Malay unity is in the hands of the grassroot, not the leadership

By admin-s On Jul 25, 2024

Even if they manage to suppress their ego and work together for a while, their cooperation will not last long. In 17 months or 15 months, their suppressed ego will somehow or other find a way to unleash itself, and cause double the havoc that it is already causing now.

Nehru Sathiamoorthy

Awang Azman Pawi, a political analyst from Universiti Malaya, believes it will be impossible for PAS, Bersatu, and Umno to cooperate at the next general election (GE16) unless they set aside their egos.

According to him, the three parties need to work towards finding a common ground if they were to forge any alliance for the next nationwide election.

There is nothing new to what Awang Pawi is saying here. Everybody and their cat in the country knows that the Malay parties will never come together because of the egos of their leaders.

I have even mentioned it in December last year itself that the biggest problems in the Malaysian political scene today is that there are too many Malay parties and the main reason there are too many Malay parties is because there are too many ambitious Malay leaders and politicians who feel that they are fit to become the next PM of Malaysia.”

Personally, I don’t think ego is necessarily a bad thing, as long as it operates under a condition of fairness and competition.

Ego is what makes you believe in notions like “if others can do it, so can I” or “even if others can’t do it, doesn’t mean I can’t” or “I will not settle for second and I don’t think I deserve anything less that what everybody else has.”

By itself, Ego is not a bad thing. It is like a knife. Whether it is a bad thing or a good thing depends on how you use it.

As a teacher, I actually try to cultivate ego in my students, because in the beginning, it is ego that will prod them to excel, and they need to excel because only if they excel will they acquire the self-esteem and internal assurance that will build the foundation for lifelong learning in them.

Inexperienced teachers tend to break the ego of their students under the excuse of teaching them humility, but experienced teachers cultivate it, because we know that humility is something that you yourself must achieve in the end, not something others can impose in you from the beginning.

Also, it is when you cultivate a healthy ego in your student, that your job as a teacher becomes easy. Inexperienced teachers love to busy themselves with extra classes and marking papers until midnight, because they believe that it is their job to make their students excel. Experienced teachers, on the other hand, know that excellence can only come from the confidence, discipline, effort, knowledge and concentration of the student itself, and to stimulate the student to excel, all you have to do is stimulate their ego. Once you stimulate their ego, you don’t have to mark their paper or have any extra class. The students themselves will be marking their paper and practising on their own without extra class.

But I digress.

My point here is that having an ego itself is not a problem, as long as you cultivate your ego when you are young and you temper it through healthy competition. If you cultivate your ego when you are young and in a competitive and fair environment, your ego will help you develop your self-esteem, while the competitive environment you are in will gradually transform your ego into humility.

The problem with third world cultures like Malaysia however, is that we tend to curtail the development of the ego too early in the name of promoting humility and we tend to equate the concept of challenge or competition as a form of rudeness or disrespect.

Because of that, what happens is at the lower level of the social strata, our people tend to have low self esteem because their ego was broken from a young age itself while at the higher strata, our leaders tend to have egos that are out of control, because their ego have never been tempered by sufficient competition or challenge.

Now people tend to assume that an overly egotistical person is someone who is loud or brash, but the truth is that many egotistical people are actually demure and soft spoken. To believe that a leader has their ego in check simply because they are soft spoken and demure is fatal. Being demure and soft spoken can be easily mimicked.

The fact of the matter is that an out-of-control ego has nothing to do with whether you are loud or demure, uncouth or cultivated, harsh and soft. The clearest sign that a person has an out-of-control ego is that their self interest will always exceed their principle, which will then manifest itself as two sets of standards – one for themselves and one for everybody else.

When you have egotistically developed one set of standards for yourself and another one for everybody else, what will happen is that when you steal, you will call it national service, but when others steal, you will call it theft. When you take the other side’s MP you will call it your rights, but when the other side takes your MP, you will call it an infringement of the law.

When you are dealing with a person with two sets of standards, there is no point trying to reason with them. Reasoning only works with those with the same set of standards for themselves and others. Those who have two sets of standards, because their ego has gone so out of control that it has convinced them that they are “special”, are impervious to reason.

If Azman Pawi is right in that the leaders of PAS, UMNO and BERSATU, can’t set aside their egos, then his advice that the three parties must find a way to work towards finding a common ground to forge any alliance for the next nationwide election is meaningless.

Rather than expect their egotistical leaders to cast aside their ego and work together for the common good, what is more feasible for the Malays to do, is start a movement from the grassroot level movement to create a condition where the Malay leaders will be forced to fight each other in a zero sum manner.

The one that wins in this battle will rule them all, while the one that loses will disappear into oblivion forever.

The only way for the Malays to be united is for 80 to 90 percent of their leaders to disappear into oblivion forever.

It is up to the Malay grassroots to create a field where 80 to 90 percent of their leaders will disappear when the dust settles.

If the Malays succeed, maybe the Indians will follow their example as well, for the Indians have the same problem with egotistical leadership, as do the Malays.

This is the cold hard truth.