Transcription
Lee Kuan Yew, now known as the founding father of modern Singapore, served as its first prime minister for over three decades from 1959 to 1990. He stepped in front of the cameras in 1965 with his voice cracking and tears in his eyes. Singapore had just been expelled from Malaysia. With no natural resources, no large hinterland, it was a tiny island with high unemployment. Its people were poorer than most African nations at the time and were scraping by on a colonial era port.
Lee told his people the future looked uncertain, even bleak. Surrounded by bigger neighbors, dependent on others for water, and cut off from a common market, it felt like the end.
60 years later, Singapore today is one of the wealthiest places on Earth with spotless streets, a massive global port, skyscrapers full of multinational headquarters, top-ranked schools, and one of the lowest corruption rates anywhere on the planet. How did this happen? It wasn't luck. It wasn't magic. It happened because Lee Kuan Yew faced hard truths about people, culture, genetics, and groups and built policies around reality instead of wishes, hopes, and egalitarian delusions.
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Lee Kuan Yew started out believing that all people were born more or less equal. But years of actual governing changed his mind completely. And he said it plainly. He started off thinking that all men were equal, but then began to understand that this is probably the most unlikely belief to have ever existed.
He was very clear when he explained that millions of years of evolution, populations scattered across the earth, developing separately and independently with different peoples, climates, and soils, all contributed to shaping the real differences between populations. Through observations, reading, and hard experience, he concluded that intelligence and talent are largely inherited. He believed around about 80%.
Equal opportunity simply did not produce equal results. He watched poorer and less educated people have more children while brighter, better educated ones having fewer. That dysgenic trend, he warned, would gradually lower the overall quality of any population, including Singapore. And in 1983, he put it in stark terms: "If you don't include your graduate women in the breeding pool and leave them on the shelf, you end up with a stupider society and fewer bright people to support the next generation."
And it was this thinking that directly led to the Graduate Mothers Scheme, which offered incentives like tax breaks and school priorities for educated mothers to have more children. Of course, it was controversial, sure, but it flowed from his view on genetics, which is absolutely heretical in the modern West. Just look at the social and professional destruction of Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of the double helix nature of DNA, James Watson, and what was done to him for expressing the same views as Lee.
Lee doubled down again and again. He believed it was clear that you cannot ignore heritability if you want a high-performing nation. He even likened it to selective breeding in animals: pair capable people and you improve the stock over time. Other ministers in Singapore knew these weren't crazy ideas. And also, Lee said that they knew it wasn't poppycock.
He was equally direct about group differences showing up in real data. And he called the findings in the 1994 book, "The Bell Curve," a fact of life. In that African-Americans average around 85 on IQ tests, with black Africans scoring much lower, whites around 100, and Asians higher by at least five points or more. These weren't just culturally argued; they were stubborn realities. Pretend they don't exist and you waste money chasing the impossible, that being equal outcomes, while frustration builds within society.
On the ethnic mix within Singapore itself, Lee saw deep and abiding differences between groups. He noted clearly what he believed: that Malays often felt that they were being asked to compete unfairly against Chinese, and that they wouldn't or couldn't admit it openly, but that history had left them a different gene pool without quite the same set of competitive qualities.
On the other hand, Lee also understood that the Chinese Singaporeans, shaped by Confucian traditions of scholarship, discipline, and long-term striving, brought an intense achievement-oriented drive. He said openly that a 100% Chinese Singapore would probably do better, but he accepted the real mix that Singapore had, that being Chinese amounting to around 75% of the population with Malays, Indians, and others making up the rest, and he worked with it.
Lee explained that if one were to change the proportions in Singapore too dramatically, say a much larger Indian share, then what would happen would be both the politics and the economics would then shift for the worse, because different cultures handle contention versus practical problem-solving in very different ways.
Within the Chinese community, he even noted variations, that being certain groups like the Tao Choos or the Hakkas, well, they often stood out especially as being hardworking and successful.
Now, what it should be stated, and what is very clear, is that Lee wasn't preaching hatred or supremacy of individuals. He believed that talent existed everywhere. In fact, he gave Malays extra educational support precisely because he recognized the average gaps and wanted the Malays to progress. But he refused to pretend that groups were interchangeable or that blank slate policies would magically erase differences. Meritocracy had to be the rule.
With a clear-eyed view of human variation built in, this pragmatic understanding shaped everything that followed. Singapore kept its ethnic balance through managed immigration rather than Western-style uncontrolled flooding of nations. Housing rules in Singapore encouraged racial mixing without creating isolated enclaves, and English served as the common working language. So no single group dominated.
This wasn't and isn't dreamy Western-style utopian multiculturalism that celebrates every difference as an automatic strength. It was and is hard-headed multi-racialism with guardrails acknowledging realities, rewarding performance, enforcing order, and shared rules. That framework attracted foreign capital, built excellent institutions, kept corruption low, and powered the economic miracle: factories rising, electronics and finance giants arriving, and a world-class education system delivering results.
Now compare and contrast this with the shambles that most Western countries today find themselves in. With native birth rates being ever so low, mass uncontrolled unending immigration from very different cultures from across the planet now accelerating demographic change. In fact, projections show that the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many, many European nations are headed toward majority non-white populations during this century. All of this is built on rabid, blank slate, interchangeability, egalitarian ideological assumptions rather than rational pragmatism.
And at the same time, multiculturalism has become the defining pseudo-religious belief in the Western world, and that being diversity as an unquestioned strength, and any discussion of group differences is treated as heresy. And borders and selective immigration have all but totally vanished.
Lee Kuan Yew would see this as the exact opposite of what builds functional societies and transformed his home nation. Singapore succeeded by managing its mix, selecting for talent, and refusing to ignore averages in intelligence, culture, and behavior. The West is betting its entire civilization and doing so by pretending that all groups and all cultures are exactly the same and throwing them all together in the same space to live will somehow produce cohesion and continued excellence in a utopia just across the multicultural rainbow.
History and Singapore's living example is clear that the West will fail. Realism built one of the great turnarounds of the modern age, and that being Singapore. Will the comfortable myths hold up against demographic shifts in the West? That is the great question of our time. I think I know the answer to that. What do you think?
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