visionary pragmatism

Hmmm. It looks like i won't be putting up my LKY Ambivalent-Fan piece anytime soon ... At least, not as a single essay or article. What i may do instead is to write short little pieces focusing on particular aspects of his personality or leadership style that i find interesting.
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So let's start with two things that, at first, seem largely contradictory -- which may perhaps explain why the man was such a paradox. i do believe though that these two qualities, together, enabled his extraordinary success and very much defined the Singapore that he created.
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i wish i had that combination of extraordinary vision, and hard-headed pragmatism. Honestly, i can't think of many people who could have dreamt the dreams he had for this country, and made them work against such incredible odds. How was it that he had such a firm grasp of reality, of realpolitik, and yet was able to envision and make into reality things that other people dismissed as impossible? How was it that he could be, at the same time, so cynical about human nature and yet so determined to build a kind of socialist-meritocratic (another one of those paradoxes .... ) utopia out of this tiny island-state? (More on the 'socialist' bit some other time -- Singapore is famous for its meritocratic system -- but as a nation, we had socialist roots, and i believe the socialist impulse is still very strong, albeit rarely publicised ...... ).
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五体投地。。。
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