To people close to him and around him, he has been meticulous, demanding, impatient and, yes, sometimes brutally dismissive.
His own superiority complex arises in part from his sense of what’s required to help redress Asia’s long-suffering inferiority complex.
Generally, flattery gets you nowhere: it’s as if he feels such fluff only slows him down, distracts him from seeing the end point, and perhaps even is aimed at lulling him into some kind of rhetorical ambush.
His face, though well lined, is animated; he is grinning now, so very alert: “Well, I think what the Western world readership does not understand is that at the end of the day, I am not worried by how they judge me. I am worrie dby how the people I have governed judge me.”
We have evolved a system, a virtual cycle. At some point, it may break down because the ablest and the brightest may not come in to do the job because they think all is well, why should they expose themselves to press publicity, constrict their family life? If that happens, we will have an alternative government.
- Are you pretty proud of what you have?
- It was the best that I could do with the people that I had.
They don’t know where Singapore is, they are not interested. They think of only Michael Fay, then maybe caning, chewing gum … strange odd place this Singapore.
To understand that the tendency to stick the remains of the gum in every which place was viewed by the authorities as a palpable attack on Singapore’s ambition to be perfect. That is, it was an anti-utopian.
I am not sure we are past history. But the media have stopped flogging the dead horse. They can see that there is a different Singapore. It is no longer sterile, it’s no longer an absence of fun.
They think they know me, but they only know the public me.
I would not call myself “fun-loving” or “light-hearted”. But I am not serious all the time. Everyone needs to have a good laugh now and then, to see the funny side of things, and to laugh at himself.
This is not surprising. People often label Singapore the “Nanny State.” It wakes you up in the morning, watches out for you during the day, and tucks you into bed at night. But it’s necessarily a suffocating love, with little room for bubbly mirth.
The fact of the matter is that the country’s prosperity and civility cannot be denied. What must be faced up to is this: Singapore is a huge success and an obvious gem (with imperfections, of course). We in the West may quarrel with the way it was achieved, but the achievement somehow seems to dwarf the critique. Why tear down a monument to hard work and smart decision-making?
If you can switch it on and off, yes, it can be a tool of government, but people with irrepressible tempers cannot switch it on and off. Now, because my father had a nasty temper, I decided that tempers are bad because it created unhappiness for my mother and for the family. So, I have never, I never try to lose my temper. Maybe I have occasionally, but I try to control it.
I’ve never forgotten because I was only about 4, 5 years old. So, I decided my father was a foolish man who never controlled himself.
We guys tend to stay submerged in denial rather than surface and face certain deeply personal realities. But, fool that I am, I push him one more time.
My faults are impatience in getting things done, pressing my associates and aides in putting in their best to get the job done, or fairly quickly replacing them when they are not making the effort well.
I don’t think in those terms. I am not great on philosophy and theories. I am interested in them, but my life is not guided by philosophy or theories. I get things done and leave others to extract the principles from my successful solutions. I do not work on a theory. Instead I ask: what will make this work? If, after a series of such solutions, I find that a certain approach worked, then I try to find out what was the principle behind the solution.
My sense is that Lee harbors the gut instinct that all general political theories, however expressed by (say) the average otherwise harmless university professor, contain either an explosive measure of danger or an ocean of profound naivete. For when pushed to logical end points, they incline toward extremism, whether Communism at its purest or a brutal brand of capitalism sometimes labeled “free-market fundamentalism” or (most probably of all) toward inconsequentialism.
So, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, I am not guided by them. I read them cursorily because I was not interested in philosophy and such. You may call me “utilitarian” or whatever. I am interested in what works.
What is my guiding principle? Presented with the difficulty or major problem or an assortment of conflicting facts, I review what alternatives I have if my proposed solution doesn’t work. I choose a solution which offers a higher probability of success, but if it fails, I have some other way. Never a dead end.
I am not anti-Marxist but anti-communist, i.e. anti-Leninist methods of organizing a party to capture power and to hold a society in its grip once in power.
“Marx argues that labor creates excess returns that are creamed off by capitalists. But Marx was wrong when he predicted this would lead to great injustices and, finally, rebellion and a collapse of the capitalist system. This has not happened because of trade unions fighting for better working conditions, and governments redistributing incomes through housing, health, education and social security benefits.”
All this is to the good, he suggests, especially the use of central government intervention to sand down the rough edges of capitalism. It keeps things moving forward. But extended to an ideology, or to some inflexible formula, state interventionism can be dangerous.
In this regard, he worries a lot about the direction of the US. He adds, “In Europe, because the social security net is overgenerous, the workers are not as hard driving and the economy has become sluggish. The US is at the other end, higher competition, with less social support. However, if the Obama administration and Congress move towards the European model of social support, it will lead to a slower and less dynamic American economy.”
I learned about power long before Mao Zedong wrote that power came from the barrel of the gun. The Japanese demonstrated this; the British did not. The Brits were at the tail end of Empire when they did not have to use brute force. The British had superiority in technology, commerce and knowledge. They built this big Government House on a hill with Indian convict labor in 1868 to dominate the populations. This building dominated the whole island. I learned how to govern, how you dominate the people, as the British did, and how the Japanese used their power.
Plato talked in terms of a city-state. We are talking in terms of meganations with many ethnic groups, many cultures, many religions, multiple contradictions between them. How it will pan out, I cannot say, but I do know that the present system is not the end of history, that nothing else can excel democracy, that you cannot displace it. That’s not true.
He views the rural Malays with compassion, but also with conviction: they are not bred to be go-getters.
He’s not against democracies when they work. He’s against defending them just because they are democracies. This position strikes me as more consistent than the US relationship with other democracies: we support them only when we approve of them, denouncing them (or worse) when we don’t.
He is also opposed to defending propositions that have little factual foundation simply because they are politically correct. He does think, by and large, Chinese people work harder than many other nationalities or ethnicities (though not, for example, more than the Japanese).
In fact, the Japanese are so driven that they serve to underscore the point that even an inefficient democratic system of government is not necessarily an impediment to economic growth.
Lee always knew that his obsession about China was in Singapore’s long-term national interest. If a tiny vulnerable country like Singapore doesn’t climb aboard and perhaps even slip into a seat behind the pilot-engineer on the Chinese train, operating as a kind of unofficial back-seat driver, it will be left dangerously behind. He has also steadily obsessed that if China itself didn’t change dramatically, that train would never even leave the station — and the whole region would be stuck without this huge economic engine.
Quick as a fox, LKY climbed aboard, ran into the cabin, and began engaging with Deng Xiaoping. The late master leader of China saved China from total collapse.
In Lee’s eyes, Nixon carved out a special place for himself in history. That is, he may have been inept in a hundred smaller ways, but not on this very big issue of China. The sins of Watergate and other serious errors of judgment notwithstanding, Nixon, for one, at least understood the big ideas that make the world go around.
Lee greatly admired the hard geopolitical groundwork of Nixon and Kissinger.
Lee says that Deng sighed and replied with something like: “If I only had Shanghai to do, I too might be able to change Shanghai quickly as you have Singapore. But I have the whole of China.”
I said to him, Communism will only work if you believe that all men will sacrifice themselves for their fellow men and not first for themselves and their families. I work on the basis that all men and women first work for themselves and their families, and only then will they share a portion of it with the less fortunate. That’s the basis on which I work.
Why do you want the communists to succeed? Well, even some of my own officers told me, look, why do we teach them and then they will outdo us and then we are in trouble?
So, I told them, this is a chance for us to get a foot in China at a time when they don’t know how to do it. But they’ve got so many bright fellows and they are going to go all around the world, and you can’t prevent them from coming to Singapore with a camcorder and taking pictures and studying us. So, we might as well do this for them; make a great impact on them and the leadership.
Lee talks often about the need for his little Singapore to see — and act on — the bigger picture.
So, the bigger picture now is this. Our fate does not depend just on what goes on in Johor or in Indonesia or in ASEAN. It depends on what happens in America in this new order now. 30 years ago, I would say Americas, Europe, Japan, they were the developed dynamos in the world. Gradually, that changed. Today, there is America Number One, Japan Number Two, Europe Number Three, and the potential now is China, Number Four, likely to be Number Two in 20 years, and India today, Number Seven or so, likely to be one behind China in 20, 30 years. So, you must factor that into your calculations as you are going forward in your policy. Because in the 1970s, I could see that China, once it changes its system, was bound to rise. Because when I went there and I talked to them, I found very capable minds, of course then blinkered by their ideology.
Please note that LKY equates tight security with national security. Conversely, easing up politically might trigger an unraveling. The Western perspective views official crackdowns critically; Lee sees them as unavoidable for a country of that size, history and degree of unsolved problems.
Yes, of course. Their first hindrance, which is something they have not contemplated doing, is to remove the privileges of the 70M members of the Communist Party. You can commit any crime; you cannot be investigated by the Public Procurator. Only the Party Disciplinary Committee can punish you. So, the Disciplinary Committee is influenced by, you know, which faction is this chap supporting? I mean, you don’t want to punish a chap who is supporting you. So, that is one of the reasons why the corruption has not been weeded out.
The Singapore leader’s apparent tolerance of all things Deng may at times seem shocking, but it is consistent with his larger view that methods of government vary from culture to culture, and cannot be condemned out of hand if the net result is steady and / or dramatic improvement in the lot of the people.
Lee is second to no one I know in his view that the Marxist-Leninist is first and foremost interested in seizing and keeping power. Everything else (economic development, social justice) is much further from the heart.
It was also his well-articulated sense of world political dynamics as being so deeply rooted in history and culture that significant change does not come easily, and often arrives convulsively. In this regard the Kissinger mindset seemed more Asian than American.
They’re both stable, they’re comprehensive in their approach. Kissinger has the advantage of being more expressive with words. Shultz hasn’t quite got the same literary style. He’s very precise. So, he hasn’t got the free-flowing, colorful, contrapuntal balance of Kissinger’s German balanced, rounded, long phrases.
He said it with sadness. LKY cares about the caliber of the elites running the top countries because he believes the priorities, conduct and decisions of the global elite are essential to securing a better future. Singapore without its governing elite would not be where it is today. Irrational democracies sometimes do little more than legitimize mob rule or policy preferences, not the surest route to quality governance; even at their best, they are hard put, in his view, to compete with truly qualified, non-corrupt and well-motivated elites.
He was a balanced, thoughtful man. Unfortunately he had this thyroid problem during his reelection campaign and showed he had lost energy. Had he not been lethargic, he could have won. He had governed well; he had fought the first Iraq War well. The economic downturn couldn’t be helped.
There are reasons for almost everything, as Lee would say. One is his reputation for saying pretty much what is on his mind, and you get the sense that this is one mind that is rarely blank. Another is that his intellectual independence (saying what he wants) derives in part from Singapore’s position in the region and the world. Since his country depends on almost everyone for something, it is wholly dependent on no one in particular.
- When you write, you can’t. The moving eye does not go back. If it has to go back, that means you’ve written poorly.
- Now, if you are not a good writer and a good communicator, which you are, that is a huge plus for a leader, but if you are not, it’s a huge handicap for a leader.
- Well, yes, because, I mean, to be a leader, you must be able to communicate your feelings and move the other fellow. It’s not just ideas, you know.
- And you don’t have to be a genius. You may be, but you don’t have to be. Ronald Reagan was not a genius.
- But you must move the other fellow’s position.
To LKY an inherited culture is sort of like a country’s DNA. To change it almost requires laser surgery. Cultures that evolve to changes in circumstances and challenges can thrive; those that do not, fall behind. In a famous interview, Lee spelled out his Toynbeeesque view that culture is destiny. That’s why he often admonishes critics to understand a country’s “starting place.”
You see, he was stuck on big ideas. He went for ideas. I chase ideas provided they work. When they don’t work, I say, look, this idea maybe sounds bright, but let’s try something that works. So we try something that works, let’s get it going.
Survival. LKY himself is quite the survivor. In an environment of utter comfort bereft of challenge, he would shrink psychologically to a more normal dimension of political actor. In the reality of his own mind, he sees existential challenges everywhere.
Threats are everywhere. He has seen off engineers to Holland to study the science of dike building in the event the pace of global warming quickens and a rising sea level threatens Singapore’s reclaimed land. He most admires those who take destiny in their hands rather than cower in indecisiveness. He admires no one more than the Israelis for their hard-scrabble, high-IQ survivalism.
They know this and they don’t know where they will end up, but they believe step by step, as the situation changes, they adapt, they change, they can remain in control and they co-opt the bright people and the activists into their party. It’s no longer a communist party. It is a party of all those who will make China great and strong. That’s all.
LKY, unlike Lawrence, always worries about potential disaster.
LKY is very good about worrying. He might argue that it’s one of his best talents. He was worrying about the Islamic world long before 9/11.
I said, Hinduism, Chinese Confucianism or Communism, Japanese Shintoism, they are secular really. They know that to progress, you must master science and technology, and that’s where they are going to compete with you in the end. But the Muslims believe that if they mastered the Quran and they are prepared to do all that Muhammad has prescribed, they will succeed. So, we can expect trouble from them and so, it happened.
Well, because you’ve got to judge a man from where he stood in his society and where he had come from and what his ambitions were. He was a farmer’s child who had joined the Japanese territorial force as a private and became a corporal or something. Then during the fight for independence, he emerged as a leader of one of the forces fighting the returning Dutch and he became part of the army. Now, he never had any secondary education, and his view of himself and of Indonesia was that he was the biggest sultan of all sultans and that was his view of his position, and as the biggest sultan of all sultans, he’s entitled to give his family and friends the patronage that they needed.
Lee believes America does some very good things, then, inexplicably, forgets it has done them, and then — worse yet — sometimes positively uproots them! So sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the senior statesman is more amused than irritated by American diplomatic incompetence.
I strongly believe that Albright and Larry Summers knew nothing about the history of Indonesia and were wrong in wanting to use Asian financial crisis to oust Suharto.
American democracy, in his view, is good because it has worked — not that it works because it is good.
Americans will not change their Constitution because other people want to have a crack at it. They believe a chap with 3 or 4 terms like Roosevelt would be uncontrollable.
LKY does not see how it is possible to rule very wisely if one does not rule very firmly. Strong leaders make hard decisions that stick. Weak leaders make bad situations worse by deciding poorly or not deciding at all.
LKY knows that Machiavelli was on to something. He has often worried about the risk of meaninglessness and the ineffectiveness if as a ruler no one feared him.
Cultures of course differ, but human nature across the board reflects obvious and enduring species characteristics. Except in rare cases, perhaps usually wartime, slavishly excessive popularity is too often a reflection of mediocre governance. Great governance sometimes takes difficult decisions. No one likes to suffer pain even in the public interest. Like the rest of us, LKY likes to be liked, but not at the cost of what he believes would lead to misgovernance. This is why his Machiavellianism is so often misunderstood. It is driven for maximum effect; there is nothing at all about it that is insincere. It is a strong and useful tool of proper governance, as part of a range of tools and priorities.
- Well, he had a tough job. I mean, he’s halfway between the bosses in Beijing and then his political activity in Hong Kong.
- No, his problem was he’s too much of a gentleman. He’s not a politician and he got pushed around, that is all.
In part because of its convenient location in Southeast Asia, and in part because lots of people look to the Sage of Singapore for counseling and perspective, his modest office is something of a drop-in geopolitical outpatient clinic for VIP politicos from all over, but especially the region.
Super-K is almost incapable of regenerating a sentence that’s a cliche. I mean, he really has an original mind, and I have to say, I don’t want to be overly complimentary, but one thing I like about your writing is how simple and direct it is.
Well, my purpose in writing my books is to get the average O level graduates to read it and understand it. So, my wife was my scrubber.
You know, I’m an orator, or at least I try to be. So, I have oratorical flourishes when I speak. You must have flourishes because then you capture people’s attention and you expand on it; then you’re able to go back and repeat it, but not in words. So, she tells me, look — and she’s a draftsman; as a lawyer, she did all the drafting of agreements, contracts, conveyances and so on; so she uses words precisely — she says, why do you want to write it like this? The O level boy will not understand this. Why not use a simple word instead of this polysyllable word? So, I said, okay, I agree with you and I think in the course of the 2, 3 years that she corrected my drafts, after the first year, I began to write simple, clear, crisp, I mean, no convoluted, sentences.
But also, you have something to say. Thus you don’t need to hide it behind a smokescreen of language.
And after I have done it [agreed to pull Singapore out of Malaysia], depression sets in, you know. I’d let a lot of people down and the anxiety of how do I get this place going. I brought this about. So, I used to wake up in the middle of the night and make notes. Some of my late-night jottings made no sense in the light of the morning, but some made sense. I pursued it, asked my secretary to chase this one out and in the end, we made it. That’s all. I mean, it was the pressure of having to do it. I mean, if I had taken some sedative, oh, I just carry on, don’t worry about it. I won’t.
No, it’s all silly talk. Why should I be irritated with that? You know, when a man is reduced to using abuse to make his point, he’s lost the argument. That’s the first thing I learnt as a lawyer; never go down to a shouting match because then you’ve lost the argument.
He said that people are only interested in an opinion column to the extent that your opinion is informed and inspired by reporting, that you know something that’s really important that they don’t.
“No, I think my answer to them is, we in Singapore have a different starting point. Your outlook on the world and my outlook on the world are different, and my aims and yours are different.”
Not a sliver of evasiveness appears in his eyes, the answer comes back straight and unapologetic. All the hard-worked years notwithstanding, at the moment he is fresh and unabashed.
But unpleasant history sticks in the back of LKY’s mind like the recurrent tick, or cough he cannot seem to shake. On his watch, at least, Singapore will suffer no such repetition of history. Big-time drug dealers will not be caned; they will be hung. Some of them he only wishes could be hung more than once — for public effect and retribution.
He could not care less that American human rights critics are appalled by this official policy. He believes they are not aware of how the British once pushed opium on China, and he has scant respect for how the Americans have massively mismanaged their own drug addiction problem.
I mean, Amnesty International says we have the highest number of executions per thousand of population, but we have a cleaner society, more drug-free, and we are not interested in Amnesty. We are interested in whether what we are doing has the support of our people, and they do. I mean, if it goes against the grain of the people, the opposition would have said, look, this is a cruel, brutal society. But they don’t.
- I loved your recent speech on aging. You said, keep on working and don’t retire. I love it, one of your best speeches.
- No, once you stop working you are done for.
That’s right, now I am almost 86. So, what is my purpose now in life? To use my experience and my international network to widen Singapore’s space. I have friends who are leaders in America, Europe, Japan, China and India who date back to the 1960s.
Decades of the good life made us soft. The wealthy especially, but also the middle class in Singapore, have had it so good for so long, what they once considered luxury, they now think of as necessities.
I would say that that’s only half-true, that if you are not making progress materially and you talk only the spiritual and aesthetic side of life, arts, culture, you will fail because arts and culture is the result of a level of life that enables such people to develop those skills — leisurely skills, music, ballet, drawing, etc.
But if you look at all the countries that produced art, literature, dance forms, art forms, they are all countries where they have reached a certain level of material comfort.
- Hobbes’s recurring thought about the definition of liberty was that it was too expansive; that, in fact, it was so expansive that it allowed the citizen to slide into negligence about obligations to family and community and to state on the ground of “liberty.” A famous American screenwriter once put the issue of liberty or freedom this way: “But take care, freedom is a drug, much like any other, and too much can be a bad thing.” Do you agree with that?
- As I said, I am not bound by theories, but my upbringing in 3-generation family made me an unconscious Confucianist. It seeps into you, the Confucianist belief that society works best where every man aims to be a gentleman. The ideal is a junzi, a gentleman. What does that mean? That means he does not do evil, he tries to do good, he’s loyal to his father and mother, faithful to his wife, brings up his children well, treats his friends properly and he’s a good loyal citizen of his emperor. It’s the Five Relationships, Wu-Lun. The underlying philosophy is that for a society to work well, you must have the interests of the mass of the people, that society takes priority over the interests of the individual. This is the primary difference to the American principle, the primary rights of the individual.
You have carried individualism and the pressing of sectional interests to beyond the limits where the good of the majority is being eroded. Every time there is a shooting spree, the gun lobby works hard and the guns keep being sold. So, there is no end to this problem.
Right. In fact, Aristotle said words such as democracy and monarchy are not definitions of an ideal type but merely “described different ways of deciding practical questions.”
Churchill once said, if you want to develop serious doubts about democracy, try to conduct a five-minute conversation on the issues with the average citizen.
He would differentiate his view from that of the Russian political concept of a “sovereign democracy” by pointing to results. You can postulate the need for strong state control and the elimination of true political pluralism in the name of development and stability, if you want. But then you have to deliver the goods. If you don’t, all you’ve done is to seize power.
Income inequality isn’t wrong because all people have some birthright to equality of living standards. That is not his view at all. Inequality is a serious danger because it breeds discontent and the potential for dangerous instability. It is the consequences of the income gap rather than nits mere existence that motivate correction. To be sure, the man with the Ferrari benefits from political stability as much as the man scratching out a living. The task of good governance is to reduce that inequality while not derailing the locomotives of economic growth.
This is pure pragmatism.
Optimal public policy is often both knowable and achievable, he believes, but the best methodology for discovering what is the best way forward is usually through a process of either comparative shopping (how others do it) and / or trial-and-error implementation at home.
Probably the riskiest way of trying to achieve the best of all possible words is through a simplistic or rigid democratic process that leaves blocking or at least mucking-up powers in the hands of narrow-interested lobbies, often in league with either demagogic politicians or backroom hacks.
Smart, very smart. Before long, government workers were staying late, especially if their homes weren’t yet so outfitted. Working for the government became, well, the cool thing to do.
Consider this: that in the last century so many countless lives and souls have been ruined, and in may cases brought to a cruel end, because of blind obeisance to some One True Idea. LKY wants no part of being that kind of strong leader.
Sustained and sustainable progress is possible only when a gifted, empowered elite is in more or less control of policy. The complete corollary to that is his belief that politics that includes significant decision-making by the unqualified — or by the well-organized narrow interests, the lobbies — is the enemy of superior public policy. This leads to the third forbidden thought: that democracy, at its one-man, one-vote purest, is almost always the enemy of a practical, here-and-now, best-we-can-get utopia.
Here’s why. Lee’s sole motive was never just power, never only political domination of his country. That would not have been enough; the Confucian in him would have known of his shortfall of character, for he is not an insincere human being.
His motive was to SHOW THE WORLD — and let me say it again, for emphasis: for all the world to see — that a Chinese leader and his Confucian people could in a united spirit do the governance job as well as anyone, better than most, and maybe, somehow, better than anybody!
Such an assertion would seem quite a stretch to anyone examining the inferior level of governance in the world’s largest Chinese country, right? That’s the whole point; that’s why, when giant China’s maximum leader visited Southeast Asia in 1978, which Southeast Asian country had the most impressive set of achievements to show Chairman Deng?
What’s more, Lee and his elite and his people, reflecting Confucian acceptance of “Father Knows Best,” did not stop there; they decided to take it one phenomenal step further Not having a Shanghai — not to mention an India or, indeed, a China — to have govern, they could imagine Singapore becoming a very model of contemporary governance at its best: using only the “best practices,” achieving maximum equity for all, constant striving for progress, all but electrocuting corruption, and maintaining the threat of Hobbesian law and order on inch below a cosmopolitan surface.
We all know that classic heavenly utopias do not really exist on this polluted planet. And some alleged utopias are nothing but flaw-ridden. The Soviet rendition of heaven-on-earth was most often a hell-on-earth.
By contrast, LKY walked the walk of utopian-inspired governance better than so many others. With enormous effort, he pieced together, layer by layer, a skilled governing elite (like a Plato, but advised by Machiavelli) — encompassing all the important professions, not just governmental — that pushed his country to the globe’s top league of accomplished economies. And with remarkable self-awareness he sought to avoid the poison of purist political and economic ideology that undid otherwise great men like Nehru, without descending into the creepy cronyism and crippling corruption characteristic of so many other egomaniacal regimes around the world.
It seems to me that LKY is where Plato meets Machiavelli — in the special land of Confucius.
So, one way or the other, we agree, earth has no utopia. So what is the next best thing? And what should we call it?
The thing itself may well be Singapore itself, faults and all. It is this era’s Neo-Utopia, a living example of getting a place into as utopian a shape as is humanely possible.
Think about that: for all the hot air of politicians, for all the complex modeling and intellectual posturing of academics, for all the high-minded moral statements of the moralists and activists, Singapore took it all in, worked itself to the bone, and got a whole lot of it done.
You have to have something more than that. You have got to wake up every morning feeling there’s something worth doing and you’re not just lying back and coasting along. Once you coast along, it’s finished.
Remember, he honestly admitted to us (with a plain-spoken directness I had not seen elsewhere before, and have not heard from him since) that the ideology of democracy left him cold. And I have to tell you that, when he said it toward the end of our first day of conversations — with absolutely no apology whatsoever — the comment seemed to me breathtaking in its utter disregard of political correctness or polite qualification. Said Lee to us: “I do not believe that one-man, one-vote, in either the US format or the British format or the French format, is the final position.”
His goal was not to stay in power for its own sake and loot, as with some Third World despot, but to deploy that power to improve Singapore dramatically and impress on neighbors how it can be done. He was often in a rush. Failures slammed progress into reverse. So what he could not tolerate was ineffectiveness, especially cloaked in ideological purity. Ideological arguments were for professors of the academic and arcane.
I say let’s follow the stars and they said okay, let’s try. And we’ve succeeded and here we are, but has it really taken root? No. It’s just worked for the time being. If it doesn’t continue to work, again, we say let’s try something else. This is not entrenched. This is not a 4,000-year society.
His distaste for philosophy developed in distrust of all general ideas. He disliked speculation and preoccupation with questions capable of no clear answers. Attempts to raise fundamental issues, whether personal or historical, were stopped by a few dry words, with growing impatience and even irritation. He had always detested romantic rhetoric, ostentation, journalism.
I may have underestimated the overall impact of the tremendous atmospheric pressure of empiricism at Cambridge, where he read law and graduated with double First Class Honors. This successful experience at such a hallowed institution would have left a deep impression on anyone.
The system of control Lee clamped on the small island city-state was somewhat suffocating. Arts and literature were slow to develop even as the scientific, mathematical and engineering skills soared to exceed the achievement level of almost all nations. Singapore’s per capita income level, grater than even the US and probably Japan, were a testament to the economic success, brilliantly achieved in the flash of a few decades. But there was a downside, a cost, as there is with almost everything.
Politics is getting your own way. Nothing more.
Lee was well aware of what he was doing. Effective leaders usually do. They will do what they have to do. In classical political philosophy, the “Doctrine of Dirty Hands” postulates that all leaders will have to do things that otherwise would be morally (and probably legally) unacceptable in less authorized hands. Let us note mild-mannered, professional President Obama — the former lecturer from Harvard Law School — keeps a hit list of possible terrorist targets at his White House desk. And so on around the globe.
Power is not pretty. Whether it comes from the barrel of a gun, from the gavel of a judge, or from the mouth of authority, it is inherently forceful and coercive. People tend not to understand power. Even when used for a good cause, it is not a nice thing.
The danger for a traditional society is either they educate their women the way the West has done, which means they become equally well educated, or they do it like the Japanese, where women are not as well educated and jobs for women are temporary. It was a deliberate choice made by the elders of Japan.
We went the way of the West; we knocked down all the barriers and allowed our women to compete. Now we are in very serious difficulties, because our men won’t marry their educational equals. It’s against traditional culture. We’re not Americans, that’s the problem. We have upset age-old traditions too fast, especially the attitudes of mothers.
As articulate as he was about his beloved Singapore, he kept an interior side to himself that perhaps only his late wife ever fully saw.