As with the weather, human affairs in Malaysia also go through seasonal cycles. In Kuala Lumpur at least, August is the season for that annual orgy of patriotism.

As usual, our Ministry of Disinformation will saturate our national consciousness with ostentatious display of national symbols again. The myth of our national history will continue to be produced and reproduced through the media, like an old broken record.

The moment when our first prime minister proclaimed "Merdeka" seven times will be shown on our television countless times. For whole new generations of young Malaysians, who have no access to history except that which is imparted in our schools, the history of Malay nationalism is indeed their only legacy.

History taught in schools and the mass media is always the truth produced by political power. As we near Independence Day every year, the crystallisation of the most dramatic snippets of this historical truth is meant to engineer and entrench single-minded love and loyalty for this illusive entity called the Malaysian Nation.

Was it Oscar Wilde who defined patriotism as the "last refuge of the scoundrel"? It does not matter. The scoundrel wins out every time. Prominent historians and scholars keep reminding us that the world is a community of nation states, and the nation shall forever be the inevitable basic unit of our political organisation.

So we humanity are condemned to the prison of our primordial tribal instincts. Daily, we give tacit consent to the unwritten rules of tribal belonging. In fact, we hold them to be closest to our heart and soul, as the basis for our core belief about who we are as individuals.

Rapid modernisation may have awakened a tinge of individualism.

Harbour idealism

But here, given the short-cut to the process of independence, we have by-passed the historical learning curve. Instead of our individualist impulse evolving into a force for developing a modern liberal democratic state, our young citizens find perverted outlets for their individualist instinct in the market place.

Personal identity, among middle-class educated Malaysians, is more likely to be associated with a job. This will be expressed in suitable language in the national narrative dominating the media. "I am an IT engineer." "I am a marketing consultant." "I am a graphic designer."

For the radical minded, i.e. for those who think themselves radical minded, the self-labelling is no less constrictive. "I am an activist" is the most common self-identification among well-meaning youths. The odd ones who are well-read also will remind you of Karl Marx's maxim that it is more important to change the world than to understand it!

At least, the reform minded youths harbour the idealism of social and political concern beyond the tunnel vision of self-interest. In contrast, the great majority of the rest prefer expressing their thwarted individualism in their choice of "lifestyle", in manner of clothes, hairdos, and leisurely activities. The meaning of life to them is enjoyment of goods and services, especially in the consumption of entertainment.

You see them, during these days of carnival sales in all shopping malls and hypermarkets, like devotees going on a pilgrimage in the great sacred cathedrals of old, filled to the brim with awe and happiness.

I digress. Independence from colonial rule nearly fifty years ago would have meant self-determination. It would have meant the fulfilment of freedom, liberation from the yoke of foreign domination, to make the important political and moral choices as citizens of a new state, where we would all be responsible for our lives and our actions.

Not good old times

Those were troubled times in Southeast Asia. In the 50s and the 60s, the dogs of war in a new East-West ideological conflict were up and about. There was little stability to speak of. Putting three meals on the table was the main concern of most parents. Sending children to school required a great deal of sacrifices, and material depravity was the driving force for working and studying hard and bettering one's life.

Those were not good old times; they were nightmares of social unrest and political upheaval, and the air was filled with the voices of visionaries and dreamers.

We had no MTV and computer games then. Our only form of entertainment was the radio, and we read, really read. Very few people owned a car, and the humble bicycle was a respectable means of transport, and together with the old buses without air-conditioning, we got around. Telephones were also few and far between. Many adults were illiterate.

The most dreaded disease was the consumption that came with tuberculosis. All school children were required to have their chests X-rayed for early detection of lung infection. The social stigma attached to TB patients was akin to that which we reserve for Aids victims these days. Few indeed would be worried about such lifestyle diseases that ravage our population nowadays, i.e. heart attack, cancer and diabetes.

Looking back across the vast expanse of nearly half a century, I have to ask myself whether the relative prosperity and material well-being today are not the very fruits of our nation's struggle for independence from colonial rule. Have we not made terrific progress in our social economic development beyond the wildest dream of our parents and grandparents? Should we not feel grateful to God at least, if not to the government, for our good fortune?

Indeed, if the youths of today are obsessed with the enjoyment of their self-centred good life, why should we begrudge them their happiness? Would the older generations of Malaysians like to see their children starving by the millions, like they do now in Africa?

Put in this rhetorical straight-jacket, the deluge of self-congratulatory feel-good Merdeka slogans seems justified. But to accept the mirage that we live in a paradise on earth would be unwise.

Victims themselves

Surely, the version of the good life and happiness as defined and delivered by the mercantile and technocratic ruling class is a little nave? To recapitulate a rejoinder to the concept of egoistical hedonism: is it not better for one to be an unhappy Socrates than a happy pig?

Man cannot live by nasi lemak alone. Beyond the world of the priok nasi, there is an entire universe of spiritual and artistic fulfilment, into which Malaysians have not even begun to explore. The landscape of the Malaysian mind is a wasteland that brings to mind T S Eliot's immortal lines, given below with a twist:

August is the cruellest month

Breeding lalang out of the dead land

Stirring dry roots with haze infested rain

Mixing racial memories with consumptive desires

The women come and go

Talking about crazy petrol prices

The closing of the Malaysian mind for half a century has not been achieved merely through a conspiracy hatched by succeeding generations of reigning scoundrels, who are themselves victims of their narrow-mindedness after all. But the desertification of our intellectual and cultural life certainly has its roots in our wasteland of racial politics.

The world is already littered with too many tragedies caused by people who cannot, or refuse to think outside their racial box. Exclusivist ethnocentrism infests the human mind, like a bird chases after its cage. Such self-imprisonment of the mind is enough to stifle the natural creative impulse necessary for intellectual search for truth and artistic adventures in aesthetics.

Submission and subservience

In Malaysia, the response to this natural tendency for tribalism has been an overwhelming attempt to coerce a form of social stability through various instruments of disciplining the legion of anarchical forces at work.

It does not help that the dominant political authority here engineering and administering the social discipline is but one of the contending anarchical forces at work. In schooling the whole Malaysian society, they have merely monopolised the right to narrate their partisan fractional world-view in the guise of a national ideology.

Nearly half a century of our nationhood has been nothing but a successful experiment in social discipline. You could say that the greatest achievement in our brief history as a sovereign nation has been the enactment of numerous restrictive laws and the employment of a vast array of enforcement agencies and their personnel. Moral policing is but one small facet of this all-encompassing programme to whip the entire population into submission and subservience.

There can neither be glorious intellectual pursuit nor artistic creativity without freedom of the human spirit. Once the freedom of thought and feeling has been ensnared, the national soul seeks solace in the numbing banality of philistine pleasures, and relish in the security of a prison cell. Ours is the happiness of the lotus-eaters in Homer's epic tale.