11/01/2010
What’s so great about the Singapore Spirit?
"When I was younger, I was very proud of being a Singaporean. But that was about five, 10 years ago. Five years later, with all the changes in policies and the influx of foreign talent, I don't know what I'm defending anymore. I feel that there is a dilution of the Singapore spirit in youth... We don't really feel comfortable in our country anymore." By Lim Zi Rui, a final year Engineering student of NTU
The Singapore Spirit is something that we can vaguely remember as the thing that helped to build this city state. There are still fond memories being cherished by the young and old. Is it still there or it is gone? Or it is no longer good enough, that we need the new hungrier spirit of the new immigrants to save us, to give us a kick in the back to wake us up?
The official wisdom today is as good as saying that the Singapore Spirit no longer living in the young Singaporeans. We need more vibrant and enthusiastic and smarter foreigners if we are to move ahead. If this is the mentality, then many European countries will end up like the dinosaurs. The truth is that the well managed European countries are those that stay close to their own spirits and not those that are flooded with foreigners and with foreign spirits. The latter are seeing a decline in their quality of life, and chaos and social disorders are becoming a norm, threatening the very system that the foreigners came to benefit.
If the fad of new and new spirits is anything to go by, there is no need to visit Finland to learn from them. The Finns don’t hunger nor pander for more hungrier immigrants to lift up their lives and economy. Simply, they don’t need new immigrants. They can make do with themselves and their own spirit of survival and do very well with their own people. They are confident of themselves and their own people.
So, what is this Singapore Spirit? Is this something great or something that is best forgotten and replace with a new migrant spirit? Or is this a Spirit that runs down its own people as helpless and goners, and there is an urgent need to find a new Spirit to replace it?
Shouldn't the Singapore Spirit be like the matured European countries, believe in themselves and their own people and continuously improving their own standard of living without having to hope or beg the hopeless and nothing to lose dare devils from the lost countries to mess up their systems and lives? When I referred to matures European countries, count England, France and Spain out. They will be destroyed by the foreigners they foolishly brought in.
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11 comments:
The S'pore spirit is just a mass illusion. An illusion designed to give the politicians leverage to better enable them to sell their bullshit to the gullible sheeple.
One aspect of this mass hypnosis is the anchor of filthy, sexy money. Both Singaporeans and their government are anally fixated on accumulating as much money as possible -- the citizens for themselves, the state for itself.
The state has oodles of money -- officially over $180 billion...unofficially...who knows?
The people are striving for more money. At the present they are madly scrambling to own a piece of their island and in the process have driven up the real estate prices at he fastest rate in the world. some of the people (the ones who can't afford to buy) blame "foreigners", but in reality, it is Singaporeans themselves who are the most energetic players in this bidding (civil) war. Yes, it is a kind of civil war: You can't afford it? You're OUT!
Once in awhile there appears an article so well written (e.g. "Disneyland with a death penalty") -- even though the truth is stretched a bit and facts sensationalised -- that it deserves mention, and needs to go viral.
Once can argue that "The Singapore Spirit" if it exists originates from the Imperial Court of the Imperial Rulers, and it passed onto the citizens by direct consciousness-injection (aka a "mind fuck")
In the not too distant past, we really had the Singapore Spirit.
We sang the song, "Stand Up for Singapore, do the best you can. Reach for your fellow men, we gotta make a stand........."
Now, it's "Stand Up for Yourself, make the most you can. Forget about your fellow men, 'cause they're not our men....."
What the fuck happened in these ten short years?
We lost the Singapore spirit because (a) prices spiraled out of control in housing, food and other necessities of living thus necessitating everyone to scramble and get more money, by hook or by crook (b) the flooding of the country with aliens who got PR or citizenship as easy as queuing up to buy a Big Mac.
When you see a peasant from a remote village in China getting an S-pass, but doing menial work and subsequently being granted PR status, you know that something is terribly wrong and doomsday is just round the corner.
Foreigners can work here but they should never ever be given PR or citizenship status unless they are truly talents that the country needs.
It was reported that in answer to the student's concern, the SM said, "This is serious".
Indeed IT IS.
It was under the stewardship of Goh Chok Tong that Singaporeans like Mr Lim Zi Rui was brought up.
And if Goh Chok Tong thinks that he should not be here doing anything for Singaporeans, he may like to know that citizens like me prefer that he was/is never one to lead us. Me gets no good feeling from his and many of his fellow cabinet members leaderships.
Pardo me from veering off the Singapore Spirit.
The Singapore Spirit today is 'don't stare at me or it is you down or me lying' as had happened within the last few weeks in China Town and Downtown East where Singaporeans harmed each other. What happened in those starring incidents is quite similar to the standoff between the leaders and Singaporeans now.
Anymore divide and rule and this Singapore Spirit will indeed be haunting spirit for a long time to come.
patriot
Singapore spirit? Dead and buried!
The spirit of the Japanese, the Chinese, the Indians, the Finns, the Swiss, the Germans, the Italians etc etc are still living all these centuries. They are not flirtatious spirits that come and go. They are not fly by night spirit that you can buy with money. They are not spirits that you hope to get from 1 in a million thrash.
A nation has failed when it has no spirit and keep on chasing spirits everywhere. It is like those good for nothing parents who don't see anything good in the own children and go coveting other people's children.
The spirit of a people, of a country, no matter how you coined it, defined it, is subjective, imaginative, but you know that it is there, good or bad. Nevermind if the politicians coined it to serve their own political goals.
It is about a people and their well being together, to make things better for themselves. It is not a selling out, like disposable goods, use throw away.
Shall we use ther analogy of a child born to parents of two distinct Races. It is not appropriate for the child to declare if he/she is of the father or mother's race, as he/she is not of pure Race blood{gene).
Singapore tries to build a nationhood out of a multi-racial society full of pure blood Races by creating a spirit that almagates all the Races. There was some level of success but died infantilely due to lop-sided developments. In the pursuit of wealth(economic), social, cultural and spiritual developments were neglected, even ignored leading to the early demise of the conceiving nationhood. Hence, in the concluding days of the First Prime Minister of Sin namely, Lee Kuan Yew, has to pronounced that Singapore is not a nation.
Maybe, Singapore will not be a nation after the Present Prime Minister or after him.
I would like to see the Japanese or the Germans or some developed countries proclaiming that their people have lost the pioneering spirit and they need to bring in foreign talents to help them.
I would like to see the Japanese or the Germans or some developed countries proclaiming that their people have lost the pioneering spirit and they need to bring in foreign talents to help them.
Quick jump in to counter a myth about "racial blood: -- "pure" or otherwise:
"Our growing knowledge of the genome and human evolutionary history help us understand why all such efforts to locate the source of innate racial difference were doomed: it doesn't exist."
[...]
"In fact, there are no characteristics, no traits, not even one gene that turns up in all members of one so-called race yet is absent from others."
Source
A book you can read online:
Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy Of Race
The concept of a "multi racial society" is flawed. Over time and with constant reinforcement (like religion) the concept is accepted as "true".
Unfortunately it is not true. It is a myth, a fallacy, but since most people have grown up with it it is permanently "fixed" in the mind and can only be changed by individual effort.
Maybe reading 1000 and 01 ways to win the lotteries will be more productive.
In the not too distant past, it was basically all about building up the Singapore spirit, and not like today, when the obvious answer turn out to be why or what do I care about this place. Singapore doesn't belong anymore.
That was the difference between then and now.
The spirit of the past was built on necessity and survival, so the bond was strong, though the stakes were minimal.
It is difficult to foster that kind of spirit now that it is largely built on opportunity in good times and desertion in bad.
It can never succeed again.
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