Reading Dr Noordin Sopiee's theory that Malaysians suffer from a colonialist-forged psychological barrier that prevents them from gaining achievement and other thoughts he deployed at a Monash University forum the other day reminded one of the practice of historical body-snatching.

This occurs when one tries to appropriate the memory of a historical personage for the benefit of some contemporary cause or to justify the actions of some contemporary statesman. This can do violence to history and introduce much confusion into present-day political discussion.

At first glance, it would seem that Dr Noordin's ability to splice the British historian John Acton and the American president Lyndon Johnson in a discourse on whether Malaysia can soar into the stratosphere is tribute to his electicism.

Lord Acton was a connoisseur of historical conundrums whose study yielded that famed aphorism ("Power tends to corrupt ... absolute power corrupts absolutely."); Johnson was master of American congressional strategy and manoeuvre who stepped up to the presidency where the brilliance of his legislative programme for civil rights and against poverty was dimmed by the quagmire of Vietnam.

Discoursants are licensed to juggle with ambiguity. Although Dr Noordin did not draw an epistemic link between the two, Acton and Johnson would make an odd couple in any telling: the former approached his craft of historical inquiry as if it were a branch of the moral sciences; the latter was a driven politico, more noted for crudity than morality.

In Dr Noordin's hands, Acton's apothegm about power is rendered fatuous by its inversion ("Powerlessness also corrupts ... absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely") and a crudity uttered by President Johnson (when deciding to keep on the malign J Edgar Hoover as FBI director, he said he preferred Hoover "inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in") is elevated to pragmatic principle, useful for building governing coalitions.

Pissing crowd

Dr Noordin inverted Acton to suggest that people imbued by colonialists to believe in their ineptitude need feats like Everest climbing and the Petronas Twin Towers to vault to enabling self-esteem; the Johnson crudity was dusted up to explain why it is better to have malcontents in government than in the opposition.

But it is not hard here to see the sophistry in Acton upended and in Johnson spruced up. Powerlessness does not corrupt; it may lead to anger and even to violence, but it does not corrupt. For something to corrupt, you must have a quantity of it; and having it, you scant its prescriptive moral framework, to want more. As for the pissing crowd, unless they reform, you can't pre-empt them merely by coopting them. They may hire others on the outside to do the pissing, as the Puteri Umno head now knows.

If you try hard enough, you can force resemblances between historical events, figures and statements, however disparate. But the art of historical body-snatching requires a dab hand as it snatches an insight from some past context into a new one with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the place where it was contextual.

Lord Acton is not a detachable epigrammatist and Lyndon Johnson's historic example is more cautionary than prescriptive. As for national enablers, empowerment is not the key. It is the happiness that results when people are enabled to pursue their talent along points of excellence.

That, Malaysians were unable to do because of a necessitous social engineering process gone off the rails that has hurt those it was designed to help and baulked others. But all may not be lost. Just now there's news of a possible return to a educational system resembling what the colonialists had in place when they left.

If that comes to pass, what of colonialist psychological barriers, imagined or real?

J TERENCE NETTO is a journalist of nearly 30 years' experience consisting of spells spent in the mainstream papers interspersed with bouts of freelancing. All that time he found that the main attraction in journalism is that it puts you in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.