Collateral damage of Elitism in Singapore

 This is the COLLATERAL DAMAGE caused by the ruling elites' desire to turbo charge and punch our economy well above our natural weight.

Given that we are a tiny hub city with no natural resources, inflating the economy on “steroids” – huge overflow of multinationals and foreign talent - IS NOT A SIN PER SE.

What is sinful is when the “loot” or the “artificially inflated economic cake” created by multinationals and foreign talents – whom of course will have their generous cut – is reaped by a few elite Singaporeans while leaving the majority of Singaporeans, in particular the old and under-educated ones, to fight over the crumbs.

LKY warned that if we did not vote the PAP, our women would become maids in foreign lands. But instead, we now have 40,000 core Singaporean men driving Grab, 30,000 delivering food, 16,000 driving taxis, 40,000 cleaners and landscape personnel, 30,000 security guards etc. all of whom are lowly paid compared to the imported high-flyers.

Throw in Covid-19 stresses and the mix can become explosive.

Therefore, racism may not be all about elitism but is more likely to be substantially a part of it. The cure for racism is not so different as the cure for elitism. A more egalitarian and a fairer society is a less racist society.

To a large extent, racism is just an excuse or bogeyman used to mask the real problem of elitism, class, and caste.

And in Singapore, how can one not expect to see an elitist pecking ordered society when a certain ruling party MP once said that if a senior bureaucrat is not paid a very high salary, how can she conduct a meeting with a CEO of a corporation who is paid much more?

What a set of bollocks and false narratives.

In Singapore, money has been wrongly and conveniently used as the sole yardstick to measure job responsibility.

By this definition, Jacinda Ardern would not be able to do her job effectively because she is paid much less than many corporate high-flyers and does not live in a "good class bungalow" in New Zealand.

She earns less than $500k per annum and by our Senior Minister's definition, she is supposed to be mediocre. Yet she was voted this year by Fortune magazine as the world's greatest leader, beating all our Singapore leaders by a mile.
In Singapore, the ruling elites have inadvertently created a big elephant in the room known as elitism. The scholarship system worked well at the time when the nation was poor. Today, the same system perpetuates elitism.

Why is there a $2 billion private tuition market if not abundantly explained by an artificially created intellectual arms race?

Therefore real cancer that is permeating deeply into the Singapore society is elitism, not racism.

A highly questionable and gamed meritocratic system, where the top salaries are uncapped and gamed (with obscenely low individual taxes for the million-dollar earners) while the bottom salaries are uplifted in a miserly and calibrated way (all cleaners will eventually earn $2420/-by year 2028!).

So, the government now wishes to conflate elitism, societal stress due to excessive and unfair competition, Covid-19, loss of self-esteem amongst commoners, pretty much everything suffering caused by skewed policies, and conveniently blame it on one single issue, which is racism/xenophobia.

Racism and xenophobia are merely the external manifestation of some FAR DEEPER ROOT CAUSES that the ruling elites are slow to address. 

Anonymous