I was sitting with a former student of mine not too long ago, together with his father. The student had just finished doing his Masters and was in the midst of looking for a job. We were discussing what the he should do next in his career. I had advised him to commit to an organisation so that he could rise in status and position over time.
His father, a retired HR professional, however disagreed. He made a caveat to my advice — one that has stayed with me since.
“Don’t commit too early to an organisation,” he told his son. “If you do, you might waste 20 or 30 years of your life going nowhere. Before you commit to a company, make sure it is worthy of your commitment. Some companies want to grow with you. Others only want to use you.
“In the companies that want to grow with you, if you give yourself wholeheartedly, you’ll learn a lot, develop good connections, and rise as the company rises. But in companies that only intend to use you, you will always find yourself shortchanged. The more you give, the more they will let you down.”
Then he added something sharper: “This experience of growing with a company usually happens in Western multinationals. As a rule, in Malaysian companies, always remember that you are working in someone else’s company. They will pay you, you will attend their annual dinners, you will receive your bonus — but you will still feel like you have been used for their benefit, not grown for yours.”
When I heard this, it struck me how right he was — not merely about companies, but about life in Malaysia as a whole.
Whether you are Sabah or Sarawak negotiating with Putrajaya, whether you belong to a political organisation, or whether you’re navigating race relations, the feeling of us versus them remains deeply embedded in the Malaysian experience, even if technically we all fall under the same umbrella.
And so I arrived at a conclusion:
The best way to deal with Malaysians — be it in corporations, politics, or society at large — is the same way you would bargain with a street vendor.
You begin the bargain by trying to exploit the other party to the maximum extent.
If they say RM100, you say RM10.
When you settle at RM50, you leave satisfied — because you believe you deprived them of RM40.
And they too leave satisfied — believing they deprived you of RM40.
Both sides walk away feeling victorious because both assume they got the better of the other, without ever knowing whether the other got the better of them.
In such a context, concepts like appreciation, transparency, sincerity, long-term relationship, or goodwill do not enter the picture.
Instead, the operative words become:
discount, bargain, pretension, secrecy, and exploitation.
If you enter Malaysian relationships — corporate, political, racial, or federal–state — with the proper mindset, you won’t complain even if the relationship never becomes strong or sincere.
You will always remember that you never wanted a strong or sincere relationship - you just wanted a transactional relationship - you just wanted to use them for you benefit for a specific case, without being a part of their life or having them be a part of your life.
Because of that , if you are satisfied with your bargain, regardless of whether you got cheated or exploited by the deal, it wouldn't matter to you. .
It wouldn't matter to the vendor will too, for the same reason.
Both sides believe just be satisfied believing they “won”, even if both sides only thought they “won” because they managed to cheat or exploit the other side.
Even if you later discover that the item you bargained down from RM100 to RM50 was bought by your cousin elsewhere for RM15, you would not feel cheated — because the bargain was never about the true value of the item. It was about whether you played the game well.
This outlook applies to race relations, party membership, state–federal negotiations, and indeed many Malaysian interactions.
If you are a suspicious, tricky, and exploitative person and you assume everyone else is the same, then you will not feel cheated even if you end up on the losing side of a deal. You will simply accept it as part of the game.
“Those who live by the sword die by the sword,” you will shrug it off, when you realise that you have come out the loser in a bargain, and just focus on winning the next bargain, rather than rue the one you lost.
But problems arise when a person who is actually suspicious and exploitative imagines themselves to be straightforward and honest, and expects others to treat them with the fairness they themselves do not practice.
Worse still, problems multiply when everyone assumes they are honest, while actually behaving in tricky and exploitative ways — toward others whom they also assume are honest, but who behave in the same tricky, exploitative ways.
It is in this confusion — where we neither know who we are nor who we are dealing with — that negativity rises.
Everyone feels shortchanged.
Everyone feels betrayed.
Everyone feels tricked.
Everyone feels used and exploited.
The Malaysian experience often turns negative and toxic, likely because we often misjudge ourselves and misjudge one another, and enter relationships with expectations that do not match reality of who we actually are and who they actually are.
And so perhaps the simple HR advice from a father to his son explains more about Malaysia than we realise:
When our self-perception and our expectations of others misalign with how we actually behave, then every outcome — even a fair one — can feel like an injustice.
Hell is only hell if you think you are burning in a lake of fire although you are a saint.
If you think that you are a sinner, you likely won't begrudge the fact that you are burning in hell for your sins. Heck, if you are the sort that can accept that you will burn in hell for your sins, you might not even commit a sin in the first place.
A psychosis is what happens when who you think you are is so flawed, that you start having a flawed impression of your world as well. When you have a flawed view of yourself and your world, everything that happens to you will likely be a negative experience - filled with confusion, dissatisfaction, frustration, anger, malice, envy and repressed conceit.
It is when you start having a correct impression of yourself - even if the correct impression of you shows you as being flawed and disfigured -will you come out of psychosis, and make peace with yourself and your world.
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