Why Singapore feels/is sterile

Singapore is a top down country, where the state determines the forms that interactions between state and society, and state and economy takes. The state determines the parameters of society. Society does not know what it is; its functioning and purposes is interfered with by the state; there is an absence of the art of living; and without the ability to determine the forms that societal interactions take, there is no collective sense of the space of possibilities for the evolution of society. Without empowerment, there is no possibility of the development of institutional forms and principles for the energy of its people to latch onto, or to apply itself upon; no spirit; sterile.

Democracy is a continuous meta conversation, not just of the role of government, but the scope of government, within the space of interaction between state, society, and market mechanisms.

This is not to say that the system as it has evolved into its current state is not the best under the circumstances, although it is too early to tell ex ante what the best form is, involving a good deal of unknowables and luck. Good in such cases is so conditional as to be meaningless. The key question is if the combination of mechanisms and characteristics are optimising the energies and capabilities of a people at any point in time, as well as creating the incentives to do so across time, and if existing institutions are generating the balance between stability and discovery in the right ways. And if the essentially totalitarian system is antifragile.

There are 3 goals of government: law and order; empowerment of citizens to change state and society; risk pooling and intergenerational contracting.

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Society consists of the building blocks of institutions and the ideologies that underlie them.

The life of a society is the embodiment of the continual philosophical conversations that it engages in to determine ends and means.

Sterility is the absence of philosophy due to the predetermination of values and actions and the institutions used to achieve them - namely, wealth creation.

That is the weakness of ossified societies - the predetermination, rather than the dynamic flux, of values.

In short, Singapore is a society of Last Men.