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,
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