ABC: Accept nothing, Believe no one, Confirm everything

"Accept nothing, Believe nobody, Confirm everything" is the traditional sound advice given to any trainee policeman or cadet newspaper reporter...

Life, as I discovered early on, is not a popularity contest. I quickly realised that the perceived (preached) benefits of conformity – something our society encourages, applauds and rewards – fade into insignificance beside the benefits of free thought, an attitude which itself makes one relatively immune to the spears and arrows of the masses. If you don’t realise all by yourself that you are “different”, society will make you acutely aware of it soon enough.

There are all kinds of clichés like “the swimmer who swims upstream becomes a stronger swimmer”, but there is no more obvious yardstick for the importance of conformity to the majority of human beings than the conformity experiments of Dr Solomon Asch in the 1950s.

They say what doesn’t break us makes us stronger. Unless you have an innate predisposition to end up a dribbling basket case (in which case you’ll find any excuse to explain why you are now in a padded cell), having a dysfunctional childhood is not always bad thing.

It’s difficult to determine exactly when my obsession with retaining control over my own day-to-day life developed. However, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I have little doubts as to why it did. But the fact is that instead of chugging through toddlerhood into childhood in blissful unawareness - and the world of the child in the 1960s was nothing near as candy coated as the ersatz Disneyland they try to convince kids of today – I developed (or maybe society failed to curtail my development of) a finely tuned bullshit filter, fuelled by the principle: Accept nothing, Believe nobody, Confirm everything.

Ever since my years in primary school, if there was an awkward question that needed to be asked in class, I was expected to ask it – even by those classmates who might later avoid me on the playground.

There are some purely practical cultural reasons for this. South Africa of the 1960s was characterised by vast and often patently absurd contrasts. I’m not just speaking of the predictable ones such as the contrasts between rich and poor based on the Orwellian grand design of Apartheid. Both law and culture were medieval in many aspects, while refreshingly progressive in others.

For example, South African law was (conveniently for propaganda purposes) early in embracing the concept of “brain death”, which in 1967 allowed the first heart transplant to be performed by Dr Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town - to the intense ire of his equally skilful colleagues in the USA where the legal definition of "death" still dated back to the Salem witch hunts.

The other side of the coin was a philosophical and intellectual tar pit whose efficiency and viscosity was carefully maintained and nurtured by the “benevolent” Calvinist hand of the Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church, then arguably the country’s de facto legislative authority. “Listen to what father, the Church and the Government say, be a good boy and obey.” I was brought up in home that was politically (Fredrician) Prussian liberal and religiously Reform Jewish. The former was more anomalous than the latter.

The prevailing political mood of the white urban middle-class my parents mixed in often paid lip service to abolishing Apartheid, while still paying their maid and gardener a pittance. My classmates were moststly Protestant, with a few Roman Catholics and a small yet significant contingent of Jews, yet even at that level, nine out of ten South African Jews were traditional conservative (not quite Orthodox) rather than Reform. The combination of the two ensured that in any given situation, I was often the "odd man out" and so I got used to it.

The result is today – I'm one who (infuriatingly for those who prefer the anonymous comfort of conformity) is variously described as a know-it-all, or an arrogant pain-in-the-arse, who still takes lessons in tact from a jackhammer. But when it comes to the one-upmanship of who is right and who is wrong (which is, like so many social phenomena, quite blatant and honest in the classroom or playground, while covert and devious - but otherwise unaltered - in later life) the person who instinctively Accepts nothing, Believes nobody, and Confirms everything really has the edge.

Dad was like Dr Frankenstein. His liberal Reform Jewish culture, born of the intellectual oasis that had been the Königsberg of Immanuel Kant, could not avoid teaching me to question everything. But once he had, the poor man had to field those questions from a precocious youngster who was unfettered by the cultural straight jacket of the 19th Century.

I was just taught relatively young to think and ask questions in a way that was contrary and often hostile to the pervading zeitgeist. I also happen to have a very good memory and soon discovered that quoting an excerpt of an authoritative text verbatim added gravity to my arguments, and almost always resulted in scared and slightly disapproving Victorian children-should-be-seen-and-not-heard adult faces.

I must have been an absolute horror. Using the “licence” of childhood, I took Machiavellian delight in pointing out adults’ prejudices and stupidities in direct and indisputable terms that prevailing social norms would never tolerate from their peers. The child may, in his innocence, seriously ask a simple question that otherwise might only be raised or even tolerated in a rhetorical sense. E.g. It was “not done” to raise questions such as: "Why do we live in a leafy suburb and our maid Mabel in a shack in a township?”, clearly because answering it would force privileged white South Africans to emerge from their state of denial and reflect on the reality. LOL – kids can get away with farting in Church…

The early days must have been fraught, although I don’t remember much of them. With a Jewish father and a still (nominally) Christian mother, I was clinically rather that ritually circumcised and then Christened in the Church of England “just in case”. Talk about hedging your bets! On the latter occasion, I reportedly projectile puked down the vicar’s cassock, reflecting what would be my life-long attitude to that institution, though in all fairness, my bile was not particularly aimed at the Church of England. There obviously just wasn’t a Roman Catholic, Calvinist, Bayou Baptist or Lobotomised Pentecostal vestment in convenient range.

The problem of growing up in a home whose walls were lined with as many bookshelves as my parents could fit into their City Bowl flat, is that if I wanted to find something out, I seldom had to look further than a leather-bound tome in the hallway. Combine a ready source of authoratitive texts with a kid who Accepts nothing, Believes nobody and Checks everything and you have a sure recipe for social disaster. Most people don’t like “precocious” children because they make them feel uncomfortable - their level of naiveté cannot be assessed and thence their malleability is an unknown quantity. And in a culture that has discouraged them from asking questions, they simply can't get their heads around an eight-year-old who knows things he shouldn’t and quotes chapter and verse from venerable tomes to underpin his gnosis (they have as much trouble with it when he's 45).


This was probably one of the first clues that I got that, rather “than always want what is best for me”, people in general would try to manipulate and control me for their own purposes. Not much has changed.


So I still: Accept nothing, Believe nobody, Confirm everything.  – AMB