#sc4101

The simplest way to make the social visible is to break the rule. Because once you break the rule, the coerciveness will show its head. Some of you say rightly, that you consent to the social, but the moment you are uncomfortable with the social order, then the punishment comes. This is classic Durkheimian deviance. Deviance makes the norm visible. Without deviance, we would not necessarily know that there is a norm.

... And the thing about liberal individualism is intuitive, it's attractive. Who doesn't want freedom, who doesn't want rights? … You don't have to earn these rights, these rights are by definition already possessed by you as a human being. Sociologically speaking, that's a little absurd. You only become human *after* being socialised. You are always, always within the surrounding of the social. You are born into society… It is from that that you derive your identity as a subject. But that's not intuitive, in the sense that the moment you understand that, you find yourself, "Okay, I'm free". And that "I'm free" is not something you naturally desire, you'd rather have your freedom as rights… Most Singaporeans, including all of you here, are actually very well-socialised. Most Singaporeans don’t really believe in individualism so much. They tend to be fairly accepting that… there will always be rules, and you will always have to abide by them… It's difficult to teach sociology in America, because there will be strong reactions as to why they can't do this. It's actually easy to teach sociology in Singapore, because most Singaporeans… will think "I can't do what I want, naturally, so I will do what I can do best". The government pragmatism is [ingrained]… You do the most within what you think you can do best at… The world that you live in becomes quite different from the American world...

You learn sociology substantively, not in the sense of how to use it. If you read theories, you have to read theories in trying to understand how they theorise.

There is a tendency, and please don't do this again, there is a tendency to claim superiority to having studied sociology. There is a tendency to claim that "people who don't take Sociology don't think that". How do you know? ...The ability to be sympathetic to other people's positions and so on, don't speculate that non-sociology students are dummies who don't think like you do. There's too much privileging of yourselves.

Don't get bogged down by details; details change all the time. Sometimes, too much emphasis is placed on empirical evidence, but you can do a lot with limited amount of empirical evidence. Whatever the phenomena, you try to eliminate the details as much as possible, especially those that are not essential to the phenomena, you strip it down to the essentials… That’s how you conceptualise. To conceptualise is to reduce a lot of empirical information into a set of statements, or better still, a single idea.

People always talk about how we always measure success with academic achievements. That's not true… The most successful businessmen are usually the lowly educated.

Everybody in this room will want to insist that they are an individual different from the other, because who wants to be the other, right? If everybody is truly individual, it will be a sociological nightmare, because everybody will be unpredictable.

Some of you write as if there's no more facts. How do you know there's a fact? It's very easy, just walk to the wall. Just keep walking. You think it's like Platform 10-and-a-half in Harry Potter, just walk into the station? There are obviously facts in the world. Just take something solid and knock against it.