Dear Editor,

It is generally believed that respect for authority is an indicator of good mental health. Moreover, it prevents individuals from being harmed or harming others. Psychologists have concluded that individuals who have a pathological disrespect for authority are antisocial.

Psychologist Dr Wendel Able says that, “Jamaica’s homicide rate is among the highest in the world.” And that, “Jamaica has become a frightening place to live, and this speaks to a high level of antisocial behaviour here.” (The Gleaner, February 17, 2010)

Twelve years later, nothing has changed in regard to Jamaica’s high homicide rate. According to police crime statistics, 446 people were murdered in Jamaica between January 1 and April 21, 2022. Indeed, the number of people murdered in Jamaica in 2021 amounted to 1,463, slightly up from 1,323 victims a year earlier. The current murder rate has placed Deputy Commissioner of Police Fitz Bailey in a conundrum, thus forcing him to confess that “no police force in the world can investigate 1,600 homicides in a year”.

Solving our antisocial behaviour does not lie in abrogated constitutional rights or blaming slavery but in facing the moral decadence initiated by the “Gangs of Gordon House” during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s.

It was the late financial editor and Jamaica Observer columnist Basil Buck who summed up the moral decadence of these two decades. In one of his articles he wrote that the 1980s “was a decade in which the nouveau riche became celebrities, and our role models took a dramatic turn and fuelled the triumph of materialism in Jamaica…

“It was a decade in which breaking the rules and not getting caught ruled the roost, from the Government, to the businessman, to the hustlers on the streets.

“The poor corrupt themselves in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates perpetual poverty in Jamaica.

“It was a decade in which corruption became part of the human tragedy”.

In Buck’s description of the 90s he said that, “Nothing has changed except the greed, the materialism, and the ugly face of escalating corruption. In particular, the corruption of the conscience of the Jamaican people by the politicians and the business sector, through the media, to uphold money and objects as what counts in Jamaica today.” (Jamaica Observer, December 29, 1997).

In the 1995 Synod Charge to the Church and the nation by the then Bishop of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands Rt Rev Neville D’Souza, he observed that, “We find ourselves as a nation impaled upon political struggles and [partisan] conflicts which crippled and inhibited the forward movement of our people.”

As to the phenomenon of violence, the goodly bishop said, “I believe that this society so greatly frustrates the organisms which are human, and because they are powerless to change the environmental realities in which they live, then they take upon themselves the only power left to them, that is, the morbid destructiveness which gives them a sense of living.” (125th Synod Charge, 1995)

It is these seeds of corruption and dehumanisation of our people that we are now reaping in antisocial behaviour. As we prepare to celebrate our 60th anniversary as an independent nation, it is time for a truth and reconciliation commission to facilitate both the healing of the nation and the releasing of the stench of the 80s and 90s that is drowning us and frustrating our development.

Dudley C McLean II

Mandeville, Manchester

dm15094@gmail.com