MRT Culture and the Crisis of Civility in Singapore

It’s a long and intimidating title, but I’m going to talk about something that every Singaporean can relate to.

In fact, it’s too talked about. All the horror stories of ugly Singaporeans who pretend to fall asleep when a pregnant lady or an elderly person boards the train, who don’t let passengers alight first, among others, all backed up by video after video posted online.

But here, I’m not going to talk about the “whats” and the “hows”, but rather, the “whys” and the “what next?” of this issue. In other words, I’ll look at how and why this horrid MRT culture came to be, the impact it has on our society, and what to do about it.

But first, of course you might say: “But that’s not every Singaporean!” or “I give up my seat, wait for others to alight, and keep left on the escalator!” but the point is, there are still people, and quite a number of them, who don’t. And it’s these black sheep that have enough effect to make our society look ugly.

So now, WHY?

The first reason, in my opinion, is the effects of culture and policy. We live in a society obsessed with speed, efficiency and convenience. We want everything done the fast way, and our way. But in the process, some people become self-centred. They have the “me first!” mentality, and couldn’t care less about the others around them.
To worsen the problem, some people actually tried to justify their actions, only to make them look even worse, of course.

Imagine someone saying that he/she had the right to sit because he/she paid for it, and that if the needy want to sit, they should pay more?

That’s obviously ridiculous. You paid for the ride, not the seat. And besides, you expect an 80-year old retiree to pay more, or a pregnant lady to pay the fare twice?

And government policy hasn’t helped much. Despite the power of the law (fines for this, fines for that, Singapore is such a “fine” city); despite all the campaigns (like Singa the Lion then and Mr Phua Chu Kang now); despite all the talk about building a gracious society... nothing seemed to work. The reason is because a top-down approach in instilling courtesy is bound to fail.

Harsh laws make people obey, but people don’t fundamentally understand why something is bad to do. When laws are relaxed, people simply revert to their old ways.

As Confucius said: harsh laws make people fear punishment, but people won’t have a sense of shame.”

The same applies for campaigning. People need to know “why be gracious?” and experience the benefits for themselves, rather than being force-fed by the government.

An interesting thing about complaints about the MRT system is that most of the people compare their MRT experience to that of other countries, like Taipei’s Metro or the London Tube. It’s the good experience of civility that they have experienced that led them to agitate for improvement in our MRT culture.

The second reason is sounds complicated, but is actually very simple. It’s the prisoners’ dilemma at work. The prisoners’ dilemma works something like this. Two prisoners are told the following without the knowledge of each other:

If they keep quiet, they get one month in jail each.
If one tells on the other, the one doing the telling gets one month, the other a year.
If both sell each other out, both gets six months each.

Both prisoners want to get only one month in jail. But one cannot trust the other to keep quiet. So they take the lesser evil and sell each other out. This is an example of a zero-sum game in which there is only one winner.

Applying the idea to Singapore, since people cannot trust each other to be gracious,and are afraid of being taken advantage of, they take the lesser evil and tolerate ungraciousness.

Yes, this is “kiasuism” in “cheem” language.

But all that talk about how bad it is, what can we do about it?

I suggest the following:

Look at how other countries did it. You don’t see the government of Taiwan or Britain telling their citizens to give up their seats, wait for passengers to alight or to keep left (right in Taipei’s case). What they used to do was to have spies. Yes, spies. They create a self-regulating society. Over time, the norms become entrenched, and the spy system can be subtly dismantled. It’s much better than the clumsy methods that the government’s is using, the results of which are temporary, and to some extent, make us a laughing stock.

To some extent, we are starting to have such a system, thanks to the voyeurs. But it’s still a long way to go...

Second, for our people to experience real graciousness. People should learn to be more gracious, and less self-centred. After they experience it, they know it’s a good feeling, they will defend the idea. The Chinese philosopher Mo-zi said this a long time ago.

Third, some infrastructure changes. Actually, the idea has been around for so long, I wonder what’s taking the government (and SMRT)so long. Our fares go up, up, up, our service quality hasn’t much changed over the past 5 years. Priority carriages, just as the Tokyo subway as women-only carriages. This is an example where positive discrimination is a good thing.


But actually, the problem might be more complicated than we think. In fact, there could be a class nature to the problem. It has very much to do with how our society has become affluent, but yet hasn’t progressed mentally and culturally.

Nevertheless, let's hope we can be really proud of our MRT culture in the future.