Singapore, Malaysia and the unevenness of good governance

The future is here. It's just not very well spread out. The diffusion of technological advancement has never been even. Why is it easier for some countries to make that leap into developed world status and not other countries? That's the question that you have to ask yourself when you're considering the diverging paths of Singapore and Malaysia.

With hindsight, we now know that Singapore and Malaysia diverged because Singapore had the right idea on how to go forward. As for Malaysia, to be fair to them, they had a lot going for them. But they were just less ruthlessly efficient than Singapore. I'm sure most third world countries would like to be Malaysia, even now.

So why does good governance have to mainly be confined to Singapore? Maybe it was better for all: Singapore needed the independence in order to have the freedom to implement its own ideas and demonstrate that our ideas were better. Malaysia could go its own way, but at least it can catch up and take a few ideas from a Singapore who showed how things could be done.

As for the separation, I thought that it was contradictory that LKY and the Tunku's government both agreed to the divorce without either side having to twist the other's arm. It was a mutual divorce. So both sides were happy with it in a way. But when you divorce, there has to be a display of sadness, and it is a real shame that two countries with so much in common could not find a way to carve out a future together. I used to think that this dual attitude was really duplicitious, but I've come around to the idea that both sides of the story need to be articulated.

And then I think about the story of the developed world and the third world. The developed world are countries which are a magnet which suck the best and brightest from the third world. The third world becomes mired in poverty and bad governance. This is a very unfortunate social dynamic. It's even happening within the US, and there are not just a gap between the have and have nots amongst people, but the regions are becoming more and more divergent in terms of their fortunes.

So was it necessary for there to be a separation, so that Singapore was allowed to be Singapore? Malaysia's fortunes have been pretty bad, until the great shock – actually not a great shock for BN to lose power a few years ago to PH. Then it took a few years after the Sheraton Hotel coup for Anwar to become the prime minister. One suspects that Malaysia is finally waking up after years of complacency because they're beginning to realise that the power and interests of the venal elite class is not as important as being able to rise up to the challenge of living in a world where US and China are starting a new great power conflict.

Does this mean that Malaysia can finally clean up its act to be a better version of itself? Will Anwar be able to shake up the power structures and point Malaysia into a better direction, going forward? Or is reformasi simply a lazy power slogan? Is he a temporary Barack Obama who will have a Trump succeed him and undo all the good things? It's very hard to tell. But I think a lot of observers can see that if Malaysia can get on the right track, it will be part of a southeast Asia which – for the next few decades at least – has a bright future.

Alex Ferguson

There's this article that said that Alex Ferguson didn't have any former player who became a great manager. And in many ways it's true. Gordon Strachan and Mark Hughes have made a decent fist of their managerial careers. Steve Bruce has had a long but undistinguished career, and a back handed compliment to pay him would be that he's one of the legends of the second tier. Bryan Robson, Paul Ince, Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Dwight Yorke, Jaap Stam have flattered to deceive. Maybe Mike Phelan has found his level at the assistant coach level. As has Steve McLaren. Never cut the dice in his role as a head coach.

The verdict is still out on Wayne Rooney.

Maybe it's the case that what Alex Ferguson did was something that you couldn't teach or pass on to another person: Alex Ferguson was very hardworking, and he was very good at psychology and motivating people. I don't know if he was great at tactics: I suspect that what he did was to delegate this portion to other people.

Rio Ferdinand said it this way: you didn't know how good Alex Ferguson was until he left. Which probably means that there were people who never figured out what was good about him, and therefore they didn't have much to learn from him.

Man United's downfall after Alex Ferguson could have been held up as evidence that he is Man United's greatest manager. For me, one of his greatest triumphs was how he managed to fend off the challenge from Chelsea, and eventually win 5 titles in 7 years between 2006 and 2013. It was a triumph that was all the more pronounced, given that he had to fend off the challenge from a club like Chelsea that was even richer than Man United. But that was a triumph that had quite a few question marks next to it.

First, was he lucky to have Cristiano Ronaldo in his team? One could also argue, then again, that Cristiano Ronaldo was lucky to have Alex Ferguson as a manager.

Second, it was an era that didn't really have a dominant club in England after C Ronaldo left: the champions were Chelsea, Man U, Man City, Man U, Man City, Chelsea, Leicester and then Chelsea. After that, we have the age that we're living in right now: the age of Man City dominating the league.

Third, during the last years, he got his ass kicked by Barcelona and Pep Guardiola twice in the Champions league. During both finals of 2011 and 2013, he was defeated, and it wasn't even close.

In my mind, during those 2 matches, the torch of the greatest manager in the world was passed from Alex Ferguson to Pep Guardiola.

Alex Ferguson's three-peat from 2006 to 2009 included 1 champion's league, and was maybe his last hurrah. And thereafter there would be a wide array of forces against him: 

1. old age hampering his ability to be as effective as once was,
2. the Glazers bilking money out of the club, making it harder to compete against ....
3. not one but two big bankrolled clubs in Chelsea and Man City. 
4. Pep Guardiola leading a revolution in how clubs are managed....
5. Not just on the coaching side, but also how the CEO of the club manages. 

Man United's fortunes have faltered because of these factors, but even if the 2008 version of Alex Ferguson were to carry on managing the club, he would no longer be the greatest manager, because he wouldn't be able to catch up to the revolution of Pep Guardiola and his peers. 

Pep Guardiola and Alex Ferguson have one or two things in common: they are absolutely ruthless at culling from their team players who they don't want, and they also have this great ability to get the best out of their players to fit the system. But from then on, the difference couldn't be greater.

Guardiola's strength is mainly as a tactician / strategist. He doesn't man manage people. He failed to manage big personalities in the past, like Zlatan. Perhaps after that experience, he decided that he had to weed out all the rebellious people. Football has been following a trajectory where it depended less on the individual and more on the system. Especially in Guardiola's teams, it's always been about control. Individual flair and spontaneity just seems to be choked out of the system. Or rather, it has to be constrained to fit within his system.

This being the age of Guardiola, football has become a science rather than an art. It has become about rehearsed sequences rather than allowing improvisation and spontaneity. While Ferguson was one of the most dominant managers within the structure of a club, Guardiola has been about building institutions, where there was a greater leeway for other people to play supporting roles within the club. Somehow, the machinery of the club is such that they'll usually buy the right player, make him fit into the team and get the best out of them.

Sergio Aguero, John Stones, Riyah Mahrez and Jack Grealish did not fit into the team at first, and people wondered whether or not they were flops. But they eventually adapted and flourished.

Jose Mourinho and Alex Ferguson represented a time when the force of personality of the individual players mattered. The force of personality of the manager mattered. They were the great titans of the game. Arsene Wenger was also a great manager, but to be honest, he got knocked off his perch the moment Jose Mourinho stepped in. Arsene Wenger oversaw a revolution in English football, and for those glorious years between 1997 and 2004, he was he vanguard of that revolution. But eventually the rest of the league caught on to what he was doing, and in many ways surpassed him.

Guardiola represented a regime where the players were just cogs in the machine and it was the force of that machine that imposed itself. I don't know that you could really represent what Guardiola did. There were times when what he did was tiki taka, and other times when it was the pressing game. Maybe I'll leave it for others to interpret what he did, but maybe he was like Miles Davis, in that he was so impressively innovative that you couldn't reduce into a few words what it was he did.

Thus the years between 2017 and 2022 were the years when Guardiola and Klopp ruled the premier league. Even more impressively for Guardiola, it seems that he has already produced one protege who has the potential to be a great manager, in Arteta. Quite possibly Tito Villanova could have been a great manager if not for his untimely demise. Vincent Kompany is relatively unproven but he's made a great start to his career. (But then again so did Roy Keane).

One of the hardest things to assess in a footballer is intelligence. It used to be more obvious in the good old days when the main criteria were athleticism and skill. But these days it's more about being able to execute a better strategy and play the right pass. That is harder to assess and see. What makes a high value footballer is less obvious to the untrained eye. I think about how dominant some of Pep Guardiola's teams have been, and I'm reminded of a saying: I don’t know any examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things. Pep Guardiola's teams are dominant because at their best, they are just more intelligent. 

Curation

 Life move outwards in an ever widening circle. I remember the time when I was 15, and it started occurring to me that there would come a time when I would lose the connections that I had with my friends at school. We were there, and we would be seeing each other every day, and this was thought of as normal life. Their presence in my life was even something I had regarded to be permanent. Until the day came when it was not permanent, and we would write in each other's autograph books.

When you're a kid in a stable environment, you don't learn the real meaning of impermanence until later, until it's way too late.

Does life go in a circle or does it go in a straight line?

I thought about this because soon after I returned to Singapore I realised that I lived 3 lives in Singapore, in Snowy Hill and in Mexico and they almost had nothing to do with each other. I walked in a market that I had first visited as a baby and was just blown away. It was like the town square of “Back to the Future” which is eternal. But it's when the constants are juxtaposed against everything else that it throws into sharper relief that everything has changed.

Does life funnel outwards or does it funnel inwards?

Perhaps when I left for Mexico, I already knew this: this is the last time my horizons will be broadening. Eventually I will be confronted with the endless duties of adulting. I might have to clean up after my parents when they're gone. I'll have to learn everything from them because whatever I don't, will be gone forever.

How do I honour their memory when I have strained for all my life to be free from them?

For me, there is a bit of clarity. I have no descendents. There were some things in the past that I have cut myself off from and I'm glad I did. I'm done with theatre, I'm done with long distance running. I left on a high. I'm done with my ex, although that wasn't really a high. But the rest will still be a part of me and I'll have to reckon with what all that is, who I am.

Curation

Therefore what we have now is the task of curation. Some things will remain and some things will be gone. That is something that struck me on a few levels. Singapore is constantly changing: so many of the things we used to know are fading and will soon be gone, because Singapore cannot afford to hold on to all its memories.

I was talking to two friends of mine: one of them was grappling with his grandfather's antique collection. They had a lot of furniture stored somewhere, and it was costing them. You can't keep everything. Land is really expensive. Physical objects are prohibitively expensive because of how much space they take up. You could sell away or keep the most culturally significant pieces of furniture.

The point is that everything decays. Some things are preserved, but inevitably, something else is lost. The loss is inevitable. The state of the world as it exists today will decay, and you will never have it back in its original form. Some landmarks will be torn down, while others remain. So what is this process by which we decide which memories survive and which don't?

I also thought about how Singapore shophouses were indiscriminately torn down in the first postwar years, and a lot of people complained that it was a big shame. But I've lived in other cities were all buildings were cultural relics to be preserved, and it seemed that the older buildings choked the life out of the city, by preventing new structures from being erected over the old. In Singapore, the old and the new live side by side, and the old eventually gets phased out. We all have pictures of what Boat Quay was like before the Singapore River was cleaned up. And that may have been the iconic images of Singapore. But do we seriously want all the boatmen back in Boat Quay now? I'd be very happy for it to be what it is right now, which is a tourist trap.

So the thing that's been haunting me since I came back is that I am in the middle of my life. I am in the curation phase. I've become acquainted with my limits. I will no longer be able to hold on to everything I had in the past. As the years go by, things will be lost and forgotten, and the memories will grow ever distant. My sense of who I was as a teenager will be gone. In fact, people, as they grow old, morph into personalities which are quite distant from their younger selves.

I no longer have infinite horizons full of possibilities. Both my past and my future are limited, finite. What I have and hold in life is limited by how much I can juggle and keep in the air at each point in time.

When I curate, I look at each object: how I came to acquire it, what I thought about its value, how much I thought they were worth back then, and what are they worth now. Do pieces of treasure turn into junk? Does junk turn into treasure? Do I hold on to it because it reminds me of a past that, if I were to cut it off, I would lose something of itself?

I've come to the conclusion that inevitably something from the past will disappear. An antique collection will be too much to retain in its entirety. How do you curate so there's a higher ratio of treasure to junk?

Novelty

Then there was this issue of novelty in my life. When I was young, I used to have a novelty seeking brain. It seemed like a good thing at the time. It was fun to keep on opening new doors and looking through them: I don't know if my blog entries from way back are still around but that's a good indicator of that. But in middle age, that becomes a problem.

I could get stuck in a rut like this. I don't really want to open any new doors because I feel that I've maxxed out my capacity for new avenues in my life. I don't want to start another string of new memories. Maybe my brain doesn't want to learn new things. Or my brain feels that I should very carefully budget the new things that I get to learn.

And yet, when I deal with the old things, there is this drudgery, this feeling that I'm not moving forward. When I was younger, and thinking about what needed to be done in order for me to focus and concentrate on the few things that I could do well, I underestimated just how much discipline and focus I needed. And now it's taking a lot out of me.

Janus - the future and the past

At one point, “Mexico” was the future. It was funnelling outwards. It was me, standing on the edge of the cliff, looking down on creation. Singapore is my past that I barely have been able to reckon with, all the stories from my elder relatives I could have heard if I wasn't so intent on breaking away from them. I chose Singapore.

I am preparing for death. I am the last of my kind, doomed to extinction. Maybe I will think about feathering my nest and making things comfy for the next 20 years.

As a teenager I was obsessed with uniqueness. In a way that was the production of culture, like I wanted to make my mark on the world, even if it was just cheap thrills. And now some part of me thinks that I arrived with nothing in this world and should leave with nothing.

Do I leave a legacy behind or do I inherit one from my ancestors?

I see that I've touched on themes that somehow Google seems to be thinking about (at least back when search was the big thing.) Attention, memory, search, curation / filtration, cultural preservation.

There was this event where I saw a lot of RGS girls. I look at them and they look a lot like what they looked like in the 1990s, but I am no longer adolescent and they no longer make me horny. The 1990s RGS girls – do they have more in common with the RGS girls of today, or do they have more in common with their incarnations in the present, some of whom are mothers of the current RGS girls? If the 1990s RGS girls resemble the 2020s RGS girls, do they equally resemble the 1960s RGS girls?

I guess RGS and RI are just like the back to the future townsquare – they are constants that exist to just remind you how everything else has changed.