WE tend to dispense less forms of personal emotions, such as empathy and insightfulness, because we live in a world that has been increasingly dependent on our individual emotional investment through materialist and consumerist cultures via capitalism that further funnelled us into ourselves – my needs, my desires, my problems – core tenets of individualism.

So, to explain a ‘cold’ society in quantitative terms is fruitless if the attempt is to understand the seemingly abstract nuances of any modern society.

A case in point was the 2012 ‘survey’ which concluded that Singaporeans are a ‘emotionless’ populace.

On which rubric were Singaporeans ‘graded’ so that the date could reach some seemingly empirical ‘data’ to reach that hypothesis?

Like most true artists, my Singaporean singer-songwriter compatriot Hell Low wrote a song called Emotionless Ones in response to this so-called survey on a split EP we released back in 2014.

The problem is that the power structures that have come to govern everyday life and culture are too vast to grasp any nuances.

Even if some core members of them do understand, they are most probably a minority for modern governance and the universal system we have to adopt collectively is ‘democracy’; the concepts of ‘majority’ and ‘numbers’ have taken precedence over any other forms of qualifiers.

This would be an interesting textual analysis for any media scholars out there, some of whom I’m sure have done in one way or another.

Even how we value our religious beliefs have come to be informed by ‘numbers’: as a Muslim, I grew up with the concept of ‘pahala’ as being the primacy currency to ‘purchase’ a ticket to eternal heaven.

You collect pahala ‘points’ – like how you rack up your membership points at the supermarket, petrol station etc – to build your mountain of pahala to guarantee your spot.

Yet we ask ourselves repeatedly: “how have we become this ‘cold’ and ‘calculative’ to ourselves?”

Sadly, it’s just how capitalism and the free market operate and hinge from. Stating that there is so much disparity in a capitalist world is akin to saying that there’s so much equality in a socialist world.

It’s a live ocean with its own internal will and logic that sail upon, or so we believe it to be.

Aren’t these systems man-made to begin with? Money and currency were not bestowed upon us on an auspicious moonlit night.

It was how we discovered ‘value’ and its equivalent worth. It is our own doing from the start.

This begs the question: is there a correlation between our broader capitalist system and cultures and the official belief systems that exist within the internal societies?

Of course, there is. Capitalism adapts well to its host, most often unwittingly. The host only realises it when its presence (or symptoms) starts to appear and that is usually at an advanced state of interloping.

A simple exercise: find a soft drink advertisement in any medium and try to identify what ‘values’ it is trying to associate with the said carbonated sugared beverage – aside from the images or words, its colours and whatever visual effects.

Then observe the product in your hands before consuming or opening it (purchase it first of course, I’m not encouraging theft): now, look closely at it.

Does it resemble what you have seen in the advertisement earlier? Note its similarity with what it is promised to be in the advertisement – in its appearance (how it looks in your eyes) and also form (how it feels in your hands).

OK, you will wake up when I snap my fingers (snap!).

Now, take a look around you – what are the things you hold dear to yourself? Are its meanings truly yours?

Or were they advertised and made ‘natural’ to you? How does this naturalisation happen?

Let’s take religion for example. I’ll take mine: ‘official’ Islam as practised in Malaysia, arguably, runs parallel with the development of Evangelist Christianity in the United States.

Itself a nation built upon the capitalist-friendly tenets of such notions of individualism, materialism, and the most important of all, conquest through exploitation.

The religious leaders in this country do not represent me but on the surface they (and others) assume that this is the ‘natural’ way it should be.

It isn’t. I don’t need a middleman in my personal relationship with the Almighty. As we know, middlemen often take a big cut.

The halal industry is a good example of the material and capitalist manifestation of this exploitation based on ‘natural’ assumptions we make about faith and kosher-ness.

Take away the lens of ‘religion’ and you will see it for what it really is. It’s like music charts now: everyone and every streaming platform has one now, defeating the original purpose of music ‘charts’ manned by gatekeepers and tastemakers.

Itself a product of mass production and capitalism. Oh boy, the circle never ends, does it?

That’s why history repeats: we are a circle of repetition as a civilisation.

We valorise conquest and exploitation – it’s in our popular culture, folks – blaring in our faces every day.

It’s in your favourite movies, songs, TV series, video games, novels, reality shows, talent shows, news, comics, fitness regimes, dieting cultures, colonial narratives, histories of empires, etc.

We have also been made to assume that religions in this world are up neck-to-neck with each other and these are based on opposing or seemingly contradictory tenets that make up each religion.

In fact, even within religions themselves there’s discontent among the different factions or sects. Do we need an Olympics for religions too? Let’s not get there.

Now, let’s take several steps back. Imagine a globe, a globe of the earth. Now step back. The further we step back, the smaller the globe seems.

That’s us bickering in God’s universe – no one can hear you scream in space.

All religions are part of a group of like-minded systems: religious beliefs. They are more similar with each other than most are able to realise.

It’s like siblings fighting, you shouldn’t believe in any of them telling the truth, because, well because they are guided by their own confirmation biases.

It is within this vast fog of confirmation bias we all, yes all of us, live in.

You can’t see it on the globe, even if you step in as close as you can get, because it’s internal – like a thought or an idea. A dream.

There are things unquantifiable. In such a premise, we must gauge its abstract quality first and foremost: we need to think in qualitative terms more than ever.

We can’t trust appearances – it’s the major fault of many, myself included, because we’re human.

Yet we are deluded again by the appearances and the vicious cycle repeats. As plainly evident in this Covid world we live in (and the present Malaysian political landscape), numbers are a great source of our anxieties.

It is in the midst of these vicious cycles where we tend to retreat and be mindful of how much we emotionally invest in ourselves towards external things.

It is like preserving heat in winter or standing in a shade in a tropical heat.

We need to conserve our emotions, be thrifty with it, for rainy days.

It is easy to vent and lose yourselves in this noisy and Internet-induced world.

Make a piggy bank for your emotions and save it for those closest to you and loved ones. They are worth it more than anything and anyone else. – August 6, 2021.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.