COMMENT | Going back to the Rukun Negara

COMMENT | We are a country with deep fault lines. Issues of race, religion, language, culture and other differences within our society have always existed.

We are constantly trying to manage these conflicts within our society. By and large, we have been successful. The last major sectarian conflict was more than 50 years ago, and fortunately, our foundations have been strong enough to withstand the challenges that have surfaced.

The advent of social media over the past decade or so have enriched our democracy, but it has also brought about new ways for conflicts to come to the fore.

We have been conditioned to believe that laws are a panacea to all our social ills. Any issue or conflict that arises we think must be dealt with by state intervention through the enforcement of laws. But laws exist to deal with those that go beyond the limits of wrongs - the extremes of what we as a society deem "acceptable".

Laws also inherently require the state to step in. We, through our representatives in the legislature, empower the state to take action to deal with those who go beyond the limits.

Laws, therefore, can and have been abused...