The same argument can be made for other signature elements of the kampung spirit like open doors and the spirit of mutual assistance. They were not spontaneous acts of kindness, but behaviors born of circumstance and shaped by material deprivations.

Open door policy is one of the kampung spirit’s cliches, and the nostalgic often write of a time when ‘trust made it unnecessary to lock doors.’

I do not dispute this fact, but I do find it confusing. Wasn’t Singapore dangerous and crime-ridden before LKY cleaned it up? Do Singaporeans have a genetic aversion to crime that renders the police force an unnecessary atavism?

That’s bullshit, of course. Residents kept their doors and windows open, but it was mutual surveillance that kept residents righteous. As Chua Beng Huat writes, the kampung’s confined nature meant that everyone was watching everyone else. It was thus impossible for any crime to escape justice when everyone had such a intimate knowledge of each others’ lives.

In other words, it was more Black Mirror than unspoiled Garden of Eden.

In any case, kampungs were rife with crime. Just of a different variety. Mutual policing might have prevented petty theft, but it certainly did not deter the secret societies that called the kampung their home and made it a ‘black area’ in the eyes of relevant authorities.

As historian Loh Kah Seng notes in his book ‘Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore’, kampungs like Bukit Ho Swee were the playground of no less than a dozen gangs, including the 08, the 24, the 36 and splinter groups like the Tiong Gi Kiam, 66666 and Gi Tiong Ho.

These gangs fought each other for the right to extort kampung residents whilst supplementing their income with ‘kidnapping, robbery and murder’. Ironically, they also provided much of the kampung’s surveillance system because the gangsters rarely worked and could thus sit at the kopitiam all day to eyeball other potential criminals.

So, if open doors were born of mafia-sponsored surveillance and sociability a by-product of unemployment, did the kampung residents at least help each other out?

They definitely did. Historical records and popular memory are filled with accounts of generosity. There are stories of towkays installing lights for poor widows and villagers banding together to form volunteer fire brigades. In the government survey ‘Urban Incomes and Housing’, a young Goh Keng Swee describes an ‘extensive network of self-help’ within the community.

This, to me, is the heart of the matter. What Goh Keng Swee saw as ‘self-help’ in the 1950s has been rebranded into ‘graciousness’ and ‘goodness’ by the 1990s, and continues till today. Selective amnesia has erased the reality that our kampung spirit’s ‘self-help’ ethos was oftentimes a response to a failed state: villagers helped each other not because they really wanted to, but because there was no choice.

The volunteer fire brigade put out flames where the firemen failed to show and wealthier residents often sponsored amenities for the community to raise their social standing. Their enhanced reputation would then allow them to act as unlicensed moneylenders (a.k.a hweis) to the community.

Our official narratives have ignored this strain of pragmatism underlying acts of mutual aid. They have ignored darker voices like those of kampung resident Tay Bok Chiu: “In those days, if you could take advantage, you took advantage; if you could bully, you bullied … it was almost lawless, like ‘there was no government’.”