A Light Mental Break from Emotional Issues

ARCHIVES 2010

By admin-s On Jan 21, 2010

It sounds very much like an attempt to create a special people with special birth rights and isolate them from the soiled and sub-human species with rude and inferior culture who have no rights and who therefore may be used, exploited and manipulated with impunity. The greatest tragedy is that religion is now used as the vehicle of force and oppression.

By batsman

In order not to suffer from burn-out on the “Allah controversy” I suggest you take a short break. I offer some light distraction for those who cannot find other more pleasant things to do. This is also to provide some variety to break the monotony of obsession that some people who revel in base emotions might use to impose a monopoly of the discussion.

I offer a light cursory tickle of your intellectual capacities on problems of production on a macroeconomic or even global scale and as usual follow that up with scathing criticism of Malaysians.

Production is a never ending headache. Produce too little, produce just enough or produce too much – all these have their own headaches to contend with.

Produce too little and prices skyrocket, people go hungry or even starve, speculators grow rich and profiteers become politically or even criminally powerful. Foreign powers see opportunities to interfere and gain influence or even invade.

Produce just enough, prices are stable but over time, people take too much for granted. They have no incentive to work hard and become bored and lazy. Innovation suffers. Rich countries become soft and stagnate and become prey to hungry immigrants or even invaders.

Produce too much and prices plummet. The rich-poor divide becomes a chasm based on quality, usability and value for money of produce. Produce rot or are destroyed intentionally. Producers become poor. Land and factories are lost to speculation and risk taking. Resources are wasted, pollution becomes unmanageable and nature is destroyed.

One of the solutions is to export or import. The world serves as a buffer. In this sense there is more stability, but eventually in a globalised world, the problems just become bigger based in the same characteristics above and may become so super big that they are unmanageable as witnessed by the many quarrels in many international conferences on trade and global warming.

The other solution is to plan well. Production is a human activity. Global production is turning the whole world into an artificial global living space for humans. Eventually nature will lose out and become unsustainable of human civilisations or wreak revenge in the form of super earthquakes (made worse by global warming?), super volcanic eruptions, super storms, super tsunamis, super droughts, super cold and super floods. This is presuming humans have not wiped each other out by super wars over super diminishing resources.

So there is a need for artificial human planning to resolve problems created by artificial human production. Needless to say, the planning has to be “good” in order to solve any problems at all. So we now take a cursory look at planning.

Also needless to say, planning must take into account and anticipate the minds, intentions and actions of millions upon millions of small individual as well as collective producers (businesses), not to mention predict the weather as well and availability of resources for now and for the future. But I am saying it anyway.

There is the Command type of planning. This is characterized by communism. The planners plan and hope for the best and use force on rule breakers to ensure the implementation goes according to plan. This type is planning is good for anarchic situations where everything has broken down or has been destroyed or people are just dirt poor originally. It is capable of pulling and dragging a country out of chaos and poverty and may even achieve a good measure of power – especially for the enforcers. Of utmost importance; the enforcers must be reasonably honest men of integrity. This system breaks down if the enforcers turn corrupt or are incompetent. It also starts to break down when the country achieves a higher level of development with attendant complexity.

There is the Market planning which leaves everything to the individual producers. The problem is that although the needs of individual producers are accounted for by the producers themselves, there is little coordination between producers. In this sense the countries which claim to be market economies actually do a whole lot of planning and coordination – perhaps even more than the planned or command economies. The difference is that they are rich (for whatever reason) enough to do it in a disguised manner (in many different ways).

Risk taking is common and socially accepted. It creates a few extremely rich producers and speculators giving rise to super finance and super banks at the same time creating an army or multitude of failed producers who are forced to hire themselves out for a living. It also creates “consumerism”. Eventually monopolies and market oligopolies form. Superpowers are created and wars and weapons technology given extremely high priority.

The 3rd form of planning is Computerized planning. This is a massive undertaking involving massive resources and minute and detailed monitoring of even the smallest producers and taking them into account in the computer model. Needless to say again, weather must be predicted with accuracy and availability of resources accurately forecast. It is something that only the most advanced and rich countries are capable of undertaking.

With such an effort, it is hoped that “just enough” production can be achieved. Eventually it is hoped that the whole world is involved through trading blocs, etc. Of course, “just enough” involves investment required for maintenance as well as innovation.

Unfortunately such a system does not exist yet. It exists only in my imagination (I am sure of some others as well). Some elements of it may already exist in the form of computerized weather prediction, computerized market forecasting, computerized planning for individual businesses, etc, but not on a macroeconomic scale or on a global scale which take into account microscopic microeconomic elements.

Currently, both excess and wastage are observed alongside starvation and deprivation. The world’s natural resources and forest cover are used up at an unsustainable rate. Good planning is now a necessity for survival, not just for development even if it conjures up the image of Big Brother watching over everyone. At the same time, it offers hope of the whole world becoming a global village with “just enough” sustainable production and people able to achieve what they are naturally, genetically best suited and educated to do without the criminals, megalomaniacs and psychopaths taking control.

How is Malaysia affected? Malaysia is essentially a nation of copy-cats. There are too many people who suck up to the west without any original thought just as RPK complains that there are people who claim religious credentials without any original thought and who blindly copy what their favourite ulama decree. In this sense, it may look as if their faith is not personal and sincere and actually belong to someone else that they swoon over and are fans of – somewhat like champions of US aid in Haiti.

In advanced civilizations, actual conditions create the ideals and philosophies that manage to find acceptance in society because they mirror the soul of each and every person. In Malaysia, it is the other way around because of the copy-cat attitude. The ideas and philosophies of other civilized countries are copied blindly or cynically altered and then implemented here.

This means ideas may be implemented in an environment lacking in social and economic realities able to support these ideas. We therefore get into trouble because we have no minds of our own and don’t understand our own circumstances.

A common mistake is to take foreign ideas, wrench them out of context and implement them here as if these are tailored to our special circumstances.

A fine example is the use of the word “Allah”. The whole world uses the word “Allah” without any problems. It is only in Malaysia that there is a claim that non-Muslims cannot use it as if by using it, the non-Muslims soil it, not that there are no contrary examples of people denigrating it provocatively even as I write.

We need to stop fighting past ideological wars on our soil and stop mouthing ideas blindly or even manipulating them cynically and call it tailoring to suit our own special circumstances.

So, as a short break from fanatical obsession over the issue, I hope the 1st part of this write-up will serve as sweet dessert to occupy your thinking space in a relaxing way, hopefully also succeeded in drawing attention to the fact that there are many more pressing problems besides the artificially created, politically motivated and cynically manipulated “religious” issues.