Form And Substance

The famous Physicist Richard Feynman (Nobel Prize winner, 1965) once told a story of a tribe inhabiting in the South Seas. During the war they saw airplanes landing on the specially built runways on one of the islands to deliver lots of goodies. When the war was over, the runways were left to ruin. The locals wanted the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land.

While Richard Feynman used this story to illustrate what he called cargo cult science, which describes work that has the semblance of being scientific, but is missing in scientific integrity and scientific thought that corresponds to utter honesty, it is not difficult to find, in events happening around us, that form has been taken as substance. Either we are too ignorant, pretend to be ignorant, dare not (or do not have the opportunity to) voice up openly, or whatever reasons known to ourselves, form is often equated to substance. More often than not, form is deliberately equated to substance simply to cater for the present needs, to show support to a certain cause, simply to be obedient, to join the bandwagon, or to be in the front line of praises and accolades. After all the substance will usually be revealed much later, usually after the initiator has long forgotten, too busy initiating another new event or perhaps, retired.

Having said that, I am not advocating the practice of equating form to substance. Abraham Lincoln's advice, 'You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time' is even more relevant in the golden age of information and communication technology, where truth can be revealed practically at the speed of light. But then again in a reality that is so diverse with thoughts, principles, powers and agendas, many people are in mental dissonance due to the dilemma faced whenever the issue of form and substance has to be deliberated--especially when it is a question of survival.