Actually I already sensed that there was something wrong with
Singapore society during my secondary schools days.
I didn't know what it was but I could feel it.
It must be the same case with you.
Well, what it was for me is actually quite simple. Even as
primary school kids you'd realise that while a chauffer looked
pretty good driving a Mercedes, it was someone else's Mercedes that
he was driving.
Taking the same principle writ large, Singapore was making a
real reputation for itself as a manufacturing base for foreign
companies; sure, we looked great churning out those millions of
TVs, radios and PCBs, but we were still doing the dogs' body work
for someone else. Japan started the same way, but by the
80's, countries like Singapore were manufacturing for them.
When was it going to be Singapore's turn to own the Mercedes
instead of simply driving it?
I started questioning what it would take for Singapore to move
up, and that's when the cancerous quality of the Singaporean
culture's obsession with control became obvious to me. I'll
be the first to point out that I was looking after number one in
deciding that my effort was better spent doing my thing in a
placewhere I had the freedom to think for myself, instead of trying
to change the minds of people who were more than happy to trudge
along to someone else's command and control structure.
