Here are horror stories emerging from Malaysian highways: almost 600,000 vehicular accidents were reported last year, and 12,417 of those involved deaths. Buried in that rubble were drivers who lost concentration, degenerating into verbal, physical and vehicular aggressors.
More discomfiting: Malaysian drivers, a study discovered a few years back, were much more enraged than those in the United States, Britain, New Zealand, Turkey and Spain.
It's ironic: we've been beatified as hospitable to foreign tourists and visitors, but the moment some people get behind the wheel, they turn into zombies.
While there's no one answer for this, social psychologists think traffic congestion is a major factor. Getting stuck in traffic can lead to anger and unpredictability.
But these are key triggers: queue cutting, no signalling when changing lanes or turning, double and triple parking, and refusing to give way. And underlying these triggers are clichés and symptoms: displaced anger and life's stress.
Terrible incidents have exemplified what happens when drivers, once provoked into becoming angry , get out of their vehicles, mouths twisted, eyes bulging, fingers gesticulating while swinging an object.
It's a Jekyll-and-Hyde paradox in the Malaysian psyche: calm in one moment and homicidal in the next.
Simmering in that toxicity was this mindless sense of justice: five e-hailing riders were charged with murdering a motorist after he collided into a fellow rider.
While the intent was to teach the driver a lesson, the assault led to death. Apparently, this vigilantism is virulent: other than motorists, housing estate residents and backroad villagers form mobs to exact a beating on drivers after they crash into livestock, worse if it's a human.
That's why offending drivers, realising the imminence of "zombie justice", flee the accident scene, especially in the countryside, and surrender themselves at a police station.
Thank goodness for Malaysia's strict gun laws, otherwise the highways would be filled with shootings. There's only one defence these "zombified" can mount: temporary insanity.
Obviously, offenders convicted of road rage and vigilantism must undergo psychological appraisals before being permitted to drive or ride again.
This sickness has flourished for decades but the government could intervene, perhaps bringing back civics classes.
It is the same class, or clubs, used to instruct our children on the Rukun Negara, about good behavioural values that might eliminate this twisted psyche.
