People who are not familiar with Singapore cannot understand how well governed it is. It’s not merely another first-world country where roads are smooth and pollution is low. It’s a whole different level of predictability and control. And this has a strange effect on its residents, which, as a student of vedanta, I find uniquely interesting.
Tear down and recreate
In the larger world, large malls and office buildings are owned by their respective owners. Some buildings remain glitzy and well maintained over time, others become musty and dull. It’s in the nature of things — the owners of the respective buildings decide what happens to, and in, them.
Singapore is different. Most buildings are owned by the government and leased to their temporary owners for 15, 30, or 60 years. Builders pick up these leases, build the buildings, and operate them as businesses, precisely calculating the return on their investment over the lease period. This means that most malls and office buildings are being torn down and completely rebuilt every 30 years. Therefore, at any point in time, some significant portion of the city is being recreated.
Residents are constantly invited to this magic show of newness. Today, this mall. Tomorrow, that shopping arcade. Day after, that row of buildings in that business district. Each is new, unfamiliar, and integrated into the changes which have taken place in the intervening years. The building which used to occupy this plot of land was a mixed-use building, with some offices, some warehouses, and two rows of shops. Now it’s a lovely new building with a tube station below and four storeys of shops and restaurants.
Civic infrastructure perfection
Singaporeans can literally walk on pavements with their heads stuck in their cellphones. They can do this because there is not a single paving stone in a single pavement out of place. I have never seen any city anywhere in the world which has pavements, corridors, walkways, as perfect as Singapore. You don’t have to look where you’re going, you will never stumble.
Road repairs and construction projects never eat up half the lanes in any major road and cause traffic bottlenecks — diversions are set up to let traffic swing by a different route and keep moving at full speed.
Singapore doesn’t have bad weather like torrential downpours, snow, ice or other inconvenient things. Rains in Singapore do not clog roads by waterlogging — they are well designed.
Residents begin to take this for granted. If you’ve never found a paving block out of place which will make you stumble in thirty years of your life, you assume that This Is How It Is.
The flawless consistency creates hard expectations. It hardens your attitude towards flaws.
It’s safe
At one level, Singapore minimises accidents to a degree few other countries can. All pedestrian crossings are marked with traffic signals telling pedestrians when to cross. All vehicular traffic is monitored and controlled to the point where drivers do not even think it’s worth the effort to “beat the system”. Crime is next to zero. Bribing of government officials does not happen — or it happens at levels completely out of the reach of average citizens. The shopkeeper will not pass on a special discount to you by avoiding taxes — the incentive structure makes it unattractive for him to try this.
Crime doesn’t happen at the level where citizens are afraid. Petty crime, small violent crime like mugging or robbery, simply doesn’t happen. You can walk on the streets at midnight in almost all parts of the city with zero danger of crime. Motor-cycle-borne police patrols cruise through all areas which may be lonely or scary. The resident doesn’t know to look over his shoulder.
A simple observation emphasizes how Singapore is unique. Traffic lights at various crossings in various cities malfunction occasionally, leaving drivers to their own devices to navigate their crossings. These experiences teach drivers to take matters into their own hands and be “innovative” where they can, and skirt the laws. In Singapore, over several dozen visits and hundreds of days of moving around on the city’s roads, I have never seen a malfunctioning traffic signal left unattended. If it’s malfunctioning, an alternate traffic control detail will be installed and will leave drivers in no doubt about what is expected of them. Flawless consistency. The citizen is never left to his own devices. Therefore, the normal small chaos in traffic pockets doesn’t happen in this city.
Communication
In Singapore, the government is everywhere, in everything, sometimes visible, sometimes below the surface. And they are constantly communicating. They set a very high benchmark for communication, constantly and clearly telling you what you need to feel and think about anything. As you enter a metro station, you see large posters telling you
- that the role of the MRT technician is valuable, and he does a difficult job, and we should be proud of them, and perhaps apply for a job with them
- that the MRT is changing the lives of citizens, constantly reducing travel time, increasing comfort and safety all around, and you should feel grateful and reassured
- that new breakthroughs in construction are making way for new MRT stations, interchanges, and other facilities and you should be impressed
I recently had snacks one evening in Lao Pa Sat, a food court area where the road is barricaded for vehicles after 7 PM and tables are laid out in the open, allowing diners to spread out at the tables and enjoy their dinners. On one side, prominent signs are put up telling visitors that these tables are for free public use, not just for the customers of the eateries. The message of free access is being communicated, preempting any attempt by the eateries to corral the dining area and cause problems for visitors. Ambiguity is bad for governance, hence ambiguity is anticipated and nullified with communication.
Nothing in the communication is left to chance, so to speak. You are clearly told what to think and feel, how to see what is happening, how to respond.
Lessons for a vedanta student
Most spiritual traditions teach us that the universe is capricious, very little under our human control. Things happen. We make our way through these things. Vedanta goes a step further and says that the manifest universe is a mirage, an illusion, as impermanent and unreal as a dream. They use the term maya.
Living life in the rest of the world teaches us to expect the unfortunate and unexpected. It teaches us to accommodate and accept. In a very deep and very down-to-earth way, life teaches us that things are not much under human control.
Singapore takes the resident away from all this. The Singapore resident learns that (a) nothing is permanent, new buildings and railways and entire districts are being created all the time, (b) everything is always carefully curated, controlled and safe, and (c) we are nudged to think and feel in specific ways about specific things. We are never left to our own devices. In some sense, Singapore is far more intense manifestation of maya than the rest of the world. And this maya is the creation of a flawless, consistent, invisible government machinery.
So, Singapore residents become slaves of the “should”. They begin to expect things to happen in certain, systematic and logical ways. They begin to feel that chaos, however small, “should be fixed”. They believe payments “should” come on time, and specifications “should” be complete and consistent, and documents “should” be formatted flawlessly. A sense of entitlement grows in them. They have seen no other way for the universe to function. This gives rise to a certain special type of nastiness in their nature — they become upset when someone fails to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. Non-Singaporeans can tolerate ambiguity, illogical processes, and plain delay more than Singaporeans can. And Singaporeans cannot understand why the rest of the world is broken.
I have felt for a long time that a person’s ability to live in the presence of ambiguity is an indicator of good mental health, at a deeper level. You can see how, in my view, Singapore discourages this development.
I feel that at some deep level, life in Singapore makes it harder for Singaporeans to comprehend the presence of a larger force, let alone surrender. They mistake the nursery which is Singapore to be an accurate representation of the universe.