While scientists and health practitioners have found ways to cure or alleviate many forms of mental illness, when it comes to political lunacy we have made few advances, and least of all in Asia.
As in the case of an otherwise psychologically healthy person who goes through a period of trauma, treatments can be found when a relatively sane political system falls into a temporary crisis. But when a country is burdened with stark raving political lunacy, what sort of remedy is there?
Unfortunately, there are many countries in Asia whose political setups are suffering from chronic mental disorders that have so far proved beyond the ability of anyone seeking to treat them. Without the slightest hesitation it can be said that Burma is one such country.
This unfortunate fact has been made obvious by the events of this August and September, when a steep hike in the cost of basic fuels precipitated mass protests the likes of which had not been seen for 20 years. Taken together, the uprising and its aftermath are likely to cause confusion among people who have had the good fortune not to have been born or raised in a country that has succumbed to political insanity.
Some would expect that such a large-scale event would produce some kind of change, as it would have had it occurred in their own backyard. Others will wrongly assert that it apparently failed to obtain immediate change for want of adequate support or planning among the people of Burma themselves.
And then there are some who will hunt around for explanations that fit with their prefabricated notions of the world. Rather than try to understand the event for what it actually was, they will find it much easier to write the whole thing off as something cooked up by some foreigners with a few million dollars to spend.
Such reactions naturally arise among confused persons trying to demonstrate some sort of knowledge about complicated things that happen contrary to their expectations, just as when people encounter others who don’t behave according to their norms they seek to come up with easy explanations that fit with their personal experiences rather than trying to put themselves in the others’ shoes.
However, for those of us who are interested in really trying to understand what has happened in Burma in recent months, it is necessary to tackle political lunacy and its consequences head on. Over forty years of uncompromising military rule there leaves us no alternative.
From studying and documenting these cases over the last few years, we can also conclude that what happened in Burma this September was a daily contest writ large. Every day people in Burma encounter things in their normal lives that force them into a conflict with one authority or another. It may be anything from a dispute over a plot of land to a public gripe about an empty stomach: anything at all that suggests dissatisfaction implying maladministration.
But as people are forced into conflict, step by step they become entangled in the web of irrationality that hangs over every part of public life. What starts as a minor irritation becomes a nightmare.
Naturally, no one accepts such a condition happily. Out of sheer frustration and necessity one or another may be pushed into an act of protest. Discontent may take a larger shape and spill out publicly in the way that it did during recent months, as an expression of immense need — to recover from psychosis and enter into a more organized way of life (not the false appearance of organization created by the politically insane) where some degree of rationality is possible.
Correct diagnosis is the first requirement for effective intervention. Where political insanity is treated as a mild malaise, a curable condition, not only the sufferer but also the third party is acting irrationally. To begin we must acknowledge what we are dealing with.
Acknowledgment of political insanity will at least save us the time and trouble of having to deal with quacks peddling generic remedies for everything from failed elections to aborted uprisings. If we can at least free ourselves from such nonsense we can get down to the serious work. As rational people dealing with the politically insane, this is our foremost obligation.
Source: No cure for political lunacy
