The Population White
Paper marks a critical turning point in the history of our nation. We stand on
the threshold of becoming a shiny tiny red dot on the blue spot of our planet
earth or a cancerous spot in a dark world. We are just a tiny red dot and we
cannot afford to make the mistakes of the Americans consuming the bulk of our
world resources. The future of Singapore does not lie in managing the size of our
population. We need to address the danger of greed and our spiritual poverty.
It is so important
to address the right questions if we are to have the right answers. We can be a
shining beacon of a small compassionate co-operative community to the world or
we can be a selfish and greedy society, a cancerous dark spot consuming
the world resources. We need to choose between greed or love as the motivating
power for our lives.
E. F Schumacher, in
his book, Small Is Beautiful, had drawn attention to the danger of Keynesian
economics that is rooted in greed. In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes had espoused the view that “for at least another hundred years we must pretend to
ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is
useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a
little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic
necessity into daylight.”
Keynes described capitalism
as “the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most
wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. At the same time, Keynes
also warned that “the decadent international but individualistic capitalism in
the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not
intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it
doesn't deliver the goods.”
We reap what we sow.
Hence the recent financial scandals in our world during the past two years come
as no surprise. We are all
living in an imperfect world and none of us are free from the temptations of
the world. The news that Singapore “is at the heart of a global match-fixing
empire” for football fixing matches all over the world casts a dark spot over
our reputation for low corruption. This,
together with the sex scandals in 2012 and the indictment of a couple of civil
servants by the CPIB are but warning
symptoms of a decline in morality in our society. Our population problems pales in the light of
our moral bankruptcy and spiritual poverty.
However, this is not
a time for finger pointing which will only cultivate a culture of blame – this
is a time for serious reflection by all Singaporeans. When we blame society for
being materialistic we need to remember that we are the society as Mr. Tan
Chuan Jin, the Acting Minister for Manpower and Senior Minister of State at the
Ministry of National Development, rightly pointed out in a forum in November
2012. He made the point that “if everyone of us chooses to exercise our rights
and fight for something we believe in, then society will change.”
Indeed all of us can
be agents of change in our homes, our workplace and the communities that we are
living in. However, in order to encourage our citizens to do so, we need a
culture of safety – where people are not penalised for drawing attention to
deficiencies in our social system. It is encouraging that the climate of fear
has been reduced and this is seen in the results of the Punggol East
by-election.
E.F. Schumacher has
also drawn attention to the need for each one of us to find the strength to
overcome the violence of greed, envy, hate and lust within ourselves. He
believed that Gandhi had given us the answer:
“There must
recognition of the existence of the soul apart from the body, and of its
permanent nature, and this recognition must amount to a living faith; and, in
the last resort, non-violence does not avail those who do not possess a living
faith in the God of love.”
It is only with such
a living faith that we will be better stewards of the resources of our world
and to use them not just for our own good but for the good of others. We will
also seek to humanise work so that work will not be “an inhuman chore” but the “true
foundations of society” through the relationships established by work.
We need a spiritual
revolution so that we will not see the “ avoidance of taxes as the only
intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward” but as a responsibility to
share our blessings and to be a blessing through paying our taxes. As Gandhi
reminds us, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not for
every man’s greed.” We need to live simple lives so that others may simply
live.
Just we need a
healthy immune system to resist and overcome disease, we need a healthy moral
immune system to resist and overcome greed. Leonard Sweet warned the Americans
that they are living under conditions of zero morality and there is a moral
vacuum in their postmodern society.
It is sad that we
did not follow the wisdom of the late Goh Keng Swee who introduced moral
education in the schools. We need spiritual wisdom in order to make good use of
information to nourish our souls, to build relationships and to harness
technology for the common good rather than for selfish ends.
The time has come for a "return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue - that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable." The time has come for us to come to our senses so that we will see that the love of money is the root of all evil, that “people do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God,” and that there is no profit to gain the whole world but to lose our souls. We are in desperate need for wisdom and love so that we will be a shining red dot and not a cancerous dark spot.
