And so I went.
I went because I remembered a line from CNN long ago. The news network ran an advertisement showing videos of important development from around the world. It ended with a line, “where were you?”
I do not want to answer, in the future, “I was in my bed.”
I will not need to. I went.
I am currently at home, contemplating whether I should be going to the biggest event of the year so far or stay at home in my bed, reading books or simply enjoy the Saturday. The biggest event of the year yet is the Bersih’s sit-in in Kuala Lumpur.
I participated in both the previous incarnations of Bersih and I thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere. In the 2011 protest, I learned how it felt to be exposed to tear gas and it was not an easy experience. I joked around immediately after I recovered from the tear gas exposure that, “I am now a protest veteran.”
I have been to multiple protests. Three of them involved loitering around the police stations in Brickfields, Dang Wangi and Bukit Aman. Despite that, I do not really enjoy protesting in such manner. It is almost always tiring and running around in the city being chased by the police is not really as fun as that “police and thieves” kid game. It is stressful. In a large protest like Bersih, there are just too many variables to think about: escape route, police location, road blocks, water source, faces of people. And I do not have the stamina to run around like dogs. I just do not.
I remember how painful it was to my lungs, how the muscles were crying stop please, how the heart begged a relief before it exploded. Only the selfish mind said, go on and don’t stop. That was in the heat of the moment.
But like any rational human being, I learn and I know the experience is not pleasant. I am just not an activist who is persistent in participating in very physical and demanding exercise. I really do not have the appetite for protests day in and day out. There is a cost to participation.
Even right now, if there was no protest, I would have gone to the office to analyze monetary data for publication on Monday. I will not do that today because I know if I do go to the office to work, I will not do anything because I will be checking my Twitter account and visiting various news portals constantly, curious about a party downtown. No work will be done, that too I know.
I am still contemplating my participation and it is still several more hours before the appointed time. But whatever the decision, you can bet that I support Bersih.
I have been accused as a purist when it comes to defining the term liberal. I subscribe to a specific definition of the term liberal that will disqualify many other self-proclaimed liberals quickly. By specific, I am referring to libertarianism. Others prefer the term classical liberals and I find it hard to really differentiate the two in a substantive manner. In any case, that label is merely used to convey the idea that I and others like me hold the individual as the most important component of our society. The way we manifest our political philosophy is by mostly emphasizing or demanding the absence of coercion in running our lives. This is most easily observable when libertarians address economic questions by trying to circumvent any reference to any political authority. There are other qualifications but those details can be suitably discussed at a more measured pace some other time. I only lay out the major identifiers generally to prove that the definition is specific and will disqualify other self-proclaimed liberals.
The term liberal in the most general sense did evolve over time. The experience in the 20th century fused ideas in so many ways. Some decidedly non-liberal understanding of the world before the 1930s became generally liberal by the 1990s. The great economist John Maynard Keynes went out to save liberalism and capitalism from fascism and communism by introducing ideas that today are so imbedded in mainstream economics, but then opposed vehemently by the liberals of his time. The results of the intra-liberalism debate produced a new liberalism that not only sharpened its thesis but also synthesized some of its anti-thesis. A new hypothesis emerged in the post-Cold War 1990s with the rise of the Clinton and Blair administrations, after a political and economic classical liberal resurrection of the 1970s.
The evolution of liberalism forces me to admit at least this: even if I philosophically despised these evolved liberalism, their subscribers do have the claim to the title. They are like the siblings that you find hard to sit with. No matter how much you cannot stand the other, you know all of you share the same parents and there have to be some kind of decorum between the sides.
The debates between the different schools of liberalism still continue today to remind all of the original early 20th century debate in the mist of the Great Depression. But the essential difference is that those intra-liberalism debates now firmly take the center stage while in the past, the opponents in the ring were not liberal at all. Communism is dead and hard socialists of old only throw potshots from outside of the ring, unable to steer the debate even as liberals’ capitalism is in trouble. Possibly jealous of the success of liberalism in evolving itself, old liberalism’s 20th century foes from the left who call themselves liberals, ally themselves with the evolved liberals and sometimes pull the strings towards the left’s original home in the process.
The left’s liberals are those that I take pleasure criticizing because I know they are not liberals in the general sense of the term, even without appealing to libertarianism. At least the evolved liberals accept the market economy even if they do not have the courage to run their arguments to its natural course as libertarians do. In contrast, the left’s liberals are not really convinced of the arguments of the market economy. Have a discussion with them about economic liberalism and one will wonder what is so liberal about them. Pursue a fundamental question beyond the veneer and a fault line will emerge. The left’s liberals would tweak the market economy beyond recognition the minute the more genuinely liberal others blink.
Outside the realm of serious philosophical debates are the superlative liberals. They are liberals just because they are more progressive compared to our conservative society. They may be political moderates or centrists but they are not liberal ideologically in a way that some ideas are fundamentally derived from first principles, like proper liberals. But the superlative liberals call themselves liberals anyway, just because they met someone who holds conservative worldviews that disturbs them. Unfortunately, that is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition to be a liberal.
And then there are the libertines. Or really, they are just socialites. While some liberals may live life large, but libertines by themselves do not ground their ideas the way subscribers of liberalism do, if they have any idea at all. Libertines’ liberalness is just like the superlative liberals’ liberalness. Their liberalness is devoid of liberalism. Moral and religious conservatives derisively call these libertines are liberals while alluding to liberalism, but that only because the conservatives do not understand liberalism as proper liberals do.
So, when I criticize non-libertarians of their diluted liberalism, I can accept the charge of being a puritan. When I criticize the superlative liberals and the libertine, I think I have full moral authority to dismiss them, if they claim themselves as liberals. In the latter case, I am not being a purist at all. It is just about calling a spade a spade.
In the world of the Parliament,
and in the business of amendments,
they can buy time,
with a measly dime.
A trend that is true on an individual level does not necessarily translate into a similar trend on a societal scale.
The most famous of all aggregation debates is probably the Keynesian paradox of thrift. Keynesians argue that too much saving by individuals could be unproductive. Too much saving eventually may make everybody poorer because there would be less demand for goods and services in the economy.
With less demand, there would be fewer economic transactions and thus, less wealth creation. In turn, the financial conservative act may later lower saving itself, contradicting the savers’ intentions.
This is not at all a defense of Keynesianism. Rather, it is to highlight the fallacy of composition regardless the tenability of the Keynesian position.
The fallacy of composition or simply the problem of aggregation has great importance in public discourse even outside of the discipline of economics. National policy can easily be so wrong simply because of innocent but difficult and costly aggregation process, with the subsequent interpretation suffering from composition fallacy.
The fallacy also has relevance in voting decision. This is particularly important as the next national and state elections loom closer.
There at least two groups of voters right now that are relevant to the topic at hand.
One group believes in the importance of power change at the federal level in bringing good. Power change enhances democracy. Power change forcefully uproots perverse interests from embedding itself further in the state.
To the group, change is institutionally desirable because it creates a precedent in a country where the same side has been in power from the very beginning. They believe power corrupts and to grant power to the same side for too long is folly. They think from the top and they intend to vote in terms of blocks.
Think of expressed party partisanship in terms of Barisan Nasional and Pakatan Rakyat. Think of the Anything But BN movement. Think of Haris Ibrahim. To them, power change is like tilling the land. The weeds will grow later but regular frequent tilling will prevent the weeds from growing too long.
The other group believes that change is overrated. Whichever the side power falls on, both sides are essentially the same as a whole. This is partly due to human nature: all of us respond to incentive for better or for worse.
There are ways to bring in change and the best to way to do that according to the latter group is by thinking from the bottom up instead of simply power change in terms of blocks. That means, ignore the political affiliation. Focus on the individual candidates instead. Evaluate the candidate on his or her own terms and then compare the candidate to his competitor. The ultimate question is who is the better candidate?
I appreciate the bottom-up approach but I fear the risk of composition fallacy. There is no guarantee that the bottom-up approach will lead to an outcome better than the wholesale power change approach.
The reason is that power resides not only with the elected ones, but also with the unelected persons and power brokers who sit in the shadows behind the curtains. While official faces may change with the bottom-up approach, it ignores entirely the crucial roles of unelected persons and their influence on elected officials and more importantly, their influence on the state.
These unelected persons are those whom the former Australian Prime Minister and more recently, the former Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd would call the ”faceless men” as he struggled to hold on to power, and appealed directly to Australian voters instead of to party officials of the Australian Labor Party. These faceless men are unelected, unaccountable and they have no direct responsibility to voters.
In this sense, the bottom-up approach tills the land but not deep enough. The bottom-up approach does not present enough threats to the faceless Malaysian men and women.
In contrast, the wholesale power change approach tills the land deeper still to threaten these faceless men. Remember that the only reason the established powers were shaken to the core in the aftermath of the last Malaysian general election was the threat of wholesale power change.
Notice how poor candidates were elected; while these poor candidates posed problems, they themselves were not the reason the incumbents were shaken to the core. They themselves were not the reason for new policies that the Najib administration has introduced so far.
Of course, just like weeds, the faceless men will come in other forms and each side has its own faceless men. Yet, the point is that at least, these will be different faceless men. The point is that these faceless men will not able to spread their tentacles deep and wide enough with frequent and regular power change.