Nietzsche, Foucault and Lee Kuan Yew’s Unreason Wrapped up in a Cloak of Reason

This article explores the attitudes and actions of Lee Kuan Yew to understand better his perspectives on modernity. This section is informed by the philosophy of Nietzsche. I also draw upon Foucault’s work on reason and unreason and later work on power/knowledge and use these tools to penetrate Lee Kuan Yew’s world and gain insights into who he was and what he did and what impacts he made. I conclude that his madder elements, which he always prompted as exercises in rational reason, such as his eugenics and anti-Indonesian and anti-Malay racism, were not so much outliers of madness as examples of his logic being pushed to the extreme under pressure and the absence of countervailing forces such as detailed criticism by experienced cabinet colleagues or systematic critique by a strong opposition. While Lee used the modernist tools of surveillance and control to discipline and normalize the Singapore individual and collective worker, his punishments of disliked opposition figures had a premodern element where his personal honour had to be avenged in public view and the opposition figures highlighted as being worthy, in his view, of stigmatization.