Overcoming ‘Defeatist & Bystander’ Mindsets; Lessons From Guatemalan ‘Aragalaya’

By Mohamed Harees –JULY 5, 2022

Lukman Harees

“Seeing the mud around a lotus is pessimism, seeing a lotus in the mud is optimism.” ― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

Learned helplessness, first observed by Martin Seligman in 1965, when he was doing classical conditioning experiments on dogs, occurs when people or animals feel helpless to avoid negative situations. Seligman concluded that the conditioned dog had learned that trying to escape the shocks was futile, and thus would not try to escape it even in the new environment of the second experiment. He described this condition as learned helplessness. Humans too are just like these dogs. If, over the course of their lives, they have experienced loss of control, they become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism. Democracy needs alert and active citizenry; it cannot afford indifferent, careless citizens. Learned helplessness as a behavioural theory, explains how people can remain passive even at the forefront of injustice violence corruption, discrimination and other forms of negative situations because of their prior knowledge or there might be other reasons like defeatist attitudes, and fear of failure.

As people of a country in a continuous state of turmoil, Sri Lankans too carrying a crushing weight of helplessness in their shoulders, and negative emotions which are leading them to a point of despair and accepting their fate or Karma. However, if they remain in this nihilist state for a long time, the danger will be that they will decide that the present status quo- of facing suffering inflicted by a corrupt political administration and need to get used to a lower quality of life and desperation are facts of life and thereby pass up opportunities to fight the evil and unjust political system which created this mayhem in the first place. The loss of control in any situation can lead to this state. The people will thus at best settle down to idiomatically ‘save the babies floating in the downstream instead of going upstream to discover how the babies are getting into the river in the first place’. Sri Lankans can no longer be political bystanders anymore, given the developing scenario of gloom and doom.

A growing recognition emerges that we Sri Lankans don’t have the stomach or the backbone to do the things we have to do to win this fight- to chase out a stubborn despot/ misfit elected due to our own stupidity and to tackle the multitude of crises he has created. Our fingers have been burned. Our international image has taken a terrible beating. As it stands, we don’t’ seem to look and like what we see in the mirror. While the self-bloated ruling politicians of the Diyawanna Oya have gone into hiding from public view , thousands if not more are joining the passport queues to take their first flight out of the country which they loved and lived in. As the crisis after crisis hit this Island nation, and many are the hitting the streets to protest and wage the struggle calling for social justice and political accountability, as a nation however, people are still wanting to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that the crises will fade away when the next fuel bowser arrives and that some other nation will salvage their country. This is merely an illusion. If there is no collective nationwide commitment to the struggle (Aragalaya) to change this toxic system of governance and if everybody feels that somebody will do it for them, it will end up with nobody doing what everybody as a collective could have done.

Seldom that the people realise that corrupt Robber Baron Rajapaksas in particular and the ruling parties in general whom they have been electing democratically since Independence have been ‘actively plotting and planning their destruction’ in a sense by sucking and siphoning out the nation’s wealth and also their future over the years. People have thus paid a terrible price for connivance with and climbing into the gutter with these political opportunists and taking the nation into an oblivion and wilderness, naively believing and trusting laughable and unenforceable election promises and manifestos. However, having realised their folly, as a collective, people can do things to change the status quo and make qualitative and decisive changes in the political system. ‘Not losing hope and having self confidence’ is the starting point.

Having hope,” writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, “means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.” Hope is “more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right”; it is “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals”. Defeatist thoughts are the mother of inaction. A defeatist spirit must inevitably lead to disaster”. One of the greatest fears people is the fear of failure, imagining all possible scenario why what you do will not work based on all past experiences with party politics, thereby going in a state of analysis paralysis. The best way forward will be to overcome this defeatist attitude and actually take a leap of faith, take that first step, and put themselves in a situation where there is no turning back. Many examples abound worldwide. What happened in Guatemala in 2015 closely resembles the Aragalaya which is unveiling now in Sri Lanka! Their campaign hashtag #RenunciaYa (Resign Now) corresponds with ours; ‘#GohomeGota’.

The political leaders of Guatemala and even Honduras have become targets of a broader frustration fed by the conviction that there is little to stop well-connected business groups and politicians from conspiring to skim off their states’ scant resources. As a Honduran journalist, said: “The government wasn’t listening to the clamour of the street. People want resounding answers. They don’t want half-answers. The peak of tolerance for corruption has reached its limit. Citizens are just fed up”(sounds familiar!).

Read More