1.How did a society that used to be seen as so gentle and fairly moral become so materialistic and decadent?
2. Have the Pol Pot years and the subsequent extreme poverty traumatised people so much that they feel that yesterday's moral and Buddhist values don't seem so relevant any more?
I apologize in advance if I offend some people who think I look down or insult any of their relatives currently living in Phnom Penh. Please note that I will generalize to some extent but also note the “ most” “many” , ‘some” I will be using.
1.How did a society that used to be seen as so gentle and fairly moral become so materialistic and decadent?
I am not a demographer and I don’t have the facts and figures to support what I am about to say. In my opinion, if one conducted a census of Phnom Penh’s population, the majority of the population would have reflected the power structure of the society, i.e. the people who were at the top of the social ladder right underneath the KR who came back with the Vietnamese and who were given the houses and the rice allowances, etc (by virtue of the positions they occupied in the ministries, “flanked” by their Vietnamese “advisors” , they were essentially nobodies in the old Cambodia.
At the risk of generalizing, the survivors of the KR Killing Fields were very young (and spared the really grueling work and whose capacity for adaptation to hardship, hunger was high), lucky to be in zones that were under the command of slightly or fairly less harsh commanders or had the most finely-tuned survival skills. And what do these survival skills entail? Lying, cheating, stealing, feigning, crawling, flattering, (let’s face it, Khmers are not alone in the world at enjoying flattery; if anything, in my opinion, Khmer leaders or those with a bit of authority love sycophants).
And the other inhabitants? Well, they are the people who have never lived in an urban environment. And throughout the Vietnamese occupation, when Cambodia was being “punished” for being “on the wrong side”, daily survival in some of the most unhygienic conditions was the main preoccupation for almost everybody, except for the ex-KR elite that was in the government.
Starting in 1993, to put it positively, Cambodia’s society “finally came of age”. Ask anybody who went to Cambodia with UNTAC. The young women did not know the first thing about putting on make-up, dressing up and anybody with a car could his pick of a bride, no matter how short or ugly he was. The foreign money poured in, the
rest is history, the girlie bars, the massage parlors, the foreigners, the sex tourists, the pedophiles, the Anakajuns with their passports, Khmer families with their Western Union transfers. In romantic terms, money corrupts and lots of money corrupt absolutely from the former Communists who took to money and moral decay like castaways who have had any sex for 14 years (from 1979 to 1993) to people all the way down the pyramid.
To put it less positively, many members of a population, especially in the cities, e.g. Phnom Penh, that does not have the highest moral fiber in a society turned upside down by the Pol Pot regime, were intoxicated by the money, the outward signs of materialism and embraced the same hedonism that has gripped the economically booming but morally decadent Thailand since the 1960s.
And if many parents have not had time to bring up their children properly, who are the role models? Their teachers? the political leaders or their peers?
2.Have the Pol Pot years and the subsequent extreme poverty traumatised people so much that they feel that yesterday's moral and Buddhist values don't seem so relevant any more?
Half of Cambodia’s current population was born after 1979 and has never known the Pol Pot regime. Dr Nou Leakhana (now of CSULB) tried to explain the bauk(gang-raping) pastime of the middle and upper-class male youth of today’s Cambodia in those “stressor” terms that are used to explain why, often many years later, many survivors of the KR regime started to show signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in all countries that have accepted Cambodian refugees. I don’t think this is a major contributor to the relinquishing of Buddhist and moral values.
I believe that there are at least three contributing factors.
One is the break-down of the family unit during and following the Pol Pot regime. In the early 1980s, in Cambodia, because the survival rate was much higher among women than among men, many households were headed by women who were often too busy and too stressed to exercise their full moral authority over particularly sons, many of whom were spoiled rotten. The practice of polygamy was rampant, not necessarily for sexual reasons but for economic reasons. Population growth was explosive and the education and moral upbringing of many children was neglected.
A second contributing factor is the “run to catch up the Thai”, desire to make up for lost time phenomenon because, in the absence of a strong and fiercely, almost jingoistic identity (dangerous in a Cambodia occupied by the Vietnamese), the lure of the “more beautiful, more Sivilay Thai was too great to resist.
In my post immediately preceding this one, I drew a parallel between the Cambodia of 1970-1975 and post-1993 Cambodia. And, in my opinion, there is at least one common thread: the corrupting influence of money. Unlike Pol Pot and Khieu samphan, I do not believe, however, that we, Khmers, are innocent babes in the wood who were waiting to be corrupted. On the contrary, I think we were and are extremely fast-learners. IMO, today's Khmers are learning faster than at any other time in our history because Cambodia is a totally open society, receptive to influences from the outside world but sadly lacking in a strong moral fiber that enables us to embrace the good and reject the not-so-good influences.
