Stop, Look, Think...

Stop, Look, Think!

By Farouk Gulsara

Here I am, waiting in my car, clutching my steering wheel. It has been a good five minutes, and I am at a standstill. There are no vehicles in front of me. It is a T-junction with traffic lights. There is no traffic on either road, but I have no choice. I have to wait.

https://borderlessjournal.com/2024/07/15/stop-look-think/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Serenity exemplified in Auschwitz!

The Zone of Interest (2023)
Director: Jonathan Glazer

Even though this is about something that happened more than 80 years ago, put in a similar situation, I foresee we humans do the exact thing that we did during World War 2 Nazi rule of Germany. We justify our actions and inaction through the dog-whistle call of the majority without taking a step back and asking ourselves, "Am I doing the right thing?"

Even during peacetime in Malaysia, a section of people is trying to steamroll their agenda to the rest of the country. Any sane person of reasonable intellectual capacity would understand this is not how democracy works. The majority chooses, and the rest would follow suit. Changes are made via constructive discourses at the appropriate forums. This renegade group is trying to change all these. The might of high decibels in the confines of an echo chamber cannot be underestimated.

Like Grobbels, who thought that the propaganda machines of the State could steer the thinking of the majority, small-minded fascists in this country are using mob power backed by their own interpretation of the scriptures to gain political power and to cow the minority into submission.

The thinking majority should be aware of this and not just that. They should also have the gumption to call the bluff. Otherwise, the outcome will be what we see in this movie—the country's machinery used to carry out a dastardly activity for future generations to curse us.

This movie won many accolades for its gruesome (not in graphic representation with gore, violence and blood) depiction of events that may have happened at Auschwitz concentration camp. All the violence, killings and death are only depicted in sounds and indirect visuals.

Serene living beside a concentration camp
in Auschwitz.

It tells the story of the Commandant of Auschwitz and his family as they live in a lovely double-storey bungalow immediately beside the camp. Amidst the background hum of the incinerator, screams of prisoners as they are led to their death and the occasional gunshots, the family leads a happy life. Oblivious to the happenings at the camp, the family grow attached to the bungalow, beautifying it and even refuses to move when the Commandant is transferred elsewhere. The air is filled with bellowing smoke of burning flesh. The river occasionally has fragments of bones discarded after incineration. The compound is strewn with ashes. Still, life goes on happily.

The irony is that the family lives without a care in the world. They conveniently overlook the carnage that happens behind the camp walls. They even have grand plans for the future.

This must be the true meaning of the word banality of evil that Hannah Arendt popularised after the 1948 Adolf Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem. People perform the cruellest of evils, not because they are sociopaths or inherently evil. They do it because the system expects them to behave in a particular way. For them, it is business as usual. It becomes the list of duties that must be completed to qualify for remunerations and promotions.

The mind shuts down. Mindfulness is lost. The higher thinking centres get bypassed. Everyone goes into zombie mode under the hypnosis of the supreme leader. 

(P.S. The director's acceptance speech at the Oscars ceremony has started a storm and could possibly be outcasted by Hollywood. His speech essentially can be interpreted as all that seen in the film was the effect of dehumanisation. His mention of the October 7th incident begs further clarification. Are the Jews, after surviving their aggressors, repeating the dehumanisation policy to the Gaza people? There is no easy answer. Remember, the state of Israel is located amongst neighbours who yearn for its annihilation. Can one practice no violence at the end of the barrel of a gun? 'We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people,' he said.)

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Our laurels paved with sin?

Credit: orangjohor.com

Lest we forget that the building of civilisation is paved with a bloody trail of heartaches, violence, injustices and loaded with double crossings, mutiny and vices.

No matter how much we try to whitewash and sugarcoat our history, the fact remains. The victors and losers are equally culpable to take the blame for the mayhem that put us all in a quandary in the first place.

No one party can put their fingers to accuse the other of drawing first blood.

Winners always sanitise their ascent to power through mutual consent as though the conquered willingly embraced their intruders with open arms. People do many things to escape torture and fear of death to themselves or loved ones.

Towns did not flourish the God-sanctioned ways. Without fail, thuggery, vices condemned by religions, sex, intoxicants and threats helped. Skyscrapers did not sprout through teachings of the book but via earnings of the unholy kind.

Once conquest is complete, the victors are at liberty to pen their history as and how they want the future descendants to see. They can start mixing the solution for the eyewash.

These, one must remember, whenever one reads the developments of townships of Penang, Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur. Sure, Sutan Puasa must have had the foresight to see the confluence of Sg Klang and Sg Gombak as a potential site to prosper his tin mine business. But it was also Yap Ah Loy and his boys, with the money extorted from sojourners who crossed the Gombak river at the vicinity of Masjid Jamek, who rolled in cash to spur various businesses to take KL to its current metropolitan status.

Ipoh became the capital of the silver state with its tin business through the blessings of the secret societies, Ghee Hin and Hai San. The royalty did not oversee Ipoh's scaling greater heights from the sidelines but by taking sides cunningly. The British did not genuinely act as the peacemaker with the purest of intention but with a carrot, a stick and lots of backhand manoeuvres.

Thus are the cases too how religious influences must have spread. Rare are instances when the masses suddenly saw the wisdom of a particular religion and converted en masse. There must have surely been lots of goodies passed around, if not fear of the unknown.

Don't blame me, I am just following orders!

Experimenter (2015)

Now, how often have we seen seemingly good people doing incomprehensibly evil deeds which are atypical of their general behaviour and predisposition? Too many times, middle management officers had been cruel beyond comprehension just because they were given the authority to do so. Even though, these junior officials know it is wrong to do certain things, they still do it as long as somebody else is taking charge. This phenomenon of blind obedience to authority was a favourite subject of Dr Stanley Milgram, a Jewish psychologist whose relatives perished in Hitler's concentration camps.

The question of the Holocaust and the justification for the acts of genocide by those accused at the Nuremberg trial must have been close to his heart.

Around the time of Eichmann trial, in 1962, in Yale, Milgram performed an ingenious social experiment (see Youtube clip below) which was later condemned as unethical, for invoking emotional stress is some participants, to show that most people would perform immoral things if ordered to do so by an authoritative figure. Not many would stand up against the majority to fight for what he feels is just. He went on to show this in other planned experiments. We are followers and can be easily triggered to go into an agentic state where we behave like an agent of the people in authority without taking any responsibility for the consequence of our actions. We blindly follow the order of someone in authority.

Many of his social experiments made it to the telly as seen in 'Candid Camera' series. The movie ends by saying that we are just puppets but with perception and awareness. Perhaps we can achieve liberation if we are aware of the strings that tie us down!

In order to get things running in an orderly fashion, the society needs to have appendages that ease administration. It cannot have all its officers having a mind of their own and doing things their way. Pandemonium would be the order of the day. Unfortunately, people is power may abuse this privilege to fulfil their own self-agendas. Herein lies the danger as seen around us. Charismatic sweet talking politicians and wayward theologian have a way to the heart of the followers to turn them into automatons to perform their dirty job. Philip Zimbardo's notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Study showed findings of the same effect. In that experiment, it was the situation rather than their individual personality that determines the participants' behaviour.

Good people do bad things through omission, coercion, with the desire to conform to society and not rock the boat!

Evil by whose standards?

Victory over evil?
Burning effigy of 10 headed Ravana on Vijayadashami.

Now, what is education and what is it to be learned? Is it the ability to regurgitate in verbatim what is written by page and chapter without actually understanding what is written or recited? Or is it the ability to understand that there may be two sides of the coin and allowance must be given to an alternative perspective to what has been accepted as the truth without batting an eyelid?

I do not think that one becomes stupid or is a trouble maker by questioning what seems to be a no-brainer.

Year in year out the effigy of Ravana is burnt with so much pomp and vigour to signify the win of good over evil with the help of the Gods. Ravana is painted in hideous hues and is vilified as the epitome of everything that is evil on Earth. After fasting and praying for 9 days to signify the greatness of the matriarchal forces of Nature, devotees celebrate their victory of staying true to their endeavour by symbolically burning something that is synonymous with evil. Who is going to argue? The scriptures innumerates the numerous misdeeds done by Ravana, the Demon and his equally demonic sister. They were accused of upsetting the tranquility of Rama's exiled household.
But then... History is written by the victors...

The remnants of the untold history of the losers insist that Ravana indeed was a cultured emperor of 10 kingdoms as well the one who had mastered the knowledge of 10 holy scriptures. The 10 heads in his representation of him is the symbolism of his supposed grandiosity. He was an intelligent physician, a talented musician (veena player) and devout Shiva devotee. His subjects enjoyed peace and prosperity under his rule. Poverty was unheard of. Even peasants in his rule used golden utensils in their daily household usage! - so they say.

Even today, he is hailed as a hero, a demi-god and is worshipped in many parts of India. Temples and statues had been erected in his name in northern and southern parts of India. 

They assert that the whole bad publicity came about because of vested interest of certain superpowers over the other. Ravana is said to be the last of defiant kings who resisted the hegemony of aliens or invading forces from the North. Or was it another deathly clash between Vaishnavites and Shaivites?

Again and again history is re-written to justify the tyranny of the victors and to put them in a better light.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/ravana-is-a-hero-for-sinhala-nationalists/article1-249335.aspx

... used the Ramayana to radicalise the Tamils in southern India against Brahminical supremacy and the domination of North Indian Sanskritic culture. For him, Rama, Sita, and all the rest of them were northerners without "an iota of Tamil culture", but Ravana, the king of Lanka or southern Tamil Nadu, was a Tamil.

Periyar E.V. Ramaswami

The evil that lurks...

Deep inside, we are all the same. Despite our seemingly outward differences and self inflicted desire to be different, deep entrenched in the crypts of our sulci and gyri and between the creases of our DNA, we are all one. Our desires, our inner, our likes, no matter how much we deny or suppress, it is pretty much the same.
We may impose restrictions on what we should eat and should not. It would only last that long. The inner drive would prevent it or suppress our desires to taste the forbidden fruit but at the same time we change the goal post to suit both the regulations. A vegetarian yearning for fish came with fish textured soya minus the odour, prawn like crusted soya to be sizzling in a wok and  so on. Kebab and teriyaki lovers replaced meat with cheese on skewers. They keep their faith and their taste buds happy.
With the aim of keeping social problems of uncared children, society imposed strict rules and penalties for its subjects pertaining mixing of the carnal kind. Again and again the virtues of monogamy and responsible parenthood had been impressed upon their offspring. Society imposed draconian rules and even inhumane punishments to cow the society to fall in line. In spite of apparently outward manifestation of conformity and piety, the primal need to sow the seed and immerse in the joy of union of the sexes thrives in all. In spite of the strictest law cast in stone, the animalistic desire prevails again and again. Of course, all laws are made to be broken, they are also amended and manipulated to please their fancy.
Traditionally, the female gender have been left with the unenviable task of running the household as the men left the caves for long spells in effort to hunt to provide for the society. The nomadic tribe had the same arrangement. As the organised religion came to fore, the gender roles reversed. The society took a patriarchal stance. The female partner became subjugates to do and don'ts. With evolving times and demand for equality via bra burning, something had to give. However, hocus pocus pseudo-scientific cockamamie excuse for protecting the weaker sex still manage to con them to submission. The fear of God, as usual, works all the time to win the male's place in society.
We make dress to appear modest and civil. We may claim conservativeness in our drapes so as not excite the faint-hearted. But deep inside, there is an eternal desire to be noticed, to stand out, to be praised of our looks, our beauty albeit skin deep. Even if the mandatory sensitive areas that need to be covered are so, the hide and seek game continues. Even the covered areas are highlighted and enhanced with accessories to enchanter the eyes of the beholder.
We can hide, we can deny but deep inside our primitive primal desires lurks like a caged animal waiting to be unleashed. When conditions are ripe when he perceives himself to be off the radar, this demonic desire surfaces. But then... he can say, "I was weak, I was tempted, in my lowest ebb, the Devil with his devilish ways won. I repent. After all I am human, I err!"

Banality of evil

As usual after our usual hard run on Sunday, during the breakfast of thosai, we got involved in our usual banter about events around the country.
This time around the subject was rather morbid, in particular about the death of an detainee by assault and the killing and unceremonial cremation of a millionairess recently. What makes a man do all these violent things to a fellow human being without flinching. Being a doctor, one of the group members could not stomach the idea of landing punches after punches and the coup de grace that tips the living daylights of the victim whilst looking straight into his eyes.
Unfortunately, I do not think that people of the medical profession are immune of this charge. Scores of heinous crimes against patients and even loved ones are testimony of this charge.
In fact, philosophers and psychologists have pondered upon this topic since the end of WW2. Hannah Arendt introduced the concept of banality of evil where people just did evil things that they were assigned to do without questioning and thinking of its consequence as if it was just banal (trivial) thing to do.
The abandoned 1971 Stanford prison experiment by Prof Philip Zimbaldo suggested that probably we all try to perform our roles too well. The prison guards, probably because of the absolute power given to them, act beyond the scope of their job with the aid of testesterone and ego. The prisoners go into submission because of their disadvantaged state and the stress hormones.
There must be some truth in Sigmund Freud's theory that man's needs are governed by their primodial primitive animalistic desires of food, violence and sexual gratification. Modernization and culture managed to rein these unsavoury traits which are not appropriate for living in a structured society. However, when the atmosphere is conducive or desperate, when they are amongst people of similar wavelength, these unabated evil behaviour may just be unleashed to its full glory.