Elitism is actually the belief that the society or a system should be led by an elite. It of course has some notions that a select group is superior to “the rest” and hence deserves and influence and authority they get. Now on what basis are they selected? There might be some prevailing perception and structures on what constitutes merit but ultimately, elitism can only go as far as the genuine contribution of the elite to society.
Genuine, consistent, generous, self-sacrificial contribution to the society should be the benchmark to ultimately determine if we should continue to someone to be considered an elite. Or whether we should continue to perpetuate elitism in our society.
Of course we can go on forever to argue what is good for the society and what constitutes contribution. But I think we should be clear about what we are all trying to serve and focus on that. When elitism just becomes snobbery, and when the class divide makes it difficult for leaders to truly listen, empathise and focus their attention on serving the needs of the masses, then we need a more nuanced approach to choosing leaders, and grooming elites.
Do you believe that the good days and bad days life throws at us is entirely your own doing? Do you have the story inside your head that if you do everything right, nothing bad will happen and your life will be great?
I think in our modern lives we are so much in control of everything that we naturally tell ourselves if anything at all goes wrong, it must be us or someone doing something wrong.
Time to review that. Time to think about the story you have in your head towards bad days. Especially when you’ve a lifetime of success with things (so far). Then you probably haven’t quite taken enough risks.
When I was back in school I usually spent most of my days “learning” – I sat in class and listened to the teacher give lecture, answered questions on a worksheet, read and try to remember things (mostly effective when you are able to make connections and associations with things you already know).
We grew up thinking learning is about studying; about reading a book, sitting in a class listening or having someone give you instructions for something. But for most important skills in life, we didn’t learn that way; we observed, we mimicked, we practise, we think, we test it out.
There was a part of my classroom which practised that. I did arts as well and for the 6-8 hours of class I had each week, I was painting, sculpting, sketching, fiddling with graphics on the computer, carrying canvas, squeezing paint, discussing projects and so on. So perhaps I have had a bit more chance compared to others in terms of learning in a different way.
My dream is for classrooms of the future to be more like science labs, art studios, technical workshops. It is for us to be able to carry on the kindergarten style of “teaching” into teenage because practising and doing is so much more important in life than sitting still, shutting up and “absorbing content”.
We don’t like studying hard as much as getting good grades. We may not like the climb up a mountain as much as the view on top. When things gets difficult in school, they sometimes tells us to try harder but more often, they come to the conclusion that there’s another mountain you can climb. So if you’re not so good at a sport, don’t bother; if you can’t make it for the auditions then just find something else instead. Maybe the exception is the most basic stuff in academics; though there are exceptions: if Chinese is too hard, do Chinese B instead.
We want things to go our way; if we can get to the outcome without the process, we rather have just the outcome. We dislike friction in relationships, in life. But we forget that just about everything is held together because of friction. We can raise a glass because of friction; every step we make on the ground is made possible by friction. We need to learn to embrace the friction and the process more than the outcome.
Don’t get me wrong; being outcome-oriented is not a bad thing. But if we forget it is the process that takes us to the outcome, then something is wrong. A culture that emphasises results at all cost compromises on the process for the outcome. This is why people desire to cheat, or to study only for the test. The fact an entire education industry blossomed on the back of grades and results testifies of the fact. If only we can create a culture that embraces the friction a bit more; if only we can say “If it ain’t easy, it’s changing me” rather than “If it ain’t easy, it isn’t for me”.
When was it ever helpful or useful to say ‘See I told you…’? Yet we use it all the time; even when we probably feel nothing positive about ourselves when others use it on us. That desire to be right is so strong we tend to momentarily forsake our important relationships just to feel good about being right.
Maybe, for some time, we can be more right by keeping silent. By giving the knowing nod, lending a shoulder, and showing grace.
There are different ways to grow a society; and also at different rates. We can take the longer path that is often messier, but potentially kinder, leaves less people behind; or we can take the shorter path that is forceful, that relies on clear boundaries and metrics, that might marginalise some groups. NEA announced that they will be enforcing penalties on those failing to clear their tables at hawker centers. They publicly announced that their extensive efforts at public education and awareness have not yielded results so they decided to take the harder stance.
And thanks to the Phase 2 (Heightened Alert) restrictions on dine-in, Singaporeans haven’t quite have a chance to try getting slapped by a fine. Perhaps the Safe-Distancing Ambassador can get extra allowance from NEA by helping with enforcement of people who leave food and trays on the tables at hawker centers.
In any case, I think we are just continuing the story of Singapore, being a ‘fine city’ and using formal incentives and disincentives to govern its people. I think that these formal rules can be ways to pave the way towards better norms but it is important to recognise that the goal in these instances, is not really about having the clean table as an output. It is ultimately about normalising the return of trays, about a clear reallocation of responsibilities. We need to be more creative at thinking of pathways towards this normalisation beyond just setting of formal rules.
The case is the same for recycling – and this is taken care of by the same government agency, NEA. We need to normalise that amongst Singaporeans and if the decision is simply to use rules to normalise the behaviours, they could have done it long ago, but they were perhaps trying out other pathways. It might not be long before they default to their rule-making ways.
The question we want to ask is; whether this rule-making way is sustainable. Does it really become a norm culturally? Especially when the rules are lifted. Because clearing tables, recycling, like being polite, have positive social benefits and are virtues in themselves. Do we, as individuals, value that contribution to society more than the ability to avoid a penalty? If we don’t, then what are we building up in the society? Order, at the expense of mental health, culture of fear and compliance? Is this the way we want to move forward?
The closest thing that schools teaches us about risk and uncertainty is mainly within the Economics and Finance discipline where they are defined, quantified, treated so mathematically that somehow can be managed in a certain magical way. There’s also the behavioural economics side of things where our psychological relationship with risk as humans are being modelled, and that gave some insights to individuals’ biases and faulty heuristics that can be ‘corrected’ to good effect.
Yet risk is potentially the most important thing we have to contend with in our lives after school. In fact, an education itself involves risks, how we conduct our social lives involves risks. I don’t think we necessarily want to create a syllabus and make ‘risk’ part of formal education but I think parents, teachers, and the culture in general can do more about helping each generation appreciate risks better.
We need to better appreciate that our inability to control outcomes as something positive. We are imperfect creatures and if the world was more up to the control of humans, I think we would have ruined it already. So that lack of control can be a good thing, and is meant to be embraced without being disempowered.
So Grab announced their $1 fee hike recently and there was a bit of public backlash. It was perhaps a bit of a sneaky marketing where they claimed it was for the drivers but then revealed that after June 2021, they will collect their 20% fee on that $1. There is the expected public uproar which I cannot be sure is matched by actual action of switching to other ride-hailing apps. After all, Grab did change the culture in Singapore’s private hire car industry. I think we can often have sentiments that don’t match our actions.
There are analysis of the consequences to Grab and the sense is that financially, Grab might not exactly be affected so negatively. It is claimed that they were trying to arrest the decline in drivers. I’m not too sure about that. But what I thought is interesting, is that this $1 fee hike in reality is a very good test of Grab’s market power and the extent of cartelisation of this industry in Singapore.
While some of the competitors may cash in and try to grab market share (pardon the pun) for example in the case of Comfort trying to emphasize their rental rebates to drivers; others might actually silently be just repricing their fares to match Grab. After all, consumers don’t have that much options; and even if one of these apps match Grab in terms of the ride fares on customer side, they might still gain more drivers through the fact they have a lower commission rate.
Grab has proven that the ability to keep drivers on their platform is an important strategy to stay in the lead. A lesson Gojek might have to learn (a non-random, unsystematic and limited-sample survey revealed that drivers think Gojek benefits their customers too much over their drivers). Customers in Singapore are not exactly that spoilt for choice. After a while, if most of the apps on average price themselves not much lower than Grab, they’d tend to default to Grab. The habits in terms of apps use is very sticky and Grab’s variety of services that keeps you tapping on their app icon is a powerful habit-forming process.
The fact that when Competition Commission lifted restrictions on fare hikes and Grab started moving fares in that one direction shows that they do have substantial market power. And even if it’s not about this one single dominant firm, they have set themselves as the barometric firm being able to call the shots on the ride-hailing “tacit” cartel in Singapore. These are things Competition Commission should be looking into.
Months back I was participating in a series of online sessions organised by Thought Collective for young people about readying ourselves for New Normal work in Asia. One interesting point brought up by the speaker was that in Singapore we don’t groom and nurture our local artists and then the state spends so much money getting foreign artists to be based in Singapore or to get them to create works in Singapore.
Our society grew through sheer hardwork and obsession with the tangibles. I think those are very important; we want to have clean streets, clean systems, good infrastructure that simplifies our lives, order, and maybe more importantly for Singaporeans, predictability. We are very upset when rules are unclear and there are no paths to follow. Maybe we overcompensated for a time when things were so unpredictable and disordered.
Somehow we accepted this story that creativity is something magical. That it belongs to other people; the ones who grew up in a different world, who can tolerate the risks it involves. The ones who were brought up in a different system which promote ‘creativity’, not the ones in Singapore. But no, creativity is a skill. You can choice to be creative, to free yourself of the implied rules and norms that society is imposing on you about what you should be doing with your own life.
And creativity doesn’t require the assurance of others. It doesn’t require you to hit KPIs or aim for particular outcomes. More often, it’s about achieving something that touches you personally, that mean something dear and important to you, with values not found in the world out there. Just to repeat the quote of Susan Kare, the graphic designer and a pioneer in graphic user interface:
You can’t really decide to paint a masterpiece. You just have to think hard, work hard, and try to make a painting that you care about. Then, if you’re lucky, your work will find an audience for whom it’s meaningful.
I once talked about finding the deep concepts in our culture that has no English equivalent and struggled with it. I thought that being famous for “Kiasu” as a concept was nothing to be proud of. It is interesting when I realised that Seth Godin picked up on this concept when he was writing The Practice.
Of course, kiasu is actually about fear and insufficiency. And it couldn’t exist if we trusted ourselves enough to know that we’re already on a path to where we seek to go.
If you are using outcomes that are out of your control as fuel for your work, it’s inevitable that you will burn out. Because it’s not fuel you can replenish, and it’s not fuel that burns without a residue.
Seth Godin
Actually, I was a bit sad; not just because this negative term describing part of our culture has spread but because what Seth said here isn’t far from truth. We all need to be taught to burn fuel that we can replenish, that is within our control, that we can use wisely.
Like fossil fuels, that focus on outcome for our society might have helped us for a while. Much of modernity was built upon the power of coal and steam engine. But as a society we need to find new fuels to sustain us as a society, fuel that is sustainable. Fuel that doesn’t burn us out, wreck our mental health and cause damage to our spirit.
