(with apologies to Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
It’s 2026 here in the good ol’ USA — a republic in constant experimentation, from the centuries of contributions of the 80 tribes of Native peoples to the preservation of nature and culture, to today’s rise and dominance of this nation as a technological republic, as a CEO of surveillance software recently said. A republic and an empire that gained independence from the British Empire in 1776, and today, in 2026, it has been a 250-year evolution — a fascinating experiment in democracy founded upon the idea of “e pluribus unum,” of a government of “the people, by the people, for the people”: constant experimentation, a continuum of defining and redefining the meaning of democracy — from conceptual idealism to a flawed system inching toward authoritarianism.
Americanism is a global addiction, as the Coke slogan goes: “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony.” In the global installation of the brand of American democracy, “Coke is it.”
I have been part of the philosophical, psychological, and cultural journey since I was glued to the black-and-white TV in my village in Majidee, Johor Bahru, in the 1960s and 1970s, as I narrated in my memoir “Grandma’s Gangsta Chicken Curry and Stories from My Hippie Sixties.” I grew up with a steady diet of American visual, audio, and print artifacts — from watching Charlie Chaplin, The Three Stooges, and Leave It to Beaver; to listening to Neil Diamond, the Jackson 5, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grand Funk Railroad, Nat King Cole, Diana Ross; to reading American pop literature such as Mad Magazine and Reader’s Digest. A steady diet of Americanism since I learned and knew how to see, listen, read, and think about the world around me.
“I am what I am,” I quote Popeye the Sailor Man.
“I am, not yet, still becoming…” as my teacher Maxine Greene, an American philosopher, once said in a lecture on Existentialism at my alma mater, Columbia University.
“The only permanent thing is change,” as the Chinese sage Lao Tzu said.
Today, on the first day of 2026, I will continue to mediate the contradictions between the self and the material self and the larger self, and to continue to dissolve the boundaries of concepts that confine us and limit our evolution as evolving selves. I share an excerpt of what I wrote in my column some twenty years ago, with reference to Malaysia, the country I grew up in. Not much has changed.
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‘Rediscover personacracy’
Where is “democracy” in the merciful and compassionate self?
Democracy is a difficult concept to practice, and we ought to craft our own government within ourselves. This will be a start in our effort to build a great architecture of the self in order to understand the self better and to connect to others in the overall scheme of understanding humanity.
The self is corrupted; the nature of corruption is larger than the kinds we have been talking about these days. We have been corrupted largely by the economic conditions into which we are structured by the system of production and reproduction that also determines how we order our lives inter-ethnically, interracially, and inter-religiously.
The corrupted self corrupts itself first and next, when given power, designs corrupt practices and ultimately produces systems that further corrupt generations born into them.
“Know thyself and you will know God,” said a wise man. The first principle of religion is to understand the supreme creator/eternal God from whatever perspective one is born into.
Only when we learn to appreciate the mystical dimension of our own belief system will we find the universal truth in all religions and grow into adulthood with dignity, respect, tolerance, and wisdom.
We will not need a theocratic state; a liberal one based on peaceful, humanistic, and meaningful socialist principles will do.
The government of the merciful and compassionate self will have its own checks and balances and its system of uncompromising ethics. This self can evolve into the incorruptible self.
‘Cleansing our souls’
We need to weed out corrupt politicians. Each one of them is a cancerous cell.
We do not even need to continue reproducing and upholding the system of rampant, rambunctious, race-based capitalism that rapes the human self and leaves it stranded in the Malaysian super corridor of multi-mediated brands of human oppression.
We must not let the arteries of our free spirit be clogged by the filth of our capitalist greed, now on a life-support system of corporate-crony, communal-based political-economic arrangements. The local and wide-area network of our political system is now corrupted to the core — we will need a brand-new system. This Malaysian house built almost 70 years ago now has termites in its foundation. We must build our habitat anew.
We continue to race faster among ourselves, inspired by the ideology of developmentalism that sanctions the rape of nature to turn it into human and material capital.
We continue to develop technology to accelerate the exploitation process so that we may now be called a “biotechnological nation” after calling ourselves “industrialized” and “information-rich,” imitating patterns of economic growth we do not yet fully understand. We become poorer in our capacity to stop, think, and reflect on the nature of the race we are caught in.
Our politicians have not read much. They are interested in perfecting the art and science of preserving power and wealth. They are skilled in plotting downfalls, like the Ides of March in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Our politicians are busy singing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” a testimony to idiotic pride and self-centered politics of survival and mistrust.
Imagine how many schools could be built, houses for the poor constructed, social services improved, and financial aid for education disbursed if we translated the money politicians spend on buying votes into meeting our basic needs. Is this the best standard of morality we expect from our leaders?
But we deserve them — we voted them into power. We continue to engage in this ritual of a hollow democracy.
Our politicians continue to design policies that are anti-nature and anti-liberation. They have not acquired the language of critical analysis, reflective sociology, or radical, humanistic transformation of society to steer us on the middle path of developmentalism — a path of moderation much needed in a world run by warmongers and profiteers.
‘System of capitalized greed’
As a nation, we will one day have a massive heart attack as a consequence of overheating our engines of growth and breathing the carbon-monoxide air of capitalist greed we have churned; we will then choke ourselves and our children to death.
Each human self in the pecking order of this Malaysian system of capitalist greed is utilized and capitalized by the next person up the ladder so that more profit can be squeezed by those who own the signs and symbols of power.
Human oppression becomes invisible; what exists is an invisible system of disciplining and punishing our minds and bodies so that the wheel of materialistic karma can continue to roll and bring humanity into the moksha of dehumanization.
Let us de-evolve from the current state of things, from this rat race couched in the language of Formula One — a feature of this informational superhighway of corporatist developmentalism we mistakenly call “national progress.” This economic design is genetically altering our natural self.
Let reason and compassion rule. Man is endowed with these to survive as a species. Let us leave the old world behind. There is a brave new world inside of us, ahead.
The world of personal democracy — of personacracy… “
I will continue my confessions. Have a good year!
