UPM Fracas - Latent Threat of Upheaval

If we are surrounded by a formless rain of discrete and unrelated happenings, there would be nothing we could understand or talk about.

The Fracas at UPM, according to Higher Education Minister, Mustapa Mohamed, derived from the investigation led by the V-C, is said, not racially motivated. It seems that it just so happen to involved groups of unique different races of students, each representing their own creed.

The V-C investigation concluded that the trouble started when a non-registered student association, the UPM Student Progressive Front, set up a booth at one of the university’s colleges, put up posters on the college cafetaria walls and distributed about 200 brochures, causing unhappiness among those belonging to registered student associations. As a result, there was a harsh exchange of words which led to a fracas.

Referring to the video recording, the V-C states that the students were “merely singing, cheering and not shouting abuses”. (The V-C had actually lost all his human senses. His intelligence is animalised).

If only, and only if only, a modicum of intelligence exist together with a proper sense of role from the university administrators, it will usually suffice to cure any defects of the formal system. Any view that ascribes some purpose or end to a whole institutional complex has very unattractive antecedents in the history of socio-political philosophy. A naive teleology has shown itself to be the worse enemy that the scientific pursuit of objective truth can have.

Those who maintain, not long ago, that the notion of inequality and uneven playing fields, particularly, in the educational system, have come to recognise more and more explicitly the historical function of this superannuated concept effected by the organized forces of those currently in power.

This fracas has brought out with surprising clarity the true dimensions of the differences and disparities between the various communities and exposed the crude misunderstanding which nurture that differences.

For a system of rules to be imposed by force on one group, there must be others in sufficient numbers who accepts voluntarily.Without voluntary cooperation, thus creating authority, the rule of law and good government cannot be established. On the other hand, we seems to see the existence of a narrow and exclusive system run in the interest of the dominant group, which are made continually repressive and unstable with the latent threat of upheaval.

In order to establish an effective formal system of good governance, those rules of behavior, which are valid according to the system, must generally be obeyed by all, and that its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of validity and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its very officials.

It had certainly become impossible for many to obey a rule that is disregarded by those charged with its administration, but at some point obedience becomes futile. As the sociologist Simmel has observed, when this bond of reciprocity is finally and completely ruptured by those who rule, nothing is left on which to ground the people's duty to observe the rules.

Increasingly, the principle object of government seems to be, not that of giving the people rules by which to shape our conduct, but to frighten us into impotence. As such a situation develops, the problem faced by the people is not so simple as that of a voter who knows with certainty that his ballot will not be counted. It is more likely that of the voter who knows that the odds are against his ballot being counted at all, and that if it is counted, there is a good chance that it will be counted for the side against which he actually voted. Those in this predicament has to decide for themselves whether to stay with the system and cast their votes as a kind of symbolic act expressing the hope of a better day. In situation like this, there can be no simple principle by which to test the people's obligation of fidelity to law, any more than there can be such a principle for testing his right to engage in a general revolution (Fuller, 1969).