comment The ‘third force’ or ‘third party’ is getting a bum rap these days.  

azlan No sooner had inspector-general of police Musa Hassan insinuated that a ‘third force’ was hovering balefully over his contingent than independent MP Zulkifli Noordin alludes to the machinations of some such party that he claimed was willing to reward him handsomely if he implicated the prime minister and his wife in the Altantuya murder.

Allusions to this sinister force remind one of those staples of communist invective – “reactionaries” and “counter-revolutionaries” – on whom the Reds were fond of placing the blame for everything that went wrong in their system in the 1950s and 60s.

This seeming attempt to allude to a phantom called the ‘third force’ is a sign that, perhaps, a paranoid element has crept into Malaysian politics.  

By no means is this paranoia confined to top civil servants, frustrated by failure to extend tenure; or imbecile politicians no political party seems to want but some may find useful as cannon fodder.  

A few years ago a state mufti caused a sensation when he claimed that several score Muslim apostates were about to be baptised.

You would think that an inflammatory claim like that, if found to be untrue, which was the case, would have drawn a stinging rebuke from his employers coupled with sanctions against its author.

Instead the alarmist mufti was lauded with honours and has become a useful agent in the competition over comparative rectitude that goes on all the time.

Laughter the antidote

Indeed if a paranoid element is afoot in our politics, there can be little doubt from which soil it springs: there is too much to do with religion in our society.   

This is not an argument for the secularisation of our body politic so that it is deprived of nutrients that feed an encroaching paranoia; only a reminder that a healthy skepticism towards everything, including religion, helps, as Santayana said, to preserve the chastity of the intellect.    

Is it surprising that just when an accusation of sodomy is preferred against a prominent leader, an imputation of sedition is being mulled, and a tell-and-substantiate effort is underway to demonstrate a Jewish hand behind a national campaign, the specter of a ‘third’ force or ‘third’ party is raised?     

No doubt about it, paranoia is aloft in our land.  

It may be salutary at this point to remind us of what the writer Aubrey Menen said after reading the ‘Ramayana’:

There are three things in this world that are real,

God, human folly and laughter,

The first two are beyond our comprehension,

So we must do what we can with the third.

There you have it in the quotation, the elements that comprise our present malady and its remedy which, in a providential twist, is referred to as the third.