AUG 19 — If all people were migrants at some point; among us Malaysians, who is more of a migrant with the converse being, who is less of a migrant?

Was Chin Peng a legitimate combatant or a mass murderer?

Have our universities become less capable, or are their students dragging them down?

These are difficult questions, ones that are not readily answered. If we are willing to be completely honest with ourselves, real questions are always a challenge to answer.

Which is why people debate — to build a better argued position rather than holding one which is merely convenient. Mind you, I’m not claiming argued-out perspectives are true, just that they are likelier to be fairer, more comprehensive and acceptable.

Things must be argued in order for there to be intellectual enlightenment. Facts which can’t cope with reasoning were never facts to begin with — just opinions strongly masked as irrefutable ideas.

But discourses are valued by their judges, the public in the instance of policies and laws. Unfortunately in Malaysia we expect our public to understand despite the selective nature of information released and the heavy infusion of propaganda.

This is the “scope trap.” The public arrives at an opinion based on what they are told and what they have acquired individually, through careful government guidance.

In university debating, this frequently works against experienced teams in situations when they face a weaker opponent who set out to convince a weak judge of their case’s merit by not scoring goals, but by moving the goalposts.

The weaker team constructs its rationale by building a favourable “artificial reality”, which renders their position perfect, or self-proving. And the judges accept the premises set within this “artificial reality” and seek no further explanation. They are comfortable with looking at the presented problem within the simpler and two-dimensional “artificial reality”. The team with more complex and varied arguments loses, because the judge (public) does not want to consider further than the “artificial reality” of the weak team.

Like this “baby dumping” phenomenon in Malaysia.

It is relentless, gory and everyone wants to stop it. However, the guided discussion on its causality by conservatives has been slightly bizarre. Young girls are being led to a life of sin by social freedoms, pornography and Western lifestyle. They therefore argue clamping down on modern mores, building schools for pregnant girls and increasing religious instruction will do the job.

There is no examination of the socio-economic background of the girls generally, the value of sex education and the number of medical professionals engaging these girls during their pregnancies for starters. It helps too to have non-judgmental counsellors in schools.

The simplistic conclusions of the conservatives are dominant in our mainstream press because all unfriendly points to their findings are actively excluded from the debate.

Unfortunately, issues are won on weight when they are not dynamically engaged.

Every argument no matter how weak has weight. And invisible arguments have no gravity. The conservative wins by denying space for alternative arguments or opinions.

And despite the emergence of the Internet and new media to diffuse the monopoly, systemic conditioning will not be shrugged off overnight.

Look at some dominant ideas.

The argument that all constitutional Malays are long-time natives within the legal borders of Malaysia has been abandoned in the last decade or so. Now it is the Nusantara argument. As long as you are from the region; so an ethnic Bugis has more assimilation rights even if Sulawesi is about the same distance from KL as Chennai, Tamil Nadu — the home of the Tamils? If that fails, then it is the constant movement of peoples in the Nusantara.

That too fails since the Chinese and Indians have travelled through, travelled in and settled in these islands long before and during European colonisation.

The thing is, all of the above is naive.

There are loads of Indians, Chinese, Achehnese, Javanese, Cambodians — them and their specific ancestors — who have never been to Malaysia until they landed at Port Klang.

That is why there are Indonesian quarters — broken further down to their specific ethnic groups — in Klang or in Chow Kit. And the close bond held by Tamil Muslim businessmen in Pudu, all of them not bothered nor would likely know “Sejarah Melayu” by Tun Sri Lanang.   

Arguing Nusantara also means you concede that all 500 million other people in our geography have a legal claim to Malaysian citizenship. You want to do that?

Or about Chin Peng, the secretary-general and leader of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), the name Malaysians throw about without visiting context. Emergency may have gone on between 1948-1960, but only in the last three years were the Communists fighting independent Malaya’s security forces. Before that they were fighting the British Empire. Malayans were then serving the British security forces.

The MCP troops are more guilty if in a skirmish they kill a British soldier who is Malayan? Were Datuk Bahaman, Mat Kilau or Tok Janggut more guilty because they killed British soldiers, a number of them Malayans?

And when the MCP killed collaborators during the Japanese occupation, were they in the wrong too? Will it be less wrong if a Malay communist cadre killed a Japanese-stooge whatever his ethnicity?

The third query, our universities. Could it be the obsession to build bigger and better campuses sidelined us from the business of learning in our universities? That a campus is a minor consideration compared to faculty strength, syllabus, teaching ideology and a culture of freedom. Or the bleeding of our better academic scorers to foreign universities creating a vacuum in our own universities, making do with less talent?

Ethnicity litmus tests, calculating revolutionaries and measuring universities, all of them are complex, connected and difficult issues. You will continuously change your opinion.

And you are welcomed to your opinion, but don’t just take in the two-dimensional “artificial reality” the state gives you for the problems.

Go ahead and disagree. But before that, test the integrity of the “artificial reality” and its own consistency, or lack thereof.

Should you not ask why some of the most perplexing problems for the rest of the world seem to be non-issues for Malaysian society? Or when non-issues elsewhere are major headaches for us.

Teenage pregnancies are on the rise globally. Perhaps the reason why most countries are not rocked with dead babies in dumpsters as much might be because they don’t oversimplify the issue like we do? 

Which is why my master Bertrand Russell states the following, his Liberal Decalogue:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2. Do not think it worthwhile to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.