Bread, circuses and the price of silence

Sep 03, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – Juvenal, the Roman satirist, looked upon his fellow citizens nearly two thousand years ago and wondered what had become of a people who once cared passionately about the affairs of the Republic. “We have sold our votes,” he wrote, before observing that the Roman citizenry had come to desire only two things: panem et circenses—bread and circuses.

Juvenal was not merely complaining that politicians were buying votes with food and entertainment; he was making the more unsettling observation that citizens had willingly exchanged the burdens of political responsibility for the comforts of being provided for and amused. The tragedy, in his telling, was not simply that power had become corrupt but that the people had become sufficiently comfortable, distracted and preoccupied to stop caring very much about what the powerful did with it.

It is an old Roman observation that has acquired a distinctly Guyanese accent in the oil age, although our bread is no longer distributed from the imperial granary and our circuses are considerably better televised. Our new bread is the walk-in supermarket, the shopping mall, the restaurant, the smartphone and the monthly salary that must somehow stretch from one payday to the next.

Our new circuses are cricket tournaments such as the GSL and CPL, the FIFA World Cup beamed into living rooms and rum shops, the endless spectacle of social media and the comforting national ritual of arguing about who dropped a catch when there are rather more consequential things being dropped elsewhere. None of these things is inherently bad, of course, but there comes a point when entertainment ceases merely to entertain and begins to anesthetise.

The question worth asking is whether the modern Guyanese citizen has become too busy trying to survive, earn, consume and provide for a family to spend much time confronting those who govern the country. The mother worrying about school expenses, the father calculating the grocery bill, the young professional trying to secure a better job and the small businessman trying to make the most of the present oil boom may all have perfectly legitimate reasons for deciding that politics can wait until tomorrow.

Tomorrow, however, has a habit of becoming the day after tomorrow, and then the next election. Somewhere along the way the citizen who once marched, protested, debated and demanded accountability becomes the citizen who mutters his dissatisfaction over breakfast, curses the politicians on Facebook and then gets on with the business of making enough money.

This may help explain why there seems to be so little public anger about matters that ought to provoke considerably more of it.  Previous generations, whatever their political defects, appeared more prepared to confront authority, organise collectively and make life uncomfortable for governments that had crossed certain lines. Today, we seem more inclined to complain privately than to challenge publicly, more prepared to share outrage than to risk inconvenience. The supermarket trolley has perhaps become the modern ballot box. We exercise our preferences aisle by aisle while those exercising political power make decisions that may affect generations yet unborn.

Consider the oil agreement with ExxonMobil, one of the worst deals ever made on behalf of the Guyanese people. A contract widely regarded as extraordinarily favourable to the investor generated remarkably little sustained mass mobilisation among ordinary citizens, even though the potential value of the resources involved is so enormous that the consequences of the agreement will extend far beyond the lifetimes of those currently shopping in our supermarkets.

Where was the national uprising over an arrangement that handed away an extraordinary share of the country’s petroleum wealth? Where were the thousands marching in the streets, the professional associations demanding answers, the churches holding public forums, the business community insisting upon renegotiation and the ordinary citizens refusing to let the matter disappear.

There have been exceptions, most notably Glenn Lall and Christopher Ram, who have persistently challenged aspects of the oil arrangement and demanded a better deal for Guyana. Their persistence deserves recognition precisely because it exposes the uncomfortable question of why so few others have been prepared to sustain the argument with comparable intensity. Perhaps the explanation is not that Guyanese have suddenly become less intelligent or less patriotic but that prosperity, aspiration and anxiety have altered the incentives of citizenship. When a man is working extra hard to put food on the table, when a woman is trying to keep her children in school, when everybody is trying to improve his/her standard of living, confrontation with political power can begin to look like an expensive luxury.

And governments understand incentives. The clever government does not need to silence everybody; it merely needs to ensure that enough people are sufficiently occupied, sufficiently hopeful or sufficiently comfortable that they do not feel compelled to become troublesome. Have you ever asked why the Global Super League went ahead in the midst of the country’s worst marine disaster?

This is where Juvenal’s old Roman warning becomes uncomfortably modern. Bread and circuses do not necessarily require oppression; sometimes they require only that citizens become so absorbed in securing the bread and enjoying the circus that they surrender the time, energy and courage necessary to defend their interests.

The danger for Guyana is that the oil age may produce precisely this paradox: a country becoming enormously wealthy in natural resources while its citizens become poorer in the habit of demanding better governance. We may acquire bigger supermarkets, more shopping malls, better restaurants, larger televisions and more spectacular cricket while simultaneously losing something far more valuable—the willingness to ask who owns the wealth, who benefits from it and whether the people are receiving what they deserve.

Juvenal’s great insight was that political power can be surrendered without anyone physically taking it away. The citizen merely becomes too busy, too entertained or too comfortable to exercise it, and by the time he notices what has happened, somebody else has already discovered that his silence is remarkably convenient.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)                      

 

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• bread., circuses, Peeping Tom, Silence

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