Does life provide meaning?

OPINION  |  AZLY RAHMAN

Published: Today 7:50 pm  |  Modified: Today 7:50 pm

     

COMMENT | 

Do we live in a rational world, one in which things make sense, explainable by the simple logic of cause and effect and correlation? Or has the world been an unpredictable universe of chance and randomness, and unpredictable events, from which we try to find patterns, meanings, explanation and console ourselves with the lessons learned?

Could an event that happened years, or even decades before, one that is seemingly insignificant, impact today’s world in a momentous way? Like a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon jungle in the 1970s, creating ripples with its wings and the ripples creating bigger ones as they interact with other ripples and over time, bigger ripples becoming waves of energy, consequently creating changes in the weather pattern. Plausible? Correlational? Consequential?

This is a world of randomness we are in, of unpredictability we are trying to make sense of, before assigning their effect to the force of deux et machina, or fated determinism, or “God’s will”.

Consider these “butterfly effects” in Malaysian politics:

Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s revolt against Tunku Abdul Rahman narrated in “May 13: Before and After”, in all its chaos and complexity, order and randomness, Fate and Determinism, has buried the possibilities of the emergence of a truly multicultural society, with the rise and Machiavellian control of Malay politics.

The chance of non-bumiputeras to get equal opportunity and fair access to resources in education and social services continues to be sealed, as a “butterfly effect” of the victory of the Umno-Ultras during the post-May 13, 1969, political consolidation and institutionalisation of race-based politics.

Yesterday’s rebel has become today’s hero, in the person of Mahathir. It could have been a different story had Najib Abdul Razak won last May's elections. The chaos could have been faster and more devastating, the class divisions wider, the people’s misery more painful and pronounced. Most importantly, there would have been no second Mahathirist Revolution that we are now seeing. Nor will there be a full investigation and prosecution of the wrongdoings allegedly committed during Mahathir’s first tenure as prime minister.

Anwar Ibrahim’s Islamisation agenda, patroned by the Mahathir leadership, in all its sincerity and complexity of emulating the ideology of Ikhwanul Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) of Egypt and the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Iran, with all the flapping of the wings of countless ideological butterflies, has created the kind of Islamic radicalism hegemonising the political elite, the masses and government servants, providing a fertile ground for another wave of change: the demand for an Islamic State.

What could have happened, had the 1997 Asian financial crisis not existed, and Anwar, as finance minister then, did not have to agree to the IMF and World Bank prescriptions to get out of the George Soros-induced financial quagmire that made the country's finances parlous? It may not have led to the dismissal of Anwar Ibrahim as deputy prime minister and the birth of PKR. 

The flappings of the wings of those ideological butterflies, in the years since “Anwar's black eye” incident, have created, in all the randomness and chaos, today's difficult transition of power from Mahathir to the next prime minister. The issue of trust dominates the consciousness of the two leaders who go a long way back to the early 80s, a period of plenty when Thatcherism and Reaganism were the dominant free-enterprise ideologies.

In a world of the Butterfly Effect, nothing is certain. As Lao Tzu once said, the only permanent thing is change. Throw in the notion of politics, wherein there are no permanent enemies nor friends, and to survive the Machiavellian way, one has to use lies and deceit, even murder. Such is the certainty of uncertainties.

Those are two examples of how one can employ the perspective of looking at butterflies in Malaysia's socio-political evolution. We do not know what force governs these.

As rational beings, we need explanations, or else some of us will go mad trying to make sense of this existential, Kafkaesque world in all its absurdities. A world in which dictators live long.

Does life have meaning?

“I don’t know,” as Socrates would answer.