Never take the word of an academic or so-called ‘learned person’ at face value who presume that they are all-knowing or wise.

Let us always engage our mental faculties and judge words for ourselves, for we are no less endowed than an academic (almost everyone is born with the mental capacity to consider and reason).

And in doing so we shall always consult the core of our hearts lest the mind gets too much of its way. Measure academic pronouncements not only against fact but also against the compass of what we intuit is right and just.

Let not academic titles deceive us into believing that we are no better or less worthy in deciding for ourselves what is for the good. Beware the conceited ‘pundit’ who may lead us astray, we were warned not long ago.

Dr Shad Faruqi, a law lecturer at Universiti Teknologi Mara, discussed the Perak crisis with fellow panellists Mohd Shafee Abdullah and Bar Council President Ragunath Kesavan on a televised talk show yesterday.

In this discussion, Shad Faruqi made the following argument which I paraphrase:

• that settling the constitutional dispute between Barisan Nasional and Pakatan Rakyat ‘would involve a long and drawn-out process as there would be appeals and counter appeals’,

and that therefore;

• one way of resolving the crisis ‘ was for the two conflicting parties to take turns to rule the state ’ [emphasis mine].

This statement reflects how prolonged immersion in the dark pools of academia, removed from the sunlight, sounds and feelings of the real, external world, can warp one's senses of what is right or what should be, even if momentarily*.

Universal principles and moral imperatives may sometimes appear dispensable; the value of principles and morals become slightly diluted, and then in a moment of false lucidity it becomes alright to gently set them aside to hasten the achievement of an end that is seen as tantalisingly desirable.

This is justifying the means that satisfy a certain end.

This is dangerous development.

And this is why I roundly reject Shad Faruqi's suggestion that ‘the two conflicting parties take turns to rule a state’ — that justice and democracy be compromised in the name of expediency.

Never has such a drastic move been resorted to in any democratic state or nation in living memory, and never has such a circumstance transpired to force such an arrangement because the institutions of a properly-functioning democracy necessarily precludes it.

Either the process of justice be seen through, or the right and power of the people be allowed expression through the democratic process when a situation of uncertainty crops up.

Never shall we act out of political expediency to placate any political party or powerful group or to save the face and grace of any individual.

The suggestion that Kesavan Ragunath presented in that televised forum — that when an impasse as unique as the Perak impasse occurs we should let the people clarify what they want in a fresh election — is the quickest and easiest way to resolve the issue that is also the fair and just route.

So let us seek out justice and democracy, or nothing at all. Disregard not what your heart instinctively whispers is the right thing to do and instead opt for ‘half-right’ measures (that are also ‘half-wrong’), purely out of a naive sense of wanting to strike a ‘balance’ or to ‘satisfy all parties’ or out of the simplistic desire to end a quarrel.

* A highly ‘economic’ way of reasoning led even Nobel Prize Laureate Robert Solow (known for developing the economic growth theory) to once declare (nonsensically) that the ‘[w]orld can, in effect, get along without natural resources’.

More broadly, when one is bound and conditioned to a particular organisational, disciplinary or social context, one starts to rationalise the dominant ideology espoused in it as undeniably true (or that it is the only truth, or that it is the ‘most beautiful’), to the exclusion and neglect of all other ways of seeing things and thinking.

This applies to religious dogma as well as to disciplinary mindsets. Falling into such a black hole is something we should guard against, for once we've fallen in, our rational faculties cannot easily reason us out of it.

Having been conditioned so deeply into one way of thinking or having uncritically and blindly accepted a single set of ideas as valid, we frame the world and its going-ons only through these lenses, and we will be always inclined to think that that is the right way to be or that what we see through this narrow telescope is the best thing there is.