Striving for Excellence

Something that Shanmugaratnam said is true.

When I was a student in school, every year there were plenty of people who did special papers. Most did 1 or 2, but a few, 1 or 2 in the school, aspired to do 3 special papers instead of 2. Naturally, because of the advantage having 3 special papers gave you in scholarships, more than 1 or 2 aspired to 3 “S” papers, but they decided that only very few would do 3 “S” papers.

I thought this was dumb, even though I wasn’t one of those who aspired to 3 “S” papers. I thought that peoples’ potential were unfairly limited. But now I think that it’s a good thing, because it’s bad enough that people should spend all their time studying, you shouldn’t encourage this sort of thing.

It’s alright to limit people striving for better and better grades. I think that exams are there solely for the purpose of sorting out the chaff from the wheat. Other than that, there is not much purpose at all. I’m not even sure that it’s really an education. I don’t really know if having perfect scores for your major exams is excellence.

The problem with this notion is that when you sit for an exam, 100 marks is the upper limit. But in real life, there are no limits. In real life, you have to run and run until you are exhausted and have to stop.

So we come to the first problem about excellence in Singapore. We live in a closeted place. We were force fed stuff from the very beginning, and there wasn’t a whole lot of people asking us what we wanted. That is a very big problem. Excellence is mainly achieved by people who have already found their niche. There’s not much encouragement for people to find their niche. Everybody takes all subjects, and are assessed on all subjects. What is taught are the facts. But often the facts are distilled from a lot of knowledge, and they are derived of context.

You will never excel in the real world by doing a lot of what people do in school. Nobody gives you prizes for being the best at mugging, except in school. And being the best in that field is a joyless thing. So people put a cap on how much you want to mug. If you don’t put that cap – well you end up with a whole generation of hikikomori.

In contrast, the real world is – well, a world unto itself. Everything has its place. You don’t get to pick and choose which skills you need to have: what you don’t have, you’d better learn. You have to work with others. You have to understand the way things work, outside of an academic context.

From the classroom environment, it is quite hard to teach people what it’s like to be great. What it’s like to excel in the real world. In the classroom, books are king. Thinking is privileged over doing. In the real world, it’s the other way around: doing is king. Now that I’ve grown older, I’ve looked around me and realised that those classmates of mine who became captains of their respective ECAs have made a better go of it at life.

When I was a student in school, people were encouraged to work hard, and they did. People aspired to get As and they did. But there was a lot of bitching about how people “spoilt the market” if you aspired to a level of excellence beyond that. If you studied all the time you were a “chao mugger”. Even the nerds were calling each other that.

I think, this is Asian society. In some ways we don’t like people who stand out too much. Yes, we are also greatly influenced by the west. So we have this fascination about people who dare to be different. There was one or two people who tried to be different, and when they were talked about, it was with a curious mix of contempt and reverence.

Then, here, we have the second problem: excellence, or being outstanding, is, in part, exceptionalism. This exceptionalism is not as well tolerated in Singapore as it may be in some other societies. It has been said that entrepreneurism has never been very well tolerated in Japan as it has been in other countries: if you fail in Japan, everybody will shun you. If you fail in California, everybody takes it as par for the course. That’s why there are many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, but none in Japan.

A third stumbling block is people’s attitudes towards excellence. Singapore is nothing if not intensely practical. People privilege face, social status. The monkish austerity of an excellence seeker ploughing a lonely furrow – a little frowned upon. People instinctively understand if you were to feather your nest. Everybody does that. Better to be a manager, living off people’s work, than to be the engineer doing that work. Eye power, vision. That’s the thing. Better to be a pimp than a prostitute.

Because people are generally more concerned about what you can get out of the system than what you can put in. That’s why, as you can read in the comments, when Tharman asked for excellence, everybody interpreted that in the sense of “here’s my boss telling me to just work harder for him”. They don’t think of it in terms of “being excellent makes me a better person. It makes me a real man.” That’s the problem with Chinese culture. It lies with how work is appropriated. In Chinese society, you instinctively know that your boss gets all the credit anyway. Yes, China is a great civilisation. We invented gunpowder, paper and the compass. Who invented those things? History doesn't record. Nobody pursuing excellence gets his just credit.

In Western culture, they respect the great artist, the great scientist. Kings? Fuck them. In Chinese culture, they respect the king. You shake hands with Queen Elizabeth, but you kowtow to the Chinese Emperor.

So don’t bother striving for excellence. Don’t bother trying to take humanity forward. China does not regard itself as the vanguard of humanity. China is for China. Don’t bother being a Leonardo da Vinci. Be a king, and make other people kowtow to you. That is the only way you will ever be remembered.

Who was the most entrepreneurial person in Western History? Christopher Columbus. And he was deified. In contrast, our Admiral Zheng He is just a eunuch working for the emperor.

That is why I fear that China will grow to a certain size, and break all speed records in getting itself up to the middle class, and then stagnate there for the rest of her existence. Like Zheng He’s magnificent voyages to Southeast Asia, to India, even to East Africa. Then after that, you fucking burn those ships because the emperor’s had enough. China will shoot itself in the foot because it has done so before. If you want an entrepreneurial culture then it will be something foreign and novel to Chinese culture. It’s not impossible but don’t count on it happening.

A fourth reason is that Singapore is a big city but it has a small town mentality. Singapore is a small market, no matter what. If you make it big here, you will still have a problem going beyond these shores to do something overseas. It is way too easy to denigrate what Singaporeans have achieved. It’s too easy to have existential crises, too easy to put down your own fellow countryman. And way too difficult to change peoples’ mindset about this. Whenever you set up a shop, you need to trick people into thinking that it’s an international brand from overseas. Therefore you have Watson’s from Hong Kong. Ferrero Rocher from Hong Kong. Delifrance from Singapore. Haach from Singapore.

A most obvious reason, actually, can be gleaned from the comments that have been made at the bottom of the article. People are asking, “Why are our ministers earning so much?” rather than asking what they can do to become a great entrepreneur. People are complaining that facilities are less than stellar. Being a complainer is more or less the opposite of being an entrepreneur.

Singapore and Culture

Somebody wrote this comment about Singaporeans: We don’t have any culture. We just like to complain about everything. That may have some truth about it, but I think there’s some blindness there.

Regarding the forging of a Singaporean identity, it doesn’t help very much when people say that we derived all our culture from elsewhere. When we haven’t really invented anything of our own. When we are but not much of a small country.

There are 2 versions of what you understand by culture. Some people think that culture is what you do, and how you live your life. Other people think that culture is what your great great great grandparents did and how they lived their lives. At the moment, the latter definition is what most people think of when they say culture. But I think that the first definition is vastly underrated.

There is a bit of frustration when I think that there’s not much that Singaporeans can really call our own. No doubt, we are proud of Singlish, since it’s a postmodernist blend of languages that you can’t find anywhere. And since Singaporeans don’t have that much to call their own, they end up being proud of the English accent. Some angmoh guys have asked, “why is this aspersion for people who speak with Caucasian accents?” And the answer is obvious to us but doesn’t come to them easily: because when we go to Western countries, we have to change our accents. Shouldn’t it be the case that when Westerners come to our country, they have to change their accent too?

Thing about Singapore is, anybody who has something interesting to contribute to Singaporean culture will get a voice. We are, right now, in the process of writing our own culture. The great artists of any culture are the ones who filled a piece of empty space in the landscape. And in Singapore, there is empty space everywhere. People like Corrine May and Electrico got to write National Day songs. I’m not any less of a songwriter than those guys (at least I don’t think so, and much work remains to be done before I prove or disprove this).

I think that there are many energetic people who might realise this. Even though I’ve lived in Singapore long enough to know that as a rule, Singaporeans hate change, they don’t like new things, I believe that there is a possibility for good things to take place in our cultural landscape.

Conversely, I think that if a place has too much culture and tradition, there is the ability to stifle whatever’s come before. I remember what it was like to play classical music, and being constantly told by music teachers that you just had to conform to their idea of what classical music was all about. Of course, it’s always good to be a little strict with children, but I don’t think I learnt that much about classical music like that.

One of the big problems, though, is that Singapore has always been a postmodern society. When I look at the history of Southeast Asia as a whole, I feel that there is something paradoxical about living in an archipelago. You get a lot of visitors from the sea. Indians, Chinese, Arabs and Angmohs. And we have absorbed a lot of our cultures from these people. But we encounter them as “the other” and we can always maintain an arm’s length from them. There’s not that immediacy that comes from living side by side.

We don’t have that sort of relationship with another culture, the way that the British and the French do, a kind of intimacy that comes about from living side by side for hundreds of years, seeing each other grow, exchanging ideas, occasionally exchanging disparaging comments, but always your cultures have a long term relationship with, and are growing side by side. You really think that Shakespeare is quintessentially English? He set his plays in Verona (Romeo and Juliet), Venice (Merchant of Venice), Rome (Julius Caesar), Scotland (Macbeth) and North Africa (Othello). Pretty damn cosmopolitan for somebody living in the 16th century I’d say.

Maybe this is not such a loss. In Asia civilizations that have grown up side by side eventually end up not liking each other. The Viets and the Khmers don’t like each other. The Viets and the Chinese don’t like each other. The Koreans and the Japanese don’t like each other. The Thais and the Cambodians don’t like each other. The Thais and Malays don’t like each other. Perhaps they haven’t really attained the level of modernity or prosperity that makes cordial exchanges possible, and perhaps one day they will.

The problem with the kind of relatively superficial contact that Singaporeans have with the rest of the world is that there’s no serious percolation of cultural influences on a deeper level. We just take the best and leave the rest. And we end up with rojak. Possibly it makes it even more difficult for Singapore to produce great art, because great art demands a mastery of all your influences, all your sources, and it demands the harmonization of everything in the universe in which it breathes and lives.

I’m starting to wonder if multiculturalism and postmodernism are a good thing for art and culture. We see quite a few negative effects when myriad influences are absorbed without the proper time and effort to see how every piece fits in, without being able to assimilate the parts into the whole.

I think about what pop music has been like since the internet took over the world. In fact, there’s not much of value that people anywhere have invented in the 21st century. The first decade of the 21st century has ended, and when I compare the music of the 2000s with that of the 90s it is utterly depressing. Of course, one must always make allowance for how I was in my teens in the 90s, and how new music always sounds more appealing to people in their teens.

It’s like ever since rock and roll till now, music has been evolving. You had new styles coming up every few years: Beatles. Rock. Hard rock. Heavy Metal. Soul. Funk. Disco. Progressive rock. Punk. Post-punk. Alternative / Indie. Hip hop. Techno / Rave. Ambient. And after the internet? Nothing. Or else, everything else has been a blending of styles.

Somebody came up with a taste test: play something from the internet era, and try to guess whether it’s 90s or 00s music. It’s impossible. Whereas play something from the pre-internet era, it’s possible to guess which decade it came from. Is this due to the internet – postmodern era, or is it due to how so much of what could possibly be invented has already been invented? This is the first time in my lifetime that something strange like this has happened.

Another hidden aspect about Singapore is, I think, comes from something that I read about the population of overseas Chinese. Apparently the greatest populations of overseas Chinese are to be found in Southeast Asia. There are 23 million in Taiwan. (I don’t know if you’d call them Southeast Asia). Then there are 7 million each in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. And probably 4 million in Singapore. That would probably mean that there is a “ghost” nation of at least 25 million overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, and it’s possible that Singapore would be the capital of that ghost nation. But I just feel that the Chinese communities of all these countries pass through each other like ships in the night. I just realized this because my workplace may be called extremely cosmopolitan, except that most of the foreigners there come from this ghost nation.

It’s like a big part of Singapore is actually part of a larger nation and we’re not even aware of it! The guy, though, I think he’s from the PRC, although he can’t be sure. I think people from China would find it very weird to be coming to places in southeast Asia and finding that people lose their Chineseness to a shocking extent – or even worse, add supremely unfamiliar elements to it. Aspects of Chineseness that don’t originate from China – now there’s a sacrilege if ever there was one.

I'd Like To Sell the World a Coke

I saw a poster that was supposed to be inspirational. Robert Goizueta was one of the legendary CEOs behind Coca Cola. During his tenure, he brought Coca Cola to great heights. To be sure, Coca Cola was always supposed to be one of the great blue chip companies. But it was one of those stodgy, “old economy” elephants who was supposed to be more of a staid big, established firm, rather than an all-conquering titan.

When I was on course today, I saw a screen showing that Robert Goizueta changed the strategy of the company. When he arrived, the main strategy was that Coke was supposed to grab as much market share as possible from Pepsi. Goizueta’s great insight was that, “hey, instead of grabbing market share from Pepsi, why don’t we try to expand the market?” Then Coca Cola set about doing that, and Coca Cola henceforth not only became a great American Company, it became one of the great forces exporting American culture to the world.

Commercially, it was a great success, but I also consider it a disaster. One of my great memories of America is how fat everybody is. That’s what’s going to happen when fast food is as common there as hawker food is here. I’m kinda glad that our diet never got taken over by fast food the way that it was in America, but you never know if it’s ever going to happen.

Coincidently, I had a brainwave. I saw this article in the Guardian just this weekend, and one line jumped out at me: Britain’s obesity problem dates back to the 80s, around the same time that Goizueta was “expanding market share” to people. Selling Coca Cola to people, not only as a drink you bought yourself as a treat, but as a substitute for drinking plain water, or coffee or tea.

And you had to consider that Coca Cola was sometimes sold to people in third world countries who couldn’t afford it. God knows how they managed to get their Coke.
And you hear stories in India where farmers are being forced off their land so that other people can plant the sugar cane that goes into coke. (I know that the recipe is a secret but there is no doubt that sugar is one of the main ingredients). Now sugar cane is a crop that drinks a lot of water, which is a scarce commodity in India. You have a lot of irrigation water going into all that sugar cane just so that people can have their coke.

I don’t mind admitting that I like Coke. But I think that Coke should have just minded their own business and sold their stuff to their traditional market base, instead of messing up the world at large.

So, I’m asking myself, why are business leaders praised so much when they screw up so many peoples’ lives? Why did we treat them like gods in the 80s and the 90s? At least in the context of Coke, I don’t think that what Goizueta did was the right thing, no matter how highly praised he was for it. There is a story about how Steve Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi to become the head of Apple. He said, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” That sums up what soda executives do: sell sugared water. And later on Sculley demonstrated the lack of a moral compass you need in order to become a soda executive (*cough* Lee Hsien Yang *cough*) : he fucked up Apple and sacked Steve Jobs.

I don’t mind admitting that this story also has a personal dimension. I bought some canned drinks over Chinese New Year because my place was hosting a lot of relatives. (OK guys I know I haven’t been inviting you to my house and I’ve been telling you that I don’t host people but the truth is that I host relatives but very few others so I wasn’t kidding.) Then there were news reports of medical research that showed that drinking 2 cans of soft drinks PER WEEK doubles your (admittedly low) chances of getting pancreatic cancer. At the same time, you wondered what it did for your chances of getting diabetes.

Well I’m not that ready to give up drinking soda yet. But I admit that around the onset of my 30s a few years ago, I developed the habit of lounging around ice cream parlours with a book (but of course) and getting my 2 scoops (I don’t mean sexually). Of course I could do that when I could just wait for the weekend to come, run 20 km (I was also training for the marathon at that time) and all that fat would disappear. But distance running is no longer an option for me, what with my bunions. I actually find myself in the awkward position of having to both ration what I eat and ration how much I exercise (by running, that is.) If there is any indication that I am growing old, that must be it!

Ex Girlfriend Project

Wow, just spent an entire afternoon reading this blog – http://exgfproject.blogspot.com. It started out as an exercise to write his memoirs about his love life, but it’s such a well written and intriguing memoir that I won’t be surprised that it becomes a paperback best-seller.

The blog writer expressed surprise that he still got 10000 hits a month after not writing his blog for a few months. He shouldn’t be that surprised – after all it’s one of the most fascinating blogs that I’ve seen in a while. I actually first read it 4-5 years ago, having stumbled upon it by chance.

Perhaps it’s different, perhaps it’s one of those grey areas that’s more private than a published memoir, but more public than somebody sitting next to you and whispering secrets in your ear. Even when you don’t see the guy, even when you don’t know anything about him other than that he comes from the South, you can plainly tell that he’s writing from the heart. There’s a writer who said that everybody has at least 1 good novel in him, and I think that this must be his.

It’s not hard to see why he has a few good friends around him. He seems like a likeable guy and says so matter of factly. He’s telling the story, so he may have been economical about many details, but he’s believable. And he calls himself ex-boyfriend. Well he’s as serial a boyfriend as Hugh Grant. For some people, love is a big part of their lives and it definitely is for his.

I like the way that he narrated his stories with colours. He gave 1 different colour for a different ex-girlfriend. There were also some funny asides about who did or did not qualify for colours, with reasons given. For me his strongest relations were with Kara and Roxanne. I don’t know if it was because those were the ones which took place during his hallowed teenage years, but those were the ones he got the most emotional about, and the ones that he never forgot. It turned out that Kara was the villain of the piece, the one that he just could not stay away from, and who ended up hurting him the most.

Some scenes look like they came right out of a Hollywood movie: a good friend’s younger sister is the one you had the hots for when you were a teenager, but she was too young. Then years later, when you just lost a girlfriend, she turns up at your doorstep and after that you spend the next few hours necking wildly. A commenter called it “movie love” and that everybody deserves 1 night of movie love. I’m not surprised that this guy says that he’s a film maker in real life.

You have to be envious of this guy. I never found myself in a position where I had to fend off female advances (but I also never found myself in a position where I noticed female advances either.) He gets all the hot chicks. No wonder his brain is so scrambled all of the time. It’s a brutal fact of life but the ugly ones are incapable of screwing your brains.

He didn’t get through all of the cast. All the ladies were described as physically attractive. But some of them, you cared for, the others you just wanted to hiss at. Most of the relationships were emotionally compelling. Especially when you were in your early 20s. I did have one relationship which was full of drama in my early 20s, and I always thought that I would have another, but there were reasons why it didn’t happen. (One of them was that I got tired of the drama the first time around.) Tragically, Bobby Robson did tell Paul Gascoigne, after he was knocked out by the Germans in 1990, “you’re still young, you will get another chance.” There was another tournament where Gascoigne inspired England to another semi-finals, where they were knocked out on penalties to Germany (again). But for the most part life after that for him was a tragic decline, and he never played in another World Cup.

So sometimes, you’re young, and you have some mind-blowing experiences. I did think that I would get another when I’m older, but I’m still waiting.

All the same, I’m pretty envious of this guy. At how the hot chicks always want to take their clothes off for him. I know that he’s just 1 right person away from a lifetime of joy and fulfillment. He’s fouled up a few times along the way while trying to look for the perfect love. He gets too emotionally involved and I can see how that scares away the girls. He doesn’t always “get it” that women are emotionally manipulating him. But he’s got great gifts – you just felt that he needs a nudge in the right direction to get him going.

Rwanda

When I first set up my first blog in 2003 I had intended to talk quite a bit about my uni days, which at that time was just 1 year in the past, rather than many years. But I still remember them, partly because they made me think a lot, and partially because many things have taken place since then that have cast everything in here in a different light.

One of the more memorable courses I had taken in the uni was a philosophy course which grappled with the question, “is it OK to invade another country and save them if a genocide is taking place?” They looked at 2 incidents, the Rwanda genocide of 1994, and the Kosovo war of 1999, which culminated in the bombing of Belgrade.

Rwanda was not a country I had heard about. It is one of the smallest countries in Africa, and the most densely populated country. This is the story that I had read: there were 2 main castes in Rwanda: the Tutsis and the Hutus. In ancient times, the Tutsis were the elites, and they were the aristocracy. The colonial powers (in this case, Belgium) sided first with the Tutsis, and later on the Hutus. There was a lot of potential for friction in this situation, although there were also times when both of these peoples got along fine.

In 1959, there was an extermination of Tutsis by the Hutus, and the Hutus set up the government, and they have ruled Rwanda since. Many of the Tutsis were in exile all over Africa, and also elsewhere in the world. In 1994, there were Hutu extremists in Rwanda who hatched a propaganda plan to kill all the Tutsis. It was a plan that was planned for very carefully, and executed impeccably. However, it was presented in the newspapers as a spontaneous outbreak of tribal violence: this was, I suppose bias on the part of newspaper reporters who don’t think that Africans can ever get their shit together to pull of something as impressive as this.

In April 1994, a plane carrying the Rwanda president was shot down. He died. This was seemingly the trigger for the genocide to take place. Over the next few months, around 1 million Tutsis got slaughtered by Hutus.

A lot of what was said in the course centred around the inaction of the UN peacekeeping force that was stationed in Rwanda at that time. The commander had been told time and time again not to take action against the Hutu government, even when they had knowledge that weapons were being freely circulated around the country for the genocide to take place. Later on, it turned out that France, who has a permanent seat on the UN security council (this is one of the 5 really powerful positions in UN, the other 4 being UK, US, China and Russia) was solidly behind the Hutu government of Rwanda, because they thought that it was important that France should have more influence in Africa.

Looking back at the term paper I wrote at that time, I condemned the rest of the world for leaving them alone. I had absorbed and synthesised the lessons of the course, and I was parroting the conventional wisdom. To me it seemed that the rich, imperialist nations were just plundering the resources of the poor 3rd world countries, and all the financial risk fell entirely upon the poor countries: changes in commodity price could adversely affect their economies and produce reccessions many times worse than what you saw in the richer countries.

I thought they were evil, but later on I took the more nuanced view that the world does not give a shit about you. Being evil and not giving a shit are different things, and the conclusion is of different degrees of culpability. I forgot to blame the Rwandans themselves for not being able to form a strong government.

A lot of the horrors unleashed by the end of the Cold War were motivations for "armed intervention". There definitely was a sense that the US could have "done something".

The other angle I missed out upon is the sheer logistics and legality involved in staging an armed intervention. I completely underestimated how difficult it was to commit US troops to a dangerous mission that did not have much to do with US interests (even as it could save many Rwandan lives). I forgot to ask how complicated the political and legal issues are for a Team America to dash in to save the day.

The Iraq War took place after I was out of uni. I saw some of the implications of armed intervention that I didn't forsee. I still think it's a great plus that Saddam Hussein was removed, that Iraq was no longer a pariah state. But I also saw whatever was still functional about Saddam Husseins government fall apart. I saw how the US invasion was partially motivated on good intentions, but I also saw a lot of corrupt intentions.

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about the Iraq war. For Rwanda, I came across a book which updates the story of Rwanda - and it is one of the most remarkable stories I've heard. Not long after the genocide, a military movement, the Rwandan People's Front, led by a skinny general called Paul Kagame won a series of military victories that enabled it to take provisional control of much of Rwanda. From there, it fought a lot of civil wars on the soil of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and defeated a lot of its militia enemies. In some ways, the RPF adversely contributed to the 2nd Congo War, which was one of the bloodiest wars in history. Inevitably there were some atrocities commited. But they managed to vanquish their enemies and then carry on with their nation building.

So it was quite shocking to know that as of now, Rwanda has a reputation of being one of Africa's best governed states. Paul Kagame has so far been the sort of benevolent dictator in the mould of Lee Kuan Yew and - great as Lee Kuan Yew's achievements have been, he didn't have to fight any major wars. Like Lee Kuan Yew, he's blessed with driven and hardworking people.

What happened with Rwanda challenged a lot of lessons I thought I had learnt in university. Perhaps the US was not that important to Rwanda anymore. Kagame wants nothing to do with the US or the UN. Understandably - because they seriously let down Rwanda in the past, but also for some other reason that I can't recall at this moment. Instead, they are co-operating with many NGOs to build development projects. Because of the international exposure that Rwanda had from the genocide, it attracts a lot of help from corporations who want to improve their image (looking at you, Starbucks). But a lot of the help comes in the form of co-operative projects and transfer of technology, rather than just monetary aid. An important lesson for the rest of Africa.

I suppose a lot of this is not in my area of expertise, even though it was a minor for me in college. I must admit that I will always be a bit of a dilettante when talking about politics. I can understand underlying principles and posit some theories but will never master the massive amounts of information that comes with being a domain expert.

As a sidenote, this has probably come as a surprise to some of you but I have banned myself from going to the library. I think I'll blog about this later.

Limpeh gar lih gong

Somebody mentioned on a facebook account, “Japanese Occupation was bad”. Then another person, probably an older relative mentioned, “aren’t you glad you weren’t born during grandmother’s time? Be thankful”. Well that is usually the reaction of the older generation, we’ve had it more difficult than you, you’re so lucky, etc etc etc.

Well I had 2 thoughts on first hearing about this. I was envious of my older cousins: they grew up before the Speak Mandarin campaign, so they learnt dialect. I’m envious of people who actually know their own real mother tongues, not the ones imposed on us by the government. They saw some of the old rural Singapore and I didn’t. They saw my grandfather and I didn’t.

But then again, I had other ties to a Singaporean past that the younger generation do not have. For example, I have a grandmother who was a kid during the Japanese Occupation, and she did tell us stories of what life was like. I didn’t have to rely on National Re-Education. So I’m actually luckier than the younger kid.

Second thought is that the older guy doesn’t understand – he thinks that life over the next 50 years is going to be great. I don’t think so. We’re going to be in a big crisis at the middle of the century. However bad WWII is, at least it had a beginning and an ending. At least you could still say “tough times don’t last but tough people do.” When times are really really bad, it's "tough times last and even the toughest people won't".

Global warming is another thing. There’s going to be economic crisis after economic crisis as more and more people chase after fewer and fewer resources. We know that the Great Depression was a great contributing factor to the rise of Hitler, and therefore WWII. We also know that from 1945 until now, there has been no war because economies grow well and life is good. It is actually that simple, no need to have great man theories. Hitler did not cause WWII, because in most other circumstances, he would never have had a chance to get anywhere near the Chancellorship.

What will economic crises all over the world do for us? We already know. And we already know it could be extremely ugly. War, famine, starvation, poverty. All over the world, not just Africa. The guy from the older generation should be happy that he’s lived his entire life in an era in peace and prosperity, having been born after WWII. It is entirely possible that the younger generation are actually the unfortunate ones.

The older relative has also complained a bit about hot being able to understand some of his children. I find this rather unfortunate. I don't think he has a very good imagination and it's rather unfortunate that in Singapore, a failure of the imagination often goes unpunished.

I think, in the end, one of the most important insights of social psychology of all time is the concept of the tribe. People have mental categories, "us" and "them". If you want to get along with people, it is unavoidable that you find some basis on which you can say that you are tribe-mates. It is very important to find some common ground, and I do this with people I otherwise have very little in common with. That older relative was always trying to drawn lines between himself and his children. Always trying to paint himself as being on the opposite side of the line with his kids.

I think that when people share half your DNA with you and you can't make it work, it is a shame. Either you don't have very much self knowledge, or you are consumed with self loathing. To be fair, parents are separated from their children with many barriers. They have different aims in life. Different circumstances. Different peers. Different values. They may have the same experiences in life, but one of them has not gone through them yet, and the other is not able to imagine what it was like before they understood certain things. The blind man cannot see, and the one that can see, cannot imagine what life looks like from the blind man's perspective. So the one that can see is also blind.

Sometimes people are confused. If you ask them, "what were you like hwne you were 15? 20? What would the 15 / 20 year old have done? What did you not like about your own 15 year old self?" Some of them wouldn't even have enough self-knowledge to answer all of that. Some would answer wrongly. Or even worse, some would answer correctly, and forget that their 15 year old self was different from their kids, and that they wouldn't think the same way.

For the last 10-15 years of his life, Johnny Cash made a project, where he covered a lot of songs written by the younger generation. In a way it was a smart marketing move, because it earned him a younger audience. But it worked with Johnny Cash, because he had a lot in common with the younger generation, as he was a rebellious youngster in his youth. Also, his music of sin and redemption was not incompatible with the punk ethos of angry disaffection. He never had to change his style one bit when doing the covers.

Most importantly, it reversed the equation. Even in pop music, even with its emphasis on the youth, people are constantly being told that the 60s were the apex of artistic achievement in pop music, and everything inevitably went downhill after that. All the elders demanded respect from the younger generations. This was an elder, a legend from Elvis's generation, appreciating the work done by the youngsters, and re-interpreting it in his own classic style. If the song was a hit, it conferred classic status on the original, as it did for "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails. Johnny Cash never had a problem getting along with the younger generation.

Dummies

As we mourn the passing of Dr Goh Keng Swee some of our thoughts turn to the guy who comes closest to being this generation’s GKS, namely Phillip Yeo. And when you think about him you can’t help but notice how his foot has a great affinity for his mouth.

Phillip Yeo has done it again. This time, he has called the people who have downloaded stuff from Apple “dummies”. Is this right? Well I have no love for him in how he clamps down on people who are his slaves, or how he doesn’t even bother to hide his contempt for people he considers to be his intellectual inferior (basically about 100% of the human race). However there is a point hidden in there somewhere if you want to dig far enough. I agree with him that human beings are dummies. This is why we had the world wars, why we have extremely unequal distribution of wealth, why the recent financial crisis happened, why we destroy our natural environment and why we will eventually fail to reverse the effects of climate change, with the end result being that we will wipe ourselves off the face of the earth in a matter of merely 300 years.

Yes, these applications are for suckers. Well, I’m not so sure. We know that the evolution of computers has been a steady trend of moving from big clunky machines which were the exclusive domain of obscenely profitable companies, to nerdy hobbyists programming new operating systems in some basement in Finland, to super user-friendly applications that less tech savvy users can pull out of their pocket and impress members of the opposite sex with. (See vaguely related article on “curated computing”). But well then – what’s the bloody point of the last part? These guys are the dummies, right? What’s the point of getting hard earned money from dummies?

That’s the part I don’t understand about this capitalistic attitude. The central tenet is this: you maximise shareholder value. OK, so that’s the game plan. So what do you sell? And is it for the betterment of humanity? Who cares? Sell them fast food to clog up their arteries with. Sell them sugared water that will give them diabetes in old age. Sell them tobacco to give them lung cancer. Sell them heroin. And when they’ve done enough to fuck up their health, sell them health care.

And what’s this? I see that he sorda approves of this. Why? Because it maximises shareholder value. You see, when you are a great capitalist, you see people all around you. And you see that they own a lot of dollar bills. And you know, deep down inside that all those dollar bills actually belong to you – it’s just that those poor suckers don’t really know it yet. So selling iPhone apps to suckers is, if not something right and just, is at least “the way of the world”.

What else do we see? He exonerates the 1% of people who don’t get suckered like the rest, the 1% of people who probably are involved in programming the apps and selling them for cash. We know that Phillip Yeo is a cold and unfeeling robot, and we know that he feels that the world will be a better place if everybody were to be cold and unfeeling robots just like him. Well, how is the world going to turn if those 1% of people suddenly made up 100% of the population?

Part of me wants to congratulate him for at least being honest – but I think he’s just blurting out what he really thinks. And I am not entirely unsympathetic for his contempt for people who just spend a lot of money and consume a lot of stuff. But sometimes, people are just people, they are human beings who are attracted to aesthetics, beautiful things. And iPhone has delivered something that they want. Yes, it’s still digital code, but with more beauty than most other competitors. What’s wrong about consuming beautiful stuff? Well the problem with that is that it makes you less of a cold and unfeeling robot.

All this spiel is the result of me having read a book by Daniel Pink. “A Whole New Mind”, in which he makes a few claims. Right brainers will become more prominent as we go along. They design products and services which take more holistically into account the entire user experience. (This is true. Creative may have had the more technically superior MP3 player, but Apple won, and won big, because they actually thought about the user experience, which Creative were completely clueless about.) And there was another statistic that interested me a lot: it’s more difficult to get into an MFA program at UCLA than it is to get into most MBA programs!

I suppose, when we understand that a good knowledge of aesthetics is crucial for differentiating between a high profit margin / high class product that “dummies” fork it out to buy and the mass produced shit that everybody else has to deal with, then it becomes understandable why our government is starting to pump in money for more arts education. But only because the art education contributes to our economy, of course. No point having theatre groups like Wild Rice putting up subversive plays and having their budgets cut. No point art schools being a nurturing grounds for people like John Lennon or Adolf Hitler. People need to know what it’s all about.

3 interesting biographies

It’s funny how these things come together. In a short span of time, I read 3 intriguing biographies of people from the Guardian, all of them are to some extent tragic.

In the first and the most tragic, a baker wins 5 million pounds in a lottery, and his life goes downhill from there. He becomes an alcoholic, spends his money on race horses, loses his wife, and dies of a heart attack 5 years later.

He blames it all on the lottery, but I know a thing or 2 about addiction. You can pinpoint the time when you got addicted to something, you only need a taste of a certain something to activate the self-destructive circuits that are there in your DNA. You only need to experience it once, then you like it, you do it a few more times, and then you’re an addict. The baker’s destiny was to become an alcoholic, and he was just lucky that he was past 50 by the time he started off on alcohol. (In case you’re wondering what my addiction is, I’m not going to tell you.) Whereas his downfall was due to the lottery, I think the causation is indirect.

The second story involves a high flying political career brought down to earth. John Edwards was a philanderer just like Bill Clinton. However, in Bill Clinton’s case, he was lucky enough that both his wife and the public were willing to accept him as a political leader and close 1 eye about his affairs. John Edwards, in contrast, had always portrayed himself as a decent family man, and neither his wife nor the public would have expected that he had affairs. I had already known, from the synopsis of “Game Change”, one of the most interesting books about that most interesting of presidential campaigns, that John Edwards’ campaign faded away because he was having an affair. Not the Bill Clinton one-night-stand kind of affair, but a long drawn out affair.

The third story is not really a tragedy, but a story of hope. (Although a lot of it is tragic.) A former editor of the Sun (that’s the UK version of the New Paper, the national trashy tabloid) comes out and admits that he’s an alcoholic. Because of the way that the UK is being run, this means that he is one of the most powerful men in the UK, and without the public responsibility and accountability to go with it. Why? Because once you don’t like somebody, you can publish a not nice story about that guy, and you could finish off his career at a stroke of a pen. I’m not even sure that the Prime Minister of the UK has that power. (Rupert Murdoch is widely regarded as a big asshole because he turned The Sun into an organisation who does this sort of thing.)

That is also the reason why he managed to keep his alcoholism under wraps: because he was always capable of taking revenge on editors of other newspapers if they tried anything funny.

But I found most remarkable about his story is that he managed to change the political orientation of the Sun. Once he found out that his real parents were leftist activists, he decided to make the viewpoint of the Sun more liberal. Eventually, he managed to quit drinking before his wife died of cancer, and be at her side.

In a perverse way, therefore, I find that his story is uplifting. In spite of his alcoholism, he was able to reach the top of his career. In spite of his working for the Sun, he managed to do something good for gay rights. At the end of the day, he managed to overcome his alcoholism.

And that is the paradox, I think, of a lot of people who manage to rise to great heights. They do it in spite of a weakness. It’s even possible to say, they do it because of that weakness. Like that asthmatic who knows how important it is to win the struggle to breathe, and later on becomes a world swimming champion. Like the man who was born of a humble background, and is blind in 1 eye, but becomes the Prime Minister of Britain (but not for much longer, I think – this is Gordon Brown). Or the street kid who, in spite of having grown up in a brothel, whose health is atrocious, and who has a string of unhappy love affairs, is nevertheless one of the best loved singers of all time in France. (Edith Piaf).

In a way, the third story is the mirror image of the lottery winner, who got a windfall, and it turned out to be the greatest curse in his life.

I don't know much about alcoholism but here's what I know. It's a little strange that something that most of us can consume without that much harm can end up wrecking peoples' lives. I don't know how it happens, but one of the symptoms is delirious tremens, or the "shakes", where if you don't get enough alcohol, your body will seize up and start shaking. You need alcohol to function normally, and of course, this constant drinking is the thing that makes your alcoholism even worse.

Some of you might remember a film more than 10 years ago called "Leaving Las Vegas", which was also the rare times you heard "Nicholas Cage" and "Oscar" being mentioned in the same sentence. It was adapted from a book about a man drinking himself to death, written by a real life alcoholic, who committed suicide 2 weeks after finding out that it was going to be made into a movie.

I'm halfway through it, but it describes the routine of an alcoholic. The trick was to make sure that you had alcohol throughout the day. You had to be very careful to stock up at 2 am when the bars close, because from then, it's 5 hours to 7 am, when the earliest bars which serve alcohol open. Then at 11 am you don't have to confine yourself to the crappy bars that open in the morning, you just hang around any bar you choose. From there it's "hor seh liao" until 2 am.

If you feel disgusted reading that, I did too.

My sis described to me what it was like treating alcoholics. Basically they weren't allowed to give them alcohol. So what do you do when the shakes come on? I suppose she just injected them with something that had alcohol in it. After all, alcohol is unlike many drugs, in that withdrawal syndromes could be fatal. There's probably no such thing as cold turkey when it comes to alcohol. You just have to drink a little bit less every day.