Imagination is one of the games that fulfil our desires. It also helps us escape reality. Imagination also has many other functions, including enhancing comparative thinking in order to know whether we are really doing what we want to do, and whether there was a better way to reach what we want.
If you have reached this point, prepare your imagination and let me lead this fantasy in a few lines.
Imagine dear readers that Shakespeare is living among us, but only as a young person. At his age he starts looking for a job and only manages to find one as a customer service adviser in an internet company, or perhaps a sales official in a real estate marketing company. Did you manage to imagine that?
Now, do you think he will succeed? Most probably, he will think of himself as a failure, and will believe that he is not responsible for his failure and that others are trying to bring him down. He might even think he is under conspiracy.
Let’s continue this trip, but forget about artists, let’s talk about Pharaoh Mena. We will assume he is retired, and the government wanted to honour him so he was hired as a minister or a governor. I wonder what his decisions will look like. Will they suit the current situation or not?
Someone is a candidate for the post of media spokesperson, but his personal traits say he is very impulsive and needs time to organise his thoughts. In this case, if he was hired in the spokesperson’s post, the consequences will not be good.
Someone else is a candidate for a job that requires dealing with the public; however, his personal traits include being tense and dictatorial without an ability to hold discussions. What will the consequences be? Most probably many problems will occur between the public and this person.
What I want to say through these simple fantasies is that for each profession, there are specific requirements for the person’s own personal traits. These days, there are tests to understand whether someone is suitable for a certain job. There could be tests for the mental abilities of the person, his cognitive or personal traits.
It is not that simple, though. In fact, there are diseases that affect decision making, like Dementia, whose symptoms begin to appear after the age of 65. Its symptoms include a change in the person’s behaviour, or his decision making or even mental abilities. Many other diseases affect a person’s ability to work in similar ways.
I leave you now with simple questions: are there any periodical tests for the psychological and mental abilities of Egyptian officials? Is choosing people for certain posts based on these tests or are there other considerations?
There are a large number of Egyptian officials in many different posts who make fatal decisions for Egyptians. Their ages are way past 65. How many of them actually undergo the tests of aging?
I leave these questions to your imagination once more, but this time, I will not lead this fantasy for you.
Ahmed Aboul-Wafa is a specialist psychiatrist
