TL;DR – When things seem too good to be true, they sometimes are?
Remember the widely-circulating reply on question-and-answer website Quora where ‘ang moh’ Theodore Shawcross wrote about how he moved to Singapore because it’s the best country, period.
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In his 2-thousand word reply, he touched on Racial Equality, Cost of Living, Car Ownership and Freedom of Expression before ending it with a patriotic Majulah Singapura. In short, “although many Singaporeans like to rant about its imperfections, Singapore is the closest you can get to a near perfectly run country.”
Now, netizens are starting to question the authenticity of this Theodore Shawcross who claims to have a PhD, schooled at Oxford and Stanford, and does work on racism, history and economics.
Local playwright Joel Bertrand Tan asks if Shawcross is just “a Team-B troll made to reassure us that as bad as it looks in the perfect city of the future” especially since he “can’t find his name on google anywhere except Quora.”
Which is quite true actually. Typing Theodore Shawcross in Google yields us:
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And additionally, his Facebook profile appears to have only been created on 2 June 2016 with no friends nor many photos while his LinkedIn doesn’t have any connections.
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Maybe he’s just a really shy person…
Or like he said, “very new to this whole internet thing”.
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We have reached out to Shawcross via Facebook and will update this article when he replies but in the meantime,
Cover image via Theodore Shawcross’s Facebook.
I should state that I too am an Expat and I have lived and worked in Singapore for 19 years although I am not as successful and wealthy as Theodore. While I agree with some of the points he makes I think Theodore does not really have a grasp on how life is lived by most Singaporeans. I believe Theodore when he says he does not work for the PAP. The reason he sounds as though he does is because he is the product of an elitist system similar to the Raffles / NUS (and or scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge) that supplies the PAP with its leadership. Although I am sure he is very bright and was good student it was not meritocracy that allowed Theodore to attended Westminster School in London; it was his parents wealth and probably connections too. Westminster School is an independent school ( Read private fee paying) within the precincts of Westminster Abbey, England. It has the highest Oxford and Cambridge acceptance rates of any secondary school or college in the world. Since his family live in Oxford Theodore must have been a boarder. The current boarding fees are more than 11,000 British pounds per term. The UK has a three term per year system so the current basic boarding fees are more than SG$66,000 per year. The of course you would have to add the uniforms, ECAs and other costs. Theodore then went to Oxford and Harvard (so as I said obviously bright) and his subsequent employment record indicates he was a partner at McKinsey & Company (Singapore), one of the top worldwide management consulting firm in the world. My point is that Theodore would be as detached from the realities of life as lived by most Britons if he was still there as he is from the realities of life for most Singaporeans.