Malaysia Sejahtera - The solution for Sustainable Development of the 21st Century

Last Sunday I had the opportunity to attend the Perdana Discourse Series organized by Perdana Leadership Foundation featuring keynote speaker Prof. Emeritus Tan Sri Dato' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak with the title The Power of Youth: Building a Better Future in the Face of Economic, Social and Environmental in the Anthropocene Era. 

He started his speech by thanking the emcee and talked about how the introduction in his CV was too glorified. He doesn't want people to be impressed with his CV because, in the academic world, too many people focus too much on their credentials, but the moment they open their mouths to speak, nothing worth listening to. He wants people to judge him by the content of his speech, which I was really impressed by at the end of the speech.

Here are some of the insights that I gained:

1. He started with the context of VUCA and BANI. To him it was the same thing, but people coined different terms. So he coined his own term - VODCA. 

Vulnerable

Obsolete

Disruptive

Collapse

Anthropocene (you can Google it but he mentioned Earth in the Age of Dehumanised Humans).

2. The Great Acceleration, somewhere between 1950 - 2000+ there was Exponential Growth in so many areas caused by the Industrial Revolution 1,2,3 and now 4. This caused things to be unsustainable, just like everything else in the world.

3. This leads to a Toxic Culture where we heard of so many cases of people burnout and stress out which leads to people committing suicide. 

4. To solve this, we need to get back into education. Education in the 21st century is too focused on the 3M - Manpower, Mindset, and Machine. That creates an education without a soul. We don't even start by asking who we are before we do anything. He proposed that 21st-century, education should focus on 3H - Humanity, Heartset, and High Touch which leads to sympathy, empathy, and compassion. 

5. So he proposed the concept of SEJAHTERA. Just like any language, there are certain words that we cannot translate. We have IKIGAI in Japan and UBUNTU in Africa. It is very difficult to find a word to substitute it. Sejahtera we can understand it, but no translation can have the essence of the meaning. 

6. But SEJAHTERA is not just words. It also summed up the National Education Philosophy - Falsafah Pendidikan Negara. 

"..... melahirkan insan yang Seimbang dan Harmonis dari segi Intelek, Rohani, Emosi, dan Jasmani berdasarkan kepercayaan kepada Tuhan. Usaha ini adalah bertujuan untuk melahirkan warganegara Malaysia yang berilmu pengetahuan, berketerampilan, berAkhlak Mulia bertanggungjawab dan berkeupayaan mencapai keSEJAHTERAAN diri serta memberikan sumbangan terhadap keharmonian keluarga, masyarakat dan negara."

The bold keyword can be put into:

Seimbang

Etika

Jasmani

Aqal (Intelek)

Harmonis

Tuhan

Emosi

Rohani

Akhlaq

7. When we talked to Makcik at kampung about sustainability, we translated it into lestari, or in the context of MADANI - mampan. Does the Makcik understand what it means? But when we talk about sejahtera, every Malaysian will understand. 

8. Towards the Q&A session, he showed a newspaper article talking about how Korean people launched their Sejahtera Centre and Sejahtera Forest. Why do Korean people have Sejahtera? It turns out that when Malaysia was so advanced as compared to Korea, they adopted our word Gotong-Royong. So they gotong-royong to build their country.

9. Now, they have become developed. People started to commit suicide. They need to have a solution for humanity. Hence again they wanted to adopt the Malaysian word - SEJAHTERA.

10. Perhaps it is about time for us to value our worn word SEJAHTERA and make it our success philosophy.