Monday, March 4, 2013

The Generosity of Locals

In high-income economies, the locals are generous in welcoming immigrants because they feel they have a lot to share as well as the immigrants will bring in new opportunities to trade things and ideas.

In very traditional communities, especially ones that have established themselves for centuries, they must have, after all those years, found their own perfect little worlds in their own perfect micro equilibrium economically and socially. If surrounding resources are plentiful and they are all willing to work hard, their communities will have grown. If not, their communities will be modest but nonetheless thriving.

By being willing to accept perfect strangers and new ideas, the locals must be in want of a new world which they must have imagined would be better. Certainly, there would be a core of elite who would be in control of the local resources and situation traditionally. Locals who accept new ideas must be those who are in want of establishing their own little niches in their respective local communities. From a stable and probably stagnant situation, a new and more dynamic situation will be created with the new influx and hence an unstable (not necessarily destablishing) situation. It is this disequilibrium which creates the new forces for change, as the immigrants and the hungry locals work together to do this that no one has ever done before.

Who is a local and who is a foreigner is a story that can only be told properly after a long evolution as time will somehow reduce the major differences and reduce everyone to the same basic features. In the immediate term, there is plenty of scope for discrimination and the ones who are likely to suffer are those who probably have very little power to fight that discrimination - the young and old offsprings of inter-racial marriages. These sufferers are a product of the locals and the immigrants and it is a shame that everybody has to suffer as a consequent of narrow mindedness. These are the silent minorities whom the extreme left and extreme right of the spectrum of colours will equally condemn as the non-pure. It is quite interesting to realise that, once discrimination rears its ugly head, it is unlikely that the capacity to discriminate will be discrete - it is likely to be part of the discriminator's indiscriminate self.

Hitler's discrimination against the migrants was that they were rich in the eyes of the local poor because of the mismanagement of the local economy (as a result of war) and claiming that the superior locals must regain their rightful place in their own fatherland, he set about obliterating the rich migrants. His discrimination policy suffered the usual problems of trying to make discrimination - it is easily to identify total immigrants, but what do you do with children whom one of their parents is a local as well as immigrants who have previously  being recognised by the state for gallant service to that state. When his schemes eventually failed, as he became convinced himself to have all the solutions to all the problems, he started blaming his inner circle whom he used to trust. His final madness was when he felt so despondent with his own people that he felt that they should all be put to death because he considered them to be useless (presumably to his madness).

A nation of everybody must be a nation of people with generosity in their hearts to accept people and their ways which are not similar to their own. Malaysia has prospered because of the generosity of the Malay people (and the orang asli) as well as the generosity of the natives of Sabah and Sarawak. Their willingness to accept foreigners and make them welcome and feel at home is a major asset of theirs whom Chinese and Indians and others could well learn for their own good. Of course, because of the great differences in background and circumstances, their different worldviews produce different economic results. The most logical conclusion must be the infusion of the positive elements of all cultures that will bring out the best of the communities that have now decided to live together in perfect harmony. It is perfectly natural as well to set about identify one's own strengths, but it must immediately be accompanied by the identification of the strengths of others as well and learn from them that the world will become a better place than the circumstance we find ourselves in.

If we look at ourselves in the perspective of the long history of the world, we are nothing but the present generation, each of us regardless of our background and profile. I think each generation should make its own decision of the life they wish to live and they should live a life that is different from the parents'. In this respect, the constant change of leaders as their generational days in the sun is over is good and necessary. The old leaders, especially those who have failed in imposing their mad ideas on us before, should gracefully retire from public life (i.e., absent from the media) and let the young leaders brew their new concoctions of ideas, however wrong they may be (and who knows). We have repeatedly seen this in history and the world today is no worse than the world yesterday (whatever people may complain).

The unfairness of discrimination is that as generations change and as each newer generation becomes more similar to each other especially within a community, the lack of social and economic and political mobility merely creates a problem for the future when a outlet is necessary to release the tension of discrimination. Malaysia has started on a good footing but when on to a wrong second foot. Hopefully, the third foot will be placed plainly and squarely on the same soil when we all in Malaysia eat and excrete.

10 comments:

walla said...

The other angle is to ask when does an immigrant become a local which means to ask if one is an immigrant today, would one's offspring and later generations born in the country to which one has emigrated be still considered immigrants or have they become locals by dint of birth.

These later generations would have come into being without their umbilical cords still tied to some foreign land.

At most, they might be given to understand and appreciate how hard was life for their forefathers who had to brave treacherous waters and challenging circumstances just to uproot themselves, start anew and eke a living on unfamiliar foreign soil until they could survive to brood new bloodlines.

That we are still today cogitating the generosity of locals and the praise of immigrants must mean that angle has not been adequately appraised.

walla said...

The next question is why hasn't it been appraised properly. Could it be because an utopian view has not been assayed?

Let's take one such view. What it says is that the final destination shall consist of immigrant descendants becoming as generous as local forefathers and local descendants becoming as enterprising as immigrant forefathers.

Is this achievable when it is asymmetric?

The immigrant descendants born here cannot distinguish themselves from the locals because they consider themselves as locals. Therefore any generosity they show must be generated from the milk of their kindness instinctive from being a generic human being not decomposed as an immigrant descendant.

Likewise the local descendants born equally here cannot distinguish themselves from the aforementioned immigrant descendants because both have been born in the same ceiling-leaky maternity ward, and thus any enterprising spirit they show must be generated from some internal mainspring of wanting to succeed that is not predicated on any inborn deficit.

walla said...

Today we see both can score equally well in the same examinations even as there are some of both who can do poorly in say mathematics which remains perceived to be easier for one than the other.

Achievements are therefore a matter of motivation and training technique. Not ingrained differences which have been made out to be perceived fact.

If we hold fast to endless possibilities from good methods, then the asymmetry can be broken and what is good and productive can be naturalized as a standard operating procedure for a multi-racial society.

In fact this is what good immigrants bring with them. That if life is ever fated, it shall be fated by one's will and effort.

walla said...

Which comes to qualities of success in the community that Hitler wanted to vanquish.

Silbiger identified seven attributes and possibly the seventh did it in during that period:

First, understand that real wealth is portable, namely knowledge;

Second, successful people are professionals and entrepreneurs;

Third, develop verbal confidence;

Fourth, be selectively extravagant but prudently frugal;

Fifth, celebrate individuality and encourage creativity;

Sixth, have something to prove and a drive to succeed, and

Seventh, take care of your own and they will take care of you.

The first six qualities are universal; it's only the extent in which they have been practiced and realized that might have distinguished that community.

The seventh quality was the cruncher. It sat them apart and made them different and thus an identifiable target excused by the madman as cause of the suffering of the others.

Yet one can understand how that seventh quality had come about. It must have started in the coliseum of Rome as they were fed to the lions.

Unfortunately today, they are applying the same method on others but for that you can blame the likes of Balfour.

walla said...

Let us now say policies were badly implemented that had put us on the wrong foot.

Instead of just saying the policy should be to help up the underprivileged in which case if the underprivileged happen to be mostly in one community, then no one can say the policy was skewed to help just that community, it turns out that the policy was implemented to help exclusively that community to the exclusion of others who could not see why they are any different since they were also born in the same maternity ward. And that's deliberate discrimination.

Which naturally reinforced the seventh quality. Which is against the grain of unity. Which is needed for the underprivileged to emerge from their despair through more honest and sincere sharing of means, know-how and opportunities.

How then can the utopian view earlier proscribed be achieved in a sustainable way to make it natural for all to be kind, generous and sharing?

By first eliminating the little hitlers and napoleons, perhaps?

Followed by a firm and sustained programme to achieve the other six qualities?

As prelude to coalesce the seventh's into one because all have learned situations of inequality are not static but dynamically change with each new wave of cooperation that recognizes the strength of diversity in much the same way that an alloy of combined metals is stronger than the sum of the properties of their component metals.

walla said...

So how do we achieve that when there still remains the difference of culture with one made primary just by using the word 'official' which revives the difference between local and immigrant when today such a difference cannot possibly apply, what more runs against the grain of what is needed to prevent the very reaction that hinders the original purpose of helping the underprivileged up?

walla said...

With that question left for wiser brows, let us next consider the case of the mixed parentage offspring.

Such a child can be given the most equilibrating piece of advice:

'If you face a problem and one of your cultures fails you, you are advantaged to have the other to turn to unlike your friends who have come from monoculture background.'

Taking that one more step, namely parents of one community adopting a child of another community, we can see how certain people will dishevel themselves at such a prospect for it will neutralize their attempt at politicization of race to divide communities.

For instance...'wait a minute, that's my son you're talking about. Surely you cannot expect me to stand idly by and listen to you lampoon the community he comes from?'

Let's take it yet one more step. A girl from another community appears at the office door and humbly asks for a job. Are we to take out the calculator to compute whether absorbing her will satisfy some quota assigned or do we do our best to give her a chance in life that will make good for society down the road in which such a society is composite of all communities blurred by common ideals, aspirations, even emotions of kindness and compassion?

Let's go on one more step. And when such a society triggers a wealthier economy which means high-income, won't it then be sustainably easier to say all immigrants regardless of their lack of ability will be welcomed because then the economy and its society will be sustain them to ultimately stand up in life and thus be a positive contributor to species homo sapiens?

walla said...

and so at the eighth..

http://is.gd/ZLbZmy
http://is.gd/iZjDCP
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http://is.gd/XnICOT
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http://is.gd/63W5H9
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http://is.gd/Jjr2Tt
http://is.gd/W9SCBr
http://is.gd/Od0ShY (refresh)
http://is.gd/vbY5mk
and rm80 billion down the road..
http://is.gd/TS7DBb

Kuok is a parasite said...

Chinese immigrants were never welcome in Malaya. They were tolerated and forced by the British. The problem is made worse by Chinese parasites like Robert Kuok who has no two feet on the ground in Malaysia but sucks out the wealth to China.

Kuok is the richest man in Malaysia and he is not even a Malaysian. How stupid could the Malay natives leaders be to allow some expat to own 40 billions of assets while the Malays are beggars in their own country.

Its Chinese like Robert Kuok who dont excrete in Malaysia but raped it of its wealth that makes the native Malays angry with the Chinese.

etheorist said...

I think the compilers presume him to be Malaysian and estimated his assets on a global basis.