The Singapore Dream®.
An ex-classmate of mine, ex-poster boy for academic overexertion, has grown into a new man. He is now an idealist. A series of Facebook ‘notes’ document his lamentations over our national obsession with the rat race paper chase. From forth this electronic pulpit, the ex-classmate—let him be henceforth referred as Bert—preached a tender sermon revolving around the tale of a most unfortunate victim: a seventeen-year-old boy who has no legitimate claim to the fruits of meritocratic labour. Bert thunders against the darkness that veils our hearts from the Truth; he beseeches his congregation of Facebook friends to reach upwards by means of good deeds; “character”, he writes, not material achievements, is that which should be extolled as barometer of success. He wants a real utopia, not a government-sponsored Shangri-la watched over by ivory tower guards. In other words (his own), Bert now stands on the opposite side from “aristocratic technocrats” that run Singapore society. All this from someone who used to volunteer to hand out returned test papers, so as to keep updated on what his classmates are scoring in comparison to his own results.
Bert’s homily is nothing new. Every “unorthodox” Singaporean (I use this mockingly, of course, if you haven’t noted the written air quotes - even in rebellion we operate on a set template) has griped some version thereof before. The education system, blah blah: children drained of independent thinking along with their childhoods etc.
The Singapore system has indeed failed us. You know how I know? A Korean friend pointed out the dearth of sex-appealing Singaporean men - faces as blank as their personalities. A crime against nature has been committed: it is a truth universally acknowledged that men from tropical climes must be in want of a fire-extinguisher. And hey, if Korean men can emerge sparkling from beneath bone-crushing institutions, it is surely lack of chutzpah that leads the Singaporean equivalent to surrender to their machine without even a soupçon attempt at self-preservation.
In all kindness, there’s simply no point talking about an alternative. Bert, for example, wonders how he can liberate his teenage charge when the teenager himself wishes to follow the cash-car-condominium-credit-card-country-club prescription to the last bitter pill. The Singapore system did not last this long simply because some acronymed higher power dictates it to be so. It perpetuates because the population itself has no other conception of The Good Life. People like the way things are in Singapore, however much the taxi-drivers will have you believe otherwise. As for those who do not share the Dream, they wouldn’t want things any different either. How else can we congratulate ourselves on being the ‘marginalised’ ‘counter-cultural’ ‘beacons’ of ‘true enlightenment’?
