#2265 Okay Im they guy who made the #2235 post. There seems to be some misunderstanding that I support PAPs policies and PAPs government but this isnt exactly true. In fact I do agree that the state of education in the first place was most likely CAUSED by PAPs standard focus on rote examination leading to a decay of critical thought in general. My point in making the post was to follow neo-reactionary principles and opening up the discussion beyond the mere standard dissident opinions. Most serious political conversations online seem to be focused around standard liberalization arguments. Mainly about loosening media, ending capital punishment, bringing up operation Cold Store etc... My gripe is that its very easy to make a big rhetorically driven case about this online. All you have to do is to write a bunch of angry posts and make a whole load of blatant attacks. Ill quote Singapore Dissident here: I remember seeing such happy faces carrying their state flags in unison in another place. It was a picture of North Koreans on their republic day. They too appeared very happy indeed and I am sure they would have no problem claiming that their citizens are the happiest in the world too. I may be cherry picking but this quote is definitely rhetoric based rather than argument based, aim at proliferating anger and emotional discontent rather than rationally arguing about policy decisions and what needs to be done. PAP is autocratic etc... etc... etc.. but do you think this level of rhetoric is really going to be particularly powerful in providing any real form of meaningful change? I dont think so. Most comments I see are also vulgarities spouted at the ministers rather than logical debates. Thats the main gripe I have with the democratic method. (of course theres the whole people are assholes on the internet thing as well but even in American political forums the assholes are still more eloquent). Thus most critiques from indie blogs of SG govt right now are thought cancelling cliches. They base themselves on rhetoric and aim to just channel pure anger, eliminating deeper considerations altogether. Judging from the White Paper uproar it seems to work mainly due to the fact that a simple number was able to snowball into a massive outrage and filled the blogs with pure anti-foreign talent zeal causing even a protest of sorts to occur. So going back to my point on making the post. My point was to create the balance between the extremely angry rhetoricians and the extremely non-transparent PAP. I took PAPs side so that I could spear the rhetoricians and get people to think about whether they had the CAPABILITY themselves to provide a more meaningful social change or whether they were mainly self-interested. If I just posted like everyone else, made a scathing remark about PAP and ended it there it would have just be a positive feedback loop. More anti-PAP, more anti-govt, more emotions rage, no proper discussion done. Debating is seriously the most underrated CCA in JC because its amazing in this regard, to get you to consider the opposing sides and consider really what is the proper way to go about achieving a good policy. Since we are at the point where the conversation is so devoid of life, I thought that it would be interesting to see what would happen if I expounded on a pro-conservative, anti-democratic stance. On to my alternative method, the slippery slope to totalitarianism (as said in #2443). The view that the state should be run by a single just king was first brought up in Platos Republic where he showed an ideal state where a single benevolent philosopher King ruled and the people just did as was ordered because assuming the King was philosophically inclined his decisions would be rationally based and create a perfect order. Of course since French Revolution etc... this view is considered extremely extremely extremely bad and anti-human rights in nature. After this weve had two types of alternative systems, Democracy and Communism. Russia of course shows that a state run government will have a high chance of falling to a dictator leading to deaths and all that. So democracy is the key but since the rise of Marxism there has been many many wholes poked at democracy and capitalism in general. So my line of logic is this. The key to a good state is the amount of check & balances in place. This comes in two forms, either legislative check & balances or human check & balances. Legislative refers to currently where government is a huge bureaucracy with laws and things to prevent any serious kind of misuse of executive power. Human check & balances are the people as a part of the system ensuring that no misuse of power occurs. Completely human C&B is the total anarchy hippy ideal where we live in small communes and small huts and we live in harmony because everyone is truly free. With Hobbes book Leviathan he states that a non-legislated state (that is anarchy) will devolve into a war against one another where everyone fights everyone because humans are inherent going to go kill one another for self-gain if no state like that exists. Democracy as we know it today partially accepts Hobbes theory. We elect members through a legislative system but we still centralize power to a single government to run things. Judicial systems, police and laws set in place prevent the crowd from going overboard and making a mess of things. As we see though it is still a huge mess in general given the masses of opinions. So the whole idea of a state is simple, find a way to manage things in the most efficient manner without pissing off the people and also have a system of checks & balances in place so that we can ensure no dictatorial hijinks ensues. Democracy is best at the check and balance part because it has a huge human component involved and everyone is in it for themselves but dont want to break social contract so they still follow laws. Now the whole problem comes with the not pissing off people. This statement is very crudely made so I have to define it. To please the people we require equality and opportunity. Communism focuses on equality, capitalism on opportunity. Opportunity is linked to meritocracy, if you work you get up the social ladder, if you dont you die. We give you the opportunity to succeed but we dont care if you dont. Opportunity provides a certain set of hardworking citizens with the opportunity to self-actualize their hopes and dreams, equality is about giving people equal resources for the sake of mankind. Classical capitalism is all about opportunity, the market determines so resources are allocated nicely. Socialist Capitalism is about providing some opportunity but also picking up those that have fallen to some extent. So all the stuff we learn in econs, market failure and all that comes in. If not the corporations would devour us (unless youre an Anarcho-Capitalist or Maggie Thatcher or of the Austrian School of Economics then you think that government intervention is a huge no-no). Since communism has died out and China has become social capitalist, since Fascism ended in World War 2, what we have left is democracy. So democracy (of the capitalist variety) is the ultimate human check and balance but it has a tendency to cause extreme selfishness, burn resources with mass consumerism (standard Marxist argument), cause massive arguments and maybe if Plato was right democracy will be the step to Tyranny (well probably not, lately US government screwed up still managed to hang on due to the checks and balances). This deficiency in democracy can be mainly attributed to the whole lack of education thing I was talking about where citizens dont have all the facts and tend to bicker about things if left by themselves. We go back to the Hobbesian State of Nature argument, if left to their own accord will the guy in power decide to go nuts or will he be very nice in place like Platos philosopher king. Historical data says hell go nuts. But then in Ancient Rome they actually ALLOWED their rulers to have dictatorial powers for a while during emergencies (like Hannibal vs Fabian) and afterwards the rulers would just give the control of the state back without any fuss; unlike a certain Hitler in current times that (possibly) burned the Reichstag and consolidated power. In Ancient Rome the rulers were brought up completely different. They were honed in honour, physical fitness, philosophy and payed tributes to the gods. My hypothesis here is that this type of full rounded education breeds essential human empathy, it turns that guy away from the state of nature into the possibly good and wise benevolent pragmatic king. Education is the key to sidestepping the Hobbesian conjecture. But if we limit power to one guy most definitely it will cause a whole load of problems now since basically somewhere along the line from Ancient Rome to current times humans picked up Machiavellian tactics. The best check and balance then seems to be not a philosopher king like Plato said but more of a philosopher commune. A group of people who are born to care about people or at least sufficiently educated to know what not to do on top. Current China is a twisted version of this, its less of a philosopher commune and more of a pragmatist nepotistic commune. They seem to be getting things done at the cost of millions of lives and corruption; but at least they get things done. The relevant quote here is LKYs quote He took over, and he said: If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it. - Recalling how former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping dealt with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Taking H1 history on the Global Economy (though it may be propaganda ehehehe) has taught me that maybe China cutting off tons of people was necessary, perhaps even justified in some way since they became more well off than Gorbachev and his policies. Is human rights worth so much if utilitarian methods can ensure that the country lives on and maybe achieves a higher state of morality and goodness at the cost of lives? Are violent means really going to bring about peaceful outcomes? These are the questions that I havent resolved yet and probably many many people out there in the seats of power and on the ground spend their lives trying to resolve. Of course at some level I dont want to admit myself to be a cog in a system thats meant to create the ideal state so I value human rights somewhat. I just think that freedom of speech can be a right but freedom of vote does not have to be a right. Freedom of speech ensures the check and balance but does the vote really need to be given to everyone? Do extremists deserve a vote because their opinion counts and anyway itll get flooded out so its okay? Is flooding out and populism really a good thing? The solution is simple; you close it off so that there is a sufficient human element to ensure the check and balance of power but they are all sufficiently caring about the state so they get things done rationally and logically without the tons of bickering. The system itself is the hard part. Ive conferred with a few friends on this and I say that a university vote works if you have the correct management. A friend came up with one based on Ancient China, the Imperial exam system adapted to modern times. People who want to enter politics have to first pass an exam dealing with political knowledge that is marked in secret and passed around unknown professors until no one person even in the government knows where it goes so that maximum transparency is maintained. I told him such a system would probably be full of holes somewhere and some guy would find it and then the exams would be rigged and it would go downhill. He says he may write out the system properly. Anyway thats the hard part of the whole process. Can a check and balance for a closed democracy be formulated? It may but someone has to be out there to do it and not just sling rhetoric at each other and naively point charges at the government in a fury. Is it the best way? Maybe not but I want to see proper arguments and systems with detailed psychology and not just mudslinging. 2000s is basically the nice transition stage where all the remnants of the Cold War mish-mash of ideologies can be freely tested. Who knows how long these peaceful (relative to the last century) will last though. On to the current situation in Singapore though. The PAP is not as bad as we think, probably, but it wont do in the LR. This was predicted in an economics paper from Singapore Perspectives in 2012 (Inequality and Need for a New Social Compact - lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/SP2012_Bkgd-Pa.pdf) which talks about how retaining current measures will only result in market fundamentalism and lists certain problems with the current economic systems that are only retained due to PAPs strict adherence to certain policies and beliefs (I may be extremely and crudely paraphrasing here). In that case to eliminate policy dogmatism there has to be those who step up and incite change yet do not have the dissident mindset of quick knee-jerk crowd-pleasing reactions. Education is the key but the change I conjecture must not be a sudden and swift overturn. Dissidents only add to the revolutionary fervor; fervor leads to tyranny. As seen in the Arab Spring it is easy to take down a dictatorship but hard to run a country. Good education is needed for new thought and good education requires people who are keen to learn. It may be because of certain social institutions, systems or norms in place but there is some kind of anti-intellectualist vein in the online conversations. Its very distressing. Whoever is to blame, PAP and MOE or whatever, there has to be a multiplicity of rational voices to come up with the proper politics. So after this very long spiel full of extremely unpolished ideas (which went on for waaaay longer than I thought it would. Also really most of my philosophy knowledge comes from random chunks of Wikipedia so I may be misrepresenting people like Hobbes here) I hope that in true neo-reactionary spirit this (at this point) mini-essay incites people to come up with their arguments for pro-human rights, anti-human rights, and brighten up the dialogue without the ad-hominems or cynical put-downs.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 05:56:53 +0000
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