Opinions of Sunday, 26 October 2014

Auteur: L’Effort Camerounaise

Moral delinquency gains ground in our society

Moral delinquency, in all its forms, continues to gain ground in our country.

The term delinquency was forged from a now anachronistic verb derived from latin delinquere, which means committing a foul. It refers to the set of behaviors that violate criminal law, as well as to the moral law, and expose perpetrators to a sentence.

Delinquency constitutes deviance or the violation of a particular standard. In every society, there coexist multiple systems of standards. They are distinguished according to their greater or lesser formalization, their greater or lesser proximity to lines or situations they set.

In a simple social organization dominated by the inter-individual relations: a group of children playing marbles, a friendly or family meeting, a sports club, the standards may remain largely informal: they are adopted and implemented without specific procedure in the ordinary course of social exchanges.

But when the social relationship becomes more complex, so also appear more formal standards to which everyone must comply. Starting from this precept, we refer to the violation of moral norms in our country. Next to embezzlement of public funds and widespread corruption, our society is insidiously plagued by the crisis of values, as well as the non-observance of the moral law.

This is manifested in some scourges facing the leaders who seem to run out of solutions: infanticide, abortion, family irresponsibility, homosexuality, pedophilia and incest. If we are at this level of decline, it is because in Cameroon, the leaders put more emphasis on politicking, demagogy and vulgar dilation on the formation of man, and on the value of life.

These evils that we have just quoted, threaten our social fabric. In the same way that a virus kills the human body, this danger could lead in the long term, to a moral collapse of society if nothing is done. These scourges are the signs of the degradation of moral values which are essential to maintaining a society in spiritual righteousness. When life no longer has any value, when life has no more meaning, it would mean that our society has lost the sense of orientation.

Therefore, we run the risk of living in the rubble of a slow deconstruction of the values which distances us from the door of faith and which manifests through plagues such as: religious indifference, easy syncretism, abortion, infanticide, the abandonment of children in trash cans, incest, paedophilia.

Like a bad perfume, they spread evil and severely affected the balance of society as a whole. The intense propaganda as well as international pressures that are made around incest, homosexuality and pedophilia see these curses as symbols of a modernity which promotes freedom. But, in reality, it is only lures and disillusionment, because they lead to the moral decay of anyone who poses these acts.