SINGAPORE – At a time when most people understand that the personal is political, individual views have become a battleground of virtue – equality, good; hierarchy, bad. Elitism? The worst possible kind of social evil.

Yet, take a step back from this instinctive repulsion and there might be benefits to muddying the waters. Elitism, the belief that an elite group, however defined, should be entitled to the reins of power has been the norm throughout much of history.

Whether it is the clergy, kings with their divine right, the Confucian scholar or today’s fintech bros, there have been groups in each time period that societies tend to value and reward. 

It was only with increasing democratisation, and a growing disenfranchisement at the chasm between the top and the rest, that elitism has become a byword for undeserved privilege and gross injustice.

This brief trip back in time is not to rehabilitate elitism, but to show that the current period against it – or at least one that pays lip service to not believing in an elite class – may be an aberrant one. In the West, this has been taken to extremes, manifesting in a debilitating disregard for experts and fatal results during the Covid-19 pandemic against the advice of doctors to vaccinate.

In Singapore, it is the elite schools that are targeted, in the idealistic slogan that every school is a good school. Though, for perplexing reasons, this scepticism has not yet been extended to the natural reverence the majority of Singaporeans harbour for lawyers and doctors. Their expertise is assumed to be universally applicable – a mentality that has narrowed parents and students’ conception of what success looks like.

In any case, the ills of elitism have been thoroughly aired, including the type of entitled, discompassionate divas that it ends up producing. The very consensus of who deserves to be elite has also fractured.

I wonder, though, if this enmity has led to some unexpected side effects. This is a train of thought sparked by recent reactions to the Government’s SG Culture Pass initiative set out during the Budget statement in 2025.

Self-sabotage

Under the scheme, $100 would be given to Singaporeans aged 18 and above for the consumption of the local arts, redeemable from September. One would expe...