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(Why do Africans do poorly at IQ tests?)
THE ROLE OF FEAR IN AFRICANS POOR PERFORMANCE ON IQ TESTS
(First daft, your opinion desired before a redraft of this paper for print media)
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the role of negative affects, such as fear, anger, pride, guilt, shame and sadness, in the purported low performance of African persons in Western designed intelligence tests and other standardized tests. It contends that one thousand years of living under slave conditions probably induced enormous fear in Africans and that that fear affects how well they do in intellectual activities. The hypothesis is presented for heuristic research. However, the author points out that there is settled evidence that anxiety affects students’ learning, thus, if we extrapolate from that empirically demonstrated fact we can reasonably conclude that fear negatively affects those who lived in tremendous fear for over one thousand years, and may well account for the so-called fifteen points difference in black and white scores on IQ tests.
It is now, more or less, taken for granted that on Standard IQ tests, such as the WAIS, WISC and Stanford Binet, black folk score, on the average, fifteen points below white folk (the average for blacks is 85; the average for whites is 100) and that whites score below Asians. This test result pattern is also replicated in how the three so-called races score on Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) and, indeed, in performance at schools. (Binet, 1905)
A lot has been written on why this is the case. Some attribute it to genetic factors and others to cultural (learning) factors. (Terman, 1960)
The issue, however, is not settled. Where there is ignorance speculations abound. Out of ignorance, apparently, pseudo educated persons like the authors of the Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994) make sweeping generalizations that all blacks are genetically inferior to all whites. One would expect Harvard professors to have, at least, taken basic mathematics and elementary logic and, therefore, understood that you cannot say that all animals have four legs if some have two legs. David Hume (1748) taught us that if you can find one exception to a situation you cannot make a categorical statement about it. There are many black persons who score in the superior range of intelligence tests (above 132); therefore, it is tautological to say that all blacks are not intelligent.
Nevertheless, until the fact that there is a fifteen point difference in the average score of blacks and whites is adequately explained many white persons are tempted to assume that they are superior to black folk; and as long as white folk feel that they are superior to black folk there will be tension and conflict between the two races.
The feeling of racial superiority, as in the feeling of individual superiority to other individuals, as Alfred Adler (2003) pointed out, is largely compensatory over felt underlying sense of inferiority.
It is very clear that what has muted Arthur Jensen’s (1998) and William Shockley’s contention that blacks are inferior to whites is the fact that Asians score higher than whites, by as many points as whites score above blacks. (Arrow, 2000) If it were not the case many white racists would have been running around telling us that whites are superior to blacks. Now, were they to say so, by logical necessity they must also say that Asians are superior to whites. To say that Asians are superior to whites, obviously, is unacceptable to whites’ proud egos.
Racist whites are prevailed upon to explain why Asians score higher than whites (in tests designed by whites). Naturally, they attribute it to Asians more studiousness and calming culture. (
Anderson
, 1992)
Hindu and Buddhist culture are rational, as opposed to the poetic nature of the Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that the West embraced.
If culture explains the differences between whites and Asians, logic tells us that culture also must explain the differences between whites and blacks.
Racists are seeking genetic explanation (Karlsson, 1991) to reinforce their preconceptions and presuppositions that they are a superior race. Unfortunately for them, genetics cannot be used to explain broad categories but individual differences. Obviously, there are genetic differences between individuals but not between the so-called races. In fact, the genetic difference between one black person and another black person may be more than the genetic difference between a black person and a white person! Whatever your group definition is, it can be shown that many black persons are more like white persons than other black persons and that many white persons are more like black persons than white persons.
There can be no broad genetic differentiation of the so-called races because all of them are the same. In fact, strictly speaking, it is a misnomer to talk about the so-called different races of mankind, for all of them are one race; they all originated in Africa and spread out of Africa, and different environments made slight changes in their superficial appearances but not their essence (such as their color, wooly or straight hair, pointed or broad nose etc).
A species of animals are those animals that can interbreed. The races of mankind have not evolved so differently that they could no longer interbreed; therefore, they remain one species. Human beings are animals with the capacity to think and understand their world and themselves, hence Homo sapiens.
It should be pointed out that it is misguided feelings of superiority that lead to the collapse of empires. How? Persons in ruling empires generally fancy themselves superior to those they rule; they could not believe that those they had considered barbarians and unintelligent could destroy their empire. Romans considered their German neighbors uncivilized and could not imagine how those supposed barbarians who did not take a bath in a whole year hence smelled awfully could destroy their empire. Yet it was the Germans that toppled the
Roman Empire
and are ruling the extant world. (See Gibbon, 1993)
The hitherto considered barbarian Germanic race now considers Africans uncivilized and cannot imagine how Africans can possibly topple their seeming impregnable empire. But if history is constant, and it is, the uncivilized topple the so-called civilized, black folk probably would inherit the declining Germanic civilization of
North America
.
We need to understand why those who are ruled by others tend to perform poorly at certain examinations. Germans were considered stupid by Romans, for they seemed unable to do any intellectual work, they were considered only fit for slave labor. At the moment white racists consider Africans stupid and only fit for slave labor.
In this paper, I posit a heuristic hypothesis on why African persons, in
Africa
and in the Diaspora, tend to score poorly at standardized examinations. The thesis is that fear is responsible for black folk low performance in standardized tests.
Those who live in tremendous fear, be they blacks or whites, tend to score lower than those who are relatively fearless.
All human beings live in fear; any one who does not live in fear must not be in our biological world. To be an animal, human beings included, one must live in fear.
Fear maintains animals in biological being; it is fear that alerts animals to danger and compels them to take defensive and protective measures hence stay alive in body.
In people the level of fear is relative; some individual human beings live in more fear than others. The level of fear in people could be due to biological and or social factors; some are born with propensity to more fear response than other persons. Social factors can increase the level of fear in human beings. (Adler, 2003)
For over one thousand years (900-1900 to Arabs; 1500-1900 to Europeans) Africans were sold into slavery. This Slave culture generated enormous fear in Africans.
For one thousand or more years, Africans lived in fear of been captured and sold into slavery. As a result of this tremendous fear, many Africans developed aspects of paranoia; in fact it can be argued that some African societies have paranoid cultures and produce higher than normal rate of paranoid persons. (Meissner, 1994)
In the Americas Africans were slaves and slaves live in fear of been punished if they stepped out of line?
In contemporary
America
black folk are, more or less, still slaves; if they step out of line the American law and order authorities apprehend them, subject them to kangaroo courts and jail them. American jails are practically the second home of young African Americans.
Those subjected to the inhumane treatment, such as African Americans are subjected to, live in fear. (Marks, 1987) Those who live in fear do not do well in intellectual matters.
I am postulating that the so-called fifteen points’ difference between blacks and whites can be more than fully accounted for by the intense level of fear black folks live in the contemporary white controlled world.
To substantiate my postulation I point out that when Germans lived as slaves in
Rome
, they had relatively more fear than Romans and behaved like uncouth barbarians hence Romans saw them as incapable of intelligent work. Now we know that Germans are intelligent, indeed it is the same Germans that now tell us that Africans are not intelligent. (The Germanic race is inclusive of
Germany
,
France
,
England
,
Scandinavia
,
Spain
, northern
Italy
and
North America
.)
Just as Germans improved their performance when they freed themselves from the yoke of
Rome
, when African persons are no longer second class citizens hence live in less fear; they would perform as well as other races.
(Orientals tend to live in less fear because their Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist religions teach equanimity towards life; they tend to be less fearful hence are more able to perform intellectual activities than other races.)
Though an African, I have lived most of my adult life in
North America
. Two years ago I was thrown into the midst of Africans and had no choice but to observe their behaviors. Their lives seemed ruled by fear. Just about everything I saw them do was motivated by fear, though they did not know it.
The perception that their lives are ruled by fear led me to conclude that it is the fears that Africans lived in that has distorted their mental capabilities hence make them handicapped in grasping what to most other people seem simple enough tasks. I believe that fear is responsible for Africans apparent backwardness in intellectual activities and that when they over come their fears (through love, since love is the only antidote to fear) they would do as well as any one else.
LOVE
At present, Africans do not seem to know what love is; in fact, they do not even employ the term love in their every day speech; in two years of relating to them I did not hear an African mother tell her children that she loves them, I did not hear couples tell each other how much they love them. (For material on unconditional love see Rogers, 1947, Fromm, 1994)
To Africans, the word love seems associated with weakness. Africans seem only interested in what would seem tough stance on life; their idea of toughness is actually weakness since love is true courage. To love is to join the loved object. It is in union, in joined state, in love that human beings have power. Love is power and whatever is not love is weakness but Africans do not seem to know this existential reality.
Africans engage in bravadoes, in false acts of power. Apparently those living in slave societies could not afford to seem loving, soft, they had to seem tough, for the tough resisted apprehension and been sold into slavery.
Africans seem to understand only those behaviors that respond to underlying fear with seeming defiance, such as boastfulness. Such behaviors do not overcome fear but merely mask it. Only love overcomes fear.
Where there is love there is no fear; where there is fear there is no love.
I have a definition for primitive human beings: a human being is primitive to the extent that he does not live from love but from fear. Conversely, a human being is civilized to the extent that he lives from love and less from fear.
America
, like past primitive empires, such as
Rome
, is a fear based empire; people are controlled by fear and intimidation. Henceforth humanity is entering a new era, a civilization where people are persuaded by love and reason, not fear and intimidation. Love based civilization is the highest form of civilization.
FEAR
A lot has been written on fear. (Marks, 1987) However, for us to follow the thesis of this paper it is necessary to summary the nature of fear.
Fear is response to perceived danger. Apparently, nature built into the body of animal organisms a danger alerting mechanism. This signaling system is, generally, not under conscious control but is involuntary. The animal does not stop and say to itself: I am going to be fearful but just reacts with fear when endangered.
An animal perceives threat to its physical survival (in the case of human beings, also to its psychological survival) and reacts with fear, and that fear makes it do what it has to do to stay alive. Fear enables animals to defend and protect themselves so as to stay alive. Fear is a means of keeping animal organisms alive.
It goes like this: a weaker animal sees a stronger animal, say a sheep sees a lion, and feels fear, and runs away from it. Somehow the sheep knows that the lion could kill and eat it and runs away from it, so as to preserve its life.
That act of running away is mediated by complex biochemical and biophysical movements in the animal’s body. A full description of these physiological processes is beyond the scope of this paper, but suffice it to say that the animal’s body releases certain excitatory neurochemicals and neurotransmitters (such as adrenalin, norepinephrine) and those excite the animal to action, to fight or flight. The elicited chemicals excite the animal’s heart to pump blood faster and take it to all parts of the body; they excite the lungs to breathe faster and inhale oxygen quickly and exhale waste products like carbon dioxide quickly. Blood rushes oxygen and other nutrients, such as sugar, to the muscles enabling the muscles to do the job of running away from danger. The nervous system works faster sending information to the brain; the brain works fast retrieving information from its memory bank, deciding how to respond to the perceived threat, and such information is feedback to the animal’s muscles and they are told what to do: to stop and fight back or to run away.
Fear’s fight-flight response is dependent on the animal’s past history; if the animal has a history of successfully coping with similar threats it would probably stop and fight back but if not it would probably run away. The objective of fight or flight response is for the animal organism to do whatever enables it to survive.
Nature, apparently, wants the animal to survive at all costs and live to see another day (survive for what, nature does not make clear, animals just have inbuilt desire to survive but what they live for is a matter of philosophizing; Arthur Schopenhauer says that it were better human beings did not live).
Threat mobilizes the entire human body and makes it fight back (anger) or run away (fear) when it feels its existence threatened. In danger, the organism thinks of nothing else but how to survive. It is like a soldier at the battle front; the soldier perceives enemy soldiers firing bullets at him, trying to kill him, and he is tense and fighting back. He is concentrated on doing only one thing: surviving; he is not motivated to engage in intellectual activities, to show the world how much Shakespeare he understood; he is in animal mode and the parts of the brain that are associated with animal processes (hypothalamus), not intellectual processes (cortex) are mainly at work (certain elicited chemical suppress intellectual activities so as to enhance animal response to danger).
It takes relaxation of the body and mind to think about Intellectual issues. As Abraham Maslow (1943) pointed out, to self actualize the individual must have gratified his lower order needs, such as physiological (food, clothes), safety (physical security), social acceptance and self esteem. Until a human being feels relatively well fed and physically and socially safe he seldom thinks about abstract and obtuse subjects, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. It is the well fed and secure human being that engages in scientific research. University campuses are filled with middle class students not with starving students (and the few starving students that make it there seldom do well in their studies, for their minds are preoccupied with survival issues).
ANXIETY AND LEARNING
Studies of students show that they tend to learn better with moderate anxiety than with either no anxiety or excess anxiety. (Dreikurs, 1964)
Anxiety is another name for fear, this time, fear with no known cause; however, those in learning situations fear failing to learn the subject been taught and or failing examinations. Fear of making mistakes and fear of not doing well at examinations are called learning anxiety. Students learn best when they have some fear but not when they have no fear or have too much fear.
Fear is part of the human condition and no one can wish it away. Without fear and its induced anticipation of what could happen to the individual in the future, it is doubtful that the individual could take measures to do what would protect his life in the future. In fact, despite the much ballyhooed notion that research is motivated by pure curiosity, it is fear that motivates scientific research, for, after all, research seeks to understand the universe so that human beings could better adapt to it, survive in it.
However, the same adaptive variable, fear, if it is excessive becomes maladaptive; excess fear immobilizes the body and brain. (In fear the cortex is suppressed, via elicited neurochemicals that are poured over the cortex, and the animal brain is given free reign to do what animals must do to survive, fight or flee.)
If fear is excessive a sheep, instead of running, is paralyzed and frozen in place and is eaten by the lion chasing it. Perhaps, at a certain point in the struggle for survival an animal realizes that the game is up, that what is after it is overwhelming and stops struggling to survive and permits itself to be eaten. Sheep stop running and freeze up and apparently permit lions to eat them. By the same token, initially, human beings struggle against those who are out to enslave them but if despite their Herculean efforts they are caught and enslaved, after a while, they give in to slavery and learn how to be slaves and behave like slaves.
As the movie based on Alex Healey’s book, Roots (1976) exhibited, upon been brought to the Americas’ as slaves, African-Americans initially struggled against slavery; they fought toot and nail and tried to run away but after a while recognized the futility of their situation and acquiesced to it, and learned to do as their white masters told them to do and became both physical and psychological slaves. In the present they are no longer physical slaves but are still psychologically slaves: they tend to anticipate what their hitherto white masters would want them to do and do what would please them; in many ways white folk still control black folk. Black folk are like sheep frozen in place; they are living dead; many of them have stopped the struggle to adapt to their environment; they say, in effect: “what is the point, the man (white folk) controls everything”; many of these people have given up on life; when the individual gives up on life his brain shuts down and he cannot perform simple intellectual tasks or does so at a reduced rate.
SLAVERY INDUCED FEAR IN AFRICANS
In Africa slave sellers and their agents, slave catching criminal gangs, roamed all over the place capturing and selling slaves; they did so for one thousand years (from about 900 AD when Africans began selling other Africans to Muslim Arabs and beginning around 1500 when they added selling Africans to Europeans; slave trade did not end in Africa until about 1900). Slave traffickers kidnapped and sold people, including children, some as young as eight years old, into slavery.
We can only imagine the type of fear Africans lived under during their one thousand years of slavery. Imagine a child goes out to play with other children and he could be captured and sold into slavery; a woman goes to the farm and she could be captured and sold into slavery, a man walks alone on the village path and he could be captured and sold into slavery. Africans must have lived in hell, for to live in fear is to live in hell. To live in fear is worse than living in jail, no wonder African-Americans prefer to live in the jails that is their
America
rather than return to living in the fear that is slave selling
Africa
. (In
Mauritania
,
Sudan
,
Niger
and other
Africa
countries there are still literal slaves! The Arabs who still enslave Africans in those countries must be benighted if by now they have not understood the devastating effects of slavery on people and still think it is cute to practice it.)
In fear Africans efforts were mainly geared towards surviving at the basic level. They struggled for food and physical security but did not feel safe enough to pursue intellectual activities.
I submit that for one thousand years Africans have been stuck at the animal level of existence and were not pursuing intellectual matters and that this accounted for the lack of science and technological developments in Africa; slavery retarded human civilization in
Africa
. Walter Rodney (1974) made a similar argument but for entirely different reason; to blame Europe for the slavery that underdeveloped
Africa
; he was correct, but, additionally I also blame Africans for selling their own people.
The animal level of existence that Africans live in was demonstrated to me when I interacted with them; their talk was filled with what seemed to me mundane subjects, such as how to get food, clothing and money for rent and how to seem socially important; they seldom were interested in questions that I would have liked to talk about. My Africans cohort showed no interest in what exercised my mind. What interested them was the here and now world and that bored me; apparently, what interested me, the world of philosophy, is not yet part of their world, a world where values are stood upside down.
I am submitting that the one thousand years history of slavery that Africans have been subjected to has reduced them to living like threatened animals and left them with little or no interest in intellectual discourse. Their tendency to perform ridiculously low on intellectual tasks has nothing to do with inherited lack of intelligence, as shallow Western psychologists like Arthur Jensen would like to convince their dense minds but due to their unbelievable history of living in an oppressive environment. Africans lived in a world where other men were predators and they had to devise ways to outsmart those trying to catch and sell them into slavery. Any one living in this incredibly fear making world would develop stunted minds.
In the process of anticipating slave sellers moves and dodging them, Africans developed high paranoid traits. Generally, the typical African and African American has high paranoid traits. (Meissner, 1994)
Paranoid behavior, such as defensiveness, guardedness, suspiciousness, struggle to seem important when the individual feels that his social and existential importance is doubted by his social environment, reduces intellectual output. The paranoid person wastes his intellect in pursuing divergent issues, such as trying to seem important and fearing demeaning and fighting those he believes made him demeaned. The paranoid person is seldom devoted, one hundred percent, to intellectual pursuits, such as research work.
Fear and paranoia, the lot of Africans for one thousand years, made Africans less inclined to intellectual productivity.
When Africans reduce their intolerable fear and paranoia they would become more intellectually inclined.
Although this needs no repetition, it should be observed that slave trading devalued African lives, reduced their lives to that of commodities that were captured and sold off. To the present, Africans do not have value for their lives and for each others lives; they treat each other as if they are nothing. The two years I dealt with them probably was the worst time in my life; these people subjected me to incredible verbal abuse, as they subject each other, damaging each others self esteem. If you want to retain positive self regard, it is probably best if you avoided the presence of Africans. These people need several generations of psychotherapy, formal or informal, before their opinion of themselves is corrected and they learn to treat themselves in a respectful and loving manner.
LOVE IS THE ANTIDOTE TO FEAR
If you love a child, a person, he feels secure around you, for he believes that you are not going to harm him; he is not defensive, as he would if he believed that you would hurt him. When a child, person feels secure he does not waste his physical and mental energy trying to survive, being defensive hence has more energy left to devote to intellectual activities. Love makes a loved person take his safety for granted hence have energy to devote to intellectual activities.
AMERICA’S ABUSE OF AFRICANS
Only a total idiot would say that a people who, in the past, enslaved other people and in the present discriminate against them love them. Let us not deceive ourselves any further, black folks are hated by white folk, and, therefore, they feel insecure around white folk and devote their energies to defensiveness, to fear and paranoia hence are less productive in white dominated America.
When white society is less oppressive towards black folk, black folk would relax, become secure and devote more time to intellectual productivity.
Of course, white society may choose to continue to be on the path it has always been: keep on oppressing and abusing black folk;
Rome
made that choice, and reaped the consequences of its choice for hatred instead of love. Those
Rome
hated, German barbarians attacked and destroyed
Rome
.
The black world is reaching a critical point where it can now fight back; all things been constant, within a century black folk would be able to finally push aside the parasitic empire that insisted on predicating social relationships on oppression, on fear, rather than on love.
The white race does not have more than a hundred years before it is shoved aside by those it is currently abusing; the only choice that the white race has is to reorganize its society and make it more just. Injustice does not last forever.
Despite appearances of chaos and impersonality, the universe is a moral universe; evil is always defeated in the long run. The time allotted evil racists is just about up.
One is not begging white racists to do black folk a favor, to change and love them; one knows that justice is destined to prevail; the truth is that, sooner or later, we shall construct a human civilization based on love, not on fear.
Civilization is moving towards only one direction, love, not hate. Of course, many detours would be made but it is inevitable that in the end we shall construct a love based civilization.
ANGER
Fear response is really two responses in one response; it is also anger response. The flight and fight response of fear means two things: the flight part of the response is fear and the fight part is anger.
The physiological correlates of both fear and anger response are the same; they are the same as far as the body is concerned. This correlation of fear and anger has always been known to people; they know that an angry person is also a fearful person (just as a shy person is also an aggressive person; a shy person will kill you sooner than an overly assertive person).
Fear arouses the chemicals implicated in anger and both are the same response. Whatever makes you afraid also makes you angry.
No one likes to be made afraid; no one likes to be threatened, no one likes any other human being to intimidate him with threat of harming him (or, as in America, sending him to jail…white Americans for all intents and purposes are terrorists; they intimidate black Americans, they use every social means of coercion, such as police and justice system, to arouse fear in blacks and, say to them, in effect, unless you do as we ask you to do we shall send you to jail; as many black psychologists have pointed out, it appears that the predominant personality type of white Americans is antisocial personality disorder or sadism). (DSM IV, 1994)
When a human being is made fearful he is also made angry. When he is made angry the fight part of his fear response kicks in and he wants to fight whatever is making him angry. If he has the wherewithal to do so he would fight back. But if those making him angry have more power than him he would bid his time and wait for a future opportunity to fight back.
When the powerful totters the weak persons they had oppressed rise up and, like hungry dogs, tear them apart. At the moment white
America
has this little fantasy going that it has completely subdued black Americans. But it has not. It has only made them angry and since they are weak they bid their time. When white
America
totters, as it is bound to totter, it would be disabused of its delusion, as black Americans rise up and tear it down. This is what German barbarians did when the
Roman Empire
was attacked from without.
When Rome was attacked from outside, by Germans, German slaves who worked for Roman patricians inside Rome rose up and helped tear it down.
Sooner or later, some outside force would call Americans bluff of been an invincible superpower and attack it. When that happens all those
America
had oppressed for four hundred years would see their chance to fight back. Make no mistake about it,
America
’s slave based society does not have a bright future unless, it changes course and starts treating all people as the same, coequal and one.
We are reaching a critical point in the understanding of nuclear physics and engineering. Generally, one nation makes a scientific discovery, guards and uses it to its advantage. But in the long run that discovery that was exclusive knowledge is now common knowledge. For example, not too long ago, Newtonian physics seemed difficult and was the exclusive preserve of college educated persons. But today most high school students understand it. By the same token, at present, Quantum Mechanics and Einstein’s General and Special Relativity Theory seem meant only for the best and brightest minds; but by the end of this century high school students would take them for granted.
Knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons, despite
America
’s self serving effort to prevent its spread would spread everywhere. When that happens the currently oppressed would have nuclear weapons.
We all know where third world countries would like to test their nuclear weapons:
America
’s cities. In time
America
would become the testing grounds for crude nuclear weapons.
Of course,
America
has the option of retaliating in kind, in which case we shall kiss the world good bye, which is better than the present existence of a world based on injustice. If the world must always be unfair it is better it is destroyed; an unjust world implies that Schopenhauer was correct: man is a mistake and ought not to exist. The alternative to nuclear annihilation is deconstructing the present unjust world order and reconstructing it on a just basis. (Given Americans fear of death and desire to live it is doubtful that they would have the guts to unleash a nuclear war that would end this world; the bloody cowards so wish to live that they would probably surrender to determined aggressors. Americans so want to live and fear death that they made medical doctors the highest paid professionals in their society; they pay these people highly and respect them for they see them as maintaining their lives. In terms of difficulty the study of medicine is certainly not as difficult as obtaining a doctorate degree in physics, yet physicists make a fraction of the money medical doctors makes. This society has its values screwed up.)
The salient point is that those intimidated by oppressors tend to be angry persons. Anger pours certain neurochemicals into the brain and those shut down the cortex, the intellectual part of the brain while activating and accentuating the animal part of the brain.
As in fear a modicum of anger is necessary for fighting. We need some sense of outrage, which is anger, to fight injustice, but too much anger makes it difficult for the brain to learn and think.
Angry students, like fearful students learn slowly. Fear and anger are impediments to learning and thinking.
Africans are forced to live in fear and anger; both affects impede their learning and thinking capability. I submit that fear and anger are partially responsible for Africans tendency to do poorly in intellectual tasks.
GUILT, SHAME AND THE OTHER AFFECTS
Human beings are constructed in such a manner that they tend to have a sense of right and wrong. When they do the right thing (generally, this is when they love themselves and love other people) they are happy with themselves and when they do the wrong thing (which means any act not deemed loving towards the self and other selves) they tend to feel guilty or shamed.
Guilt is predicated on the individual’s ethics, his sense of right or wrong; shame, on the other hand, is predicated on social norms. A person feels guilt if he violates his personal ethics and morality; a person feels shame if he feels that what he did is not accepted by society even if he personally does not see that particular behavior as wrong. (Piaget, 1932; Kohlberg, 1981)
Human beings tend to feel proud when they measure up to their sense of what is valuable. Each human being, building on his society’s values, sets up his own personal value system; he constructs a self concept and an image form of it, a self image. His self concept and self image has its standard of good and bad, beauty and ugliness, what is desirable and not desirable. If he does what meets the standards of his idea of good he feels proud, if not he feels lowered in his self esteem.
Pride, however, is a tricky phenomenon for while there is such a thing as normal pride, there is also false or neurotic pride. In neurosis, as Karen Horney (1991) pointed out, the idea of the self is grandiose; the neurotic posits a false self and ideal, perfect standards which he takes pride in. In Alfred Alder’s (2003) terms, the neurotic desires a superior self with superior standards and takes pride in those impossible states. If he seems to live up to his false high standards he feels fine if not he feels bad. Since no real human being can ever live up to perfect standards the neurotic does not live up to his extraordinarily high standards hence most of the time feels bad about himself. This may lead to neurotic depression, dysthymia, where nothing he does is ever good enough for him and he feels like he is worthless; such self devaluation may lead to self destructive behaviors; people preserve their lives if they value them and destroy them if they do not value them.
SOCIETY MANIPULATES THE VAROUS AFFECTS TO CONTROL PEOPLE
The rulers of society, past and present, attempt to manipulate the various affects; they do so as to control the people and get them to behave as they expect them to, which are to serve the interests of the rulers, not the interests of the ruled. In oppressive societies, such as racist
America
, efforts are made to manipulate fear, guilt and shame.
White America attempts to make black
America
feel fearful and to the extent that black folk feel fear they are controlled by white folk.
Most people obey the laws of their society not because those laws are just but because they were socialized to believe that if they did not obey laws that they would be apprehended and punished; it is internalized fear of punishment, which includes rejection by other members of society and or doing jail time that compel people to obey the laws of their society.
If the powers that be can get you to feel fear of harm and death, unless you do as they expect you to do, they can control you. This is actually how many societies are organized.
Human beings want to live and fear death and political leaders manipulate that reality to make them obey oppressive laws. But when a critical mass of the people overcomes the fear of death the rulers would no longer have the power to intimidate them into obeying oppressive laws.
An example is the developing phenomenon whereby young Muslim Arabs defy the fear of death and strap bombs on their bodies and blow themselves up, so as to kill a few of their perceived oppressors. This process defies racist psychologists’ calculation that people are motivated by fear of harm and death hence easily controlled by proposing to kill them. In the Prince, Machiavelli(1527) recommended that the Prince, leader, randomly kill a few people so as to instill fear of death in those who are tempted to defy him; in effect, he asks the leader to behave as terrorists do.
If the people are no longer afraid of death, Machiavellian power politics would no longer intimidate the people into doing as the prince asks them to do.
If a person tells you to go ahead and kill him, what are you going to do, kill him? Okay, go ahead and kill him. If many persons do the same, how many of them would you kill? If you killed all of them then you would have nobody left to kill. Slavery exists largely because people are afraid of harm and death hence permit the sadistic personalities called slave holders and extant rulers to enslave them, to rule them, rather than revolt and get killed, if need be, than live as slaves, as second class citizens.
If the person who has overcome the fear of death is also willing to kill before he is killed, oppressors then have a real problem in their hands.
White America is predicated on the premise that people desire to live and fear harm and death hence permit themselves to be oppressed but as soon as a large number of Americans defy fear of harm and death the rulers of America would have serious problems in their hands; they would have a war where the oppressed are not afraid to die hence would fight to death. White America has not seen that type of war before. In the past it had cowards who were afraid of dying, those who ran away from, or acquiesced to the killing machine called the American military; the oppressors are about to be checkmated and would have no choice but to reorganize society on equal footing.
RELIGION AND CONTROL OF THE MASSES
Society, through its religious element, manipulates people to feel guilty and shamed for what it considers sinful behaviors. The Catholic Church, for example, teaches its members to feel guilty and shamed for the most trivial behaviors. While getting the people to feel guilty so as control those, the leaders of that satanic organization, from the pope to the parish priest engage in more evil than any member of society; they, for example, engage in such bestial behaviors as homosexuality and pedophilia. The leadership of most religious organizations, not just the Catholic Church, is as oppressive as secular leaders yet manages to get the masses to feel guilty and shamed for minor misconducts.
If one can make you feel guilty and shamed one can control you. As Nietzsche pointed out in Thus Space Zarathustra the individual must reexamine all social values and make sure that he does not feel guilty and shamed from doing that which to his personal value system is appropriate behaviors. We are like camel, we kneel down and permit society to place heavy cultural burden on us and bid us to get up and carry that burden all our lives, and we do so, and they weigh us down. The superman must do away with unnecessary social values and only live for what is right.
LOVE MAKES JUST
Love is my definition of right; any law that makes for loving all human beings is right and the individual must obey it. Who defines what is love, what is right? The individual does. Right is doing unto others as you want them to do to you; you want to be loved by other people so love other people; unless, of course, you are masochistic and want other people to inflict pain on you, in which case you should inflict pain on them and since they do not relish pain they should kill you and cure you of that perversion.
In the meantime, not too many persons have attained freedom from social coercion. In extant society, people are controlled through social manipulation of fear, guilt and shame. African people are controlled by white people through been made fearful, guilt feeling and shamed. They must reevaluate all the values they were given by the West, especially those perverted values given to them by the horrible and sinister institution called the organized Christian Church, and only accept those that serve the purpose of love and throw others out.
Love makes for life, whatever is not for love is for murder, and is evil, and must be discarded. Love and the rest are details.
TAKING PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY
Africans should not make the mistake of thinking that only external others made them fearful, angry, guilt feeling, shamed etc. It is true that other people did some of this thing to them, but they also did this thing to themselves. When one point two fingers at other people, accusing them for what they did to one, three fingers point right back at one. The lesson is that yes other people do affect one but one affects one more than others affect one.
We live in a shared environment; other people do affect one and one affects other people. We do not live in an either or world but a shared world. As physicists tell us, the world is a general system; in a system everything affects everything else. We all affect each other; each of us is responding to other people’s behaviors as they are responding to his behavior.
We do not need to spend all our time blaming other people; we must also blame ourselves.
However, blaming ones self and other people is a waste of time and energy, it does not lead to changing behavior; what is more productive is changing identified problematic behavior.
The Africans’ reality is that Africans captured and sold their people into slavery. Other people bought Africans. Therefore, both Africans and other persons contributed to the pernicious effects of slavery on contemporary Africans.
In the contemporary world Africans have spill over effects of their one thousand years history of slavery; they tend to be selfish and self centered and mostly do not care for their fellow Africans.
African politicians mostly seek office for their own good not for society’s good. In office they steal from their people’s money and generally do not develop their people’s economic infrastructure.
African politicians are as corrupt as human beings could become. Give them money to help their people and they spend it on themselves and, worse, blame the West for their peoples continued poverty. These Machiavellian criminals have learned to redirect their people’s anger by telling them that the West is the cause of all their problems. It is true that the West exploits
Africa
but Africans also exploit other Africans.
Africans cannot change the behavior of non-Africans; the only persons whose behaviors they can change are themselves.
It is useless talking about changing the other person’s behavior, the fact is that one cannot; the only person one can change is ones self. Therefore, the individual must concentrate on changing his behavior, not other people’s behaviors.
At the group level, Africans must concentrate on changing their behaviors and stop focusing on white men’s behaviors.
Africans must learn to remedy the antisocial behaviors that they learned in the past one thousand years. They learned self centeredness and lack of social interest; now, they must learn social interest. Africans must learn to devote their lives to serving their common public good; in a word, Africans must become loving people.
Love is true definition of mental health. Love and you are mentally healthy; hate and you are mentally ill.
HATE
Those who are oppressed by others, unfortunately, tend to devote an enormous amount of energy and time to hating their oppressors. Of course, they must do whatever they could to remove their oppressors but they ought to not hate them.
What white folk did to Africans they did to themselves, too, for the person holding slaves enslaves himself as a jailer must live in jail. They did not know any better. White society is predicated on fear and hate; to live in fear and hate is to live in hell. To live in a love based society is to live in the heaven of our imagination.
Hate is a response from fear. The person who has transcended fear does not hate other people, he loves all people.
Fear plays a complex role in people’s behaviors. Consider the bravadoes and boastfulness of young black persons. You see these young persons talking loudly and swaggering down the street, with a defiant and in your face attitude. You would think that they are bold and courageous persons. Though they are ready to pump bullets into other people, to show them how tough they are, in reality they are really in a state of fear; they are cowards.
A brave person does not join street gangs and kill other people, especially kill in drive by shootings where gang members kill those they do not know, and people who have done nothing to them.
A courageous person appreciates the human condition of suffering and does his best to alleviate it; he loves and cares for all the people.
Acting out in anger and hatred is not power but powerlessness; real power lies in love.
FORGIVENESS: THE PATH TO PEACE AND HAPPINESS
Clearly, forgiveness is the best route to obtaining personal and social peace and happiness. However, if you are like me, if another person does something bad to you, you want to get even; you bear grievances and seek revenge. The pursuit of vengeance pumps adrenalin into ones body and motivates one to destructive action. But an unforgiving person is a tense and unhappy person.
It is only when you overlook what other people did to hurt you, when you forgive other peoples wrongs that you feel peaceful and happy. In as much as peace and happiness are desired qualities, and forgiveness gives those, forgiveness is the gift that you give to your self and to other people, those you forgive. If you want to be calm and joyful you have to forgive those who hurt you.
The act of forgiveness is easily undertaken if you understand that people who do bad things are not healthy persons. Consider a person who is acting out and calling you derogatory names. You feel put down and experience attack on your self esteem, feel narcissistic rage and want to attack and destroy the person you perceive doing so; you want to slap that person around, for as you see it, he had no business being disrespectful. But if you slapped him around you pour petrol unto fire; he now sees you as the aggressor and fights back to defend himself, and two of you would be in a fight, and peace would be disturbed and nobody is happy.
You could look at the situation differently. The acting out person is really not responding to you; his personality is at work. He has a screwed up personality, an anger prone personality and a personality that does not love but hates. Because he attacks other people, generally, other people are defensive towards him, and the more aggressive persons would even counter attack him. In effect, he lives a miserable and unhappy existence.
The angry person has the misconception that the best way to obtain power is to act out against other persons but that merely makes people angry at him.
Real power is obtained from loving and caring for other persons, not from attacking and berating them.
If you understand that the person acting out has a personality problem you do not have to be angry at him. You ignore his temper tantrum, stay calm (try anger management maneuvers like walking away, deep breathing, counting to twenty before you talk etc) and not allow yourself to be drawn into his personal drama (which is not your drama).
Angry persons project their problems to other persons, to you, and you do not have to buy into their show. You did not cause their problems (though you could be a trigger). You overlook their attacks and forgive them and love the inner self in them, the higher self that does not relish attacking other people (it is the lower ego self that attacks people and enjoys conflict).
You do not try to punish the acting out person, for it is the ego, the lower self, the animal self in us that wants to punish; instead, you relate to him from your higher self, the part of you that understands why people do what they do and forgives them their mistakes and correct those mistakes, not condone them.
To forgive is to love the person you have forgiven. When you forgive other people, that is, love them, you give yourself inner peace and happiness. You stay calm even if the world around you is in conflict.
Angry persons lack love in their lives and their acting out is call for love when love is missing in their lives. Give them love by forgiving them their temper tantrums.
Those who hate other people waste their time and energy. Haters do not live in peace. It is in this light that the Jewish rabbi, Jesus Christ, asked his followers to forgive those who harmed them. Look at the person who wronged you in the face and say to yourself: I forgive you. Though your animal self, the ego, wants to kill him, respond to him from your higher self, the unified self, the loving self.
FORGIVENESS IS CORRECTION, NOT CONDONING OF MISTAKES
Forgiveness does not mean permitting the oppressive person to keep on abusing people. Black folk must work to prevent white folk from abusing them.
Forgiving white folk does not mean tolerating white abuse. If you tolerate other people’s abuse you probably do so from a state of fear; you probably feel that if you challenge them that they are too powerful and could harm, jail or kill you.
; Fear is not the place from which one ought to be responding; one ought to respond from relative fearlessnesses.
If you are fearless it does not matter if the oppressor killed you; what does matter is your doing the right thing. At all times the fearless person does the right thing, which is to love all people, and tell others to do the same and not fear them killing him.
Love all white people but insist that they not oppress black folk. If you tolerate their tendency to sadism and sociopathathy you have reinforced that negative aspect of them.
You have no right to reinforce and perpetuate bad behavior in other persons out of fear of harm and death. Stand up to the oppressor and tell him to do the right thing and do not fear what he could do to you. Under no circumstances should you fear another human being. Remember that we are born, live and must die, so there is no use fearing the inevitable, death.
We live and must die; in the interval we live we ought to do the right thing, which is to love one another.
DISCUSSION
I have dealt with many psychologists and psychiatrists and can honestly report that of all the professions they probably contain the most antisocial personalities (sociopaths and psychiatrists). It seems that a criterion for becoming one of these people is that one be a sociopath/psychopath ( have no conscience, be amoral, feel no guilt or remorse upon hurting other people, indeed, enjoy hurting other people; feel special and seek other persons admiration, use people and discard them). I have never seen a more lying group of human beings than these people.
Their first lie is to say that their field is a science; the field is not a science and probably would never be a science; these people pretend that they are scientists when they are not. They seem to think that people are fools and that if you an opinion and clothe it in fudged statistics that such false opinion becomes true. The fact is that we cannot predict what people think or will do in the future hence the so-called science of thinking and behavior, psychology, can only be speculative and not a rigorous science likes physics. This does not mean that we should not study psychology. Of course, we must study psychology; we are interested in understanding ourselves. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that we can have absolute self understanding. Whoever promises us absolute self understanding, such as religion and psychology, always end up misleading us?
In the present, Psychiatrists fool the public into believing that their bag of medications could heal the mentally ill. Thus they fill schizophrenics with neuroleptic medications, manic persons with anti mania medications, depressed persons with antidepressant medications, anxious persons with anxioleptic medications. These medications do not cure the various illnesses that they are supposed to heal. In the meantime, their side effects destroy people’s bodies. These people are killing people with their snake oil medications.
Psychologists, beginning with Sigmund Freud the Fraud fool the people into thinking that they have understood how the mind works when, in fact, they have not.
Some psychopathic psychologists, fancying themselves the era’s authorities on human beings, when they are not, would like us to believe that there are differences in people. The fact is that biologically there are no differences between the so-called races. People are biologically 99.9% the same. There are cultural differences; culture is learned, not biological.
In the past one thousand years black folk have been abused beyond belief. All things being equal, those who abused them feel guilty for what they did and are seeking a way to rationalize their abuse. One way to do so is to blame their victims, to say, in effect, “you are inferior and that is why we used and abused you; it is your fault that we abused you”. This is blaming the victim behavior; it is an antisocial personality pattern of thinking and behaving.
Racist psychologists criminal thinking will not wash; black folk are not buying their pseudo thinking (they are angling at getting black folk to feel that it is their fault that they were/are oppressed).
Common sense marvels at the fact that people at different stages of material development can be brought together and easily learn the same tasks. You can go to
Papua New Guinea
and take a child from there and give him proper preparatory education and he enters
Oxford
University
and does well there. This tells us that people are the same. But instead of celebrating what unifies us, our sameness and equality, the sociopaths who call themselves racist psychologists talk about what divides us, such as trumped up differences in people’s intelligence.
These idiots always have an audience; their target audience is weak minds that are looking for a demagogue to tell them that they are superior to others. Germans were looking for a demagogue to tell them that they were superior to other people and Adolf Hitler told them what they wanted to hear and led them to war where they killed fifty or more million persons. White racists are looking to their pseudo experts on human nature, so-called psychologists, to mislead them into believing that they are superior to non- white hence attacking them. However, this time around the world is unto their trick. When they start a racial war they would pay the ultimate price. In a race war, it is the white race that would suffer, not the black race; the black race has taken one thousand years of abuse and is still standing and is a resilient race.
Clearly, contemporary
Africa
is backward. But by the end of the twenty first century
Africa
would have transformed its culture and established the economic infrastructure to enable its people compete with the rest of humanity. At that point Africans would no longer have the patience to listen to overfed white psychopaths masquerading as psychologists tell them that they are inferior persons.
It is said that evil is always afoot in the world and white racist and their psychologist’s exhibit that reality. It is time that humanity finally relegated these warped minds to the garbage dump of history where they belong.
The world of the future is a world that accentuates love, not fear as insecure racists psychologist do (psychologists know that their field is not a science and are always trying to prove that it is a science hence are insecure).
CONCLUSION
We live in a world where that which is common sense is not perceived as such. One supposes that that is why they say that common sense is not so common. Common sense tells us that a people held in slavery and beaten down for hundreds of years would loose confidence in themselves. In
North America
black folk are told every day of their lives that they are nothing, that they have no value, that they are worthless and that they are not intelligent. Common sense tells us that many of them internalized this negative presentation of them and come to believe that they are nothing and not intelligent. This low self esteem is then reflected in their tendency do poorly in what otherwise are easy tasks. Apparently, white racists do not have common sense to understand the obvious correlation between abuse and poor performance on tasks.
Every once in a while racist organizations fund antisocial psychologists and or scholars (one of the least publicly known facts is that the average psychologist is a psychopath, a sociopath in personality structure; these people are a liars; Cyril Burt was a liar, so were Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, Charles Murray etc) to use fudged statistics to prove that blacks are less intelligent than whites. Thus the writers of the Bell Curve (Richard Herrnstein, a quack, and Charles Murray a foolish political scientist) tell us that blacks are inferior to whites. In the minds of these despicable creatures they have made a point, but in the minds of men and women of good will they are misguided creatures.
We are tempted to see them for what they are, white color criminals, and ignore them, but since they tend to influence impressionable minds we feel compelled to respond to their gibberish.
I responded to these Neanderthals and presented the argument that whatever differences exist between black and white is due to the fear generated by one thousand years of slavery and racial abuse.
In this paper I pointed out that the perceived differences in the performance of black and white so-called races is probably due to the fear black folk have lived in the past one thousand years. For a thousand years black folk have lived in tremendous fear. Fear does cloud the brain and make fearful persons not do well at learning tasks and at performing tasks.
The paper also elaborated the other affects, such as anger, guilt, shame, pride, depression etc and examined some of their putative effects on human behavior, particular on performance at intellectual activities.
This paper presented its points as heuristic; it is up to more experimental observers to verify, accept or discard them.
August 6, 2007
Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD
Africa Institute, Seattle
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Posted by Robot| 08.08.2007 00:46