The Cascade Effect

The excerpt I have here is from an article entitled "Larger issues at stake in unnatural sex debate" published in the Straits Times. I think it has a beautiful insight into how Singaporeans function and the direction we are heading in.

Perhaps one should take a read first..

"PUBLIC OPINION
THE allusion to the number of people apparently supporting repeal is naive. Apparent support can be due to the 'cascade effect' which University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein writes extensively about.

A large-scale social movement can result from the behaviour of a few early movers who are followed by many others. In an informational cascade, people cease to rely on their own information and opinion, and decide based on the signals conveyed by others. In a reputational cascade, people think they know what is right but silence themselves to maintain the good opinion of others, even when they privately abhor the views they believe are held by others.

Some identify the term 'cosmopolitan' with the ways of the West, 'tolerance' with the acceptance and, indeed, embrace of every lifestyle, and 'democracy' and 'openness' with sexual permissiveness, whether manifested in a flourishing of the arts in this area, or bringing in magazines of a certain nature.

There seems, unfortunately, to be a peculiarly Singaporean fear of being seen to be narrow-minded. This has the ironic effect of making us unthinking, the articulation of competing perspectives suppressed for fear of being labelled bigoted or unreasonable. Genuine debate is thus foreclosed.

An important aspect of freedom lies in a deliberative democracy that engages as many of its citizens as possible in dialogue. But this is not necessarily a society that embraces every position just because it is a minority or morally permissive one.

In the end, we do not want to be seen as readily changing our positions on matters such as sexual morality, without proper consideration of the myriad of issues. It would be sad if we became libertine in matters of sexual morality, but remained indifferent to leading what philosophers call an examined life. Would we have imbibed only the worst of 'progressive' societies?"

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This is definitely representative of my opinion on the state of Singaporean public consciousness at the moment. In embracing "openness" and "democracy", we have simply leapt to the other end; we remain an unthinking population. My worry is that with the new catchphrases such as "comopolitanism", together with media competition leading to more saucy sensationalist stories for the sake of catching eyeballs, the moral and social fabric of Singapore, which has been protected so dogmatically up till recently, is about to explode into something no one wished for. "Dialogue I say! But who shall open up...?"