This is the full text of my talk at the Institute of Policy Studies’ Singapore Perspectives conference on 20 January 2025. The theme of the panel was Community and the State.

Video recording of the panel session.

I’m very happy to have been invited to speak at this conference because it allows me to share with you my research on political polarisation.

My book, Fighting Polarisation: Shared Communicative Spaces in Divided Democracies, will come out later this year from Polity. This is my first chance to talk about it since completing my manuscript a couple of weeks ago.

By polarisation, I don’t mean big differences in people’s views or beliefs. I’m referring to deep us-them divides, where different camps don’t just view one another as competitors but also as enemies. Our group feels we deserve respect but they don’t. Without the Golden Rule of reciprocity, negotiation and compromise become unthinkable, and democracy, unworkable.

If polarisation is about us-them divisions, fighting polarisation is about building a larger “we” — not by flattening our differences, imposing harmony, or forcing consensus but by helping people see cross-cutting identities and shared needs, thus building a solidarity resilient enough to accommodate different values and viewpoints.

My research took me to several countries to find out about projects ranging from interfaith dialogue between Muslims and Christian in post-war Ambon, Pro-Palestinian and Zionist students gathering over meals on American campuses, memory sites for reconciliation in South Africa, and citizens’ assemblies in Ireland.

From this work, let me draw just two points that I think are relevant to our discussion here today. 

First, these diverse projects suggest that ordinary citizens, even if they started out thinking of one another in hostile terms, can be nudged toward a bigger “we”, if given the chance to engage one another in dialogue and deliberation — not debates for settling arguments and picking winners, but conversations carefully designed for listening and understanding. Unlike opinion polls, the usual way we discover what others think, deliberation allows for collective learning, including from one another, before deciding where we stand.

Mostly organised within civil society, these are face to face, in groups of about thirty to a hundred, led by trained facilitators.

Most participants may not change their positions on issues, but they tend to lower their animosity toward those with opposing views. There is an increase in empathy, and a greater confidence in democracy.

The most institutionalised of these deliberative forums are citizens assemblies, first tried in Brazil more than 20 years ago, now taking off in Europe. These bring together mini publics, representative in terms of social class, gender, education, and other key relevant identities, over a weekend or several weekends to discuss a controversial issue involving trade-offs or moral values. They then present recommendations to lawmakers.

I would not be surprised if most people in this room are sceptical. Ordinary citizens meeting, talking things through, finding common ground, dialing down polarisation. How is that possible? Aren’t people naturally tribal? What about the fault lines that we hear so much about?

This brings me to my second key point. People tend to overestimate how divided their own societies are, and how unreasonable and even immoral others are. This doesn’t mean polarisation isn’t real. Perceptions of polarisation become self-fulfilling: if you believe that others cannot be trusted, you will treat them accordingly, making you less inclined to cooperate with them or make sacrifices for them.

I would guess that most of us harbour such perceptions. If I were to ask you: Do you trust yourself to make socially responsible decisions for the common good if given adequate information, I think practically everyone would say yes.

Then, if I were to ask you to look around you at others at the room: Would you trust them with collective decisions, I suspect your level of confidence would fall, though it might still be quite high, given what we know about the profile of IPS event attendees.

Now, if I ask you, do you trust the people “out there” the same way — the so-called “ordinary citizens” in heartland malls or MRT stations — I’d predict a very different answer. We are reasonable, socially responsible. But the people out there? We have our doubts.

Where do these impressions come from? We all have had direct encounters with unreasonable and anti-social strangers. But I’m sure we and our loved ones have also benefited from selfless acts of compassion by good samaritans. So why we do we choose to believe the worst?

Our image of groups that seem different from us are mostly shaped by three influential sources. First, news media, to which we have outsourced the task of finding out about our own societies and the world; second, social media, which we allow ourselves to think are an honest reflection of our social networks; and third, the political representatives to whom we have delegated the job of social conciliation. 

News media are polarising because of the way they define news: they treat conflict as more newsworthy, which cultivates a picture of a mean and dangerous social world. This news bias also gives more attention to community leaders with extreme views. You may mistakenly think those leaders speak for the whole community, if you don’t know it well.

Social media amplify such dynamics. Their algorithms and incentives reward the worst behaviour. Many people feel negatively about social media but fail to understand that social media isn’t society and so allow their despair and disgust to spread to society in general.

But most political polarisation around the world is top-down, driven by politicians and other elites. Politicians everywhere have a vested interest in making differences more salient for their own electoral advantage. They need to differentiate themselves from competitors and so make differences more pronounced. Organised religion also plays up differences for similar branding reasons.

Face to face dialogue and deliberation works because it bypasses the political representatives and media that usually filter and distort our social relations.

How would I apply these takeaways to Singapore?

Although politicians and other elites are the major driver of polarisation here and elsewhere, Singapore has been spared the worst, first, because we have a long tradition of responsive government, so communities have not suffered the kind of prolonged insecurity that drives them into the hands of populists; and, second, because our major political parties are not ethnic-based, which significantly lowers the risk of sectarian or religious-secular conflict.

Globally, therefore, we measure low on political polarisation.

But I think the organisers of today’s conference are right to want to look critically at the health of community in Singapore, because we don’t have the kind of horizontal, people-to-people trust that would allow community to flourish.

People-to-people trust in Singapore 

“Has the government ‘crowded out’ opportunities for Singaporeans to engage each other organically?”

When I read how the question was framed in the programme, I was instantly reminded of George Yeo’s speech on “pruning the banyan tree” more than 30 years ago. Is that what we need to do?

No, I would not put it that way. In the book I co-authored with Donald Low, PAP v PAP, we argued that the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated the need for strong and capable states. That’s not Singapore’s problem. The flaw in our model is the assumption that a capable state needs to be autocratic and cannot tolerate vigorous competition, nor contrary and dissenting voices in civil society.

Donald and I are aligned with the thinking of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in the The Narrow Corridor, which argues for high-capacity states and vibrant societies, neither devouring the other, each ratcheting up the other’s contributions to collective well-being.

Singapore is not yet in that virtuous circle. The state overwhelms society.

But not because the state is too large or too capable. There is no negative correlation between good, strong governance and vibrant civil society activity. Concerned citizens will always find ways to relieve suffering and reduce injustice whether in our society or beyond our shores.

Singapore’s young are among the best educated on the planet and enjoy higher levels of security than any cohort in human history. But they are not short of ideas or energy to make Singapore and the world a better place. The video we saw earlier showed us just two examples of such initiatives.

What the video did not show are the examples of community organising that are actively discouraged and even penalised by the state.

Whether it is activists speaking up for Palestinians or migrant workers, or against the death penalty or for stronger climate action, these groups are not threats to national security, or challenging Parliament’s authority.

They are just trying to persuade their fellow citizens and shift public attitudes and values in ways that policymakers cannot ignore.

Instead, they are shut out of mainstream media and campuses, forced to try more creative but hardly disruptive means to get attention, and then subject to legal sanction and blacklisting.

In its regulation of theatre, the government even feels the need to warn the public if a play makes the audience think about environmental policy and political issues. The government thus legitimises and institutionalises the notion that people need state protection from others with non-mainstream views.

The state’s polarising approach to managing difference has been internalised in establishment media, which are more allergic to controversy than when I was a journalist at The Straits Times 30 years ago.

Our universities have followed suit. You may have read how NUS now requires faculty to rate how controversial a talk may be, before deciding whether and how it can proceed. The university doesn’t just think lowly of people “out there”; even people within Kent Ridge and Bukit Timah campuses, home to the highest concentration of educated Singaporeans in our land, cannot be trusted to deal with controversial ideas or speakers without management oversight.

There is a direct cost to the community organisers and artists targeted for such special treatment.

But more relevant to our discussion is the indirect cost to our community of multiple establishment institutions doing this sort of thing for decades: the cumulative impact is to persuade Singaporeans that the people out there are self-centred; that minority opinions and views that sound controversial may be dangerous; and that people who express them should be shunned and excluded.

Much more than in our neighbouring countries or in liberal democracies, our state sets the tone for our society.

And the state has consistently strummed a tune of vertical trust and horizontal distrust. We are to believe in our leaders’ best intentions; there’s no need for checks and balances that ministers may find too onerous.

But we are never to believe that the dangerous fault lines between our people can be bridged except in a future that is perpetually out of reach.

A similar line was sold to our forefathers by our British colonial masters: We Asian natives were civilisationally unfit for democracy. The British maintained power through divide and rule, promoting stability but never solidarity among ethnic groups.

So it’s not surprising that, after not just 60 years but two centuries of state propaganda, most Singaporeans lack trust in others, and are happy to delegate people-to-people relations to the state.

I want to end by recalling the banyan tree, which entered Singapore’s political discourse via George Yeo’s seminal 1991 speech.

Everyone was so enamoured of his eloquence that they forgot to fact-check his argument.

Banyan trees in nature do not need pruning. Yes, they can grow to cover an area as large as a football field, but they do not turn that area into a desert. They are in harmony with the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. The banyan is strong and majestic, but it sustains diverse animal and plant life beneath it and, within it, and on it.

Unlike the giant redwood — the tallest and most massive trees on earth — the banyan spreads horizontally more than they race vertically. It remains close to the ground, making them more resilient to storm winds.

Its aerial roots form separate trunks. Depending on micro-conditions, any of these new pillars can surpass the original trunk in importance.

Thus, creative destruction is in its DNA. The species is programmed for external cooperation and internal competition, all in the interest of the ecosystem.

So, in George Yeo’s image of a Singapore where the banyan needs pruning, is the PAP really the banyan tree?

No, the PAP is the over-enthusiastic gardener armed with axes and shears and pesticides.

Unwittingly, George Yeo put his finger on the problem: he reflected the PAP’s techno-authoritarian impulse, deeply distrustful of life around them, believing that educated elites must apply their superior capacities to correct citizens’ ways.

If building community solidarity is the objective, the state does not need to retreat from its engagement with social issues. It just needs to radically rethink the terms of that engagement.