Survival of the fittest

Everyone in Cambodia, from top to bottom, still operates on a survivalist mentality. This is understandable because of our recent past. The country has found relative stability just 10 years ago when the final remnants of the KR were eliminated. When one works on a survival instinct, one has a tendency to hoard resources, often to the detriment of everyone else, and to flee (to a more survivable place). The survival mentality promotes selfishness– help yourself before helping others. Selfishness, as it addresses more basic human needs like food and shelter, takes precedence over selflessness, a quality identified with higher needs like moral idealism and political ideology. That’s why Khmer leaders don’t like to lose their seats. Their survival would be threatened. We don’t live in a country where a president who earns just $400K a year can make tens of millions of dollars writing books, giving speeches and working for private companies when he is out of office.




Most of us are frustrated with the slow transition from selfishness to selflessness, from the individual fulfillment to collective fulfillment, from survival to living. It’s going to take some time and patience. In the meantime, we have to avoid repeating the same mistakes and replaying same old tunes like a broken record.

When one considers the challenges that Cambodia faces, the issue of corruption always seems to jump out. Corruption is really a collection of often unfair, inefficient, and abusive practices arising from the extreme scarcity of resources, greed, and degradation of social and moral foundations of our society. We all know that corruption exists in Cambodia; it’s rather hard to miss. But in order to formulate an actionable plan to tackle this problem, we must be able to measure and quantify the various aspects of corruption and understand the complex interactions among the multitude of economic, social, political, cultural and religious factors that give rise to unwholesome practices collectively known as corruption.

Simply calling out wealthy high-ranking government officials and demanding that they end corruption is not going to get us anywhere. Corruption in Cambodia is an incredibly complex matter that requires a much more thorough and comprehensive approach.

Too much focus on the conceptualization of corruption can be counterproductive because it promotes finger-pointing and the distancing oneself from shared accountability. In the end, we’re all part of the web of humanity that commits all the good and bad deeds in the world.

As complex a problem as corruption is, I think there is, yet, a simple solution for it. Was it Gandhi who said, “Be the change you want to see in world”? This is one of the reasons I decided to move back to Cambodia. If you are mindful of your own thoughts and actions, you’ll find that in each and every day, you’ll have some thoughts and impulses that are good and wholesome and some that are destructive. As long as you’re able to keep track of your own thoughts, impulses and actions everyday, you’ll naturally become more moderate and compassionate. You’ll still make mistakes and commit unwholesome deeds, but at least you’ll commit fewer of them and have less crave for the excesses for yourself that lead to suffering for others.
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