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Age of creative ideas

By Goke Omolade
18 June 2015   |   6:43 am
AS if playing back to the then age of enlightenment vis-a-vis reason (circa 1700-1800), someone a while ago said that the greatest feat of the first millennium was the discovery of electricity which has come to denote to human advancement what oxygen is to the animal species or carbon dioxide to the plant system. Quite…

YSAS if playing back to the then age of enlightenment vis-a-vis reason (circa 1700-1800), someone a while ago said that the greatest feat of the first millennium was the discovery of electricity which has come to denote to human advancement what oxygen is to the animal species or carbon dioxide to the plant system. Quite foundational and quintessential is the power of lightening ideas that it readily comes handy in unraveling the virgin fields of the unknown. It is on this exploring note that scientific research and technological thoroughfare beam their interconnecting rays for multiple exploits.

One good point about human endeavours is that where one’s best efforts optimise is the initial take-off step of another curious explorer and like that proverbial cat with nine lives killed by curiosity, the deepening but resourceful well of discovery is never tired of the daring and ideas-hungry stock. Because the more they quest to know is the more open and receptive the vista of advanced ideas willingly available.

We may wish to have recourse to the creation era of man where the Creator initiated the first couple. By this rare feat, it made Him to be the Original Surgeon by carving Eve out of Adam and went ahead to put the pair over and above the rest of all creatures. If only Adam had behaved truly to type like his Creator by exercising full reign over his home front, the then-avoidable void misused by Eve and cunningly exploited by the wily serpent on its dare-God-and-die-temptation-visit would not have been. Till date has man in entirety found it almost impossible to get out of the torturing pit of the consequential venomous vices and misdeeds of unimaginable proportion.

In a way, not that the abounding dissimilarities of the past ages have all been wiped off, rather it is the relentless efforts of highly enlightened and freely liberated minds that have stood guards against relapse to the iniquities of the medieval era. Between then and now, the pivotal role that creative ideas have played can hardly be overemphasised by steadily ejecting, trimming and discarding outdated and inimical practices. One enduring beauty about creative ideas is that it is never stopping or self-indulgent.

There was once a gathering of some sages in a cave where each living being was faced with an impending extinction owing to scarcity of both air and water and increasingly came the pressing choice that each had to make between the two sustaining commodities. In unquantifiable discipline, those who opted for free air could hardly last more than 60 minutes on a long range while the water-group tarried for a couple of days.

After a pause of some respite, the weak ones were the initial victims who succumbed to the subsequent deathly blows while the seemingly endowed resorted to the survival-antics of steaming water to air on the one hand and condensing air to water on the other. In fact, those sheer typical antics were reminiscences of an era in Nigeria when the charge went out or so it sounded to whosoever cared to heed it: ‘Use whatsoever so you had to get whatsoever you so needed’!

It may be so hypocritical in our contemporary existence to assert of any one or nation without one form or layer of vices either trapping or sinking. Even in the advanced Western world of North America and Western Europe, which the rest of humanity looks up to as guiding models, their abiding gods are now so resolute and resident in the limited power of science and conscious awareness. For this unarguably economically well-nourished stock, any attempt to rationalise godly virtues may sound so ludicrous and pedestrian. As far as they care, the very idea of godliness is now a museum relic since virtually all their human needs are within reach.

Not only has the world at large been assailed with the trapping vices commonly in the currency of market-place wickedness, high financial frauds and corruptible malpractices, hatred, disobedience and other compounded misconduct but quite condemnably, man on a general trend has sunk to the abyss of vices of bestial homosexuality, ravenous cannibalism, devil-driven misdeeds and other darkening vices as frontally but shamelessly championed by the popular culture of Westernised decadence and libertine lifestyle. Atimes and on deep reflections, one wonders if mankind is not actually on the last bend of complete annihilation.

Times were when men (and women) were their fellow keepers and the attendant fellow-feeling and altruistic values were accorded their due course. Then the struggle for stifling material gains and tenacious power was on low ebb as there was more emphasis on one’s family and individual pedigree. It was a classical case of minding the child of whom you were as against the now-hype of your fleet of cars, detached castles on vainglory avenue, fat-bank accounts coupled with free reins of vices-ridden lifestyle.

At this age and era of corrosive vices, the simple idea of standing for virtues hardly ever matters as the main preoccupation is on who gets what and when irrespective of the exacting cost. In a situation where who gets what is at the expense of others, it may then be an issue of deterrence before today’s victors become tomorrow’s victims, perhaps, at a more costly price. Like a never-ending melodrama of musical chairs on a vicious circle, man has stubbornly refused to let go of any slight space of ‘advantageous’ vices. Obviously not willing to be outdone in intrigues or ultimate possessions, it is habitually a theatric of man-for-man while the mankind-at-large saddles the Father Creator to cater for His own!

Even in the intellectual, ideological, spiritual or moral realms, abounding vices in comparative depth, width, length and breadth overawe sane reasoning because wherever virtues are held in bondage, what consequently follows are evil-reigning vices. Intellectualising (i.e. justifying) vices are not so farfetched especially in the tribe of pecuniary idealists whose stock-in-trade are just everything-for-everyone’s advantage. At worse, these individuals can aptly be described as urban militants without visible roots who seamlessly flow with any directional wind and in the market place of free ideas, this typically anaemic set of dwellers have no fixed store of reference or definable relevance.

Pacing back to man’s origins, the interwoven threads of suffocating vices can be located in the less-than man called Adam because if he had taken full charge of his home front as expected, man’s first misdemeanor of disobedience against his Creator would not have arisen. It was in fact the existing vacuum between the First Couple that the cunningness the great serpent readily exploited and man has since then continued to suffer in its offensive release of decadent and sinking vices. What is more, as if on a blind binge, prevailing vices have become so ubiquitous like a free-to-air transmitted programme that as soon as a new vice props up in one part of the world; it becomes almost instantly viral on a universal scale in no time.

•To be continued.
gokeomolade@hotmail.com

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