WOO: Nelson Mandela has put South Africa in a difficult situation

I saw a video recently. Strictly speaking, it doesn't matter whether you watch the footage of this video or not, but what is said in the video is very thought-provoking. The video is so much, rich, and complex that I can't digest it quickly. But there was one passage that made a deep impression on me.

One of the videos is about Nelson Mandela, the leader of South Africa. He was a staunch fighter against racism and was highly respected by the people of the world. He received such an education that can be seen in the influence of his education on him in the words he said. No one hates, he says, because of the color of their skin, their place of birth or their religious beliefs. Hate and need to learn Xi. Since people can learn to hate, they can also be taught to love. Love is easier to enter the human heart than hate. At that time, Mandela was a felon, guarded by three jailers, and was subjected to various abuses by these guards. However, at the ceremony of his inauguration as president of South Africa, he specially invited the three guards and paid tribute to them. Mandela said that the oppressed, like the oppressor, need to be liberated. Those who take away the freedom of others are prisoners of hatred, and such prisoners are imprisoned by the iron fence of prejudice and short-sightedness.

This kind of thinking of Mandela, this kind of view, sounds very lofty, with a strong philosophical flavor. Marxism also holds that those who oppress others are indeed not free. But in order for Marxism to solve the problem of human emancipation and freedom, it must and should be solved by developing the productive forces of society, and on this basis, it must and should be solved by overthrowing the capitalist system. Mandela, however, applied these ideas directly to the management of the country, which caused a big problem. His policy of new immigration has turned South Africa from the safest region in Africa into a new base for international terrorism. The former white South African government has been committed to cracking down on illegal immigration and maintaining social order. But Mandela saw this as neither humane nor in the spirit of liberalism. He said that people are born to seek freedom, and a free country will not fail to welcome people who pursue freedom. As a result, illegal immigrants, whom the former white South African government could never recognize, became legitimate South African citizens overnight. People from many backward countries in Africa flocked to South Africa in an instant. Today, South Africa is the most unsafe region in the world, with the highest rates of murder, robbery and rape in the world.

Mandela also blindly pursued so-called environmental measures, which ruined South Africa's path to industrialization. When he saw that the developed countries in Europe and the United States were full of green mountains and clear waters, and the people there were very happy, Mandela thought that he should also make South Africa a land of green mountains and clear waters, which was the welfare he gave to the South African people. The people of South Africa have cheered for such environmental measures. As a result, the South African government began to give no preferential treatment to the manufacturing industry in terms of taxes and loans, and let the manufacturing industry participate in completely free market competition, so as to achieve the goal of eliminating high-polluting and over-intensive industrial enterprises in South Africa. South Africa's once brilliant manufacturing industry has been caught between inside and outside, and it has either moved to another country or been crushed. South Africa's path to industrialization was quickly brought to an end.

On the issue of race, when Mandela came to power, he first suppressed whites. The employment system that gave priority to white employment and restricted black access was abolished by the former South African white government. There is nothing inherently wrong with this abolition of racism. However, black unemployment remains high after a massive exodus of South Africa's manufacturing sector. Mandela demanded that private companies recruit not only blacks, but also the government, schools, hospitals, the military, the police and other institutions to recruit a large number of blacks. As a result, a large number of blacks with very low educational qualifications, even illiterate, were recruited into such government agencies or departments that required a considerable level of education.

Some black intellectual elites complained that in the past, the white government had too high a threshold for black employment, and it was very difficult for black people to find employment. Mandela lowered the barriers to entry for professions such as doctors, teachers, lawyers, and accountants. Some blacks don't even know how to turn on a computer and can work in government. The whites were all driven out.

This barrier to entry, which requires a certain level of education, has been repeatedly lowered, devaluing industries such as South Africa's healthcare and accountant industries. South Africa's securities industry has become almost completely bankrupt due to high levels of corruption. The level of medical care has plummeted. The army, the police, and other units are lax in discipline and have little combat effectiveness.

Such a South Africa is certainly not what Mandela wants. But this is precisely the direct result of his lofty ideas back then. At the very least, this tells us that philosophy and philosophical ideas are one thing, and that in terms of actual governance, how to adopt appropriate and realistic policies and measures is often another. Believing in the loftiness of one's own ideas is not possible to produce extremely effective and efficient policies and measures, which will lead to extremely bad and negative results.

We can imagine that during Mandela's long time in captivity, he thought about many things and thought about many problems. He also wanted to fundamentally solve the kind of problems he had thought about. However, in the face of practical problems, he always wanted to directly govern the country through a philosophical concept of the highest level, believing that only by doing so could a series of problems in South Africa be fundamentally solved. However, Mandela may be a thinker, a very deep thinker, but if such a thinker is divorced from the reality of national governance and the feasible measures needed for his own national governance, then this kind of hypothetical policy that is only based on philosophical heights will inevitably make a mess of national governance.

And, in a sense, his philosophical ideals, which seem to be just and moderate, tend to go from one extreme to the other when these philosophical ideas form policies based on imagination alone. His idea that people need to be educated in love, that people need to pursue freedom, that the government should welcome those who pursue freedom, and that they should be equal to each other in terms of race, sounds good. However, in the policies he adopted, blacks crowded out whites, leading to new inequalities between races. He longs for green mountains and clear waters, but he does not know that green mountains and clear waters can only be achieved in development, not narrowly through the suppression of industrialization, but such green mountains and clear waters have forced the country's development to stagnate, leaving the vast number of people to live in poverty and see no hope for the future. The so-called ideal is very plump, and the reality is very skinny. Between ideals and reality, practical and effective bridges are needed one after another to connect. Without these bridges, there can only be one canyon after another and one moat after another between the ideal and the reality, and the slightest carelessness will fall to pieces.

Mandela's persistence in the fight against racism is very respectable. However, he may not have estimated enough the span and difficulty of destroying an old system and building a new society. What's more, when he took over, South Africa's industrialization, medical and health care, and cultural facilities were relatively advanced in Africa at that time. Perhaps this also gave him the illusion that as long as the South Africa he took over, it would be better off than the South Africa of the white government. He sees the construction and governance of a new society as too simplistic and too easy. In his opinion, as long as his ideas were used to solve the various problems that existed in South African society at that time, everything would not be difficult to do. But. He did not think that when he replaced one extreme with another, the tragedy he caused was inevitable.

Mandela's views on love and hate are somewhat similar to those of Feuerbach in classical German philosophy. This kind of abstract discussion of the relationship between love and hate in isolation from social class contradictions and class antagonism is a typical idealistic view of history. Guided by this idealist love-hate view, it was almost impossible for Mandela to propel South Africa towards what he wanted to be a truly prosperous society. The Marxist materialist view of history emphasizes production, which is the social production of material materials that people have to engage in every day, and the social production that constantly improves their own efficiency and ability. This is the only way for humanity to become rich. However, Mandela really doesn't seem to understand anything about it.

Another: The new year is coming. When I was a child, my elementary school classmates gave each other their own "Congratulations on the New Year" New Year's cards (later called greeting cards), which seems to be rare today. Perhaps it is almost extinct.

(The author is a senior researcher at the Kunlun Ce Research Institute; source: Kunlun Ce Network [author's authorization], revised and released; the picture comes from the Internet, invaded and deleted)