Archive Details
A systems-oriented meditation on morality, scale, and the quiet mathematics of compromise. The piece explores how individual actions, seemingly negligible in isolation, accumulate into structural consequences that shape institutions, governance, and collective dignity. Neither sermon nor absolution, it examines the uneasy tension between personal responsibility and systemic design— where greys multiply, yet law insists on black and white.
Sin Divided By Six
Of six, the denominator, of course you’ll find nothing.
In the microscope of individual errors made multiple by habits, you get zeros.
But in the Eros of a tapestry woven by a little compromise here, a pollination there—of reds and reds, you get the corpuscles that make the devil fat.
It is easy to judge a system righteous because scale is a multi-climber. Yes, it is far easier to judge a system broken when a crack here makes a ditch there pronounced.
But in the everyday minutes of madness, “C’est la vie.”
Sin divided by six is zero—one individual at most.
What can one say then?
Key Highlights
- Examines morality through systems-level reasoning
- Explores aggregation effects of small compromises
- Analyzes tension between individual guilt and systemic outcomes
- Reflects on law
- scale
- and ethical absolutes
- Uses metaphor to frame corruption and responsibility
- Blends philosophical prose with socio-political critique
- Challenges binary interpretations of right and wrong
Punish the petty thief today so that the penitentiary never exists?
Yes—glorify the teen who returned the purse so that nation builders are not a dying breed tomorrow?
Punish the cookie thief today, so that the national treasury knows no Diezani.
Reward the Peter Pans in their youth so that in distant times Nigeria’s waymakers are not limited to a God in distant heavens.
What can one say?
For law is not the stuff of greys. Yet in the many greys of our green and white, black should be black. And white should stay white.