally, Igbos are boastful; they are always boasting about their ideal selves. Their real selves are like every one else real self, imperfect; but they dissociate from their real selves, indeed, are ashamed of it.

Those who do not love themselves and their fellow human beings are unhealthy persons, even if they seem materially successful. The definition of mental health is the ability to love. Igbos, like white Americans, are unhealthy; both are at the lowest level in spiritual evolution.

They are in need of radical change. They need to learn what matters most in life: love, and begin loving themselves and loving all people.

SPIRIT VERSUS EGO

In their true essence, human beings are love. Why so?  It is because human beings are the children of God.

God is love and his children are love. God’s children decided to experience the opposite of love and separated from love and seem to live in an unloving place, our world. The separated self housed in body is the ego self. The ego self is always a false self, but some ego selves approximate our true spirit self. An ego used to love other egos approximates our true spirit selves; when we love we are at the metaphoric gate of heaven; loving persons are near our heavenly home, but not in it, for to be in it we must be egoless and formless. In their empirical world there is absence of love and they, as Buddha tells us, suffer. To live as a human being is to suffer. Our suffering is due to the lack of love in our lives.

In the world, achievement oriented persons substitute specialness and superiority for love.  They seek ego importance and respect; and respect folks who seem successful and disrespect those who seem like failures in life. In doing so, they live in psychological and social pain.

To live in the absence of love is to live in darkness. Igbos live in the absence of love hence live in darkness and in psychological pain.

They are to be pitied. As Buddha observed, we must have compassion for all human beings and not blame them. You should not blame a person living in pain, albeit self induced pain. As long as human beings seek ego goals, that is, worth based on human achievement, not in unconditional positive acceptance of each other, they must live in pain.

(I am using Igbos to illustrate my points; you can substitute your own society for Igbos, if you think that it is conditional in accepting people; I delimit my analysis to the society I know best, Igbo society; a society I feel motivated to help emancipate from the great psychological pain its people live under. The saddest part of it all is that Igbos do not consciously know in how much pain they live in. They in fact pretend to be happy. Nevertheless they attempt to mitigate their tremendous psychological pain by engaging in childish behaviors, such as putting other people down, imanjakiri, Iko okwu.  In doing so, they obviate their pain but not eradicate it.  What would eradicate their pain is for them to love those they seem to take sadistic pleasure in verbally abusing and to love themselves.)

One must gradually teach these benighted people what matters most in life, love, not their pursuit of appearances of success.

In the here and now, their achievement orientation leads to their apparent success. It is doubtful that any other human society is more successful than Igbo society. They have only had one hundred years of encounter with Western civilization (1902-2006) and are today found competing in the best of Western institutions. But their apparent success has its downside: their inability to love themselves and other persons.

If you expect an Igbo man to love you, you had better think twice; in fact, you might as well forget it. He is more likely to use you, and if it is possible, sell you, particularly if in doing so he obtains money with which he seems to be a very important person.  In the here and now, he would not accept you unless you are a very successful person. This means that he would damage your self esteem. Since you need positive self esteem to live, it is probably best that you avoid the man who would damage your self esteem by always asking you to become a successful person, as his underdeveloped mind construes success to be (real success is the ability to love).

These people are motivated by only one thing: to seem very important persons in other people’s eyes, to gratify their ego narcissism and achieving the material accoutrements of success.

The goal is for Igbos to change their psychological selves and their society and still retain aspects of their achievement orientation. It is for them to begin to accept their real selves and stop trying to become their idealized selves.

The ideal self is a mental construct; it is not real; it is a fiction and no matter what folks do would never come into being.  The ideal cannot replace the real self and its real world.  Pursuit of the ideal self and its ideal world merely gives folks anxiety, and since it cannot be achieved it is giving ones self anxiety for nothing.

To be healthy and happy folks must desist from attempting to become neurotic ideal selves and relax into being their God created real selves.

DISCUSSION

By way of general discussion, it should be noted that all over the world, primitive man’s behavior is shaped by his awareness that existentially he has no worth and value, that life in body is pointless, purposeless and meaningless.  Aware of existential nothingness, he juxtaposes an ideal ego and pursues it, believing that if he becomes that important ego that somehow he would wipe off his existential nothingness. Life on earth is largely "make belief"; we know that we are nothing and pretend to be something important. Human life is characterized by awareness of human nothingness and denial of that fact, dissociation from it and efforts to seem to have a worthwhile life. (We generally project our worthlessness out, to other people; seeing other people as worthless while seeing ourselves as worthwhile; that is, seeing them as one sees ones denied real self.)

The pursuit of ego importance serves a purpose for primitive man. One must understand the dynamics of what is going on and not blame him.

Ultimately, all human beings have to accept the fact that existence as an ego housed in body is pointless. When this reality is accepted, folks then ask whether there is worth in life and where that real worth is to be found.

There is worth in Spirit, in God. In God we have absolute worth, but in ego, separation from God, we are worthless.

For our present purposes, primitive human beings do not know where worth lies and seek it in the wrong place: egoism and social success. Civilized persons are persons who love themselves and other people in an unconditionally positive manner, persons who have returned to God, their real self and real home.

Please note that my conception of God is not rooted in Judeo-Christian or any other Semitic religion, but a definition that is self evidently true. God is the whole and we are his parts. The whole and parts are the same and equal. The whole and parts are joined, connected and unified. Where the whole ends and its parts begin is no where. The whole is in the parts and the parts are in the whole.

Only the non-material can join. Our true self is non-material, spirit. God is infinite spirits, unified spirit; each of us is a part of that infinite spirit. This aspect of us, of course, is not known to our temporal minds. In the temporal universe, we forget our true self and believe in a false self, the separated ego housed in bodies.

The goal before us is for us to rediscover our true spirit self. Good religion and or spiritual psychology enable us to find our way back to our true self and our true home, unified spirit.

*This essay appears critical of Igbos, but this is constructive criticism; it is meant to help Igbos. To love is to help. Please note the distinction between hatred and love; hate desecrates, love heals. I am a healer.  I write out of love, not hate for any one. My goal is to heal folks. To love is to be healed. To not love is to be sick. A healed mind knows only love. Love is union. A loving person is in union with all creation and its creator, God. In unified spirit state we are finally peaceful and happy. We do not have to die before we attain the gifts of God: peace and happiness; we can attain them now, by loving the next person we see. Since to bear grievance against those who wronged us is to separate from them, we must forgive all those who wronged us. In forgiveness we return to the presence of love, which is peace and happiness.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

November 28, 2006

Robot  Villager

# 1 Igbos are an achievement oriented people. They tend to admire and respect the person who appears ...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 30.11.2006 18:47

Exxcuzme  Villager

# 2 Thanks for making this piece short,however, this same point has been made in several of your past article. Posted by Exxcuzme| 30.11.2006 21:10

Hamattan  Villager

# 3 I will like to remind this writer that though Okonkwo is the main character of Achebe's things fall apart, his character in the story represents an attribute found in any individual. We find Okonkwo types among Igbo people, Yoruba people, Effiks, Nupes, Ibibios, etc. We find his type among Americans, Russians, Europeans and so on. In the same vain Respect for success and scorn for failure is a universal thing, it is not found only among the Igbo people. Posted by Hamattan| 01.12.2006 04:58

Abamieda Wanderer  Villager

# 4 “ They are like Americans: they flock to winners and ignore losers. Like Americans, emotionally, they are immature and childish. The white American is probably the most childish human being there is on planet earth. Mature persons understand the primacy of love and love/accept both the successful and unsuccessful person. Carl Rogers teaches us that mature, healthy and happy persons accept all human beings in an unconditionally positive manner and in the process contribute to the making of healthy, happy persons. On the other hand, neurotic persons posit idealized conditions that must be met before they accept themselves and other people. They use their minds to construct ideals and posit those as standards that people must live up to before they are accepted. In the process, conditionally accepting neurotics produce neurotic people, people who do not accept themselves as they are, people who wait until they are perfect before they would accept themselves. Since no human being ever becomes perfect, people who do not accept themselves until they are perfect are people who are perpetually unhappy. A person must accept himself as he is, imperfect and all, to be happy and contented. Igbo society is perhaps the most neurotic society on planet earth; it accepts only successful persons and rejects those it considers failures; in the process it produces massive neurotics. Upon seeing you, the average Igbo man compulsively checks you out; evaluates you, and if he thinks that you are successful, whatever that means, he admires you, and pragmatically wants to be close to you, so as to use you to become successful. But if he thinks that you are a failure, whatever that is, he disrespects and avoids you. He actually thinks that such opportunistic behavior is normal; he does not know that it is pathological, neurotic. He does not know that what constitutes healthy behavior is to accept all people as they are, without any pre-conditions that they ought to live up to before you accept them.” ====================================================== Thomas, Let me be one of the people to say thank you for making this short and straight to the point. I know sometimes that you have been called different type of names on NVS but damn! you are just spot on and sometimes it is scary. I have always thought that maturity and being a good person is accepting people regardless of their shortcomings in all life's achievements be it education or financial success. I think to summarize the whole thing; some of us are just not good people. While I agree with your analysis and I know that you are talking about the Igbos because you are closer to them than any other Nigerian tribes, I am going to re-iterate again that this problem not only applies to the Igbo people alone. I am Yoruba and I swear to you that I see some of my so called friends, relatives, cousins, aunts, uncles, in-laws, church member prayer warriors and pastors in your Igbo people analysis. One thing you should know about this issue is that many of us Nigerians do not like to talk about mature, important and intelligent conversations like this; sure we know that this is the Cancer that is destroying our collective success as a society, Africans, Nigerians, Yoruba, Igbos , Hausa, Itshekiris, Ijaws…….et all why? because some of us are just too afraid that if we look and I mean really look into the mirror we might just clearly see the person you have described in your article. I’ll tell you something; until we can collectively sit down and discuss demons like this, our successes in life will always be individualistic while our homeland and Africa as a whole disintegrates. What do you think is behind the political instability of all African nations? Expecting to read more from you Thomas. Shikena, Abamieda Posted by Abamieda Wanderer| 01.12.2006 10:46

Auspicious  Villager

# 5 “ They are like Americans: they flock to winners and ignore losers. Like Americans, emotionally, they are immature and childish. The white American is probably the most childish human being there is on planet earth." Abamieda Wanderer: I wonder what you make of the comments made by the author in quotes above. Does it not bother you that a man would make blanket aspersions of whole peoples just like that? I mean, only a Perfect Being who knows the thinking and orientation of EVERY peoples on planet Earth, in my opinion, is qualified to make such sweeping generalizations of any people or society. What more, the author is just plain wrong about Americans there. In the America some of us know, the poor are closer to being treated equally as the rich than in almost any other society - if we try and ignore the policies of specific hypocritical conservative governments like that of George Walker Bush. I think I know what the author may be trying to say, but his presentation is just so..arrogant and condemning in that sweeping sense. It makes one uncomfortable to agree with some truths in his words. He needs to tone down his absolute generalizations. "The white American is probably the most childish human being on planet earth"? Even the word "probably" is not enough to neutralize the corrosive generalization in that statement. No wonder then that his people find it difficult to accept some of the potent truths he points out about them. Auspicious. Posted by Auspicious| 01.12.2006 11:29

Nkire  Villager

# 6 Mazi Osuji: Last week or is it early this week you wrote about the uncivilized nature of the African and how this phenomena explains his way of life currently. The write-up did not differentiate between sub-cultures within Africa. On this current write-up of yours, you have focused on the Igbo. My question to you is: how can you reconcile your psycho-analytics of the Igbo as summarized herein and your overall conclusion that Africans are uncivilized with all the inherent and attendant manifestations? If Africans are uncivilized, should the attributes of such uncivilized behaviors not manifest on the Igbo? Are Igbos not Africans or are you suggesting that though Africans are uncivilized, Igbos are the most uncivilized? If Igbos, in your esteemed analysis is the most uncivilized, which group is most likely to wake up from the slumber – the Igbos or the rest of Africa w/o the Igbo, when and how? My brother these are softball questions for you, please oblige us with an answer. Nkire Posted by Nkire| 01.12.2006 11:45

Abamieda Wanderer  Villager

# 7 Auspy My brother, Of Course, you know that I do not subscribe to generalizations of characters, people and or race. If you remember in my reply; I said that sometimes Thomas is just scary period! His scary thoughts sometimes overshadow some of his important and cogent assertions. Of course I do not believe Thomas thinks this way of all the Igbo and white people (but I could be wrong) and neither do I; I just wanted him to know that there are good and bad people amongst us all, these are non-discriminating traits. Auspy, you and I and indeed Thomas (I guess) know that some white people are doing more positive things for Africans better than our so called African big men. I just think some of his analysis and questions deserves to be looked at properly and the junk sent to where they belong; yes, you guess right. Shikena, Abamieda Posted by Abamieda Wanderer| 01.12.2006 12:06

Auspicious  Villager

# 8 =Abamieda Wanderer;140464>Auspy My brother, Of Course, you know that I do not subscribe to generalizations of characters, people and or race. If you remember in my reply; I said that sometimes Thomas is just scary period! His scary thoughts sometimes overshadow some of his important and cogent assertions. Of course I do not believe Thomas thinks this way of all the Igbo and white people (but I could be wrong) and neither do I; I just wanted him to know that there are good and bad people amongst us all, these are non-discriminating traits. Auspy, you and I and indeed Thomas (I guess) know that some white people are doing more positive things for Africans better than our so called African big men. I just think some of his analysis and questions deserves to be looked at properly and the junk sent to where they belong; yes, you guess right. Shikena, Abamieda Abami Eda fun ra e! Scary he is, but he speaks 'some' truths. You are right there. Plus, it is also true that a good number of western individuals and institutions are doing more for us Africans today than many Africans ever did for themselves. Let somebody prove 'us' wrong there.. Auspicious. Posted by Auspicious| 01.12.2006 12:15

GirlWifanAttitude  Villager

# 9 Mr. Osuji what do you have against Igbos? Though your name sounds Igbo I don’t think you’re one, or you must have experienced something sinister and insidious from the hands of the Igbo community you grew up around at some point in your life to make you attack these people so. As an Igbo daughter and one that has been previously offended and is currently offended by all your diatribes and jibes against the Igbo people, I hope you don’t mind my asking you, are you an “Osu”? Where you and yours ostracized and maltreated by your Igbo community when you were growing up? If any of this is the case and you’re harboring all this buried hatred and ill feelings “Nwanne m ndo o!” forgive for the love of God. Let bygones be bygones and let peace reign before your hatred turns you into one that promotes terrorism with his pen, or should I say keyboard against the Igbos. How many lives again did the New York World Trade center take, because of preachings of hatred and sneers like this? All these noise about Igbo people, I don’t understand, all I know is that I love these people and everything about them, this is not to say I have anything against any other Nigerian ethnic group mind you, and if I am permitted to choose again to come back to a people, I will not mind one bit coming back as an Igbo person. You want to emancipate them from their great psychological pain my foot, and please do not even try and bring the batty professor in Houston into this baseless argument to justify your case. Like I have said before somewhere, every society or group have their black sheep, which does not mean they don’t have good people that are doing right, and that Houston professor is a useless person not fit to be called a man and a father, talkless of an Igbo man. Constructive criticism ni, constructive criticism ko, abeg take your constructive criticism and generalization and go “Aturu na eme umu nne ya ihere”. Posted by GirlWifanAttitude| 01.12.2006 13:34

Fjord  Villager

# 10 There's more to clear thinking than shocking speech. Osuji makes his points by sounding "shocking", usually either by making sweeping generalizations (thus invalidating his points), or seeking specificity when his points applies to a much wider spread of people (thus also invalidating his points). The former Osuji does in his many previous installments, the latter he does in this one. Here, Osuji softens his message by copiously invoking God, and adding a caveat declaring his intentions. Pray, what's written here could be adapted to any society; an ethnic group may have elevated some elitist and/or materialistic outlook on life to an art form, but it's clear such can be found in most societies. For example, we read: Igbo society is perhaps the most neurotic society on planet earth … This is at best a display of gross ignorance with the attempt to shock and elicit harsh responses transparent. It is words like this that nullifies Osuji's nonsensical "apply this to any other society as you wish" statement at the end of the article: those other societies can't be "perhaps the most neurotic society on planet earth today". Again, we read: .... an Igbo professor at an American university actually put hot pepper into his child’s penis, all in a misguided effort to make him succeed... the man is probably a pedophile and wanted to have an incestuous relation with his son. Why would he be touching his child’s penis if his motivation was not perverted sex? He is probably a pedophile who denied his disorder and projected it into doing the dastardly thing he did… Now, this is gross speculation bordering on professional irresponsibility. Agreed, the professor may have some deep-seated psychological issues; let's suppose, even, that he may have haboured pedophile thoughts; the dividing line between penile chili treatment and teenage penile fetish may be thin, but is there any credibility to Osuji's speculation? . Posted by Fjord| 01.12.2006 14:37

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