Singapore Spleen

The sea is brown, tankers pass offshore. Empty bottles and old packets of instant noodles wash up at my feet on the artificial beach. Opposite are the wooded shores of Malaysia so close and yet so far. An inlet barely, but relentlessly crisscrossed by coastguard boats to prevent anyone from entering. Or to get out? I close my eyes, just for a moment I imagine that the six million people swarming behind me, with whom I am stuck in this equatorial humidity, have disappeared. For a moment, I am on the ocean, I sail without destination, free. A car honks and the illusion disappears. I reopen my eyes and start heading home.

 I walk through the endless maze of symmetrical concrete buildings. Large numbers are painted on the facades, like the blocks of an overcrowded Soviet prison complex. I'm sweating, it's scorching hot, no matter the time of day or the day of the year. In addition it rains all the time and it is infested with mosquitoes. But what could have gone through Sir Stamford Raffles' head to have the idea of ​​founding a city in such a hellish place? Me, when people ask me what I like best about Singapore, I answer "the departure hall of its airport", but the Singaporeans, when the English finally buggered off, instead of fleeing quickly, as any sensible people would have done, they stayed. And as if life in such a climate weren't painful enough, they thought they had to add on top of that an authoritarian state where almost everything would be forbidden.

And that's how today at the top of this Asian Alcatraz, a tutelary power watches over us. Through hundreds of thousands of cameras it observes us in silence, follows our every move, analyzes each of our behaviors. No gray area, no blind spot escapes its implacable eye. But that's not enough, so it's now tracking cellphone positions, it wants to know, which store we're going to, who we are visiting and for how long. No doubt it would also like to know what we say to each other and why not one day also, what we think. It proceeds in small leaps, one small liberticidal measure at a time, and it never goes back, it's called "the ratchet effect". But it is a benevolent state, it watches over us like a strict father over his children, it wants our well-being, and well-being begins with security. Because we don't know it but we are in danger: rain, cycling, outdoor activities, camping, the sea, barbecues on the beach, sports, slippery pavements, water, low door lintels, tree branches… danger lurks everywhere, but fortunately the government is there to protect us. It won't let anything happen to us. It has set itself the objective of eliminating all the risks of existence, even if it means eliminating even the one of living. In fact, when you live in Singapore, you have to start from the principle that by default, everything is prohibited, and that what is authorized is the exception. Obama's motto was "Yes we can", Singapore's is: "nope, you can't". Escaping madness is a perpetual race to find the little loopholes of freedom and try to take advantage of them before the government identifies them and hastens to fill them with regulations and prohibitions.

So how did we get here? How did Singaporeans got trapped in this security hell? Something terrible must have happened at one time or another in their very short history, one of those original traumas that marks a People with a hot iron. But when you delve into it, you find no trace of a coup d'etat, or a fascist dictator, or even a communist revolution. No, the history of Singapore is simply the story of people who decided to give up their freedom in order to become a society of assisted children. It's hard to accept at first because deep down we're all a little Rousseau. We need to believe that men are good and that it is greedy and corrupt governments that betray them. So as if to prove our theory to ourselves, we decide to carry out our little investigation, we discuss with the man in the street, the taxi drivers, the office colleagues, the friends. And then after a while, it becomes impossible to deny that we got it all wrong. The majority of Singaporeans not only approve of their government, but they even think that it does not go far enough. Yes, you read that right, they want more restrictions of freedom. The Peoples have the governments they deserve.

Singaporean society is a society that has become too rich, too fast. As if its standard of living had risen above that of other developed countries while its values ​​would have remained those of a third world country. They are poor-rich people, who live as rich but still think as poor, whose ambition is limited to getting rich in order to be able to consume, to consume in order to exist. Everyone here knows how to calculate the amortization of an interest rate from the age of five, but no one seems to have ever opened a book of poetry, or even anything else for that matter, except perhaps the biography of Jack Ma or Warren Buffet. Thus they have no knowledge of the past, they live in an eternal materialistic present where the notion of the future is only considered under the aspect of a financial investment or the repayment of a loan. Under these conditions, each square centimeter of the territory is evaluated in terms of its financial profitability, the natural spaces bringing in nothing, disappear under the unbridled construction of luxury buildings and shopping centers. Getting rich on one side to consume on the other. The rare remaining natural spaces are only tolerated on condition that they are well domesticated, ideally enclosed in glass cages, and squared by concrete paths from which it is strictly forbidden to leave. Armies of grass cutters and hedge trimmers crisscross them relentlessly to track down the slightest stem that dares to overtake. Each tree is pruned, no dead leaves should lie around. Flowers only grow where they are told and only when they are told.

Men are reduced to their simple economic utility, individuals fade away, replaced by numbers, managed by a cold and disembodied administration. Volumes of immigrant workers are imported and re-exported according to needs and rates on the great poverty world  market. And if the majority of the Singaporean population expresses its uninhibited xenophobia, it is nevertheless these armies of immigrant workers, a kind of modern slaves who make the country go round. In sometimes inhuman conditions, they are the ones who take care of all these essential tasks ranging from cooking the everyday meals of their Singaporean masters to the construction of roads and buildings. What about the Confucian values ​​of a country where we say we respect the elders but where we have no problem letting them clean the foodcourt’s tables until they die and where the individual is supposed to erase for the benefit of the collective but where we cut the queues, don't let you get out of the metro or get on the highway? Is it also necessary to mention the place of women? Treated like fragile and idolized objects, and who behave like capricious little princesses, whose only ambition seems to be playing with little dogs, while waiting to be taken to dinner in very expensive restaurants, where they can take photos of their plate to post on Instagram. Because this is at least the great passion that unites them all: the veneration for food, a sort of old reflex deeply anchored in the collective unconscious, a memory of a time when famines still existed and where eating when hungry was an understandable dream, but which, today in one of the richest countries in the world, seems totally obsolete. Among the immensity of subjects of interest that can fill a life, it is still heartbreaking to have only chicken wings as only unsurpassable horizon. 

Many articles have described Singapore as a model city and as a laboratory for tomorrow's society. I agree on at least the second point, hoping that the lab's containment systems will be strong enough to contain this experiment gone wrong and prevent it from spreading across the world.