Containing the Self-Interested Individual: Moral Scepticism of Political Parties in Myanmar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I examine a persistent set of concerns regarding the political party system in Myanmar that I read as emerging in response to a Theravāda Buddhist-grounded conception of human nature as inherently self-centred, biased, and morally ignorant. Although these critiques come from political actors anchored in different ideologies and situated in different historical periods (including the early twentieth-century politician U Ba Khaing, contemporary military leaders, and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy), I argue that the resonance of their critiques with this understanding of human beings has imparted a consistent disciplining and delegitimising effect on opposition and minority parties. However, the same conception of human nature has led other Burmese political commentators (including the independence hero General Aung San and the nineteenth-century minister U Hpo Hlaing) to construct opposing arguments that present collective, participatory political action or engagement as the necessary response to human moral deficiencies. Putting these arguments in conversation helps to reveal the disciplining aspects of the critiques of parties and offer alternative justification – still in accordance with this conception of human nature – for a robust and inclusive party system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".