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This is the transcript of my post for The ScoopNG. Read the original post here

I’m not a big fan of politics. Let’s face it, far too many people my age-group aren’t exactly excited about it either. It’s not that I’m unpatriotic or anything, it’s just that I haven’t fully grasped what the alternative option is – or that it is useful.

Apathy towards governance is an alluring stance to take. There’s no use getting your hopes up every four years, expecting things to change for the better and then having them dashed now and again. It gets old. It’s apparent the government couldn’t care less about me. Everyone is in it for himself, apparently. So maybe I’d just focus on my own hustle instead and take what I can.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to be patriotic. I want to love my country and be able to walk tall and talk in glowing terms about it anywhere I go. It’s just that there aren’t quite enough reasons to make me be that way.

Every fabric of our government has either failed or is grossly uninspiring. Nearly everyone at the top echelon of power is possessed with greed and their leadership skills leave much to be desired.

I read about some other countries and I hear reports about them in the media and I wonder why what happens there can’t happen here. I read about some of the policies enacted by our government and I’m depressed at the level of blatant corruption; more so, how easily they get away with it.

It’s an arguable fact that the scale of corruption in any place/establishment is directly proportional to the level of ignorance abounding in that place. Corruption, it seems, is an inextricable part of any government in the world. But some countries seem to have paralyzed that demon because a large percentage of their citizens aren’t blithely ignorant about their government and how it affects them.

That’s why I know that apathy, though alluring, is obviously not a wise stance to take. Because government affects you anyway regardless of your stance towards it, being aware and making a conscious effort to understand its workings seems to be the smart stance to take. That way, you can at least make a voting choice you may be able to live with for four years consecutively.

Adam Smith was famous for (among other things) positing that in competitive situations, individual ambitions serve the common good or that the best results come from everyone in the group doing what’s best for themselves. What this means is that the world would supposedly be a better place if we all were a little bit more selfish.

That principle has pretty much been the innate trait of the social construct of most human interactions for centuries. It is what holds sway in the very strata of our politics. Leaders get elected into offices and then proceed to put their personal interests above the collective interests of the people on whose votes they got there.

Yes, they may amass wealth and opportunities for themselves but they lose, among other freedoms, the freedom to walk the streets anymore without fear.

Well, newer economic principles, especially that proposed by John Nash that the best result comes when everyone in the group does what’s best for them and the entire group (and real-life experiences) have since shown that looking out for yourself alone doesn’t necessarily yield the maximum result. Many examples of the short-comings of being self-serving in social and political situations abound all around us.

I want me a government I can trust. Where elections would afford us the opportunity to select the best possible leader from a pool of worthy candidates, not those sprung on us to sate the personal and tribal interests of political bigwigs.

Where said elections would be preceded by campaigns to ascertain the policies on which the various candidates would run and afford the populace to gauge the level of leadership mien each candidate possesses so they can make informed choices at the polls.

I want a government that has goals and make actionable plans to achieve them, not one that now and again whips up a nebulous vision 20xx after a previous one fails.

I want a government that is serious about education and would ensure that a much needed tinkering is done on our school curricula to bolster up our preparedness for the realities that we have to deal with now and in the future. An educational system where history and civics would be mandatory subjects taught from the elementary levels so as to foster a sense of identity and patriotism on Nigerians is what we need.

Knowing your government truly cares about you and that policies are implemented with your interests in mind feeds on your drive to be patriotic. That’s the natural response. I want a government that works. My guess is that we all do.

In two years it’ll be time to go to the polls to elect a new president. The race for the office is on already. Alliances are being formed and broken across various platforms in preparation for the big prize. There comes that feeling which makes one want to hope that something will give when a new government comes. But I’d much rather observe and see what the process throws up before letting my hopes up.If the candidates are a rehashed version of the same old machinery that runs the current system, then there’s not much hope for a change for the better. And most youths would much rather tilt towards apathy again. But there’s an inherent problem with that disposition, I think. For people can only cling on to apathy for so long under a heartless government before a looming uprising breaks out.

Nothing can quite really wake you up to life like nearly dying. Being consistently inundated with the going-ons of life and trapped in a Maslow’s-Hierarchy-of-Needs circus, we’re sort of trapped in perpetual dream state.(The matrix, if you will.) There’s an eerie cognitive dissonance at play in most of our lives today: we’re aware of the intermittent throbbing signal in our minds that something is awfully not right with the system, yet we’re too far gone into dream state consciousness we’ve attained a certain level of acquiescence with the hand life deals us everyday.

It’s the reason you loathe going to work on your present job everyday, but you go, still. I know, we need the pay, right? It’s the reason far too many undergrads are fed up with their majors in school, because deep down, they really want to chase their dreams and do something else with their lives. But they stay on anyway. They’ve got something to prove, haven’t they? It’s the reason no matter our level of discontent with the way the politicians run the government we(OK, only a rather worryingly large number of us, really) relapse into complacency and never demand to put things right. I know, it’s foolhardiness that makes us think we can be heroes by standing up to a corrupt government, right? Perish the thought.

Thing is, as much as we think we desire(strive to, even) to have more control over our lives, we, subconciously, are relieved we aren’t. Being in control is the toughest responsibility there is. It means you’d have to do an awful lot of thinking, fight and earn what’s coming to you. It means you’d have to wake up and take a shot at your dreams. It means you’d have to own up to your contribution in bad days and good days instead of unwittingly appropriating blame to uncontrollable circumstances. But that is a hard ask. We’d rather let others we’ve, in our minds, placed on some pedestal do our thinking for us. And we care too much about our “reputation” and what people think of and expect of us to bother to answer the inner yearnings gnawing away at our hearts to make the desired changes in our lives. Like a throng of zombies, we latch onto every scent that wafts across our senses, almost never stopping a moment to collect ourselves. If you care too much about unsettling the steady bitter-sweet humdrum voyage you’re on, you’re too far gone. You’re in deep sleep. You need to wake up. You need a near death experience(NDE).

Nearly dying puts things in perspective. It is at the point of death we’re most lucid. We see clearly then all we’ve done, been, could have been, and could have done. How people see you is way too trite to fester in your consciousness then. Only one thing matters when you get to the borders of eternity: You. How you played out your script. Most things that are a big deal to you now(and you’re rather quite content to distract you from living a full life) won’t mean anything then. It is in [the thought of] nearly losing it all our costing/estimation skills glow brightest. Value(s) becomes sacrosanct then.

I’m not positing we all grow suicidal proclivities. That’s silly. You don’t need to stage a confrontation with death(your chances of besting him aren’t near the neighbourhood of good, anyway). Death is around us everyday. Recall any old buddy who isn’t around anymore? A sibling? Relative? Colleague? That guy down the street who’s name you never knew until you heard? A neighbour? Death is around us, an unseeming, unwanted neighbour. But he’s lurking around anyway. You think all those people you miss now would live their lives the same way they did before should they get plugged in again? You think they wouldn’t do all within their power to make their lives count instead of giving in to trifling cravings? I doubt that they wouldn’t.

Death is an inevitable end we all share. And if you’ve had an NDE yourself, remembering usually helps to joggle your jaded perspectives and help you realise what really matters. If you haven’t had an NDE, you don’t need to have one(please oh!). Just think of those who’ve gone and are only alive in your mind and the minds of their other dear ones now. Ask yourself, if you were just about to check out now, would you be leaving with a smile knowing you lived a full life?

I know you’ve heard the cliche, “live everyday like it was your last” but i think there’s a rather disturbing finality about living like that. Rather, i think we should live like we’ve already died and have nothing to lose in making the required calls to make the changes we crave. You want more out of your life? Great, everyone does. So, what’s holding us all back?

*Now hands you the red pill*

Blink.

Some of the coolest, pithy, witty and sarcasm-laden 140-character thoughts I’ve ever had never made it to my timeline. Such thoughts usually come amid conversations with people or in the middle of a task I cannot walk away from. So what happens is that I keep making mental notes along the way, telling my mind i’d tweet that 140 characters of comic wisdom as soon as I get on the web. They almost never make it that far because when i do get on the web, either the point of the thought/tweet would have been lost on me because of the time elapsed or I forget altogether due to other 140-character thoughts working their way from my mind to my fingers and onto the web in real time. They were obviously too cool for Facebook, anyway.

As pervasive and ubiquitous as social media has proven to be, there’s still a time lag between real time events and the when they get on the web. Don’t get me wrong, i’m not oblivious of how quick news gets on the web in our day and how live events can be followed on the web as they happen. But lets say a reporter was covering a war troubled region and he/she sees or uncovers vital info as they unfold and, God forbid, got killed before they could log it in or tweet it. Or if a guy like Einstein or some other brainiac icon on his deathbed, without the ability to write, happens upon a profound theory in their mind, still, what are the implications of us not knowing those thoughts? I could whip up other scenarios where it’d be critical to have a seamless transition between when our thoughts are hatched and when they get published, but i’d let you think some up yourselves.

I know what some of you’re thinking: ‘there’s a reason we have diaries for documentation.’ Documentation on a private pad for later reference of a time critical info that needs to get out there immediately defeats the purpose already. For this kind of data, diaries, recorders and the likes would prove futile. Only a Thought Transmitter(sic) would suffice. No, i’m not talking about mind reading, where the subject is largely oblivious of the act due to hypnosis. In thought transmission, the subject is aware and in full control of the process. Enter the realm spooky science where a person could will their thoughts or any mental data onto an external device probably far away from proximity instantaneously. A new superstar innovation is begging to be launched. By the time our kids are college freshmen, or their kids are in Juniour High, this would probably have been taken care of(wait, you don’t think they’d still be buzzing on about BBM, Facebook and Twitter and Life on Mars then, do you? That’d be sad).
Crazy, unrealistic idea? Touché.

After Faraday discovered electricity, it took a stiff competition between Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla to take the remarkable experimental discovery from the confines of the laboratory to the streets of America in the early 1900s. They marketed and made it real, tangible and useful to the non-nerdy folks of earthville. And the world was never the same again since. Electricity is by far the single most important discovery ever hatched by a human mind. It’s the bedrock on which many other outstanding innovations stand. Airplanes, industrial machines and home appliances, computers and the big one of our generation: the internet, are all standing on that single invention. And each of these other innovations were the ‘Big thing’ of their era and their founders were immortalized.

The web/social media is the big thing of our day. It’s a profound scientific innovation which aids communication across multiple layers at an alarming speed across the globe. It’s as much about speed of access as it is about ease of access. As the comm devices we build get faster and faster, yet with each upgrade(see Moore’s Law), the only limitation we’ll encounter, with time, is the pace at which we load these devices with info. Our minds aren’t getting an upgrade, and that’ll ensure the time lag between generating a time-critical thought/info and when it gets published/sent to an appropriate location via social media is sustained.

If the earth remains for much longer (and we have people crazy-smart enough as Stephen Hawking, who, sadly, won’t be around for much longer), this ability to transmit thoughts in real time could become a reality. Of course, like all inventions, it’s downside would probably outweigh the upside. People could then transmit any thought ranging from the genuine and useful to the dumb, irritating and useless. It’s only reasonable that people’d be able to subscribe to and block channels at will.

I keep hoping this happens in my lifetime, though. It’ll sure cure my fingers’ insubordination as they, having a mind of their own, keep typing what they will with partial disregard for some of the thoughts streaming from my mind in real time. That’s why this post is how it is. Blame it on the hands.