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Close the shebeen and open the mind

It is believed in the Christian faith that fasting brings the soul closer to God. The underlying theory is that the soul's consumptive capacity is sharper when the body is starved.

We derive from this the important lesson that January is the best time to have a meaningful discussion, when most people don't have money.

In December people don't listen. So let us use January, while we are broke and starved, to knock sense into each other's heads.

The matter we must confront honestly is the social destruction caused by the material success of people who have not discovered a higher purpose to animate their lives.

Members of the black middle class typically go "home" during the December holiday. "Home" refers to rural villages where they were born and bred.

There is a characteristic behaviour when they are "home" in December. In the morning they go to town to buy this and that, or visit relatives they had not seen in a while.

In the afternoon most of them converge at a popular shebeen, where they showcase their "success", represented by the expensive German cars they drive.

At the shebeen they consume copious amounts of alcohol, accompanied by braaied meat. They use their fancy cars as a magnet to attract the attention of less "successful" shebeen-goers.

The corrupt among the returnees use local "girls" as ephemeral sexual companions. The "girls" fall for this since the pockets of the people from the city are loaded. That is why they are called "Moreki" - the one who pays.

A socially conscious observer watching all this cannot help but despair at the extent to which so-called "success" sucks members of the black middle class into decadence and destructive consumption.

To be sure, December only magnifies what is in fact the pattern of ordinary life among most members of our middle class.

Behold the life of a male teacher in rural and township South Africa: after school he heads for the nearest shebeen.

Those who live in suburbia fancy themselves different, but they are equally trapped in a life devoid of higher purpose. Those who from time to time experiences boredom must know that their lives are not guided by a higher purpose.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is right to say "boredom is in fact the weight of unused capacity".

Those who pursue a higher purpose don't experience boredom. Their time is taken up by a continuous search for solutions to important questions of life. Even if they drive a German car, they know that it is not a symbol of success. They know that a monkey in a flashy car is still a monkey.

What is a higher purpose?

It is an ideal that animates man's action; it is high only if it nourishes the mind, not the body.

A man who spends his leisure time pursuing a charitable initiative is after mental pleasure, as distinguished from the low, animalistic cravings of the body.

The life of a historic man is driven by an even higher purpose. Today mankind can fly thanks to people who spent their lives seeking answers to what looked like the unsolvable riddles of aerodynamics. Such people had not a minute to waste at a shebeen.

What determines the purposefulness of a man's life is not what he does when he is obliged to be at work, but what he does with his own leisure time.

A man whose idea of pleasure places the body at the centre cannot be distinguished from an animal wagging its tail because it finds the grass it is eating enjoyable.

For as long as there is grass, animals eat. In the process they take no precautions to avert the destruction of their grazing grounds.

The greatest challenge facing the hedonistic black middle class, and therefore the entire black nation, is how to blunt bodily appetites, and how to sharpen mental thirst, so that life is made to follow the light of the mind, and to avoid the destructiveness of the body.

All the great civilisations of mankind rose from the pursuit of mental satiation, not from the natural necessity imposed by the demands of the body.

A nation of sensuous consumers who prefer the shebeen as their rendezvous is guaranteed an inferior future.

In the 1980s, there was a time when young militants went around our townships burning down shebeens, hoping to keep black people sober enough to engage in political struggle.

Perhaps we should add yet another resolution to those we have already heaped on 2017. Can it also be a year against the shebeen?

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