Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

SINGAPORE AND THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS 149
A 1993 survey of the aged-forty-something established middle-class population
shows that an overwhelming number of the respondents can be characterised as
follows:
All the basic necessities can be gotten, from the market or the government.
The middle-class band has become so wide that they feel it is difficult to fall
from it just as it is difficult to rise above it. There is little point in struggling
for more. It is better to lavish in what they have achieved. With regard to
their inner state of being, the middle class is simply contented. The top three
ideals are maintaining high economic growth, maintaining a stable economy,
and maintaining order in the country.
Associated with the contentment and security is a lack of interest in public
affairs. The class is enveloped in an aura of political apathy and fear of
political retribution. Politics become a passive state of submitting to the forces
of the government, receiving government guidance, and asking for more
intervention if policies are not working towards their well-being.
This apathy and political passivity comes from the feeling of not being in
control of its own destiny in the various realms of life experience. It has been
overwhelmed by the larger forces that shape its identity. Indeed, most are
grateful, grateful to the government and the same forces that brought them
to this situation. So as individuals and a class, it feels powerless. If it cannot
control the tide the least it wants to do is to go against it. Inwardly, it feels
contented with the state of well-being which is largely not of its own creation.
(Leong 1995:19)
Significantly, there is no contradiction here between the government-imposed
ethos of ‘meritocracy’ and a sense of lack of control of one’s own destiny because
personal effort as merit is realised only within a larger social and economic context
not of one’s choosing; it is doing one’s best within a context beyond one’s control.
Contentment comes, either because one had already acquired both private
housing and a car at an earlier time when such possessions were within the reach
of a middle-class salary (although there is always the issue of necessary
replacement of the car), or if one resigns oneself to never owning private property
and to living in public housing, preferably with a car, or in private housing without a
car. With their dependency on the state to provide a substantial amount of their
consumer goods and services, this established middle class constitute the loosely
organised mass-support base of the ruling government; with their desire for
stability, they constitute the mass inertia for social change.
The government’s long-term worry is mounting difficulty in satisfying the
consumerist demands of the middle-class mass, which, if frustrated, may turn them
against the ruling regime. Attempts to dampen consumerist demands are mounted
through both material and ideological means. Materially, stringent conditions are
imposed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on the issuing of credit
cards and granting of unsecured credits. Advertisements that ‘unwittingly’ or