SS blog discussion

“Democracy creates stability in a society”

The previous posts were definitely enlightening. I would now pick on points in the previous posts to support and rebut. Society as haozhi defined, is ever changing in every country and I shall be linking democracy, stability and society together.

Democracy as jinfu has said, gives the citizens, the people an opportunity to voice their thoughts. It allows them to suggest implementations of various policies like examples of social advocacy amongst our midst, this is all done by kind-hearted citizens. Democracy defined as a freedom of speech is indeed important to a country for it to survive without riots. Democracy is a unifying form of governance that involves the whole country to decide on the leaders for the country example through the form of voting.

In my opinion, i would be for the fact that democracy creates stability in a society. However, i would also attempt to support chen wei's argument. Freedom of speech is like giving people a voice to speak, allow their thoughts to be heard. In singapore, a small country with four races, depriving certain ethnic groups of voting rights would certainly be 'suicidal' for Singapore. The next thing that would happen is that the country would be split into 4groups going head on into each other with riots and the country would basically disintegrate.

If other forms of government are practised in Singapore, let me illustrate the results. As for dictatorship, let's say a malay leader emerges. Won't everyone view him with a slanted perspective? For the other ethnic groups like the Chinese and Tamils, they would immediately make their complaints heard. A malay leader would also be naturally bias for the malays. Favouring one race over the other is sending a direct provocative message to the other three pillars of Singapore: Chinese, Tamils and Eurasians. I believe within a short period of time, riots would be inevitable. Democracy helps prevent this from happening and ensures stability. Although our president is not Chinese, however, we are allowed to make our voices heard and any grievances would be addressed by the government.

I would also like to rebut Chen Wei's point about what if majority of the society vote for something negative. Firstly, we are assuming that the society is flawed in this situation. Which country is corrupted till a point that actually more than half of the society would vote for something not advisable for the country. The quote is "what if what they want is unadvisable for the country?" this point is definitely worth rebutting and makes unsupported assumptions that the nation's citizens are all corrupted or illiterate. In Singapore's point of view, that is clearly not the case. Our government has a reputation of being among the least corrupt countries present throughout the world. Our system of voting has also not brought us any problems so far.

Developing on Haozhi's point that there would be opposition parties in a democratic form of government also ensures continual progress and improvement of the nation's political ideals and policies ensuring stability in the society and harmonious living among the citizens in the country. These opposition parties serve to 'balance' out the government's policies and making them ideal for us citizens, example delaying the GST hike etc.

Democracy is definitely beneficial at least to a country like Singapore. For other countries, basically everyone wants equal rights. In countries with unbalanced ratios of ethnic groups, democracy allows equal distribution of rights as the smaller ethnic group is allowed to speak up. Therefore, democracy definitely creates stability in a society. Even though representative democracy is another good idea, however, proving representative democracy is good does not disprove the fact that democracy indeed helps to create stability in society. Democracy gives each one of us the right to speak and that alone is the most important point of democracy which allows each one of us to voice out our grievances. With this continual suggestion of improvements to long standing policies, stability would grow as everyone would be pleased and our society and ultimately, country would continue its fast-paced development.

Chester Yan (5) 3B