I think Singapore is now basically a two clas society with
elites at the top and the non elites.
We can say that Singapore society has developed into the final
stage before the crisis comes.
As this process goes on, you get certain other things. I've
hinted at a number of them. One is misplacement of satisfactions.
You find your satisfactions--your emotional satisfaction, your
social satisfaction-- not in moment to moment relationships with
nature or other people, but with power, or with wealth, or even
with organized force--sadism, in some cases: Go out and murder a
lot of people in a war, a just war, naturally.
The second thing that occurs as this goes on is increasing
remoteness of desires from needs. I've mentioned this. The next
thing is an increasing confusion between means and ends. The ends
are the human needs, but if I asked people what these needs are,
they can hardly tell me. Instead they want the means they have been
brainwashed to accept, that they think will satisfy their needs.
But it's perfectly obvious that the methods that we have been using
are not working. Never was any society in human history as rich and
as powerful as Western Civilization and the United States, and it
is not a happy society. Just this week, I looked at a book called
"The Joyless Economy", by an economist, Tibor Scitovsky, who
diagrammed some of these things.
In the final aspect of this process, controls on behaviour shift
from the intermediate levels of human experience--social, emotional
and religious--to the lower, military and political, or to the
upper, ideological. They become the externalized controls of a
mature society: weapons, bureaucracies, material rewards, or
ideology. Customary conformity is replaced by conscious
decision-making, and this usually implies a shift from your own
conformity to someone else's decision.
In its final stages, the civilization becomes a dualism of
almost totalitarian imperial power and an amorphous mass culture of
atomized individuals.
http://www.wealthbuilder.ie/essay15.htm
I'm just talking of the most basic needs of any life form,
natural water, not some castle in the air aspirations. If they can
sell you for a dime they will, no love lost!
