You can tell a lot about a society from the types of buildings it produces. Over the years we have swapped porous wooden structures for concrete cells of various dimensions. Guyanese used to conduct a large part of their social exchanges outdoors, at their gates, on the roads, in public. Our houses were open to the tradewinds and the call and sight of a passing neighbour. Now we take it for granted that homes and businesses must be ‘protected’ and a substantial, largely underpaid workforce has been mobilized to do this. We barricade ourselves behind large fences and grilled windows and doors. Any claims we make to live in an open society become slightly risible when our architecture is scrutinized. These changes are most apparent when, as recently, fear in parts of the land reaches a certain pitch. The streets become deserted. We all retreat indoors.
About ten years ago, Malcolm Gladwell, a writer of Caribbean extraction, produced a book called “The Tipping Point: How little things can make a big difference.” In it he tried to analyse the momentum that gathers behind ideas, behaviours, messages or products. He called this process a ‘social epidemic’ and compared it to the spread of an infectious disease. He believed that it was possible to start epidemics. Epidemics could be positive or negative in their impact.
Gladwell argued against the prevailing orthodoxies; the tendency to view upheaval in everyday life as the product of gradual, cumulative change and the tendency to assume that change was governed by the laws of cause and effect. Major change, he said, could have a small cause akin to a measles flare-up in a kindergarten class caused by one infected child: “ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread like viruses do.” Malcolm Gladwell’s theory was based, in part, on his research as a reporter into the AIDS epidemic. He adopted the concept of a ‘tipping point’ from epidemiology (the study of epidemics): it describes the moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. As he explained in an interview:
“It’s the boiling point. It’s the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards. AIDS tipped in 1982, when it went from a rare disease affecting a few gay men to a worldwide epidemic. Crime in New York City tipped in the mid 1990’s, when the murder rate suddenly plummeted…What if everything has a Tipping Point? Wouldn’t it be cool to try and look for Tipping Points in business, or in social policy, or in advertising or in any number of other non-medical areas?”
Gladwell wrote of ideas being contagious, of behaviours being ‘transmitted from one person to another’ and used this concept as an analytic tool for social phenomena as varied as the rise in sales of Hush Puppies in the mid-1990s, teenage suicide in the South Pacific islands in the 1970s and 1980s and the mass shootings that occurred in America in the mid-1990s.
Social epidemics have three agents of change. The first of these are people with ‘rare social gifts’ of whom there are three types; connectors, mavens and salesmen. Connectors are those with the ‘ability to span many different worlds’ and link people. Mavens are ‘information specialists’ who start ‘word-of-mouth epidemics’. Salesmen or ‘persuaders’ are charismatic and good at negotiating and converting others to their cause. The second agent of change is what Gladwell terms the ‘stickiness factor’: something about the message, idea, behaviour or product makes it memorable, makes it rise above the fug of daily social intercourse. Finally, human behavior is a product of its environment: “epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur”. So, for example, a zero-tolerance approach to minor crimes such as fare-dodging and graffiti on the New York subway led to a decline in more violent crimes city-wide.
Gladwell’s theories seem to fit events in Guyana. It is tempting, for example, to apply them to an analysis of the Agricola skirmishes. But why stop there? It could be argued that we have reached a cluster of tipping points or that the entire society is at a tipping point. At one level, the events in Agricola are part of a wider, deep-rooted and longstanding social and political phenomenon in Guyana, namely the unravelling of the authority of the state. There are many reasons for this. One reason is that the state is diminished: it lacks the means to impose its will. Another is that the electorate has lost faith.
We have reached a point in Guyana now where, regardless of who is in charge, regardless of who governs, at least half of our electorate will not trust or believe in the government and, by extension, the state. When such a large portion of the nation has so little faith in the integrity of the state, it is either time to reconfigure the role of the state or to disentangle the state’s core functions and duties from the priorities of the prevailing government. It is also time to make the mechanisms of government as transparent as possible, to try to re-kindle a little of the lost faith. To some extent, this is exactly what is playing out in a rather sloppy and disjointed fashion in the wrangles over budgets, interim management committees and so much more. These battles all converge on one main issue: the integrity and authority of the state. However political parties waiting in the wings and the incumbent would do well to heed this fact: the country can no longer be governed in the way that it has been governed since independence. Things must change, the culture of government must change.
Symptoms of a similar malaise can be seen elsewhere. As a way of coping, we seem to have developed a collective case of schizophrenia. So, we live in immaculate homes but care little for the condition of our streets and public spaces. Visitors remark on the squalor, the noise, the chaos, the lack of regulation of traffic and pedestrians. Yet many of us have come to regard this as the norm. We have created our own (internal) comfort zones and are profoundly detached from the public arena. There is also a sense that there are bigger battles to fight. A few traffic or planning violations and the odd festering pile of garbage can seem pretty inconsequential in the wake of a series of dreadful accidents, violent crimes and episodes of social unrest. Gladwell says that there is a link. A society that tolerates the small violations creates an environment conducive to the larger ones. Clean up the streets, penalize the drivers exceeding the speed limits and jumping the lights, enforce the basic building regulations and, eventually, you create a different environment, a culture that is less conducive to crime.
Other theories may help to shed some light on where we are right now. Henry Ford, the American industrialist, believed that it was imperative to pay his workforce a good salary if only because a well-paid workforce would be able to afford his cars. Economists would duly christen this theory the ‘virtuous circle of growth.’ In Guyana, we have cultivated entire industries based on an underpaid workforce. If people lack the ability to earn a living wage, they must resort to other means to acquire funds to live. Some will seek a second job. Many more will seek to supplement their income by any means available. Either option has major social costs.
Let’s take a long hard look at the behaviours, ideas and messages prevalent in our society today because they dictate our fate as much as any exterior forces. We collectively indulge in pervasive, low-grade infringements of the law. We collectively exclude and disenfranchise swathes of our workforce by failing to equip them with the skills for work and then refusing to pay them adequately.
The state routinely fails to enforce basic laws and to fulfill its core duties. These strands are all inter-connected. They have all been unravelling for some time. We are at a tipping point.
