Indiscipline

Often Jamaicans accuse themselves, or at least their fellow countrymen of a wild indiscipline. And it looks that way. Except that it is not true. It is true that nothing happens at the right time, or that nothing happens with the precision that is needed for the intollerant systems of modern technology, and the intolerance of western exactitude where the worship of the rightangle, the straight line, the perfect circle and the love of order and measurement are the very cause of their particular technological revolution. And yet it is modern society which Jamaica aspires to. And so the cogwheels of society (we are forced into a mechanistic metaphor here) are screaming under the extraordinary friction that they have to withstand. But the friction is caused not by indiscipline, but by the good that is being pursued, which itself is not convinced of the argument of Western progress and the discipline imposed by the means to power. A society where everything happens to achieve a status relative to the immediate surroundings, where many live for themselves alone to escape the imagined abyss, but with a worth measured only through the eyes of others, places their values on subsiding foundations. The submerging of the environment becomes as effective as the clambering of the self. It is like walking up a downward escalator.