MAY 21 — On April Fool’s Day, (in)famous blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin (RPK) made a RM100,000 bet on the outcome of GE14. RPK challenged anyone — but in particular news portal Cilisos — to put up the cash with the winner collecting his prize after Polling Day.
From the looks of it, nobody took up the challenge. In hindsight, if many parties had taken the bet then RPK could have lost almost half a million by May 10.
Whatever the case, there’s a lesson in RPK’s challenge which politics-obsessed Malaysians need to learn:Opinions and predictions (especially the latter) shouldn’t come cheap. And if there are consequences to people, then there should be a cost for being wrong.
In this vein, I’ve written about how we need corporate dis-incentives to talking high-brow bulls***. The last thing organisations need is pseudo-VIPs earning big bucks by yacking away and spreading more work and risks to everyone else at virtually no cost to themselves. E.g. if a particular project or idea succeeds, the person reaps the rewards. But if it fails? The same person hides behind “committee decisions”, how it was “the other department’s fault” and so on.
There’s a connection here between the corporate world and the political one. Thousands of people shout “instructions”, make predictions, and talk big. But if there is no cost to being proven wrong, it’s all fluff.
This is why I actually respect the “mob” that showed up at the Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah airport a few days after the election, because they were concerned the former prime minister and his wife were trying to flee the country. At least these people took the trouble to be physically present.
They put their time on the line and some were even prepared to use their bodies to block the ex-PM’s car if required. So should these folks be judged by folks who were probably tweeting from the comfort of their beds? That sounds wrong.
Likewise, this is one of the reasons why before Raya, there must be puasa. And why Christians tend to fast before Easter. God doesn’t want cheap signalling (see Note 1). You want the benefits of the universe? You want to fill your soul? Suffer first.
Compare the devotee carrying the kavadi up 272 steps with the average dude blasting Donald Trump on Facebook.
One has paid a huge price, the other pays nothing. One (literally) carries a huge burden, the other merely signals how “virtuous” he or she is compared to POTUS.
How a costly opinion matters
Back to RPK’s RM100,000 bet.
Imagine if every time we made a prediction and simply shared an opinion, we were required to put some money on it. How would this change things?
Surely, we’d be far more cautious in what we say. Surely we’d do way more research and thinking before exercising our “prophetic” abilities.
Should we be proven wrong, you can bet there’ll be loads of reflection and analysis to ensure we get it right next time. Hey, we don’t want to keep losing money, right?
Again, compare this with the average social media post which takes absolutely no risk whatsoever. Even worse if the post is made anonymously.
I’m guessing this is one of the reasons why INVOKE’s predictions on GE14 were largely accurate. Using almost 50,000 volunteers all clocking in more than 25,000 man-hours and about RM11 million raised, that’s skin in the game.
That’s “involvement”, that’s pain and sweat i.e. that’s “cost” already paid upfront. Compare this to the average Malaysian performing “social justice” via his keyboard, throwing out curses and “advice” to elected folks; the only cost we’ve borne is lining up in a school, having our fingers inked and marking “X” on a ballot sheet.
In fact, it’s quite the fallacy to always talk about the people needing to “have a voice.” If that “voice” doesn’t come with any cost to being wrong, we can say whatever we want and do so with impunity.
Clearly, this is one of the main reasons Barisan Nasional lost, because Malaysians wanted to ensure that those who wrecked the country pay a price for doing so. It would appear that even some Umno members had had enough of the “free lunch” mentality their leaders were practising, tragically because it was FOC for those in power but not for the nation as a whole.
Social media, unfortunately, is one gargantuan free lunch where one can curse a million people and make a zillion reckless proposals without suffering an iota of pain or cost.
At least, people like Wong Chen and Rafizi Ramli risk being rejected at the next election and their reputations are 100 per cent at stake. That’s skin in the game and, whatever our views of their views, these two will never be called cowards who only receive the upside without any downside.
Do we make others take risks they shouldn’t?
Which brings me to the final point of skin in the game: Whenever life comes with a price or a risk (and this happens very often), someone has to bear it. Each time we write or speak or tweet or whatever, we are either:
A) drawing attention to it and encouraging people to take fewer risks, or
B) bearing the cost of it by putting our own necks on the line, or
C) making someone else bear it (at no cost to ourselves)
When Pakatan Harapan candidates went to jail for their activism, they were performing [B]. When RPK made the RM100k bet (even for an outcome he was wrong about), he was performing [B]. Tun Mahathir working so hard at 92 years, so Malaysia can be a better nation? That’s the highest [B] ever.
When Zakir Naik preaches that it’s better to choose a bad Muslim leader over a good non-Muslim one, he’s doing [C] i.e. he’s making another society bear serious political risks with no penalty to himself.
When hordes of “social justice warriors” condemn a non-Chinese girl for wearing a cheongsam to her prom, they are realising [C] i.e. they are raising the level of needless fragility and hypersensitivity among society as a whole, simply to satisfy their own sense of cultural appropriateness (whatever that means).
When people encourage the Palestinians to march and riot along the Gaza border, that’s a major [C] i.e. they are putting both the Palestinians and the Israeli soldiers at risk, whilst they themselves condemn Israel from the comfort of their homes. Needless to say, Jho Low is a [C] dude through and through.
Less sensationally, I think every parent and teacher performs a [B] when they quietly dedicate their lives to their children and/or students, for barely a word of thanks. Same goes with every PACA person on election week.
I’m sure you can think of many examples where individuals helped others bear the brunts of life. During this puasa season, maybe it helps to ensure we don’t behave like [C] people.
This article? I hope it’s at least an [A].
* Note 1: Check out Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s article on this topic of “costly worship.” His book Skin in the Game(New York: Random House, 2018) is without doubt the best work on how the lack of risk-taking leads to perilous outcomes for everybody.
** This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
