For the most part my blog is known as a “Singaporean blog”. 6 or 7 (or more) of my top-grossing blogposts are all about local issues. CISCO, PM Lee, 2011 Election issues, that sort of thing. But lately I’ve grown a little disinterested in writing about these things. Just because it’s what I’m best recognized for doesn’t mean that it’s the best thing I could be doing with my time and energy.
I find myself revisiting a few thoughts over and over. Let’s suppose Singapore has 7 million people (which it doesn’t, but it makes for nicer back-of-envelope calculations). That makes us less than 0.1% of the 7 billion human beings we have on planet Earth. Less than 0.1%! That’s less than 1 in 1,000 people. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what we see is all there is.
But there’s more. There’s 99.9% of humanity out there. Singapore’s a tiny little echo chamber, an anomaly. It’s an interesting social and political anomaly for political scientists to study, but it’s really hard to pretend that our nation-state is significant in the grand scheme of things. I think the government understands this better than the citizenry- it’s easy for us to complain about things, and there are certainly lots of things to complain about, but we’re also a drop in a bigger bucket than most of us adequately conceive. (When I was volunteering with Singapore Prisons, the guy in charge used to use the term “piss in the ocean”. That’s what Singapore is.)
I don’t mean to say that small = necessarily insignificant. There are more people in Singapore than there are employees in Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple together- and those organizations I think arguably have more influence on the world than our country does. I don’t have any evidence for that, it just seems likely. The world would probably rather lose Singapore than Google. That’s the reality of the world we live in. And it raises some interesting things to explore and think about.
There are a lot of interesting and significant things going on in the world. Elon Musk is working on three of them- electric cars with Tesla, sustainable electricity production with Solar City, and manned space travel with SpaceX. Advancements in any of those things is incredibly exciting. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is working on eradicating polio, then malaria. These are incredibly significant things. Polio has been reduced over 99%, saving more than 10 million children from paralysis. That’s like, twice the size of Singapore, paralyzed. It’s practically impossible to visualize. Our species is on the verge of eradicating the disease altogether. Strikes me as a worthy problem to work on.
Technological advancements do incredible things. Things like Twitter and Facebook, even if they’re used by most people for superficial reasons, can be life-saving and enriching to others. Google has emergency response maps and data that’s going to save lives.
I would never get employed by Google, and I don’t think I’ll be able to contribute in any meaningful way, but it’s interesting to think about how there are certain spaces and places where a person can do a lot more for the species. There’s a Singaporean working in Google called Meng, and he’s Google’s “Jolly Good Fellow”, in charge of employee wellness or something like that. I wonder what his life is like.
You could be a teacher in a Singapore school and struggle miserably against the system, fighting to make a meaningful difference for the students in your classroom- their smiles and growth being your salve. Or you could seek to revolutionize and disrupt education altogether, like that science teacher from TED making accessible science videos, and the people at Khan Academy. You could build the future and impact millions. If you’re hell-bent on making a difference to individuals in a classroom, I guess this discussion isn’t for you- but if you just want to help people, I think it’s important to think about where you can make the biggest difference. It could be outright immoral to decline to think about it. It would be vaguely equivalent to letting people die.
Then and again, we’re all guilty of letting people die everyday. And I don’t want to guilt-trip anybody. All I’m saying is- maybe a little bit of effort and thought might direct us to put our energy into things that could potentially make a much bigger difference. Einstein said something along the lines of how his equations were more important to him than his politics, because politics were about the present, while his equations were for eternity. I think there’s something to that.
Lee Kuan Yew himself said that he never planned to get into politics. He only did out of necessity, because of the circumstances he was in. He was planning to make a comfortable living as a lawyer. Who knows what he’d have done if the Japanese never invaded? What would a young Lee Kuan Yew do if he were a young Singaporean today? Let’s assume he got his straight A’s in JC and completed his National Service as a great officer. Would he still want to get into Law? I believe he said something about being pragmatic and picking whatever’s lucrative… something about going into engineering instead. Maybe somebody can dig up that quote. Regardless, the point I’m loosely trying to make is- maybe Singapore matters less than we think it does.
That’s a rather heretical, treasony thing to say, so I’d need to qualify that. I’m incredibly thankful for being born in Singapore. We’re so blessed. We have the opportunity to bitch and whine and complain. Billions don’t. We have clean water, we have roofs over our heads, we have jobs, we have medicine. Singapore didn’t always have these things, and if it didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to write this. But LKY was a pragmatic man, and he should understand very well that people naturally get complacent when things get successful. He acknowledges that not all of the best and brightest are going to want to work in the civil service or in policy-making. Some of his own family and descendants are turned off by the idea. It’s a huge burden/sacrifice and the juice isn’t quite worth the squeeze in times like these. I’m not talking about money nearly as much as I’m talking about job satisfaction (and this is already coloured with a very privileged perspective). LKY and the founding fathers had their backs against the wall, they were caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. They had no choice but to take some crazy risks, many of which paid off. Now we are somewhat victims of our own success.
I’m reminded of the Punggol East by-election, and I’m thinking of the PAP candidate who was fielded there. Poor guy had no way to win. If he had won, the public would say “See lah, PAP candidate, parachute in there, backed by such power, confirm win. Untested guy. Loser.” If he had lost, as he did, people would find something negative to say too. THIS IS STRUCTURAL. It’s not the PAP’s fault. Anybody in power that long will be treated with this sort of suspicion and derision unless there are external crises to be dealt with.
So whose side am I on? I really don’t care anymore. I used to identify as “Pro-Singapore”, but now I’m not sure what even THAT means. There are some good people working on things. I met PM Lee and thought he was really thoughtful, perceptive, intelligent. Tharman Shanmugaratnam seems to really know his shit. I’ve heard really nice things about K Shanmugam and others. I really like Sylvia Lim and Chen Shao Mao and Vincent Wijeysingha. I wish everybody could just get along. I think it’s pretty clear that all of those people want what’s best for Singapore, but it’s easy to get caught up trying to win fights. The media doesn’t help, we don’t help- we always end up focusing on all the unnecessary, sensational personal drama (like the hawker ceiling nonsense- does it really MATTER?) rather than focusing on the more ‘boring’ problems that matter.
I think the problem is that there’s nothing very exciting for Singaporeans to work towards. If there is, we don’t know very much about it. We’re cramped and worried and confused. We turn on foreigners and we turn on each other. And we queue for Hello Kitty still, and minions… I won’t even try to explain that. The most exciting thing I’ve encountered in Singapore so far is Tong Yee’s School Of Thought. I’m a huge advocate for that. If I weren’t working in ReferralCandy, I’d beg Mr. Tong to take me in to do anything. (Assuming I can’t somehow run away to work for Elon Musk or Bill & Melinda Gates, or Jacqueline Novogratz’s Acumen Fund, or Kiva, or Khan Academy, or…)
Those people are working on exciting problems- they’re helping to revolutionize education. Here’s my vague vision of how this is going to happen- increasingly, kids are going to be differentiated based on what they do outside of school. Who builds the most interesting things, who works on the most interesting projects, who writes the most compelling essays, who makes the best videos.
The people who do these will be the ones who’re the most driven and passionate, and surrounded by the best peers. I think SOT has an early-mover advantage here. Mr. Tong and his kids are onto something special- a real entry point into what will be real bottom-up social change. That’s something to be excited about.
This is getting a bit long. Will continue in a part 2.