We are the descendants of those brave few who, fleeing war, fleeing famine, or perhaps just seeking their fortunes, gave up their whole world to move to a new life on this island.
They built a country which works so well, it has tamed the utter chaos that historically defined most of our forebears’ lives and given us all a neat, packaged life. A life which most of us can live formulaically, sleepwalking through it without doing a single brave thing. You are, of course, still expected to work hard, but we hold the honour of being the first immigrant nation to have so thoroughly self-domesticated, to have ourselves doused the ambition which ferried the droves of hungry poor, desperate and begging for better lives.
We are a rich land, and we have been a rich land for decades. Our people are industrious, hard-working, and well-educated. Our universities are nearlyworld-class, and they will only get better with time. We hold the privilege of being the only nation in this world with a sane government, and a competent bureaucracy.
All this effort — fifty years of non-stop toil — turning a fallow wasteland into fertile earth, and where are all the crops we have to show for it? Where are all the local companies that we can point to and be proud of? Where are our Ericssons and Nokias?
The names we give ourselves have changed over the years. We were first an “entrepôt”, a base where the riches of China and India were exchanged for opium and silver. We swapped the coolie’s rags for the standardized garments of industry, becoming a “manufacturing base” where the labour of our people etched silicon wafers and refined oil. Today, we have given up the factory overalls for the business suit and lab coat, becoming more than just a “base”, but a “hub” – of finance, biotech, and other buzzwords that print well on The Economist.
The times have changed, yet the core relationship between a Singaporean and his work has stayed the same. We are still fundamentally the comprador-par-excellence of the world. We are a service economy, in that we train our young to serve the banks, funds, labs, and factories. Where we used to serve as interpreters for the companies of the West to unlock and exploit the riches of the East, we are now PR-men for the companies of the East to whitewash themselves and fit into a world still ruled by the West. The bossman is dead, long live the bossman; he may look like us now, but we are still just his workers.
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more.