The Comfort of Conformity

Now for anyone who doesn’t know me, I’m painfully idealistic (some people say naïve, I prefer idealistic). Just imagine what I was like 10 years ago. And damn impressionable, to boot.

This is when I first watched the movie Dead Poets Society for English literature in Taylors College. So we didn’t just watch the movie, we studied it. And boy, did it affect me- especially the conformity part of it- Captain (Mr Keating) had all the schoolboys marching in the schoolyard and told three of them to all walk in their own individual ways, and eventually they all start marching in the same rhythm. The rest of the boys start clapping in time. When they discover they are marching in rhythm, they exalt in it. He stops them, and he says he has tried to illustrate the point of conformity.

He describes “The difficulty in maintaining your own beliefs in the face of others.” And he says to them “Now, those of you -- I see the look in your eyes like, "I would've walked differently." Well, ask yourselves why you were clapping. Now, we all have a great need for acceptance. But you must trust that your beliefs are unique, your own, even though others may think them odd or unpopular”

Now lets bring it back to now, 2008, 12th general elections- I see a mobilized, excited society, in particular the youth. I see a change from as early as two years ago. I remember when I first started reading and becoming interested in politics not that long ago, the crowd I would be speaking to, regardless of age, were people who simply did not know or care, or cared but were too cynical about things to even engage in conversation about it. Now, what a change! What a breath of fresh air! How heartening to read the responses to the blogs, to the alternative news websites. How exhilarating to see people standing in the bludgeoning rain sharing umbrellas with their neighbours to hear what the opposition has to say. How exciting for us, Malaysians.

I am as thrilled as can be imagined that the change in mentality that people previously flippantly and callously brushed off as ‘never gonna happen’ is happening right in front of our eyes. But I worry, because are we suddenly just blindly following what the ‘in’ thing right now is? Since I have come back from Australia, I have noticed a massive change in the air - it is suddenly ‘cool to care’. And that is phenomenal. And very, very rare. But its similar to the anti American bandwagon traveling all over the world, what we have here in Malaysia is an anti-BN bandwagon. Now, don’t get me wrong, I would drive the anti BN bandwagon, or the anti American bandwagon if given the chance. There are so many reasons to be angry at these institutions/empires for the wrong they have done. But I want the people jumping on to jump on because they are angry, and they know why they are angry.

If they don’t, then suddenly it becomes a crowd mentality, where no one person is responsible for anything, and we are just a mass of people, not individuals. Initially full of different voices, saying different things. Different, interesting, colorful things, and then slowly becoming one voice chanting out a slogan. That sounds kind of beautiful doesn’t it. One Malaysia, one voice. What the hell!? How can we be one voice, each one of us is different. We care about different things. I care about leprosy and TB in rural Malaysia, the person next to me cares about roadworks, someone else cares about racism, others care about corruption and inequality. We are not one voice. We are a united people fighting for issues that affect the Malaysian rakyat.

The only reason I have started thinking about these things is because I am guilty of it myself. For the last two or so years, I have begun reading the work of Farish Noor- from his books, to the Other Malaysia (which is great, make sure you go have a look www.othermalaysia.org), to Off the Edge to his Facebook notes. At a time when I was so confused and disappointed with a whole range of things from Islam to Malaysian politics, his writing lifted my spirits and helped me understand. Now, all of a sudden, I feel I have idolised him, and by doing so, I stop thinking about what he says and just blindly believe. That’s ridiculous, I mean the man is intelligent, witty, knowledgeable and lets face it, seriously smoking hot. But if I suddenly decide he is the shit and think that everything he says is gold, I will just be repeating history. Worse still, I will be rejecting the advice of advocates of free thinking like Farish himself. Its weirdly ironic.

Im not saying I should not admire him and another like-minded activists, I should, and I really, really do. Without them, I truly believe the world would be significantly poorer. I just, for myself, at least, believe that I have the intelligence to constantly think carefully of every idea, every protest, every complaint put forward. To always think about both sides, sit in the middle and look at both the left and right wing.

To come back to the quote from Dead Poets Society, I think sometimes it is not so much the difficulty in maintaining your own beliefs that is the problem, but the ease in assent to others beliefs and ideas. The ease of not fighting, not opposing. The comfort of it. It takes a toll on the mind, to constantly question, to constantly oppose and challenge, people you dislike, like, admire. But it is essential because as Malik Imtiaz says in his blog 'It is only in the clash of ideas and opinions that we see the synthesis of true democratic value.'