“The Singapore Solution”, National Geographic, 1/2010. On the success of Singapore, which has come at some costs. There are elements of the society that appeal to me, and others that don’t.
Achieving all this has required a delicate balancing act, an often paradoxical interplay between what some Singaporeans refer to as “the big stick and the big carrot.” What strikes you first is the carrot: giddy financial growth fueling never ending construction and consumerism. Against this is the stick, most often symbolized by the infamous ban on chewing gum and the caning of people for spray-painting cars. Disruptive things like racial and religious disharmony? They’re simply not allowed, and no one steals anyone else’s wallet.
Singapore, maybe more than anywhere else, crystallizes an elemental question: What price prosperity and security? Are they worth living in a place that many contend is a socially engineered, nose-to-the-grindstone, workaholic rat race, where the self-perpetuating ruling party enforces draconian laws (your airport entry card informs you, in red letters, that the penalty for drug trafficking is “DEATH”), squashes press freedom, and offers a debatable level of financial transparency?
The aspect of that society I don’t like, as described in the article, is its intensely obsessive competitiveness and capitalism, which makes life stressful and uncertain.
And so bloggers, like the satirist Mr. Brown and the urbanely pugnacious Yawning Bread, are free to broadcast opinions unlikely to be found in the pages of the government-linked Straits Times. As a result, more and more young people are questioning the trade-off between freedom and security—and even calling for freer politics and fewer social controls.
[…]
I returned to what the MM had said about Confucius’s belief “that man could be perfected.” This was, the MM said with a sigh, “an optimistic way of looking at life.” People abuse freedom. That is his beef with America: The rights of individuals to do their own thing allow them to misbehave at the expense of an orderly society. As they say in Singapore: What good are all those rights if you’re afraid to go out at night?
Melbourne is a sorry example of abuse of freedom: it is not safe to go in the city (or around the suburbs) at night due to the drunken violence and stabbings that have become prevalent in recent years. Australian society is in general undisciplined (perhaps a legacy of its convict settlement origins), and I find myself wishing that some aspects of the “Singapore Solution” could be implemented! (Such as the banning of chewing gum and caning for graffiti vandals.)
For myself, I would trade off some freedom for security: for good (affordable) health care, for a stable job, for a place where I could walk around without fear of assault. But I would wish to live in a slower-paced society than what Singapore is.
