I refer to the letter 'Malaysian First' requires doing a Ridhuan Tee.

The writer's letter throws a grenade into the works but sadly I think some readers misunderstand the nature of the explosion or that anything has, in fact, blown up.

His argument revolves around the idea that ‘the ambiguity of Malaysian First lies in its intrinsic character: it's a negation of a negation.’ In other words, I am not what you are not; and he articulates this quite clearly: I define myself not by what I espouse, but by what I reject. You, seeing that I am a dangerous bearded contradictory nutcase, define yourself by rejecting my act of rejection in favour of...what exactly? An all-espousing goodness?

But that universal source of comfort requires that we get off our hobby horses and subscribe to yet another dark experiment in social engineering. To achieve the Malaysian identity we must reject our individuality in favour of some deluded Orwellian nonsense that does not even have the benefit of being sinister. It is not so much ill-thought as un-thought and we perform all kinds of mental amputation so that we might fit in.

This puts us on the downward spiral towards meaninglessness, and every attempt we make to express Malaysian First, or ‘1Malaysia’ for that matter, drives us deeper into mindless babble not because we lack the vocabulary, education, or means to express ourselves but because these things are engineered precisely to resist close definition or scrutiny.

Here I depart from the writer because I believe that this kind of babble is necessary for the preservation of the orderly and willing ignorance that forms the foundation of political engagement in our country.

We are fundamentally lazy and as a people we depend on greater meaninglessness for the simple reason that we can read into it whatever petty, selfish or vindictive sentiment that happens to come into our heads at the time.

Undefined feel-good sloganeering serves precisely the same purpose as blind faith: it achieves mass appeal only because it appeals to the lowest common denominator, and in turn this is necessary for any kind of mass mobilisation (or manipulation, which is the same thing).

It is also very easy to oppose a slogan with a counter-slogan, just as it is so much easier to attack the writer as ‘truly stupid’, ‘shallow’ or lacking ‘self-confidence’, as some readers have, than it is to attack his arguments.

In this sense the tools of both the regime and the opposition are one and the same: both sides depend on the mob, both appeal to it, and both are elected on the same endless streams of empty babble. And it is the tools that ultimately triumph.

We know the system is rotten to the core, but instead of working at piecemeal social engineering to subvert it, the bulk of us seek some sweeping utopian panacea – whether a change of government, the imposition of theocracy, or the restoration of some equally undefined ‘justice’, ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ – that merely replaces one defective vision with another.

We cannot possibly win against these odds unless we have the courage individually to determine our convictions for ourselves and to stand by them. In this sense the folks at Perkasa are at least honest about what they desire.