Singapore: Butterfly or Frog?

What irony to have these two articles together in the same page.

I agree with Kishore Mahbubani our existential need for literature, which he called the Great Singaporean Novel is not yet written. We have over the years made that just harder. The concomitant irony is that while talking long term we have been acting short term for quite a few years now. The excuse is that our long range radar is no longer reliable. How do we know which direction to sail if we do not know where we should be heading? If this question cannot be answered we will still put up the sails and go. We shall go in circles and we will only know after we had done so. We will make no progress even if we feel progress during the journey.

The last twenty years were probably rich but wasted years. For two decades we sold our intangibles for too little money, and we do not know because we didn't know how to value our assets. The two IRs is perhaps iconic of that morally bankrupt value system.

So what we need to do is to go back to where we had strayed and rebuild from there. We must also take care that the retooling is not so painful that we die from it. The PAP government has no wisdom or vision to do this. They could only offer analgesic hoping that afterward they can return to their lost ways. Creeping welfarism is entering Singapore. The government hope wealth transfers will get the people buy in for their dystopian policies. They ignore how soul destroying it is from crushing people's desires to have good jobs. This is as bankrupt as Roman emperors bribing Romans with bread and circus. As long as we do not have the Great Singaporean Novel we are at risk that the Singaporean soul is starved and dying because we do not know how to feed it. However for the government to get more buy in to their economic worshiping but socially divisive policies, the Singaporean soul is an impediment to their plans. Devalue the soul so that it can be sold otherwise with its infinite price, there will be no buyers.

Publicly this government claimed they cannot equal the Old Guard but privately they desperately want to live up to and beyond their achievements. I can understand the pressure on LHL given who his father was. It also feel the pressure to out perform all members of the UN so that we continue to punch well above our small size. It feared failure and so it raided our intangibles. Yes this is cheating. Sold them which no other country would. We cheated ourselves to achieve. We cheated ourselves to beat Hong Kong and the other erstwhile little dragons. Then we disparage them especially Taiwan for being uncompetitive and how much better we had done. Quite simply we must stop cheating ourselves to create illusory success. We have discovered that managing wealth is more profitable than creating wealth but we do not yet understand that this will change and that is when disaster will befall us. At that time we will be forced to see that we were just money whores.