We are on sale – aren’t we?

Trade has been a conspicuous practice in all societies. Since antiquity, people have traded the commodities they produced and offered services they were experts at. In ancient societies, despite the scarcity of resources, the only commodities traded were goods and services.

Presently, we can consider ourselves the most skilled and resourceful generation; however, we are also the most unsettling, insatiable and gluttonous breed. This is because we have strangulated or sold out our conscience. Today, in our part of the world, conscience is one of the most traded and perhaps profitable transactions. Obsessed with idleness and engrossed with stagnation, we love effortless outcomes. People take advantage of their own or others’ conscience, principles, social values, trust, ethos and religious tenets for their selfish gains, which only offer temporary profits.

Due to this, instead of working hard and building ourselves on our own, most people around us love to take advantage of our consciences. This is reflected in the honest hypocrisy, megalomania and minimalist approaches to success, including sycophancy and flattery. We are no longer inspired by moral values or social standards but by money. Rather than trade on our labour and efforts in our personal development, we are apt at appeasing and pleasing empowered, moneyed and notoriously prominent thugs. We love to bow to the elite and aristocrats who are corrupt to the core. We love to lick their boots and always look for their “blessed” glance.

Once we have exploited our rules and principles, we are driven by anarchy, greed and egoistic tendencies. It’s this egoism and selfishness that has been fast dragging our society to a bottomless abyss of decay and despondency.

Devoid of conscience and undeterred by any law, we trade on the very features and values that make us a society. We auction education in school; health in hospital; citizen’s rights in public office; justice in court; religion at the pulpit, truth in media; votes in elections; national interests in the estates of the state. With a few exceptions, no one around us is sincere with the assigned responsibilities. All we do is maximise our riches and satisfy our ego. Therefore, most people wait for a higher bid to be sold out.

Paradoxically, most of us are cloaked in piety and peddle honesty, integrity and truthfulness. Most of us in our own right are self-righteous souls, self-employed sages, and self-proclaimed saints. Our faith, words and morals are adulterated, and integrity is deceptive. Each of us is the epitome of megalomania, chameleonic and Machiavellian to the extent of their capacity. We have been so accustomed to hypocrisy and duplicity that we view an honest soul with suspicion. For a man of integrity or exalted moral standards no longer appeals to our society. A society that idolises and crowns criminals, notoriously prominent and influential thugs, and pampered and patronised elite regardless of their moral and ethical considerations is destined to doom. And we are on the path to doom, aren’t we?

Why does it have to be this way? Why did we collectively and individually fail to interrupt the decay of societal morals and ethics? Either we are unaware of having abandoned our values and conscience or we are unwilling to acknowledge the reality. Even if we are aware, we aren’t ready to acknowledge it. We don't dare to publicly speak about it. Even if we voice it, it gets lost in the cacophony of falsehood and social fabrication. Even if it is heard, the conformist majority condemns and censures it. Even if it is not condemned, it gets lost in the overwhelming gloom. 

However, where there’s a norm, there is an exception. There are maverick and rebellious souls defying herd mentality and wrestling against the decadences. We must idolise them and gather the courage to redirect the course of our society. Only through determined individual and collective actions can we rescue this society from the accelerating slide into an amoral and anarchic spiral of doom.