Book 4 The Threat to our Hope for a Better Life

We are All ‘Prisoners’ of our Own Destiny

Escapism is imprisonment within the very walls of your own prison!

WE HAVE all been ‘escapees’ trapped in our own prisons at some point in our lives. This brings to mind my two-year stint as a prison officer at a Reformative Training Centre.

A prisoner, who had been convicted of manslaughter, managed to escape from his cell late one night. Since I was living in the staff quarters nearby, I was rudely awakened by the ear-blasting alarm call to emergency duty. I, together with a dozen other officers, had the awesome task of finding a jailbird on the loose.

I dashed out of bed immediately with one hand fumbling to pull up my trouser zip as I joined the frantic team, clutching a torch on the other hand. At the guard house on this fateful night was Kubla Singh, the duty officer, looking all agitated and sweaty, as he issued instructions while reporting on the phone to his immediate superior about the unfortunate incident.

The Chief in turn briefed his superior, the Superintendent of Prisons, who in turn reported up the line to the Minister of Home Affairs. This system of reporting up the pyramidal hierarchy is a well-known fact of life, which we see installed in all modern business organisations and institutions.

The Many Deadly Inadequacies of the Survival of the Fittest

I knew the escapee because he was in my care. Let’s call him Kiasu because he had been through enough failures in his life and had probably decided that he was not going to be a failure again, ever! He was short and small built, aged 21, with a stunning, colourful display of dragon tattoos all over his body. In a fit of rage, he killed someone who had played him out over some bar-girl he knew at an infamous girlie bar in Katong.

He was caught barely days after his escape and was locked up in solitary confinement as punishment. It transpired that the reason he escaped was due to the constant taunts he had received from the other inmates, probably because of his diminutive size.

In prison, it is quite common for the prisoners to while away their time ‘gambling’. As they would usually have no money to gamble, they would issue “IOU” notes, which were redeemable on their release from prison. Unfortunately for Kiasu, he had issued so many IOU notes that he had to repay his debts in kind by allowing his body to be sexually abused by his ‘creditors’.

The indignity and intolerability of submitting his body to the abuse forced him to hatch out a plan to redeem his ‘face’ or honour — thus his determination to escape. The moral of this story is that there are many deadly inadequacies in our lives that we need to take control of before they destroy our lives. It is all too easy for us to shift the blame on to other people or, worse, escape from the problems that are gnawing away into our lives, eventually destroying it.

My examples of John and Kiasu are good examples of the different aspects of escapism that we sometimes resort to out of desperation. John was deeply unhappy with the insensitivity and lack of managerial competence shown by his superior. He found himself imprisoned within the four walls of a desperately depressing and unhappy work environment.

So he did what many of us in his position would have done — he ‘escaped’ by quitting from his job on the spur of the moment. Kiasu’s escape was less symbolic although more dramatic. Besides escaping from the regimental life of the prison, he was also escaping from the unhappy ‘culture’ of life in there, which he found to be abusive and dehumanising. He wanted to preserve his honour as well as his liberty. Kiasu is no different from you and I.

We all try to run away from the painful realities of life rather than take them face on. Whenever we shirk our domestic or work responsibilities, we are effectively no different from John or Kiasu in their bid to ‘escape’. Kiasu’s behaviour was an abnormal reaction to the outside world, which had derailed his childhood dreams of a better life.

To ensure our survival beyond the narrow confines of our ignorance, we must step out of our smug and comfortable nest and get into the practical world by taking charge of our lives. If we wish for some of our cherished dreams to materialise, we must attempt to address two critical areas of potential harm that was inherited from our long evolutionary origins:

1. The self-defeating self and the dangers it poses

2. The ugly side of mismanagement.