Musings

Fight With Facts, Defend With Logic.

By Marina Mahathir

Let's have our water today, never mind that we kill off one of nature's most beautiful gifts and we displace people with so much less than we have. Where exactly do we expect them to go? If they then become a burden to our communities, do we still blame them or do we have the grace to remember that we started this in the first place?

FORGIVE me for saying so," said this very polite researcher from abroad sitting in front of me, "but I've noticed one distinct difference between Western societies and Asian ones."

"Oh yes?" said I, "What is it?"

"Well," he gulped, fearful of offending me, "when we see something wrong in our society, we want to know everything there is to know about it before we do anything about it. But I've noticed in the many countries in Asia that I've been to that you don't necessarily do everything you can to find out why before you react."

His comment, made quite sincerely, gave me pause for thought. We had been having a discussion on certain social policies for input into a research project he was conducting. He was very experienced in his field and had been to many countries around the region in the course of his work.

It became clear to him, and also puzzled him, that there is little support for evidence-based policy-making on many social issues in our region. Rather, policies are often made based on opinion, cultural bias and other intangibles.

I thought about what he said and had to admit that in my own work, I found this to be true. More often than not, so many decisions that are going to affect people's lives are based on ideas that cannot be supported by real hard facts.

For instance, some years ago, there was the issue of lepak. Lots of young people were seen loitering around shopping complexes, to the annoyance of adults. This loitering was deemed to be the cause of any number of social "ills" among young people.

Yet not once did anyone do any research that positively identified the link between lepak and the problems that are attributable to young people.

Somebody somewhere opined that there was a link and voila, a policy to curb lepak came into being. What research that might be done often is to support a predetermined conclusion so there isn't a great deal of objectivity there.

The same is true of just about every other social problem we have. Logic and facts are low priority in preference to opinions based on personal prejudices, defensiveness and whimsy.

I once asked, quite reasonably I thought, whether the thousandfold increase in drug users in this country since the inception of the government anti-drug programme could be seen as an indicator that the programme had failed. No, I was emphatically told; if there had been no programme, the scenario would have been much worse.

A thousandfold increase in drug use is acceptable? Similarly the need to build more and more drug rehabilitation centres could be seen as a signal of failure, not success. Yet few people stop to think about the logicality of this.

Again I wonder if this is a product of our education system. Are we not taught to think logically and rationally? In Mathematics, we have to logically prove equations. If we don't apply logic, they simply do not work. Perhaps the fault lies in nobody ever teaching us that this formula can apply in the way we approach other problems as well.

I had to fill in a long questionnaire for this researcher and I found it singularly frustrating. First of all, it was apparent that in this country we live in an environment where there is a dearth of information.

We simply do not know the pertinent answers to so many questions. In fact, I wonder if we even ask ourselves these questions. Primarily, why exactly do we have the social problems that we do and why have they not responded to the solutions we have tried to implement?

Secondly, I realised while trying to answer the questionnaire, how opaque the whole policy-making process is in this country. If you are not in the government sector, you can be sure of being excluded from policy-making in the field that you are working in, more times than not. Yet you are expected to carry out work based on these policies and when they fail to work, you get blamed.

For instance, anti-drug policy-making almost never has any input from NGOs working in the field. At most, they might be invited for a brainstorming session where it is deemed that their input was noted. But whether their input, based on real-life experience, has any bearing on policy at all is another question.

The same can be said about many other issues; women's issues, HIV/AIDS, the environment, etc. Then everyone wonders why NGOs get irritated and resort to giving their views in the papers. How else would we get alternative views to the public? (Of course, we operate under the naive impression that the public should know.) The point is there are always alternative views and I think the views of those who work in the field have to have equal if not more weight than the views of those who sit behind a desk all day.

Sometimes you wonder how serious we are about tackling the problems that beset our communities. We need training to see the links between cause and effect, the advantages of the long-term view as opposed to the immediate short-term gratification.

Let's have our water today, never mind that we kill off one of nature's most beautiful gifts and we displace people with so much less than we have. Where exactly do we expect them to go? If they then become a burden to our communities, do we still blame them or do we have the grace to remember that we started this in the first place?

Of course, the easiest way to deflect criticism is by questioning how foreigners can come and make comments about us. I was mortified once to witness a local with very little expertise blithely tell an expert from a neigbouring country that he was wrong in his interpretation of some figures, without any supporting facts.

How do we go about thinking we are right all the time? The only way to answer back is by having hard facts ourselves, by arguing logically and rationally. We seem to be able to do this when it comes to economics and business. But for anything else, we fail dismally because we think image is more important.

Never ever let other people know that we aren't perfect. Yet we don't realise that we expose our own inadequacies just by being so defensive.

It's a problem that we have to address, how to take the bull by the horns and face issues squarely. If we want to counter people, let's have our facts ready and be prepared for proper debate, not dismiss other people as wrong just because they are "other people", foreign or local. Then maybe our problems won't linger on as much as they do.

“Sebagai rakyat yang patriotik, adalah menjadi tanggungjawab kita untuk membawa negara kita keluar dari kemelut sekarang. Maruah negara perlu dikembalikan. Arang yang terconteng di muka bangsa Malaysia perlu dibersihkan. Nama Malaysia perlu diharumkan kembali, iaitu negara yang mempunyai rakyat yang berani berjuang menegakkan kebenaran dan keadilan." Datuk Seri Anwar “Political parties andnon-government organisations must work together and set aside their differences in orderto free Malaysia from continuing stranglehold of crisis and oppression....Our party is prepared to sacrifice its own interests inorder to achieve the larger goal of forging a credible alternative to the Barisan Nasional  (National Front),"   " Dr. Wan Azizah KRU-keADILan Home - Links - keADILan Official Website