This is a collection of thoughts, comments, illuminations from one of the most brilliant minds in Singapore, Professor Tay Kheng Soon.
All curated from his Facebook profile.
Thought 2: it is Sunday. I walked the neighbourhood. It is peaceful and quiet. One or two people walking and jogging. Trees well trimed. Grass is mowed. Lots of covered walkways. Drains clean.
I saw a lone young guy batting balls tossed by a battery powered machine in a court ringed by a high fence provided by town council. A small group of mothers helping their kids play on see-saws and slides. Careful they dont hurt themselves. Just like the government. Dont play-play..
China learnt from Singapore’s economic model and achieved spectacular growth. Its Socialism with Chinese characteristics A big country allows centralised governance but with decentralised democratic participation.
Singapore’s small size naturally produces decentralised centralism with only look-good participation.
There used to be a corner in the void deck where parcel deliveries were stacked pending distribution. Within two days a notice was posted disallowing it. Everyone sees the note.
Everyone feels the whites are all eyes and hands everywhere. The blacks are ring-fenced out and the greys bay at the moon.
Town Councils, Community Centres, Resident’s Committees, the Civil Service are all under centralised control by the whites. Those on the grey list and definitely black listed ones are totally blocked out. Only the whiter than white can play. Increasingly, even professional associations tend to elect white looking officials.
Despite white dominance, as people get more educated, greys will grow in number. Why? Because it is natural. People dont like feeling useless and meaningless. Its the function of Grey Matter and testosterone.
This is the governance challenge, how to look democratic while the axe and the whip remain ready. Is AI the future of automated social control?
Thought 3: It’s my neighbourhood monday morning. Quiet. I had listened to a discussion on the implications of the Venezuela action by America. No doubt it was a flagrant violation of international law. It signals a return to the rule of the jungle. Is it a return or has it always been cloaked by hopeful belief? Singapore condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine followed by sanctioning. Our response to the American action was not like that we said on Russia. Why?
Why, because we are beholden? There are linkages throughout reality, each link is part of a network of interelated parts. For us survival is paramount. This normally requires alliances and obligations.
What happens to values? Do values have to be set aside for the sake of survival in a desparate situation?
When Singapore left Malaysia, Malayan values were thrown aside. Survival meant that the search for authentic identity rooted in people and place had to be abandoned. Singapore had to become a vassal state of the West.
To not look like an emptied vessel, we cleverly rebranded ourselves instead as a Global City. And to look the part, we began to look like New York.
Thought 4: the monks walk for peace acompanied by pariah dog Aloka is a wonderful inspiration. It is action without rancour or roar.
What this conflicted world needs is quiet action not contestation. The dialectics of consciousness intersects the dialectics of materialism. It is mind and matter not mind over matter. Yes, mind is personal and matter is all around. How the two mingle is a matter of the mind.
Education shapes the mind. The latin word is educre. It is to bring out from. What we have us not education, it is inducation, the process of putting in.
As the world enters the age of AI, education becomes more important. Education is no longer skilling. It is becoming human. This is the challenge.
We need new type of schools. Buddhism taught enlightenment. Its a long tough process to tame the distressed heart and mind. Taoism said let it be, follow the Way. Confucianism taught that good family life is the basis for good social life. The Abrahamic religions taught redemption comes from faith.
All these are parts of the whole.
Thought 6: here i am seated on a bench surrounded by tall forest trees and dense undergrowth. Planned, intentational but authentic. Its a nature park. People walk pass quiet, contemplating…
AI can fake everything like real but we soon develop ways of seeing through. We ruled over nature. AI makes us natural because everything else is fake, false..artificial.
The jester tells truth in the court of the king. Out of necessity the joker in us emerges in the kingdom of AI. Jesting is humanity’s domain.
I hope to do a three day workshop at the Singapore Institute of Architects, SIA, on architecture in the age of AI.
I hope that me and attendees will come up with new design ideas. How a neighbourhood or town or city can be funny, and fun places? Where no one works and play is the purpose of life, and childhood is never ends…
Crazy? Think about it. What’s the point to invest in robotic production if people have no more jobs, no income, no money to buy what robots produce?
The money gods’ are faced with a dilemma of choice. Is it to blow everything up for the heck of it or to indulge in the ultimate fun of ruling over the amusment park they can now create…?
18 January 2026
Thought 8: The rise of “brutalist architecture” is an interesting phenomenon. It signaled a moment of socio economic and political change.
Beautiful classical architecture in Europe was produced under the old aristocratic or feudal social order. The emergence of a Neo-classical architecture came about under the patronage of a new merchant class, a new emerging social order.
Industrialisation fundermentally changed the social order even more under a capitalist industrial class .
As the new social order emerged, and with.it a new aesthetic order came into being. This produced a confusing situation.
A confused aesthetic cityscape emerged that challenged everything. In this situation emerged both conservative as well as revolutionary impulses for and against industrialism among the new middle classes
There were those who were against industrialism. They sought humanism and naturism. Then there were others who gravitated towards the middle ground in the.Beaux Art and Art Nouveau styles.
The progressive among the middle classes rejected all these as cloying sentmentalism. They saw decoration as feeblemindedness. They thus gravitated to raw and heroic functionalism free of decoration.
Into this chaos, the German Bauhaus was born. It invented a whole new industrial aesthetic that defined the new age in art, graphics, design and even in dance. It was considered by the Nazis as decadent and expunged. The Nazis resorted to exagerated Roman Classicism. A symbold of German racial Supremacy.
In the European reconstruction after WW2 Brutalism symbolised the heroic social transformative ethos. That is why those who advocated it regarded decorative architecture as feeble-minded middle class conservatism.
Global capitalism adopted the Bauhaus style and it became the International Style that represented progress itself. Modern architecture reptesented progressism and with it westernism. Asia is caught in this assumption. When will a new architecture in Asia arise will be the day when Asia finally becomes its true universal self
Thought 9:
Richer parents tend to be extra protective of their children. Poor parents too but they don’t have time so their kids are freer to play around. In the old days Singapore was poor. Most lived in rural kampongs, urban slums or in shophouse cubicles downtown.
Urban kids lived and played in busy bustling to and hustling urban environments. They learnt how to survive and thrive. Many grew up became leaders and entrepreuners. Some turned bad, some became union leaders and political activists.
The past 60 years changed everything. Singapore became an orderly and a well planned place. It became a well functioning well oiled mechanism. Thanks to LKY and LTK.
Singapore has become a cosy corner of the World for the rich to stash their wealth here because the World is becoming a wild place. The “rules-based order” cannot be relied upon anymore.
We need to hustle. To succeed we need to become a daring, cunning and creative smart people. Intelligence is not enough, we need smart guts. How to become that?
Sadly suffering is always the greatest teacher for those ready to learn its lessons. Who to turn suffering into creativity?
How to get ready through policy, education and physical design? We got money, lots of it. Use it for rough and ready play. Turn campuses into rough and ready 1 out of 10 success sandboxes. Remove all plastic coated neighbourhood childrens’ play grounds into rough and ready experimental places. Let communities form collective cheap buying and sharing. Allow schools to become fruit snd food growing cooperatives so teachers and students get involved.
Whats the end game? Turn the whole Island into an enterprise campus spilling out into Johor and Batam. Pass laws that block certain AI functions that take away jobs. Invest in areas of robotics that earn income for citizens financed from the citizrns’ national savings.
Is it crazy to think out of the box?
Thought 10: as i walk around the neighbourhood i am impressed by the extent of care the govt has for people. I am seated on a bench with a backrest. I look at a cluster of exercise machines next to a childrens’ play station. Lots of these in every neighbourhood too.
I had walked pass an old peoples’ activity centre too. Ramps for wheel chairs everywhere. So much care and concern for the physical care of people! The Bangladesh sweeper said good morning. Care for mind and spirit? Basic…
Then i thought of the Mechai Bamboo School in the poorest area of Thailand in Mechai’s bold effort to turn the poorest kids into the smartest. The first batch graduated. One third went to University and are considered its best students. The others went into business and community service.
Students learn in teams of 5, a mix of smart and less smart ones, to do projects they themselves decided upon. Most did projects to help their families improve household income. Teachers helped in maths, history, science, economics. Kids also did community work, planted trees, cared for the infirm…learnt compassion. Learning by doing…
The Thai MOE got upset because the school does not believe in exams. At the equivalent stage of our PSLE, their MOE insisted that,) the school’s, not exam-smart kids, take the standard exam. To the shock of everyone the kids scored in Thailand’s top 10%!
Yes we look after the physical body well but the mind and the heart? It is time to move forward. Why? How? Who?
Why? The govt’s worry is smart people will upset political stability but Singapore needs smart people. Who are smart? How to identify smartness? By exam marks.
Then bring them into govt. Pay them well. Have a list. Everyone has a file. Thus there is a white list, a grey list and a black list. Keep the grey ones at arms length and the black ones in cold storage.
Well and good. The system works. Money pours in. Singapore achieves 1st world status!
Now? Govt gets bloated with whites. Greys cant be trusted so have to bring in foreign talent. These come for the money not dedication to nation building. Why should they fight for a nation that is not theirs? It does not look or feel good for locals. Citizens get fedup. All the wonderful things govt provide somehow feels taken for granted – hollow. Not good. So how?
Govt is trying, reaching out to the ground. New vocabulary is used. “We”, “together”, “participation”…its a start but a fundamental shift is required. This is the dim view of human nature. The fact is people make society and then society makes people. Its circular.
The place to start is in education. Let there be some Mechai type schools with parents who are keen to try for their kids. Once it works multiply them, then the existing system will slowly change.
Next turn Higher Education into Enterprise Campuses. Mix scholastics, research with startup enterprises on campus. Expect modest returns on investments. It is talent investment.
Expand Scouting. Build on the Scout Law’s universal values of honour, compassion, loyality, courage, honesty and helpfulness. Courage is the big missing part.
Turn NS into a National Community Building Project. Improve understanding of geopolitics…how we got here and where we should go. Build a New Singapore!
27 January 2026
Thought 13:
As i walk through Singapore’s housing neighbourhoods i am impressed by the abundance of trees and plants. What i miss is the “string bush” which was very common in the 1950s
The string bush grew very easily thats why it was commonly used as a hedge for compound houses. Short cuttings were stuck along the fence line and in a short while a dense trimmed hedge would sprout. In open grounds the string bush could also be found in dense clumps.
The string bush got its name because it produces at the tip of every stalk a string of small fruits and tiny white flowers hense its name. Butterflies love the flowers and the yellow vented bul bul birds love the fruits. Its seeds were thus spread far and wide.
Why no more string bushes in Singapore? It seems because it profilated too much it had to be curbed. A type of beetle was introduced and slowly the string bush vanished. A bio-weapon!
I think it is time to reintroduce string bushes again to have more butterflies and to bring back the yellow vented bul bul into the ecosystem again.
Too often things can get overdone not only in nature management but also in human management. Its the remit of the administrative state
Singapore has been a very successful bio-laboratory experiment adapting to the demands of the external world. Certain things were encouraged to grow while other things were rooted out in managing the natural and human ecosystems.
A new, much more complex and a much richer global ecosystem is however emerging. Multilateralism may actually be in the process of creating a much richer griwth topsoil for talent and economy.
With water (money, which Singapore has plenty of) the tillers of the enriched topsoil must now look to reintroduce those once expunged vigorous plant and human species to take advantage of the new situation.
Bring back the string bush!
12 February 2026
Thought 24: in my Reality Matrix, at the Conscious level of the Super Structure is culture. This is a messy jumble of beliefs, bits and pieces of traditional wisdom, practices, symbols, appearences and fashions, rituals and habits, art, music, language, idioms, etc etc…
All these make up a person’s identity which feeds back into basic human nature at the conscious level of sub-structure. This in turn impacts the politico-economy at the level of materialist structure.
As human labor is a major component in production and consumption what and how people think and feel affects politics and economics.
Political stability needs trust and compliance. No matter the type of regime, compliance and consent are needed. In authoritarian regimes, compliance is attained by compulsion. In democratic regimes, consent is “manufactured” by a mix of incentives and disincentives and by mind control through media and by distractions through entertaining amusements. This is non-formal education, it is brain washing.
Formal education in all governance systems is designed to service the economy and the political order. History is important because people need a sense of identity. This must be simplified so that the unfinished business of the past does not stir up passions that might upset present-day concerns.
The to-and-fro interaction between substructure is human consciousness, the centrality of the human factor in the political economic structure manifests in culture is in turn influenced by it. This is where culture back flows into structure and substructure.
This back-flow phenomenon is the post-modern critique of Marxism. Marxism is too single minded materialistic. The Maoist Cultural Revolution was a tacit recognition of this and it failed because it did not see the necessary interplay between subjectivism ie culture consciousness in the materialist political economy. The economy thus failed.
This is where Deng Xiaoping’s opening up and transformation’s strategic compromise was brilliant.
Singapore’s future needs just such a strategy. Without inspiring latent human capabilities among its citizens and only relying on foreign talent, Singapore’s future is at stake.
Call it Singapore’s grey-ground, this is the ground on which inspiration not instruction, talent not threat are the well- springs of the future.
In my next thought 25, i will discuss how the super-conscious level categories impact human consciousness, culture and the political economy.
11 February 2026
Thought 23:
Most people grew up from early childhood experiencing the unconditional love of mother. This gave them the sense of goodness and empathy as adults. There is a minority that were unfortunate. They were neglected or even abused as a child. They grew up distorted. Some became monsters.
In the Matrix of Reality the intersection between substructure and consciousness, human character is determined by early childhood experiences but is also influenced by religious ideas, political ideology, survival imperatives
and cultural identity in adolesence. All these shape basic adult human character.
Since all people live in a political economy basic human character is then shaped by socio-economicll context.
The role in society framed by role in the economy. A boss who had an abused childhood, driven by powerful survival instinct and cunning intelligence, who was able to claw way up the politico-economic ladfer would have a dim view of others. Such a leader will be a hard driver, unforgiving, and may even enjoy punishing others.
If such people take power they are self serving but they also create an atmosphere of overall fear thst becomes widespread. They say to themselves that fear is necessary for stability and social order.
A leader who experienced loving kindness when young and who is able to ovetcome fear will likely be one who inspires cooperative effort, dedication and social progress.
The nature of an economy is the overarching context. Basic human character is influenced by the economy and the social values that it breeds. This is where the Reality Matrix helps. It shows the flow of influences from basic human nature forward into the politico-economy and then back again from this into basic human nature reshaping it. This goes on and on until the political economic culture becomes totally toxic.
This process is cyclical. It is the Dialectics of Materialism intersected by the Dialectics of Consciousness. Materialism is the economy which is the interactive flow of human labour effort amplified by technology applied to material resources to make products and services with are marketted with a proffitable return on monetary investments back to the owners of capital and to social benefit and its meaningful values.
In thought 24 next, i will eloborate on how “meaningful values” is “manufactured…” and how this enters into the Matrix of Human Reality…
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