Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. -- Hamlet [I, iv, 90]

I was taking a taxi home today from training with a teammate, and the taxi driver was supposed to take a left turn off the highway to drop her off at her place, before continuing on to mine.  As we approached the appropriate turn, my friend noticed he was about to miss it.  "Uncle, can turn left please?" she called out -- but by then it was too late, and he had missed the turn.  He cried out an apology, swore softly ("God!") and had to take a long detour to make it back to her flat. 

Later on, after she had gotten down from the taxi, he apologized once more to me. 

"Sorry ah, I was thinking about the Worker's Party."

"Worker's Party?"

"Ya, I live in Aljunied.  Worker's Party, nearly lah."

(laughing) "Oh, yeah, 56 to 44%.  So you support opposition is it?"

"Ya.  Actually last time, Braddell Heights, then Marine Parade, then Aljunied.  Braddell Heights 48-52% you know! Very close."

"Yeah, I'm sure things will be better next election.  I think Aljunied will get it.  So uncle, why you support opposition?"

"Oh many reasons.  I think the government does not care enough lah.  You are student right? Or working?"

"I'm a student."

"You all student, I'm sure you work very hard.  My son and daughter, also work very hard.  Work so hard, graduate? No job.  My son degree in electronics engineering, now no choice, become what? Teacher.  Government don't care.  Never create job, then never provide.  And you know, government no family values."

"Yeah, did you hear about the retirement villages?"

"Retirement villages? What?"

"You know, Khaw Boon Wan announced that because it's cheaper to buy land in Johore, Bintam and Batam, they will send our elderly there instead, cos here it's too expensive."

"Ahhh, you see? No family values! Who will take care of them there? Nowadays, divorce rates going higher and higher.  Government, only think about profit.  Money, money, money.  Never think about its people."

Even as I continued to make small talk with him, my mind was making connections with what I'd heard only this morning, when Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Bilahari Kausikan, visited my school for an N.E dialogue.  He made an opening address which, though short, was concise and illuminating of typical Singaporean foreign policy, which is essentially as follows: what's this thing called humanity? There's no such thing as friendship in politics, there's only a convergence of interests.  The world wouldn't be any different without Singapore in it, so we must strive to make ourselves extraordinary.

This was alright in and of itself, but that mentality started to come across more and more strongly as questions were asked.  One student stood up during the question and answer session and asked about the impact of outsourcing on our local population.  Though that wasn't an entirely relevant question to pose a man from the MFA, he had no qualms with answering it as follows:

"We have to be realistic.  There is a limit to how much re-training we can do for some workers, so we have to look overseas.  Look at my generation, more than half of them didn't even complete primary school education.  What are we going to do? They are not going to conveniently die off..."

At this point, I was so flabbergasted I stopped listening to the rest of his answer.  Perhaps he didn't think he had to watch his words very closely, as he was only speaking to a bunch of teachers and students.  I don't even think many of them caught what he said.  But his callous attitude was so typical of the government's seeming attitude towards the 'chaff' of our society.  The fact that older workers stubbornly remaining alive had little to do with whether or not we should be protecting domestic jobs for our own workers (like that taxi driver's son, an engineer) didn't seem to concern him.  He just took his time wending down the garden path of why we should outsource jobs, and the fact that we had an aging population was just a by-the-way manner of illustrating his point.

The same attitude, though more subtly manifested, was present throughout the rest of the dialogue session as well.  When asked about what ASEAN planned to do about Burma's recalcitrance to international authority with regards to its human rights situation, he said: "There's nothing we can do.  Regime change is useless, and economic sanctions won't work." A student stood up, and said --

"Does that mean if thousands of people are being slaughtered in Burma, we won't do a thing because it's not in our self interest?"

"Yep."

"But if everyone thinks that way, nothing will be done."

"You're right, and most of the time nothing is done."

I proceeded to question him thus --

"You say that regime change is futile with regards to Burma, and economic sanctions don't work.  Yet it is interesting that these very same punitive measures were applied to Iraq, and that Singapore had no qualms whatsoever in being a part of the coalition of the willing that showed support for the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.  I have three questions, then: 1) Does that mean that though we supported the Iraq invasion, it has been a futile endeavour? 2) Did we make ourselves more of a target by announcing our support for the invasion, considering we are surrounded by countries with dominantly Muslim populations? 3) Did our willingness to be a part of the coalition have anything to do with the signing of the landmark Free Trade Agreement signed between Singapore and the USA soon after the Iraq invasion?"

To which he replied,

"The Americans were deluded, it doesn't mean we supported them because we thought it would work.  I believe the question you are too polite to ask is, did we suck up to the U.S? Well, yes, our basic interest was to show support for the USA, you are right.  But what did we really commit to it? How much of our assets did we lend to Iraq? We put one plane in the air and one ship in the sea.  And were we more of a target because of it? To which I reply...we were already a target before the invasion."

Okay, freeze-frame a moment here.  I believe this man was being extremely loose with his words because, again, he was talking to a bunch of kids (900 or so of them).  Hence his carelessness with language.  But I appreciated this hour and a half of candour because it gave me a lot of insight, personally into how Singapore operates like: a cold and calm automaton of self-interest.  We don't care about whether or not the Kurds and the Shi'ites are being helped by regime change -- we don't want to implicate ourselves too badly by, God forbid, actually committing troops or doing something more than 'one plane in the air and one ship in the sea'.  And we were willing to do something that made us more of a target, knowing full well we were already a target of hostilities to our dear neighbours Malaysia, Indonesia, etc., so we could profit from a FTA.  There is no interest in common humanity here, there is only a cool-headed weightage of pros and cons.

This is, of course, an entirely attractive idea.  Look out for your own selves and you shan't have to bother about the person next to you unless it is expedient for you to do so.  A student asked him why we were unwilling to help to build the bridge between Malaysia and Singapore as a gesture of goodwill between neighbours, and he said:

"You want to build a bridge? Sure.  But make it worth my while."

This mentality of self-interest -- which, let's call a spade a spade, is really selfishness -- sounds well and good until we begin to consider a few things.  Firstly, I'm quite concerned that Singapore's selfish tendencies may just come round to bite us in the behind at some point.  Our reluctance to do anything about Burma means that ASEAN is weakened from within, and our reputation as a region tarnished overseas.  Our small-mindedness about the matter of goodwill and ties between Malaysia is not only downright obnoxious, but spells out ill omens for diplomatic and trading ties between the nations in the future.  And let's not even talk about what will happen when the water agreement expires.  With regards to Iraq? Our insensitivity to our neighbours' needs and our willingness to 'suck up to the US', which he essentially conceded, is hardly going to endear ourselves to Islamic radicals in the region.  Gee, I wonder which secular, Westernized, urban, capitalist, soulless, amoral, small, vulnerable, nation-state in Southeast Asia we shall bomb today, Azari Husin?

More than that though, our selfishness in our foreign policy is an outward reflection of an inward ugliness, which is to be coldly calculative of our interests and to be perfectly willing to sacrifice human welfare in the process, if we deem it a fitting sacrifice.  The taxi driver's lament of "money, money, money" is precisely what Kausikan is articulating more verbosely with his "international relations is governed by no other obligation than a convergence of interests".  When I say that it is our basic and fundamental moral obligation to people other than ourselves, and I use that to justify needing to temper our foreign policy with some measure of goodwill and genuine concern for the people of Burma and Iraq, others cry 'idealist'! But do these same people realize that unless we affirm this fundamental duty to someone else, a capitalist society like Singapore will always and forever place the interests of the rich above that of the poor, and tolerate, even condone the suffering of some in order to further the interests of others?

Look at this extract from an article by Asiaweek magazine, here:

"What happened to Singapore, the land of plenty? In its rush to forge a manufacturing, then a high-tech economy, the city-state rarely bothered to look back at those who were lagging.  Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew developed a system based on hard work and government support for industry.  Singaporeans were expected to earn their rewards.  The results were astounding: a middle class emerged to build Asia's second-richest country.  But with the advent of globalization and an influx of cheap foreign workers, Singapore's economy is becoming increasingly ruthless.  According to its own statistics, the nation's rich are getting richer and the poor are falling further behind.  To most Singaporeans, the mere existence of poor folk in need of care packages comes as a shock.  And this realization has prompted an uncharacteristic bout of soul-searching.  The rich-poor disparity strikes right at the heart of Singapore's development model - and challenges the city's smug self-image."

Though the article is dated 2000, nothing much has truly changed since then.  In fact, our idea of finding solutions for the old and the poor are to a) buy them off with quick injections of cash via the Progress Package at election time, which has virtually no long-term implications for a sustained increase in national income due to the fact that the multiplier effect for government spending is minimal as we have a highly open economy with many withdrawals, and b) ship them off to Johore, Bintam and Batam.  Oh yes, and let us not forget c) the raising of the minimum retiring age, so that more old people can sell tissue paper and clean toilets.

The truth is that Singapore should not, any longer, be willing to countenance the compromising of human welfare in order to feed its own selfish interests, which revolve around the rich and the middle classes.  What about those who have been retrenched, who have worked hard but are unable to find jobs -- what about the elderly and the disabled? Our citizens are not units to be judged and weighed according to the marginal revenue each one brings to our coffers.  This is a mentality which we have to accept in our domestic policies, but one we seem to be currently deadset against.  Our foreign policy is a reflection of how we treat our own people: with expedience.  Baldfaced, unashamed, expedience.

I appreciate and commend Mr. Bilahari Kausikan for a candid and open discussion, which generally had no holds barred (except when I asked him about Temasek Holding's takeover bid for ShinCorp and how that had had negative bearings on our bilateral ties with Thailand, to which he promptly and categorically denied any government association with the deal and insisted that the MFA was not consulted, 'nor did it want to be consulted').  But honestly, I'm creeped out by the fact that our government is probably populated with people who think just like him.  And the general feedback I received from everyone was this: "He was good, but boy, I wouldn't want to be his friend." That's Singapore.  Good at what it does, extremely efficient, no doubt, but boy, I'm embarrassed to be a Singaporean sometimes.  We're not making very many friends, and neither are we, to be honest, being good friends to the very people in our midst who need our friendship and our helping hand the most.  Who says beauty is on the inside? The ugliness within is the same ugliness without -- only, I think, with far more devastating consequences for our people.