The saying that “people do not appreciate what they have got until they lose it”, appears to be what is happening in my adopted country of Finland.

I was greeted on arrival here by what I considered to be a triumph for mankind. This was because the system was designed to cater to every single person in the society, and done in such a way as to head towards a truly egalitarian society. This obviously implied that the people who lived within the system lived in dignity, as this is normally defined by the differences in the conditions under which people live. Having come from the class-based societies of the United Kingdom and Nigeria, where the existence of the classes, either based on the family one was born into or the amount of money one had, led to some within the society not living in, and not being treated with dignity, the system in Finland was one I found very refreshing, as well as a triumph for the creativity of humankind.

One cannot help but wonder why having taken the pains to create such a wonderful system, the new crop of politicians is bent on destroying it. I watch with pain as system after system is being destroyed by the introduction of ideas from countries where those very systems have been proven not to work. The most poignant is the privatization of what can be considered to be the base of the future society, the tertiary educational system.

Is it not clear what the implications of privatization are? Is it not clear what would surely happen when the provision of a service is carried out by an organization that is founded on the making of profit? Would that search for profit not lead to the service, that such an organization offers, being made available to only those who can lead it to make that profit? Would what then happen to those who cannot afford the service not lead to a class-based society?

For those who have not had the experience of living in such class-based societies, my news to you is that it is not pleasurable. This applies to even those who are at the top of those classes, as there is the need for isolation, something that leads to building high fences and having guards, to protect and isolate them from the rest of society, in other words living in prisons.

For those advocating this break up of the system, here in Finland, come different reasons why it should happen. The latest one I heard was that poverty has always existed in societies and that there existed a class system before the second war, so we should be happy to go back to such a system. I wonder what those advocates would think if they were to be poor. Maybe it should be that such advocates should be made intentionally poor, and allowed to live in that state of poverty for a few years, following which we could then ask if they still would like to restore the system to one in which there was poverty.

Another point to note about such advocacy is the concept of development. I wonder what these advocates would think if doctors stopped prescribing antibiotics, with the reason that there was a time when there were no antibiotics. Would it not be clear what would happen? In that light, the introduction of the use of antibiotics could be considered a development in medicine. Is it not clear that the inverse relationship that crime has with the state of equality in society points to what kind of society would be created if there are classes? Is this not clear even today, when one carries out this comparison? Why then should such advocacy be even considered, and not only considered but taken seriously? Something that is worth noting, in all of this is the idea that it is more difficult to build than to destroy. This is proven by the fact that what was created, in this society, over probably more than five decades is being destroyed in less than one. From that point of view, those who want to live in peace, something that is again strongly connected to how equal people are within a society, would have to stop the dream becoming a nightmare, which it already is starting to be.