towards total war and work

War didn't use to be so bad. In the feudal days, war was fought between knights (circa 1000 AD) or mercenary armies (circa 1500 AD), and peasants just got on with life and paid their dues to whoever happened to win. They also had a gentleman's code of conduct. Even in the hundred year's war between England and France, it was almost a side event between professional soldiers, as trading and diplomatic relations continued. But it gets worse.

During the French Revolution, Napoleon began the levée en masse (also known as conscription), and suddenly even unwilling people had to fight. In the American Civil War, Sherman laid waste to the South in his march to the sea, the first time a civilian population was targetted to starve the armies they supported. And with the firebombing of Dresden and the two atomic bombs, WWII employed the destruction of civilian population centres as a means to break the spirit of the nations. In the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian army used mobs of children to clear minefields in advance of their ground troops.

This is total war - when every single person is thrown into the conflict, and life is a struggle for everyone, from the front line to the home front. There is no holding back. I sometimes feel that work is like total war.

For one thing, they are both downward spirals in the rat race for recognition and promotion. You work hard, I work harder. There are absolute gains in production (not productivity), but the relative standing is still the same. Everybody loses; but once you get caught in the trap, you cannot stop. You cannot work less hard. Instead, we compete to see who can stay in the office longer, who can handle the most projects, who can produce the most. And when it gets really bad, we start cutting each other down and stabbing backs.

And this problem is endemic to our Singaporean society and Chinese in general. We work so hard, but are we truly more productive or is it just blood, sweat and tears? Compare our official working hours with the Europeans, or even the Americans. Then compare the unofficial working hours to see how bad the situation really is. And yet they are still more productive than us! No wonder no one wants to work in Singapore, and everyone here wants to leave. But we have no natural resources and as Krugman puts it, we have run out of growth factors. So the only way to compete globally is to work ourselves into the ground.

In this total war, we are all losers.