A Ghana society satire on the two faces of selfishness. There is one face nobody wants to see at all.
The Side of The Coin Nobody Turns Over
There are two sides to selfishness as many as there are to a coin or a story. Nobody really tells you this. They only hand you the coin, point at one face, and tell you that is the whole story. A story you should believe no matter what.
But It is not the only story. There is another story that causes epic fury. That is because it makes people uncomfortable like they are in cars that perform jumping jacks in the almighty potholes on Ghanaian roads.
Selfishness is the invisible angel in radiant feathery wings on a Sunday morning—the man who puts on his oxygen mask before helping others, the woman who sleeps eight hours because she knows she is useless to everyone when she sleeps two hours less. And then also, selfishness is the very well-known devil in blood-stained apparel on a sun-infested hump day—the contractor who ate the road budget, the politician who designed the hill and watched everyone else push him over it.
Two faces, one coin. But society has chosen to discuss only one of them.
The Most Revered One
Outside of the coin discussed above, there is a neighbour who is known as altruism. Altruism—the most revered concept by the people. The one who is mostly ingrained in the visceral mores of societies because all that humans and societies care about are the benefits we could derive from other individuals. It’s not a written rule but no matter how less one has at a time, it is binding to give before any complaint.
However, if we do not get what we want, well, then, the most selfish person ever is born. Or so the story goes.
Ghana society satire requires us to examine this story carefully. Because what passes for altruism in our societies is frequently something else entirely—performance. Public sacrifice dressed in Sunday clothes. A man losing himself trying to sacrifice his inner lamb for the general good while the people he is sacrificing for are busy at an expensive table with gold forks, ordering from menus printed on gold papers that cost more than his lifetime pay slip.
After all, one is just an infinitesimal part of an infinite scheme called the universe—one who barely matters as the world has moved on countless times from its brightest minds and dedicated servants who once lived like we live now.
Altruism is very real. The beneficiaries, however, are carefully selected to benefit more from others.
The Cliff-Edge
Here is the part that kills. Not the selfishness. Not even the performative altruism. It is the cliff-edge posse of expectations for people to trudge along the dogmatic routes carved out for them—be what we want you to be, sacrifice what we want you to sacrifice, defer what we want you to defer that does the real damage.
Society has a formula for the acceptable human being. That formula requires you to pour from a cup that nobody is refilling. It requires you to give to a community that the politicians have already extracted from. Give everywhere you find yourself. Give at the church, give at the chop bar, or even give to support someone’s political ambition. Further, society also requires you to be publicly altruistic while being privately exhausted. And if you stop, if you say, actually, I need to attend to my own genuine individual problems and desires first, you are tagged.
Selfish. Traitor. Unpatriotic. These are the tags.
As if the society whose infrastructure budget was absorbed somewhere between allocation and implementation has moral authority to call anyone unpatriotic and selfish.
The Devil In The Details
But for once, if the devil is taken out of the details, selfishness could also be for individuals a taking-care-of-myself-first and a see-you-later approach—which would not necessarily be another case of biting the forbidden apple.
An individual could then attend to genuine individual problems and desires first, without the tag of being selfish, a traitor, or unpatriotic.
This is not a radical idea. Airlines have been saying it for decades. Put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others. Not because you do not care about others. Precisely because you do, and a person who has passed out from oxygen deprivation is not helping anybody.
It is my honest understanding that for one to influence the community in a wider positive net, that individual ought to be stable and sane first. That stability would eventually elevate commitment and outputs to astronomical levels with respect to the community.
A broken person cannot build an unbroken community. A depleted person cannot pour into an already empty system. It’s pretty obvious one can’t give what one doesn’t have, or always give out the little left.
Ghana society satire must acknowledge this truth even when it is uncomfortable.
The Fulcrum
This is the point where I lead you to the point of balance that could tip the scale against the public enemies we make of ourselves. The selfish-altruist—the fulcrum that could perhaps balance the beams for both the individual and society.
The selfish-altruist is not the contractor who ‘ate’ the budget and donated a portion of it to build a dining hall for his church. Such a person is simply selfish, and a traitor. He has no altruism anywhere in his vicinity, but he puts up theatrical performances for what the public will praise.
Rather, the selfish-altruist is the person who has decided that taking care of themselves is not the opposite of taking care of others. It is the prerequisite for it.
Society has spent considerable energy condemning people for resting, for setting boundaries, and for saying “I cannot give what I do not have.” Meanwhile the people who are actually extracting from the community—the road contract eaters, the manifesto writers, the commissioners of inquiries that produce reports placed near previous reports. Those people are described not as selfish but as public servants who also give back to society.
The language is doing extraordinary work in the wrong direction.
The Act of Selflessness
Consider the specific arithmetic of the Ghanaian public selflessness expectation. You are expected to vote—standing in the sun for hours. Also, you are expected to pay your taxes to a system that will absorb them somewhere between allocation and implementation.
Finally, you are again expected to be patient with electricity that arrives as a threat, with roads that have been under construction since before you were born, and with a salary that has never once adjusted to anything except the comfort of the people setting it.
In return, you are expected to feel guilty for occasionally putting yourself first.
The selfish-altruist looks at this arithmetic and notices something. The transaction is not balanced. The giving is flowing in one direction and the receiving is concentrated at a specific table with specific cutlery.
Genuine altruism—the kind that actually elevates communities rather than performing elevation for an audience begins with a person who is whole enough to give something real rather than something extracted. Society has been pointing at the wrong selfish people for a very long time.
Turn The Coin Over Sometimes
There are two sides to selfishness. The devil in blood-stained apparel has been correctly identified and correctly condemned. However, the angel in radiant feathery wings—the person who sleeps before they are too exhausted to function, who refuses the guilt trip, who puts on their own oxygen mask first—that person deserves a different name than the one currently being assigned.
Not selfish, not traitor, not unpatriotic.
They are getting prepared to help society.
The selfish-altruist is not the public enemy. The public enemy is the system that requires everyone to pour from empty cups so that the cups at the top of the table stay perpetually full.
The coin has two sides. Society has been reading only one of them. Next time someone denies you a favor, just remember that, perhaps they have to take care of some personal stuff first. Sometimes, there is a wrong time to ask for a favor from someone. You do not need to be angry at the wrong person, at least not so early.
Sometimes, all you need to do is just turn the coin over.
The Brewed Satire
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