In this post I have already mentioned my general thoughts on democracy. And it seems that I am not the only one who thinks this way: I saw that a contemporary version of Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People was playing in BAM this weekend, and I felt compelled to go and watch it live (YouTube videos of the English version available here). This was my second European avant-garde play I have watched at BAM (the first one was Nosferatu). I must say I have never quite seen any play like this (in style and presentation), so it was an overall positive fresh experience for me. The play also happened to weave in quotes from The Coming Insurrection and touched upon the various strands of discontents voiced (a la global Occupy movements) post-2007 recession and US government bailout.

Thought of the day:

With a majority always comes a minority. That means social exclusion, period.

I must say that when the Occupy movements first started, I didn’t think much of them. I pitied these people who I thought were probably involuntarily unemployed and frustrated, or drew a bad hand of cards at birth, or were too lazy to work hard and find better work. Hence, why they had the time and were willing to camp out in the middle of the day (or for days even) to protest over something (the system) that a majority of people think will never change. Some of my classmates (especially in the business school) thought them too idle and shouldn’t waste their time fighting the system, but instead go out and try to make ends of meet instead of wasting their time loitering in a park.

But coming from a developing country and having seen poverty in abundance first hand, I knew better than to believe these people were living bad or poor lives because they were just lazy. For some of them, that might be the case; for the other lot who work hard or try for years to grow out of poverty yet cannot because of their personal circumstances, because of low minimum wages, because of bad education, because our society often only values test results as a measure of intelligence, and almost requires us to acquire an oftentimes expensive formal education in order to be deemed useful to society, and then tell us that a degree is not enough to acquire a good job when you’ve already taken out $200,000 worth of loans to get that piece of paper — you start to really wonder how you can truly be successful in life, and more importantly why we need to be “successful” this way and not measured in other ways.

Some of the quotes that really stood out to me in the play (I am paraphrasing because some of this stuff is not from the original play’s text):

“I feel bad telling them lies in school. We tell our children that they have equal opportunities in life, and then start grading them and separating them from each other in preparation for social exclusion in the real world.” –Katherine Stockmann (a school teacher)

“The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us is the Liberal majority! The majority may have might on its side but not right.” –Dr. Stockmann (“whistle blower” warning about the dangers of the town’s new economic ‘blessing’)

” “I AM WHAT I AM,”  is not simply a lie, a simple advertising campaign, but a military campaign, a war cry directed against everything that exists between beings, against everything that circulates indistinctly, everything that invisibly links them, everything that prevents complete desolation, against everything that makes us exist, and ensures that the whole world doesn’t everywhere have the look and feel of a highway, an amusement park or a new town: pure boredom, passionless but well-ordered, empty, frozen space, where nothing moves apart from registered bodies, molecular automobiles, and ideal commodities.” –Dr. Stockmann (quoted directly from The Coming Insurrection)

Of course, they were trying to sell us that long block quote from the very beginning of the play. And despite the fact that they were sort of shoving it down our throats “here, this is the medicine to achieve the wake-up call my friend!”, I resonated with it because that is how I have felt about downtown Kuala Lumpur as well as Singapore/Hong Kong my whole life. This “passionless order” is the most painful thing to see happen in a country you love. You can educate society to adapt to a world where economic competition is of utmost importance; tell them that everything must be sacrificed in order to build a developed nation with a strong middle class; measure one of the highest GDP in the world, yet ironically still hear the haunting echoes and longing of the meaningful past in an empty nation where numbers measure unhappiness. < Sorry Singapore, that your development had to come at a price.

~~~

Going off on a tangent:

One of the characteristics of modernity (as has been discussed briefly in my college class), is that it becomes hard to pinpoint or blame who or what is causing social change or damage to our “humanity”. Is it those “greedy corporations”, those “corrupt politicians”, those “foreigners”, that are to blame for the suffocating lives we live in? Is it just a by-product of modernization through industrialization and capitalism? Is it capitalism itself? Maybe, or maybe not. The point is that there is no one face or specific object we can point to and say “you’re the culprit!” At least with a tyrannical dictator or monarch, we can focus our energies towards something specific and lay the blame directly on them. With the rise of modernity, the “enemy” seems to arise from nowhere and yet from everywhere. Maybe it is indeed, capitalism itself — if that is the case then we are screwed and revolution will be painful and will have to start from within.