Prof Wahbie Long — Author, Psychologist, Thinker

And once more, it is another edition of What's Involved. This time, a special guest. He is the author of the book called Nation on the Couch inside South Africa's mind. And knowing me, as you do, as soon as I saw this, I went, I want to get into the mind of South Africa. Who is he? He is Professor Wabi Long. Wabi, welcome. Good to have you along with us. Thank you, David. I'm glad to be here. OK, so before we get into the book and why you would write a book like this, which to date, and maybe I'm misinformed, but I haven't seen anybody write a book from this particular perspective. Let's talk a little bit about Wabi. Give me a bit of your background, a bit of your history, and it leads you up to where you are today. Sure. Well, David, I'm born and bred in Cape Town.

I grew up very much in the 80s and the 90s. Went to university at UCT in the late 90s, trained as a clinical psychologist at Stellenbosch in the early 2000s. I joined the National Defense Force, went off as a peacekeeper for a few months and then started at UCT as a as an academic in around 2010. And here we are, here I am, 11 years later. OK, fair enough now. Number one, you are in a field that absolutely fascinates me, one that I've been too scared to study myself because I was convinced that if I did, I would drive myself nuts. But what made you want to get into psychology? You know, I'm just thinking to myself, David, of that famous quote by Kierkegaard, that life could only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards. And I suppose when I when I started psychology, I had no idea that I was going to become a clinical psychologist. I did a general BA degree at UCT and I did subjects like economics and maths and philosophy. So there was no early indication that clinical psychology was going to be it for me. But hindsight is 2020. And of course, training as a clinical psychologist, one of the things one has to get to grips with is one's motivations for wanting to sign up for a profession like this.

I think my my motivations derive very much from from my experiences growing up in the later part eight years and the early democracy years. I was very fortunate as a person of color to attend some of the best schools in Cape Town in the late 80s and through most of the 90s. And because of the lack of integration in some of those top schools, I was always on the outside, always on the outside watching, looking in. And so I think that's really where my my, I suppose, interest in in human beings, in observing, in taking notes and trying to understand why people do what they do took off. That's, I think, the the prime motivator for for my decision, at least in retrospect, to to get into clinical psychology. And yes, as they say, the rest is history. Now, speaking of history, I mean, what made you think and correct me if I'm wrong, because because what I'm seeing when we when we talk about this book nation on the couch inside South Africa's mind, it's almost as though we're looking at South Africa as a person, for want of a better, better words and saying, OK, let's now go and unpack what's happening in this rather complex mind. What made you want to write a book like this? Well, I've always been interested in the connection between internal worlds and the external social material world that that surrounds us.

I think one of the biggest conundrums in in the social sciences and humanities is around how to connect the two. If one thinks of sociologists, for example, they will they will analyze social conditions to death, but they won't have very much to say about internal worlds. And psychologists, on the other hand, are notorious for doing the exact opposite. And one of my intellectual interests over the last five to 10 years is about trying to understand that connection between internal consciousness or unconsciousness, for that matter, and what's happening in the world that surrounds us. And there is a there's a rich tradition within the academy that attempts to, if you like, heal that split between the inside and the outside, the internal and the external. And I'm referring specifically to the Freud Marxist school of thought, as you'll know from the book, David, I draw a fair bit on Freud and Marx, because I think Freud Marxism is is a useful well represents a useful tradition for trying to keep the internal and the external in conversation with one another, rather than collapsing that that binary in one direction rather than than the other. Now, of course, one of the one of the big ideas in the book is the idea of a political unconscious.

And what I do there is I move beyond the idea of an individual unconscious, a la Freud, an individual personal unconscious. I also don't really look at the Jungian idea of a of a collective unconscious. What I what I posit is is the existence of a of a political unconscious and by political unconscious, you can already see that I'm trying to bring the internal and the external in conversation with into conversation with with one another. So by political unconscious, I really mean the storehouse of all our unsolved social antagonisms. That's how I understand the unconscious. When human beings don't know how to solve a problem, the problem becomes unconscious. And that's at least at an individual level, but at a political social level, a similar repression, if you like, takes place. We don't know how to solve sexism. We don't know how to solve racism. We don't know how to solve inequality. These are the the the unsolved social antagonisms that then come to populate our shared political unconscious as South Africans. Now, in the book, OK, you've you've divided up into sections. There's a section called shame, one called envy, one called impasse. And then you go on to my favorite topic, which is hope.

So let's let's have a look, because you mentioned something very important. And if I think back to 1994, we were the happiest people in the world. OK, we've just gotten through what could have been huge, huge civil unrest. We had a new rainbow nation. Everybody was talking about it. We were all very, very happy. And now, however many 20, 30 plus years on, nothing seems to have changed terribly much. And we're all very vocal about saying our country is broken. And we can tell you exactly where the broken bits are, but we can't fix them. Or we haven't been able to fix them or even look at them to this point. So in terms of your take on this book, why shame, envy, impasse and then hope? Well, I essentially wanted to think about what the different psychological complexes are that as sale as South Africans. Now, of course, the very idea of South Africa as a nation is a contested thing and understandably so. So you'll have noticed, David, that as one moves through those first three chapters in particular, shame, envy and impasse. I'm really looking at different South African constituencies because I think there are different psychological complexes in operation. So the chapter on shame, for example, is is really about the psychological experience of poverty and not just poverty, but or absolute poverty, but relative poverty.

In other words, inequality. So that chapter is very much about the poor and working classes of South Africa. The chapter on envy looks at a different South African grouping. And here I'm looking at the rising black middle class and particularly in the shape of university students. So fall is an important point of analysis in that chapter on envy. And then the chapter on impasse looks at at white South Africans, where I suggest that for many, the the unanswered question is is how to understand themselves as white South Africans in an integrated post-apartheid democratic South Africa. Maybe I can just add parenthetically that there's there's one group of South Africans that I don't look at here because really, if one if one thinks about the poor and working classes, the rising black middle class and white South Africans, that would seem to be the whole nation. But there is one one section of of South Africa that I think is relatively underrepresented in this book. And that has to do, I think, with the established Black bourgeoisie. I don't have much to say other than one or two chapters, sorry, one or two pages in the book on that particular grouping. But broadly, those first three chapters cover, I would say, the fractured South African nation that, of course, leads into the chapter on hope, given all these these complexes, given the destructiveness of the kinds of of emotions that I'm theorizing around in those first three chapters.

What hope is there for South Africa to to not just survive against the odds, but also to flourish?

And then in the very final chapter after the chapter on hope, I try to operationalize, I try to concretize what a hopeful South Africa would look like. And to that end, I unpack what has become known as the Golden Rule. Wonderful stuff. Well, we're going to dive deeper into that and into some more of those chapters, because it's a fascinating book and some of the stories and the way you've written it to this stuff that is quite shocking and sometimes quite heartbreaking. My special guest is Professor Robbie Long, author of Nation on the Couch Inside South Africa's Mind. We'll be back in just a bit. This is what's involved. And we're back with my special guest, Professor Robbie Long, author of Nation on the Couch Inside South Africa's Mind. So from very much a layperson's perspective, Robbie, as I mentioned earlier, we all acknowledge South Africa is broken. And you're talking about being inside South Africa's mind. Alienation, talk to me about what are these factors? Why? Why could we not just have the 1994 elections? Everybody get together in Sinkumbaya and go forward as a rainbow nation, because I'm the eternal optimist. I believe in this country. I take great offense to all the people that are saying that they're leaving because by leaving, you're not helping and you're not being part of the solution.

But how? What is it? Where did it come from? Talk to me. Well, David, I think that in Freudian terms, what happened is the repressed returned. We had that honeymoon phase in the mid-1990s, but TRC aside and the legacy of the TRC is contested. There really weren't opportunities for for national healing, frankly. And I think what we are seeing now is not just the return of the repressed

stemming from centuries of colonial and apartheid oppression, but also contemporary or real time responses to the various inequalities and structural violences of today. So we're not just sitting on the legacy of the past. We're also sitting on the traumas of the present.

One of the interesting things that one learns, for example, in Holocaust studies is that the survivors of the Holocaust were reluctant to speak about their experiences. They just got on with the business of life, much like we South Africans did. We got on with the business of life. But what happened was that the grandchildren of those survivors started asking questions. And once those questions began to be asked, there was an outpouring of grief. And then the full horror of the Holocaust, the full emotional horror of the Holocaust emerged. And I think something similar has happened in the South African instance, where the generation that lived through apartheid, and that includes my generation of 30, 40 year olds, just wanted to get on with the business of life, try and rebuild a broken country. But what happened was the grandkids started asking questions. And by the grandkids, I'm talking, of course, about the born frees. It's anomalous to older South Africans when they look at the anger

of young South Africans who weren't alive during the apartheid years. Older South Africans are nonplussed. They wonder how this can even be possible. I can remember for my generation, we were the first black generation to go to university, at least in any serious sort of show of numbers. Our parents would tell us, get on with it, work hard, keep your nose clean and build a life for yourselves. And the born frees don't see it in that way. The born frees see that as a whitewash of centuries of trauma. Then, of course, it coalesced around that sentiment, coalesced around the various flawless movements that hit universities between 2015 and 2017, especially. So it's an interesting question. Why now? But there is historical precedent. If one looks at what happened to survivors of the Holocaust and the grandchildren of those survivors in particular, it's a very interesting question. But whatever the answer, the point is that we cannot wish away the past. The past is always with us. It's a common refrain in civil discourse. Why can't we just move on? And speaking as a clinical psychologist, that just isn't how psychological life works. One cannot just move on. The ghosts of the past have to be, if not exorcised, they have to be lived with.

They have to be made peace with. And that is not something I think that that as a nation, South Africans have done. I would agree with you there, because if I relate to my own experiences, I was sort of in the in the in the really bad times in the 80s, I was in the defence force. And part of what we had to do at that stage was was riot duty. Now, I went into the army as this naive 18 year old that had no idea, no idea about politics or about anything. And I then went through that phase as well. When I came out, there was there was no sort of support for for myself, people like myself at all. You were just you did it. Now get on with it. And I was talking a little while ago to somebody who was at that same stage was a member of Mconto SSW and they were having exactly the same things. You know, they got in there now. Everything's patched up. We're all supposed to be OK. But there's hundreds and thousands of broken people. And even for me to be able to sit down and eventually get to a stage where I could talk about the trauma of those days and that time, it was an immensely difficult thing. But having said that, once you're able to talk about it and discuss and discuss with other people, effectively discussed with somebody from the other side, that helped me to find a whole lot more peace because I was I was living on a knife edge most of the time.

Yes. And David, I think that it's becoming more and more possible to to to talk about lived experience these days. I think we are increasingly living in a. A therapeutic society, actually, to to use the phrase that some sociologists use, we live in a therapeutic society that values or at least is increasingly open to expressions of emotion and and vulnerability. It may well be that back in the 80s and 90s, before the therapeutic society had really set in, at least in South Africa, it just was harder to to have these kinds of conversations, apart from the fact that we were perhaps just too close to the trauma of of apartheid and and and colonialism.

But it's it's it's perhaps indicative that as we move into almost our fourth decade of towards our fourth decade of democratic rule and as we gain distance from the past, apart from the fact that we live in a therapeutic society, it just becomes more possible for people to express emotions that that that perhaps couldn't be expressed

in in the the early years of democratic South Africa. But well, there's still a whole lot more that I'd like to dive into. And I think we've we've talked a little bit now and discussed the things of shame, for example. But there is another whole section all about envy. So I want to get into that a little bit more when we come back. My special guest is Professor Wabi Long. We are talking about his book Nation on the Couch Inside South Africa's Mind. We'll be back in just a bit. This is what's involved. And we're back. What's involved? It is Nation on the Couch Inside South Africa's Mind. The book that's just been released by Professor Wabi Long. Wabi. So just before the break, I sort of shared a part of my story and a part of what we felt. And I said, you know, it was it was from all sides that we had this this sense of shame and guilt. But you talk about envy in the book as well. Can we dive into that a little bit? Explain to me where this envy comes in.

So, David, I use the word envy not in a colloquial sense, but really in a technical psychoanalytic sense. Envy in the colloquial sense is seen as a moral failing, which is not at all what I'm arguing for in that chapter. I'm really making the case that envy is a part of life, a part of life, but especially prevalent in unequal societies. The thing about envy, though, is that psychoanalytically speaking, it is a destructive emotion. And what happens is, if I can just go into the theory of envy quickly, when when an infant comes into the world, it is effectively dependent. It is it is utterly dependent on another human being for its survival. And it is the experience of dependence, especially when that that other human being, that all powerful human being is is withholding or not completely available, that the impact of envy becomes especially destructive. So it's part and parcel of of of psychological life, but at a at a more social level, a more social political level in context of inequality, the effects of envy are especially dangerous. So the argument I make in the chapter on envy is that for the rising black middle class, young black South Africans who are entering historically white universities, elite universities for the first time, they find themselves dislocated in all sorts of ways.

Linguistically, culturally, racially, materially, just alienated in so many respects, but also utterly dependent on this institution, really this life giving institution because of the promise of the life of dignity, the promise of the life of dignity, material support, networking opportunities and all the rest. And it is it is the experience of being shamefully dependent on these institutions, I argue,

that drives envious acts of destructiveness. And of course, we all know how much damage was done to universities, whether in the form of artworks being burnt, buildings being looted, feces being poured into lecture halls. The destruction came to the tune of about 800 million rand, I think, at one point. And that really is, is for me, what happens in unequal societies. If one thinks about it, why is it that there was never a forest school, for example, in sorry, a forest movement in the township schools of Cape Town? And the simple answer is because everybody's getting an inferior education in those schools. There is no culture of social comparison on which envy can feed, as it were. But once students from disadvantaged backgrounds move into historically white institutions, once the experience of relative poverty kicks in, then social comparisons become inevitable. Then one's dependence, one's dependence, experience of dependence becomes actually excruciating. And this is when when envy must kick in. The difficulty with envy, of course, is that it's it's hard to stop. Once acts of destruction begin, they they develop an almost unstoppable logic.

And then, of course, university managers face the very difficult decision of whether or not a line should be drawn in the sand, whether or not they need to hold the frame, whether or not they need to set limits. And different universities, of course, dealt with those questions. Differently, if one if one thinks of UCT, for example,

I think the general sense is that the university management were didn't really draw that line in the sand, whereas at WITS, something quite different happened. So institutions handle the expression of of envy, I think, differently across different campuses. Now, the interesting thing for me, because now I'm not of that generation and a bunch of people I know also not of that generation is we would look at and go, but why? It makes no sense. Why are you destroying that which can give you this this this entryway into the big, bright world? And I think that's also one of the difficulties that we're having.

Absolutely. That's the paradox of envy. And Jonathan Jensen, for one, in a different forum has asked the question, why these other Africans burn on a Friday? What we need on a Monday? The thing is that envy doesn't wait for Monday.

It it is it doesn't operate in the realm of logic. And again, I don't want to set up a binary here where I'm suggesting that logic is good and illogical irrationality is bad. What I am saying is that envy is a natural part of human life, but that it's its impact is especially aggravated when one is

when one finds oneself in an unequal society such as South Africa, because it's an unequal society that the experience of dependence is very much intensified. And it's that experience of dependence on on an object that is experienced as frustrating or as shaming or as withholding that that drives envious acts of destruction. Now, having said that, I mean, we get to and I know I've spoken to a bunch of people about this. We kind of we're at this place now as South Africans. And I often talk about what I call the silent majority. And these are middle class South Africans. We know it's broken, OK, we know we know it's not working. We've seen all sorts of protests and violence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But we don't know how to fix it. Is this where you come in with the term impasse? Well, I think my my reading of of of impasse is is much more existential, David. It's not so much about white South Africans not knowing what to do to to fix this country. The the impasse is is really about.

At an experiential level, white South Africans confusion about their own identity in this country, because for hundreds of years, white South Africans were masters and black South Africans were slaves. Now that we're in a in a democratic dispensation, that dialectic, the so-called Hegelian master slave dialectic has been turned on its head. And the question now for for many white South Africans is, well, if I'm not living in a master slave society, what kind of society I'm living in? How do I how should I see myself? And the the argument I make in the chapter on impasse is that unfortunately, and many white South Africans have retreated rather than stepping into the void that has been created by the collapse of this master slave dialectic. They've simply battened down the hatches. Many white South Africans have really just retreated from from public life.

Many, as you mentioned, at the the start of this interview, I've just gone for the immigration option. Many leave Johannesburg because they imagine that Cape Town is is is the place to be. And I also spend a bit of time in that chapter trying to understand what what this psychology of avoidance is is all about, because that really, I think, is what it what it comes down to. If one thinks about how white colonialists engaged with with the natives in South Africa hundreds of years ago, there was always this there was always this this paranoid fear, I think, about being overcome by a deluge of of black people. And I think that those are those are very primitive fears, and I think to some extent they persist even into into the present. So the question, I think, for many white South Africans is how how do they relate to people that they identify as not being like them? How do they relate to the so-called other with with a capital O? And and that's the impasse that the chapter is is is named for. OK, you know, it's actually strange as we were talking now, I sort of flashed back to the days in the military where the big thing was the sort of far, you know, the black danger. And yeah, in those days, it was a very real thing.

These days, I can look at and go, huh, that'll make sense. Listen, I want to get on to some happier topics. Sure. I want to talk about hope when we come back. This is what's involved. My special guest is Professor Wabi Long, author of an amazing book called Nation on the Couch Inside South Africa's Mind. We'll be back wrapping it up in just a bit. And we're back with Professor Wabi Long wrapping it up. Nation on the Couch Inside South Africa's Mind. That's the book we're talking about. So Hope Wabi, talk to me about hope and then let's lead into the golden rule. Well, David, you will have seen that my prognosis is guarded, shall I say. The question of hope for me is not only a psychological one, it's a material one. We can't wish away the past and simply direct our energies towards the future. That just isn't how psychological life works. In the same breath, we can't theropize our way to a better future. There are material problems of staggering proportions that need to be worked out. So here's the burning question for me. How does one fix inequality? Of course, there are all sorts of other structural violences to contend with, whether it's gender based violence, racism and all the other isms.

But inequality for me is the primary problem that we have to reckon with in this country. Now, unfortunately, the historical record would suggest that inequality is only dealt with effectively when a lot of people die. And I draw on the work of the Stanford historian, Walter Scheidel here to make that particular argument. And Scheidel, in his book, The Great Leveler, he writes about four horsemen. And it is one of these four horsemen, one or any of these four horsemen that historically speaking has been responsible for making a real dent in the problem of inequality. And in each of those four cases, the horsemen in question slays many, many people. We're the ones talking about world war, revolution, state failure, outbreaks of diseases and pandemics. A lot of people die. Now, of course, that is not a viable solution for dealing with inequality in our country. But it just goes to underscore the point that the problem of inequality

is not one that is easily solved. Of course, depending on who you speak to, you'll get a different answer. If you speak to your neoliberal economist, they'll say, well, the problem is that government is too big that we need to roll back state benefits and let the market work its magic through trickle down economics and all the rest. If you speak to an economist on the left, they'll say the exact opposite, that we have to regulate the market. Otherwise, it will simply run riot and inequality will worsen. So I prefer to look at the historical record rather than what economists say. And the historical record basically indicates that we are in for a battle.

There is one thing, however, that does appear to be linked to addressing the problem of inequality, and that is land reform. So the question of land, of course, is one that is constantly revisited in civil discourse in this country. And my sense is that if we are to talk about hope in a non-trivial sense, then the land question needs to be looked at seriously. I'm not a political scientist. I'm not an economist. So I am just not going to presume to know what the details should even look like. Should look like all I'm saying is if we want to learn from history, then land reform is something we have to take seriously. Psychologically speaking, of course, what can we do to cultivate spaces of hope in this country? That is very much the question of the final chapter, the so-called golden rule. Okay, now the golden rule is very interesting to me because you start off the chapter talking about, and it's one of those, I don't know, some people might call it a dead joke. How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb really, really has to want to change. So in terms of this golden rule, where do we go? Because we are, I don't know, my solution is we need more books like yours.

We need more discussions. We need to sort of launch some of those boils that have developed. What is your thought and how does the golden rule tie in? Well, I think that it ties into the golden thread of the book, actually, which is about alienation. The problem in South Africa, as I diagnose, is really a problem of alienation, which simply means that our relationships with each other are distorted. And in a serious sense, actually quite perverse. That is why we are capable of inflicting the kinds of sadistic violence on each other that we do. And I'm not only talking about interpersonal violence. I'm talking about economic violence as well, gender-based violence too. The symbolic violence of racism is another. So the golden rule is really about getting our relationships with each other right.

If you like, disalienating ourselves from each other. And what the golden rule essentially states is treat other people as you want to be treated and don't treat other people as you don't want to be treated.

Interestingly, this golden rule is perhaps one of the very few universal ethical principles that human beings have ever come up with. It's found in agnostic, atheistic, theistic systems all over the world across the millennia. And I think that it represents a high point, I think, in human thinking about how to relate to each other. And that's really what the book calls for. Again, it's much easier said than done. Given the ghosts of the past, it's not going to be a simple matter treating each other as fully human. There are going to be many ruptures. There are going to be many misunderstandings.

But ultimately, I believe that the golden rule holds promise for building a South African polity that recognizes the dignity of each one of us.

But again, I want to stress that if we're only going to focus on the golden rule, then we're effectively going to try and kumbaya our way to a better South Africa. And that's not going to happen. The question of hope is not just a psychological question. It's a material one too. And that's why, as I said earlier, the land question is just as critical. We have to keep both streams moving in parallel, not just reimagining our relationships with each other, but also reimagining materially how life in South Africa gets done.

Well, I'd love to be able to say thank you. You've answered all my questions. But instead, I'm going to say thank you. You've given us a whole lot more questions to ponder. And I don't think that's a bad thing. Before I let you go, though, Wabi, the book's out. It's a great book. It's well worth a read just to change some of your perspectives and to get you thinking. Where are you now? What are you going to be doing going forward? Well, for the time being, David, I'm really just doing interviews, taking questions, giving talks. There's been a remarkable, I think, outpouring of interest in this book. And as you say, the book is something of a conversation starter in the sense that it raises so many more questions. I think the book has been generative for many people across the political spectrum in South Africa. And for the moment, that's really what I'm doing. I'm just engaging with people about the book, trying to tease out the implications of my arguments still further. And I suppose just trying to help some South Africans develop a different way of thinking about our problems. The blurb on the jacket is that there are so many social commentaries, political commentaries, economic commentaries on life in South Africa, but desperately few, if any, psychological ones.

And my hope is just that this book will be thought provoking for people and offer them a different way of thinking about life in South Africa. Well, you know, I thought I was doing fairly OK until I started to read the book. And as I said, personally, I've got even more questions now. Robbie, the book available in all good bookstores, is it available online as well? Yes, it is on Amazon via Kindle. It is available. And then, as you say, in all good bookstores. Wonderful stuff. Well, it is definitely a thought provoking book. Professor Robbie Long, thank you so much for taking the time out, having a chat to us and writing this book, which I think is needed. So we do wish you all the best going forward. And hopefully we get to chat to you again sometime in the future. And we've got better news and more hope. That would be great. Thanks very much, David. There we go. That was my special guest, Professor Robbie Long. The book is called Nation on the Couch Inside South Africa's Mind. It is well with a very, very thought provoking and it wraps it up for what's involved. Teach and every one of you look after yourselves. Take care and thank you for listening.