Pathological complacency
At Sunday’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) national congress, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said that he had no reason to apologize to Taiwan.
At the same meeting, Deputy Legislative Speaker Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), in her speech following the party’s official endorsement of her as its presidential candidate, said that the problems Taiwan is facing right now are the “threat of economic stagnation, widening wealth disparity, a lack of distributional justice and declining quality of life, with political infighting and populism causing national development to become mired and society to descend into disorder, leaving the public at a loss.”
KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) spoke of the reasons for the party’s rout in last year’s nine-in-one elections, asking the audience: “Did we put everyone together, irrespective of their strengths, and leave behind those at the bottom of society? Did we concentrate on people of all generations, and not think about the future of the young generation? When we were striving to expand the fruits of Taiwan’s economy, did we forget to share these fruits with everyone, across the board?”
The funny thing is that all of the unfortunate circumstances listed by Hung and Chu in their speeches were actually the direct result of seven years of Ma in office. Ma might believe that he has no reason to apologize to Taiwan, but this kind of cognitive dissonance and complacency in one’s own achievements has already reached pathological proportions.
Yu Kung
Taipei
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