Are we a First World Country with Third World People?

The ugly Singaporean kept coming up for discussion. Now, the society’s heavyweights are joining in the chorus of disapproval. 

It started with Tommy Koh, who coined the phrase - “We are a First World Country with Third World people.” 

Today, the papers cited Professor Kishore Mahbubani as someone who agrees with Prof Koh. 

He recounted a recent occasion “when his maid asked for time off to go to the airport. “Why?” he asked. Her friend has broken her arm, the maid explained, and her employer had decided to pack her off. She wanted to say goodbye to her friend who was flying home.””

Mm...isn’t that inverse Kantian humanitarian logic? That is, instead of treating people as an end in itself, we treat them as a means to an end. And in the sending-off-of-the-maid’s case, the end is a clean and tidy house so as to present to others how neat and organised the employer is? 

Prof Mahbubani remarked: “Singaporeans should celebrate the fact their country has gone from Third World to the First World. But they should deeply reflect on what this means in terms of their moral responsibilities.”

Another professor Paulin Straughan concurred: “We can’t really have a First World country with Third World behaviour. It’s the community that defines the country.”

So the social sage Tommy Koh has undeniably started a movement, erm...the kindness movement? Aka William Wan? 

But kindness movement or otherwise, Prof Koh is not going to mince his words. He said: “Many of our people don’t give a damn for the environment when they should. Many of our people are selfish and unkind.” 

For a moment, those words felt like a rather jaded Greta Thunberg who has come of age and is decidedly pissed off with how we want change but are changing the wrong things - very much like the streetlight effect. Here is what that means. 

“A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “this is where the light is.”"

When it comes to kindness, developing our moral responsibilities, becoming unselfish, or “giving a damn”, we are looking to become or evolve into one at the wrong place, (so to speak), or to put it another way, we are looking for those virtues (or to embody them) in the economic/material light. 

This is spelt out by Tommy Koh. “Today, we are not a classless society. We are divided by wealth, by income, by profession, by place of residence, and even by the school we attend.” He is referring to the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the have and the have-not.

And on the question, “Why do Singaporeans display such ugly behaviour in the first place?”, NUS sociologist Tan Ern Ser said: “I believe it’s because we have been socialised to be more focused on “I, me and myself”, and our own family, rather than the larger community and society.”"

This ugliness is displayed by the way some of us treat our maid and foreign workers, by the way we leave trays and plates on the table without clearing them, by the way we discard shared bikes into the drain, and by the way we drive. 

Tommy Koh gave examples of how drivers just refuse to give way by speeding up. Or how some drivers cut in at the last minute without the courtesy of signalling. 

And William Wan, the founder of the Kindness Movement, elaborated it further: “When we are other-centred, we become thoughtful, and start to think of others before ourselves. In turn, this will impact the way we treat others and public property positively.”

But how do we bridge the gap then - from being essentially me-centred to others-centred? 

Honestly, I would have thought that the conscientious publicity of the ST’s Singaporeans of the Year (I think in its 4th year now) and the recent Generation Grit stories would have nudged our First World society in the right direction of being First World People”, thereby closing the gap to some extent. But it seems like we still have a social chasm to bridge. Why is that so? 

Well, if you study the Singapore Kindness Movement (SKM) survey 2018, one particular trend or inverse correlation they picked up was materialism and kindness. “When cross-referencing with their behaviours, SKM found that those who rated material success as not important are also more likely to have done an act of kindness. This could be attributed to the desire to make a social impact within their own capacity.”

But alas, how "not important" is material successes to our young, especially when they are constantly exposed on social media (and by way of social comparison with peers) to what a good life they can enjoy when they keep on heaping up more money, fame and power for themselves? 

What's more, there is always the pursuit of not just material success, but the bragging rights that come with it. Like the egotistical spread of the peacock‘s feathers, the way our society is engineered is to be the ”First” in the economy, in efficiency and in out-competing others. In that blind pursuit, we have unfortunately forgotten to strive for the other “First“, namely, in humanity, humility and in a others-centred mindset. 

If you want a wake up call on that, here is Prof Mahbubani to sound the alarm for you. “if you don’t inject an ethical dimension into it, it really is an empty society. It’s not just about material goods.”

This reminds me of the tale of a village guide and a modern day tourist. The latter was all psyched up to reach the top of the mountain climb. He wanted to achieve it in the fastest time possible. He had prepared everything needed to make it up. He was clearly efficient, all geared up. His goal was to boast to others his achievements when he reached the top, standing taller than all others. 

So, half way through the journey, the village guide suddenly stopped, sat down and started to rest, meditate and enjoy the view. The flustered tourist was clearly nonplussed and asked him why he had stopped. He reminded him that there is a deadline to meet.

The village guide then turned to him, smiled and said: “I am waiting for my soul to catch up.”

In parrallel to Prof Mahbubani’s empty society, we risk rushing through life and career and family, driven by an acquisitive mindset, that we leave behind our soul, or what it means to be a fellow human being, to be a spouse, a father/mother, a others-centred giver, a life-influencer.

From the flip side of the same coin, Tommy calls it the “obscene race to see who can pay the CEO more.” He compared the average bus worker earning a monthly wage of $3,600 and a chief executive of the bus companies earning in excess of $1 million a year, “with one paid between $1.75 million and $2 million a year.” And he asked, “Is this fair? Is running a bus company rocket science?”

Let me end with the astute observation of former National Environmenr Agency chairman Liak Teng Lit. He noted that “agrarian societies tended to focus on communalism and cooperation. This is not so in cities.”

He explained: “In a city, you begin to professionalise and monetise almost every role. Cleaning is a cleaner’s job. I make a mess, somebody cleans it. I pay the guy to do it.” As a result, financial planner Devan Tay added: “This is how self-entitlement starts - when people feel that whoever pays more should have the right of way or be the first in line, at the expense of all others.”

And the price we pay for such a society is a divided one, as Tommy Koh puts it, “we are divided by wealth, by income, by profession, by place of residence, and even by the school we attend.” 

This division only gets worse and society gets more stratified when we remain predominantly single-focused to rush up the summit of being the First World Nation, thereby deepening the wedge of an entitlement mindset. Mind you, the piped pier’s tune in such a soulless society is this: “I pay, you do; you are the means to my ends. And when you can no longer do what I pay, you are of no use to me.”

The all-important question here, as Tommy Koh had posed, is not about an alternative to capitalism. But what kind of capitalism we want? 

“Moral capitalism is where companies consider themselves accountable to not only shareholders but to wider society, where they care for the environment and employees, and champion gender equality and diversity.”

Although the Ambassador-at-Large has a point about moral capitalism, my thought is that the foundational stones we lay for the building of our society is indispensable to the enduring changes we seek. And like the frantic climbing of the social ladder to reach the top just to find out it was leaning on the wrong wall, building our society on the foundational stones of capitalism may just be the equivalent of leaning the social ladder on the wrong wall because the prosperity of capitalism depends mainly on seeking to be first for all the wrong reasons. Food for thought?