In the aftermaths of Anton Casey's now notorious remarks on cleansing the 'stench of the poor', some people have called for some leniency, a little re-evaluation of our attitude towards him on the premise of a kinder, more gracious society.
'Where has all our empathy gone?' asks William Wan, general secretary of the Singapore Kindness Movement. (The existence of such a movement in the first place is an insult to all Singaporeans, but this is a topic for another day.)
I have a lot of empathy, but none of it is going to Anton Casey.
First of all, what did Anton Casey actually do that justified his inflated sense of self-importance ?
Does his work in any way enrich and improve the human conditions? Does he contribute to the scientific or cultural development of the society in general?
No, he is a private wealth fund manager, whose job entails making already obscenely rich people even richer.
The recent NY Times article 'For the Love of Money' written by a retired investment banker lent us an insight on what makes people like Anton Casey tick:
I felt so important...The satisfaction wasn’t just about the money. It was about the power. Because of how smart and successful I was, it was someone else’s job to make me happy.
It's not hard to see from his facebook posts and video that not only does Anton Casey have an endless appetite for more power, he draws his power from belittling people whom he deem less worthy because they make less money than him.
The author of the NYT article eventually came to realization the whole dishonesty of taking so much for contributing so little:
I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.
Unfortunately unlike the author, Anton Casey lacked such self-awareness.
According to a recent report by Boston Consulting Group, Singapore has the highest percentage of millionaires in the world:
Singapore had 188,000 millionaire households in 2011 – or slightly more than 17% of its resident households. Effectively, that equates to more than one in every six Singapore households having disposable private wealth of over US$1 million, excluding property, businesses and luxury goods.
- source:wsj
Behind that glamorous facade hides the lesser known fact that Singapore is slowly becoming one of the OCED countries with the highest income inequality.
Drawn by the attractive location and low tax, rich expats came in hordes. Our government welcomed them with red carpet and open arms brimming with gifts: 'They're here to pump gold into our land and rejuvenate our economy!'.
And so they did.
They came and they flourished. They lived in shiny new condos with security guards and enjoyed the pristine cleanliness of our streets. They married our women, hired low cost maids and became fat and content from the richness of our food.
But the promised gold never trickle down to the poor as the government promised they would. The poor continued to toil days and nights for less than what would constitute a minimum wage in another, perhaps more civilized country.
The work never became easier, their burden was never reduced. Instead, survival became harder as the cost of living and housing skyrocketed. In 2012, Singapore was the world's sixth most expensive country to live in according to the Worldwide Cost of Living Survey 2013.
So the land became a little more crowded, the infrastructure moaned and groaned under the additional load they were never built to take, the frail frames of ordinary elderly Singaporeans who swept the floor and sold tissue papers in the corridors of our hawker centers seemed to shrink under the weight of each additional year they had to work before they could finally retire and rest.
All this while, the rich expats get richer and more arrogant. They take all that the land has given them, and yet lack the basic decency to be thankful and appreciative for the locals whose sweat and blood provided them with such luxury and comfort.
William Wan wants us to spare some empathy for Anton Casey, but has Anton ever, in all his excesses, felt any empathy for our poor?
God knows our capitalist, elitist government never spared a thought for them, the people who got left behind when we're too busy chasing after the shining visage of a brighter future, the people who are stuck in a cycle of perpetual poverty toiling for a land that was already no longer theirs.
In Singapore's connected society where countless others had fallen due to disparaging remarks made on social media, Anton's deliberate crassness speaks not only of carelessness, but a sense of invincibility and infallibility.
There is no one to blame but himself for his shameful fall from grace. He had to learn that there is a price to pay for his arrogance, and it's highly debatable whether he even learnt the lesson at all.
In all likelihood, he may be cruising down the beautiful coast of Perth in his Porsche now, his pride a little injured but otherwise unscathed, laughing with his son and wife at all the Singaporeans who flamed him.
After all, when the flames die down, which they will, eventually, nothing has altered the undeniable fact that he's rich, will always be rich, may even become richer, and we're not.
But when I opened my browser this morning and read the news that Anton Casey had been fired from his previous firm Crossinvest, the thought that crossed my mind is:
At least some justice is served today.
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