Crowds of the inhabitants of the faubourgs in their Sunday clothes, sometimes even decked with fleurs-de-lis like the citizens, were scattered over the great square and the square Marigny, playing games and going around on wooden horses; others drinking; a few, printer apprentices, had on paper caps; their laughter resounded through the air. Everything was radiant. It was a time of undoubted peace and profound royal security; it was the time when a private and special report of Perfect of Police Anglès to the king on the faubourgs of Paris, ended with these lines: ‘Everything considered, sire, there is nothing to fear from these people. They are as careless and indolent as cats. The lower people of the provinces are restless, those of Paris are not so. They are all small men, sire, and it would take two of them, one upon the other, to make one of your grenadiers. There is nothing at all to fear on the side of the populace of the capital. It is remarkable that this part of the population has also decreased in statute during the last fifty years; and the people of the faubourgs of Paris are smaller than before the Revolution. They are not dangerous. In short, they are good canaille.’
That a cat may become changed into a lion, prefects of police do not believe possible; nevertheless, it may be, and this is the miracle of the people of Paris. Besides, the cat, so despised by the Count Anglès, had the esteem of the republics of antiquity; it was the incarnation of liberty in their sight, and, as if to serve as a pendant to the wingless Minerva of the Piraeus, there was, in the public square at Corinth, the bronze colossus of a cat. The simple police of the Restoration looked too hopefully on the people of Paris. They are by no means such good canaille as is believed. The Parisian is among Frenchmen what the Athenian was among Greeks. Nobody sleeps better than he, nobody is more frankly frivolous and idle than he, nobody seems to forget things more easily than he; but do not trust him, notwithstanding; he is apt at all sorts of nonchalance, but when there is glory to be gained, he is wonderful in every species of fury. Give him a pike, and he will play the tenth of August; give him a musket, and you shall have an Austerlitz. He is the support of Napoleon, and the resource of Danton. Is France in question? he enlists; is liberty in question? he tears up the pavement. Beware! his hair rising with rage is epic; his blouse drapes itself into a chlamys about him. Take care! At the first corner, Grenétat will make a Caudine Forks. When the tocsin sounds, this dweller in the faubourgs will grow; this little man will arise, his look will be terrible, his breath will become a tempest, and a blast will go forth from his poor, frail breast that might shake the wrinkles out of the Alps. Thanks to the men of the Paris faubourgs, the Revolution infused into armies, conquers Europe. He sings, it is his joy. Proportion his song to his nature, and you shall see! So long as he had the Carmagnole merely for his chorus, he overthrew only Louis XVI; let him sing the Marseillaise, and he will deliver the world. [Les Misérables. Book 3: In the year 1817. Page 90. Victor Hugo]
Category: Society
Money, my honey,
buys you a pony,
and if you’re lucky,
it’ll buy you a lackey.
Liberal Malaysians in general are happy to stress on the wisdom of the crowd. In a context where the government holds a condescending attitude towards the public and in times when information spreads faster before the government can act, it is an appealing point to subscribe to.
Travel around and try to talk politics among critical and liberal urbanites especially, and somebody in that circle will remind you that the public is not stupid. Whether it is an honest opinion or words tailored to appeal to the post-2008 crowd, even Prime Minister Najib Razak said the days of government knows best are over. That is an acknowledgement of the idea from the very institution that traditionally sits opposite of the liberal crowd in Malaysia.
In heated political discussions, it is easy to take the black-and-white approach and engage in hyperbole stating that the crowd or the public is always right. Put a liberal and a statist in the same room and the game is on.
The truth is more nuanced. The crowd can be brilliant at times, and utterly stupid at others. The validity of the idea depends on the situation at hand. The examples that strengthen and undermine the idea exist all around us if only we care to see.
The chaos at the KTM Komuter train station at KL Sentral on Thaipusam Day provides contradictory examples all at once.
The trains were late. The platform was full of impatient commuters. When the trains arrived 30 minutes late, those on the platform found the coaches were full. If that did not make things bad enough, everybody wanted to go Batu Caves. With the roads closed, the trains were the most convenient means of transportation for ordinary folks.
The adjective convenient, is of course only used in superlative terms. There is nothing convenient about the service provided by KTM Komuter. For those who depend on the service daily, every day is a battle to be won in the scrappiest of all manner. The least painful way to go through the day is to embark and disembark as quickly as possible. This was what the crowd did exactly on Thaipusam day at KL Sentral.
The crowd did it by ignoring one unrealistic policy introduced by KTM and the government: the ladies’ coach. The ladies’ coach is meant to address complaints about sexual harassment that have happened before. The intention is good. Yet as with any policy, there will always be sacrifices that need to be made and the ladies’ coach policy sacrifices efficiency.
It just takes too much time to choose coaches to start with. For those who travel together, like families, friends or lovers, separation on the train is a hassle. And at least in theory, because the ladies’ coach is meant only for women and children while everybody is free to board the other coaches, the other coaches will be filled up quickly while the ladies’ coach will be relatively empty. Its inaccessibility effectively reduces the capacity of the train. All that means slower embarking, slower disembarking, and longer waiting time on a crowded platform.
With an already lamentable train service and a spike in ridership, something has to give. The crowd throughout the system implicitly and collectively decided to ignore the ladies’ coach policy and treat all coaches as the same. In doing so, they immediately improved the train efficiency by themselves without relying on good-hearted bureaucrats and politicians holding public office, whom by the way do not ride the KTM Komuter train and are essentially divorced from the reality on the platform.
That is one point for spontaneous order arising from the wisdom of the crowd. In the ladies’ coach, nobody minded men boarding it because it solved a big problem painlessly while the KTM policy, if adhered to, only exacerbated the issue at hand. All they wanted to do was to get on the train and get to Batu Caves either as tourists or Hindu devotees.
At the other end of the spectrum is a thoughtless mob of sheep.
The sun was strong but it was on its way down. The visitors were now tired and weary. They began to head to the Batu Caves station so that they could get back to the city. In the station, the crowd packed up a small compound. Even as there was no more space to stand, more came in.
With nowhere to go and too many standing too close together, restlessness set it. Some was pushing and shoving, struggling to get into the train, which was characteristically late. Some were shouting and others were panicking, making the scene surreal. Instead of spontaneously finding the solution, they were clueless until they made a danger out of nothing.
KTM officials and the police were there to monitor and eventually address the situation, albeit poorly. Nevertheless, they did prevent the situation from turning worse.
The fact that it did not turn worse when it easily could have, and the fact that the situation did not need to be like that if there had been proper crowd management, highlight the limit of what a crowd is capable of.
The same contradictory lessons from the very bottom of society can be applied nationally too. The majority knows what corruption is when they see it. Given a chance at the ballot box, they will possibly do the necessary to address it, as they had done in 2008.
On the other extreme, the majority is happy to receive handouts from the government but does not realize that somebody has to pay for those handouts. Either higher debts or higher taxation, it will come sooner or later. The separation between cause and effect in public finance is so great that they cannot see what these handouts mean on a wider scale.
With the folly of economic populism coupled with a magnified replication of what happened at the Batu Caves station, the wisdom of the crowd will be harder to argue for. The wise mob of Greece resorted to sticks, stones and Molotov cocktails wanting more when there is no more, with only the few to reason their way through with less.
This is a piece of advice to those liberals referred to in the beginning. They who overly emphasize the wisdom of the crowd need a more nuanced view of the argument.
Fun-quotation-that-has-something-to-do-with-Australia:
…he had confessed to repeated intercourse with sheep on a recent visit to the family farm; perhaps that was how he had contracted the mysterious microbe.
This incident sounds bizarrely one-of-a-kind and of no possible broader significance. In fact, it illustrates an enormous subject of great importance: human diseases of animal origin. Very few of us love sheep in the carnal sense that this patient did. But most of us platonically love our pet animals such as our dogs and cats. As a society, we certainly appear to have an inordinate fondness for sheep and other livestock, to judge from the vast numbers of them that we keep. For example, at the time of a recent census, Australia’s 17,085,400 people thought so highly of sheep that they kept 161,600,000 of them.
Some of us adults, and even more of our children, pick up infectious diseases from our pets. Usually they remain no more than a nuisance, but a few have evolved into something far more serious… [Guns, Gems, and Steel. Chapter 11: Lethal Gift of Livestock. Page 196. Jared Diamond. 1999]
Happy Australia Day!
Words for Malaysian religious conservatives, maybe especially for Hasan Ali and his sympathizers.
In November, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, an independent Salafist cleric and presidential candidate, was asked by an interviewer how, as president, he would react to a woman wearing a bikini on the beach? ”She would be arrested,” he said.
The Al Nour Party quickly said he was not speaking for it. Agence France-Presse quoted another spokesman for Al Nour, Muhammad Nour, as also dismissing fears raised in the news media that the Salafists might ban alcohol, a staple of Egypt’s tourist hotels. ”Maybe 20,000 out of 80 million Egyptians drink alcohol,” he said. ”Forty million don’t have sanitary water. Do you think that, in Parliament, I’ll busy myself with people who don’t have water, or people who get drunk?” [Thomas Friedman. Political Islam Without Oil. New York Times. January 10 2012]