Tag Archives: lee kuan yew

the dark enlightenment part deux

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Continuing my thread on the so-called dark enlightenment, the term was actually coined by a British philosopher named Nick Land, following up on Curtis Yarvin’s ideas. From Wikipedia:

Land’s work with CCRU, as well as his pre-Dark Enlightenment writings, have all been influential to the political philosophy of accelerationism, an idea resembling that of the “fatal strategy” of “ecstasy” in the earlier work of Jean Baudrillard, where “a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization.”[citation needed] Along with the other members of CCRU, Land wove together ideas from the occult, cybernetics, science fiction, and poststructuralist philosophy to try to describe the phenomena of techno-capitalist acceleration.

Okay, up to this point it all sounds at least Singularity-adjacent. Now, I thought the Singularity was just good clean science fiction fun. But somehow the ideas have seeped into right-wing thinking. Anyway, Nick Land is the guy who came up with the term The Dark Enlightenment and wrote a long online manifesto called…The Dark Enlightenment. Now, before I link to I have to say this contains some racist ideas, so I link to it in the same spirit I might link to something like Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kampf – you can read it for historical/academic interest and to try to understand what might have been going through the diseased mind of the person who wrote it. Again, the reason this matters is that it seems to have influenced individuals with some power over all our lives, possibly including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and J.D. Vance. So without further ado, here is the link.

[tick tock tick tock time passing]

I skimmed through the thing. And mostly it is just…dumb. It’s an endless word salad of very loosely related ideas and free association. Amid the racist drivel about IQ and eugenics there are some ideas about city-states run by corporate boards of directors, in which citizens are free to shop around for a jurisdiction that suits them.

There is some cheerleading for Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. I lived in Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore at the very tail end of his life, and I read his very long book From Third World to First while I was there. I also read William Gibson’s essay Disneyland with the Death Penalty in the Singapore national public library and nobody beat me up. That would have been around 2012 or so, and from what I have heard that book would not have been available and might even have gotten me in trouble even 15 years earlier. Anyway, about Lee Kuan Yew – he imprisoned some political opponents without trial and controlled the way his people were allowed to dress and act up to a point. But overall, in my view, he was a selfless person who had the welfare of his people in mind in all his decisions and actions. He believed strongly in what you might call “meritocracy” in a dictionary sense, where policies were designed by economists and lawyers and politics was not allowed to get in the way of these policies. He provided housing and education for all his people. He cracked down vigorously on any form of organized crime. And he cracked down on any form of racist speech and put strong policies in place to protect ethnic and religious minorities, which in Singapore means people of Indian and Malay descent, who are largely but not all Muslim. To this day, as far as I know, there are no statues of Lee Kuan Yew because he did not want there to be.

But there are not going to be many leaders as selfless as Lee Kuan Yew. For every Lee Kuan Yew there are going to be a million mediocre leaders and maybe a Hitler or Stalin if we are unlucky. Ordinary people given the kind of power he wielded are going to be corrupted, and genocidal psychopaths are going to do mass murder. His sometimes brutal embrace of economic theory and evidence-driven policy is completely opposite the made-up, corrupt, fantasy-based shooting from the hip we are seeing from the Trump administration in 2025. If Singapore is the Dark Enlightenment, Donald Trump is a dark lump of shit spiralling around a clogged drain.

So a quasi-libertarian city-state run by a board of directors on a floating island or, exercising my imagination here, a space station someday? Maybe. Turning existing large countries with democratic or at least (small R) republican governments into these city-states. No, this is pure fantasy and not even the “common sense” variety. It makes no sense. If we want citizens to be “shareholders”, focus on policies that promote economic growth, institute a value added tax with minimal loopholes, and then return that value to the shareholders in the form of either cash or services. There is no practical alternative to majority rule with the human rights of minorities protected. If we are worried about the majority making bad decisions, educate the people. In the U.S. at the moment we are going 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

Lee Kuan Yew

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Lee Kuan Yew, the founder and long-time leader of modern Singapore, passed away on March 23. I regret I never saw him in person, but I did live in Singapore from 2010-13 and read his memoir From Third World to First. His accomplishments are extraordinary whatever you think of him. The western press is a little unfair in constantly calling him an “autocrat”. It’s true that he outlawed short skirts and long hair for a time, censored foreign publications, and locked up a few Communists for decades without a proper trial. But that was the Cold War, and before you judge, you have to consider the utter chaos and climate of fear that was going on all around Singapore in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Korea, China, and pretty much the rest of Asia at the time. Singapore stayed relatively calm, peaceful, safe, and eventually became prosperous on his watch. Singapore has a parliament with regular elections. They are dominated by one party that only considers a narrow range of policies, partly because that party is popular and has served the people well, and partly because there are strong barriers to entry built into the system for opposition parties that might consider a wider range of policies. But replace that one party with two parties that are only slightly apart on the narrow range of policies they consider, keep the barriers to entry, and you have the U.S. system.

Economically, Singapore took full advantage of its critical location in the global shipping network. They focused on foreign direct investment to build industry first in low wage manufacturing, and gradually built up to advanced industries today such as refining, chemicals, drugs, technology, finance, etc. They have something called the “central provident fund” – this is a personal social security account that people save their money in (it’s not optional) for retirement, housing, and medical care. This money gets invested in the local and global economies and earns a good rate of return. Almost all housing is developed by the government and subsidized – but it is not exactly “public housing” as we think of it in the U.S., because it is owned rather than rented. So it’s more like a condo where the government is your condo association. You can buy your first unit at a discount to the market price, then resell it later at the market price, although the government puts some limits on who can buy where and when. So the combination of this housing scheme and savings scheme has built a fairly broad base of wealth for the population without resorting to a large income redistribution or social insurance scheme like we see in Europe and the Anglo-American countries. Lee famously believed that this would be counter to “Asian values”, part of which is maintaining very tight family units that take care of each other in times of need.

Although I enjoyed my personal time in Singapore, it was a little too cold and corporate for my taste. Too many people seemed to view accumulating wealth and designer handbags as the primary objective of everyday life. Although I agree that people were tolerant of religious and ethnic diversity, I perceived a coldness between strangers on the street, and even between neighbors, that I found disturbing compared to the way people treat each other in the U.S. and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. People sometimes expressed petty racial and class-based attitudes that would at least engender some guilt in other places. Sometimes I felt that Singaporeans have allowed themselves to become the perfect example of the new Homo economicus species described in the economics textbooks. The country also has some demographic challenges – fertility rates are low partly because women have so many more career and life options available to them than in the past. This is great, but because Singapore is so small it is going to mean a dramatic drop in the native-born population. Immigration can compensate in terms of numbers, but the culture and sense of nationhood will somehow have to adjust to this. A shared love of designer handbags is not a good cultural foundation for a nation.

Singapore has an unbelievable PR machine. You should assume that things there are never quite as rosy as the propaganda they put out, nor as bad as the western press sometimes accuses. Regardless, it is pretty amazing to think how far it has come since the ashes of World War II, and hard to point to another figure who has created a prosperous modern country through sheer force of will like Lee Kuan Yew.