By Jimanze Ego-Alowes
MON, JUN 29 2020-theG&BJournal- Too often one reads or hears members of the Nigerian intellectual and artistic glitterati speculate that Nigeria is not developed because her best and brightest are not ruling. In plain talk, that is, the geniuses are not the ones in power. To them, the rest of the world, the developed world, from China to Singapore, where ostensibly the best and brightest rule, are proofs of their thesis. Of course by best and brightest, by geniuses, these power punters and speculators mean themselves. Well, they might just be geniuses, but is their thesis right?
Anyway, the facts point that there is nowhere in time, space or history that the best and brightest, that is the geniuses, actually ruled. The reality of this is not even conceptually imaginable. Let us illustrate with a graphic, if not dramatic, exposition of the implausibility, of the best and brightest ruling.
Great Britain is perhaps the lead founder of the modern democratic order. Their invention of constitutional monarchism, is perhaps the greatest leap ever taken towards the electoral equality of man, at least the white man. Little else compels democracy than the equality of men and officially circumscribed powers.
For a long time, it so happened that in Britain they had a certain exam. It is called Tripos. The exam is to determine the most intelligent graduand [in mathematics] in Britain in any one year. Mathematics by the way is the mother of all sciences, of all knowing. So a mathematical prodigy is the closest you can get to an all knowing man. Or at least, the man who is as deeply informed as perhaps the gods themselves.
Now, whoever wins out finally in the Tripos is styled a Wrangler. So, Wranglers are men who took the national math trophy for a given year. So as brains go, the Wranglers are it.
Perhaps, you are beginning to suspect the historical scandal? No Wrangler ever made it to becoming the Prime Minister of Great Britain. We can’t recall if any Wrangler put himself up to be so elected. However, one thing is clear, none was for his brains invited to enter the politics of his era.
So what happened? The cleverer and more plausible answer is that these Wranglers went about the most important things and duties of life. These are duties and briefs that are of finer and of greater purchase than wallowing in politics, including becoming Her Majesty’s prime ministers.
One recent Wrangler example comes to mind. Ronald Fisher, for such was his name, went on to lay the foundations of modern statistics. As is apparent, no prime minister comes close to him in influence and good works. His works permeates all life as you know it, from health to wealth creation and maintenance, from agriculture to ballistics. And his successors, including Andrey Komorogov for instance, are some of the glories of mathematical science. Komorogov, Russian, was one of the big names that ensured Soviet dominance and power in science and thus politics. Yet, Fisher, or any other Wrangler, never made it as Prime Minister.
This Fisher-Tripos-Wrangler example in Britain is what happens in any other country despite optical illusions. The best and brightest, the geniuses, are into the manning of the greatest productive plants in the universe – brain powers. They don’t soil their hands begging for votes or being thugs for power. Why rule a nation, when you can create whole new imagine-nations? Is that not the moral equivalent of God descending from paradise to run the earth, with politicians?
Additionally, there is what economists call the law of comparative advantage we are told. It just doesn’t make sense that the best and brightest should sweat the common stuff, like being leaders, crooks or politicians. This is for the simple fact that only they have the gifts to forge new imagine-nations. In other words, it serves them and humanity best that the common all too common peoples do details work, like politics, like soldiery, like being patriotic, being fools, while they monopolize the franchise of being the best and the brightest.
Thus by the law of comparative advantage, it pays genius best and his society most if he self-restrained himself from joining issues with mediocrities on the matter of ruling nations. As Mother A’Endu will say, ”of nations let the mediocrities rule. Of imagine-nations let the geniuses create.”
Mediocrities are called to rule nations by the justice of their overwhelming kind and numbers. The best and brightest are called to create imagine-nations. This is by the logic of their being the elect, the priesthood, and not goyim, the efulefus, fools, politicians, soldiers, carpenters, police, writers, journalists, etc. of the world.
Mediocrity thrives because despite denials, man is decidedly a tribal beast. Man lives by his kind. A sense of solidarity for his kind is his common all too common standard. Thus, mediocrities prefer to hang together, even in hell, than be led to paradise by another genus, say the best and brightest, the ”Levites” or Ndi-Agwunedus.
Jimanze Ego-Alowes (PhD) is Author and public commentator
