Tribute to LKY

Excerpt from New York Times. Interview with Lee Kuan Yew:

Asked whether, looking back, he felt he might have gone too far in crushing his opponents, sometimes with ruinous lawsuits, sometimes with long jail terms, he answered: “No, I don’t think so. I never killed them. I never destroyed them. Politically, they destroyed themselves.”

Singapore’s secret, Mr. Lee said, is that it is “ideology free.” It possesses an unsentimental pragmatism that infuses the workings of the country as if it were in itself an ideology, he said. When considering an approach to an issue, he says, the question is: “Does it work? Let’s try it, and if it does work, fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one.”

“We built up the infrastructure,” he said. “The difficult part was getting the people to change their habits so that they behaved more like first-world citizens, not like third-world citizens spitting and littering all over the place.”

Its sometimes hard to misunderstood a wise man. And LKY looks like one of them. When you hear these from his mouth, his ideology sounds like far reaching at meta-perspective. I like the 'ideology free' ideology and changing the cultural infrastructure thing. These are problematic though and take an very ambitious man to even try. 'Ideology free' ideology does not pin point a common standpoint and does not encourage common identity. And changing culture is difficult. But this man tried.

Sometimes, and I think many Singaporean did, is to avoid taking our dislike of the country on this man. He's smart and he brought us here in his dream. Still, many things lie in our own hands. We still have to deal with difficult people who are put at the helms of important institutions in our country. LKY does not really control everything. Something he has to leave to his men to do, and trust them to do it.

I think many talented men were frustrated in not being able to release all their potential -- a by product of a heavily regulated state with a low appetite for risk. We cannot blame LKY for this as I thought he understand this with his perspective on cultural infrastructure. And he's trying to change it. But a pat on a back of an old man. We sometimes decides on own path based on many factors. Not to say the least, Singapore is a great place but may not be for everyone.