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I AM Intrigued By Our Intriguing Psychology

In a response to Messay Kebede, a well-known commentator on Ethiopian politics writes this: The fragmented and intriguing characters we have, and the loss of our self-reliance, and weak theoretical background we posses, are some of the factors which block our wishes to develop Ethiopia. Gasp! Myself, I take my cue from Henry Farell as [...]

In a response to Messay Kebede, a well-known commentator on Ethiopian politics writes this:

The fragmented and intriguing characters we have, and the loss of our self-reliance, and weak theoretical background we posses, are some of the factors which block our wishes to develop Ethiopia.

Gasp! Myself, I take my cue from Henry Farell as to how to treat such absurd assertions. We shouldn’t treat them as serious academic claims, but attempts at immortality by those who make the claims. We have had similar emphatically clueless attempts at essentializing the characters of Ethiopians such as “double-faced Ethiopians”, “intriguing Amharas” and “irritatingly proud northerners”, and the above statement is best suited to such company.

And this:

I do not know any Ethiopian economist who has extensively studied the role of Mercantilism, and the Works of Friedrich List, Heinrich Pesch, and others, which are crucial indeed for the application of a developmental state economic policy. Neither do I know who has a good understanding of philosophy and tries to combine philosophy, sociology and cultural transformation with a kind of renaissance economic policy to foster industrialization policy in our country. As so long as we are stick to the market economic policy of the IMF and the World Bank it is practically impossible to get Ethiopia out of the present situation.

So we are really, really screwed if our intellectuals haven’t read the academic tomes the writer approves of. Intriguing, Indeed. It reminds me of a hilarious hypothetical conversation between a philosophy student and his friend:

PhD student: My research is on Derrida

Friend: Have you read “Sein und Zeit”?

Student: That is Heidegger’s work. I don’t have time to read Sein und Zeit. I want to read Derrida.

Friend: But if you don’t read “Sein und Zeit”, you will never understand Derrida

Student:But my thesis is on Derrida. I don’t read German. I am already enrolled in a language school to study French.

Friend: But if you don’t read German, you can’t understand Hegel or Husserl. If you don’t understand them, you don’t understand Heidegger. If you don’t understand Heidegger, you don’t understand Derrida.

Another friend: But if you want to truly grasp Heidegger, you should also read Kierkagaard. “Sygdommen til Døden” is foundational to “Sein un Zeit.” To understand Kierkagaard, reading Danish is a key.

Student: I wanted to study radical politics, and now I am told that I couldn’t understand radical politics without understanding a Nazi and reading three languages. I don’t think I will get out of this F***** PhD alive.

3 Responses to “I AM Intrigued By Our Intriguing Psychology”

  1. entertaining. abiye…u r scoring good points by presenting ur ideas in a funny way

  2. Hell ya, a f..cking PhD life…Tell me about it…

  3. This intellectuals on steroids need to calm down.Out problems as a people are not that difficult to overcome, we just have to do what has been done by humans for thousands of years. Learn form our mistakes and find a better way forward.

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