Ernst Roets
speaker
479 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard May 2025
Ernst Roets’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
One of our Afrikaans philosophers, a man named N. Pierre van Wyklo, wrote, I think in the 1930s or something, that you love a people not so much for their accomplishments as for the hardships that they've had to endure. That's right. And I think that's true for South Africa.
South Africa has endured many hardships and also for our people, the Afrikaans people, as with many other peoples all over the world. have endured many hardships. And it's through these hardships and maintaining our sense of identity that we really love our history and our tradition and our culture.
Yes, the French Huguenots, yes. It was the fleeing the religious wars in Europe. Of course, they were getting killed. Yes, in big numbers. Yeah, yeah. It's... That's part of our origin story, how we came to be. Well, it's also factually true.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
Well, the problem is if you do that, you get bashed quite aggressively. Yeah, but like compared to what?
Well, the alternative is worse. It's just living the lie. It's much worse than getting bashed for telling the truth. Can I tell you a quick story or a quick reference about courage? Of course. So it's somewhat philosophical, but I'll make it practical. So Odysseus is on his way back from the Trojan War. And he has all these hardships and he's trying to get home.
And he gets told that the only way for him to get home is to face Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla is this six-headed sea monster, and Charybdis is a monstrous whirlpool that swallows ships whole. And the only way for him to get home is he has to navigate through these two monsters. Which he eventually does.
He decides it's better for him to sail his ship closer to Scylla, the sea monster, than the whirlpool. And a whole lot of his people die, but he reaches his destination. And so Aristotle writes about this in the Nicomachean Ethics, when he talks about the golden mean. And he says any virtue... is about finding the balance between having excess of it and having a deficiency of it.
And so this goes to courage, and courage is a good example. If you have excess courage, you become reckless. And if you have a deficiency, then you are a coward. And so the point of having courage is finding the balance between cowardice and recklessness. And what's great about the story of Odysseus is Odysseus discovers that he cannot simply go exactly in the middle between the two.
He has to be closer to the one threat than to the other. Because if he goes too close to the whirlpool, his whole ship gets swallowed up. And so the point here, and Aristotle says this as well, it's not to find the exact middle point. It's to find the appropriate balance between the two extremes. And so the one extreme is recklessness and the other extreme is cowardice.
And I honestly think in the situation we are in, it's better to err on the side of being too bold than to err on the side of having not enough courage or trying to find some form of solution through appeasement. And so we make mistakes in the process, and sometimes you say something wrong or you do something wrong.
But I'm very much convinced that if we're on this course and we try to pursue what we are trying to pursue, rather err on the side of having too much boldness and too much courage and facing the consequences than having to face the consequences of having a lack of courage. I love that.
Well, I think there are many ways. The one way is just to follow what's happening in South Africa and speak about it. Because we've had this incredible barrage of communications coming, just telling us again how wrong we are. This narrative is this zeitgeist in a certain sense. It's really like a monster that you have to fight.
That you're not allowed to say, speak certain truths, even though the truths are self-evident. So I think one thing is if people just can help spread the message, help take some interest in South Africa, because what's happening in South Africa is also of interest to the rest of the world. I think it is. In many ways, South Africa is the future of the Western world.
In terms of the problem and the solution, I think. So that's one. And then the other is there really are some institutions in South Africa who are really focused on building community-based solutions. And I think if people can... can identify these institutions and support these institutions, it really would help.
And I think in terms of the US government, if the US government is willing to do something, as it seems that they are, I think the most important thing that they could do is a combination of pressuring the South African government away from these destructive policies, but also supporting communities, local communities or minority communities or nations, you should say, who are committed to finding some form of self-determination.
Amen. Well, Godspeed.
I hope you'll come back. Oh, thank you. I hope so too. And I have to thank you for not just for this interview, but also for the focus you've been putting on South Africa in the past.
Well, thank you very much.
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