Of Reliance and Trust

Good evening Miss Rin.

I take it you are still confining yourself to your room, since this voicemail is the only avenue left for me to reach you. The events of yesterday must’ve been devastating and I suspect it will take some time before you’ll be back on your feet. Make no mistake; I have designed the circumstances precisely so you can never return to your usual self. You have every right to loath me as you do, but this last lesson will culminate all that I have taught you thus far. After this, you may choose never to hear from me again.  

Reliance and Trust: They are two sides of the same coin; one that governs our relations more strongly than blood, race, or creed. They can be used both as a weapon and a shield; for they can grant a man great strength, or give him terrible misery. They are a paradox those two, exactly the same but ever so different. I knew when I met you that you hold great promise for me, but for all your youthful exuberance I had feared that you will never learn to make the distinction you need. So I forced them upon you, I had hoped that in the course of your despair, you will be able to split them apart.

Reliance tend to take us by surprise. Initially fulfilled, the irresistible convenience they promise becomes an addiction. Over time the bubble of expectation grows as it feeds on the confidence of the taker and the benevolence of the giver. But as you can surely attest, bubbles never last. Inevitably they burst, and a smothering wave of helplessness and sorrow shall sweep upon the fools who blew them.

Reliance is a weakness and I despise it so! They sour in a single day that which took years to build. They perverse our opinion of others, separating them into boxes of the useful and the not. They reduce our friends to cables, humans to tools, compassion to servitude.

I knew the experiment was nearing its end when I saw you act the way you did. You hold no blame from me, for you are only human and I have learnt that our kind behaves in predictable ways. We are prone to become pretentious because of Reliance, compelled as we were to protect our insignificant possessions; status and appearances. We taught ourselves to appear courteous, for we rely on others to act alike to us. We fool ourselves to appear caring, for we rely on others to do the same to us.

Yesterday you saw that Reliance is fickle. All men are but actors, Miss Rin, their shallow facades crumble at the very instance they decide their want your reliance no longer.

 

But when you are ready to step out of that door, I pray you do not lose heart at what this city has yet to offer you. I did not choose to do what I did to you to see you broken beyond repair. My only wish is for you to find the resolve within your heart to look outside with wiser eyes.

Our hope lies within Trust. We yearn for it, crave for it, quest for it by command of our very nature. I know full well the power of Trust, for such things are not trivial. It may be the only tool we have to catch the dreams that we imagine. Trust takes time, nourished with sincerity by the giver and appreciation by the taker, yet try as we may, these two are not commodities we can cede to just about anyone we meet. Only when you recognize the rarity of genuine Trust can you grasp its true value.

Despite the cruelty of what I have done to you, you are like a precious seed to me and I trust you to do great things. I have always believed that it is Trust that bounds us, whether or not you still share this sentiment is for you to decide. I want you to know that Trust is permanent, unperturbed by disappointment, it survives even hatred.

It's one those inexplicable things, one you can feel without words being said. What is it about someone that determines his value to you? What does it take to earn his Trust? Where can you find such people? I can’t teach you the answer to these questions but I can tell you this: Trust is not a gift, it is a prize. You will never win it by staying alone. So chin up, walk out, and look deep into the people around you.

What do you see in their eyes, Reliance or Trust?

 

P.S. Part 4 of the series "The Human Game"

Of course! Trust me.

I have a buddy who says no to everything I do. If I can somehow convince this rock headed twit to agree with me, the rest of the universe should be easy enough.

Lethal dangers of Disconnect

I'd like to draw some parallels with the problem at hand, so let's first take a look at what happened to the banks. For most of us layman, the financial system is a beast too complicated to comprehend, let alone understand. So much so that this latest crisis seemed to sprung up for no apparent reason, caused by "some greedy bastards somewhere" and woe betide us poor civilians from the fallout of their mistakes.

Yet as Evan Davies puts it: Banking should not be complicated. In the days of old, the business of banking is a business of building trust. Remember the old movies where applicants had to be interviewed by the dreaded manager when asking for a mortgage? Why did they have to go to such trouble for permission, when banks can only make money by giving out loans anyway? That is because back then, banks had an explicit interest to actually have the money they lent get paid back.

Well, it all changed with the invention of derivatives. All of a sudden, banks can now pass the buck of possible loan defaults to someone else. In exchange for interest payments over the long term, they can now opt for an instant cash injection instead. This translates to more capital to give out more loans with, to create more derivatives to sell for more cash injections, wonderful! As absurd as it sounds, risk can now be sold for profit.

Therein lies the disconnect. No longer tethered to the risk of loan defaults, banks have chosen to lend with fervour. The Disconnect had distorted their priorities. But if the man reaping the profits is not the same man holding the risks, misdemeanours are bound to happen. It was only a matter time when the banks, by some insane logic, started granting loans to people who can never repay them. Obviously, these loans eventually default with gusto, in such numbers beyond what they can handle. The rest as they say, is history.

As hard as it is to believe, we have more pressing concerns than the collapse of our credit supply.

Sometimes I got perplexed. How is it that the taps can ever go dry, when we are living in a country drenched in copious rain? Why is it that fish in the markets gets smaller and more expensive, when we are blessed on all sides with abundant coastline? Why is it that we are so paranoid about the domestic price of oil, when we have always produced more of the stuff then we use.

Why? Because thus far, our economy has been operated in blissful disconnect with the environment, a system that is also far too complicated for us to understand. Preoccupied as we are with our own personal trivialities, we left its care in the hands of the government. With the division of labour now being so specialized, surely there is someone in there better qualified to worry about it than us. The Disconnect had made us ignorant.

But when the people reaping the profits are not the same people taking the risks, ugly compromises are bound to be made. Then we found out that an unsustainable economy does impact our lives after all. The taps are dry because we are polluting our streams faster then we can find new ones to divert for treatment. The fish gets more expensive because we are catching them from the seas faster then they can breed.

Now I am not a hippie, I believe that every inch of value that can be extracted from the land, should be extracted from the land, none less. Yet the truth of the matter remains that we are taxing our natural resources way beyond the capacity it has to regenerate itself. Some of our top exports; oil and gas, timber and palm oil, the industries we depend on for our material wealth are unsustainable if not in their nature, then in their operation.

Becoming sustainable means we are going to have to preserve the perpetuity of our industries. The rice fields should still be able to produce rice without requiring a continuous input of synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides. We should still be able to generate timber revenue without wasting away our limited supply of five-hundred year old trees. We should still be able to export palm oil to the world without obliterating our precious rainforests.

 

I’d like to elaborate more about the Golden Crop, since it has cause much controversy in the news.

It is evident to anyone travelling the PLUS highway that we are devoting large swaths of land to the cultivation of this single plant. Rows and rows of oil palm as far as the eye could see. These plantations were crucial as a source of income to many social programs we have had in the last few decades. But land is limited, and we have come to a point that we may need to clear away our rainforests to create more room to grow more plantations.

A worthy trade-off? Since the rainforests are unproductive to the economy anyway, maybe it’s about time we utilize the wasted space they sat on? We can even sell some valuable timber in the process, which has the fortunate habit of being in the way.

Yup, like selling away gold now to buy a large stockpile of rocks for later.

No doubt palm oil is a valuable resource, but is it valuable enough to justify replacing our amazing biodiversity with a single monoculture of this foreign species? The only reason the demand for palm oil is so high is because it cost less on the market compared to other vegetable oils. I don't know about you, but I don't feel flattered wining over the competition by being the skimpiest product around. Sacrificing our rainforest for this cheap alternative is a bad investment. If we can't add more value to the crude stuff we're extracting from these plants, then the margin from selling them will not be high enough for this to become a profitable business venture.

Why? Because the cost of producing palm oil stretches beyond what we can measure in cash.

I don't care about the poor cuddly orangutan, drugged and confused, forced from it’s home with a tranquiliser dart sticking out of its backside. Nor do I care about the dwindling numbers of venerable tigers left in the wild, long revered as a source of inspiration in our culture. Such symbolism brings little point to an argument of dollars and sense. This is a matter of bad environmental management, and it enrages me as such. I am insulted by this the same way siblings get enraged when the elder absconds a funeral bringing away the dead parent's inheritance.

Protecting this possession of ours by no means require leaving it alone, untouched and pristine. Even the rainforests can not survive by being in Disconnect its human caretakers. Such romanticism creates more problems then it solves, and with so much human interest to look after, it's not affordable for mother nature to be given such luxury. On the contrary, the rainforests should be even more integrated with our economy, our lives and our future, insofar as such that the perpetuity of it's ability to function is preserved.

Think back of all the things we covet from the industrialized nations. What do they have that we don't? Wealth? Sophistication? Technological prowess? Such things are easily within our reach. The diffusion of knowledge is inevitable, and an inventor will not be able to maintain any advantage he gained from his proprietary inventions for long. As we move into the future, there will be few things they do that we can’t easily emulate.

But in that same future, the new measure of strength will be how nations manage to ensure prosperity with the limited natural resources they have. The more sustainable they are with the generation of their material wealth, the longer they can maintain their growth and superiority. The more they depend on unsustainable means however, the more they will struggle, the more likely they are to have enemies. Where shall we stand in the new world order?

The rainforests is something we have but most other don't. It's about time we use it to our advantage.

Malayan Dilemma

With the exam period over and done with, I decided to gamble with a little game of coin toss. Heads, I'll go to this ‘leadership’ camp everyone was fussing about. Tails, I'll pretend I never knew anything about it in the first place. If you are out there somewhere, then curse you lady luck! I was packing my luggage and on the train to Birmingham within the hour.

Turned out I was four hours late, so the first talk was already well underway. Not that anyone minded though, this being a Malay function through and through. As I made my way amongst the crowd for an empty seat, memories from the yesteryears came flooding back to me, and suddenly I realised what I had just gotten myself into. I had this same feeling from a similar camp a few years before, and another exact same one a few years before that. Déjà vu all over again! This next couple of days are going to be swell indeed...

Functions like these sums up all that it is so wrong about these people I'm suppose to call my own. All the way from the overdramatic opening to the self-congratulating end, I picked up little clues here and there to try to piece together my personal puzzle of their predicament. I didn’t buy the story they told me when I was sixteen, and I didn’t buy it when I was nineteen either. I was only a wimpy maverick back then, knowing not to pick battles I couldn’t win, so I kept my opinions to myself. By and large, life went on uninterrupted.

But this time it’s different,this time, I have heard enough!

Do they really think they can waste taxpayer’s money, bore me out of my heads for an entire a weekend and get away with it? The nerve! There are some perfectly fine ways to spend a your day, but listening to old men bantering on and on about their misguided rhetoric is not one of them!

 

Let’s start with the context. These people are my sponsors, part of a government initiative to balance the socio-economic scale of my homeland. In a multicultural country like ours, that balance is everything, paramount to the endearing of society and crucial for keeping the peace, or so they say. The programme they come up with is very selective as a result, and only hundreds are chosen from the thousands who apply, from the millions who qualify. I don’t have anything to prove my worthiness for it other than luck.

I will not debate the necessity of this initiative; neither will I debate the justice of it. It will be like biting the hand that feeds you, and these people have been feeding me since high school. I am nothing without them. What I will critique, is the conduct of the organization trusted by the people to carry it out.

It has only been a few minutes since the moment I step into that room, but my head was already cringing in annoyance. First, there’s the shouting. The more you shout, the less people actually listen, don’t they teach you that in school? I never liked people who shout, especially not into a microphone with the loudspeaker right next to my skull. Who is this man? Why is he so angry? Where has all the love in the world evaporated to? Why am I forced to listen to this? I need to write something down!

So I did; on the back of an envelope I was carrying in my pocket. Blabber mostly, but also some very important conclusions about the lecture at hand. It was a history lesson, about how we got to where we are, and where we fit in the grand scheme of things. The speaker insisted that his rendition of history is superior to the ones taught in schools, that we have been misinformed of certain bad things so that our thoughts can be controlled.

Really? Is that a good reason to sleep in history class or what!

I believe there is no such thing as bad history. All things happen because they did, never because they should. So the ancestors never conquered the world or enslaved a continent, so what? No need to hammer into our heads their failures upon failures as if enraged of the fact that they hadn’t. What good has anger and contempt ever brought us? What good is there to blame our problems on people who are already long dead? The challenges we face today, they are not woes to be lamented, they are problems to be solved! Why seek to replace good pragmatism with senseless emotional dogma?

Why? Because it’s satisfying. I could almost feel the tension building up around me as I looked up from writing my notes on the envelope. The audience has gotten increasingly angry... at someone, but who? Rather than looking into ourselves, it is always easier to find a scapegoat for our woes. Rather than fighting an invisible force you can’t point your finger at, it is always easier to fight an enemy with a name and a face. So he gave it to us, the cause of our misery, the kinds of peoples we have to be vigilant for, the reason we have live the rest of eternity watching our backs in paranoia: It’s everyone else.

Pathetic.

Next morning came a slot on the economy and current issues. Nice title, if only the speaker would actually talk about them. Instead, he chose to talk about.... something I can’t remember. He must have felt that he was so well endowed with experience that he needn't prepare, and I must’ve felt that I knew too much about the current issues to find him particularly enlightening. If it was anything important, I am sure I would have taken notes. The speech was dragging on pointlessly, at times resorting to immature innuendos in an effort to entertain the still yawning crowd. These are jokes of bad taste, and the fact that they managed drew some chuckles at all is sickening. How can you laugh at one when it concerns doing harm to other people?

Are these the kind of people we trust our country with? I suddenly felt more qualified.

 

These two talks exemplify the kind of culture that exists in many organisations I came in contact with. To say they are isolated cases would be wrong, since I have come across too many to dismiss them as such. When you talk only to your friends, it becomes impossible to see how you really fare compared to the rest of the class. When they overzealously tried to convey all the great things they –ahem- ‘we’ have achieved in the past, I knew exactly how significant those achievements are, and so do they. Our estimates probably differ by an order of magnitude at least.

You have to be indoctrinated pretty badly not to sense the disillusionment among my peers who attended that day. The speakers didn't seem to understand this, they stand in collective wonder, perplexed at why their efforts bore so little fruit. How could they? Not when the same massage has been relayed to generations before, resulting in none other but themselves. On and on the years went by, and they end up collecting only friends, only those who would believe everything they say. When you have only friends to talk to, the outside world speaks in mumbles.

 

How can you have an effective social movement with a top-down patriarchal approach to the people you serve? Do you really expect the successes of a few elite examples can tickle down and empower the eager masses waiting below? Sirs and madams; you seriously overestimated yourselves. Wouldn’t it be nice if these were like the good old days, when times are simple are the people are gullible? When the Malays crave for your infinite wisdom and beg for your benevolent patronage?

Naive fools, those times are long gone. You view your duty as sacred, and that renders you feeling untouchable. The only thing protecting you then is the information gap, but now the people you serve know much, and they have the audacity to demand you be so much better. How are you to know this if you can’t listen to all the dissenting voices around you? No amount of power will stay. In this day and age everything, everyone, everywhere, is expendable.

The day the Malays can truly be successful is the day when they say they don’t need you anymore. I loved you for the things you have done for me and for that matter; I want to see that day come to fruition. I want to say this with pride someday: We don’t need you anymore. No need to yank our eyes apart, in case you haven’t notice.

Our eyes ARE open.