Beware of power abusers
A speech to Malaysian students on the occasion in
conjunction with the aftermath of the Pilihanraya
Kampus 2005, organised by Solidaritit Mahasiswa
Malaysia (SMM) at the Main Hall of Masjid Kolej Islam
Malaya, Petaling Jaya, Saturday, 15 October 2005.
by Dr. Azly Rahman
>From far I send you my humble greetings,
To my dear best and brightest Malaysian students, to
my respected fellow academics, leaders in politics,
and to all of you wonderful participants eager to
learn what power means and how it is used and abused
at rampantly, as our economic and economic system
enters another phase of rapidization.
For this speech, I draw my inspiration from my almost
twenty years in the teaching profession both in
Malaysian and in the United States. As all of you are
aware, I had, together with a fellow academic and
wife, Dr. Mutiara Mohamad, were dismissed by
Universiti Utara Malaysia for refusing to sign the
Surat Akujanji; a piece of document that represents an
iron-fisted philosophy of totalitarianism and
intellectual oppression in Malaysias public
university. We were fired from UUM on December 8 2004,
almost one year ago without any reply for our
request to be reinstated.
I taught the courses Ilmu Pemikiran and Etika when
I was in Malaysia and believed that our society in the
21st. century will create more thinkers and ethical
human beings as we progress materially. But I was
thrown out of the Malaysian university for asking
ethical questions. My letter to the Yang Di Pertuan
Agong, Prime Minister, Minister of Higher Education,
and several other Cabinet Ministers was ignored till
now.
I now am teaching courses in Foundations of
Civilization, Politics, Education, and Culture in
three different departments in the United States. My
love is still for the development of intellectualism
and deep sense of social justice amongst Malaysians of
all race, color, and creed.
We will continue to refuse to sign the Surat Akujanji
and continue to carry the burdens of the consequences
until the Minister of Higher Education discard the
document. You as students will continue to demand for
the abolishment of the UUCA, the ISA, and all forms of
repressive acts that serve to perpetuate arrogance and
ignorance in our society. Many have become victims in
the process, many more victimizers continue to be
created.
Let me talk about the relationship between power and
indoctrination
Indoctrination
Indoctrination comes from the way power is derived and
disseminated. Let us further explore what this means.
I will then talk about how to differentiate between
negative power and positive power and how we can
become vigilantes against power abusers.
Power, to put it in simple modern management terms, is
the ability to make things happen or to make other
people do things for those who want to make things
happen. Power must be made to be visible through
legitimation and through the display of the signs and
symbols of power.
Power, as exercised in democratic settings can be
liberating and transformative, but when exercised in
totalitarian settings can be shackling and oppressive.
I believe that we must learn to deconstruct the
meaning of power, to analyse how it operates, and to
deconstruct its meanings and manifestations so that we
may understand what are negative and positive uses of
power.
Power can come from legitimation and from the
instilling and institutionalisation of fear. Power can
be exercised through Virtue and Terror, like the
French revolutionaire Robespierre who put the concept
to devastating use.
Those who own the means to control others can also
exercise power in the most sophisticated and gentle
way so that the means of oppressing others can be the
least visible.
Power, as Machiavelli advised, must first be
acquired/wrestled for, consolidated/maintained, and
expanded and used to control and dominate via ways
that will make it effective and long-lasting.
In a post-modern state, those in power desire to
arrive at, borrowing Antonio Gramsci, a state of
hegemony or moral and intellectual leadership
whereby total power is derived from coercion and
consent.
To understand how power relations evolve and how those
in power may cleverly use the ideological state
apparatuses, one must understand how hegemony develops
and how leaders or totalitarian regimes that produce
regimes of truth survive.
Manifestations of power
It is no wonder that especially in the economic boom
years of the 1980s and 1990s in at least one Malaysian
university and other corporate educational settings
there was an obsession to read two major classic work
of raw power namely, Niccolo Machiavelli's The
Prince, and Sun Tze's The Art of War.
There was an obsession to study the history of
warriors and warmongers such as Attila the Hun,
Genghis Khan, and Bismarck and craft business
strategies via guerilla marketing techniques and use
them to govern human beings.
I believe the greatest danger is when these principles
of war are used in higher educational settings to
control and eventually stop the growth of democratic
voices. I believe the exercise of power through the
application of such war principles, is one way to
chart future ruins to the monuments and testament of
democratic thinking Malaysia is constructing.
Power must be understood in all its dimensions and
complexities. It is manifested in the use of language,
in signs and symbols of things around us, in the
choice of knowledge being made official, in the
control of the print, broadcast, and digital media.
It is also manifested in the control of law-making and
executing, in the way educational ideologies take
shape, in the way the state educates its citizenry for
a particular purpose, in the way human relations are
conducted at any point in time, and in a multitude of
other ways.
Power can be concentrated and dispersed, seen in the
way rites and rituals are publicly displayed, made
evident through the most mundane and minute of all
forms of official communications, in the forms of
addresses, in materials culture, and in the way one
uses it as signs and symbols of history.
Power is ascribed through one's very existence as an
economic or cultural being; in one's professional life
as well as one's cultural self. There is power in the
image one produces through the fashion statement one
makes and through the visual communication in which
one engages.
Michel Foucault often used the term power/knowledge as
one. How is this a possible amalgamation in our
analysis of the world as a book of signs?
Knowledge becomes power in the hands of those who
produce or reproduce it. There is knowledge to
transform the human self and there is knowledge to
imprison it.
Negative power
When is power negative? In the hands of those who
own the means of transforming others, or entrusted to
make decision for others, negative use of power can be
seen in many dimensions.
When given power, the leader uses it to summon the
resources to his/her own political, economic, and
cultural agenda by building a network of peoples who
can support the leaders' rise to higher levels of
power.
One can observe the rise of leaders and how power is
gained, maintained, and used for particular gains. One
can see how the ideological state apparatuses are used
- the political, economic, military, social machinery
- to further gain the legitimation to have power over
others. When given the power, the leader imprisons
those who opposes him/her.
There is another example from my own profession as an
academician.
When an educational leader is given power in a public
educational institution, the leader will use his/her
power to curb academic freedom, silence the voices of
dissent, define what questions can be asked and what
is forbidden, what bodies of knowledge to filter into
the minds of the students, and how to manage the
organisation like an efficient production house of
good workers obedient to the dictates of the
prevailing ideology.
The leader will ensure that the teaching faculty will
not be allowed to teach the students how to think and
to curb dissent among the faculty members. A leader
who abuses power in academia is one who will
discourage dissenting points of view.
Leaders with power, in both instances, are exemplified
as good users of negative power. They are, in short
good abusers of positive power. Malaysia's
transformation as a knowledge society cannot afford
to have such abusers of power.
Positive power
When is power positive? When given the power, a good
leader of the people will make sure that he/she is
first and foremost a representative of the people and
elected into public office to make things better for
the greatest number of people.
A good user of positive power will free people from
the shackles of domination and to ensure that being a
political leader does not mean being an inheritor of
colonialist thinking. He/she must understand, as the
Algerian thinker Albert Memmi would put it, who is the
coloniser and who is the colonised and how the
colonised can gradually transform into a coloniser.
A good political leader is not elected to further
divide and sub-divide people so that it will be easy
for his/her regime to rule and to profit from turning
people into utilities and consumers.
A good political leader learns from the moral and
ethical philosophies of the people governed and
transform his/her understanding to create a humanistic
and socially just nation of diverse peoples, guiding
them through a careful path of social and
technological progress; one that values social needs
more than profits for the national and international
few.
A good political leader will allow the growth of a
strong system of check and balance, be they in the
form of clear and efficient separation of power (of
the executive, judiciary and legislative) or through
the setting up of a strong opposition coalition in
Parliament or Congress.
A good political leader will allow himself/herself not
serve indefinitely. A good government might even agree
to share and rotate power amongst coalition parties in
the spirit of collaborative politics.
One-dimensional beings
And, what is a good educational leader, then? How can
we recognise whether he/she has used power wisely?
A good university leader will assume the role of a
philosopher and an intellectual leader, and not one
playing the role of a politician or a commander of a
regime of an ideology.
A good university leader is one who understands
philosophy. Philosophy is about helping people make
choices, helping develop strong principles in support
of the choices made, and helping use the people's
diverse opinions to create a learning environment in
which diversity and dissent will in turn create a
strong foundation of intellectualism.
The university should be a logical place to nurture
the spirit of free inquiry wherein professors are not
afraid to speak their truth and ask questions, and
students are responsible enough to decide what
political direction they are to choose.
A good university leader must be a social-democratic
thinker in order to entertain and to encourage
multiple voices to flourish. He/she must be a strong
moral and intellectual leader who ensures that
multi-dimensional thinking reigns and not one who will
create, in the words of the American sociologist
Herbert Marcuse, one-dimensional beings.
The public university is therefore not a place for
authoritarian leaders who has not understood what a
university means, let alone what a public
university built for the common good signifies.
A good university leader helps the place grow more
intelligent and open. He/she will ensure that the
institution will not turn to be a place for students
to be suspended for asking questions in a university
forum, or faculty members to be expelled, among other
reasons, for asking for further clarifications on the
fundamental issue of academic freedom. This has
unfortunately happened in a Malaysian public
university.
Power, in the instances I have sketched above, can
therefore be conveniently abused or properly used.
As democratic Malaysian citizens, we must learn to
become vigilantes against those who have promised to
serve us but choose to be intoxicated by the sweet
arrogance of power.
I have to say goodbye now.
>From far I give you all my warmest regards. I shall
one day return home, reinstated with dignity, to meet
with all of you, God Willing.
Have a wonderful conference. Peace and justice to all.
AZLY RAHMAN
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