My speech today is titled “Singapore Awakened: How Success – and the Alternative of Flourishing – Shape Family”.

Now there is a local movie titled Singapore Dreaming, and the movie was about a working-class Singaporean man who aspired to a better future. For a long time. The Singaporean Dream is to get the five C’s, so the better future really meant just a more affluent future.

Since it’s a movie, the protagonist got lucky. He was the breadwinner of the family, and he won $2 million in Toto.

However, tragic events unfolded. At the cusp of the fulfilment of his Singapore Dream, the protagonist suffered a heart attack while being interviewed for a country club membership.

Now, this is very dramatic. After all, it’s just a movie. But the death in the movie symbolically raises a poignant question: What prize awaits at the end of the Singapore Dream, when the Singapore Dream is fulfilled?

The movie was made in 2006. By 2023, our then DPM (Deputy Prime Minister) Lawrence Wong launched the Forward Singapore Report, which looks at our social compact for the future. He said that the Singapore Dream is no longer about getting the five C’s or material success. We now want fulfilment, meaning and purpose.

In the last few years, the government leaders have expressed a more inclusive version of the Singapore Dream, according to which Singaporeans would not be pressured to conform to narrow ideas of success.

The reality, though, is that some of the five C’s are actually out of reach for many of the younger generation who are not born into wealth. So, if meaning is defined by materialistic achievements, a lot of angst would actually build up.

Furthermore, the narrow mindset of success was actually causing a lot of mental stress amongst young people. So, during the Parliamentary Motion for advancing mental health in February 2024, Mr Wong said that Singaporeans should not be unwittingly drawn into a rat race of hyper-competition and endless comparisons with one another.

Now, even for those of us who are not suffering from any mental stress, we suspect that success does not bring fulfilment. Decades ago, my grandparents’ generation lived in a much less politically secure country. Lifespans of people were shorter. People were even malnourished in childhood and so on.

My grandfather came from China and he engaged in manual labour. In his old age, he walked barefoot around Bedok South. I wondered how it is possible that he walks barefoot. But I suppose that maybe he had no money for footwear when he was young, and the habit kind of stuck.

When physiological and safety needs are met, those needs in Maslow’s pyramid are met, we have the mind and heart space to think about our life plans.

Now, in July 2024, PM (Prime Minister) Wong said in a dialogue with youths that people should be following their own talents and striving to reach their own full potential, to thrive and flourish.

But, along with these statements of the government about flourishing and thriving, the government did add that we need to watch out for the economy, reflecting a certain tension and fear that individual aspirations, left to our own, might veer so far from the common good that the economy becomes unviable and individuals fare poorly overall.

Now, today, I’m going to be speaking about the Singapore Dream and the narrow mindset of success and how these negatively affect Singapore’s conceptions of marriage and family. And I propose that a narrative revolving around flourishing leads Singaporeans into a better future.

I will touch on the following:

1. Geopolitical and historical factors that contributed to our mindset;
2. How flourishing is different from success;
3. How government choices have funnelled us into chasing success; and
4. How success and its alternative for flourishing shapes how we think about family; and
5. How to move from success to flourishing.

Geopolitical and Historical Factors

So how did we come to become so success-driven? Now, the narrative of the nation has always been that we are a young nation under siege, needing to fend for ourselves. We have no hinterland and no natural resources other than human capital. We were forced dramatically into independence and then threatened by communism and communalism.

The government often emphasises the need to build a stable and secure country, and for each individual to play their part. We are told often to place society above the self.

So, we celebrate national success: our container port, our airlines, our airport, our Flower Dome, our math literacy of our young people. While the government takes the lead in being proud of the nation’s achievements, I think that we end up comparing and competing with one another within the country.

Add to this a competitive, driven, materialistic East Asian culture – and meritocracy on top of that.

Of course, meritocracy is better than the alternatives of nepotism or corruption, but it also accentuates the narrow idea of success.

Minister Chan Chun Sing in 2023 called for a rethink of meritocracy. While it worked in the past to propel Singapore forward, the problem is that its reward structure had become associated with elitism, leading to socio-economic stratification, as people who do well in meritocracy can then advantage their children in the next generation by provision of better resources.

So, with our constant celebration of individual responsibility, there is sometimes condescension or a lack of sympathy towards people who are lagging behind by conventional metrics of success. People are not aware that systemic factors can actually contribute to an individual’s lack of progress.

How Flourishing is Different from Success

Now, success has actually featured prominently in the national narrative, individual flourishing, less so. But of course, flourishing became more fashionable in the last few years.

What are some problems of the narrow mindset of success?

I think that the narrow mindset of success actually discourages individuals from leading an examined life and exploring what we are good at. We end up going unthinkingly with the flow. Our obsession with success also drives us to focus on results instead of the whole journey of courageously living for what we believe in and persevering to accomplish our own goals, a journey which is formative of our character.

When success in terms of outcome is over-celebrated, the fear of failure or of being wrong in our choices can cause inertia to set in, and we can end up in some paralysis where we don’t want to extend beyond our comfort zone.

When we are chasing success, important aspects of human flourishing also become instrumental to us.

But it’s actually flourishing that makes for an abundant life. And yet, we are just chasing it as part of a means to getting success. A narrow mindset towards success also tends to lead us towards more materialistic pursuits.

Now, narrow success actually helps the economy, so this may be why we are funnelled towards certain pathways that contribute to the economy.

When an equally strong narrative of flourishing is lacking in our country – because we keep being funnelled to what’s contributing to the economy – we forget that economy is to serve us and not the other way around.

But what exactly is human flourishing?

Now, there are several schools of thought.

Recent studies on human flourishing measure human flourishing. Empirically, they tend to focus on subjective experiences of well-being of a group of persons. One example is the Harvard Flourishing Program.

But I’m using a more traditional idea of flourishing. A neo-Aristotelian theory, [John] Finnis’s theory, which links flourishing to living an examined life.

Finnis examines certain basic goods of human flourishing. The seven goods are: life, knowledge, practical reasonableness, religion, play, aesthetic experience, and friendship / sociability (and caring for the well-being of another).

Not to worry about these goods; I’ll explain them as I go along.

Individual choices make sense according to this idea of human flourishing, if we actually do certain actions to pursue these goods and not something else.

I’ll use Finnis’s idea of flourishing as a contrast to success. I’ll begin by saying that we may be deficient in our ability to view these basic goods as inherently good.

We tend to view them instrumentally. And what do I mean by this?

We tend to view them as a means to success or as a means to being productive. That’s not actually living for flourishing.

So, for example, knowledge in Singapore: knowledge tends to be seen quite in an instrumental manner. We emphasise the STEM subjects, science, engineering, math and so on. And we emphasise professional courses. They are favoured because they contribute to the economy.

Then when we engage in play or aesthetic experience, we need no further justification for engaging in play or aesthetic experience. But some of us feel guilty. We must explain why we are playing or enjoying aesthetic experience. It’s almost as if we must say that we are actually recharging, we need rest so that we can better contribute to the economy.

But our mindset is taking us away from flourishing and it adds stress to our life, because we always see these goods as serving our productivity, our contribution to the economy.

Sociability or friendship can also become utilitarian if we choose to network with people to further our own goals. Then, practical reasonableness, where Finnis is concerned, involves evaluating what we actually want in life and carrying out those choices. But if we follow after what society values, we are being unthinking. We are not exercising or partaking of the good of practical reasonableness.

Government Choices that Funnel Us Towards Chasing Success

Now, there are government strategies that funnel us towards chasing success, towards a success-driven pragmatism. And the ethos in areas outside of family and marriage is affecting how we view family and marriage.

I’ll give examples from two areas.

Arts, Entertainment and Culture

The first is arts, entertainment and culture. On a day-to-day level, I must say that the government provides well for the goods of play, aesthetic experience and sociability.

Have you been playing pickleball in one of those multi-use courts that you find everywhere?

Have you found that there’s a lot of greenery, a lot of community spaces for you to interact, a lot of infrastructure for arts-related stuff?

At the same time, I think that the efforts of the government, even if they go towards flourishing, they are also geared towards attracting tourists and making Singapore an exciting city that is very liveable for talented foreigners. So, these efforts also serve our economy.

Now, that’s not wrong, as long as flourishing is also facilitated for all of us.

But there is also a dissonance in some governmental choices. They give the impression that the economy is most important. Even long-standing moral concerns can be compromised for the sake of the economy. They stem from pragmatism and, overall, they contribute to an ethos that that is very success-driven, that drives us towards chasing success.

Let’s look at, for example, the film classification in 1991 that introduced the ‘R18’ rating. It brought in softcore porn. I can guess your age if you’ve heard of an actress called Amy Yip who was featured in these Hong Kong films.

It was brought to the heartland cinemas before the days of the internet. There was public backlash and, swiftly, the rating was then changed to “Restricted Artistic” (RA), with the films then shown in downtown cinemas.

But why the sudden liberalism pursued by the Ministry of Information and the Arts? Back then, there appeared to be no clear moral bearings, perhaps just a pragmatic move away from being branded a “Nanny State”.

Then, there’s the decision of the government to allow casinos. Minister George Yeo, then in Ministry of Trade and Industry, coined the term “integrated resorts”. This is an about-turn from a previous strong moral resistance towards casino gambling.

But casinos were now part of a larger, integrated space that would make investment of the operators financially viable, providing an infrastructure that would attract tourists to Singapore and create jobs in the tourism sector. So, certain decisions like that are made for rapid economic growth.

And we’ve not really cared about the compromise of moral principles. Such pragmatism again drives us towards always thinking about productivity and economic growth and narrow ideas of success.

Another decision in favour of rapid economic growth – that I find quite sad, but I didn’t think of it like that when I was young – is the linguistic policy with respect to Chinese dialects.

The “Speak Mandarin” campaign was launched in 1979, and it led to Chinese dialects falling out of use. And this was to support the bilingual education policy, which is, of course, seen as advancing the economy in the longer term.

But there were severe effects on one group of persons: the elderly Chinese persons who had difficulty communicating with their grandchildren because the only language they could speak was dialect. This may have contributed to the view that people who speak dialect only are unschooled, inferior and irrelevant.

Dialect programmes were banned on TV and radio. Suddenly, if you are illiterate and you speak only dialect: You’ve lost your entertainment. You’ve lost your access to news. You’re also diminished in the eyes of other people. You are losing possibly your relationship with your grandkids.

If you are illiterate, you can’t be reading any stuff and you no longer can watch any TV or listen to your radio in dialect. So, there are damaging effects on the goods of knowledge, play, sociability. Within a family, intergenerational relations are affected. Simple pleasures of a group of people were sacrificed for rapid economic growth.

So, that is the kind of ethos that is being fostered in our country.

Education

And next I look at education. Education serves the basic goods. Students have a safe space to pursue the good of sociability.

Under the tutelage and guidance of teachers, CCAs (co-curricular activities) and the main curriculum bring opportunities to pursue goods of knowledge, aesthetic experience, play, life, practical reasonableness and religion.

So, many goods are facilitated by education. But government policies can give the impression that education is not about these goods, but about future contribution to the economy, leading to a success-driven mentality where grades are everything, opening the doors to good schools and, later, good careers.

What are some examples of the policies that fostered this mindset?

Again, the focus on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) subjects, is one example.

They are seen as serving the ever-growing sectors of tech and innovation – the economy. Humanities are often justified by critical thinking that they teach us so that we can add value to our careers and future. Again, framed in terms of being productive and framed instrumentally.

Now, policies that favour the best and the brightest, such as scholarships and the gifted education programme are understandable when human capital is an important resource for our nation.

But such investments make it seem like we prize, primarily, people who can contribute to economic growth, thus leading people to favour a narrow conception of success, because these are the people who are valued in the nation, people who are productive for the economy.

It doesn’t help that, anecdotally, some Singaporean parents are said to want their kids to study hard so that they do not end up in ‘fill-in-the-blanks-of-what-job-that-is’; usually, it involves some kind of manual labour.

So, we end up unwittingly disparaging some types of work as inherently unworthy. And it leads to disrespect for people who make a living from such work as having failed in life because of the lack of talent and effort.

Now, even when the government takes active steps to expand our notions of excellence, such as through the Direct School Admissions route for people to be admitted to secondary school on the basis of sports, leadership qualities, and so on, there is a “parentocracy”.

What’s a “parentocracy”? It is a proactive, interventionist parenting culture that dominates in a society that drives children back into a new rat race with new trophies to be won.

Now, instead of just having supplementary private tuition, parents will really pile their efforts into giving enrichment classes so that children who are not doing well academically can still get into the elite schools on the Direct School Admissions path.

Now, “elite schools” – that got a woman into jail last week.

So it will take a while to correct our besottedness with success.

Narratives for Marriage and Family

Now, I move on to marriage and family. Marriage and family serve the goods of sociability and life, which includes the transmission of life through procreation.

Governments can use laws and policies to encourage marriage and the formation of family units by subsidies and incentives for housing, healthcare, education, infant care, childcare, parental leave.

Right now, this is the approach as marriage rates are dipping and Singapore has one of the lowest total fertility rates. (I humbly confess my contribution to such statistics.)

Governments can also be anti-natalist, against childbirth, as was the situation in years of nation-building.

In the past, there was rapid population growth. This threatened the economy, because there was great demand for jobs that didn’t exist and there was a great demand for the social infrastructure. The economic gains that the nation made had also to be shared among more people if the population growth was rapid.

Whatever the good intentions of the governments are, some of the old policies were criticised for being elitist or even eugenicist. It’s worth looking at this because an instrumentalist view of persons may have lodged in the Singaporean psyche, leading to such a narrow mindset of success that we now have and cannot break free of.

Overall, I think that these policies gave rise to a sense that the worth of persons is not intrinsic. The worth of persons is not by virtue of our humanity, but by virtue of our contribution to the economy. So, from the start, the State’s thinking about family was at least partially driven by economics.

There’s the Two-child Policy introduced in 1972, and there were anti-natalist, anti-childbirth disincentives for having more than two children.

Abortion was liberally permitted, and voluntary sterilisation grounds were liberalised.

Anti-childbirth rhetoric was directed especially at those without the means to raise children, perhaps creating a hurtful impression that the nation does not want these kinds of kids who will lower the quality of the population.

Founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew also expressed that 80% of how well you do depends on nature and only 20% on nurture.

Then there was, of course, the infamous Graduate Mothers’ Scheme, which offered priority for primary school registration and tax deductions for your third child and above if you’re a graduate mother. Accompanying this was the hurtful scheme that offered an incentive of $10,000 for low wage uneducated persons who underwent sterilisation. So, that kind of message is sent.

Now, this was in 1984 and 1984, of course, is the title of George Orwell’s dystopian novel.

But in 1984, a lot of things happened in Singapore: the Graduate Mother Scheme, the Gifted Education Programme.

This was the year that then-Deputy Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong promised the “Swiss standards of living”, and it was also the year that SDU (Social Development Unit) was set up for lucky graduates to be match made.

Later years saw other units being set up, Social Development Section for ‘O’ level holders and Social Promotion Section for those without secondary school education; this kind of categorisation, of course leading to a further sense of elitism.

Now today we still want economic growth, but we need more babies and now we have to turn pro-natalist. But where are we on the subject of marriage and family? Can we suddenly turn pro-natalist?

Can individuals, raised on an ethos of pragmatism and the celebration of narrow success, embrace the life goal of big families with resources spread thin?

Now, the sales pitch for more marriages and children is empty, unless people understand the intrinsic worth of the community of the family, that it is an aspect of human flourishing.

At this stage, we should be careful not to instrumentalise the family as merely an important institution for the transmission of values for a stable continuity of the State or children as just digits who add to the total fertility rate for population replacement. A root and branch overhaul of the understanding of the place of marriage and family and human flourishing is necessary.

How should this narrative be crafted?

Finnis’s flourishing was actually built on Aquinas’s view. Aquinas saw humans as a social animal. This goes beyond the Aristotelian idea of human as a political animal.

Aquinas recognises many primary units of association coordinated by the larger association, which is the State.

The individual is central, but so is a plurality of human communities; that means many, many communities, and they are all necessary. And this includes the family unit. It includes other relationships such as kinship, friendship. They are all indispensable to human flourishing.

So what is community actually? Do we understand what is community in this digital world?

Community is actually an ongoing sharing of life, of action, of interests. It’s doing life essentially – through associating and coming together.

What unifies us is our wanting to share our life, our action and our interest. In the community of the family, the good of sociability is actualised, just as is also actualised in other tiny communities, such as friendship between two friends.

Now, these different relationships constitute basic aspects of each individual’s well-being, and the essence lies in going beyond self-centredness to caring for the well-being of another person.

Each individual is never absorbed by any community, not even in marriage. They are enabled in their individual growth and can in turn engage voluntarily in self-giving, which is to partake of the good of sociability. So, in caring for another person, for example, and committing to marriage, individuals essentially undertake to mutual caring until death. Spouses are committed to the good of sociability with respect to each other, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in health or sickness. So that’s a wonderful bond.

Now, foundationally, the government’s narrative for family and marriage in Singapore should be rooted in the indispensability of the family as a community that is vital – that is vital to human flourishing.

Indeed, it is the very first community if you think about it. The family is the very first community in which most of us find ourselves. As the first community, it’s also practically indispensable.

Younger members of the community – that is, children – need help to develop and grow. But those who help them are also self-actualising and flourishing, finding their character being shaped, discovering new aspects of themselves in self-giving acts of love.

In such a vision of the plurality of communities – meaning many communities, many different types of communities that enable flourishing – even those that are not married can participate in the lives of families to friendships and other relationships, just as those who are married can also participate in the lives of single friends and other families.

Now, in an optimal society in which families are not selfish and cloistered – because they have now laid down meaningless competition, meaningless amassing and meaningless achieving for their own family to hit the mark of what counts as narrow success – they can welcome others into the family.

They have space in their hearts, a heart that is now free from slavery to success. They can love and care for those outside from an abundance within.

Family becomes a secure base, a secure base from which love can overflow to everyone else. Less-endowed and less-equipped families can actually be helped with finances, through befriending, through fostering, through respite care. More things are shared, more time is shared. It’s presumptuous to think that those who are not financially well-off cannot have abundance.

My Mom was always generous, even when we didn’t have much.

I think a person who is not enslaved by a narrow mindset of success is ready to be generous. We have enough heart space for relating because we are living in abundance, not in enslavement, not in shortage, not in enslavement to success.

So, in this kind of optimality of human flourishing, we are ready to recognise that there is a friend who sticks closer than a sibling.

Also, the next generation does not exist for population replacement. What kind of an empty sales pitch is that, if you tell someone to have give birth because you need to help population replacement?

All human lives have inherent worth. Individuals rejoice either to be the vessels to bring new lives into being within marriage, or to participate in the raising of the next generation, directly through interactions with the young or indirectly by friendships with families.

The narrative based on human flourishing values the individual as the ultimate end and paradoxically poises the State to continue into a successful future.

How to Move from Success to Flourishing

So, I conclude now, talking about success, how to move from success to flourishing,

And I want to say that our enchantment of success was fostered in earlier decades of nation-building, given the national narrative about the nation’s precarious place in the world and the aims of securing rapid economic growth and a stable society. The government then made certain choices to curb population growth, to develop certain industries, to implement a meritocratic system, to invest in the best and brightest, and so on.

Strategies were executed by a very efficient government, alongside the instillation in the population of a culture of contributing to the economy, of being productive.

Now, the considerations for whether to embark on a certain course of action often tended to be pragmatic: Is it likely to produce rapid economic growth and stability?

But what works, such as meritocracy, now lands us in socio-economic stratification, and it lands us in emptiness.

Take it that we have been awakened from the Singapore Dream. We can be free from the intoxicating effects as well as the toxicity of success.

I end with some hard questions and propose some attitudinal shifts.

First, be careful in the narrative not to make it sound like economy is what truly matters. That would be inverting the means and the ends. The economy is merely the means. The individual flourishing is the end.

Second, we all know the economy is meant to serve quality of life. But what exactly is quality of life? Flourishing life is true abundance. Material success is not.

The third is this: forget about rehabilitating the notion of success. We keep thinking that the opposite of success is failure. Hence, we keep wanting to hang on to saying that we are successful – just on our own different terms.

What if the alternative to success is eudaimonia, a richer and more abundant life of flourishing? If so, someone who rejects chasing success in a narrow sense is not going to be lazy, is not going to live the life of a wastrel.

Rather, one who chooses to live – counter-culturally – an examined life, and pursue flourishing, does so living a fulfilled life, inspires others and also contributes to the common good.

So, finally, how rapidly is the economy to grow, and how much is enough?

If we truly understand that it is merely a condition for human flourishing, what moral principles and what of human relations are we willing to sacrifice for rapid economic growth, or to maintain a certain GDP (Gross Domestic Product)?

Values in a nation, like those at home, are not taught, but caught. Did a nation’s pragmatism and pursuit of economic success lodge in the Singaporean psyche, leading to the worship of narrow success that now enslaves and takes its toll on the next generation and makes us devalue human relations?

Today, you can choose from where you are, and it begins with you. You can declare that you want to be set free from an identity that depends on success. Success is a hard master. The culture of competition, of living a rat race, of constant comparison, can end today.

What has been lodged in the psyche over decades may take time to undo, but it begins with a first step, like it did for me when I was first year student in law school and made a decision not to look around me to see how others were faring. I just wanted to decide my own path.

The idea that Singaporeans can flourish as an alternative to narrow success opens a new vista. Laws and policies that facilitate flourishing and a narrative that supports flourishing will bring the nation into a sustainable future on a new ethos, because it respects individuals for who we truly are – persons who desire to flourish in our unique talents and personalities, and when properly supported and guided by the State in doing so, naturally contribute to society; indeed, persons of intrinsic worth, regardless of whether we measure up to society’s sometimes brutal metric of success.

Thank you.

(Note: The views expressed in this article are the speaker’s own, and may not necessarily reflect the views of Cultivate SG.)