If you are a person who drives carefully, follows all the rules and acts in consideration to the wellbeing of other users of the road, you might still make a mistake and cause harm to other people on the road, but on such an unfortunate occasions, people are more likely to to see the fault as being limited to your action, without necessarily seeing you as being damaged or faulty. When people see the fault in your action, but not yourself, they are apt to forgive you and let bygones be bygones, even if the the injury that you might have caused them is grave.
To err is human, to forgive, divine. This saying mostly applies to cases where the person who has committed the error is one whose fault lies in their action, not their intention.
When we do not doubt a person’s intention, but we are aggrieved by their action, we tend to be more inclined to forgive and forget, even when the harm done to us is grievous.
The same however, cannot be said to an injury that is done to us, by a person whose intention we doubt.
When people doubt our intention, they will take offense against us personally, and not just our actions. When people take offense against us personally, even if the harm that we cause them is small or accidental, they will still make it a big fuss about it, in order to use our mistake as an opportunity to punish us.
If we are a person who regularly drives dangerously, without following any rules of the road and act without any consideration towards the safety and wellbeing of others, no matter how smart we think we are, at some point, we will make a mistake, and when we make that mistake, no matter how small it is – even if all we did was to accidentally scratch someone else's car – not only will the owner of the car come after us with a desire to cause us harm, a mob of people might come after us too, on account of their bad experience with us in the past.
As a rule, we must keep our distance away from people who we do not have good intentions towards. If I, for instance, have an intention to make you feel bad in order to make myself feel good, I shouldn’t see you often, be too close to you or spend too much time with you. I should also practice a degree of restraint, in that I should try to make myself feel as good as possible without making you feel too small or too bad. Other than that, I should also try to be a good sport, and accept that just as how it makes me feel good to make you feel small and bad, you might every now and then attempt to make me feel small and bad, to make you feel good about yourself as well.
If I cannot keep my distance away from you, I should at least make sure that you need me more than I need you, before I try to make myself feel good at your expense. If I have a tendency of making you feel small in order to make me feel big, I can get away with it, for as long as you truly need me more than I need you. If I am your boss for example, and you are an undocumented foreign worker, I can probably be very nasty towards you, and you will have no choice but to resign yourself towards it, for as long as you need me more than I need you. One day, when you no longer need me, you are probably going to relish the opportunity to be nasty towards me, but until that day comes, I can be secure in the knowledge that as long as you need me, you will do nothing against me.
Although all of us are aware that intentions are real, not all of us are aware that intentions can be known, even if it cannot be seen.
If we are a reasonably self-aware person, who is aware of our own intentions towards others , we generally will be able to tell what the intention of another person is, by observing their actions and expression for a period of time.
The problem with a self-absorbed person is that they tend to not be aware of their intentions towards others. They are not aware of their own intentions towards others, because their intention is to make others feel bad so that they can feel good about themselves. When this is your intention, naturally, you will hide your intention even from your own self. When you do something nasty to others for example, you will likely explain it to yourself, and everyone else, that all you were doing is just something innocent - like telling the truth, or telling a joke - or that you were just doing it out of concern and good intentions towards others.
Because a self-absorbed person tends to not be aware of their own intentions, they tend to not be aware of anyone else’s intention either. When you are so self-absorbed that you have no knowledge of your own intentions, what more the intentions of others, the only things that you can understand about others is their action and expression, not their intention.
However, just because a self-absorbed person can only understand the expression and actions of others, it doesn’t mean that they will accept any expression or action from others. Being self-absorbed, they can and will only accept the expression and actions of others that make them feel good about themselves. If the action and expressions of others make them feel good about themselves, they will accept it as true and sincere even if it is absurd and unrealistic, and if the action and expression of others make them feel bad about themselves, they will reject it even if it is self-evidently true and can be rationally proven.
Also, if you are self absorbed, for the same reason that you can only understand the actions and expressions of others, not their intentions , you will tend to believe that the only thing that people can understand about you, is also your actions and expressions, not your intentions.
When you believe that no one can know your intentions, you will too conveniently assume that if you don’t show your intentions through your actions or expressions, or if you show the opposite of your intentions via your actions or expressions, people will just believe your gestures and your words, regardless of the intention behind them.
When this is what you believe, you will become convinced that if you cleverly mask your intentions by using clever words or noble gestures, you can get away with anything, because no one will know what is going on in your heart and mind.
When enough people in society believe this, it is all downhill for that society from that point onwards.
Things will go downhill, because the entire society will be talking in noble platitudes – about justice and charity and forgiveness and selfless service – but there will be nobody listening or believing in anything anyone says.
Whatever good you see in others you won’t believe it , and even if you see no signs of evil in them, you will still suspect it is in them nonetheless.
Going by how the issue of Bak Kut Teh, Kantin Sekolah being open during Ramadan and the KK Mart socks issue that has been happening recently in the country, I think the number of self absorbed people in our country has breached the critical mass necessary to keep a chain reaction going.
In other words, I think that our country will continue to decline, no matter how nobly we speak and gesture, because in our hearts, too many of us have come to conclude that it is impossible for a society as degenerate as ours to truly be a place where anyone can genuinely be sincere, good intentioned, selfless or just.
If enough of us believe that ours has become a degenerate society, then we will also concurrently start to believe that the only satisfaction and joy we can get from our society is by reaching a position where others need us more than we need them.
If we can reach such a position, we will be able to make ourselves feel good by making others feel bad, and making ourselves feel good at the expense of others is really the only satisfaction and joy that is available in a degenerate society .
Once enough of us believe that this is true, we will all aim to get to the top by any means possible, and thus we will all begin to frantically pull down those who are above us, step on those who are below us and push away those who are in the same level as us, as a matter of normalized practice.
Once we have normalized and internalized such a practice, it is the beginning of the end. The more we fall, the more we will lament our fall, and the more we lament our fall, the more we will fall, and so on and so forth it will go, until we hit such a low point, that it will occur to us that unless we stop making ourselves feel good at the expense of others, we will never climb out of the rut that we are in.
From a historical perspective, it is not unusual for this turning point to come only after generations or centuries has passed. If we have passed the point of no return, and i do believe that we might have passed the point of no return, i think that the only wise thing to do, is give up on the hope that things will change for the better in the future, and just resign oneself to the fact that our best years are behind.
Nehru Sathiamoorthy is the author of “While Waiting for the World to end”. He was a columnist at FMT and a frequent contributor to the South China Morning Post, The Star, Malaysia-Today, MalaysiaNow, MalaysiaKini and Focus Malaysia.
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