While I agree fully with Mat Bulog that harsh punishments are needed to deter rape and other crimes, I also feel that it's more important to understand why incidents of rape, anti-social activities like illegal motorbike racing, violence, murders, road bullying, etc, occur more frequently in the modern Malaysia of today than they did 30 years ago.

Mat Bulog has offered some explanation for that in our more materially acquisitive, consumer society where one's personal value and prestige is measured by what one possesses, wears, the car one drives, etc, rather than what one is as a person.

The consumer society is the result of capitalism in its decadent stage where a capitalist economy needs people to buy more and more to enable capitalists to continue making a profit and keep the wheels of capitalist economy turning.

Everything from ever changing fashions; the continuous stream of PCs with faster processors, more memory, larger hard disks complemented by increasingly bloated software to consume all the new-found capacity; the never-ending stream of new mobile phone, digital camera, car, consumer electronic models, etc, all contribute towards promoting the consumer society, and helped no doubt by the mass media which promotes the consumerist lifestyle.

While these items have certainly enhanced our life and made it more convenient in many instances, we should not be led to go overboard to keep on acquiring them for its own sake, to satisfy our own vanity or to succumb to peer pressure created by advertising and promotion.

There of course have been attempts by movements like the hippies in the 60s, the environmentalists, ecologists, consumers' associations, etc, to resist this acquisitive, consumer lifestyle but at the end of the day, the capitalists with their big advertising budgets and their mass media win out, unless they are tightly and effectively regulated and controlled.

At the end of the day though, only in a socialist society where the means of production, distribution and exchange are based on social need, rather than private profit is it possible to end the consumer society.

Besides the consumer society's distortion of our value systems, we should also look at other sociological factors which have increased a sense of alienation and destroyed the kind of social cohesion which existed in Malaysia say 30 years ago when I'd say life was very much better than today.

Back then, urbanites like me may have had less materially but were certainly much happier and life was very much less stressful without all the traffic jams, etc.

We must also ask whether the increased incidence of rape, violence and murder could well be driven by the increased availability of pornography accessible through the Internet and pirated CDs, the easy availability of violent, bloody and gory computer games, etc - all adverse side effect of the much touted and glorified "information society."

Then we also have to consider whether the construction of buildings and other symbols of so-called "development" on public playgrounds and fields like the cordoned-off playing field in Brickfields is contributing to social problems like lepak in the burgeoning number of shopping complexes and malls.

We should also look into whether the callous disregard for the environment in the name of "progress" and "development" is having an effect of societies' attitudes and value systems.

The point I'm trying to make is that instead of mainly proposing harsher cures to social problems, we should be taking an holistic approach and pay equal if not more attention to their causes and prevention.