this deep cynicism which characterises the attitudes of ordinary people to the established courts of the Republic. There is a certain perceived sense of alienation from their experiences and from their priorities of what is important to them in life. So there is this process of alienation which I think one needs to be conscious of.
Then take again traditional attitudes to government and to political culture. Those who believe in the freedom of the individual and the need to preserve and to develop that sense of freedom generally endeavour to do that in keeping with Western political culture by evolving a system of checks and balances.
The assumption that we make so readily is that freedom is synonymous with checks and balances that are part and parcel of a political system. We believe with Lord Action that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So we believe that concentration of power in the hands of an individual or a tribunal would necessarily be inimical to the cause of freedom.
We therefore want to ensure that power is restricted, it is circumscribed, and it is curtailed. That is very much our approach to things. But that is not the approach of indigenous people. Indigenous people assume that power belongs to a king, a ruler.
That is something total; it is something absolute. It is not amenable to restriction or curtailment. Of course, there are restrictions. But these are not restrictions that are imposed externally. These are restrictions that come from within. The king or the ruler is bound by certain matters which are part of his conscience and that the restraints that accompany the exercise of power are restrains that arise from within They are part of the psyche of the ruler.
There is this story about the traditional Tamil King Elara who was always accessible to his people and the idea was that any person who had a complaint to make to the King could go to the King's chamber at any time, ring the bell and tell the king about his problem and redress would be personally given by the ruler himself.
So there is absolute faith in the benevolence of the ruler, the notion of benevolent despotism. The benevolent despot does not use his power in a tyrannical or dictatorial manner. It is tempered by certain qualities of mercy and of gentleness. But those qualities are not enjoyed upon the ruler by any external norms. Those are internal restraints. That to my mind is the significance of the fundamental contrast.
Modern jurisprudence believes in the restriction of governmental power by invoking external norms. The separation of powers, the restriction of the powers of the President or of Parliament, justifiable fundamental rights, which are incorporated in constitutional instruments. These are all external forms. But traditional values of indigenous people emphasise the internal content of those restraints rather than the external levers.
So these are some of the contrasts between modern attitudes to justice, to government, to tenure of land on the one hand and the aspirations of indigenous peoples. Now one matter that we should always be suspicious of, I think a safeguard that is very essential, is to refrain from endeavouring to incorporate these values mechanically into a modern system. We must not feel the aboriginals, the indigenous people, have their own values. There is some value in those, there is some merit in those. Our system is different.
We have therefore to carve out some sort of niche in our own system to accommodate them. That is we seek to accommodate them in a periphery of our own system. I don't think that is a helpful premise. This has been very much the approach in countries like New Zealand, where the Maoris, for example, had had certain rights conceded to them and a sustained attempt has been made to bring them into the system, for example by means of quotas. That is very much a part of governmental policy in New Zealand at the present time. Then it comes to admission of children to schools or to universities, recruitment to the public service, and other such benefits. There is a ce