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OPINION
The all-or-nothing view of Myanmar contestant Thae Su Nyein and her supporters is born of a siege mentality that pervades the country’s politics.
By SAI LATT | FRONTIER
Back when Nan Khin Zayyar stood for the 2012 Miss International competition in Japan, Myanmar netizens flooded the internet polls, delivering the then-24-year-old Pa-O woman nearly 95 percent of the votes cast for the People’s Choice Award. That equaled more than 39,000 of the roughly 41,000 total votes cast. For comparison, the runner-up received less than 1,500 votes from her compatriots in Guatemala. Netizens in India, where more than a billion people live, cast just 135 votes.
That victory was achieved in the Myanmar of 2012, when internet penetration was extremely low and connections were very expensive. Still, “supporting Miss Myanmar became a ‘national cause’”, I mused at the time, referring to the previous military regime’s zeal for “national causes”. “After all, she represented Burmese pride, so every vote they cast for her was a vote for their beloved nation.” A childhood friend of mine spent hours voting over and again for her.
By 2017 the internet had fully penetrated the culture, and that March the second season of Myanmar Idol reached its grand finale. Partisans in the wildly popular singing contest took to the web to champion their favoured contestants. Rather than showering them with praise, however, many chose to show their support by attacking their rivals, often with sexist or racist language aimed at the finalist’s ethnic and other identities. The months-long social media war of insults left me wondering if in this television entertainment I wasn’t seeing a mirror of Myanmar’s crowd psychology, with a “commitment to the ruthless crushing of opponents”.
It is hard not to hear this history echoing amid the digital fracas following the 2024 Miss Grand International competition, which took place in Bangkok on October 25. There, Myanmar contestant Thae Su Nyein placed second runner up (meaning third), and because this was less than first, she broke down in tears. Surrounding her were contestants who had won neither gold, silver or bronze, yet still they all smiled in celebration of Miss India Rachel Gupta’s victory. After the ceremony, Thae Su Nyien made a show of returning her crown, saying Myanmar had been “robbed” of the top prize.
The reactions of Thae Su Nyein, her manager Htoo Ant Lwin and their fans – who on social media have accused event organisers of cheating and corruption and have battered Gupta with body-shaming and otherwise disparaging comments – also reveal much about Myanmar’s political psychology, and how the current crisis is hardening some of our worst, most totalitarian, impulses.
While others have analysed the pageant drama in light of Myanmar’s deepening social polarisation, or as a sign that we’ve failed to adequately instil values like love and compassion, it also reveals something deeper about our politics – something that, without confronting directly, could stand in the way of a peaceful future.
Total victory
First, there is the belief that anything short of total victory is equal to total defeat. With this comes the related impulse of not just seeking to outdo but to utterly destroy one’s rivals. Taken together, this attitude makes it impossible to accept momentary defeats with grace, or to see winning and losing, and the spaces between them, as part of a longer history with both ups and downs.
Worse, it diminishes our capacity to empathise and to engage in what cognitive scientists call “mentalisation” – the capacity to consider others’ viewpoints, feelings, desires, concerns and experiences.
Certainly, this is not unique to Myanmar, but these behaviours pervade Myanmar politics. Even our most popular political parties, including the National League for Democracy, seek not just victory but taung phyo kan phyo. Generally translated as “landslide”, it literally means to make the “mountain collapse, the shore collapse”. They seek this against not just their traditional rivals, but also their erstwhile allies, who have struggled with them through harder times. On a far worse level, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s refusal to accept electoral defeat with grace in 2020 led to his military coup, plunging the country into a level of chaos and destruction the country had not seen since the Second World War.
In the current crisis, it’s tempting to see victory as all or nothing, and to see attempts to mentalise your opponents’ perspective as naive – in essence, to see things in black and white: the military on one side, everyone else on the other. The revolution should rightfully triumph over the military, and the military leadership be held accountable for it war crimes, including genocide, and for impoverishing the nation. Yet politics is rarely so straightforward. Armed resistance groups that commit war crimes must also be held to account, and the rivalries among them are many; today’s allies can become tomorrow’s foes. Attempting to eliminate one perceived rival can often have unintended consequences, and can prolong suffering. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but the cost of striving for a complete victory may be high.
Blaming and shaming
The fallout from this year’s Miss Grand International also exposes the popular instinct to lash out at opponents or those who don’t come to our aid, blaming and shaming them rather than reflecting on one’s own weaknesses and mistakes.
Here, leading resistance groups’ approach to diplomacy is a good example. First, they seek the support of the international community or a particular neighbouring country, but when either fails to satisfy their expectations, they immediately criticise them, without reflecting on their own possible missteps.
The international community’s failure to support the democratic movement does warrant criticism. However, the movement’s reactive blaming and shaming campaigns are unlikely to help – whereas some reflection on how to better align the movement’s goals with other nations’ domestic and foreign policy interests could. Every time the resistance castigates the international community for not doing more to end the violence in Myanmar, it risks painting itself as a liability rather than as a partner in improving regional security.
This behaviour belies a siege mentality deeply embedded in the Myanmar political psyche, bolstered by nationalist sentiments. Thae Su Nyein donned a gown inspired by an ancient Myanmar warrior queen, recalling a lost time when the country was a conquering force in the region. She and her partisans argued online that the pageant organisers denied her the gold because of her Myanmarness, and perhaps because the taint of its current political and humanitarian crisis is bad for business.
The 2021 coup has pushed Myanmar to the bottom of nearly every metric of success or wellbeing, humiliating its people on the international stage and as an ASEAN peer. The desperation for victory, and the aggressive rejection of anything less, reflects the psychological struggle to reconcile two opposing sentiments – on the one hand, a deeply-ingrained pride in being the descendants of an empire stretching into parts of present-day Thailand and India; and, on the other, a sense of contemporary national embarrassment.
Accordingly, people see neighbouring countries as only wanting to exploit Myanmar. There may be some truth to this, but such an embedded victim narrative blinds them to the way their reactions are seen in the eyes of the world, and hinders their ability to mentalise. It also impedes regional people-to-people ties amid an unprecedented wave of outmigration from Myanmar.
There are lessons here to learn for both Thae Su Nyein and the larger democratic movement. But first, it is worth investigating where this mentality comes from. While I do not condone the hysterical response of Thae Su Nyein’s fans or the resistance’s reactionary diplomatic approach, it is not hard to understand and empathise with them.
Surrounded by enemies?
For most of the last century, Myanmar has been dominated by brutal military regimes with powerful propaganda machines, and these machines have successfully pounded messages of fear, racism and xenophobia into the public consciousness. Ten years of semi-democratic government, from 2011 to 2021, did not fundamentally reverse this.
Our brains are wired to protect us from perceived threats, even if that threat is to something as abstract as identity, and this wiring often overrides rationality. But our perceptions are also shaped by our memories, and forged from the social and political environments in which we develop. In Myanmar, these environments are largely organised around identitarian ingroups and outgroups, to the extent that parents hoping to quieten crying children often threaten them with a visit from a “scary old man” or a “rickshaw driver” – veiled references to certain social or ethno-religious others.
These dynamics seem to motivate both Thae Su Nyein fans and resistance diplomacy. Their aggressive reactions, especially to those outside a perceived ingroup, reflect fear, insecurity and a deep-seated, if largely unconscious, perception of an outsider threat. In other words, a siege mentality.
None of this is to suggest that the people of Myanmar are merely a mass of sadness and fear. Our incredible show of resilience and creativity in the face of oppression, environmental catastrophe and political crisis has been remarkable. It is apparent that, at our best, we can respond to setbacks and defeats with mindfulness.
But we must acknowledge and move past the culture of fear and sense of collective victimhood if we truly hope to change Myanmar society and achieve a revolution, rather than merely change who holds power. True systemic change must start with foundational cognitive shifts at the level of the individual.
Such change cannot wait for the fall of the military. We must start now, with how we raise our children, design our school curricula and view our religious institutions, which still instil fear and intolerance rather than challenging these sentiments. Overcoming deeply-ingrained attitudes through schooling and child-rearing may sound overly optimistic or misguided amid a brutal war, with hundreds of thousands being displaced and exiled. But at some point, we have to find practical ways to replace our most aggressive impulses with more conscious, mindful habits and behaviours.
Sai Latt is a research associate with the Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development at Chiang Mai University and the York Centre for Asian Research at York University. His social and political research focuses on peace and conflict in Myanmar through interdisciplinary perspectives, with recent work emphasising political psychology and social neuroscience.