2 Sep 2019
Ms Sun Xueling
Blk 308B Punggol Walk
#01-364
Waterway Terraces 1
Singapore 822308
Dear Sir/Mdm,
There Is No Fair Play, Honourable Members of Parliament
1. He has a complaint. He lives in Singapore, a prosperous city. A law-abiding citizen who leads an ordinary life. He did his national service in the army and held many jobs before retiring early. He learned to read and write in english, do arithmetic and read chinese articles in depth with the help of an online translator. His poor grasp of the spoken language in chinese was because he never had much use of it since young. In all other ways he is ordinary.
2. It would have been enough if he could live his life that way until he dies--watching the world, doing what is required of him and doing his own things. However, his upstairs neighbour was the trouble. They caused noise working a trade in the flat. He complained and the first occupier was evicted. To cover up the eviction, the flat was transferred to the next owner with the help of officers. Noise continued for a number of years, stopped for a number of years because of insiders and continued with a vengeance for a number of years once they sought protection. They stopped only after intervention from within the government.
3. Singapore celebrated its 54th birthday. It is still a place of efficiency and competence, but it has slipped. Why was noise from the neighbour not resolved. The problem was trivial to begin with but was extended to include the sale of his flat, his CPF Account and his CPF LIFE. He pointed out the mistakes made by referring to official documents. The problem left to fester has now affected officers throughout the government. It seemed that by correcting the mistakes, the government would have admitted to wrongdoing. He therefore asked his MPs to bring up the problem in Parliament. The MPs have not given a reply so far. An investigation by Parliament is the only means left for a resolution.
4. It had been suggested that he brings his complaint to court. If he files a lawsuit against the government, it will mean he is taking the government agencies to account. Although the complaint is simple to understand, it will be a drawn out affair in court. Whether the judgment is against him or not, he will incur large monetary loss. He may yet hope that the appeals court will give him a shred of justice. It is not the commonsensical way of finding out what is right, but a different kind of justice. The kind that is hard to obtain.
5. He knows people around him caused him trouble because he kept bringing up the problem. Any number of people are willing to do the bidding of bad elements in the government because of the advantages. Power accumulated through kinship, friends and allies is a scourge. Dissent severely limited is a dysfunction society. Tightly controlled life of people is an authoritarian rule. In the name of efficiency, the city may not be a good place to live. There should be human flourishing.
6. In the case he mentioned a possible break-in at his flat and the-people-in-the-flat-across-the-neighbour that watched out for the neighbour. He was not surprised after he sold his flat and moved to a new flat that his next door neighbour appeared to be monitoring him. After they left, it is possible the new neighbour still do.
7. A system of one person one vote can be manipulated. If there is always goodies to be given and people are not discerning, the dominant party will have a majority of the votes which resulted in dissatisfaction in certain section of the population. Government-owned media does not report negative news and a lop-sided parliament means that certain issues are always overruled. Concepts such as equality and the rule of law can be up-ended. Trust and respect are not as important as being in position of power. People are only servile to the state, not the idea that it is the other way around.
8. The following are extracts from url at aeon.co:
a) The right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge
Consider an alternative political system called epistocracy. Epistocracies retain the same institutions as representative democracies, including imposing liberal constitutional limits on power, bills of rights, checks and balances, elected representatives and judicial review. But while democracies give every citizen an equal right to vote, epistocracies apportion political power, by law, according to knowledge or competence.
There are many ways of instituting epistocracy, some of which would work better than others. For instance, an epistocracy might deny citizens the franchise unless they can pass a test of basic political knowledge. They might give every citizen one vote, but grant additional votes to citizens who pass certain tests or obtain certain credentials. They might pass all laws through normal democratic means, but then permit bands of experts to veto badly designed legislation. For instance, a board of economic advisors might have the right to veto rent-control laws, just as the Supreme Court can veto laws that violate the Constitution.
Or, an epistocracy might allow every citizen to vote at the same time as requiring them to take a test of basic political knowledge and submit their demographic information. With such data, any statistician could calculate the public’s ‘enlightened preferences’, that is, what a demographically identical voting population would support if only it were better informed. An epistocracy might then instantiate the public’s enlightened preferences rather than their actual, unenlightened preferences.
One common objection to epistocracy – at least among political philosophers – is that democracy is essential to expressing the idea that everyone is equal. On its face, this is a strange claim. Democracy is a political system, not a poem or a painting. Yet people treat the right to vote like a certificate of commendation, meant to show that society regards you as a full member of the national club. (That’s one reason we disenfranchise felons.) But we could instead view the franchise as no more significant than a plumbing or medical licence. The US government denies me such licences, but I don’t regard that as expressing I’m inferior, all things considered, to others.
Others object that the equal right to vote is essential to make government respond to our interests. But the math doesn’t check out. In most major elections, I have as much chance of making a difference as I do of winning the lottery. How we vote matters, but how any one of us votes, or even whether one votes, makes no difference. It might be a disaster if Donald Trump wins the presidency, but it’s not a disaster for me to vote for him. As the political theorist Ben Saunders says: in a democracy, each person’s power is so small that insisting on equality is like arguing over the crumbs of a cake rather than an equal slice.
On the other hand, it’s true (at least right now) that certain demographic groups (such as rich white men) are more likely to pass a basic political knowledge test than others (such as poor black women). Hence the worry that epistocracies will favour the interests of some groups over others. But this worry might be overstated. Political scientists routinely find that so long as individual voters have a low chance of being decisive, they vote for what they perceive to be the common good rather than their self-interest. Further, it might well be that excluding or reducing the power of the least knowledgeable 75 per cent of white people produces better results for poor black women than democracy does.
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-right-to-vote-should-be-restricted-to-those-with-knowledge
b) In defence of hierarchy
Apart from their civic importance, hierarchies can be surprisingly benign in life more broadly. Hierarchy is oppressive when it is reduced to a simple power over others. But there are also forms of hierarchy that involve power with, not over. Daoism characterises this kind of power effectively in the image of riding a horse, when sometimes you have to pull, and sometimes let go. This is not domination but negotiation. In Daoism, power is a matter of energy and competence rather than domination and authority. In this sense, a hierarchy can be empowering, not disabling.
A common Confucian ideal is that a master ought to aim for the student to surpass him or her. Confucian hierarchies are marked by reciprocity and mutual concern. The correct response to the fact of differential ability is not to celebrate or condemn it, but to make good use of it for the common pursuit of the good life.
To protect against abuse by those with higher status, hierarchies should also be domain-specific: hierarchies become problematic when they become generalised, so that people who have power, authority or respect in one domain command it in others too. Most obviously, we see this when holders of political power wield disproportionate legal power, being if not completely above the law then at least subject to less legal accountability than ordinary citizens. Hence, we need to guard against what we might call hierarchical drift: the extension of power from a specific, legitimate domain to other, illegitimate ones.
This hierarchical drift occurs not only in politics, but in other complex human arenas. It’s tempting to think that the best people to make decisions are experts. But the complexity of most real-world problems means that this would often be a mistake. With complicated issues, general-purpose competences such as open-mindedness and, especially, reasonableness are essential for successful deliberation.
Expertise can actually get in the way of these competences. Because there is a trade-off between width and depth of expertise, the greater the expert, the narrower the area of competence. Hence the best role for experts is often not as decision-makers, but as external resources to be consulted by a panel of non-specialist generalists selected for general-purpose competences. These generalists should interrogate the experts and integrate their answers from a range of specialised aspects into a coherent decision. So, for example, parole boards cannot defer to one type of expert but must draw on the expertise of psychologists, social workers, prison guards, those who know the community into which a specific prisoner might be released, and so on. This is a kind of collective, democratic decision-making that makes use of hierarchies of expertise without slavishly deferring to them.
But are hierarchies compatible with human dignity? It’s important to recognise that there are different forms of hierarchy as there are different forms of equality. The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights says in Article 1: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’ It is entirely compatible with this equal dignity that some should be honoured more than others. In other words, we can acknowledge that individuals differ from one another in embodying excellence of various sorts, and these various forms of human excellence elicit from us a special kind of positive regard that philosophers call ‘appraisal respect’. Appraisal respect is a form of esteem that we have for those who display certain excellences: for example, for their high moral character, or their great skill in argument. Since excellences are intrinsically comparative, people will inevitably be ranked through these appraisals, and so to honour someone is to regard them as (in some particular respects) better than people who embody or advance the value less. Equality here seems conceptually out of place.
Good paternalistic interventions, on this view, take two forms. They disseminate knowledge of what is best in forms that are accessible to imperfectly rational agents. And they might habituate individuals’ irrational impulses from an early age such that they later collaborate in the implementation of reason’s prescriptions. Such interventions are justified only to the extent that they ultimately enable us to act more autonomously. That they might is suggested by Aristotle’s theory of habituation, which says that to live well we need to cultivate the habits of living well. Hence, being required habitually to act in certain ways, especially while young, might, paradoxically, enable us to think more rationally for ourselves in the long run.
Paternalistic hierarchy might then benefit individual autonomy. And hierarchy has one final benefit. Although it would seem to be divisive, hierarchy can promote social harmony. Many cultures justifiably place a high value on communal harmony. This involves a shared way of life, and also sympathetic care for the quality of life of others. Excessive hierarchy works against this, creating divisions within societies. Indeed, in a sense, hierarchy always brings with it the threat of tension, since it is a condition in which one adult commands, threatens or forces another to do something, where the latter is innocent of any wrongdoing, competent to make decisions, and not impaired at the time by alcohol, temporary insanity, or the like. But the goal of preserving communal life means that hierarchy might be justifiable if – and only if – it is the least hierarchical amount required, and likely either to rebut serious discord or to foster a much greater communion. This is a minimalist justification that only ever sanctions the least amount of hierarchy necessary.
https://aeon.co/essays/hierarchies-have-a-place-even-in-societies-built-on-equality
c) Rorty’s political turn
If Rorty’s therapeutic approach aimed only to overcome such resistance, then, given philosophers’ relative isolation, the social impact could only be negligible. However, Rorty did not just advocate a therapeutic approach to philosophy. He wanted to transform philosophy itself into therapy, to make it accessible as such and, harking back to his hero John Dewey, plug it more directly into the concerns of ordinary people. The practical upshot of this came to have political implications beyond the normal confines of philosophy.
For the ordinary person, Rorty began by championing an enlivening conception of their personal identity or ‘selfhood’, urging them to regard it as a product of their own hands, something self-crafted like a work of art, rather than given in any fixed form or beholden to a higher authority. In doing this, he converted what might have been just another narrow, technical conjecture about how personal identity should best be discussed within philosophical circles into a fertile and empowering social suggestion.
This was the Freud who held that each human life unfolds out of complex, idiosyncratic fantasies, and that the mind is in its very constitution poetic, making all lives interesting when reflected on in sufficient detail. Moreover, he provided a serviceable vocabulary within which anyone’s life might be re-described, by themselves or others, in ways that reveal quirky details of their past, and capture what is distinctive about them. The vocabulary floated free of Freud’s theories about psychoanalytic technique, and could be found woven as such into the works of novelists and poets who provided further resources for self-creation that Rorty enthusiastically promoted. This should not be surprising because, as Lionel Trilling surmised in 1955 when considering Freud’s relationship to literature: ‘the first thing to say is that literature is dedicated to the conception of the self, [and its function] through all its mutations has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves’. But Rorty also recognised that the resources for self-creation do not have to be bookish. They could, for instance, include films, documentaries and recreational activities.
After this therapeutic slimming exercise, there was no longer supposed to be a need to worry about liberalism’s theoretical foundations or sophisticated arguments to back it up. For the trick was to make its justification wholly practical, hinging on the two factors just mentioned: safeguarding freedom and alleviating suffering. Indeed, Rorty regarded those as pragmatically definitive factors that, when operating at ground level where politics is about living, render supporting theories superfluous to the extent that there is not even a temptation to seek theoretical reasons for their absence. One quick way of making good sense of this is to take Rorty to simply be saying something like: ‘If we think of the benefits that liberalism can confer and of the cruelty it can protect us from, then that is enough. There is no need to be concerned about whether what works in practice will work in theory.’ And in considering these benefits, we might think of where liberalism let us stand with regard to what, in the book In the Beginning Was the Deed (2005), Bernard Williams called the first political question, that of securing ‘order, protection, safety, trust and conditions of cooperation’.
When critics bothered to pay serious attention to Contingency, they tended to treat it as a quasi-literary re-enactment of Rorty’s supposed death-to-philosophy stance, overlaid by a crude defence of a crude liberalism. As for Rorty’s prioritising of politics, they were inclined to play up the dangers and ignore the advantages, fearing it to be harmfully reductive. Putting philosophy in the service of politics and, indeed, making everything of nontrivial social significance in the public realm depend on political considerations would invite corruption or even tyranny. In ‘Reading Rorty: Pragmatism and its Consequences’ (2000), Jacques Bouveresse worried that it might unleash the politico-philosophical terrorism he had personally witnessed in France. But it should have been clear that Rorty’s account of selfhood was designed to prevent anything like that, as was his version of liberalism. Countervailing advantages were inbuilt.
It was therapeutically radical in unveiling and appropriating for political purposes a sub-theoretical level of discourse within which hopes for a better life for all can still be expressed as realistic options, even in prevailing circumstances of inequality and social injustice. This turned the notion of what it is to be radical on its head. In an ethos of pessimism, and even despair, regarding the prospect of existing liberal democracies being able to function without a backcloth of untold pain and suffering, the act of redescribing them in terms suggesting that they might, after all, be already institutionally well-equipped to do so was radical.
Rorty argued that we can best reawaken confidence in liberalism as a practical, piecemeal, reformist option by giving up on the dogma that only ideology can supplant ideology, and foreswearing the conviction that there just has to be one big theoretical solution to problems of social injustice. We should sever romantic attachments to idealisations of entities such as classes, and also accept that no such entity can still be seriously considered the repository of all ills. It was high time we owned up instead to the fact that history unfolds in unpredictable ways that cannot be tracked scientifically, that none of us – least of all, perhaps, the connoisseurs of critique – know what is the best relationship between the state and the economy, or possesses a viable blueprint for constructing societies that can usher in a better life for all, especially the worst off, without depending to some extent on markets and institutional arrangements that enable unfettered participation in them under a rule of law.
Rorty’s therapeutic slimming programme was fashioned so as to protect his proposed liberalism against standard intellectual objections by ensuring it did not depend on vulnerable theoretical claims. It did not require, for example, any prior assumptions about human nature, nor was it tied to any particular conception of morality. But he was well aware that a society based on his ideas would be unintentionally provocative, and hence exposed to brute force exerted both internally and externally. The internal pressure would come from resistance to reform on the part of vested interests, and the external from regimes perceiving liberalism’s successes at home to be a threat to their own legitimacy.
He did not spell out any specific ways of coping with these threats. However, the clarity surrounding the institutional arrangements of his liberalism, a clarity that accrued from their rationale being transparently pragmatic and results-based rather than ideological-cum-theoretical, would make it easier to identify and assess internal threats. And the growth of knowledge and complexity of character that evolved through the processes of self-creation would foster a resilient citizenry, comprised of people always on the lookout for similarities that enable them to include in their ever-expanding community of ‘us’ those who might seem hostile or simply different. On this path to greater human solidarity, they are likely to become better equipped to devise ways of dealing firmly with external threats and treacherous global alliances in a conversational spirit of compromise and negotiation rather than immediate confrontation.
https://aeon.co/essays/richard-rortys-hopes-for-liberalism-and-solidarity
d) Can reason make room for religion in public life?
This vision of religion as the ‘highest’ part of humanity was a new iteration of a very ancient idea: the notion that politics alone cannot bring about human flourishing, and that political categories can’t completely capture or describe the full extent of a person. Politics isn’t cancelled out or overthrown by ‘religion’. Instead, for Schleiermacher, the business of governing well is a means to a higher purpose.
While he saw rationality as affording dignity and freedom to human beings, Schleiermacher the Romantic also stressed how people are bound to the world in other, less predictable ways. We are creatures among other creatures, mere tiny parts of nature’s great organism. All of our thoughts, he argued, are conditioned by our circumstances: the language we speak, where we’re from, the community roles we have. Born into surroundings that existed before us and will outlast us, it was clear to Schleiermacher that existence, reality and truth are not created by human beings themselves. Our existence is instead given to us, he maintained, from a transcendent, eternal and infinite source.
According to Schleiermacher, then, to be religious is to recognise that human beings are not the ultimate authors of their own existence, and that they are not the arbiters or producers of value in what they see around them. Meaning is not grounded in human reason. It was in this light that Schleiermacher understood piety as an abiding ‘feeling’ that accompanies all human thinking, imagining, dwelling and doing. Piety for him meant coming to terms with the precarious and miraculous nature of our experience, being conscious of ourselves as creatures who are ‘absolutely dependent’.
But just as politics has its limits, so too does religion. It can’t displace or do the work of politics in our world; the work of the church belongs instead to the domain of the spirit. This is why Schleiermacher didn’t believe in theocracy or religious states. On the contrary, he argued for the separation of church and state, on the grounds that this would promote the success of both. In On Religion, we find Schleiermacher pushing this argument to its limit, when he proposes that religion really belongs to the institution of the family. And vice versa, as part of his national vision, he contended that the education of children in Germany (traditionally falling to the church) should be taken on by the state instead. He also argued that full legal privileges should not be withheld or bestowed for religious reasons, an unusual view at the time.
https://aeon.co/ideas/does-religion-have-a-place-in-a-progressive-public-sphere
9. It is said that if the top leaders of the world are taught the way of spirituality, it will end human suffering. Spirituality teaches us that everything is consciousness. Everything comes into existence out of nothingness. There is no death and other sayings. Can reason make room for religion in public life? at 8d) is on the practical aspects of spirituality. It is not like tilting at windmills.
10. The problem is the second and third paragraph. He has referred the problem to MPs many times. Will the MPs at Pasir Ris - Punggol GRC finally put the problem to Parliament?
Yours Sincerely,
hh
cc
Mr Lee Hsien Loong
Mr Heng Swee Keat
Mr Teo Chee Hean
Observation
Letter handed in at Meet-the-People Session with copy emailed to PM, DPM, SM and MP:
There Is No Fair Play, Honourable Members of Parliament
2. It would have been enough if he could live his life that way until he dies--watching the world, doing what is required of him and doing his own things. However, his upstairs neighbour was the trouble. They caused noise working a trade in the flat. He complained and the first occupier was evicted. To cover up the eviction, the flat was transferred to the next owner with the help of officers. Noise continued for a number of years, stopped for a number of years because of insiders and continued with a vengeance for a number of years once they sought protection. They stopped only after intervention from within the government.
3. Singapore celebrated its 54th birthday. It is still a place of efficiency and competence, but it has slipped. Why was noise from the neighbour not resolved. The problem was trivial to begin with but was extended to include the sale of his flat, his CPF Account and his CPF LIFE. He pointed out the mistakes made by referring to official documents. The problem left to fester has now affected officers throughout the government. It seemed that by correcting the mistakes, the government would have admitted to wrongdoing. He therefore asked his MPs to bring up the problem in Parliament. The MPs have not given a reply so far. An investigation by Parliament is the only means left for a resolution.
5. He knows people around him caused him trouble because he kept bringing up the problem. Any number of people are willing to do the bidding of bad elements in the government because of the advantages. Power accumulated through kinship, friends and allies is a scourge. Dissent severely limited is a dysfunction society. Tightly controlled life of people is an authoritarian rule. In the name of efficiency, the city may not be a good place to live. There should be human flourishing.
7. A system of one person one vote can be manipulated. If there is always goodies to be given and people are not discerning, the dominant party will have a majority of the votes which resulted in dissatisfaction in certain section of the population. Government-owned media does not report negative news and a lop-sided parliament means that certain issues are always overruled. Concepts such as equality and the rule of law can be up-ended. Trust and respect are not as important as being in position of power. People are only servile to the state, not the idea that it is the other way around.
9. It is said that if the top leaders of the world are taught the way of spirituality, it will end human suffering. Spirituality teaches us that everything is consciousness. Everything comes into existence out of nothingness. There is no death and other sayings. Can reason make room for religion in public life? at 8d) is on the practical aspects of spirituality. It is not like tilting at windmills.
2.8.10
12. Intelligence
Intelligence: a history
Intelligence has always been used as fig-leaf to justify domination and destruction. No wonder we fear super-smart robots
Stephen Cave
As I was growing up in England in the latter half of the 20th century, the concept of intelligence loomed large. It was aspired to, debated and – most important of all – measured. At the age of 11, tens of thousands of us all around the country were ushered into desk-lined halls to take an IQ test known as the 11-Plus. The results of those few short hours would determine who would go to grammar school, to be prepared for university and the professions; who was destined for technical school and thence skilled work; and who would head to secondary modern school, to be drilled in the basics then sent out to a life of low-status manual labour.
The idea that intelligence could be quantified, like blood pressure or shoe size, was barely a century old when I took the test that would decide my place in the world. But the notion that intelligence could determine one’s station in life was already much older. It runs like a red thread through Western thought, from the philosophy of Plato to the policies of UK prime minister Theresa May. To say that someone is or is not intelligent has never been merely a comment on their mental faculties. It is always also a judgment on what they are permitted to do. Intelligence, in other words, is political.
Sometimes, this sort of ranking is sensible: we want doctors, engineers and rulers who are not stupid. But it has a dark side. As well as determining what a person can do, their intelligence – or putative lack of it – has been used to decide what others can do to them. Throughout Western history, those deemed less intelligent have, as a consequence of that judgment, been colonised, enslaved, sterilised and murdered (and indeed eaten, if we include non-human animals in our reckoning).
It’s an old, indeed an ancient, story. But the problem has taken an interesting 21st-century twist with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In recent years, the progress being made in AI research has picked up significantly, and many experts believe that these breakthroughs will soon lead to more. Pundits are by turn terrified and excited, sprinkling their Twitter feeds with Terminator references. To understand why we care and what we fear, we must understand intelligence as a political concept – and, in particular, its long history as a rationale for domination.
The term ‘intelligence’ itself has never been popular with English-language philosophers. Nor does it have a direct translation into German or ancient Greek, two of the other great languages in the Western philosophical tradition. But that doesn’t mean philosophers weren’t interested in it. Indeed, they were obsessed with it, or more precisely a part of it: reason or rationality. The term ‘intelligence’ managed to eclipse its more old-fashioned relative in popular and political discourse only with the rise of the relatively new-fangled discipline of psychology, which claimed intelligence for itself. Although today many scholars advocate a much broader understanding of intelligence, reason remains a core part of it. So when I talk about the role that intelligence has played historically, I mean to include this forebear.
The story of intelligence begins with Plato. In all his writings, he ascribes a very high value to thinking, declaring (through the mouth of Socrates) that the unexamined life is not worth living. Plato emerged from a world steeped in myth and mysticism to claim something new: that the truth about reality could be established through reason, or what we might consider today to be the application of intelligence. This led him to conclude, in The Republic, that the ideal ruler is ‘the philosopher king’, as only a philosopher can work out the proper order of things. And so he launched the idea that the cleverest should rule over the rest – an intellectual meritocracy.
This idea was revolutionary at the time. Athens had already experimented with democracy, the rule of the people – but to count as one of those ‘people’ you just had to be a male citizen, not necessarily intelligent. Elsewhere, the governing classes were made up of inherited elites (aristocracy), or by those who believed they had received divine instruction (theocracy), or simply by the strongest (tyranny).
At the dawn of Western philosophy, intelligence became identified with the European, educated, male human
Plato’s novel idea fell on the eager ears of the intellectuals, including those of his pupil Aristotle. Aristotle was always the more practical, taxonomic kind of thinker. He took the notion of the primacy of reason and used it to establish what he believed was a natural social hierarchy. In his book The Politics, he explains: ‘[T]hat some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.’ What marks the ruler is their possession of ‘the rational element’. Educated men have this the most, and should therefore naturally rule over women – and also those men ‘whose business is to use their body’ and who therefore ‘are by nature slaves’. Lower down the ladder still are non-human animals, who are so witless as to be ‘better off when they are ruled by man’.
So at the dawn of Western philosophy, we have intelligence identified with the European, educated, male human. It becomes an argument for his right to dominate women, the lower classes, uncivilised peoples and non-human animals. While Plato argued for the supremacy of reason and placed it within a rather ungainly utopia, only one generation later, Aristotle presents the rule of the thinking man as obvious and natural.
Needless to say, more than 2,000 years later, the train of thought that these men set in motion has yet to be derailed. The late Australian philosopher and conservationist Val Plumwood has argued that the giants of Greek philosophy set up a series of linked dualisms that continue to inform our thought. Opposing categories such as intelligent/stupid, rational/emotional and mind/body are linked, implicitly or explicitly, to others such as male/female, civilised/primitive, and human/animal. These dualisms aren’t value-neutral, but fall within a broader dualism, as Aristotle makes clear: that of dominant/subordinate or master/slave. Together, they make relationships of domination, such as patriarchy or slavery, appear to be part of the natural order of things.
Western philosophy, in its modern guise, is often taken to begin with that arch dualist, René Descartes. Unlike Aristotle, he didn’t even allow for a continuum of diminishing intelligence among other animals. Cognition, he claimed, was the business of humanity. He was reflecting more than a millennium of Christian theology, which made intelligence a property of the soul, a spark of the divine reserved only for those lucky enough to be made in God’s image. Descartes rendered nature literally mindless, and so devoid of intrinsic value – which thereby legitimated the guilt-free oppression of other species.
The idea that intelligence defines humanity persisted into the Enlightenment. It was enthusiastically embraced by Immanuel Kant, probably the most influential moral philosopher since the ancients. For Kant, only reasoning creatures had moral standing. Rational beings were to be called ‘persons’ and were ‘ends in themselves’. Beings that were not rational, on the other hand, had ‘only a relative value as means, and are therefore called things’. We could do with them what we liked.
According to Kant, the reasoning being – today, we’d say the intelligent being – has infinite worth or dignity, whereas the unreasoning or unintelligent one has none. His arguments are more sophisticated, but essentially he arrives at the same conclusion as Aristotle: there are natural masters and natural slaves, and intelligence is what distinguishes them.
For many decades, the advent of formal intelligence testing tended to exacerbate rather than remedy the oppression of women
This line of thinking was extended to become a core part of the logic of colonialism. The argument ran like this: non-white peoples were less intelligent; they were therefore unqualified to rule over themselves and their lands. It was therefore perfectly legitimate – even a duty, ‘the white man’s burden’ – to destroy their cultures and take their territory. In addition, because intelligence defined humanity, by virtue of being less intelligent, these peoples were less human. They therefore did not enjoy full moral standing – and so it was perfectly fine to kill or enslave them.
The same logic was applied to women, who were considered too flighty and sentimental to enjoy the privileges afforded to the ‘rational man’. In 19th-century Britain, women were less well-protected under law than domestic animals, as the historian Joanna Bourke at Birkbeck University of London has shown. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that for many decades the advent of formal intelligence testing tended to exacerbate rather than remedy the oppression of women.
Sir Francis Galton is usually taken to be the originator of psychometrics, the ‘science’ of measuring the mind. He was inspired by The Origin of Species (1859) written by his cousin Charles Darwin. It led Galton to believe that intellectual ability was hereditary and could be enhanced through selective breeding. He decided to find a way to scientifically identify the most able members of society and encourage them to breed – prolifically, and with each other. The less intellectually capable should be discouraged from reproducing, or indeed prevented, for the sake of the species. Thus eugenics and the intelligence test were born together. In the following decades, vast numbers of women across Europe and America were forcibly sterilised after scoring poorly on such tests – 20,000 in California alone.
Scales of intelligence have been used to justify some of the most terrible acts of barbarism in history. But the rule of reason has always had its critics. From David Hume to Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud through to postmodernism, there are plenty of philosophical traditions that challenge the notion that we’re as intelligent as we’d like to believe, and that intelligence is the highest virtue.
The meritocracy of intelligence has always been just one account of social worth – albeit a highly influential one. Entry to certain schools and professions, such as the UK Civil Service, is based on intelligence tests, but other domains emphasise different qualities, such as creativity or entrepreneurial spirit. And though we might hope that our public officials are smart, we don’t always choose to elect the smartest-seeming politicians. (Still, it’s revealing that even a populist politician such as Donald Trump felt the need to claim, of his administration, that ‘we have by far the highest IQ of any cabinet ever assembled.’)
Rather than challenging the hierarchy of intelligence as such, many critics have focused on attacking the systems that allow white, male elites to rise to the top. The 11-Plus exam that I took is an interesting, deeply equivocal example of one such system. It was intended to identify bright young things from all classes and creeds. But, in reality, those who passed came disproportionately from the better-resourced, white middle classes, whose members found themselves thereby reaffirmed in their position and advantages.
So when we reflect upon how the idea of intelligence has been used to justify privilege and domination throughout more than 2,000 years of history, is it any wonder that the imminent prospect of super-smart robots fills us with dread?
From 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Terminator films, writers have fantasised about machines rising up against us. Now we can see why. If we’re used to believing that the top spots in society should go to the brainiest, then of course we should expect to be made redundant by bigger-brained robots and sent to the bottom of the heap. If we’ve absorbed the idea that the more intelligent can colonise the less intelligent as of right, then it’s natural that we’d fear enslavement by our super-smart creations. If we justify our own positions of power and prosperity by virtue of our intellect, it’s understandable that we see superior AI as an existential threat.
Natural stupidity, rather than artificial intelligence, remains the greatest risk
This narrative of privilege might explain why, as the New York-based scholar and technologist Kate Crawford has noted, the fear of rogue AI seems predominant among Western white men. Other groups have endured a long history of domination by self-appointed superiors, and are still fighting against real oppressors. White men, on the other hand, are used to being at the top of the pecking order. They have most to lose if new entities arrive that excel in exactly those areas that have been used to justify male superiority.
I don’t mean to suggest that all our anxiety about rogue AI is unfounded. There are real risks associated with the use of advanced AI (as well as immense potential benefits). But being oppressed by robots in the way that, say, Australia’s indigenous people have been oppressed by European colonists is not number one on the list.
We would do better to worry about what humans might do with AI, rather than what it might do by itself. We humans are far more likely to deploy intelligent systems against each other, or to become over-reliant on them. As in the fable of the sorcerer’s apprentice, if AIs do cause harm, it’s more likely to be because we give them well-meaning but ill-thought-through goals – not because they wish to conquer us. Natural stupidity, rather than artificial intelligence, remains the greatest risk.
It’s interesting to speculate about how we’d view the rise of AI if we had a different view of intelligence. Plato believed that philosophers would need to be cajoled into becoming kings, since they naturally prefer contemplation to mastery over men. Other traditions, especially those from the East, see the intelligent person as one who scorns the trappings of power as mere vanity, and who removes him or herself from the trivialities and tribulations of quotidian affairs.
Imagine if such views were widespread: if we all thought that the most intelligent people were not those who claimed the right to rule, but those who went to meditate in remote places, to free themselves of worldly desires; or if the cleverest of all were those who returned to spread peace and enlightenment. Would we still fear robots smarter than ourselves?
Observation
Intelligence: a history
Intelligence has always been used as fig-leaf to justify domination and destruction. No wonder we fear super-smart robots
Stephen Cave
It’s an old, indeed an ancient, story. But the problem has taken an interesting 21st-century twist with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In recent years, the progress being made in AI research has picked up significantly, and many experts believe that these breakthroughs will soon lead to more. Pundits are by turn terrified and excited, sprinkling their Twitter feeds with Terminator references. To understand why we care and what we fear, we must understand intelligence as a political concept – and, in particular, its long history as a rationale for domination.
This narrative of privilege might explain why, as the New York-based scholar and technologist Kate Crawford has noted, the fear of rogue AI seems predominant among Western white men. Other groups have endured a long history of domination by self-appointed superiors, and are still fighting against real oppressors. White men, on the other hand, are used to being at the top of the pecking order. They have most to lose if new entities arrive that excel in exactly those areas that have been used to justify male superiority.
I don’t mean to suggest that all our anxiety about rogue AI is unfounded. There are real risks associated with the use of advanced AI (as well as immense potential benefits). But being oppressed by robots in the way that, say, Australia’s indigenous people have been oppressed by European colonists is not number one on the list.
We would do better to worry about what humans might do with AI, rather than what it might do by itself. We humans are far more likely to deploy intelligent systems against each other, or to become over-reliant on them. As in the fable of the sorcerer’s apprentice, if AIs do cause harm, it’s more likely to be because we give them well-meaning but ill-thought-through goals – not because they wish to conquer us. Natural stupidity, rather than artificial intelligence, remains the greatest risk.
It’s interesting to speculate about how we’d view the rise of AI if we had a different view of intelligence. Plato believed that philosophers would need to be cajoled into becoming kings, since they naturally prefer contemplation to mastery over men. Other traditions, especially those from the East, see the intelligent person as one who scorns the trappings of power as mere vanity, and who removes him or herself from the trivialities and tribulations of quotidian affairs.
Imagine if such views were widespread: if we all thought that the most intelligent people were not those who claimed the right to rule, but those who went to meditate in remote places, to free themselves of worldly desires; or if the cleverest of all were those who returned to spread peace and enlightenment. Would we still fear robots smarter than ourselves?
Intelligence has always been used as fig-leaf to justify domination and destruction. No wonder we fear super-smart robots
Stephen Cave
As I was growing up in England in the latter half of the 20th century, the concept of intelligence loomed large. It was aspired to, debated and – most important of all – measured. At the age of 11, tens of thousands of us all around the country were ushered into desk-lined halls to take an IQ test known as the 11-Plus. The results of those few short hours would determine who would go to grammar school, to be prepared for university and the professions; who was destined for technical school and thence skilled work; and who would head to secondary modern school, to be drilled in the basics then sent out to a life of low-status manual labour.
The idea that intelligence could be quantified, like blood pressure or shoe size, was barely a century old when I took the test that would decide my place in the world. But the notion that intelligence could determine one’s station in life was already much older. It runs like a red thread through Western thought, from the philosophy of Plato to the policies of UK prime minister Theresa May. To say that someone is or is not intelligent has never been merely a comment on their mental faculties. It is always also a judgment on what they are permitted to do. Intelligence, in other words, is political.
Sometimes, this sort of ranking is sensible: we want doctors, engineers and rulers who are not stupid. But it has a dark side. As well as determining what a person can do, their intelligence – or putative lack of it – has been used to decide what others can do to them. Throughout Western history, those deemed less intelligent have, as a consequence of that judgment, been colonised, enslaved, sterilised and murdered (and indeed eaten, if we include non-human animals in our reckoning).
It’s an old, indeed an ancient, story. But the problem has taken an interesting 21st-century twist with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In recent years, the progress being made in AI research has picked up significantly, and many experts believe that these breakthroughs will soon lead to more. Pundits are by turn terrified and excited, sprinkling their Twitter feeds with Terminator references. To understand why we care and what we fear, we must understand intelligence as a political concept – and, in particular, its long history as a rationale for domination.
The term ‘intelligence’ itself has never been popular with English-language philosophers. Nor does it have a direct translation into German or ancient Greek, two of the other great languages in the Western philosophical tradition. But that doesn’t mean philosophers weren’t interested in it. Indeed, they were obsessed with it, or more precisely a part of it: reason or rationality. The term ‘intelligence’ managed to eclipse its more old-fashioned relative in popular and political discourse only with the rise of the relatively new-fangled discipline of psychology, which claimed intelligence for itself. Although today many scholars advocate a much broader understanding of intelligence, reason remains a core part of it. So when I talk about the role that intelligence has played historically, I mean to include this forebear.
The story of intelligence begins with Plato. In all his writings, he ascribes a very high value to thinking, declaring (through the mouth of Socrates) that the unexamined life is not worth living. Plato emerged from a world steeped in myth and mysticism to claim something new: that the truth about reality could be established through reason, or what we might consider today to be the application of intelligence. This led him to conclude, in The Republic, that the ideal ruler is ‘the philosopher king’, as only a philosopher can work out the proper order of things. And so he launched the idea that the cleverest should rule over the rest – an intellectual meritocracy.
This idea was revolutionary at the time. Athens had already experimented with democracy, the rule of the people – but to count as one of those ‘people’ you just had to be a male citizen, not necessarily intelligent. Elsewhere, the governing classes were made up of inherited elites (aristocracy), or by those who believed they had received divine instruction (theocracy), or simply by the strongest (tyranny).
At the dawn of Western philosophy, intelligence became identified with the European, educated, male human
Plato’s novel idea fell on the eager ears of the intellectuals, including those of his pupil Aristotle. Aristotle was always the more practical, taxonomic kind of thinker. He took the notion of the primacy of reason and used it to establish what he believed was a natural social hierarchy. In his book The Politics, he explains: ‘[T]hat some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.’ What marks the ruler is their possession of ‘the rational element’. Educated men have this the most, and should therefore naturally rule over women – and also those men ‘whose business is to use their body’ and who therefore ‘are by nature slaves’. Lower down the ladder still are non-human animals, who are so witless as to be ‘better off when they are ruled by man’.
So at the dawn of Western philosophy, we have intelligence identified with the European, educated, male human. It becomes an argument for his right to dominate women, the lower classes, uncivilised peoples and non-human animals. While Plato argued for the supremacy of reason and placed it within a rather ungainly utopia, only one generation later, Aristotle presents the rule of the thinking man as obvious and natural.
Needless to say, more than 2,000 years later, the train of thought that these men set in motion has yet to be derailed. The late Australian philosopher and conservationist Val Plumwood has argued that the giants of Greek philosophy set up a series of linked dualisms that continue to inform our thought. Opposing categories such as intelligent/stupid, rational/emotional and mind/body are linked, implicitly or explicitly, to others such as male/female, civilised/primitive, and human/animal. These dualisms aren’t value-neutral, but fall within a broader dualism, as Aristotle makes clear: that of dominant/subordinate or master/slave. Together, they make relationships of domination, such as patriarchy or slavery, appear to be part of the natural order of things.
Western philosophy, in its modern guise, is often taken to begin with that arch dualist, René Descartes. Unlike Aristotle, he didn’t even allow for a continuum of diminishing intelligence among other animals. Cognition, he claimed, was the business of humanity. He was reflecting more than a millennium of Christian theology, which made intelligence a property of the soul, a spark of the divine reserved only for those lucky enough to be made in God’s image. Descartes rendered nature literally mindless, and so devoid of intrinsic value – which thereby legitimated the guilt-free oppression of other species.
The idea that intelligence defines humanity persisted into the Enlightenment. It was enthusiastically embraced by Immanuel Kant, probably the most influential moral philosopher since the ancients. For Kant, only reasoning creatures had moral standing. Rational beings were to be called ‘persons’ and were ‘ends in themselves’. Beings that were not rational, on the other hand, had ‘only a relative value as means, and are therefore called things’. We could do with them what we liked.
According to Kant, the reasoning being – today, we’d say the intelligent being – has infinite worth or dignity, whereas the unreasoning or unintelligent one has none. His arguments are more sophisticated, but essentially he arrives at the same conclusion as Aristotle: there are natural masters and natural slaves, and intelligence is what distinguishes them.
For many decades, the advent of formal intelligence testing tended to exacerbate rather than remedy the oppression of women
This line of thinking was extended to become a core part of the logic of colonialism. The argument ran like this: non-white peoples were less intelligent; they were therefore unqualified to rule over themselves and their lands. It was therefore perfectly legitimate – even a duty, ‘the white man’s burden’ – to destroy their cultures and take their territory. In addition, because intelligence defined humanity, by virtue of being less intelligent, these peoples were less human. They therefore did not enjoy full moral standing – and so it was perfectly fine to kill or enslave them.
The same logic was applied to women, who were considered too flighty and sentimental to enjoy the privileges afforded to the ‘rational man’. In 19th-century Britain, women were less well-protected under law than domestic animals, as the historian Joanna Bourke at Birkbeck University of London has shown. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that for many decades the advent of formal intelligence testing tended to exacerbate rather than remedy the oppression of women.
Sir Francis Galton is usually taken to be the originator of psychometrics, the ‘science’ of measuring the mind. He was inspired by The Origin of Species (1859) written by his cousin Charles Darwin. It led Galton to believe that intellectual ability was hereditary and could be enhanced through selective breeding. He decided to find a way to scientifically identify the most able members of society and encourage them to breed – prolifically, and with each other. The less intellectually capable should be discouraged from reproducing, or indeed prevented, for the sake of the species. Thus eugenics and the intelligence test were born together. In the following decades, vast numbers of women across Europe and America were forcibly sterilised after scoring poorly on such tests – 20,000 in California alone.
Scales of intelligence have been used to justify some of the most terrible acts of barbarism in history. But the rule of reason has always had its critics. From David Hume to Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud through to postmodernism, there are plenty of philosophical traditions that challenge the notion that we’re as intelligent as we’d like to believe, and that intelligence is the highest virtue.
The meritocracy of intelligence has always been just one account of social worth – albeit a highly influential one. Entry to certain schools and professions, such as the UK Civil Service, is based on intelligence tests, but other domains emphasise different qualities, such as creativity or entrepreneurial spirit. And though we might hope that our public officials are smart, we don’t always choose to elect the smartest-seeming politicians. (Still, it’s revealing that even a populist politician such as Donald Trump felt the need to claim, of his administration, that ‘we have by far the highest IQ of any cabinet ever assembled.’)
Rather than challenging the hierarchy of intelligence as such, many critics have focused on attacking the systems that allow white, male elites to rise to the top. The 11-Plus exam that I took is an interesting, deeply equivocal example of one such system. It was intended to identify bright young things from all classes and creeds. But, in reality, those who passed came disproportionately from the better-resourced, white middle classes, whose members found themselves thereby reaffirmed in their position and advantages.
So when we reflect upon how the idea of intelligence has been used to justify privilege and domination throughout more than 2,000 years of history, is it any wonder that the imminent prospect of super-smart robots fills us with dread?
From 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Terminator films, writers have fantasised about machines rising up against us. Now we can see why. If we’re used to believing that the top spots in society should go to the brainiest, then of course we should expect to be made redundant by bigger-brained robots and sent to the bottom of the heap. If we’ve absorbed the idea that the more intelligent can colonise the less intelligent as of right, then it’s natural that we’d fear enslavement by our super-smart creations. If we justify our own positions of power and prosperity by virtue of our intellect, it’s understandable that we see superior AI as an existential threat.
Natural stupidity, rather than artificial intelligence, remains the greatest risk
This narrative of privilege might explain why, as the New York-based scholar and technologist Kate Crawford has noted, the fear of rogue AI seems predominant among Western white men. Other groups have endured a long history of domination by self-appointed superiors, and are still fighting against real oppressors. White men, on the other hand, are used to being at the top of the pecking order. They have most to lose if new entities arrive that excel in exactly those areas that have been used to justify male superiority.
I don’t mean to suggest that all our anxiety about rogue AI is unfounded. There are real risks associated with the use of advanced AI (as well as immense potential benefits). But being oppressed by robots in the way that, say, Australia’s indigenous people have been oppressed by European colonists is not number one on the list.
We would do better to worry about what humans might do with AI, rather than what it might do by itself. We humans are far more likely to deploy intelligent systems against each other, or to become over-reliant on them. As in the fable of the sorcerer’s apprentice, if AIs do cause harm, it’s more likely to be because we give them well-meaning but ill-thought-through goals – not because they wish to conquer us. Natural stupidity, rather than artificial intelligence, remains the greatest risk.
It’s interesting to speculate about how we’d view the rise of AI if we had a different view of intelligence. Plato believed that philosophers would need to be cajoled into becoming kings, since they naturally prefer contemplation to mastery over men. Other traditions, especially those from the East, see the intelligent person as one who scorns the trappings of power as mere vanity, and who removes him or herself from the trivialities and tribulations of quotidian affairs.
Imagine if such views were widespread: if we all thought that the most intelligent people were not those who claimed the right to rule, but those who went to meditate in remote places, to free themselves of worldly desires; or if the cleverest of all were those who returned to spread peace and enlightenment. Would we still fear robots smarter than ourselves?
Observation
Intelligence: a history
Intelligence has always been used as fig-leaf to justify domination and destruction. No wonder we fear super-smart robots
Stephen Cave
It’s an old, indeed an ancient, story. But the problem has taken an interesting 21st-century twist with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In recent years, the progress being made in AI research has picked up significantly, and many experts believe that these breakthroughs will soon lead to more. Pundits are by turn terrified and excited, sprinkling their Twitter feeds with Terminator references. To understand why we care and what we fear, we must understand intelligence as a political concept – and, in particular, its long history as a rationale for domination.
This narrative of privilege might explain why, as the New York-based scholar and technologist Kate Crawford has noted, the fear of rogue AI seems predominant among Western white men. Other groups have endured a long history of domination by self-appointed superiors, and are still fighting against real oppressors. White men, on the other hand, are used to being at the top of the pecking order. They have most to lose if new entities arrive that excel in exactly those areas that have been used to justify male superiority.
I don’t mean to suggest that all our anxiety about rogue AI is unfounded. There are real risks associated with the use of advanced AI (as well as immense potential benefits). But being oppressed by robots in the way that, say, Australia’s indigenous people have been oppressed by European colonists is not number one on the list.
We would do better to worry about what humans might do with AI, rather than what it might do by itself. We humans are far more likely to deploy intelligent systems against each other, or to become over-reliant on them. As in the fable of the sorcerer’s apprentice, if AIs do cause harm, it’s more likely to be because we give them well-meaning but ill-thought-through goals – not because they wish to conquer us. Natural stupidity, rather than artificial intelligence, remains the greatest risk.
It’s interesting to speculate about how we’d view the rise of AI if we had a different view of intelligence. Plato believed that philosophers would need to be cajoled into becoming kings, since they naturally prefer contemplation to mastery over men. Other traditions, especially those from the East, see the intelligent person as one who scorns the trappings of power as mere vanity, and who removes him or herself from the trivialities and tribulations of quotidian affairs.
Imagine if such views were widespread: if we all thought that the most intelligent people were not those who claimed the right to rule, but those who went to meditate in remote places, to free themselves of worldly desires; or if the cleverest of all were those who returned to spread peace and enlightenment. Would we still fear robots smarter than ourselves?
12. Ethics
1. It is one thing for HBO (Head, Pasir Ris HDB Branch Office) to cover up wrongdoing at the time of the eviction in '99 and another when he continues to do so the wrongdoing of the neighbour since '07. 2. An officer wrote there was no eviction at the neighbour's flat when the owner knew there was one. The owner wrote about the occupier before and after his eviction in letters to the Branch Office and HDB Feedback Unit respectively. In fact the owner saw the occupier moved out after he complained that the occupier came pounding on his door, and a technical officer visited the owner to inform him of the eviction. Also the letter from HBO in Sep 08 may have indicated that the flat had not been sublet which showed the occupier was in the flat illegally. But he was not removed for many months even after a visit from an estates officer and the technical officer following the owner's complaints. The estates officer told him she knew what the occupier was doing but was not saying. After the eviction the first owner was allowed to transfer his flat to his people who is the neighbour to continue with their works. 3. How the cover-up begun: a) The owner's first letter to HBO mentioned a previous complaint about similar noises, an occupier's eviction, an unauthorised alteration in the flat pointed out by a HDB officer, a maid causing noise through the day, and his observation of the neighbour over a month. There was no reply to the letter. b) OIC and a official-looking man visited him after his first letter. The man did not want to give his name when the owner asked, they did not want to go into his flat when invited, and they had not read the owner's letter. The owner gave them a draft of the letter before they went upstairs to visit the neighbour. The owner waited and heard an under-the-breath shout from the neighbour's son after the officers. The officers did not return down to take the lift. Since there was no lift upstairs on the top floor where the neighbour was, they skipped the floor to avoid the owner by using the other staircase farther away. Their behaviour gave the owner cause for suspicion. c) When the owner tried to confirm whether the Branch Office received his second letter, he could not get through the phone to the Branch Office including the number to HBO that he got from HDB Headquarters. d) The owner had to contact the Officer-in-Charge (OIC) with the number he gave earlier. He said the office did not receive his second letter. e) The owner then handed a draft of the second letter at the counter and asked for an acknowledgment. The letter was photocopied, signed and gave to the owner. When he asked for a meeting with HBO, he was shown two officers to meet but he insisted on meeting HBO. f) The owner noticed two lines missing at the bottom of the signed photocopy. The two lines referred to a quiet period before the OIC's visit and three to four hours of rumbling noise after his visit. Without the two lines there was no mention of noise before and after his visit, only OIC checked back over the phone and the owner told him about the rumbling noise. g) HBO asked the owner whether he knew of a recent transfer of the neighbour's flat during the meeting in Item e). It did not make sense, but he was able to confirm from OIC's fact sheet two days later the transfer took place just after the eviction nine years ago. HBO did not want the owner to link the transfer to the eviction by saying the transfer was recent. h) HBO did not reply to the owner's second letter just as he did not reply to the first although both letters was addressed to him by his name. 4. The owner wrote to the first MP about eviction, maid, force-entry, and noise, and met him later at Meet-the-People Session (MPS) with another letter about noise through the night to the next morning. He was referred to the first MP by HBO in a letter after he attended his first MPS in which no MP was in. After the MPS with the first MP, HBO replied to the owner that he may instruct his solicitors to obtain a court injunction or seek assistance from other agencies. Instead of being forthright since he knew what was going on, he issued a challenge as seen from the tone of his letter. He crossed the line for ethical behaviour, and his actions from then on indicated the extent of his influence. 5. Having seen the first MP, the owner went to see the area's MP at the next MPS. After the meeting he noticed noise was heightened, and he refused to let OIC and a fellow officer entered his flat when they wanted to check for noise. It also occurred to him the incessant knocking was deliberate the morning that HBO and the Chairman (Residents' Committee) visited the-flat-across-the-neighbour. It was the same morning after their visit that the Chairman and Treasurer, whom the Chairman had arranged to meet separately, visited the owner. During the meeting the owner told the Chairman and Treasurer he would be writing to Mr Teo Chee Hean. A week later and a month from the time the area's MP wrote to HDB on behalf of the owner, HBO replied to the owner, cc to the area's MP, and bcc to the Chairman. The bcc was sent to the owner at the time of his next MPS with Mr Teo in Nov 08. 6. In the bcc HBO wrote "no noise nuisance being detected", asked the Chairman to explain to the owner "good neighbourliness in length", and wrote they "really appreciate" the Chairman's effort and assistance. What HBO did was showed the Chairman he had connection by letting him on to the-people-in-the-flat-across-the-neighbour so that he would cooperate. Another event to do with HBO and the-people-in-the-flat-across- the-neighbour was Town Council's letter to the owner after he asked Mr Teo to bypass HBO. Town Council's letter stated the owner would hear from HDB soon but no officer came to visit him. The-people-in-the-flat-across- the-neighbour caused them from visiting because it would only be a show as there was nothing they could do to help. The-people-the-flat-across- the-neighbour were personnel who moved in shortly after the owner's first MPS in Feb 08 and they stayed to protect the neighbour. HBO and his contacts were able to prevent the problem from going up to higher authorities. No reason needs to be given for their actions since they have the backing of high officials in government. 7. Just as HBO sent the Chairman to explain good neighbourliness to the owner, he sent counsellors to help him cope with his difficulty. They were man and a women who met him outside his flat when he came home one evening. They talked, but the owner did not invite them in. When the owner posted Discovery (9), four officers who had each spoken to the owner before visited. They were the counsellor from Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS); the senior station inspector from Neighbourhood Police Centre (NPC); the estates officer and OIC from the Branch Office. They wanted the owner to mediate, but the owner told them as they were about to leave that if the noise stopped he would not pursue the matter further. HBO then replied to the owner he had exhausted all forms of assistance and copied it to two MPs. It added to five the number of MPs who wrote to HDB on behalf of the owner that HBO had replied to. He did not, however, respond to the area's MP after the same posting. The area's MP informed the owner through an email he had asked the Branch Office to look into his complaint. Although HBO knew about the owner's blog through letters sent to his office, he made no reference to it. He is in position to avoid all issue as long as he could continue to make his replies only to MPs who wrote to HDB on the owner's behalf.
8. HBO's influence could be seen over Community Centre Members (CC members), the Chairman, the-people-in-the-flat-across-the-neighbour, police officers at NPC, and counsellors from MCYS. His reach also included people from online community and companies with connection to the government. It could be assumed HBO knew about the first owner, neighbour, occupier, and maid from the owner's letters to him and to the MPs. He could have known of the force-entry and a possible break-in because he knew about the-flat-across-the-neighbour. It was likely he maintained a relationship with the neighbour throughout as seen from their behaviour. And he would have known about the owner's blog through emails to his office from the area's MP, Town Council and others. Of note in the blog were insiders who assisted the owner. For examples, HBO's suggestion that the owner may instruct his solicitors to obtain a court injunction against the neighbour was followed by a message on perceived injustice broadcast over TV, and his bcc in Item 5 and 6 was sent to the owner. 9. HBO contrived to place the owner at a disadvantage. Item 6 is an example where MPs were unable to bypass HBO. Town Council had transmitted the owner's appeal to HDB because Mr Teo Chee Hean wrote to them. A copy of Mr Teo's letter was attached in a cc to HBO for his information. With it HBO did not reply as he would have with letters from MP to HDB. It did not, however, stop him from replying to all subsequent MPs' letters to HDB including one from Mr Teo. Meanwhile the officers kept the neighbour informed. The neighbour has just to appease for a time with reduced noise when informed of a complaint to enable them to continue with their works over the years. It is now two and a half years that the-people-in-the-flat-across- the-neighbour have stayed to protect them from insiders. 10. The owner has no doubt the neighbour uses his flat for their works. He heard similar noises from the occupier who was evicted. Officers had facilitated the transfer of the flat from first owner to the neighbour without recording the eviction to allow them to continue with their works. He saw workers outside of neighbour's immediate family who let themselves into the flat then heard noises from their works. They used noise to intimidate and signal the owner. His encounters with OIC, other officers, HBO, the Chairman, the-people-in-the-flat-across- the-neighbour and two CC members from MPS showed they were part of the cover-up. It would have seemed far-fetched if the owner had not been able to recount the events at the neighbour's flat, at the-flat-across-the-neighbour and of insiders who assisted him. 11. An investigation is required. How else to prove cover-up and an existing arrangement between the officers and neighbour? Only three results are possible: no wrongdoing, a cover-up, and insufficient evidence. The authorities have not conducted such an investigation. 12. The owner has a case. There is sufficient details and these could be corroborated. Random check is only required to stop the neighbour. Suspected officers, including the-people-in-the-flat-across- the-neighbour, need to be removed. Personnel board and ethics committee should come to a decision. Ethical conduct is foremost. 13. Because no one could help with the problem, the owner emailed people he found in the Singapore Government Directory and Who's Who in Singapore 2006. But the replies referred him to the relevant authorities, thanked him for his feedback and a few commented. He also emailed to addresses found on the web and in directories of company. 14. The owner quoted PM Lee Hsien Loong on "government misbehaviour", SM Goh Chok Tong on "trust deficit" and "morally upright government", and DPM Teo Chee Hean on "logical rather than ideological path and stay pragmatic in making policies - an approach that has produced many innovative solutions in the past". The quotes may or may not be related to his case, but it was pertinent. 15. The owner also quoted DPM Teo Chee Hean earlier on "the government is on the lookout for 'bold and visionary' leaders and people who can adapt to changing environments" and "the government would strive to boost the quality of public service leaders by giving them different and challenging job assignments". It was in the Prime Minister's Office's addendum to the President's address. This was reported in an article in the Business Times on 22 May 09 after the owner's email was published at civicadvocator.net on 11 May 09. The email is at Help (69). 16. Do the new appointments here have anything to do with the owner's problem?
a) 2 Jun 10, new permanent secretary appointments.
b) 15 Jun 10, three statutory boards under the Ministry of National Development were set to get new CEOs.
c) 10 Jul 10, new chief executive director of the People's Association in June.
17. Prospect (6) is prospect of resolving the problem.
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