Emotional Distance

 

I thought about the last few years. Something has changed, and one of the biggest things is that I stopped being very emotionally involved with people.

It is an exaggeration to say that I no longer have a friend in this world, but it's true that I haven't really taken the hard work to hang our with my friends.

I also think about my love life. There's not really been anything. The first phase was when women were untouchable and unreachable. I hadn't really known how to approach them, and they were painfully awkward years.

The second phase was when I was emotionally involved with a girl for the first time. And some of the moments were probably good (probably because I don't really remember.) The term didn't really exist in those days, but I was very likely the victim of narcissist abuse.

The third phase was when I still hung out with that girl, and I thought we were going to be “friends”. But I've come to realise that some of it was that I didn't want to lose her company, and some of it was that I still harboured the hope of getting into her ass. Time went on and it slowly dawned on me that

1. The prospects of consensual sex were very dim.

2. She was a bitch and I was wasting time with her.

3. We were growing apart. You could go along with anybody you found attractive when you were a teenager, but when you grow older, you'll know each other better and the differences will start to matter. I started to see more clearly that the person that she really was was really getting on my nerves. She was studying things that did not have a strong relationship with reality – an incredible amount of postmodernist mumbo jumbo.

We started getting contemptuous of each other, and eventually I made the decision to ghost her, which was quite easy because at that point I was mainly the one initiating contact. To be honest, I ghosted her because it was the one thing I could think of doing that would piss her off the most.

And as time went on, I didn't just ghost her, I promised myself that I would not talk to her, ever (it was surprisingly easy to keep this promise) and I would not hold on to any memory of the time that we had together. It would be like “Sunshine of the Eternal Mind”, when a person wiped his memory of an unhappy relationship. It brought me a peace of mind that I hadn't had for ages, at least since my adolescence. And I wasn't totally unaware of it, but every time I took out pictures of Japanese gravure models to get myself off to, I was emotionally distancing myself from women by reducing them to sex objects (and getting an hour of fun while I was doing it.) If my love life was a cute furry animal, this was a conscious decision on my part to strangle the life out of it, and also inflict the same kind of abuse on my own privates. 

The fourth phase was when I finally got my freedom back and I loved not having around so much that I didn't look for a girlfriend for the longest time. After a few more years, I ended up living in Mexico and that probably killed the prospect of me finding a girlfriend. Life was great.... up till the point when it was not.

I've now realised that that was very short sighted. When you are older, that is when you need the most the girlfriend that you met when you were young. My entire youth had gone by without me being in a proper relationship, and I had missed that rite of passage. I spent half an hour at the public piano, bashing out song after song. It happens very rarely but I did have one or two people clapping for me. That's me, reaping the reward as an old man, for what I did as a young man. Maybe I should have gone through the ordeal of having a girlfriend. Your happiness level outside of a relationship is a 5. Your happiness level in a relationship is somewhere between 0 and 10.

So while I'm happy that I got myself a peace of mind after emotionally distancing myself from that girl, I'm wondering if this is filtering into my contempt for the opposite sex. And while wiping my memory of all the good and bad things that took place was good in the short run, I wonder if it would have cost me in the long run.

Every School is a Good School

 

In hindsight, there is some consistency in the policy that the government wants to close down Yale NUS, and wants to close down the GEP. In both cases, they're taking what was purportedly an elite form of education, and trying to scale it up and make opportunities available to more people.

I'm an alumnus of the gifted program. I enjoyed my time there, and I will mourn the passing of that program, but I'm not going to mourn if some of the programs that made it what it is are opened up to more people.

When Singapore was newly liberated from colonial rule, there was some kind of sense to elitism. You didn't have a lot of money, and whatever you did have, you probably wanted to pool them together and select a few of your brightest people to send to developed countries, so that they could get educated, come back to Singapore and help build a society.

That was why a Columbo Plan scholarship was set up. And that's why, in a family of five, you would choose your eldest son to study and get into the middle class, so that after that happened, he could figure out a way to bring the rest of the family into the middle class. There's a mirror of that in Black America: Harlem was the place of art and culture for the Black people. It was where the entertainers went to prove themselves, at the Apollo theatre. Morehouse would be their Harvard University. (It's a respectable school but probably not an Ivy, unfortunately.)

But then the existence of elite universities is an uncomfortable one, because a few people could climb the ladder, and then kick it away when they reached the top. Over the years, there was this obsession about who would reach the top of the pile. There was the mentality amongst Singaporean students, that they needed, as children, to obtain the best credentials, then as adults they could take it easy and coast along on those great credentials. This is hardly a formula for maximising peoples' potentials.

Also, there was a crying need for Singapore to embrace multiple paths towards excellence. There was a lot of wastage of talent for people who may not fit in with the main strain of test taking.

These days, the computer science schools of NUS, NTU and SMU all have good students coming in. I know some of the graduates who are from neighbouring countries. I wish I knew what the Singaporeans who came through those programs are like. At the Factory, which is where I work, I've seen people from those three major universities, as well as Singapore Tech and SUTD.

Another significant change is that they've narrowed the credential gap between polytechnics and “A” levels. There are clueless morons who are chiding the youngsters for choosing polytechnic over the “A” levels. But polytechnic is better for preparing you for engineering and IT, whereas “A” levels is better for preparing you for science and data science. Obviously “A” levels is more intellectual, but polytechnic teaches you a lot of different skills. Instead of teaching critical thinking, it teaches pragmatic thinking.

We're in a different phase of developing our education system. We're no longer seeking to find our best people to create a beach head. It's now about Singapore being a magnet, and trying to attract the best talent from everywhere to turn it into a future ready economy.

I even spoke to one or two of the colleagues who worked with me, and they were wondering why Asia has this obsession with sending their children to the best grade schools. It's also notable that a lot of youngsters from overseas just enroll into whichever neighbourhood school they can find, and the best amongst them still end up in the best integrated programs and get good university places. 

They may be living in a world where it was no longer the case that all the best resources would be funnelled into the Raffles schools. Those schools would probably continue to be centres of excellence, but they would have to compete with the rest on a more level playing field. 

The idea that a leaving cert from a good school would set you up for life is an old idea from the 80s and the 90s. We have entered an era of creative destruction where it would not be good enough to latch on to a prestigious institution - a blue chip company or a prestigious government department. You had to be good, and had to prove yourself constantly, or else you'd get left behind. 

Changi Airport

 

Changi Airport is one of the most Singaporean things ever. A modern metropolis, a futuristic caravansarai. An island in the tropics which is somehow not like the rest. In a relatively backwards (but not necessarily unpleasant) part of the world. Hospitality, cosmopolitanism. A gateway between worlds. Between the Chinese, Malay, Indian and Western worlds. Between the civilised and rural worlds. A concrete jungle in the lush tropics. A piece of tarmac carved out from filling the sea in. A garden city housing a facility which is inherently destructive to the environment. A waiting room, a quarantine. A check-in area which is neither here nor there. A hundred kopitiams await you as you while the time away. In case you didn't know that Changi Airport is a bubble, they even built a glass dome around Jewel to press the point home.

Singapore is one of those great contradictions. It aspires to be a great city, and yet it is obviously too small to be a great country, let alone a great power. It is not a great cultural centre, and yet it imbibes from the great cultures of the world. It is small and yet it aspires towards exceptionalism. This exceptionalism is necessary, because without it, that would be the end of our existence as a an independent entity.

I was talking to a visiting angmoh, and he told me that this was an unreal and ephemeral vision. That was back in the day when Asia was still a rising power, and not yet a serious challenger to the west. I thought there was something quite condescending about that remark, but other than that, it showed how the idea of an Asian metropolis is quite strange and alien to his point of view, and it does highlight the vast contrasts – if not contradictions – in the various aspects that make up who we are.

It's not true at all that we are nothing more than a vision of the “floating world”. There are solid bases to who we fundamentally are. You should look at all the old photographs of pictures from the Rust Belt during the glory days. Your Detroits and Cincinnatis and Kansas Cities. The beautiful art Noveau buildings which no longer exist. That's ephemeral too!

Something to Die For

 I read a review of “wicked”, and one of the things is that it was revealed that Elphaba was actually a bit of an animal rights activist. She turned against society because of how animals were treated.

There was something that bugged me 10 years ago. Around that time, I was on a roll. My first few post-graduation years were not good, but gradually, I settled into my adult life, and it turned out to be not bad. I had a pretty good run of 7 years.

I learnt how to play basketball.

I became competent at work.

I learnt software development.

I earned a degree.

I picked up useful skills at work.

I made friends at work.

I enjoyed life in Singapore.

I became a good songwriter.

I moved to another country and was accepted there.

I earned a master's degree.

I found a well-paying job as a techie.

I ran a marathon.

Those years were and still are the highlight of my adult life. But later on, I sensed that things weren't going well. It was quite subtle at first. Life was still good, only I felt like I had lost my sense of direction. But a few years later, it became more obvious: I was in groundhog day, and I was living the same life over and over again. I lived alone with a housemate I didn't really know but was nice and civil all the time. I worked in a job that had nice perks, but didn't really interest me that much, and I stopped trying to stretch myself. I never managed to make time and space for my hobbies. I was wasting my time and energy on things that were unproductive.

And in hindsight, that was probably the prelude to what was to come: the midlife crisis.

When you're young, in some ways you are consumed by passion for something. Every time I did something out of the ordinary, it was because of where my passion led me. I would do a little extra to be good at mathematics. I would learn to be a great musician. I would write something special for the stage. I would go overseas and live and see what it was like.

But I never recaptured that drive that would make me want to uproot myself and move to another country. That drive, I think, was rooted in those years of failure, where I was lost and going around in circles, and things were so different from when I was in an elite school and it seemed really unlikely that I would ever fail in life. I think, the first few years after I started pulling my life back together, things felt really great. I was around 30, I was in my prime, it felt as though anything could happen.

But then things started to fall apart 10 years later. Because it stopped feeling great. Because good things happening to me felt like some kind of a routine, and maybe I started taking it for granted. There was no longer a drive, and no longer something I wanted to die for. I just wanted more of it, and not to have to sacrifice for it anymore. Or maybe things stopped being fun and rewarding.

So what was lost? What was lost was a cause to get excited over. I guess that would happen to anybody. What was lost was this sense of sportsmanship, this association of putting in effort with the possibility that something good was about to happen. What happened was that it was no longer about a yearning for adventure that was yet to happen, and instead looking back on the time that you tried this or that, and it turned out to be less satisfactory than what you had hoped.

Future of Western Democracy

 There's been a lot of handwringing about liberal democracy in the West.

My thoughts are these:

1. The West has gone through worse. They've gone through the nightmare of the middle of the 20th century. WW1, Depression, WW2. There aren't many heroic episodes in world history but the postwar institutions were heroic, the defeat of fascism was heroic. Ultimately, though WW2 was about the defeat of colonialism and that was basically self-inflicted. But they will have to go through some hard times, muddle their way through, find it deep within themselves to develop problem solving capacities, and triumph over adversity.

2. USA is basically Western Civilisation plan B. Plan A was Europe and it failed during WW1 and WW2 and after that it became subordinate to the USA. The institutions that make up the West are under attack on all sides and they dug themselves into a hole: for decades they had the mentality that emergent systems could take the place of government, that evolution could take the place of intelligent design. (When running a country, unlike in nature, intelligent design matters.)

3. Another heroic episode which has gone about unnoticed by the West is the rise of Asia. If they want to get out of their current mess, they will have to study how the rise of Asia was achieved. Because we did it without needing to rely on democracy and capitalism to function well. We had other qualities that helped us, and if the West doesn't figure out what those other qualities are, they will be going down further.

For example, I don't doubt the greatness of their intellectual tradition. But there are some things which are disconcerting. "Government" and "Political Science" are used interchangeably, as though they were the same thing. They are not. "Government" is about administering and running the show. "Political Science" is about monkey business. They need to start thinking more about administration and less about monkey business.

Europe needs to start thinking about how to function like a developing country, because some parts of their system are broken and they need to rebuild. There's been this habit of thinking, "let's just give people freedom and on their own accord, they will build a great society". That is lazy thinking, and they need to be more specific about how they will go about their business.

RI Petition

Something interesting caught my eye the other day. Somebody from RI, my alma mater put up a petition calling for the removal of the principal. I think it only made the news because of the sheer outrageousness of the whole thing.

Let me state that in the RI I went to, there was a high degree of tomfoolery. It was a place that was much like a looney tunes cartoon: violent but forgiving. People were up to all sorts of hi-jinks. People threw toilet paper against the ceiling to make paper mache. Somebody left his footprint on the ceiling. Teachers had limericks written about them. People got locked inside the toilet for laughs. Played squash against the blackboard.

But there were other incidents that took a darker hue. There are plenty of memories that give me a warm fuzzy feeling of nostalgia when I think about them. RI was a place where I was challenged for the first time, and I had to do things to prove that I had character, for example I had to go on a 20km route march. I had to write a school play, represent the school in competitions, master a musical instrument. Take pride in my own achievements.

But there were things about RI even back before it became a very competitive and unwelcoming place. People could be a little self-centred and only respected you if you did something that impressed them. They weren't very helpful to each other, and would look past you if you didn't have enough social status.

By and large, I was OK with the people who were there. Whether or not they were my good friends, I could always count on them to behave with honour and act according to the bro code. There were sufficient examples of people sticking up for me that I would have confidence in them as human beings.

There were a few things where I wasn't proud of RI. They didn't protect my mental health very well when things weren't going well for me. (Thank goodness I found a way to get back on my feet and in a way earned back my mental health). I didn't feel that somebody reached out to me to help, although to be fair, in retrospect people were concerned about me and I would have received more help if I were more receptive to help. There were bullies and I did get my things thrown around on the school bus, although it stopped once he got the message that he would be physically deprived of oxygen if he were to do that again.

There were certain things that disappointed me, although many of those things took place when I left. I was in one of the batches which moved from Grange Road to Bishan. RI had been in Grange Road since before I was born, so I barely understood that it was very much a temporary premises, RI was there for less than 20 years, which is basically a blink of an eye. But it felt that Bras Basah and Grange Road's RI was a very “old school” RI, which still retained a very working class and conservative mentality of the world. It was an RI which was still good at football. The RI of Bishan was the first place where we had computer labs, where people bought cassettes and CDs. It was a more internationalist, tech-savvy, cosmopolitan and worldly RI that took its place. Football was no longer an ECA in RI, quite possibly because the kids of my generation would get thrashed at it.

Perhaps when bad things happened to the old RI, things were kept under wraps. The RI of Bishan seemed to be a version which became more like what it is today – a bastion of the privileged elite. In fact, I was quite oblivious to the fact that a few of my classmates were children of civil servant royalty – maybe a minister of parliament or a permanent secretary or a superscale grade.

I was very disappointed when I heard about some of the scandals that made the news. I used to be embarrassed at some of the hi-jinks that I detailed earlier, but I don't think any of it was outrageously bad enough to go viral. The first one that really disappointed me was the “Elite Girl” scandal, where one of the RJC kids (who was the daughter of an MP) basically rubbished the idea about the growing divide between the haves and have nots. I think it got bad enough that she would be persona non grata if she comes back to this country.

Perhaps I wanted to believe that RI was some kind of a classless society. It was easy to believe, especially in RI's Grange Road era, where the economic advances were very broad-based, that we had finally transcended there being an economic divide in society. RI was that wonderful paradox: it was a symbol of Singapore. On one hand, it was an academically elite school and yet, it was supposed to be have students from all backgrounds. At least, that was the fantasy, that we were unlike the other traditional colonial elite schools who were the exclusive scion of the moneyed class.

Then there were a few other blackface incidents. One of my schoolmates was a playwright who – I respected his talent, but I thought he may have been a little thin-skinned about being a minority in RI. And make no mistake, RI is not a great place for a minority, and minority races are underrepresented in the school.

This petition felt different. For the first time, it felt that this institution was under attack itself. Perhaps I attended the school in a different era. I thought of the school first, and then secondly I thought about the school as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. I'm wondering about the guy who wrote the petition.

There is this thing about foreign students. I was a foreign student in Snowy Hill, and while I will always be proud of Snowy Hill, I also know that it's not my home. I could have attended many other universities, and there's nothing special about that university. Well, it's special, but it's not like a country that I would die for.

I'm starting to wonder if the guy who wrote it is either a foreign national or the son of a new immigrant, given that he did make a few English mistakes in his writing. Of course, every one of us at school has slagged off our teachers behind their bags for laughs. But we were careful not to do it in front of them, and while we weren't always very concerned about the reputation of the school (I can't imagine the number of crazy things I did while in school uniform) it's another thing entirely to want to decapitate the school's leadership.

So I actually went and signed the peittion and slagged off the kid for good measure. It's one thing to be disciplined by the school authorities for something as outrageous as this, but quite another thing to have to face up to a playground taunt, having to deal with a rebel within the ranks of the rebels.

As a former alumnus of RI, attended during the 90s when most of you were nothing more than a by product of your father's horny imaginations. I am here to tell you young punks that your conduct is nothing short of a disgrace.

During my time, we had to wear slacks every day and sweat as much as a horny female. The teachers made the rules and we had to live with them, whether we liked it or not. We had to sit in sullen silence as somebody threatened to slap our faces every 5 minutes.

While it is alright to want to aspire to independent thinking, what most appalls me is that such a flimsy and shoddy case is being built. You are asking him to be fired because he's turning off your air con and asking you to get a proper haircut? Many people have gone through RI and found it a character building experience. Are these pussies going to be our heirs and successors?

Teaching is not a popularity contest. You have to do the right thing whether the kids like it or not. It is OK to bargain against some restrictions that may be overly excessive. Reasonable to petition against the scrapping of an ECA (after having actually discussed this with a real person instead of hiding on the internet like a craven coward) But calling for the head of your principal is beyond the pale, especially on grounds that are as flimsy as the ones that are stated in the writeup.

People rebel against authority because of injustice. Like Lim Bo Seng against the Japanese, Lee Kuan Yew against the British, maybe even a few opposition party members. None of you are fit to be in that category. The frivolity with which you conduct your business, and the flimsiness of your stand make this whole affair a complete sham.

I was in sec 1 more than 30 years ago. I've seen a few things I didn't like – the shameless wayanging, the “elite girl” incident, people throwing away other peoples' lecture notes, a few blackface incidents, but never have I seen anything exposing the rot in the soul of RI more than a bunch of whinging brats offering to throw their leader under the bus over a few petty grievances.

I personally feel saddened that in this day and age, people who think that it's "personal correlation to judo" instead of "personal connection to judo" are allowed to wander the hallowed walls of our august institution. I am also disappointed in the people of my generation who have raised brats like the ones I see over here. Raffles Institution has fallen so far in standards as to be as bereft of character, like the graveyard that used to occupy the Bishan plot.

I am petitioning the board of directors for authorisation to allow the people who run the school to find the person responsible for this petition, and have him banished from Raffles Institution forever I am calling for people who sign this trash to have this on their permanent record If believe your generation calls this "cancellation")

If you think that calling for the head of your school principal is A-OK, I assume that this would also not be rough justice.

PS: Just because I'm an anonymous coward and a hypocrite, it doesn't mean that you guys aren't thin skinned cowards who can't face somebody calling you out for being unworthy Rafflesians and thin skinned narcissistic pricks who do not have the balls to face criticism.

One of the things is that the guy instigated quite a few people in RI to rise up against the principal. This is something more serious than blackface people embarrassing themselves. You actually got at least 100 people to join in the mutiny with you. You've made the principal's job more difficult. And if the school board feels that they have to fire the principal, then it sets a very unpleasant precedent that students in the school can remove the principal just by staging an uprising.

The principal, on the other hand (who may even be a younger person than me) has also done himself no favours. There was a blackface incident last year, where somebody turned up as a minority blackfaced Foodpanda delivery man. It was something very insensitive, possibly in breach of the religious harmony act, and he should have been punished. But the principal stopped short of doing something courageous and punished him. The principal, I felt, owed him at least a mock execution.

Quite possibly there were a few cutbacks to school programs. I'm starting to wonder if they were pushed down from the board, or from the Ministry of Education. Some of the CCAs, some of which had a pedigree in RI, had their plugs pulled. But the petition seemed so cheerfully nihilistic that I somehow doubt that it was truly about these weighty concerns. The guy just seemed more pissed off that the principal was withdrawing a few privileges.

There are quite a few question marks about the principal. He may have been unlucky enough to have had to implement quite a few unpopular changes to the school. Maybe RI was supposed to no longer have a monopoly on many of the special enrichment programs, and they were more broad based. This would be in line with making the Singapore school system less elitist. And there were criticisms of his style.

Somehow, though, this seemed to wind me up. The guy seemed to be doing something malicious as an insider. He was a traitor to the Rafflesian community. Maybe he was a spoilt brat who thought he could get away with anything. It's unfortunate that there are a few other people who have genuine reasons to feel upset at the principal and are being instigated to turn on him in a public forum. But this has made RI into some kind of a laughing stock, and highlighted the internal division between people in the school.

Last Week before Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump

 There are a few troubling signs ahead for the elections. In 2016, I could feel that the movement against Trump was very vociferous. People literally thought that he was going to destroy the US system. He didn't destroy it, but he did a lot of damage to it.

It is reassuring on the surface that some people have called the race for Harris. But they tend to be the old folks, and if there's anything I've learnt recently, old folks are not shy about losing their credibility because when you're old, there are fewer consequences when you lose your credibility.

The polls are starting to turn against Kamala Harris. This looks bad for her. The complaints are that she hasn't articulated a coherent point of view. A respected pollster has repeated that complaint recently. She had a lot of fundraising recently, and she rode a wave of enthusiasm, but that wave is about her not being Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

Kamala has quite a few things working against her: the current government is unpopular, and a lot of elections this year have favoured the "change" candidate. I've just realised that US presidential elections do not favour women, because the US self-image is quite masculine (as opposed to many European countries who have traditionally had female heads of state). She's black, and that was a bigger problem back in the day when US was basically a white country, but it's still some kind of disadvantage, especially in a race where small margins matter.

In a democracy, when you have 2 candidates for president, and people vote for them based on ideological differences, things are already going to be heated, and they'll be bad enough. But when both of them are of different races and the voters are split on racial and gender and geographical lines, then you don't really have a functioning democracy. What you have is tribal war.

What she has going for her is that many former Republicans are really tired of Trump and are turning out for her. But I don't know if that would actually help her. As Michael Sandel pointed out in the epilogue to "Democracy's Discontent", what's going on is not that people necessarily agree with Trump, but they agree that he's against the system, and they hate the system so much that they would destroy it. So for the professional eggheads to turn up for Harris would actually be a reason for them to vote for Trump.

If she loses, then at least she will be a less tragic figure than Hillary Clinton, who wanted her whole life to be president, but lost the election at the last moment. Also, the 2 anti-Trump sentiments are that he's too weak to govern, and that he will be extremely disruptive. It's been pointed out that these two objections contradict each other.

It was a little curious to me at first that both the Democrats and Republicans act like they're supremely confident they're going to win. And after thinking about it, it then occurred to me that this election is very likely to be disputed, and if it is disputed, you didn't want to be the guy who expressed doubt that your side was going to win. You wanted to create the narrative beforehand that you're the winning side, so that if it were become as close as Florida in 2000, you'd be in with a fight.