The Ones Who Walked Away From Singapore

I spent four years as an expat in Singapore. The trappings of expat life offer far more than what most people could achieve in their home country: luxurious apartments, tropical getaways accessible every weekend, an instant network of fun, like-minded friends. Despite nonsense reporting about this being the world’s most expensive city, the fact is when you are an expat here, you are as rich as you are ever going to be in life. The city itself is gleaming, spotless, and at the top of every UN development and good governance ranking there is. What more could one want?

And yet: like me, few expats make it past the four-year mark. Unlike other successful counties, this is not a magnet for immigrants. This is a revolving door. Stepping back from the totality of excuses people offer for leaving (kids, career, parents, humidity), it’s clear that none of those are it. I’ve lived in transient cities where young people vibrate through city life before settling down in smaller towns and suburbs. This has nothing to do with what is going on. Rather, I think people leave because there is something wrong — something deeply, ineffably alienating about this place. There is another side to the coin that most expats don’t see because they can’t step into a local’s shoes. If they were to, they would see the institutions of schooling, government, race and class that set the rules of the game for the population. They set hard constraints on what is possible in life. Those rules are not pretty. They form a deliberate, de-humanizing program to set people up as their own enemies: to inflict a climate of fear, monitoring and secrecy. It is Foucault’s panopticon under the veneer of a global “smart city”: a Smart-Opticon™.

Expat and local society are two planets locked in synchronous orbit, each casting shadows on the other, otherwise impermeable world. The authorities do a decent job of keeping untoward local goings-on out of view of the expat and international community. Part of this opacity stems from self-enforced barriers to local-expat interaction, and the superficiality of those interactions when they do occur. But even through those barriers, over years, the shadows cast by Planet Local add up something weird and unseemly.

My first exposure to this world came not long after I moved. I was browsing the gay location-based social networking app Grindr before sleep. I struck up a conversation with a nearby boy who seemed more interested than usual in talking about politics. He liked chatting with foreigners, he told me, because he can say what he wants without having to worry. Charitably then, I let the political conversation run its course before it took a turn to tinfoil hat conspiracy land: “The Prime Minister is out to get me,” he said. “He’s out to get my family, I’m worried about my safety. I’m going to have to flee the country.” This was a strange thing to say on a gay hookup app. Thank the Lord I didn’t meet this boy in person. I would have been skinned alive and worn as a foreigner suit.

Ngerng’s crime had been this: suggesting that the rate of return paid on individual pension funds should be closer to the rate earned by the Government’s sovereign wealth fund (where pension assets are invested), and that restrictive covenants on individual pension funds should be loosened. Banal stuff with a capital B. These were not the lunatic ravings of a schizophrenic madman or Marxist revolutionary. But of course, Ngerng’s deeper crime had been questioning the rules of the game.

It is not exceptional to his case that Ngerng worked for the Government. Everyone works for the Government. For every local, your job, your house, your savings are but for the grace of Government. Indeed, before most young men enter the labor force they are conscripted into the military for a two-year period of “National Service,” and remain reservists until the age of 40. National Service exists to provide the bulk of the labor force for military. But it is more than that. The scheme is a part of the glue that binds Singaporeans together. Locals will tell you that many of their lifelong friendships were forged during National Service. It has the benefit of bringing people from diverse backgrounds of race, class religion together and providing a formative shared experience. Lee Kuan Yew, its originator, wrote that the lackadaisical jungle climate and fractious, superstitious Chinese cultures were not conducive to creating the cohesive, hard-nosed society that would be needed to protect Singapore from its precarious geographic position. National Service was about creating a new man, refashioning culture and the individual into disciplined and vigilant defenders of the nation.

A cohesive fighting force cannot have people wandering off in their own direction. It cannot have people questioning their place or purpose on the battlefield. It must follow orders, unquestionably. Its members must have the fear of god that if they do not follow orders, they doom not only themselves but their cohort and their nation. Fear and shame are the regulating forces. Group punishments are meted out for minor infractions by a single member of the group. Seemingly trifling incidents of insubordination get you solitary confinement and beatings. Don’t follow orders, and you relegate yourself to a squalid hole with nothing to occupy your mind but your physical pain and mental shame. Servicemen are rewarded for reporting the infractions of their peers, while always looking anxious over their shoulders to avoid such perceived infractions. This environ of intense comradery latent with pervasive mistrust leads to ear-splitting levels of cognitive dissonance. Where psychotherapists talk about Fear, Obligation, and Guilt (FOG) as the cycle of an abusive family, these are the deliberate, weaponized dynamics of National Service.

Ask a Singaporean what truths they hold to be self-evident, and the answer will not be “all men are created equal.” Elitism is the wrong word for the system because it implies the elite are winning. Foreign commentators accuse Government ministers for the state of human rights in Singapore. If anything, ministers are the biggest victims. They are co-opted from an early age, too early to know better, into the schools and institutions that feed the Government. They are given impossible-to-refuse scholarship packages to schools like Harvard and Cambridge and bonded to Government jobs on their return. By the time they are released from the bond they are tied by golden handcuffs to high Government pay packages and too de-skilled to pursue international private sector careers. Unlike the hawkers and shopkeepers who live in contended ignorance of other possibilities, these Government ministers know that there is a better, freer world out there, but they cannot access it. No matter how high they rise, they are reminded that they are still always one step down on the dominance hierarchy. They cannot do what they want or what they think is right. They are still not good enough, and will not ever be. The PAP Central Executive Committee are the Captains of the Sea Org in Scientology: simultaneously the most elite and most victimized people.

Western public policy analysts spill copious ink trying to explain and replicate Singapore’s “success” as an economy. To them the policy environment is a Rorschach blot: Those on the right see a low-tax, free-market utopia. Those on the left see an interventionist state with massive public investments in housing, transit and education. They all miss the mark. Unlike in Western political debates, the proper role of the state, vis-à-vis the individual, is not even on the table as part of the conversation.

What do come up are issues like migration. This is for somewhat different reasons than they come up in the West, which are anxiety over wages or culture. In small Singapore, migration certainly benefits wages, and culture is already taken to be a hodgepodge. But migration is doing something more unsettling: It is visibly laying bare the dominance-oriented, kiasu house of cards for the wasteful nonsense that it is. Many Singaporeans go to work in multinational corporations, but they are unemployable in leadership roles. Their perpetual middle-wage jobs are guaranteed by generous subsidies and tax abatements to multinationals from the Economic Development Board (EDB). But western managers complain that the local staff do not think creatively, do not work independently, and cannot lead. Imagine that! When your entire educational life, the penalty for thinking creatively is four strokes of the cane!

For all the local sneering at “foreign talents”, the phrase contains its own grudging acknowledgement that there is something inadequate about being a local in the local labor force, and as the revolving door from outside grows more crowded, it further exposes and underscores that inadequacy.

Talk to enough Singapore taxi drivers and one would be shocked how many of them had been mid-level managers in multinational firms earning six figures. Why is this the case in Singapore but not in New York or Berlin? The answer lies in the ways in which human capital is formed and retained. In New York and Berlin, free market outcomes, including employment outcomes, reveal a preference for individuals, processes and firms that respond and adapt creatively to new information. In Singapore employment outcomes are not the work of the free market but rather the heavy hand of the EDB. The EDB’s whole subsidy and quota logic encourages multinationals to treat local employees as costs to minimized, rather than assets to be maximized.

Because, in Singapore’s subsidized corporate welfare ecology, one’s employment in a multinational is not signifying any real human capital, once an employee’s subsidized business case stops making sense, that employee has no human capital to fall back on. He only has taxi driving.

In the last couple of decades Singapore has committed itself, in rhetoric and funding, to being a hub for R&D and innovation. This has amounted to pouring billions of dollars into “research” and then importing the brains. The fad-driven sector-picking strategy treats the key to economic success as a kind of expensive kabuki theater. Real development economists know to look at performance vs. a baseline: Did Singapore need all the subsidies to “research” and “innovation” to achieve its top-line growth figures, or was this a spendthrift distraction? Real research scientists know to look for causation, not correlation.

For a place that pretends it lives on the knife edge of global competition, Singapore grants itself expansive licence with the competitive effects of it’s anti-speech, anti-art policies. A perpetual advocate for reducing barriers to trade, what is Singapore doing to reduce barriers to thought? If nothing, who is going to do all that research?

What are you selling your young people, indeed? What’s the new dream? What if the new dream is, simply, to dream? The new dream is abstract reasoning. The new dream is performance art. The new dream is laying down weapons. The new dream is taking ownership of your mind, turning away from the FOG, and asking: Why are things like this? How should things be different? How are the great engineering problems of the 21st century, or any problems, to be solved, if people are trained to avoid asking those two basic questions?

It’s hard to say how Singapore could start to go about building a robust meritocracy of ideas worthy of the global economy, but here are some ideas:

Chan’s advice to get out is not more relevant now than it has ever been. Reflect on the life of the elder Mr. Lee, who spent his youth in London cavorting both with communist enemies of colonialism, and colonialists. Soaking up, processing, and internalizing competing ideas to develop his own inductive version of the truth. Mr. Lee did not intend Singapore’s intellectual journey to stop with him, with his ideas or with the policies of his time.

What Le Guin leaves out of the story of Omelas, and what should not be left out of Singapore’s, is what happens to The Ones Who Walked Away. What happens to the six percent? One can imagine them wandering in the desert, awaiting the arrival of a proverbial Moses among them. Waiting for a plague, or for the passage of time, to appear at the gates of the Pharaoh and demand: “Let My People Go!”

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