After 50 years of nation-building, how far has the Singaporean come? Sure, the country has one of the highest GDPs in the world, highly-educated workforce, and world class ports, financial hub, etc. But those accolades are about the country. What about its people?

Perhaps the advent of social media has put negative behaviour under the spotlight with bad things going viral more easily. It seems that there are some quarters who think Singaporeans are a bunch of self-entitled whiners. With so much vitriol online, one can't help but think:

"Why are some of us cool with 'original' Singaporeans but not new citizens?"

"Why do neighbours resort to calling the police when they cannot settle their disputes? Why is 'calling the police' the be-all-end-all solution for some Singaporeans?"

"Why are some Singaporeans being labelled 'self-entitled' especially by older Singaporeans? Is that bad?"

Another common belief is that Singaporeans love to blame the Government for their problems. Is the Government really to blame for how present day Singaporeans act and react?

Well yes, and of course, no.

Early policies that reflect a different time

Immediately after 1965, Singapore was in "survival" mode -- do whatever was necessary to survive, get our foundation right.

Pioneer leaders recognised people's propensity to love, create, and collaborate. They recognised that people are also capable of manifesting hate, destruction, and disunity. People, if left to their own devices, tended towards their own impulses and motivations.

Our leaders, perhaps recognising this truth, took the pragmatic approach of governing. Pragmatism calls for governance with people's ugliness in mind. Aspirational ideals and goals took a step back, and rightly so for a young nation that had nothing but people as a resource.

Take, for example, how the Government dealt with the racial tensions in the 1960s.

Aside from providing the obvious thought leadership and appealing to people's better senses and propensity to love, it put in place practical solutions -- bilingual policy, Group Representation Constituencies, ethnic self-help groups, and ethnic quotas in public housing.

These measures worked. Singapore joined a rare group of countries whose heterogeneous people not only lived well together but prospered.

The same practical approach applied to other problems as well:

Estates plagued by litterbugs? Fines were put in place. Rubbish bins were made readily available.

To curb sex crimes and allow some "pressure release", prostitution was legalised and allowed in designated red light districts.

Seeing how drugs crippled countries and empires, severe penalties were introduced to ensure the same fate does not befall the fledgling nation.

Perhaps the spirit of governing people then was best expressed by the late Lee Kuan Yew: “I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn't be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn't be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters - who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.”

Some "muscles" in Singaporeans have atrophied while others are never developed

With the Government covering all bases and deciding "what is right" and not minding "what the people think", it is also easy for Singaporeans to switch off and leave decision-making to the Government. The decision-making "muscle" either grew weak or never really developed in the first place.

Is it any wonder why Singaporeans prefer to not offer help, and adopt the "it's none of my business" approach to things, or that they would rather rely on the reserved seating sign to ensure the needy gets a seat rather than verbally asking someone to give up his seat? And what happens when all official avenues have been exhausted? Call police.

Taking our racial harmony again as an example, perhaps the older generation Singaporeans understood the need for racial harmony after living through race riots. Younger Singaporeans who are born into racial harmony, born into HDB blocks with racial quotas, born into a country where races are treated equally have one distinct difference from older Singaporeans.

This difference is that young Singaporeans never had to make a conscious decision and commitment to live in racial harmony, they were born into this constructed reality. In a way, they did not know it was also their responsibility to maintain this constructed reality because they did not own the decision to create racial harmony in Singapore.

Which is no wonder, actually, why Singaporeans who are supposed to be well-known for embracing multiculturalism and multi-racialism exhibited signs of xenophobia when Singapore ramped up its intake of foreign manpower in the late 2000s. Our political leaders had to come out repeatedly to explain the need for foreigners and that xenophobia had no place in Singapore.

Up until the influx of foreigners, some young Singaporeans did not really develop the "muscle" to accept new people of different cultures and races, some older Singaporeans perhaps also found it hard to work those "muscles" because of the decades of racial harmony between the 1960s and 2000s.

This can also be applied to why Singaporeans don't clean up after themselves in public. Someone else does it for them, be it road sweepers or the aunties and uncles clearing our dishes at the hawker centres. The "muscle" to clean up after themselves never gets worked.

Why do students demand good and high-paying jobs upon graduation? Well that's because of the "reality" that was constructed for them since young -- parents telling them to study hard to have a good life. That might have been true thirty years ago when people with a university qualification was rare and they were a commodity in high demand. The paradigm has shifted along with economic requirements, but mindsets have not.

So, ultimately, whose fault is it?

This framing of "fault" and "blame" when policies fail or when Singaporeans act in an anti-social way is probably not the best way to change things.

Instead we should accept that no Government can perfectly administer a country and no individual is perfect. How can we have a Utopian world with imperfect people and vice versa?

When Singaporeans blame the Government for policies, the only "muscle" that gets worked is the blame and complain muscles. Similarly when the Government chides Singaporeans for being self-entitled or xenophobic, the root cause of the problem is not addressed.

Personal and policy paradise

Imagine each individual as an explorer traversing in a jungle. The Government can help clear paths for the explorer to where it thinks qualifies as the explorer's paradise. Some paths may be wrong or looped about.

The explorer can blame the path-builder for building inefficient paths or paths to dead-ends, but the choice of whether to stay in the jungle or to find his own definition of paradise lies solely with the explorer. The explorer in choosing his path, also decides which 'muscles' he would be developing to help him along his journey.

To best summarise -- policies are not perfect, but it is up to the individual to decide how one will react to it and make the best of it.

Similarly, if the Government realises that nobody is taking the paths it paves or many people are rejecting the "paradise" it thinks people want, it needs to be nimble and responsive enough to adapt.

So to answer the question, "Are we products of our Government's policies or our own minds?", it really isn't the point now is it? It is how both the Government and individual reacts to changes in the world and to develop the necessary "muscles" that is vital.

Top image from Rog1

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