How To Make Singapore Great
The wisdom of Singapore's legendary founding father Lee Kuan Yew, a great statesman of the 20th Century
Comrades: Lee Kuan Yew tried to warn us.
As the first Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990, LKY engineered one of the greatest economic miracles of the 20th century. Through sheer will, he transformed a 300 square mile island from impoverished swamp (1.5 million people, $400 per-capita GDP) to wealthy metropolis (6 million people, $80,000 per-capita GDP). Not only is he the founding father of a nation, but also the patriarch of a family that includes a son who also served as Prime Minister and a grandson who is the current head of the Government Technology Agency.
Born in 1923, LKY persevered through many upheavals during World War II, the Cold War, and independence. His political party has governed for 65 years, the longest run among the world’s multi-party parliamentary democracies. Singapore University’s school of public policy is named after him. His country is now synonymous with good governance and cleanliness. Since he passed away in 2015 at the age of 92, his stature has only grown as an underrated and under-appreciated leader with the highest IQ, EQ, and grit.
I have compiled his best quotes below from least to most spicy. What is your favorite? Does the West need an LKY figure?
Spice Level 1: Life advice
"What I fear is complacency. When things always become better, people tend to want more for less work."
"Life is not just eating, drinking, television and cinema. The human mind must be creative, must be self-generating; it cannot depend on just gadgets to amuse itself."
“If you want to reach your goals and dreams, you cannot do it without discipline.”
“I have no regrets. I have spent my life, so much of it, building up this country. There's nothing more that I need to do. At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.”
“Even from my sick bed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel something is going wrong, I will get up.”
“Having an education is one thing, being educated is another.”
“As you solve one set of problems, new ones appear. That is part of the nature of life.”
“You begin your journey not knowing where it will take you. You have plans, you have dreams, but every now and again you have to take uncharted roads, face impassable mountains, cross treacherous rivers, be blocked by landslides and earthquakes. That's the way my life has been.”
“At the end of the day, what I cherish most are the human relationships. With the unfailing support of my wife and partner I have lived my life to the fullest. It is the friendships I made and the close family ties I nurtured that have provided me with that sense of satisfaction at a life well lived, and have made me what I am.”
Spice Level 2: On leadership and democracy
"Whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him. Or give it up. This is not a game of cards. This is your life and mine. I've spent a whole lifetime building this and as long as I'm in charge, nobody is going to knock it down."
"I always tried to be correct, not politically correct."
"I have been accused of many things in my life, but not even my worst enemy has ever accused me of being afraid to speak my mind."
“I have never been over concerned or obsessed with opinion polls or popularity polls. I think a leader who is, is a weak leader. Between being loved and being feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I'm meaningless.”
“A society to be successful must maintain a balance between nurturing excellence and encouraging the average to improve.”
“The ideas of individual supremacy and the right of free expression, when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep America society cohesive. Asia can see it is not working. In America itself, there is widespread crime and violence, old people feel forgotten, families are falling apart. And the media attacks the integrity and character of your leaders with impunity, drags down all those in authority and blames everyone but itself.”
“One-man-one-vote is a most difficult form of government. Results can be erratic.”
“There are some flaws in the assumptions made for democracy. It is assumed that all men and women are equal or should be equal. Hence, one-man-one-vote. But is equality realistic? If it is not, to insist on equality must lead to regression.”
“With few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries. What Asians value may not necessarily be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual. As an Asian of Chinese cultural background, my values are for a government which is honest, effective and efficient.”
"You've got to do one of two things when you've got to keep people happy: either, give them something that will satisfy them, better food, better clothes, better homes; or if you can't do that, then give them the vision of greatness to come".
“I am a realist. The magnitude of what one terms license or civil liberties or personal freedom has got to be adjusted to the circumstances.”
"I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters.”
“We accept human nature as it is, then we base our system on it. Your system must accept that human nature is like that. You get the best out of people for society by incentives and disincentives. If you remove too much of their rewards from the top tier, they will migrate.”
"I believe Hayek was a very clear thinker and that he hit upon the eternal truth, explaining that the free market is necessary to get the economy right".
Spice Level 3: Based shitposting
"An MP must now not only be good at speaking but also at getting things done. When an estate is dirty, out of order, and rubbish not regularly and properly collected, that is when residents realize that without regular maintenance, the value of their flats will drop."
"Amazingly, throughout most of the contemporary Western world leaders in government require no special training or qualification. Many get elected because they sound and look good on television. The results have been unhappy for their voters."
"I have never understood why Western educationists are so much against corporal punishment. It did my fellow students and me no harm."
“You know, the cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government. You get that alternative and you'll never put Singapore together again: Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again... my asset values will disappear, my apartments will be worth a fraction of what they were, my ministers' jobs will be in peril, their security will be at risk and their women will become maids in other people's countries, foreign workers. I cannot have that!”
“You’re talking about Rwanda or Bangladesh, or Cambodia, or the Philippines. They’ve got democracy, according to Freedom House. But have you got a civilized life to lead? People want economic development first and foremost. The leaders may talk something else. You take a poll of any people. What is it they want? The right to write an editorial as you like? They want homes, medicine, jobs, schools.”
"What we are preventing is duds getting into Parliament and government. Any person of quality, we welcome him but we don't want duds.”
“If I were not the Prime Minister, [my son Lee Hsien Loong] he could have become Prime Minister several years earlier. It is against my interest to allow any family member, who's incapable, to be holding an important job because that would be a disaster for Singapore and my legacy. That cannot be allowed.”
“But for the misfortune of Watergate, Richard Nixon had a realistic view of the world. He was a great analyst, realistic, but also a tactician to get things done. But this need with wanting to know everything and to make sure he got re-elected became obsessive."
"In Britain, if you look at the First Class Honours list of Oxford or Cambridge and trace their careers, you will find that these people end up not in politics, but in banking, finance and the professions. The frontbenchers in Parliament are often not from the top tier. They are not drawn from the best lawyers or surgeons."
“Singapore’s domestic debate is a matter for Singaporeans. We allow American journalists in Singapore in order to report Singapore to their fellow countrymen. We allow their papers to sell in Singapore so that we can know what foreigners are reading about us. But we cannot allow them to assume a role in Singapore that the American media play in America, that of invigilator, adversary and inquisitor of the administration. If allowed to do so, they will radically change the nature of Singapore society, and I doubt if our social glue is strong enough to withstand such treatment.”
Spice Level 4: Critiques of communism and diversity
“If you are a troublemaker, it’s our job to politically destroy you. Put it this way. As long as JB Jeyaretnam stands for what he stands for – a thoroughly destructive force – we will knock him. Everybody knows that in my bag I have a hatchet, and a very sharp one. You take me on, I take my hatchet, we meet in the cul-de-sac. That's the way I had to survive in the past. That's the way the communists tackled me. He brought the Chief Justice into the political arena.”
“I started my political life fighting for the unions as their legal adviser and negotiator. By the mid-1950s the communists had gained control of most of them, and both communists and non-communist unions had turned combative. To attract investments, we had to free unions from communist control and educate union leaders and workers on the need to create new jobs by getting investments."
“I don't know why Amnesty International always picks on people who are not very popular with Communists."
“If you don’t include your women graduates in your breeding pool and leave them on the shelf, you would end up a more stupid society. So what happens? There will be less bright people to support dumb people in the next generation. That’s a problem.”
“I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils... I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I've come to.”
“Human beings are created unequal, and no amount of social engineering or government intervention can significantly alter one’s lot in life. At most, government policies can help equalize opportunity at the starting point, but they cannot ensure equal outcomes. Society is bound to end up with unequal outcomes.”
"Chinese and Indian jurors were never happy to convict if it meant sending a man (of their own race) to his death… I had no faith in a system that allowed the superstition, ignorance, biases, and prejudices of seven jurymen to determine guilt or innocence."
“China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the United States can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion and recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot.”
“The Bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score more. The Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow.”
“Repression, Sir, is a habit that grows. I am told it is like making love-it is always easier the second time! The first time there may be pangs of conscience, a sense of guilt. But once embarked on this course with constant repetition you get more and more brazen in the attack. All you have to do is to dissolve organizations and societies and banish and detain the key political workers in these societies. Then miraculously everything is tranquil on the surface. Then an intimidated press and the government-controlled radio together can regularly sing your praises, and slowly and steadily the people are made to forget the evil things that have already been done, or if these things are referred to again they're conveniently distorted and distorted with impunity, because there will be no opposition to contradict.”
“We are the corns in the dung heap.”
Ah yes, Lee Kuan Yew - the original democratically elected 'authoritarian' leader, the first to discomfit the modern globalists.
My favorite LKY moment was the Michael Fay affair back in 1994. A dirtbag American teenager stole road signs and allegedly vandalized a bunch of vehicles in Singapore, and was sentenced to be caned, as well as spending several months in prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Michael_Fay
Lee at that time wasn't *technically* running the country, he was senior minister, which he described as an 'advisory' role. But when all the predictable western libtards started clutching their pearls and mewling about the horrors of corporal punishment (incl US president Bill Clinton), Lee went on TV, saying 'the US was neither safe nor peaceful because it did not dare to restrain or punish those who did wrong, adding, "If you like it this way, that is your problem. But, that is not the path we choose." '
Whoever was in charge reduced the sentence from 6 to 4 cane strokes. It's safe to say that Lee wouldn't have bowed to pressure, had he not already stepped aside.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-03-09-mn-31971-story.html
The part that today's western globofascists don't understand is 'the path we choose.' The people of Belarus, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Singapore are apparently supposed to run their affairs exactly as the failed states of western Europe do.
We traveled through Singapore in 1973 and spent ~5 days there before boarding the train through Malaysia to Bangkok. I loved it. Contrary to all other Asian cities, Singapore was clean, beautiful, clean, ancient - trending modern, and CLEAN. I recall that spitting outdoors was outlawed and came with severe penalties since spitting was considered a primary vector for transmission of tuberculosis. I think what I loved most was the night market. Huge and filled with hundreds of street vendors offering the greatest variety of food I've ever seen. I hope that is still a tradition there. Of course, it's been 50 years, but of all the cities of Asia I've traveled through, Singapore has always been the one place I'd like to return to.