When one thinks about it, the concept of “Government” is a strange one for it assumes as its fundamental premise that certain men and women – human beings like you and me – can and should be allowed to take upon themselves the right to direct the rest of us what to do, presumably for our own good. On the face of it that is a very unreasonable premise and a remarkably arrogant presumption.
Why should flesh and blood men and women, with feet of clay like anyone else, presume to think for us and act for us and push us around and mollycoddle us and punish and reward us as if they were inherently superior beings? It doesn’t make sense does it? Yet, unless there is government with strong executive power, the lives of men in general soon become, as Thomas Hobbes pointed out long ago, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
We in Guyana have been embarked for a long time in a search for answers to the perennial question of how can men and women best make arrangements for governing themselves.