These are not, plainly, the sentiments of someone who has a fair and balanced view of Malays (whose divorce rates, for the record, appear to be lower than average). So it’s not surprising that her posts, which were widely circulated, prompted outrage, or that complaints to her employer cost the woman her job the next day. But things could have gone much worse for her. Three years earlier, a Christian evangelical couple in Singapore was sent to prison for violating the Sedition Act (and the Undesirable Publications Act) when they mailed out tracts that denigrated Islam and Catholicism as false religions. In the wake of the bad-tempered Facebook posts, law-enforcement officers visited the offending party and issued a warning; taking the hint, she moved back to Australia, where she was born. This is a high price to pay for an irritable posting on the web. As you’d expect, sometimes remarks about other groups that seem less obviously bigoted can also land you in trouble.

There’s a complex bargain here: If the state helps protect ethnic identities in Singapore, it also polices them. Last year, an imam was expelled from Singapore for insulting Jews and Christians, and two Christian preachers were banned for denigrating Islam and Buddhism. The country has a minister in charge of Muslim affairs who issues strenuous warnings to his coreligionists against “self-radicalization.” The Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act provides for the state to issue restraining orders against clerics who promote hostility between religions—or, yes, disaffection with the government.

Singapore’s extraordinary efforts to avoid internal cleavages, through a national project of respect for racial and religious differences, embody the promise and perils of what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called the “politics of recognition.” (He’s from Montreal, so for him Quebecois language politics is front of mind.) In this influential model, the benevolent state is to confer public acknowledgement on various identities. And state recognition is certainly a way of being respected; the trouble is that it’s also a way of being reified. I’ve called this the Medusa Syndrome: When the state gazes at us—with its identity cards, educational stipulations, and other instruments of recognition—it invariably fixes and rigidifies a phenomenon that’s neither fixed nor rigid. The strategy is never going to be adequate to the real-world complexities, to compound identities that can grow as pleated as an accordion. But it may be the only strategy that such a managerial city-state has.

In later years, Lee Kuan Yew’s speeches became less focused on values and aspirations and more on policy, precisely because the Singaporean identity had been to some degree stabilized. If the state he created was watchful and intrusive by the standards of a Western liberal democracy, it had also convinced most of its citizens that they were engaged together in a meaningful national project. A friend who spent much of her childhood there once put it like this: The people of Singapore felt watched but also seen. The death of Lee in 2015 produced a vast and genuine outpouring of grief in Singapore. There was a week of national mourning with flags at half-mast. Nearly 450,000 people paraded past his coffin in Parliament over three days and nights, with public transportation running 24 hours a day to enable their visits. But the state-imposed silence about intergroup difficulties remains. Someone is still always watching; younger Singaporeans may not any longer be quite so glad to be seen.