The ‘Save-My-Ass’ Complex
I was reading Che Det's opinions on the racism-card and as always, damn-it, I'm bloody impressed. That man, the dear Tun has his way with words and the fact that he's nearing his 90s makes it all the more fantastic. My feelings and opinion of the man who was Prime Minister of my country for almost my entire life fluctuate between love and hate all the time, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I'll be quite devastated when he leaves this world eventually, although a good percentage of my thinking brain also hates the guy for his brand of top-down, save-my-ass politics.
The other percentage of my mind who is willing to forgive the Tun for his misgivings and disastrous mistakes keeps telling me also, that no one is ultimately innocent in the unmaking of Malaysia. Although I try hard not to generalize the entire human race as a scheming set of selfish idiots bent on surviving the Great Disaster, its hard (at least for me) to be optimistic all the time.
We may hate to admit the truth, but its true, we all suffer from the 'Save-My-Ass Complex', and the disgusting thing is, none of us are willing to face up to this, so we liberally label others as racist, judgemental, selfish, fundamental, greedy, evil, prideful, conceited, etc., while hardly reserving any space for personal improvement on our part.
Now I'm not saying that Tun is not racist in his views, but my perception of our ex-Prime Minister as a racist person doesn't come from anger and hatred… rather its because I look at him as just another person in this country who is just as racially-bigoted as you or me. What I'm saying is that not everyone of us who keeps fighting for 'equality' is willing to admit that he is not exactly keen on acquiring equality. This, possibly, is due to the damned 'save'my'ass complex' we all suffer from, we're just unwilling to be responsible and take ownership of that degrading label we so liberally dose upon the poor old man.
For God's sake, show me a 90-year-old man who is NOT racist, not even a bit. My granddad used to tell us that Tun Tan Siew Sin caused this entire MCA nonsense of submitting to the ketuanan Melayu issue, and the history books (or the writing of our History books) tell us that we're all keen on self-preservation, except very few of us are willing to admit that. In fact, the entire system of disequality has been hardwired so deeply into our souls its hard to shake it off ourselves within just a few months. The very fact that the Chinese insist that they must speak Chinese to remain Chinese, and the Indians wants their rights preserved in this country, or that concept of Ketuanan Melayu (what Ketuanan, the world's going to end one day and we're talking about KETUANAN? Sheesh), or even the fact that the 'true-Malaysians' born of mixed marriages can't help gushing about how mixed and truly Malaysian they are compared to the rest of us, tells us we're all eager to finish top in this crazy race of who's a better and more deserving Malaysian than the other.
Moving on to the issue of saving the environment. It's almost rubbish, the entire, concept, if you ask me. The problem is we keep kidding ourselves that we love the earth so much that we shouldn't let it go to waste… but the issue of a dying earth keeps staying because ultimate when it comes to choices, money is Lord of all things and decisions. I don't think it is possible to keep fighting for cheap goods and proclaim that we're keen on saving the world, because the facts remain that cleaning up the mess we have left behind costs tonnes of cash. We spoke about installing solar panels for the church building the other day (so that we can cut down on burning energy), but how many of us have actually done some research into what goes on in factories that build solar panels? Who's kidding us? Some part of my logic tells me that this race to save the world from greenhouse gases isn't about the environment, it's really about all of us, and how we MUST make sure that our asses don't get killed in the process of development. But people don't want to look at it that way. The problem is we are all so afraid to put our 'reputations' on the line and at least admit that we're all terrified of dying to failure, and we will continue to defend our right to be known as tree-huggers and earth lovers, when honestly it isn't about the environment, its really about our selves and our asses.
I wanna blame it on the advertisers and the marketeers, the people who call themselves communicators (people like yours truly), because we're all keen on painting a bright and lovely picture (of ourselves, damn it), even in the light of impending doom. So we blame other people for being racist, we blame industries for greenhouse gases, we blame governments for lousy governance, we blame employers for lousy managing, we blame boyfriends for lousy sex perhaps, all in a futile attempt to keep saving our asses in no-matter-what-situation.
So in the process, we forget, we voted for the dude and put him in power for 23 damned years, we bring our children up to remember that that guy is Chinese, and you are Malay, we teach our kids that non-Christians will go to hell, we complain when blackouts happen in the middle of the night (and that my aircond can't work so my kid can't go to bed), we forget we spend office hours deliberating on what to blog instead of doing work, we dress lousily and give our boyfriends lousy blowjobs (or not give them at all), and we keep asking that petrol subsidies and gas subsidies stay so that we can keep our costs low. We bloody complain when the government places a restraining order on foreign cars from buying petrol, but we also bloody complain that Singaporeans come in and take advantage of tax-funded petrol subsidies.
And on top of that, we conveniently say things like, 'all these price hikes, it's going to hurt the poor ones', but when some beggar comes to your table asking for just two dollars so that he can buy his lunch, we pretend he's not there and continue to yak away about how terrible the politicians are for not walking the talk.
I don't think the Tun is more evil than you or me. Instead, I want to give him credit for being so openly racist in his opinions. That guy has got the guts, although I suspect that he rattles off his opinions at that rate because he really has got nothing to lose anymore. But the 'save-my-ass' complex, we're all suffering from this, and hence we're not above him in our moral values. What if, we recognize he is wrong because he is a direct reflection of who we all are, deep inside, and it scares the shit out of us? How should we really react to that?
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:31 pm
I don’t really have much to say except that I believe that ultimately, self-preservation i.e. save-my-ass is hardwired into us as a part of evolution…
Other than that…good post!
*applause*
June 2nd, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Great blog! We may hate to admit the truth, but its true, we all suffer from the ‘Save-My-Ass Complex’, and the disgusting thing is, none of us are willing to face up to this, so we liberally label others as racist, judgemental, selfish, fundamental, greedy, evil, prideful, conceited, etc., while hardly reserving any space for personal improvement on our part.
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:32 pm
so this is why you had this up as your gchat message today. notice i dont blog politics anymore? just sick of it already.
June 3rd, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Norms and Deviations: Who’s to Say?
Tags: stigmatization
A letter published in the May 26 issue of Time magazine protests the inclusion, in Time’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people, of two researchers allied with the organization Cure Autism Now (a name that speaks for itself). The letter writer declares himself to be “outraged” because, in his view, “Autistic spectrum disorders are not diseases, but rather markers of ‘genetic difference’ in the same vein as skin color [and] gender.” He equates the search for a cure with genocide — it’s “part of a campaign to wipe out ASDs” [autism spectrum disorder] — and he wants the world to know that those to whom the cure would be offered neither need it nor desire it: “I speak for many when I say we are happy the way we are.”
A genetic difference is often adaptive and can be regarded as an advance in the evolutionary process; it is well-known that autism sometimes brings with it remarkable powers in the areas of music, art and mathematics. In the 2006 movie “X-Men: The Last Stand,” the augmented powers of those known as “mutants” are even more remarkable and include the ability to walk through walls, to move metal objects as large as California’s Golden Gate Bridge, to auto-generate fire or ice, to be in seven places at the same time, to read minds, to assume any identity, to kill with a touch, to fly like Icarus, to change the weather. These abilities are seen by many “normal” human beings, and a few mutants, as disabilities, as an indication that the person who possesses one of them is a freak.
From this perspective, the best thing a mutant could hope for would be a cure, and it is the discovery of one that sets the plot of the movie in motion. The response of both “centrist” and militant mutants to this “medical advance” is the same. Storm (Halle Berry) declares, “They can’t cure us. You know why? Because there’s nothing to cure!” A crowd of mutants rallies to the chant, “We don’t need a cure.” The leader of the militants, Magneto (Ian McKellen), roars his defiance: “They wish to cure us. We are the cure, the cure for an imperfect and infirm condition called homo sapiens.” Not only is he happy with the way he is; he pities and scorns those who walk another, inferior way.
It might seem meretricious and insensitive to link a serious condition like autism with the heroes and anti-heroes of a comic book fantasy. But the link is encouraged by the film’s director, Brett Ratner, who said on About.com that the story “has strong racial, political and sexual aspects” and wonders, “What if … African-American[s] could take a pill [that would] ‘cure’ them of being black or if a gay could take something that would alter his sexuality?” That is, what if a condition scorned by the majority but prized by the minority that inhabits it could be eliminated by a simple injection? What would the minority do?
In the case of blacks and gays, the answer has already been given in the mantras “black is beautiful” and “we’re queer; we’re here; get used to it.” In the years since these battle cries were first heard, African-Americans and gay Americans have secured rights, gained in influence and earned respect, however grudging and superficial.
And why couldn’t the same thing happen to autism and mutancy or to any other mode of being that refuses the judgment of those who scorn, marginalize and seek to destroy it? For it is a question, Ratner observes, of “the use and misuse of power.” Do those labeled deviant, he asks, acquiesce and “conform” to a “prejudice,” or do they “maintain their uniqueness … and embrace what makes them different?”
“Difference” is the key concept in these socio-political dramas, and difference is an inherently unstable measure. In order to mark it — in order to say where difference resides — you must first identify a baseline, a center; but any such identification will appear to those exiled to the periphery as arbitrary, a function of prejudice and an illegitimate exercise of power: it’s only because there are more of you that you can consign us to the margins and refuse us respect. Armed with this argument (which flourishes in some versions of multiculturalist and deconstructive thought), there is no form of behavior that cannot make a case for its legitimacy and for its right to be free of external coercion, whether it takes the form of legal sanctions or a forced “cure.”
For some time now, many in the deaf community — a phrase that makes an argument: we are not just persons similarly afflicted; we are a community — have resisted cochlear implants, reasoning that to accept them would be to deny their culture, their language and their identity. “An implant,” wrote the editors of Deaf Life, “is the ultimate invasion of the ear … the ultimate refusal to let deaf people be deaf.”
“I’m happy with who I am,” Roslyn Rosen, then president of the National Association of the Deaf, declared on “60 Minutes” (through an interpreter), “and I don’t want to be ‘fixed.’” The story of the “hearing world,” writes Douglas Baynton, associate professor of history and American sign language at the University of Iowa, is that deafness is an incapacity; but, he explains, what we are dealing with are “physical differences” (exactly the point made in the letter to Time), and physical differences “do not carry inherent meanings.” That is, they do not come labeled “normal” and “inferior,” “abled” and “disabled”; these labels, Baynton contends, are fixed by “a culturally created web of meaning,” a web constructed by no one and everyone, a web that those who live within it find difficult to unravel, even when they know that the meanings it delivers are false.
Deafness appears, it is said, as a defect only against the background of a norm that has been put in place not by nature, but by history. It follows then, argues Lennard Davis, editor of The Disability Studies Reader, that “the problem is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create ‘the problem’ of the disabled person.” “There is no ‘handicap’ to overcome,” insists Tom Humphries of the University of California, San Diego. Paddy Ladd, a British advocate of Deaf Culture, draws the moral: “Labeling us as disabled demonstrates a failure to understand that we are not disabled in any way within our own community,” and the implicit question he asks is, Who is to say that your community is better than ours? I. King Jordan of Gallaudet University drives the point home: “People who come to our campus and who do not know sign language are communicatively disabled.” (PMLA, March 2005)
The logic of that question is the logic that has driven all the anti-discrimination movements of the last 120 years. A minority (deaf activists view themselves as a linguistic minority) is regarded by the mainstream as defective, impaired, criminal (Italians and Irish in the 19th century), inferior (Asians and blacks), immoral (gays, polygamists and gypsies), lacking in mental or physical resources (women until only recently) and either less or more than human (X-men and Jews).
Within the minority community the conviction grows that its stigmatization is the result not of “natural” deficiencies, but of a politically established norm that serves the interests of the powers that be. Exposing that norm as a mere artifact of history with no special claim to authority means first that it is no longer obligatory to honor it, and second, that the community’s norms are worthy of both loyalty and protection. What was once seen as a deviation or something to be eradicated is re-characterized as a culture, and in a short time the culture has a lobby and is demanding respect, representation and even reparations for opportunities denied and rights withheld. The formerly shunned but now legitimized community opens cultural centers, galleries (think of graffiti artists), museums, historical archives, and soon it is being courted by the very mainstream constituencies that for so long accorded it only a negative recognition.
This could happen to any group; for once the norm has been relativized (you have yours, we have ours; why can’t we just get along), there is no obvious way to declare a way of life beyond the pale. You can of course say that the test is whether those whose life style the majority finds dubious and offensive cause harm to others. But the “harm” standard (elaborated by J.S. Mill in “On Liberty”) cannot itself be neutrally applied. Smokers and pornographers say, leave us alone; what’s it to you? Those who want to regulate them respond that smokers drive up our medical costs and pornography erodes family values and corrupts our children. Polygamists claim that they more than any honor family values (theirs is a big love); their critics talk about forcing young children to marry long before the age of consent, and polygamists come back with the observation that the “age of consent” is a political construct and certainly wasn’t honored in the Bible. (This drama is now playing out in Texas.)
Perhaps you draw the line by marking off what is criminal from what is not. But no category is more obviously the plaything of politics and prejudice than the category of lawbreakers. Until 1967, it was criminal to engage in interracial marriage; until very recently, it was criminal to engage in sex with someone of the same sex; once, it was criminal to teach blacks how to read; rigid drug laws have made criminals out of several generations of young men; Nelson Mandela was a criminal for decades.
Maybe you apply the universal outrage test, which, one presumes, would put pedophiles and serial killers in the class of those whose actions no one could possibly appreciate or justify. But the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) advertises itself as fighting for personal freedom and “for the empowerment of youth in all areas.” NAMBLA believes that any child, regardless of age, should have the right to say “yes” or “no” to a sexual relationship. Those who would deny them that right are guilty of “ageism.” (In short, boys loved by men like the way they are.) And as for serial killers, one admiring Web site credits at least some of them with the desire to purify the world by killing bad people, as Dexter does in the cable TV series that bears his name (he is the cure); and the same Web site suggests that they are heroic individuals standing up to a repressive society: “People who become serial killers will not repress their fantasies and their true feelings just because society and morality do not accept [them].”
I am neither making nor approving these arguments. I am merely noting that they can and have been made, that they will continue to be made, that there is no theoretical way to stop them from being made, and that their structure is always the same whether the condition that asks for dignity and the removal of stigma is autism, deafness, blackness, gayness, polygamy, drug use, pedophilia or murder.
We want to say that these are all different, that there can be no equivalence between them, and that making the case for one is not to make a case for the others. And of course as a practical matter, that is true. The distinctions that can not be shored up by theory will be put in place, at least for a time, by history; and the degree to which they remain firm or are challenged will be a contingent matter depending on political, social, economic and other factors that cannot be predicted or managed.
All we can be sure of is that the struggle between the impulse to normalize — to specify a center and then police deviations from it — and the impulse to repel the normalizing gaze and live securely in a community of one’s own will never be resolved
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Saudari,
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August 7th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
[...] It’s to be said because I can say it without people paying attention, that the public I know is far too preoccupied with the most trivial of events and far too angered by the most irrelevant of things. It is a public face that misses the point completely. A side of the world that would argue against the things they do not understand because they want to “save their asses”. [...]