The Idola-Virus and Battered Fritters: An allegory 

By Mujahid Ahmed 

Since the beginning of time, our quest for knowledge commences the moment we develop the ability to grasp things within our reach. Given that this behaviour has primarily used to determine what was safely edible and what was not, the random probability that one of the items ingested turns out to be poisonous -and possibly lethal-, suggests that the first ever game of Russian Roulette was played millions of years before the Russians decided that life was not exciting enough as it is. 

My daughter Faye, has just turned one. And although there was no specific term for people who identify with mixed ancestry -South Africans use the term coloured¬, which I feel is pejorative-, people still find it amusing when I describe as her being caramel-skinned and that only way she was distinguishable as half African and half Anglo-Saxon was when you compared her cocoa-brown eyes with her pearly white and permanently cheeky grin. That being said, her cheeky larrikinism and easy-going nature quickly gives away her half Hakuna Matata and half “No worries” Afro-Australian heritage. 

My wife Grace and I often reminisce over the fact that we had determine her ancestry only 2 hours after she was born when my wife was handed a “Baby Ethnicity Group” form to complete for census purposes. Although I had not had a chance to read it, Grace’s facial expression as she glazed through the form was enough for the theme tune from “Jaws” to start blaring in my head loud enough to the point that I felt that I myself was haplessly wading on a beach at the wrong time, because I knew the chain reaction that followed it. A migration and refugee lawyer by trade, my wife Grace had developed a reputation of being extremely fierce and relentless in her industry to the point that I often quip that the only difference between her and an angry tiger was her Prada lipstick. I’ve often marvelled at her commitment for her disadvantaged clients over and beyond the call of duty. I will never forget the night one of refugee clients called her one evening advising that he/she was barred entry to Australia due to an overnight change in legislation overnight. So, if you cringe at the thought of calling a friend in an ungodly hour, try calling a Federal Judge after ten PM demanding he files an immediate injunction to allow her client to re-enter the country. Truth be told, seeing her turn to red-headed version of the hulk only a few hours after enduring the pains of the labour and birth filled me with nothing but sympathy for the person coming back into the room to collect it. 

After reading the form myself, I found that her anger was extremely justified. Firstly, the form provided a small list of 7-8 ethnicities to select from -which included Australian even though the jury was still out on what exactly that meant, and if your ethnicity was not on the list, we were expected to tick “other” and specify. To top it off, the form stated -verbatim- that if the baby is of mixed ethnicity, we were required to pick our preferred one, and the form could only be signed by the mother. After some serious convincing -which included Grace carpet bombed me with enough legislation acts which I truly felt would have been enough to impeach the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, we opted not to fill it in at all the end. And although it was very difficult to resist the temptation to put her ethnicity as “Jedi Knight”, I can safely confirm however that no hospital staff were harmed as a result of this incident. 

Faye is living proof of our genetic predisposition to grab and immediately chomp on items within reach although I sincerely doubt that our forefathers -had they encountered one- would have deliberated long on whether a TV remote is an essential part of a healthy diet. Faye on the other hand, was still of the firmest belief that the TV remote would become edible one day, but until then she has found solace in the fact that -at least- biting on it repeatedly ends up switching on the television. In contrast, it only took her two attempts to determine beyond reasonable doubt that my wife’s spinach and corn fritters were definitely inedible. Since then, the indignant facial expression she gives us at the mere sight of a fritter has been enough for us to hurriedly offer her an alternative, and -now that I’ve recounted the story Grace’s to the Baby Ethnicity Form, it does not take a genius to figure out where she got that side of her personality. Behold, Baby Shark! 

From my perspective, Faye is the quintessential embodiment of an Afro-Australian. He larrikin yet infinitely tenacious and unwavering relentless -and ultimately- battle to prove the TV remote equals sustenance is as an ANZAC Spirit as it can get. Her African ancestry is also easily recognizable given the menacing glare and battle roar she lets out while she rhythmically bangs her wooden spoon as if it were a Zulu warrior’s deadly spear when spots the evil hordes of fritters in the distance. G’day! Are you the cheeky bugger who dares challenge the mighty ANZA-Zulu?! No worries, mate, but I’ve got to tell you from the get-go, that your chances are pretty much Buckley’s and none, mate, and I reckon I will be washing my spear with your blood before the footy starts! Howzzat!” She’ll be alright indeed. 

Accordingly, we often joke that -if she could speak- Faye would probably quote some of Samuel L. Jackson’s ominous lines from the “Pulp Fiction” film, given that we’ve watched it a few times while she was still in the womb… 

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides. And if you try and force me to swallow one more spoonful, I shall strike upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger for attempting to poison me with this sorry excuse for a fritter!” 

“Say here comes the airplane one more time! I dare you! I double dare you!! 

Truth be told, I have resigned myself to the fact that there has not been much difference between my sentiment towards the information that I force-fed, -and expected to regurgitate- during my studies, and Faye’s sentiment towards the fritter. Both are dry, and bitter-tasting, and ingested and egested looking relatively similar -albeit with slightly different texture-, with the direct quotations akin to undigested corn kernels. It also quite saddening to profess that most of my study efforts over the past 20+ years have been more dedicated towards staying within the word count limit, and avoid “death of a thousand citations” by attempting to correctly cite authors -who will also apparently strike upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who forget the comma after their surname-. At the same, I can’t deny this arduous process has also helped me develop super-human abilities by which I can now conjure extremely long-winded -yet somehow coherent- sentences in order not to fall too short of the word count. 

The results were inconclusive 

“Consequently, there was a general consensus among the research team that the findings of the study did not yield a sufficient amount of quantitative data required to complete the statistical analysis. Therefore, it was impossible to confirm or deny that the hypothesis that was being tested was proven beyond reasonable doubt. Hence, -and as a direct consequence of the findings- the unanimous determination after the study was completed was that the results were ultimately labelled as inconclusive”. 

The study is Irreplicable 

“Accordingly, it has been found that it was highly unlikely that the experiment that was conducted could be reproduced. As this was classified as a breach of one of the key tenets of empirical research which explicitly states that true experimental design is contingent on the fact that an investigative study can be replicated in the future or else the results of which -even if they were found to be ground-breaking- will not be deemed as valid”. 

Another disheartening realization was that the hundreds of essays and reports I’ve written, will not necessarily enrich humanity in any way, shape, or form as they were completed at a student level, and therefore unpublishable. Secondly, I have grown tired of feeling like Switzerland in the middle of an eloquent and passive aggressive cold war between one researcher who dares to critique the theory proposed by another, taunting them to respond to the ludicrous criticism of their theory by authoring a paper where they critique the critique of their theory in an infinite loop. Legend has it that Prometheus was punished by the gods daily for stealing the heavenly fire of knowledge for humanity. Little did he know that even if he had gotten away with it and escaped the wrath of the gods, by being placed into an earthly witness protection program, and given a new identity as a college professor. Dr Titan Prometheus would’ve also been be punished on earth by being forced to respond to the critique of the manner the heavenly fire was stolen, and how it could have been done better. 

This non-sensical, time-consuming, and often expensive loop has no correlation with a person’s level of education whatsoever. It is the same primal urge we feel as children to bicker and tease one another. The “I know something you don’t know” drug is highly addictive, readily available, and people have literally robbed and killed each other for it. Sticks and Stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt me unless they have been peer-reviewed and subsequently published in an internationally respected and well-known scientific journal. I also remain quite puzzled by how modern-day knowledge is instilled in a manner that is polar opposite to which it was modelled upon. Using Plato’s allegory of the cave as an example, which makes it explicitly clear that students should not be confined to cave-like campuses, and -ideally- should passively receiving knowledge rather directly from teachers. 

Therefore, it has been ironic that I had spent many a night absorbing the tenets of the Baconian Inductive Reasoning method, that forewarned of dangers of falling victim to pointless and time-consuming and viral logical fallacies such as Idola Fori or "Idols of the Market", which results from the imperfect correspondences between a word’s definition and the real things in nature the word represent such as “Why is it called an outstanding fine when there is nothing outstanding or fine about it?” or Idola Tribus and Idola Specus¸ which occur when the words or research of the renowned and the revered are unequivocally taken as “Gospel Truth” without introspection even if they were clearly biased, such as Abraham Lincoln’s famous saying “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet just because it has a picture of a famous person next to it. 

Consequently, we -supposed intellectuals- have completely absorbed in debating logical fallacies such as how is warfare ever fair, more so than the logical fallacies that have caused the eruption of warfare in the first place. Nevertheless, I strongly recommend against anyone asking a supposed intellectual what is the correct pronunciation of the data, as they will most likely gasp at you in horror, and assert that only imbeciles pronounce data as data! 

There is no greater testament to the fact that the war educated and the ignorant is -will remain- in an infinite state of stalemate than the current pandemic. Every day media outlets broadcasts live footage of hundreds of irate protestors defying the social distancing rules and the need to wear masks voicing their concerns that their government’s lockdown measures are in fact fascist and draconian restrictions (Fori), even though these restrictions have come at the cost of billions of dollars to the economy. Another channel broadcasts footage of medical professionals and politicians lambasting their government for not acting on faster to combat the spread of the virus (Tribus), followed by subsequent interviews on a different channel where they voice their scepticism of the efficacy of the proposed vaccine given that they have caused the death of 1 in 4 million cases, and therefore led to limited interest in vaccination drives (Specus). Consequently, the only clear consensus is that neither faction can agree, or agree to disagree, or even agree that their disagreement might be disagreeable both within themselves, let alone the other side. If the Idola fallacies were a virus, this combination of all three combined (Fori-Tribus-Specus) would’ve surely been deemed as its Delta Variant. 

After completing both Bachelor and Masters Degrees, two Graduate Diplomas, learning four languages, and travelling and living in over thirty countries, I was finally beginning to think that my 30-year personal quest for enlightenment which has felt like a tortuous swim through what I now affectionately refer to as the Styx Acadamicus, the river that forms the boundary between Earth’s well-educated, and the ignorant who inhabit the underworld. Legend has it that those who successfully cross Styx Senior become invincible -except for their heel-. In the same vein, it has also been said that those who cross the Styx Acadamicus supposedly attain the highest level of knowledge. People who manage to cross the Styx Acadamicus will suffer total loss of their ability to discern between what does and what doesn’t constitute beneficial knowledge, such as the fact that if you yelled for eight years, seven months, and six days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee, or the discovery that posits that if you passed gas consistently for six years and nine months, you would produce enough gas to create an atomic bomb's energy. 

After I made it to other side of the river. I see a box in the distance, and crawl towards it with what energy I have left. And when I pry it open, I find a scroll. 

“Glory to you, weary swimmer for finally making it to the destination that many have died trying. The first step towards reaching the highest level of knowledge and achieving enlightenment, requires you to know well what you do not know. The less afraid of the unknown you become, and embrace your uncertainty, the more comfortable you will feel knowing what you don’t know. Moreover, you must accept -and learn to live with- the countless number of times you will stumble and fall during your quest however, your path to enlightenment will not be based on how many times you get up each time you fall, but rather on your ability to continue to keep stumbling, yet always to find your footing. Do not become frustrated by the fact that it will seem that all you are doing is stumbling from the right answers to the wrong questions, and the right questions to the wrong answers. You will also need to understand and resign yourself to the fact that it will not be the truth that shall set you free, and prepare yourself for the most brutal and soul-crushingly painful experiences that you can ever imagine that comes with the realization that everything you imagined to be true and any belief you cherished is not. Until then, -and rather than continuing to search for constant truth- dedicate the bulk of your efforts towards the search for constant doubt about everything as for nothing is certain, and even when it is, it is still debatable."

Yours sincerely, 

Socrates and Philo-falafel Squad 

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I suddenly see Faye playing with the sand. Finding the scroll took me 39 years, but she was able to do it 12 months given that she knows that chomping on the remote switches on the television, and even if she does not know why, it doesn’t matter and she’s content with the fact that she gets to watch Teletubbies. In the same vein, not knowing why spinach and corn fritters are terrible is inconsequential, and is equally content with fact that she has no idea why she gets offered a different meal when she scowls as long as it was not a fritter. Looking back at my own journey, I can’t help but get choked up however knowing that -like her father- she will be spending night after night through Styx Acadamicus only to find that most employers will hire her more so for her cheeky smile, inquisitive nature, and affable personality rather than her “I swam across the Styx Acadamicus” certificate. 

As soon as we lock eyes, she runs towards with her cheeky grin. “Daddy”
“Yes, oh mighty ANZA- Zulu, I mean Faye?” 

“Why is naked is pronounced as naked but baked is not pronounced as baked?