Social: How Are Cold Blooded Murderers Nurtured In A Society?

Social: How Are Cold Blooded Murderers Nurtured In A Society?

A year ago we discovered with horror of how a young girl, Huang Na, had been murdered in Pasir Panjang. Now we again come across another cold blooded murder of a child, Nonoi. The murderes in both murders were closely acquainted or related to the victims enough for the victims to trust them fully.

No murderer is born as one. He/she only grows up to be one. As a child or infant he/she is incapable of committing anything what they eventually end up committing. Hence there must be some form of transformation that transforms him/her into a beast capable of murder OR there must be something within us that if not controlled, will transform us into such a beast. Therefore we must realize there are negative environmental forces present within society that transforms one into a beast and/or there are positive environmental forces absent within society to prevent one from turning into a beast. Indeed it’s a combination of both the presence of these negative forces and absence of positive forces within a society that promotes the nurturing of such cold blood murderers. Therefore Singapore undeniably possesses such an environment enough to breed these two murderers. Singaporeans, who are averse to self-criticism, will deny vehemently and naively point out that if this assertion is true, why then every Singaporean is not a killer. Well this is a case of basket of apples. When they are left in a room with the inappropriate temperature and humidity, not every apple will rot but some definitely will.

When we have a few apples rot in a basket of apples, we throw away the rotten apples. That’s precisely what we do with our murderers. However we can do more. Even for apples we try to adjust the temperature and humidity to ensure no apple rots. Why aren’t we doing that for these beasts? It is easier for the institutions to look at them as rotten apples and just discard them than to complement those efforts by ensuring the apples don’t rot in the first place. Nothing can promise us that our apples in our basket will never rot should we control our temperature and humidity. Yet that element of uncertainty never damps our efforts. However when it comes to preventing humans within a society from turning into beasts, its always a different attitude and approach.

Religious institutions have a large role to play in this and secularism within a secular society remains a primary devil in stopping it. A secular society can never, as much as it can deny or proclaim otherwise, be able to develop ethics and virtues within each individual of society as effectively, efficiently and successfully as a religious society. Secularcrats can only be cynical to this statement and have produced nothing really empircally tangible to prove their ideals. Every secular society since the enlightenment age has a darker story to tell than their religious former. Secular societies tries in vain to promote ethics, virtues and good conduct through ethics boards, state run campaigns, propaganda etc etc but can never have even a fraction of the kind of impact that religious doctrines can. Even the coldest terrorists that we are seeing today are the fruits of secular societies using methodologies in their reasoning from secular societies. Societies based on religion have always been more humane and never saw such barbary. Even recent phenomenons of religion based societies which were trying frantically to reconstruct parallel to traditional religion based societies failed miserably only because they were more parallel to secular societies and were instead only pseudo-religious.

Educational institutions are another set of primary tools necessary to create a society that is incapable of nurturing beasts. That is where everyone of us spend up to a quarter of our life. That’s where you can nip the devil in us in the bud. Unfortunately our educational institutions from primary schools to universities here in Singapore function nothing more than as large tuition or teaching centers, tutoring kids to score good grades in examinations. Good conduct is paramount and supreme to good grades. But its not quite a prerogative but rather an ideal. Do teachers spend even half their time teaching good values? What’s the use of learning and understanding mathematical theory of equality without understanding the equality of mankind? I really wonder what schools these two beasts went to. I do know only one of them studied in Singapore. But Malaysian educational system is not too far different from Singapore’s. Theirs might not be as taxing but in Malaysian schools, just like in Singapore schools, is promoting good conduct, ethics virtues and values amongst students as central a mission as teaching kids how to read, write and pass exams?

Computerized, mechanized societies such as Singapore chant on the mantra of productivity. But how meaningful can a high level of productivity be when it wrecks the social well-being. The time one spends in office and with family is a natural tradeoff. Its pure shortsightedness of the capitalists because deteriorated social well-being will then in turn in long run affect future productivity.

When the space of an individual becomes too possessed by commercial culture through media, music, cinema etc, that person becomes bankrupt of emotions as he/she is de-sensitized to anything outside him/her realm and instead transforms into a selfish object. Money is like fire. Its only beneficial to us as a slave and not a master. When money is our slave, which happens when we give it no priority, then we are its master. When money is our master, which happens when we chase after it, then we are its slave. Building a society on money and material enslaves us to money and material which then burns our inner core away.

There are so many other forces present in our Singapore society that promotes the negative influences which transformed these two men into beasts .Likewise there are so many forces that prevents the existence of positive influences which protects these two men from turning into beasts. Indeed as a society we need to redefine our space in order to stop any forces that can nurture the growing up of individuals into cold blooded murderers.