The Intellectual Legacy of Goh Keng Swee - Dr Ooi Kee Beng

Ooi Kee Beng is a political historian, writer, and executive director of Penang Institute. He has been studying the process of nation-building in Asia.

He is also the author of Dr Goh Keng Swee's Intellectual Biography- In Lieu of Ideology.

In this podcast, we talk about the ideas behind Singapore's founding economic architect and how his core ideas came to shape Singapore.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 - Trailer & Introduction
01:21 Why Read History
03:52 Goh Keng Swee vs. Lee Kuan Yew
09:10 The Leaders As Nation Builders
11:10 Avoiding Corruption
16:42 Why Singapore Was A Social Revolution
21:45 Where Goh Keng Swee Diverged In Economics
23:38 Why Western Hippie Culture Didn't Take Root Here
26:42 Geopolitical Dynamics and Historical Awareness
29:45 Export-Oriented Industrialization vs. Import Substitution
35:25 The Role of Institutions in Nation Building
36:42 Could Merger Have Worked
38:54 The Political Economy of Singapore
42:28 The Importance of a Common Market
43:54 Ideology vs. Pragmatism in Leadership
46:15 Defining 'Socialism That Works'
50:24 Singapore's State Building Efforts
52:37 Ensuring A Rule Of Law
55:45 Creating A National Identity
59:07 Building a National Economy
01:01:17 Harsh Reality of Raw Power
01:02:09 Lessons from Dr. Goh's Leadership
01:05:06 Book Recommendations
01:07:54 Advice For A Fresh Graduate Entering The Working World

Transcript

Keith 00:01:21

Why should people read history?

Prof Ooi 00:01:26

Whenever you meet somebody you don't know the person until you get some background about him - that's history also, biographical if you like. I find if you don't have a love for history, you probably are missing out on very important insights about any subject you're looking at.

Let's say you want to talk about the EU. If you don't know actually Europe's history itself, you don't quite know what the point with the EU being so hurried is all about. And so anything at all - ASEAN or let's take Singapore, right? You have to know what the various takes on Singapore's history actually are. It could be Lee Kuan Yew's, it could be somebody else's, but you need to know that these are how people have analyzed.

So not to be curious about how others have analyzed whatever you want to know before you would be rather silly, right? Why are you tying your hands up like that? And you'll probably otherwise be having opinions that are rather standard. History gives you the ability to analyze. If you don't know all the details from history, you probably will be rather glib. You'll be repeating things that your crowd, your peers probably already know. That's one quick answer to that.

But to me, history is everything. I sometimes have trouble talking to professional historians in that they strangely enough tend to think of history as studying the past. I seem not able to do that. I see history in the here and now. When I look at you I think where does he live? Where's he studied? Is he this? Is he that? I don't know. All these things can be relevant so that I know what I'm looking at.

I think that applies to all areas of knowledge, really.

Keith 00:03:27

On that note, you wrote an intellectual biography of Dr. Goh Keng Swee. One of the burning questions that I've been trying to answer in my study of the work of the founding leaders is I was trying to figure out what each brought to the table that the others did not have. So to put the question glibly I guess is what did Goh Keng Swee have that Lee Kuan Yew didn't?

Prof Ooi 00:03:57

What I think is incredibly interesting is how the two came together at the time that was so vital to this island and they complemented each other tremendously I think. But of course there's also somewhat to answer like that. But I think they're very different people. I haven't studied Lee Kuan Yew the way I studied Goh Keng Swee through reading his books, which to me was the only way left to get into the man's head as it were. Nobody can get into someone's head totally, but he was known to always be a serious thinker, serious writer. He did nothing that was not serious as it were.

But there were many things about him. He was not a politician. I think he was actually more technocratic as a leader than a politician. I think while Lee Kuan Yew for all his strength was more a political leader, Goh Keng Swee I think - listening to those I've talked to who knew him - was not that type. He was the one who wants to get things done, build institutions rather holistic. I'm sure Lee Kuan Yew was holistic as well but more from a political angle - how to maintain power and stability of power for things to happen. In that context he had Goh Keng Swee who taught up many of these institutions and knew why they were needed and how they were to be interconnected.

So I was surprised that coming from outside not knowing Singapore until I came here in 2004, that many of the institutions I was learning to know about - it could be EDB, HDB, whatever - all started with him in one way or another. Either he started them or in the case of the CPF he transformed it so that it became a very strong pillar within the Singapore scheme of nation building.

Now how lucky can you get a country to certainly have someone like that who thought that way and working with Lee Kuan Yew who could always provide that continuity in political stability. I suppose that's always needed if you're going to build things, right? We could immediately connect that to China and how China in the last 20, 30 years could grow that quickly. In China's case at least you can't deny the fact that the political stability that they managed to maintain the last 30 years was necessary. If you were dealing too much with political fights all the time, you can't possibly think on nation building itself.

But in your question about these two men, I suppose one covered certain ground and the other covered others. If you look at Lee Kuan Yew's history as minister - he was economic minister, he was defense, he was education. So he was sort of covering all grounds and probably I'm sure could see that he could use this man anywhere. Not that he was always ordering Goh. I think Goh was his own man and would go wherever he thought was necessary. He went with defense in '65 because that was what was needed. So he left what he thought was always important - economic growth - and suddenly with sudden independence he went straight into defense because that's necessary.

So I can see moving ahead - perhaps you haven't asked me such questions - but the connection between economics and defense was always on his mind. If you read some of his early writings before he became a minister - I mean this is when he was still a school boy during the second world war - he already wrote a piece on how Malaya and Singapore should contribute to the defense of England during the beginning of the second world war for example. So I think that connection never left him.

We do say today and many older Singaporeans would say that Goh Keng Swee could be understood as the man who always talked about the primacy of economics. But then I think if you read all his stuff and I think the book also makes it clear - my book there - it wasn't everything. He was a holistic thinker. But economics you must get right. But don't forget it's not all economics. Human life is not only economics, right?

And I think I have a chapter or two in the book about it. I call it the human element. That part of him gets forgotten even by Singaporeans, older ones, that it wasn't all economics. He started many things that were not purely economics - the bird park, all sorts of things, the Singapore Philharmonic.

Keith 00:09:09

As S. Rajaratnam made the assertion or he quipped that Lee Kuan Yew was like the visionary and then Goh was like the top civil servant and then he was the ideas man. That was his kind of description. How much weight do you give to that?

Prof Ooi 00:09:29

Probably I would see them as equal on many scores and that they knew that they had to get along. They probably did quite easily. Not always. I hear from some of the interviews that well someone said Goh is the only man who can scold Lee Kuan Yew in public and I have colleagues who actually were present when that happened.

And I suppose Lee Kuan Yew trusted this man especially in the early days as an equal in many ways - not as a politician but as a nation builder. Definitely I doubt that Goh Keng Swee had to always ask for permission to do things. I think whatever he needed to do he would do and Lee Kuan Yew would be smart enough to just go along.

Or let's say the founding of the Pyramid Club - that I think that was a Goh Keng Swee idea that he learned from having lived in England. He noticed that England actually had all sorts of clubs where leaders would get together and knew about each other. And he thought in a society like Singapore - and I could say it's the same in Penang - you have all sorts of decision makers who don't really get along or don't know about each other. There's something about this diaspora culture where you're quite separated. So given that inherited situation you want to build a country, you better get all your top people, all the decision makers, all those with assets and power and so on to know each other, to get them on the same page and to know that we are building a country here. This is fate has given us this so we better get it right. Failure wasn't an option if I put it that way.

Keith 00:11:14

It seems to me that an institution like this, it would engender itself to corruption, right? Like you would see this as some form of backroom dealing. There's all kinds of weird incentives. There's this quote, I'm not sure by who, but it was this idea that when rich people gather or rich people of the same profession gather, they always end up colluding. So I guess the question was like why did he - how did he avoid the trappings of corruption which was something that he saw was happening a lot in the region? And he wasn't just against it philosophically as a moral argument but he was also against it because he thought it affected economic efficiency as well.

Prof Ooi 00:12:01

The PAP leadership I suppose if I use a more collective term - these were very smart people. These people knew the world. These people probably knew human character well and so on. You're going to build something you're going to - all Asian societies or most societies if not all societies have that problem, right? Even Sweden, you do have the issue of corruption.

And the first issue is corruption. How do you define it? And in the Asian context, I think we've always had that problem. We tend to think of corruption as we understand it to be defined by the west in some ways without consideration for - you're right. What you mentioned - the culture has something to do with it, right?

But building a nation state is a new project. It's not just repairing something. That I think is one important point I picked up writing about Goh Keng Swee. He was very concerned about social revolutions, right? And he would I'm sure think of the nation building of Singapore as a social revolution. You have to change people. You can't have them thinking the old way and then you have a new phenomenon coming out of that. That's not possible. It's a social revolution.

So I think the nation builders of Singapore in the first decades knew this. They had to change the people and if you have too much of the traditional ways of doing things which would involve a lot of superstitions and so on, but you're going to build a country that's going to compete with the rest of the world and survive, you have to be totally clear about what kind of society you're building and what are the weaknesses in that society and so on.

And I'm sure in certain areas some things gets overdone, some things are not properly done and so on. And I tend to think over the generations that come one can't keep blaming the first generation because they did - in their situation they did what they thought they had to do. It's actually up to later generations in a new context, including the context of the first generation having succeeded also bring certain challenges. It's up to them to nation build as well. You can't always just follow the solutions taught up by the first generation. Their solutions was to problems that they probably solved already. You know what I mean?

It's that I think. So I tend to think sometimes later generations take a shortcut and that it's all done. I just ride along but you have new problems. And you have to think anew and it is in that context I think books like the one I wrote on Goh becomes important. You have to get to the nitty-gritty of why he was thinking like that and where he failed, where he did not fail and how he connected institutions and so on.

That was one thing and now I've looked into nation building for a long time now while when I was studying in Stockholm University. Building institutions is one thing - that's quite easy. It's almost standard. But how are they connected? How do they synergize? And I think if you look at Singapore, it's very well synergized the institutions and so on. And of course, some would say because it's a small place, but nevertheless, you needed people who could build institutions that were not separate from each other.

You can't have a military that's totally different from society. You can't have a housing program that doesn't tie in with other things - it could be in Singapore's case maybe ethnic distribution, education you have to have the schools in the right place. And it's a small society so isn't there a limit to how many brilliant people you're going to get? All those things had to come in so I think they were able to think in a rather holistic and pragmatic if I may use that overused word - they had to think that way.

And that's why I call the book "In Lieu of Ideology" - that's another way of almost saying pragmatic. Pragmatic is too vague a word I think, but being a practical person, that was what I meant with in lieu of ideology. So he was a practical, very educated person, very insightful about anything about economics and so on so forth.

One thing that surprised me because I had translated the Sun Tzu's Art of War in Sweden before I came back to find that that was one of his favorite books, right? And so you know, a new situation requires new thinking practically all the time, I would say, right?

There will be stories about when he was building the SAF, the armed forces, and if I don't know if most Singaporeans might have forgotten this but the first two years or so of Singapore's existence, the only armies on the island were the Malayan army and the British army. There was no Singapore army. So very quickly you had to build an armed forces. So national service and you get help from outside to very quickly put something into place and so on. That sense of purpose I find extremely commendable in these early leaders.

Now if I may tangentially perhaps mention something about why I'm interested in these people. I was born in 1955. I think the tail end of independence coming to the region and so on. And I was always fascinated by those of the early generation, the one before me. I saw myself as the tail end of that generation who - you're born and you're the most educated in your society in what was going to become a postcolonial society who's going to build the next country, next society. And there are very few of you. And what does that do to those people like you and so on? They could see their fate.

And so this sense of nation building. They're building a new world basically. They're part of a social revolution that is going to be political in nature but basically a social revolution. So that's why I like to write biographies about them to see how this sense of purpose - I mean, working in Singapore, I've had bosses here who still had that, right? Which amazed me. I mean, fascinated me greatly. But the whole purpose is Singapore, Singapore, Singapore. Singapore must succeed. That sense of purpose I find interesting and it's something given to a certain generation.

Keith 00:19:16

He spoke to Professor Wang Gungwu and one of the comments he made to me which I find fascinating was that he said that the idea of a nation state is such a modern concept and most of us still don't really understand what that means especially even in a country like Singapore. I think till today although there are a lot of kind of emphasis on different national values that seem trite and maybe some people say overplayed, but if you were to really look at historical kind of lens. If you take a historical lens, this is a very artificial construct, right? Like Singapore as a country is a very artificial construct.

Prof Ooi 00:19:54

I'm glad you bring that up now. When I'm back in Penang and working with politicians and looking more closely now at how Malaysia functions, I do get that sense that Wang Gungwu talks about greatly. The cultural concepts are still there. The ancient cultural concepts are still with us much less in Singapore than in Malaysia, I would think. And they could be very basic concepts like economics. Everyone seems to think they know what they're saying when they say national economics or even politics or even nation state.

And back to what you were asking your first question about history. If you're not curious about history and especially history of concepts, you wouldn't know what is meant by this thing being new because this is all you know. So what is it that wasn't this?

The idea of the nation state as you know came out of Europe where it's a sort of agreement that there is no no man's land. Every inch belongs to somebody. There's a clear border that is your responsibility on that side. This is mine. That wasn't the case around here, right? Our idea from what I understand, let's say the Malay polity, the raja, the sultan controlled areas where he had subjects. He didn't control land, he controlled subjects. So that is the line if I understand it correctly.

And economics as we know is quite a modern subject to the extent that when we think back about pre-economic analysis we wonder how societies functioned when they didn't have economies all over the place and statistics and charts and right but of course it functioned too. And so the culture that comes out of a place that modern times where economics - Adam Smith or whoever that way of thinking has come in - we think in terms of profits and whatever. We didn't always do this.

And if you think of Marx say who assumes that the capitalist wants to maximize profit - that's the capitalist. But then when we look at Asian societies, there are many that's not what they want. They just want to be able to make a living. They don't want their company to aim to become Microsoft or something, right? There are different ways of understanding economics.

So that's one thing again with Goh Keng Swee. He was a great economist and so on, but he didn't always like developmental economist because they simplified the human condition too much. Things like that, you know.

So if you're not interested in the history of words in history of very basic words, you're just not going to be able to analyze what you have what you have been born into that you should perhaps be critical about.

Keith 00:23:03

One of the themes that I've picked up in his thinking, and I think you pointed it out, was that he thought that many so-called experts in reality lacked concrete knowledge about Singapore and relied instead on abstractions and generic ethical positions to generate arguments. Often, local intellectuals would adopt attitudes from foreigners whose theoretical insights were incongruent to Singapore's situation. Could you give me a sense of like were there any examples that stood to you in which you said that well this is a very clear example of his original thinking?

Prof Ooi 00:23:42

I tried to reread the book the last two days for this podcast. I suppose one thing I could think of was what he discussed about the hippie attitudes and so on. But in that he saw it as something that Singapore couldn't afford to cultivate in or to have in Singapore. But at the same time he said it's rather superficial - those who are attracted to it are attracted to it only in the frills as it were and they lack the wish or the knowledge to see the hippie movement in the west as a historically based reaction to western life.

So you sort of import the maybe the long hair, the taking of drugs and so on which meant something as a protest of some kind in the west but means practically nothing here. It's just - that would be I don't know if that's a good example but I've lived a long time in the west and so on. And you do see there's so many things that we superficially accept.

So there is a power of discourse as it were - global discourse is something that pumps up. So you couldn't really think for yourself because you're being pumped with new with the same ideas all the time. And be this is all before social media. If you throw social media in, we're all in our own little bubbles. Those bubbles are connected, no doubt. But we don't have the luxury - very most of us don't have the luxury of having the time to analyze all the things that are hitting us. You have to be someone as ingenious as Goh Keng Swee or Lee Kuan Yew to be critical and analytical of all the concepts that you are drowning in as it were.

Again back to what you need in order to resist this is actually a strong sense of history. If you don't have that you float with this stream of ideas that are being thrown at you.

And in the end you sense that there are powers behind this that are flooding you with a certain idea right now today when the geopolitical situation is so mixed up. If I may jump ahead a bit and we really need to rethink our situation. And now that I was seeing some mass media thing about how Singapore won't last and so on, right? All those to me are just signs that in the present moment we are being we are in a very uncertain time, right? globally as we know.

And for me anyway who loves history I noticed that many of the new generation don't seem to think of the formation of Singapore and Malaysia and so on as products of geopolitical conflicts. We somehow think we're essentially necessary - Singapore is somehow essentially needed, Malaya is essentially needed, Malaysia is essentially needed - but these are all geopolitical contingencies and that keeps going.

So we shouldn't be so surprised that suddenly the geopolitics change but it has always changed but because our individual lives might be too short for to really see the span of historical changes and that's maybe my better answer to your first question. Why history is important is that when for one person you have a certain time span, a certain attention to certain things because you're born at the time you're born and you're going to die at a certain time.

But human life and anything nature and so on they have spans, right? And some of the spans go for thousands of years, some are hundreds of years. Then if you don't study history you don't get the sense that you are caught in a lot of dynamics - dynamics that might not matter to you as a person in one life, but you're caught in it. Depending on when you're born, you're caught in it. And so, you want to know what collection of dynamics you are caught in. That would be my answer to why history is important. You have to know what you're in historically.

You know, someone born in Gaza 3 years ago is going to have a terrible life compared to you born a few decades ago in Singapore. Now, those are the obvious ones, but then there are so many dynamics that go on forever in human history. So, let's say China rising, suddenly we're talking about the 5,000 years of Chinese history. That's why you can't destroy it and so on so forth, right? And that's there's something to it. And why colonialism from the west? What was pushing them? So you have to look at the history of Europe itself what was - and especially northern Europe, right? Why this expansion and then you might get to know that oceanic travel is something very new and it changed the world because it came otherwise you just take it as something given.

Keith 00:29:20

There is a sense that Dr. Goh had this like sense of history from your writing and from a study of his life is that he had a sense of like knowing how to zoom out and also to not blindly follow what was invoked. One example I think about quickly was and I think you detail or talk about this was the kind of allure of doing import substitute industrialization and from the start right he was very stridently against it in the sense of this is not only maybe impractical but it could set up a lot of path dependencies that Singapore should avoid. Can you talk a little bit more about like why he chose to kind of put Singapore on that path of export-oriented industrialization?

Prof Ooi 00:30:11

Well, first I would say that for an economist, he thought very much like a historian or a sociologist even, right? And if you compare Singapore how the path Singapore took and you compare it to countries around who are bigger and therefore maybe prone more to those ways of acting which is rather defensive, territorially defensive. And when you're territorially defensive, you're probably going to think about how to save your culture. And then you very quickly try to define what that culture is that you're trying to save.

And then your sense of economics wouldn't be like Goh Keng Swee's. He's a graduate from LSE right? You're probably thinking of basing yourself on what you actually see so you see imports of English goods and you find that your people are not producing this maybe that's not so good maybe we should produce that superficial way of thinking about economics. So you start - you would go quite naturally into import substitution. Let's stop buying Milo from England. Let's make our own Milo and so on. But it took a long time for England to be able to send Milo to you at this low price and they control the whole market of the world and so on so forth. So you can't just take over like that.

Now, I think what made Singapore different partly the leaders as well of course but maybe the size itself and the history of Singapore being a port for the British and so on to play in international trade is what you have to keep doing. Now not all countries did that. They tended to isolate. They wanted to protect their not only their economy but their culture whatever that might be.

Now that I think gave Singapore a push forward in that they were not going to be defensive in that sense. If you're a small island, maybe your defense is quite a simple matter. You just create an army to make sure and control your borders and so on. But in the end, it's economics, right? And you are born out of the colonial system of the west. And now as they are falling due to their internal fights, it's a new situation. So how do you build for the future?

You still have to use the power that the west had created namely international trade. Now even what 60 years later we have to think of the - well I would like to say one of the strongest forces ever created by man ever is the system of international trade. It's so powerful that when the Soviet Union and Mao China under Marxist thinking tried to create their own they just failed. They couldn't - the western or Anglo-Saxon they were like inter Anglo-Saxon control international trading system was just way too strong and they can crush you in the end. You can't fight them too long.

And you can see why - my personal take on it is why China has succeeded so well they and at that level I think Singapore was a model how to build a country is you have to accept the fact that the Anglo-Saxon based world had created a global economic system that is so powerful you have to play along with it. And Singapore never went against that. You play along with it but you make sure that it works to your advantage.

And I think China after Mao saw that. It can't you can't fight this giant. You can be part of it and learn from it and so on and in the case of China when we talked about how institutions have to be integrated. I think for China, you're rebuilding an empire that had been totally crushed. And what was the logic for them to for institutions to rise that could support each other? You can't build them separate of each other.

I think some of the SOEs that the communist parties created, they didn't work well together. But if you have something already working rather well outside meaning the international trading system, you mirror that and you use that as the logic for institutions to grow in an integrated fashion. That's my simple way of putting it.

Now from there I would like to also say that we have to realize that when in many countries the nation builders that suddenly came in - it could be Tunku Rahman, it could be anybody - they're amateurs, they don't know what they're doing. So back to your question about the concepts that come in. They're not all brilliant scholars, you know, they just make do and of course once they make do, they make a lot of mistakes and those mistakes come to be the things we have to live with forever kind of thing. So it's up to the next generation to correct. We're better now. Next generation should be better at knowing what's gone wrong, what's gone right. And then, you know, it's an endless process.

And I think Singapore was blessed in that sense. Small but important. Its location was always important. That's why the British had it. And the first generation leaders of Singapore knew where the strengths were. You couldn't build your country as if it were Malaysia.

Now, if we, this is interesting, we'll have to since we're talking about Goh Keng Swee. He wasn't very keen on the merger with Malaysia unless it led to a common market for Singapore as an economy. You can't just join Malaysia and then become what - it must be to Singapore's advantage too. And that's why he was always during those two years fighting for a common market which his cousin apparently Tan Siew Sin was against. And so when things got really bad politically as well to split to go was a perfectly rational idea and then Singapore as an economy will build itself. And they succeeded. So it's like one of the amazing stories of modern times really.

Keith 00:36:46

One of the questions I had was about the common market that he was so fervent about - like that was kind of the central reason as to why he would do it. For someone like S. Rajaratnam like that was - he thought that it was historically like maybe I'm not using the right words here - but he thought that was inevitable that Singapore would merge in Malaysia partly because I think Rajaratnam himself was born in Malaya. The question would then be could there have been actually an alternative path or another version of history where the common market was actually practical or was it just structural constraints that made it impossible for this common market to manifest itself?

Prof Ooi 00:37:31

I think if our nation building had been - had Malaysia especially was not a nation-based but a state-based economy based concept - it could have worked. I think what would have concerned Goh Keng Swee was Singapore wasn't just swamps when it became independent. It was already the most urban place around and modernity is urban whether we like to think so or not. I might be 10% wrong in that I think but largely and Singapore was it along with Penang and certain other places - not many modern cities around in the 50s - and so modernity modern economies run on urban mindsets and urban ways of organizing I think that's important.

So back to what I was saying that social revolution was always important to him. You have to look at the social revolution. So I think he's written here and there about - well one thing that's become controversial is that when you want to talk about modern Singapore it has to start with Raffles because Raffles coming was a social revolution, change the way people did things. That was what he meant by social revolution. In what way? It was the coming of modern ways of doing was the coming of international trade. It was coming of an empire that was going to control the seas. And Singapore was part of that project.

So in if I use the term political economy, right? So and if I latch on to Wang Gungwu's term national empires, we used to have empires which were based on a family. But the empires that the British and the Dutch started, they were not - they were nation states becoming empires, right? And so they deal with economics. So the political economy of England was what the colonizing of the world was about. I would put if I put it in simpler terms, right? So as England went out, they were building their political economy, their national political economy which takes the form of piracy at first and later colonialism and so on so forth.

And Singapore was part of that. So Singapore was part of the building of the English political economy. So when Singapore became independent, now Singapore has to make use of those processes that the dynamics that were going and transform them so that they support Singapore society itself, independent Singapore itself. So how can you turn the this fringe bit now of the English political economy into a local economy based on this the Republic of Singapore?

So you make use of whatever dynamics were playing to your advantage but you have to know this and you have also be to be clear that power had been exercised on you for quite a long time. So it still exercises power. Do you just fight it or do you make use of it? And I think Singapore went the right way now when we look back hard to deny it. They did not go against England on all fronts which many countries tended to do when they once they gain independence. You have to hate the colonialist. But of course the colonization of Singapore wasn't a violent one. We don't have this history of massacres by the British - by the Japanese yes. But not the British.

So the advantage of hating your colonial power wasn't really something that Singapore could make full use of because there there is no that kind of history. It wasn't relatively it wasn't that bad if you put it that way. I like to say I'm from Penang so I would like to say that my grandfather wouldn't have come to Penang if the British hadn't come first. So we have to think colonialism means different things, right? So the Straits Settlements as a colony isn't the same as the colony of India. So we have to be clear about that.

And I suppose in Malaysia part of the interethnic tensions that keeps going is part of that they because the migrant people if we call it that - they were urban and they when they came they were part of the modern economy. It could be mining, it could be the plantations and so on. They were all part of a global mindset of supply chains and so on. Urban again, urban and educated and and globally conscious - that's important. Singapore had loads of that in the first generation of leaders.

And the common market for Singapore - if you don't have a common market, you're probably going to be controlled from KL. That was important for the Singaporeans. I think we can from Singapore's side they will be thinking we can take part in the building of Malaysia but we can't be controlled by you and until today we still have this problem. How many states are there in Malaysia 13 or is it 3? It's a federation on a federation. It's a consociation or what do you call it confederation in some sense.

And that's why during those days Lee Kuan Yew was always prime minister he was not chief minister, right? That was very important to them that when Malaysia was formed, it was formed by four signatories, not Sabah and Sarawak are not like Penang and Malaya and and any other state. That thing was important and it has to do with the self-image of Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore. So they were joining with eyes wide open knowing that the greatest political power will probably be Kuala Lumpur. So we have to limit that.

And for Singapore, the most modern city around, you're thinking more in modern terms of a state being an economy.

Keith  00:44:00

It was very interesting as I read about the history of separation and merger - merger and separation was that the leaders were clearly very almost how do I say clinical or calculated in the way they understand Singapore's merger with Malaysia and eventual separation. I think for many of us younger Singaporeans growing up it was kind of seen as a historical inevitability like you know we tried and it failed and then therefore we're out. The more you read about it then you realize that actually they were very clear as to what their relationship was and I think you've pointed out to that and in a sense they captured a spirit of not being too captured by ideology which I think is not - I think it's less common than what people think would assume. I was quite surprised by how almost non-ideological Goh was.

Prof Ooi 00:44:58

Ideology is of course a big word and I like to - I tend to think nowadays that ideology is the shortcut. You might think certain things and then you say oh this is what Marx also taught and then you can let yourself be drawn into bigger pictures than you actually have proper knowledge about. It's a shortcut way of thinking and in a world when there are conflicts to be solved and so on people would fall into ideology and would - the way I think of religion as well I hope I don't offend anyone here - religion also is a shortcut where spiritual development is concerned just like ideology is a shortcut where you want to think of politics.

Now Goh Keng Swee was a much more confident and sharper thinker to ever have been an ideologue in that clear sense. You could in his writing that he's slightly socialist is slightly this and slightly that. He's making up his own mind. And if you're going to be a very practical person, you also have to be someone who studies your immediate surrounding and your immediate dynamics and the nature of people and so on so forth. That's how you would be if you were holistic.

Keith  00:46:15

You had all these isms that were floating around, right? Socialism, democratism. I mean Marxism, communism. He kind of saw these ideas as just concepts but they must work and he kind of famously championed the idea of a socialism that works. I guess the question would be like what does he mean by that? What does it mean to have a socialism that works? Because if you look at today maybe like a socialism that works is something like maybe the China model though this is a socialist model but Singapore's socialism or the PAP socialism back then were very different. So what do you mean by that?

Prof Ooi 00:46:56

You know back in those days if you were anti-colonial you would immediately be considered rather socialist. So those two were mixed. So it's not strange that all leaders from that time would be somewhat socialist - Fabian socialist or whatever.

But I think if you look at Singapore today, we think of Singapore as rather very capitalist financial hub and so on. But then you look at how Singapore society runs. There are many elements of what Americans might call clearly socialism.

The HDBs - you know in many contexts you do hear people say, "Well, Singaporeans live in social housing." Well, technically, yes. But have you seen some of these HDB flats? I mean, they're not what you think of as social housing in Europe 30 years ago or something. They're just houses built to put people in so they have a roof over their head. Of course, that was the problem for Singapore after the war. How do you house everyone and so on.

And of course again a sign of the holistic synergic way of thinking that the founding generation had was that you had to house people and then you could use that itself for other means. The usual one you hear about is that this was the way to make Singaporeans have a buy in. If you own something, if you never own anything, why would you bother?

The first chance you get, you go off somewhere else. But if you own something, you would then have a personal stake in the future of Singapore. That is another way of looking at what the HDB is worth. Of course, the most immediate one is you have to give houses to people.

But how do people buy these houses? How do you pay for them? From there Goh Keng Swee developed the CPF system that Singapore had inherited from the British into what you have today that you can actually use it as well for savings if you like but then those savings go into getting a house for an apartment for yourself. That kind of synergy is what I point to.

So that those clearly is socialist if you like because the state is coming in and building houses for you - subsidized price and so on - and then you have your hospital system subsidized, education subsidized today.

I tend to think that in if in the future the if the organizing of modernity and of human modern humanity continues in a peaceful way. You're bound to have social democratic thinking in how you organize, right? Because you're organizing from masses from poor to rich and so on. How do you organize all that without chaos breaking out? You have to have means of social democratic means of helping people. Like in Singapore's case, you have the highest home ownership in the world practically. And that gives you a stability that shouldn't be underrated.

That would be one example I think and a lot of subsidies. So I would if I put it this way, Singapore is very much into state building more than nation building. We use the words very loosely. I would introduce the term country building instead of nation or state building. Country building as the natural term and neutral term. Singapore is very much about state building. You have to create a very strong state and as that state gets created the organizing of society happens and then along the way if enough time goes by Singaporeans would have enough common experiences to start calling themselves Singaporeans because nobody else has this just you and me you know that kind of thing.

So it's state first and you build a state and the nation follows. In many other countries you define the nation and then the state project is how to help this prescribed nation. That would be the Malaysian model if you know what I mean. So the Malaysian model is nation state building in a even in a bad way. While the Singapore one is a state building that would supposed to lead to a nation over time.

Keith  00:51:27

When you look at Singapore's conscription policy back then when they first formulated it, they kind of noticed - he knew that you know the Chinese majority was very averse to taking up work in military because after all a lot of them the diaspora came here for trade not necessarily to serve in the military and public housing was seen as the way to like as you put it earlier to have that skin in the game and to kind of create that sense of like you have a home that you have that will be here. And it's really first the state right like you have that kind of capacity to defend yourself and then over time hopefully by your children's children's children because you've been doing this together for so long eventually you become you see each other as citizens because of this experience. Are there any other kind of like examples that come to your mind when you think about the way he adopts this holistic thinking in terms of building the state than the nation?

Prof Ooi 00:52:42

Well, the nation comes into being if there is if people realize the rule of law is for real - that you're more or less treated fairly. Well, I mean that's saying too much. No society ever has a population that totally feels they all freely fairly treated, right? But enough - there is rule of law. There's there is very little arbitrariness. That's important. That's why the corruption thing comes in. What corruption is in a way arbitrary. It favors certain people and not others. Certain people get a leg up. They jump the queue. They can influence rule of law and so on so forth. So if you minimize those possibilities, people feel it's a fair enough deal.

And you do hear the discussion today about how this generation now of Singaporeans now feel that their children might not have a better life than them. And they think of that as a problem because that's how they've been thinking for a few generations that you know my I didn't go to Harvard but my son will. But then they forget that after Harvard what's your grandson going to go something better than Harvard? You know somewhere the that whole rhetoric and that part of state building gets accomplished but you can't keep having the same logic for for something to happen.

I would think also why socialism does play a role - socialist thinking does play a role in nation building in the third world and Singapore. You see the influence of history here right? So if you know socialism or Marxism or whatever - there are ideologies that must then that brings in the whole of human history itself. In the case of communism it brings in the whole of human history. Socialism doesn't have to go that far. But if you know, you need to know what colonialism was in this part of the world, how it happened and so on. And why were ships suddenly so important? Why were traveling by sea so important and so on. Then you sort of if you're going to build a country, you have to know what all these forces are.

Again back to what I was saying earlier - this spans of time that go way beyond one person's lifespan has to come into the calculation. So someone brilliant like Goh Keng Swee would would be seeing all this. So to the extent he want to say he has socialist leanings is because well Singapore was a port - you have a lot of poor people and they need housing and they live in poor quarters and you know - I mean he was one of the first civil servants to ever do surveys on poverty in Singapore and so on. So that's interesting about him. So he's not just an economist, he's at most maybe you could say he's a socioeconomist if that helps but very much a sociologist - not your econometric.

Keith  00:55:50

He had this idea that the citizens have to be shaped - that a country or the government of a country must do its job to shape the beliefs the norms and the morale of its people. If you tell this to a westerner they think this is like propaganda or brainwashing to a certain extent but to him it's like it's necessary to do.

Prof Ooi 00:56:18

Yeah. I think westerners forgot that that happened to them too, right? Again, if without history, you are what you born in. And this has always been the case. But again, the social revolution idea, right? If you're going to build a new kind of society, which a new nation had to be, which Singapore in '65 had to be, you can't do it using old ingredients. You have to have a process that changes people and make them realize this is what we're doing. Are you in or out? This has to be done.

Now that need for new nations, I think is hampered by if you have too much democratic thinking from the start. If you're going with democratic thinking, how are you going to get the social revolution that the state needs to create? So nation building, we don't like to think like that. But nation building is an elitist undertaking. And that's what I meant again. When you have an elitist undertaking without experts, you're in trouble. You're just going to go back to whatever was.

I tend to think Malaysia has that problem of being a democracy where you did not have a proper social revolution. So, if it's about counting votes, you're going to fall back to the traditional way of thinking, traditional unity and not national unity. You'll have ethnic communal identities and interests that are not national ones. So that's what Malaysia suffers from and that's why we always rule by coalitions. Malaysia has never had a party with majority power.

Keith  00:58:14

It seems to me that you need some form of like Kuznets curve for democracy, right? Where like maybe at a certain level of education, income level, material standard of living, then it will make sense for you to kind of embrace democracy wholeheartedly. Whereas if you introduce that too early maybe before you have that kind of standard I suppose then you have then you tend to undo or unravel that national project.

Prof Ooi 00:58:45

But you do see the problem, right? It's a chicken and egg somehow. You need a new state that creates a new economy, a new national economy, a new sense of identity. Maybe that's one term we have to throw in here, the national economy, the building of a national economy. It's not about state and nation only. How do you build a national economy that keeps growing? And perhaps that's what one has to put in in a discussion about Goh Keng Swee. Not state, it's not nation, it's a national economy that provides stability in all directions.

In Singapore, I think it's easier to see that. But if you take a more complex society like Malaysia, building a national economy out of all the bits that went into making Malaysia, my god, you better know what you're doing. There are reasons why Malaysia is a federation because they are so different. What has Singapore got to do with Perlis? What has Penang got to do with Kelantan and so on. And out of all that you need to create a national economy, an integrated supply chain, integrated kind of society out of that.

That I think is not maybe looked at that way enough. You look at the state and the nation. But creating a national economy and in the case of Singapore, you did that knowing how the world works, if you put it that way, how the world economy works. I think that made the first leaders of Singapore less amateurish than in many other countries.

You will notice in other countries in Southeast Asia, the military always played a big role, right? In early - I mean even in definitely in Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia - because it's raw power. You start with raw power and then you try to build up from there. Singapore, Malaysia never had that because they're less amateurish perhaps, you know. They know what the game is. They understand the history and the dynamics that they're caught in. So you're not building in a vacuum. You're building in a world where the cold war was going on and the cold war couldn't be fought out as a hot war because it'll kill us all. It was fought by proxies and so on and you know and the rest of us go around saying we're balancing balancing balancing.

But maybe is it because also like in Singapore and Dr. Goh specifically and Lee Kuan Yew and the founding generation of leaders were very acute of that vulnerability.

Keith  01:01:26

I remember like Lee Kuan Yew himself said that like the Japanese occupation taught him more than any university education could.

Prof Ooi 01:01:32

Raw power, right? Raw power looks like this. You better know this. And maybe what's happening in in the USA under Trump is that the raw power is showing itself. You know before this we talked about soft power, American soft power. Okay. It's a good term but it does show it is still power. Soft doesn't make it something else. It's still power but when you have seen raw power I'm sure you come out a different man.

Keith  01:02:12

If you were to look at someone like Dr. Goh today, what are the kind of - what are the right lessons that not just Singaporeans perhaps an interested reader in history. What are the right lessons you should take away from him?

Prof Ooi 01:02:24

It's a tough one to answer, but I thought I should let Dr. Goh answer. May I read a little passage?

Keith  01:02:31

Yeah, please.

Prof Ooi 01:02:37

I thought that would be good instead of me trying to guess. Now this is a speech he made at Bukit Merah - the PAP branch there. This was - he was talking about cultural development here which is good to answer your question with because it's about how people should be and not very concrete state measures. So he's talking about how plays should be written and how plays should be acted out - theater plays.

Firstly, the themes of the play should be in keeping with the realistic life in Singapore and its multi-racial, multicultural and multi-religious spirit. Secondly, they must discard the crazy, sensual, ridiculous, boisterous and over materialistic style of the west. In the same way, the feudalistic, superstitious, ignorant and pessimistic ideas of the east are also undesirable. Thirdly, they must emphasize the spirit of patriotism, love for the people and for the sciences and cultivate diligence, courage, sense of responsibility and a positive philosophy of life. Fourthly, they must be free from crudeness in production, opportunism, monotony, vulgarity, copying and backwardness. Fifthly, they should provide noble, healthy and proper cultural entertainment for the people.

Now, this it's quite broad, right? But it does bring to the fore that people would see that Goh Keng Swee wasn't just about economics. One would say is economic the end or is it building a sound society the end? I think why I picked this passage is that you can see economics is not the end goal. You need it - you need it to function but there is a purpose to this and it is not too much emphasis on education itself. It shouldn't be too much emphasis on material gains and so on. It's about a healthy, happy, vibrant, confident. I would put the stress on confident society.

And maybe the challenges for the Singapore of today is actually to relook at what the goals once were thought out for us for Singaporeans and see where certain things haven't really worked out, and then with history, you will see why they didn't work out and but it was still necessary to do it that way and with the risk and the risk is always real that you overshoot. And then the next generation have to say we overshot. We better correct this instead of trying to be defensive about everything that has gone before.

Again important with history at that level. You have to know why we are in our situation. Use economics as a tool which is I think what he was known for - the practical economics where it's more about using as a way to serve an end which is a better life, more successful Singapore.

Yeah. I think every parent would know that you always overdo it with your kids, right? You over control them. You give them too much freedom. But at that point, you had to do it like that. And you don't always stop at the right time.

Keith  01:06:05

I have two more questions for you. What is one book that everyone must read in their lifetime?

Prof Ooi 01:06:12

It's hard for me to narrow down to one book. But if I have to, in the end two books if you don't mind. I like the Sun Tzu's Art of War. I think - don't think of it just as military battle, but it does tell you a lot about about being pragmatic, about being about thinking on your feet, about shifting to shifting situations and so on. I like that book, but maybe it's for more mature people to read. I don't know. But I always like that - it did change my way of thinking a lot when I translated it.

The second one, well, I'm a philosopher. I love language philosophy. So, Ludwig Wittgenstein was always a thinker I thought was mind-blowing. His book, Philosophical Investigations, his second book, I think everyone should read it, but it's a book that most people wouldn't even think of reading, but it's - I mean, if you ask me, I think those two books affected me greatly.

But beyond books you know talking to smart people who are around you I find something not to be underrated. I mean it's not about knowledge alone - it's about learning how to think. You know when you read a book it's not just knowledge not just facts you're learning - it's the processes. How did this guy get to this point? How does he respond to this question? It's how the brain works. So, if you know of someone who's really smart, reading his book is one thing, but you want to talk to the person - interview and see how he responds to questions. You get a sense of how his brain - why is his brain sharper than mine. It's a technique. I think a lot of thinking is technique.

Now, I'm not saying that some brains are not born better than others. I don't know that. But just like building muscles and so on, a lot are techniques that one should learn from the masters. I think we mentioned Wang Gungwu - I think discussing things and asking him questions has taught me a lot is one thing but it's sort of upgraded my mind if you like.

And I think it's not only Wang Gungwu - throughout my life I think I've met people who who think in ways that I thought wow how did he get there and then you get to know the guy and then after a while you sort have picked up the technique. Oh, this is how you strengthen your brain and how you - those are important lessons I think.

Keith  01:08:52

Last question. One piece of advice for fresh graduate entering the working world.

Prof Ooi 01:09:04

I mean I run the Penang Institute - the think tank out there. It's one of the things we think about - AI, we immediately think of AI and jobs, right? But I think AI and the knowledge industry is a big thing. Knowledge industry would include education, consultancy, think tanks. How are we all going to be affected by it and being a father of three children, two of them just finishing university, I push them all into humanities. I encourage them to at least know humanity as human. So could be history, philosophy, geography. Those things I find they teach you how to think more than know things.

And if the AI is going to know everything except the analytical - I mean this is written about all over the place. And I don't know if it's the right thing to do for me and my for my children, but I can't think of anything else. Whatever they go on to do, they must know the humanities at some level. Because we are being mechanized, right? Machines are taking over. The Skynet is here. And AI is growing so fast. It's gone into videos. It's gone to - now that we now can't tell if a picture is should be believed or not.

So all the more reason for children to be to learn to be critical and to be critical - I mean I don't mean critical I mean critical minded. Don't take things for granted. Read things. Step back a bit. Look at the words being used. Look at who is telling you this.

Maybe I would like to end to for younger listeners - power I think we have to start studying properly what power is or what power are - it's all sorts of things. And I think people are not conscious enough anymore about that. I think during the cold war for all its faults when we had left and right and so on it allowed for people to be critical of everything but it's bipolar so it's not always that good.

But in our time, I think we should any word that you use, you should look twice at it. Who created this word? Who coined this word? And why is it always used by these people and not those people?

I think I don't know what else to tell young people, but be conscious of power.

Keith  01:11:41

With that, Dr. Ooi, thank you for coming on.

Prof Ooi 01:11:45

Thank you. Thank you, Keith.

Keith  01:11:49

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