Sabah – Leaders and Followers

Some people think it is sufficient to use intellectual debate to persuade the other side. This is silly to the extreme. When a person grows up in his community, he absorbs everything within his community as part of himself. Intellectual debate is not going to persuade him that all that he is and all that he loves and all that he believes in is wrong or inferior.

By batsman

Needless to say, a discussion on leaders and followers alone is too narrow and does not do justice to the huge problems facing Sabah. Other matters such as relations between communities, between states and between the state and the centre will be discussed as well. 

Secularists like to pretend that their ideology is purely based on ideas and intellect. They are in denial. Although secularism may be said to have started as an idea, over time, this has merged into the emotions and has become just as emotional as religion can be. It is now as dependent on faith as any religion. Over the next centuries, secularism cannot be guaranteed to be any more successful as a method of organizing humans as religions were over the same amount of time. The success of secularism is therefore based on faith alone. In fact the stubbornness and tenacity of religion may outlast secularism after all, just as faith eventually conquered communism which claimed to be the latest and the mostest in scientific thought. 

How is it possible that base emotions can triumph over the higher stratosphere of human intellect and thought? I submit that human emotions and faith is more basic to humans than reason, intellect and scientific thought and is therefore more tenacious and lasts longer because essential human life and basic human experience is not much changed with the centuries while reason and philosophy is too often based upon circumstance and assumptions which go obsolete too easily and too quickly. 

All this has a lot to do with relations between people, belief systems and institutions which is why it served as an introduction to this discussion. 

From the moment a human baby is born, it is reliant on its parents. We are not reptiles which can fend for themselves the moment they hatch. We therefore need a more sophisticated emotional arsenal and not just reptilian instinct – both as parents and as babies. It is part of our nature to rely on faith and on love. When this faith or love which bonds parents to children is broken, the child often turns into a dangerous social misfit. Even parents turn into monsters. One is reminded of the Korean couple who would rather look after their cyber baby than their real life baby which starved to death. 

In normal human society, the child grows up in a family within a community. Its faith teaches it to depend on this community and its belief systems, values and traditions. These are part of what identifies the child as a member of its community and also partly as an individual. When the bond of faith and love between the individual and his community is broken, the individual becomes a dangerous monster. 

Capitalism which promotes the individual above the community inherently seeks to break this bond because the strength of the community often frustrates capitalism in making profits. Capitalism would rather deal with isolated, powerless and marginalized individuals rather than with a united and strong community to extract the maximum profits in the easiest way in the shortest time. 

This is where the discussion about leaders and followers need to diverge a little and treat this relationship that exists in the powerful west and that which exists in the weak east as 2 different things. 

The west is powerful and predatory. Its leaders and their followers often have commonality of interest in subjugating weak nations of the east. Both enjoy in the loot and rapine. Even if there is no war and no invasion, the west’s superiority in finance, technology and systems is enough to give it an edge in exploiting super profits from the east. Leaders in the western world therefore are closer to their followers even if for this reason alone – the followers are more easily seduced to tag along with the hope of enjoying in the loot and rapine. 

The situation in the east is different. Eastern communities are seen as inferior and uncivilized. Living conditions within the communities are primitive. Leaders in primitive communities therefore can be subverted and seduced more easily, especially when they are offered more civilized, comfortable and advanced styles of living compared to their followers. When they are seduced by being given the chance to rub shoulders with the rich and powerful, they often abandon their followers and become monsters in the process. 

The bond between the leader and his followers is broken, but the converse is not true. The followers sadly often see their leaders who rub shoulders with the rich and powerful as their hope of becoming civilized themselves. Their faith in their leaders actually becomes obsessive and fanatical. They are turned into super victims and super mercenaries at the same time. 

I submit therefore that any leader in the east who has a lifestyle that is far above those of his followers is suspect. One only has to compare some of the UMNO leaders whose bonds with the Malays can be said to be stretched to the breaking point with PAS’s Nik Aziz of whose lifestyle and whose bond with his people can be said to be unbroken. 

In other countries of the east, great leaders come to mind whose lifestyles are simple and in tune with those of their followers’ e.g. Gandhi and even Mao during his early years as a revolutionary. 

As for relations between communities, some people think it is sufficient to use intellectual debate to persuade the other side. This is silly to the extreme. When a person grows up in his community, he absorbs everything within his community as part of himself. Intellectual debate is not going to persuade him that all that he is and all that he loves and all that he believes in is wrong or inferior. Relations between communities need time and practice to work and be mutually beneficial. To start off, respect and humility are necessary to even make the first contacts. All these escape the secularists who think that endless repetition of their ideology and taking on the airs of someone superior is sufficient to persuade the other side. They need to be cut down a peg or 2. 

Sabah has a great many different communities almost all of which feel threatened. Some communities are themselves internally split and feel threatened and betrayed by their own. E.g. the Kadazan-Dusuns appear to be split as are the Chinese and even PKR. All these desperately look for decent and good leaders who will not betray them to pursue individual selfish interests and in their desperation often place forlorn hopes on unsavoury (mainly rotten secularist) characters. 

In the meantime, outsiders look at this great confusion and do not know who to trust since the locals cannot even trust themselves. So distrust moves up the ladder and builds up between the state and the centre. Any moves by the centre to ensure reliability and discipline are seen as suppression of the locals. Perhaps they are suppressing the locals. Perhaps the mainlanders are taking advantage of the confusion and imposing brutal rule adding some of their own spanners in the works to foul up the situation even more. 

Whose fault is it? I think the situation is so complicated and so confused that there is no point putting blame on anyone. More blame means even more confusion. Discipline, organization and solutions are needed. More than these, time and practice are needed. Decisiveness is needed. Good leaders are needed. Sabahans, please supply these before the confusion spreads to the mainland as well, not that the situation here is any better. Heeheehee.