WHAT is “the Jamaican psyche?”? A phrase often used to justify the weird and wonderful people we are and things we do. So what is our psyche? And why is it important? Psyche infuses our soul, spirit, principles and actions as a people and is the reason we win or we lose. Our present psyche fuels a febrile lurch to goals we set but never achieve. Our national psyche breeds failure, but we can change it to engender success.

Psyche is born of social evolution. The lessons we learn from our ancestors and our environment at national and family levels are the glue of our lives. The family myths, tales and icons build personal character and those we imbibe at school, public events, etc, build national character. Anancy, the samfie spider man, is in my national psyche. If this were all, then pity me, but thank God, hard work, public service and winning are in my family’s psychic legacy. A child whose psychic realm embraces Anancy in his national and his family pack may be criminal, will be a loser. A child, grown by the same national myths, but with courage and enterprise in his family’s psychic bundle, is a national asset, a winner. We should unbundle our national psyche and change the drivers of negativity. A winning psyche thrives on myths, tales, icons which transmit the drive to prosperity and our state must foster or create these. To do well, individuals and nation must be steeped in things that make for doing well. Despite our negative national psyche, positive family psyche has taken many to success. Only a few have a quality family life so we need to engineer our national myths, tales and iconography to create a success-oriented psyche and rid ourselves of negative myths, icons and the “loser” mindset.

The Jamaican psyche is more reminiscent of people in bondage, than a free, independent, self-determining nation. In our counterinsurgency past we would steal, sabotage or waste “Bucky Massa” time, raw material, goods and machinery. Now, it’s our country, taxes and jobs, yet we still undermine them. Money for scrap metal means more to us than its productive potential. Our instinct to self-harm is strong. Our psyche is imbued with self-hate, negativity, misogyny and freeness mentality, inspired by tales from an irrelevant past. Our parents washed and reused kitchen foil and jam jars and this psychic baggage makes us hesitate before we toss them out even now when they are not scarce. We live in a brave new world, control our nation, but our cowering psyche is framed by myths of a pre-1962 time when we controlled nothing. We are in a prison of our own making. Education may not help, as to overlay a toxic psyche with knowledge does not always change the substrate. How we see things and react may be the same as the illiterate.

What is our national psyche? More important, does it enure to success? Sadly, no! Worse still, we are at ease with failure, we expect it; it is winning that shocks us! Our national psyche is negative because its bases are negative. Our myths and icons do not support; they subvert national goals. Our tales don’t celebrate our beauty, joy, hard work, trust, peace, courage, generosity and winning. Our mythmakers and myth content are imbued with the ominous, foreboding, duppy story, negativity. We glorify the “samfie man”, luck not labour, misogyny as “ooman a heby load, ooman a heby load..”; good looks, but not too black as “brown skin gal”, sex not love, and a minstrel life with no self-analysis. Anancy, the minstrel king, is the core of our national psyche – witty, salacious, work-shy, devious, wily- a smarmy flatterer. We celebrate these icons, they control our subconscious and we live them. I offer a man work and he tells me “Baas me nuh wan no slavry an’ no speech, jus let aff a moni an mek me gwaan”. I know our psyche is not in sync with our goals.

If Cabinet begins now, in 2020 every 10-year-old will be confident and imbued with positive psychic energy, some adults transformed and good things will follow. Up to age 10, the psyche is fed by what we ingest, via mouth, our senses and later on our brains. Our psychic heritage is skewed to failure. Our take on love and family is informed by abusive adults; our work ethic, by jobless men and an insecure ethos of lust, greed, fear, anger and violence. The state must engineer a national psyche for success. The iconography of power and symbols of nation are crucial to success. Assyrians, Egypt, Rome used “shock and awe” and about 500 BCE, Jews got a social engineering codex, the Torah, a blueprint for nation building and it worked! Great nations raise larger-than-life statues of their icons. Few have any of pop artistes or sportsmen as gravitas, not fun, builds a nation. They put statues on plinths to force us to look up – none are at eye level – to awe citizen and visitor. They use verse, performance, symphony, prose, nuanced to elicit action and veneration. We erect penile statues of marionettes and minstrels with no psychic value. We raise no stelae to our thinkers, entrepreneurs, scientists, men of letters; just to politics, song and sprint, hence our youth just want to chat, sing, dance and run. Yet, Doug Orane and Ryland Campbell add more to a psyche of success than any dozen politicians or entertainers. Would our youth be more inspired to venture and nation-build by a film in cinemas on Buju’s, Bruce Golding’s or Butch Stewart’s career? You tell me!

So, how do we fix things? The state must realign national psyche with national goals. Cabinet needs a group of thinkers and futurists to elaborate the way forward – no money is needed. This would underpin many new commissions for major creative and media works to begin now, peak at our 50th in 2012 and endure from basic school up. Let’s use our musicians, composers, thespians, bards, writers and creative forces to reorient our national psyche. After 48 years of failure we need to forge the psyche of modern Jamaica. We must plan the symphonies, stelae, sonnets, structures, etc; the psychic Viagra we need to succeed in the second half of our century. We need prosperity, but frankly, we are in the wrong psychic state. We can’t get there from here! Stay conscious!

Dr Franklin Johnston is an international project manager with Teape-Johnston Consultants, currently on assignment in the UK.

franklinjohnston@hotmail.com