Manufracturing Consent

You wake up in the middle of a coup and the first thing that hits you is that its so quiet. Hushed. Tense. A voice on the phone which seems more distant, telling you "today not same yesterday, more better if you go north, you go tomorrow". You peer through the window onto streets which are empty. Straining to make out the tanks in the intersection a distance away. Everyone is like you, waiting, watching, wondering and wary in the beginning.

Perhaps it is what Bakunin terms as the "instinct to freedom", but people cannot stay cooped for long. Its always the children isn't it? They venture first. Tentatively onto the streets, Staring at the tanks and the guns and the yellow scarved soldiers. When the child walks, the mothers will follow. And a mother walks up to the soldier. A flower in hand, an offer of peace, perhaps hope. The soldier smiles, accepts the flower and partakes in this moment of peace, perhaps hope.

With this gesture, the empty street fills slowly. People step out from their hiding places. Its less quiet, less tense and some semblance of life is restored.

The people are happy. The bigger evil, Thaksin is gone. A little bit uneasy perhaps of the way he went, but still happy nonetheless. For there is the King still, the revered personification of Grace, who allowed this. The people are happy because the King is with Them, and they are with the King.

In my previous entry, there was some distaste at the notion of Singaporeans, in the shadows. Waiting. Commenters' fear its for Godot, we wait. And while we wait and tarry, people are leaving, one after another. There was some frustration, helplessness, resignation and well-placed anger even. And I agree with these sentiments. We can only wait because we have no King, no Messiah, no Saviour. And it may be some time for we could have possibly used up our quota of great leaders for a while yet.

I once made my way, in one of those freezing winters of NYC to attend a talk by Noam Chomsky in Greenwich. He is one of the few great living thinkers left in our crazy world today. It was in a small auditorium, crowded with leftists, anarchists, conservatives, liberals, intellectuals, intelligentsia, even hacktivists. Everyone rooted to Chomsky, a MIT professor emeritus in linguistics, rambling in his monotone. He was talking about Hume's Paradox in which, any society, the population always submits to the rulers, even though force is always in the hands of the governed. Be it democratic or not. He explained that submission is gained not through a social contract, but through a manufacture of consent. Manufactured.

Chomsky was talking about and critiquing the US sytem of governance, especially in its foreign policy.

In an entry, Singapore Central, I talked about resistance, what it means, what it can be, in the Singapore context. Its about accretion, accreting resistance into the Singapore consciousness until the moment of possiblities arrive. It could be an election period. It could be at other junctions in Time when change and disjunctures present themselves. No matter. But it is only though this accretion, that we can recognise the moment or monad in Time when "change is in the air", when History is in the making. To be able to recognise the moment is important because we lost that when the Government dulled our creative spirit and de-politicised us. We retain Bakunin's "instinct to freedom" but we have no way to act upon it.

But to accrete is slow. At times, the system will crush you. I too have said previously : it is okay to go. To run. To leave. Especially in today's world. As the visitors to this blog attests, even those who left, remain somehow for those left. We are frustrated, angry even, only when we think we are fighting alone. We have to nurture the instinct to freedom, with each other, for one another.

Remember this : force is always in the hands of the governed.

And our role is to accrete this. Then we will know when to manufracture our consent. When to refuse to buy what they manufacture. Because these moments do not come by every day.

Remember too : the coup was bloodless only when the soldier accepted the flower from the mother.


Quote of the Day --

"Whether the instinct for freedom is real or not, we do not know. If it is, history teaches that it can be dulled, but has yet to be killed. The courage and dedication of people struggling for freedom, their willingness to confront extreme state terror and violence, is often remarkable. There has been a slow growth of consciousness over many years and goals have been achieved that were considered utopian or scarcely contemplated in earlier eras. An inveterate optimist can point to this record and express the hope that with a new decade, and soon a new century, humanity may be able to overcome some of its social maladies; others might draw a different lesson from recent history. It is hard to see rational grounds for affirming one or the other perspective. As in the case of many of the natural beliefs that guide our lives, we can do no better than to choose according to our intuition and hopes.

The consequences of such a choice are not obscure. By denying the instinct for freedom, we will only prove that humans are a lethal mutation, an evolutionary dead end; by nurturing it, if it is real, we may find ways to deal with dreadful human tragedies and problems that are awesome in scale." -- Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy