Controlled rage is a well-calibrated barometer that measures unfairly amended constitutions, vague legislation, and unjust government policies as if mindless politics must go unpunished.
Pragmatic democracy demands equal opportunities, not only rights, to be fairly designed, arranged and distributed. Arbitrarily controlling the levers of power and authority by a select few unqualified but well-connected individuals compounds the outburst of controlled rage.
As principal guardians of controlled rage, the voters, and their elected representatives, ought to create a dichotomous synergy to make things right for genuine democracy to work. A close scrutiny of the Federal Constitution (FC) from Article 44 to Article 69 reveals the alarming fact that the job descriptions of elected representatives as MPs or State legislators are not at all enumerated.
Article 59 FC requires elected representatives to swear an Oath of Allegiance under the Sixth Schedule together with an Oath of Secrecy! Must public officials undertake such an Oath that is impliedly immune to legal or judicial sanctions? Is it sensible to the voters that they elect into office people who swear to maintain secrets for all the wrong reasons and purposes? Is it not justified for voters to question this anomaly with controlled rage?
Proverbs 29:11 tells us that “Fools vent their anger, but the wise quietly hold it back”. This does not mean that the wise bury their anger or do not deal with it, but it means that they control their anger and how they express it. When you restrain your anger, you keep it within limits that includes belling the cat for the rakyat’s expectations for honest services by the government.
The government that cares for power and authority without controlling and shoring the shrinking ringgit, for instance, invites controlled rage. Why elect a government represented by low intellects armed with scant knowledge and shamefully low morals? The voting public, knowing it’s not paid to vote, has every right to demand visibility and transparency despite sinister oaths of secrecy.
Controlled rage unequivocally tells suspect government that you are capable of awakening others when constitutional convulsions disturb and distract order, law, decency, morals and social justice. Controlled rage took off into a different trajectory with different shades and hues of byzantine politics twenty-two months after May 9 2018.
The judiciary evidences controlled rage with utmost finesse in language. The late great Eusoffe Abdoolcader SCJ hardly minced his eloquent and learned words when he declared that section 418A of the Criminal Procedure Code was “both a legislative and executive intromission into the judicial power of the Federation” in Public Prosecutor v. Yap Peng [1987] 2 MLJ 311, 316.
The constitutional amendment that led to Article 121(1) inspired one former Malaysian chief justice to remark that “an amendment made in anger as a reaction to a decision of the court could last only for one generation” and that just as “water tends to find its own level”, the country is now facing its way back to the original provision. That dastardly amendment was certainly not made in justified anger or controlled rage. It remains an outrage while languishing unamended as it dilutes judicial power and makes a mockery of the separation of powers.
Judicial anger is healthy. Aristotle observed in his Nichomacean Ethics that the impulse to anger which pulls in several directions “may be felt both too much or too little, and in both cases not well”. Seneca in his De Ira wrote that anger is a choice, and therefore is a blameworthy mistake. Both almost agreed that justified anger, or controlled rage, is a normal human reaction and response void of spiritual crutches.
Controlled rage found expression in Bohari Taib & Ors. v. Pengarah Tanah & Galian [1990] 2 MLRA when third-rate lawyers were roundly told off: “when the defences taken in this case were so absolutely sterile one needs to ask why they were solemnly put forward by officers of this court whose duty is to advise their clients on what the law is and not what in their or the clients’ opinion it ought to be . . .”
Controlled rage offers powerful checks and balances to tell the next elected government that corruption cannot be a heinous cult or a shameful established culture. The rakyat will speak, hopefully, and not money politics. Several million 18-year-olds will check, count and cast their votes without a fog of anxiety to prevent setting fire to pragmatic democracy come GE-15.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.
