Why Politics Never Leaves You Alone: Khoo Ying Hooi on Living Inside Malaysia's Political Reality

The piece begins with a conversation between Khoo Ying Hooi and a friend. Khoo, an associate professor at Universiti Malaya, writes in a Malay Mail opinion column published on August 9 that she understands why people say they want nothing to do with politics. They are tired of the drama, the betrayals and the cycle of promises and disappointments. They want to work, love, raise children, read, travel and see friends without thinking about politicians.

Her answer is that politics does not honour that wish. You can stop reading the news and refuse to argue about elections, parties or politicians, and life will carry on in many ways. But decisions are still being made, rules written and boundaries drawn, whether or not you are paying attention. Even leaving the country, she writes, only moves you from one political reality into another.

Khoo argues that Malaysian politics has travelled well beyond Parliament, party headquarters and campaign stages. It sits at the dinner table, in talk with colleagues and in exchanges with strangers. It lives in questions of race, religion, royalty, language and belonging that are never allowed to be ordinary questions. Many Malaysians, she says, learn this young: what can be said openly, what needs a softer voice, and which historical events are handled carefully because everyone knows how much meaning has piled up around them. On some subjects, disagreement is treated as provocation, disrespect, disloyalty or danger.

From there she turns to what she sees as the deepest form of political power: not making people speak, but making them stop themselves before they do. She points to a familiar Malaysian refrain, "better not": better not say too much, ask that question, be seen as too political, or make trouble. She does not dismiss it. People have jobs to protect, families to look after and institutions to navigate, and silence can be survival. She says she has never believed everyone must be brave in the same way. But when the phrase becomes this common, she writes, power no longer has to work very hard. An institution does not need everyone to believe in its decisions; it may only need enough people to conclude that objecting is pointless, inconvenient or dangerous.

She places this against the country's recent history. Since 2018, governments have changed with a frequency once unimaginable, old coalitions have collapsed, new ones have formed, and old enemies and new allies have married and divorced. Reform has become a common language of government. Yet Khoo says changing who governs is not the same as changing how power works. A new coalition can inherit old methods, a reformist government can come to like the tools it once criticised, and politicians who demanded openness may discover the appeal of control. Those who complained of being silenced can grow less keen on dissent when it is aimed at them. In her words, power can make hypocrisy feel reasonable.

That is why she has little patience for the claim of being apolitical. Disliking politics, skipping the vote or the protest, or insisting none of it concerns you does not put you outside it; it only means you are not engaging with a world still deciding things about you. Privilege, she adds, offers more room and protection but not exit, because the same laws and institutions apply. For others the pressure is more immediate: a refused permit, a scholarship that never materialises, a law not applied equally, a book that cannot be discussed openly, a job that suddenly feels insecure. Everyone lives inside politics, she says; some are simply better shielded from the consequences.

Khoo also warns about what follows outrage. People become exhausted, then cynical, then expect less, and blame politicians as corrupt, incompetent and all the same. Sometimes, she says, the anger is deserved, but blaming them can be too easy, letting people grow used to the same behaviour and excuses. They lower the bar and call it realism. Power, she writes, does not always need loyalty; sometimes exhaustion is enough.

She closes by admitting she feels the pull to be left alone too, preferring at times to think about music, love, travel or friendship. But politics, she says, is not interested in fatigue, and by the time it finds you again it has often decided more about your life than you realised. The open question is whether public debate on race, religion and royalty widens, or whether disillusionment hardens into resignation.