Transcript of President Tharman Shanmugaratnam’s remarks at the Honour International Symposium Fireside Chat 2024

Mr Lim Siong Guan: Thank you again for giving us your time, being with us and helping us think through some of the important issues of the day. As we get into the topic of The Centre Can Hold, I'm just wondering, looking at the world, what are we learning from the way societies are evolving and becoming more polarised and fragmented internationally?

President Tharman: Well, first, thank you for inviting me, Siong Guan.

Your starting question, the polarisation that we see happening within societies and to a great extent globally as well - it's a very serious challenge. We're seeing, first, a long drift - a drift towards more pessimism, or the loss of optimism in one society after another, particularly in societies that have been relatively advanced.

It hasn't happened suddenly. It's been happening over a period of years. There's been that loss of optimism in the future, amongst individuals but also a loss of collective optimism - the belief in that capacity to progress, to overcome challenges, to find new solutions and to move up together. And with that loss of optimism has come a greater sense of differences between people. A greater sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them’.

If you look at the today’s advanced countries that emerged from World War Two, they did very well for at least three decades- in Europe, in the US. There was a period when there was a strong sense of ‘us’, that ‘we’ were going to be able to do this. Everyone was going to be able to complete high school. Many more people were going to college. Everyone would get good jobs, and the ordinary blue-collar jobs were regarded as very good jobs. There was just that strong sense of ‘us’.

We have seen an erosion of that sense, and a growing politics and social culture that revolves around differences, of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. And it's hardening. the differences are hardening. There's no natural mechanism for correcting this.

Democracy does not naturally breed a greater sense of togetherness; it can easily do the opposite. That’s not to say it is inherent in democracy, but there's no natural mechanism for correcting this sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them’.

And it doesn't help that we have an information space that is not only laissez-faire, but also readily allows for mistruths and misinformation to be not only propagated but to be self-sustaining - so people can live in their own realities, with their own facts, or even just their own insistence on denying facts. This, too, is a very serious problem now in many more democracies, both in the advanced world as well as in the developing world - the fact that there is no longer a common set of facts, a common basis for understanding, on which we then take different views as to what the solutions are, or even what the causes of the problem are.

But we need a common foundation of information and facts, and we need institutions for that. You need media institutions, but you also need to grow up and go through school and be part of a society where there is some respect for facts, upon which you can disagree when it comes to solutions.

So that doesn't help, because not only do you lack this natural corrective mechanism in politics, you also now have this problem, a very serious problem of information itself, and how information is received, being fragmented, which itself sustains the problem. The differences harden.

I'm answering your question in a very broad way. I'm not yet getting to how the centre can hold, but we have a problem. There is a problem in one democracy after another, and there's a problem internationally now with increased polarisation.

Mr Lim Siong Guan: Thank you. The question is whether there is some way to get out of the pessimism. To get out of pessimism requires this sense of commonality, this sense of solidarity, or this sense of a country being united by common purpose. And whether pessimism depends on that, or whether we are facing a world where people feel that they have discovered their secret formula for success and therefore just stick with the formula. But this formula now ends up in a different situation for us. So if we say the common first position has to be people being united behind a sense of common purpose or a common vision, what are some ways by which we can get this sense of commonality or solidarity?

President Tharman: I think it needs both institutions and social culture. The institutions are critical because they create the basis for common experience, the experiences that people go through. Schools are critical and how you organise schools, whether you organise them so that people of different backgrounds go to different schools, or whether they come together in the same schools, is really critical in any society.

Urban neighbourhoods and housing estates - do they involve segregation, or do they involve people living together across different income groups, broadly speaking, and different ethnic groups or cultures? Do neighbourhoods segregate people or keep a distance between them, or are they neighbourhoods which create the opportunities for interaction between people?

The workplace too is important, as an institution. Do you have open workplaces open to people of all backgrounds? What are the hiring practices of employers? Do employers look out for every talent, every ability, and see how they can meld a team together? Or do they hire based on social pedigree, or as in some countries, based on ethnicity?

These are very important institutional features, and we know what we need. We need institutions that give people common experiences and increase that connectedness between them.

But we also need the social culture. I believe a culture of respect is critical to breeding optimism and reducing the possibility of the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mindset. And I don't just mean respect in the sense of a respect for differences, respect for the fact that people are different from each other. I mean the respect for every effort, respect for every contribution. The respect for someone striving to be better, to develop a particular skill. The respect for the different merits within a meritocracy - the different merits within a broader concept of meritocracy.

Respect for what everyone brings to the table - that's a deeper form of respect than merely respecting differences and accepting that we are together in the same society. And that respect doesn't come naturally either. It has to be nurtured from young, nurtured through community organisations and activities, nurtured through the tone and substance of political and social leadership, in any society.

Respect is a very powerful motivator - for people to know that you're not on your own, and you're respected for who you are, what effort you're making, and what you're contributing. It's a very powerful motivator for individuals, but it is also what gives us collective pride, because it's when we respect everyone's contributions and efforts that we also take some pride in what's being achieved. Everyone feels the gust of wind when Yip Pin Xiu wins a gold, when Jeralyn wins a silver in the boccia competition. Everyone feels that gust of wind. It's not just admiration; we're not just admiring someone with an exceptional talent. There's collective pride.

This culture of respect is, in my view, very powerful. It has to go hand in hand with renewing and refreshing institutions, so as to provide the basis for people to have that connectedness with each other.

So the centre can hold - if we focus on the institutions that keep people close together and avoid distances from widening, and if we continually breed that culture of respect - not just respect for differences, but respect for every effort and what each person is trying to achieve, and taking collective pride in these different achievements.

Mr Lim Siong Guan: President, you know, when we talk about the culture of respect, we say this has to be nurtured. It's almost like a generational change that we have to address. I remember the first time we met you as a Board of Directors of Honour (Singapore). that you that you made the point about social sustainability and why everything goes back, as it were, most fundamentally to social sustainability. Why do you think social sustainability should be the fundamental pursuit?

President Tharman: Well, it's the foundation for everything we want to achieve. If you think of an economy - if you think of the economic vibrance and economic growth that all societies would like - an economy is really part of society.

You can think of it either in terms of businesses making investments and looking for people to hire, or you can think of it in terms of how you provide opportunities for everyone.

Those two things go hand in hand. You need the businesses to grow, to invest, to hire people and develop them. You need the businesses to innovate, you need the universities and scientists to be there at the frontiers, creating new knowledge. But it's ultimately about opportunities for everyone. And you create opportunities for everyone, not just through economic incentives, but through social mobility, through education, through helping everyone discover themselves and go that extra distance beyond what they may have thought they were capable of. So social mobility is bound up with economic opportunity, and with a vibrant economy.

I would say social sustainability is also bound up with how we address the climate challenge – and how we address the enormous risks that the world faces, coming out of the shifts in the planet’s ecology. The largest risks that every nation faces are increasingly going to be global risks, and the risks that are common to all of us.

But to tackle these challenges, to tackle the challenge of climate change especially, we're all going to have to pay some cost for a period of time, before the benefits are realised. The benefits will be large - at the very least, the benefit of avoiding catastrophic loss. But we've got to pay some cost over a period of time in order to get there. In order for society to pay that cost, you need that sense of solidarity - both amongst ourselves in today's generation, and a solidarity with future generations, so that we can share the burden fairly and progressively, and ordinary folk aren't hurt. So we find a way of sharing the burden appropriately, and knowing that everyone will benefit eventually.

And that requires social solidarity. It requires a sense of optimism - that this is going to work out well for all of us if we all play our roles - with those who are better off being better able to play an extra role. It's going to work out better for all of us if we are able to innovate and invest at a higher level to tackle climate change. But it requires that sense of solidarity within societies today, and between nations, and also a sense of solidarity with future generations.

Mr Lim Siong Guan: Let me close with a final question and bring us back specifically to Singapore - whether you think this polarisation and stratification, which we see in the developed countries in the West, is simply inevitable for Singapore as we seek continuous progress in the future, or whether we can do something or develop something like an anti-culture of polarisation and stratification.

President Tharman: The risk is there in every society, and Singaporeans are not exceptional beings. I think we stand a very good chance of avoiding that risk if we continue to focus on giving everyone opportunity to be the best they can be, and that must start from a much younger age. It actually starts from birth; in fact, it starts with the mother, and then it with the first 2 to 3 years of life, and we are putting a lot of effort into that in Singapore now.

Social mobility starts from birth. We have to give the best possible chance to our children to develop their basic capacities when they are young, and follow on by ensuring that they’ve got a level playing field on which to develop – and in fact, different playing fields for different skills and talents to flourish. And we've got to deepen that culture of respect for all the different skills and talents, the different merits that people develop.

It also means in the Singapore context, when we think of how we avoid some of the problems we see in the rest of the world, that we put effort into a further deepening of our multiculturalism, which I believe we can. We are in a much better place than most societies are. We don't have overt racism or conflict between different ethnic communities. We can go further, where we take more intrinsic interest in each other's cultures, quite apart from ensuring that our cultures are each thriving on their own. More people crossing into each other's cultures, learning the intricacies of each other's cultures, and feeling that their identity as Singaporeans has a multicultural dimension to it. We are not just people with our own cultures and languages, but we also have a multicultural dimension to our identity. It's not easily achieved, but I think we can achieve it in Singapore, and that too is part of the deepening connectedness that we need in society. We are starting from a much better place, and we have to go further.

Mr Lim Siong Guan: Thank you for leaving us with that sense of optimism to be able to rise over the overall general sense of pessimism we are seeing in the rest of the world. And, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid that we have to end our conversation at this point. And just to say thank you to Mr President again, for just giving us this time to leave us with a whole lot of ideas for us to think deeply over and to do something about it.

President Tharman: Thank you very much.