Political Philosophy

Some of the courses where I learnt the most interesting stuff in school didn’t even have anything to do with my major. One of them was political philosophy. I asked a senior which courses she liked taking, and she told me that a good course was political philosophy, so that was one of those that I took.

It was not bad, and the teacher was lively. 2 lessons stuck out in my mind.

First was Hobbes. His theory of society was something that was truly dark. He saw people as atomised entities, a rowdy mob of people who just did whatever they felt like doing unless they were restrained by violence. His theory was an argument against anarchy. Basically people will take advantage of each other to the fullest extent. They will fuck each other over for nothing. Moreover they are so equal in strength and abilities that nobody will really win. There will be a permanent state of chaos and anarchy. In his most famous phrase, he says that life like this will be “nasty, brutish and short”.

And that is why we need a government. We need to have a person who is king. We give away some of our rights, and pay him for protection. It might be a tyranny, but it’s still better than nothing.

I supposed in a way it was an extension of what I saw in America. People hardly had any deference to each other. Not to say that they are necessarily rude, but they don’t really have that keen a concept of structure as we do in Asian culture. But then again, having grown up in Singapore, deference to authority was more or less automatic. If I was disobedient to my teachers or my parents, it was because of a moment of weakness, like I didn’t do this piece of homework, or I didn’t do what I had to do because I was lazy. But to stand up and challenge them, or outright defy them, that was totally out of the question, even though we did discuss with our classmates the strengths and weaknesses of our elders.

But thinking about an atomised society made me see human relationships in a completely different way: what if a lot of the people I saw in real life didn’t have any kind of special relationship with me? Like they weren’t a teacher who I had to defer to, a drill sergeant I had to obey or get assraped in detention barracks, or a parent who at one point in my life was some kind of a deity? What would all these people be like if I were to relate to them as though I were a peer?

Now, I suppose, this is one reason I had never heard of Hobbes until I got to America. What he was proposing was in some way the opposite of Confucius, although they are some similarities. The crucial difference is this: Confucius would never start from the standpoint of everybody being of equal status. This situation, even if it were hypothetical, must be completely inconceivable, which is probably why I had never thought of it that way, no matter how rebellious I had been when I was a teenager.

The similarity is that both of them come to the conclusion that there has to be some higher authority in any society. But their attitudes towards this higher authority are different. For Confucius, this is simply the way that it is, that it always has been. Hobbes will ask “why should it be this way?” But Confucius will never even allow this question to be asked. Just shut up and listen. Confucius will say that deference to authority is the highest virtue. Hobbes will say, well, anarchy is really bad and messy, so I guess we’ll have to settle for tyranny instead.

But after this, my attitude towards people was going to be very different. I would be more judgemental of people, even my elders. Before, I would ask, “who are you in relation to me?” And if that person was a superior, I would treat that person as a superior first and foremost, then I would think about what that person is like as a human being. After that, the reverse would be true. Some part of me would defer to a higher-up even though he’s a dick, because there is a limit to the amount of unrest that I’m willing to cause. But primarily I would think about what sort of a person he is as a human.

I suppose all this is part and parcel of growing up, that there are no more superiors like the ones you had as a kid. That you have to make your own decisions, your own mistakes. I suppose I would have picked this up after spending enough time in a western country. But I think it was Hobbes famous story of the war of man against every man which sealed it for me.

Plato and the noble lie.

Nowadays when it comes to the big argument between Plato and Aristotle, I’m more inclined to side with Aristotle. Aristotle is more the realist, and Plato the idealist. But Plato appealed to me more at first.

He held that there were 3 types of people. First was the philosopher, the educated scholar. Second was the warrior. I forgot what the 3rd category was. The first one would be king, because he is wiser and smarter than the rest. (Sometimes I believe that this is just a geek fantasy on his part). For the second type, the problem was how to tame him. The warrior had to believe in a cause so great that he would lay down his life for his country. He had to believe that this made him a great person, a bigger person than he would otherwise be.

You have to construct meaning out of the miserable life of being a soldier. You have to give him prestige, and make him out to be a great man. Even though he's not the real leader, or the one running the show.

The last thing I did before entering uni was to be a soldier. I wasn't much of one, actually, and spent 1 whole year being a clerk. But unfortunately our NS is long enough that I still spent a substantial period of time being a soldier. It made me think about what it was all about. At first, during BMT, I bought the whole thing hook line and sinker. When you're fresh, you don't always know what it's all about. But later on, we did start to question the absolute authority people had over us. We were being fed the noble lie, and some of us bought it whole.

To be sure, the noble lie is not entirely a lie. It is heroic to stand up for your tribe, no doubt about that. There was a disturbing book that I read not long ago which argues that somewhere deep inside of the human psyche, we love war. I would guess that is true, because war is so terrible that it is difficult to imagine anybody engaging in it unless he loves it in some way. The noble lie was there to make us love it.

But what were the 2.5 years? I had very little expectation of the 2.5 years except that my parents were always nagging at me that if you don't get your shit together the army's going to eat you up. But there was a lot of pointless bureaucracy in the early days. A lot of having to wait for the rest of the company to get things done. A lot of lousy food. A lot of pettiness and backstabbing. A lot of pretending to work. A lot of janitor work.

I could have approached it with a better attitude than I did. After 6 months I was completely in the mode of "avoid all possible work". And sometimes I wondered if this attitude did spill over in other aspects of my life.

Let's ask ourselves whether this lie is even a noble one. In the early days of the republic, we definitely needed an army, because we never knew whether our neighbours were going to kill us. But after 20-30 years of nothing happening, everybody doing great, you had to wonder about the war.

In a place like the armed forces, it is full of people who give up an easy life for the security of an iron rice bowl. Are they predisposed to change? I don't think so. Even when the army wants and needs to change, you will have a few stubborn buggers fighting till the last breath against that, everybody defending his turf. It was a very bloated army in those days, with a lot of people shuffling around and not doing very much. I thought that it was a great thing that they cut down the length of service to 2 years, because seriously, we don't need such a large army.

After defending our sovereignty for so many years, the armed forces risks having the rug pulled out from under them. The concept of sovereignty is somewhat perverted because this world has become so inter-connected. Can you imagine Toa Payoh waging war against Ang Mo Kio? That is never going to happen. There are some times when I wonder whether Singapore vs Malaysia is going to be like that.

The nature of the threat has also changed a lot. In an introduction to his book "The Utility of Force", a British general who served in Bosnia points out that the old model of the war, which had 1 state fighting against another state, is gone. The last such war took place in 1973 between Egypt and Israel. Practically all other wars since then have been guerilla wars.

Is our army up to this task? Have we evolved?

Understandably, the fact that such a war has not happened is not the reason why we can dismantle our army. It could well be that the reason why these things don't happen is that every nation in the world has armed forces which prevents this from happening. But the fact is that we can still cut our armed forces by a very significant amount, and that will not change the fact that nobody wants to invade us.

The other thing is that somebody wrote a book on a more pernicious and pervasive form of the noble lie. Thomas Frank, "One Market Under God". In the 1990s, in corporations all over the world, rights have been taken away from the workers at the bottom of the corporation, as it exposed the dark side of America's miraculous economic growth.

Workers were all persuaded to work harder and tougher for the company even though their wages were being cut. They were being told "this is for your character." They were given a substantial amounts of "freedom" in return for their medical benefits being cut away. Starbucks aimed for "flexibility" and not telling their workers when they were going to show up for work until a few days beforehand. They were to act as though they were perpetual college students.

There were a few main reason why the big companies were able to get away with this. One of them is the hype surrounding the "new economy" that was being remade by the advent of the internet. You could believe that "everything's changed" and the old rules didn't apply. I'm sure that a lot of bosses had fun making up the new rules. You had internet startups where a few of the earliest employees had to work like slaves for a few years, in the belief that they were this close to conquering the world, only to see the bubble pop and all their efforts come down to nothing.

Another reason is that bosses had changed their image, and wisely (for them) decided to become more hip and trendy. You could come to work in T-shirts and jeans. You bosses listened to rock and roll, just like you!

Another reason is a whole slew of management theorists which line up to persuade you that the whole meaning of your life revolves around hard work. I agree that a lot of your life revolves around hard work, but this is just emotional manipulation. People now came to work to have fun and attain spiritual fulfillment (which probably means they didn't need to have fat paychecks anymore, I suppose.)

Thomas Frank is a cultural critic, so he didn't touch on many of the economic reasons, chief of which is this: China and the rest of the world are driving wages of all people in developed countries down. But I will refer to his work because it tells us all that the noble lie is alive and well.

My workplace instituted a training program that tried to develop management talent at work. It is a good thing that is long overdue, because training is the best way of transmitting values that we want in our organisation. One training aid raised my eyebrows, though. It came from a booklet written by various SAF personnel, a series of essays where people talk about their "defining moments". A lot of the essays - well they talked about "I must do my best for this, for that, etc etc. I should push my limits a little further". Others were in the vein of "I must be more thoughtful of others".

There was a bit of ambivalence about reading that book. There are some parts, which are in the vein of "more effort", which I don't like - asking them to work harder is not unimportant, but the effects are temporary. You can inspire people, but can you inspire people to work harder every day? You can do this by making a systemic change. You can change the environment in which they work. Otherwise, getting people to put in more individual effort alone is not going to work.

Elsewhere, though, I liked it that you see the workplace as a community of people, and I like it that people are actually thinking about the values in the workplace. That a team is more than just numbers and performance.

I don't completely agree with Plato - he talks about the noble lie, but it is not a lie. It is something that has basis in reality. I would call it a half lie, no more than that. There is this social divide between people who think for a living and people who work for a living, Plato doesn't seem interested in overcoming that.

I know that I always appear quite philosophical to people but my family, at least those in the older generation are people who have always worked for a living, and who have always believed in the practical over the ideals. For me, ideals serve only one purpose: they are a means with which we seek to understand the world, they are a framework with which we learn about our environment. Once that purpose is served, it's time to throw away those ideals, open your eyes, and see how things really work in reality.