OUT of the legacy of the “massa” culture that shaped our nation’s birth from slavery and colonial economic servitude and imperialist-driven social inferiority, we today harbour deep in our subconscious a debilitating dependency syndrome.We look up to big authority with a sneer, suspicious, fearing that we’re victims of forces in the world too big and powerful, out to get us. So we perpetuate the feeling in our subconscious that we’re helpless. We depend on fate. Too many Guyanese refuse to perform the personal intellectual effort to plan, design and develop our individual lives.
This leaves us crippled in our psyche and unable to muster the confidence and inner courage and deep resolve to even see that we hold our destiny in our hands, that we’re personally empowered today in a thriving, democratic Guyana to make our way in the world.
So many citizens sit around idle blaming Government for all and sundry under the sun, not seeing that self-development calls for personal responsibility, active pursuit of individual goals.
We live in an organic, dynamic, alive meritocracy, a society open and free, allowing any citizen to read literature to develop the mind, with an abundance of books, and free access to thousands and thousands of classics online, with our landscape such a peaceful, pastoral place, where we could enjoy an active lifestyle, our bodies absorbing the warm sun and fresh air and interacting with vibrant, verdant, colourful nature.
Developing the mind, keeping the body active, eating healthy fresh vegetable and fruits, freedom to pursue a spiritual lifestyle to develop morals, ethics and sound personal values, these make for a heavenly life in Guyana.
We cannot expect heaven on earth, as the world is prone to all manner of crisis and emergencies and bad stuff, human nature being what it is, fallible, imperfect, many times subjected to wild desires of the heart that lead us down paths of self-destruction.
But our Guyanese history is a story of the self-development of ordinary folks into world class, outstanding human beings.
Our nation is so young, still forming our national identity, yet designing our way in the 21st century global village having emerged out of troubling times during the Industrial era, now working out our place in this Knowledge Age of robotics and the Internet of Things.
To grow and mature as a nation, we’ve got to work on developing the consciousness of our people, to awaken new dreams and profound visions and high aspirations as a national culture in the hearts and minds of our sons and daughters.
We accomplish this with our language and literature and originality of thinking.
In fact, Nobel Prize for Literature novelist V.S. Naipaul came up with this original insight as he sought to bridge a gap he saw in his father living in Trinidad and Tobago, a descendant of Indian indentured immigrants to the Caribbean.
Like Naipaul’s society in the Caribbean, Guyana grew out of the colonial economic servitude of sugar plantations and rice fields and back-bending sun-scorching tilling of the land.
So this Naipaulian insight becomes instructive and a serious lesson to us as a nation, on how we see ourselves, how we approach living together as a people culled into nationhood out of an imperial desire for the economic wellbeing of far-flung colonial masters.
Naipaul relates in a little book he wrote that he thought long and hard of his father in Trinidad and Tobago, working as a Journalist at a newspaper, and struggling to become a fiction writer. Naipaul also contemplated hard on the attitude of his wider social circle, as folks lived and worked in a new land, upholding aspects of their culture from memory.
Later, as a successful writer living in the colonial master’s land in Britain, Naipaul travelled to India, and proceeded to start a conversation with his fore-parents’ relatives in the villages of that vast ancient place. What he found shocked him, and he wrote of it in that little book, which he titled ‘Ways of Seeing and Feeling’.
The great thinker found that the way his ancestral people see and feel left much to be desired: like in Trinidad and Tobago, they stared at his questions with blank minds, unable to fathom his search for ‘why’. Naipaul called it a state of unconsciousness.
This unconsciousness, this blankness as to our condition, seems evident in Guyanese society today. We sit around idle, too many of us, blaming Government and the State and history and those colonial masters and imperial kings and the world at large, for our condition.
The Opposition adopts an attitude in this society that were we to change Government, even if it means removing the freely and fairly elected Government by whatever means possible, things would improve.
Never, ever do we hear from leaders who blame everything at the feet of the democratic Government a word of advice or encouragement or inspiration, exhorting individual Guyanese to self-develop, to read literature, to live a sound active lifestyle and eat fresh local vegetable and fruits and to enjoy the blessings of our freedom to think and to practice a spiritual lifestyle.
Instead, these leaders, with shameless disregard for the opportunity every single Guyanese citizen today holds to self-development and cultivate personal growth and individual responsibility, they just generate a national atmosphere of scapegoating and blaming Government. They make out as if Government and the State operate as god over individual Guyanese citizens. Such grotesque dishonesty leaves too many citizens crippled and helpless in our psyche, particularly the constituents of the Opposition, who look up to their leaders for guidance, motivation, inspiration, advice and good sense.
Thus, these leaders who blame everything on Government perpetuate a Guyanese society caught in the trap of that dependency syndrome. In other words, it’s the poorest of leadership.
Leadership is about empowering people, showing Guyanese how to use our freedoms to choose our own Government, freedom of thought and expression and freedom of movement, these sacred democratic rights, to self-develop.
Political leadership is not about stirring up the rabble to cause social unrest and dissent and mass hysteria against Government. Political leadership is about empowering one’s constituency to use the tools of democracy to self-develop and contribute one’s full human capital to the cause of lifting the nation’s wellbeing in the global village.
Opposition leaders absolutely fail to inculcate in our people a sense of personal responsibility, whereby self-development is the ultimate tool for national development.
This national attitude of dependency, of depending on forces big and powerful that we tell ourselves lord it over us, which causes us to become stunted and myopic and helpless so that we won’t even read literature or cultivate the mind, because we think it’s all useless, as only Government could cure our ills, this attitude cripples us into inactive citizens.
But this attitude also causes such vital institutions as the national media to perpetuate the feeling that we’re helpless, that only Government could babysit us and nurse us to our dreams.
It’s a vicious circle, and we’re unconscious that we swirl around in it, becoming tired and worn out and unable to face ourselves. We become a nation numb, sitting on our hands and blanking our minds, as we wait for Government to come fix us.
So we’ve got to find a way to overcome and conquer this dependency syndrome that may have been foisted upon our way of being in our very formative stage, when we looked to the colonial “massa” to build our slave houses and logies and to serve us food and pittances of pay and to be our landlord and to enslave us on plantations of hard labour.
Today, Guyanese citizens stand personally empowered, among the most free of nations on this earth, fully, absolutely able to self-develop. We’ve got to become conscious of the opportunities that lie dormant at our feet, and ignore the leaders who want to keep us helpless, unconscious of our abilities.
We’ve got to shake off the shackles of this awful dependency syndrome, once and for all, and it starts with insisting that the national media and other important institutions like the Opposition foster a Guyanese social landscape of citizen empowerment and individual responsibility and personal self-development.

Today, Guyanese citizens stand personally empowered, among the most free of nations on this earth, fully, absolutely able to self-develop. We’ve got to become conscious of the opportunities that lie dormant at our feet, and ignore the leaders who want to keep us helpless, unconscious of our abilities.
Written by Shaun Michael Samaroo