Are Singaporeans Really Apathetic? Part II

How is it that people who claim that we either live in an apathetic or engaged society, never ever seem to explain how they derived at this conclusion?  Doesn’t it seem incongruous to you whether we are apathetic or engaged ought to be as amenable to investigation like whether the Lochness monster or the Yeti actually exist?

I believe this can be accomplished. However, I don’t believe this can be done by simply asking: are we living in an apathetic society?

That sort of question is bound to produce, the fallacy of faulty generalization – where too often it leads to the promotion of preferences (subjective view) along with dispensation (propaganda) which reduces everything an imposition (laws) that manages to account for what is happening (theory), worst still it elevates a fallacy (myth) to some sort of supreme guideline. That all of us have to (yes, you guessed it) accept as the truth.

Let me give you an example of this sort of fallacy and why I believe it subtracts rather than adds any value to the discussion. Consider this: “377A proves that we are an engaged society….” – “I have a friend who often serves on weekends in a grass root committee….”

What we often fail to appreciate is how that sort of generalization is deemed suitable to establishing the claim we already live in an engaged society – but it doesn’t really tell us how this assumption was derived at!

Neither does it give us a comparative to enable us to scale the issue of apathy vs engagement divide. What’s actually happening in this sort of sub standard pariah dog logic is nothing short of an attempt to try to pass off the will of somebody, as the will of everybody and the preoccupation of a few delusional individuals as the collective will of the majority. That’s the reason why attempting to ask the question: are we an apathetic society? Can never successfully produce an accurate answer – it’s a loaded question. 

Having said that, it doesn’t mean we cannot successfully answer this question – we can, only in a round about way and this requires us to take the high road by examining the political process to see; how many avenues it provides for opportunities for contrarian expression and whether they can even lead to fruition by bringing about meaningful change. Confining our examination to the processes and systems which allows for representation should ideally form the basis of answering this question – it stands to reason – as either apathy or engagement MUST be directly proportional to our capacity to either control and moderate the outcome of events – so the higher the scope for representation, the less likely, we are to be an apathetic society and vice-versa.  

In that sort of approach we are looking at how many ways there is to stay engaged and  more importantly charting the rate of success i.e opportunities for successfully bringing about changes – by restricting our investigation to these linkages, it’s a cold an even objective calculation, but at least it cuts out much of the noise, propaganda and back slapping rhetoric associated with the apathy vs engaged debate. As it instills a measure of discipline to the whole investigative process and that will simply produce more accurate results!

Now in this case, what sort of question are we asking? It is simply this: does the system allow citizens to engage the government effectively and safely? If the answer is ‘no,’ then you can even have the best homily sugary fairytale of “I have a friend who is not apathetic…..” but the answer as to whether we live in an apathetic society still has to be a resounding yes! Conversely the same applies to producing an equally resounding ‘no,’ we are not living in an apathetic society. Only on this occasion, we have to be able empirically determine the presence of linkages which allows citizens to remain engaged. 

The conflict whether we are an apathetic or engaged society is not just about the best means to pursue generally acceptable ends. Ultimately, whatever answer it produces represent a way for us to discern what is actually happening around us without the danger of being led astray by what I term self-serving rhetoric – that suggest we are all together so different from the rest of the world, there may even be kernels of wisdom to propose, we should forge our own path of defining what our society should be, if it to remain engaged. That sort of nonsensical rhetoric is meant to defend the view that Singapore, in its current political reincarnation after the S377A debate has magically somehow become a more enlightened and mature society. As we know much of this rhetoric includes belittling the achievements of other regimes whose political processes allows fringe groups to vilify one another as bigoted religious fanatics or morally depraved atheist, racist reactionaries or crypto- totalitarian socialist, but at least in their political system, there is never ever any doubt, they have real opportunities of staying political engaged and even plenty of opportunities to moderate the outcome of their destiny. Meanwhile we are still ambling in dark trying to figure out whether we have really reached first base.

Empty rhetoric, I am reminded goes a long way to shore up the ‘reality’ that we may be engaged rather than terminally apathetic. Then again when one makes too much of rhetoric and only rhetoric at the expense of content, that can’t be very imaginative.

In any case, part of what it means to suffer a failure of imagination may be that one is unable conceive that one’s own imagination is too improverished to see the flip side of the coin – in the greater scheme of things, that can only mean, we may be apathetically engaged after all.

(By Darkness – Socio/Political – EP 9903737 – The Brotherhood Press 2007) 

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