Inspiration at Borders

Dispositional-Situational Totality

Dispositional:

1. Physical Health

2. Biography

3. Mental state

Situational:

1. Economic & financial

2. Social location

3. Prospects

4. Nuclear social location (?)

5. Autonomy and obligations

Collective conscience is a myth. All there are are multiple overlapping webs of belief enforced or perpetuated by a narrow ruling class and modifications to the sum confluence of these webs are contingent on power symmetries between groups or individuals. Personal liberty has an inverse causal(?) correlation with cultural homogenity because individual deviance is not penaised - it may even be respected on equal par with antecedent paradigms.

Culture = common practices within a particular social loci(?)

Chinese = "Jews of the East" - Phibun Songkhram

Ethnic and cultural loyalties provided a more intrinsically appealing basis for national identity than the modern state system, based on complex ideological foundations imported from 'alien' societies.

In South-East Asia (SEA), Marxist class conflict is entangled with ethnic conflict between native races and 'alien' ones. Prior to independence, the native races have always occupied an economically inferior position compared to the economically dominant white colonials. After independence, alien economic hegemony persisted as the Chinese became the economically dominant ethnic group in every South-East Asian country. Attempts to transfer ownership of the economy to "real natives" or Bumiputeras, such as Indonesia's Benteng Program or Malaysia's New Economic Policy (NEP) were circumvented by "Ali-Baba" arrangements where businesses would be registered under the names of Bumiputera while Chinese businessmen called the shots.

These conditions resulted in widespread ethno-economic conflicts in various forms. Malaysia experienced racial riots in 1969, Chinese in Indonesia had to relocate or surrender their businesses (PP 10/1959) and those that refused faced harsh repression. Such xenophobic tendencies even resulted in attempts to 'naturalise' the alien races via cultural genocide or forced assimilation. Thai and Indonesian Chinese were forced to take on Thai- and Indonesian- sounding names respectively, although the latter went so far as to forbid all public expressions of Chinese culture resulting in the closure of many temples, Chinese-language schools and the prohibition of public displays of Chinese script as part of the 1967 "Basic Policy for the Solution of the Chinese Problem".

I've become very adept at lying.