Saddam & the good-goodie toads
in the White House
April 1, 2003
MOST of us are now familiar with the Thief of Baghdad, the chap called Saddam accused by the US White House of looting his country and being guilty of every crime imaginable.
But few have heard of the other thieves, the good people in the same White House who read the Bible and hold prayer meetings before giving the orders to bomb Iraq. These good people are those identified by Confucius as the thieves of virtue (Analects chapter 8).
According to the sage, ordinary society can be divided into four classes:
First, the rare saints and Bodhisattvas who follow the Way or Golden Mean (other advocates of the Way are Lao Tze, Jesus and the Buddha).
Next, are the brilliant but erratic people -- like the philosopher Chuang-chou who sang during his wife's funeral. These people have minds so clear, focused and detached they no longer follow society's conventional behaviour and practices.
Third, are the dull but anxious-to-learn people. You and I probably belong here. We are aware of our shortcomings and the nasty, shameful things we have done in the past. We want to start leading an ethical life so as to reduce the opportunity to create further bad karma by our thoughtless living. But we are slow and slow-witted when we try to seek spiritual knowledge, hence our anxiety.
Finally, there is the thieving bunch. According to Mencius (the disciple who expounded and popularised Confucius' teachings and principles), Confucius once remarked these are "the kind of people I don't mind failing to visit me when they're passing my door. They are the hsiangyuan (or goody-goodies), the thieves of virtue."
Mencius described them as follows: "Their words do not tally with their conduct and their conduct does not tally with their words. They are quite contented with securing the approval of society. Hsiangyuan are what country folk call 'good men' or 'goody-goodies.' Since folk call them good men and everywhere they go they are called good men (respectable, nice people), why did Confucius call them thieves of virtue?
"You want to criticise them but they seem so perfect. You want to lampoon them and they seem so correct. They fall in with the present conventions and thoroughly identify themselves with the ways of the times. In their living they seem to be honest and faithful, and in their conduct they seem to be so moral. Everybody likes them and they are quite pleased with themselves."
Mencius went on to quote Confucius that these people resemble the real things but are not the real things. "It is impossible to lead them to the ways of Emperors Yao and Hsun." [Yao and Hsun were model rulers of ancient times who helped found the Chinese civilization.]
After America, the next place where most goody-goody folks congregate is Singapore. For such a snug, smug 600 sq km island, there seems to be too many such characters. You see them each Sunday morning, arriving in church in their gleaming new cars which they park free and illegal by the road. They are law-abiding and will not litter the streets but will move heaven and gehanna in order not to enter a paying carpark.
And when they drive across the Causeway to Johor Bahru town in mainland Malaysia, they will happily throw their soiled tissue paper (covered with pi-sai or nose droppings) and paper cups onto the road. JB is already dirty, so a bit more Singapore trash won't make much difference.
Many years ago, I travelled with a colleague, Katherine Chan, to Yogya city in central Java, during a business trip. Sitting in a coffeeshop next to the train station, we ordered a bottled drink each. Kath inserted a drinking straw into her bottle, pressed a finger on the top end of the straw and pulled the straw out of the bottle. She then flushed the liquid inside the straw onto the dusty but clean-swept floor of the coffeeshop. I gave her a horrified look as the puddle of water spread across the floor, but she merely shrugged.
Two years ago, she withdrew -- just in time -- from a joint venture in computer magazine publishing, leaving her partner to face creditors and financial ruin. As for Kath, she is too busy preparing to be a Christian missionary to worry over these minor concerns.
Even the government has given a label for these people -- the Ugly Singaporeans.
I remember another, more dramatic incident that exposed the truly Ugly Singaporeans.
It was midnight in the news room of the newly launched New Paper tabloid. A report came in that someone, in the course of renovating his flat, had knocked down a crucial supporting wall. This caused the entire apartment block tower to wobble, and the residents had to be evacuated. The reporter on duty, Wan Ching, went to investigate and came back to say that the flat belonged to no other than our very own graphic artist, Hup Lee.
"Now Hup's in big trouble," she said in a gleeful voice. Everyone and I laughed. Suddenly, I remembered that Hup was supposed to be my good friend -- I enjoyed his small town stories of life in SP or Sungai Patani, his home in the north. We used to lunch together and indeed I was the one who helped him draft a work order for his renovation job that included knocking down the wall.
So why was I laughing with the rest?
As you can see, I too belonged to the fourth class of people that Confucius hated: the nice, respectable, church-going, materially comfortable individuals who would not hesitate to chuckle over their friends in trouble while offering condolences in the same breath, photocopy personal documents in the office, inflate transport and expense claims, and come early to work so they can shit in the company's toilet and save on their own home water bills for WC flushing.
[I'm not making up the last bit: the chap who used
his employer's toilet for clearing his morning bowel
was a Mr Ong, a sales man in a food-processing
factory in Woodlands where I worked in 1976-77.]
Hopefully, after watching TV footage and reading the
killing of Iraqi civilians by American weapons of
mass destruction (known as collateral damage),
I have grown more self-aware that I too was a
self-satisfied, gloating toad. Now I am anxious to learn
and help make the world a good place to live,
despite the best but dangerous intention of the
goody-goodies.
As for the gleeful reporter, she used to be slim and
attractive back in the late-1980s during the near
building disaster. Recently I went back to the
newspaper office and saw that she was round as
a ball. No, I didn't gloat. -- Francis Chin
