Building Group Malaysia

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By Yusuf Martin

Malaysia has drifted from yet another Merdeka Day, eased through September 16 (Malaysia Day) celebrations and once more has packed bunting flags, collected burnt out rockets and dispensed with sundry the other spent fireworks which had assisted those annual events of redefining national identity.

By now obsolete nostalgia and retrospective (dis)illusions have been put firmly in their places so that a nation can once again continue future gazing through ocular devices of a distinct roseate glow, and maybe now is a good enough time for a little catch up.

If you are at all spiritually minded, perhaps getting older and entering into Jung’s time for individuation, the question “Who am I?” starts to raise its balding and confused little head. The learned men of psychology tell us that we human beings all like to indulge in being ‘the Other,’ to know that we are different from him and him….. but especially her. There is something in the makeup of mankind that encourages both separateness and, conversely, a group mentality - an aligning with, and a differing from, a way of being.

Those individuals, who, for reasons of their own, chose to live in caves, half way up trees or in forests miles from habitation and away from the herd, are seen as odd, strange and often become alienated and stigmatised. The original meaning of the (Greek) word stigma, incidentally, is marked. In ancient times criminals were marked, branded, to show society who and what they are, shown to be different from the ‘group,’ from society at large. In other places and in other times, those choosing to live apart from their own society often have a very strong notion of their own identity, and see themselves as different from the society in which they matured - they take steps to confirm their identity, by disassociating themselves.

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