Insanity in Modern Man

One Monday night in one of our TV channels, I caught a programme that was addressing a rather unsavoury subject, namely, madness or, as it is called in polite company, insanity.

It is a subject that most of us prefer to ignore believing that we are safely insulated against it or that it only happens to other people.

While listening disinterestedly to the talk show, I heard a statistic that shocked me into alertness: that one in four people in this country are either mad now, have been mad in the past or are likely to become mad before they die! That is 25% of Kenya's current population of 44 million which translates to over 10 million people. Is this a credible statistic or is it the wishful thinking of an over enthusiastic clinical psychiatric? Put another way, it means that you and I are likely to have a 25% chance of becoming mad in our lifetime.

I was about to dismiss it until I recalled an event that I still cannot come to terms with and that which a lot of us Kenyans have locked somewhere in the recesses of our personal hard disks: the brutal massacre of 147 innocent university students in Garissa in March 2015. This horrific murder might have been understandable if it was done by your ordinary fanatical heretic. In this case, however, one of the leaders was a university law graduate who was only 27 years old.

As if that was not enough, we have the case of the Briton who was killed during the Lamu raid. Reports say he was only 25. Then there is the current case of the 25 year old Tunisian "good boy" according to a report on Britain's TV who cold-bloodedly killed at least 30 British tourists in a Tunisian beach. Then another crazy 25 year old American who killed 9 worshippers in a church in the US. It could go on and on...

Possible Explanations

The tragedy of these "isolated" incidents and many others that are not as attention grabbing is that they are committed by relatively young people either freshly out of college. Which raises a disturbing question: Are these psychotic youngsters the product of a misguided educational system, the consequence of inappropriate religious indoctrination or, God forbid, an unacknowledged medical condition called "madness".

Having had time to reflect on the three possible explanations, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that the first two possible "explanations" are largely to blame for exploiting an unfortunate human weakness, i.e., a fundamentally insecure human mind. Why do I say this? I have two unfortunate explanations.

On education, there is the unfortunate situation that we have over the years been giving our children the "wrong" type of education. By concentrating on the three traditional 'R's - Reading, (W)Riting and (A)Rithmetic, we forget that a child is much more than the sum total of the three components of education. I hold the minority view that a child goes to school to learn, yes, but also to grow up, to learn to live with other people and, most importantly, to get help to discover their natural talent. This could be art, music, football, athletics, mountain climbing or whatever else their creator programmed into their genes. Do our teachers give these kids a chance to do this? I leave this to the reader...

The second one is our religious training. I hold the view that too much emphasis has been put on religious training or indoctrination. While I have no quarrel with the inculcation of values embedded in a religion, I believe too much emphasis is placed acceptance of the tenets of religion without allowing the young mind to even question the validity of some of the basic assumptions of their faith. I know that this is a controversial statement but that does not make it any less important because, truth be told, when you examine ALL religions, they are creations of the human mind. When in later years, the youth realizes the fallacy of what has been inculcated into their minds the results can be calamitous.

Finally, back to madness. I believe it was Albert Einstein who made the famous statement on the subject: "The true definition of madness is repeating the same action over and over, hoping for a different result". In essence, this means that if we keep repeating something in our head, we come to believe that it is true. Even when our intellect tells us it is manifest nonsense. The tragedy of mankind is that we learn to convert belief into irrefutable truth regardless of evidence to the contrary.

So, is there hope for mankind? Unfortunately, we are in so so deep that the only recourse may be madness. Society must pay the terrible price and the worst is that, with modernity, it is getting worse by the year. In case you doubt me, just look around around you.

I hope that I am wrong.

JH Kimura,
Nairobi,
March 2016.

Now that I have had time to think about more logically, I realized that I missed a fourth factor: Early childhood parenting.

This arose out of two incidents that have made me realise that something could be very wrong especially in my “society from the mountains” as some people call us.

The first involved a young man from near my rural home of Ndakaini called Chomo. He grew up in Thika, a town I know well having got my first job there after my A-levels in Embu. This young man had met a girl in school in the slums of Thika where he grew up. I do not know much about his parents but, after reading a book titled “Find Me Unafraid” by Kennedy Odede, I can guess.

They became friends and went on their separate career ways: he to computer programming, she to medical school in a distant place called University of Eldoret. He found a job in a micro-finance company in Thika and was doing fairly well if the events reported are true. She, on the other hand, was about to graduate from medical school.

And this is where trouble started. He had been supporting her financially but, it seems, she was not “reciprocating” properly. In a fit a Othelian jealousy, he filled his car with fuel, drove all the way to Eldoret - a distance of 320 kms - bought an axe, sharpened it and went to the gate of the university’s medical school.

The rest of the story you know..

The second story involved a senior military officer in a barracks at Nanyuki who invited his estranged wife to the barracks with their two children. He was the officer on duty at the time and so, he figured, he could give orders to his juniors without question.

One night, he cold-bloodedly murdered all three, called a taxi to carry the bodies to a cemetery, buried them there and proceeded back to his duty station where he happily carried on with his job until all hell broke loose.

The rest of the story you also know...

Without going into details, both cases are now much clearer. The murderers are the result of poor upbringing and, I suspect, a frequently recurring case euphemistically known as “single mothers” syndrome. Many more than we care to admit.

Even, I suspect, the candidates for all those cases I had identified earlier. If true, a truly pathetic state of affairs not just for Kenya but for all mankind...

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