Special thanks to Dansong for inspiring this reflection on my beloved island-nation that is Singapore.
If you will indulge me, picture yourself in an enormous underground shelter, being bombarded by subliminal messages such as “You are specially chosen… The world out there is uninhabitable and lifeless… You are safe here… Your job is to wait for the chance to go to The Island, where you will be free from all the radiation outside these walls…” etc.
And so you go about your life, alongside others who look somewhat similar to you, but you can’t really place your finger on it, working on something that has been defined as “a job”, but its true significance is lost on you, because “it is pointless to ask questions”, “people are watching”, “it’s really hectic here”, “just wait, I’ll be the next one to win the (Island) lottery”…
A inexplicable sense of fear courses through your veins whenever you hear the terms “CEO”, “authority”, or “unruly behaviour”. All you’ve known about the CEO all your life is that he is the one who has shown you sufficient grace to *save* you from the dark outside, which you don’t really have any concept of as you’ve never been there, as far as you can remember anyway. Sometimes you notice that some of your friends who exhibit “unruly behaviour” (not-too-close ones, as it is forbidden to gather in groups other than those explicitly permitted by the CEO) are taken to meet “authority”, and a few days later you notice they have been moved to another location “for their own good”, and you never chance upon them again. Others are loudly announced as having won the lottery — a ticket to go to The Island. You think to yourself how wonderful that must be, to finally be chosen to live the life that they want, or so it seems… I won’t spoil the story further for the benefit those who have not watch this film lol…
Doesn’t this sound a little similar to life in Singapore? Having watched The Matrix and The Island, I marvel at the establishment’s ability to ‘turn reality into fantasy’, and all “for the good of the nation” as well. Either our CEOs, oops, I meant our leaders are superb at whatever it is that they do, or they *genuinely believe* their pronouncements… I don’t know which is scarier 
I’m going on a fairly cynical slant in the next few paragraphs; please bear with me. The game as I see it is quite simple: to manage public opinion, the establishment permits the holding of elections every 4-5 years, according to the Constitution. If the fragmented opposition does not unite (by some unforeseen circumstance), and if the ruling party manages itself such that it does not become split down the middle, the latter will in all probability virtually secure a significant proportion of the number of seats available by Nomination Day.
Throughout each day of the campaign, generously pepper the voters with consumer benefits such as upgrading or tax rebates, or at least make it seem so. Watch for any slip-ups by the opposition, and use these to highlight the risk of a change in the government of Singapore (though I suspect that, in substance, the term is ‘the management of Singapore Inc.’) For good measure, sprinkle little bits of fear in the form of “national security”, “racial harmony”, “welfarism” and “anti-globalisation”. Dress all these up as logic, accessorise with statistics, figures, charts and other numerically-intensive forms of data. Once election results are announced, the public opinion figure shall be obtained, and shall remain as a point of reference i.e. be filed away till the next election, and normal operations will resume for another 4-5 years.
Any interruptions during the interim will be dealt with, summarily or otherwise. Elements deemed ‘non-useful but tolerable’ shall be sidelined from, subsumed into the system, or somehow allowed to remain as ‘impractical intellectualisation’ or ‘harmless entertainment’. Elements deemed ‘non-useful and intolerable’ may be removed from the system, forcibly or otherwise. So much for managing public opinion.
In line with my conflict hypothesis, I would rather say that it is the (hyper?) active policy-making of the government that is eliciting the *(super) non-active* opinion-making of the public lol. To borrow from CEO-speak, based on prior data analysis, in the medium-term at least, employees are likely to remain sufficiently distracted to be able to mount any meaningful form of resistance i.e. motivation to convert their formidable lethargy into forceful action is expected to remain low.
