I was on the MRT when I read it.
The train was doing what it always does—moving steadily through tunnels and stations, carrying people who looked half-awake, half-lost in their phones. I was one of them. Somewhere between scrolling headlines and half-formed thoughts, I came across an online post written by a fellow Singaporean. The post was firm, confident, and practical. It argued that art was non-essential, that government funding for the arts was wasteful, and that the money would be better funnelled into “more useful” things—things that actually mattered in times of crisis.
I remember putting my phone down and feeling unexpectedly unsettled.
Not angry. Not defensive. Just… affected. In that quiet, lingering way that follows you even after you’ve alighted at your station. It wasn’t because the argument was unfamiliar. We’ve heard versions of it before, especially during difficult periods—pandemics, recessions, wars happening elsewhere that remind us how fragile stability can be. It was because the statement forced a deeper question to surface: when we talk about defending Singapore, what exactly are we defending?
This year, as we commemorate Total Defence Day, that question feels worth sitting with a little longer.
When conversations about defence happen, the language often shifts quickly to survival. Food security. Clean water. Energy. Healthcare. Digital infrastructure. These are critical, and no one seriously disputes their importance. In moments of extreme crisis—war, natural disaster, global pandemics—human needs collapse into something brutally simple. Strip life down to its most basic form and survival depends on three things: food, water, oxygen. Without these, nothing else follows.
But here is where we need to slow down, because survival needs and essentials are not the same thing.
Survival needs are immediate and unforgiving. Miss one for too long and life ends. Essentials, on the other hand, are what allow life to continue with dignity, coherence, and meaning beyond the next hour or the next day. They operate across time. They support not just existence, but endurance.
Take shelter. Many psychological frameworks place shelter high on the hierarchy of human needs, and rightly so. Yet imagine a wartime scenario where you must make an impossible choice: you have limited resources and limited time. Do you build a house, or do you slaughter an animal to feed your family? Almost everyone would choose food first. That choice does not suddenly make shelter non-essential. It simply reveals that essentials are contextual and sequential. Shelter may not save you today, but without it, survival tomorrow becomes unlikely.
The same logic applies when we talk about the arts.
Art is often dismissed because it does not keep the heart beating in an emergency. A painting cannot purify water. A song cannot vaccinate a population. And yet, history shows us something curious: in every major crisis humanity has faced, art has not disappeared. It adapts. It compresses. It hides if it must—but it remains.
Soldiers write poems in trenches. Prisoners sketch on scraps of paper. Songs circulate quietly under oppressive regimes. During lockdowns, people sang from balconies, baked bread, drew, wrote, shared humour online. These were not acts of excess. They were acts of survival of a different kind.
Psychologists have long studied the role of art in mental and emotional resilience. Engagement with music, visual art, storytelling, and performance has been shown to reduce stress, regulate emotions, strengthen social bonds, and provide a sense of meaning in uncertain conditions. These effects are not “nice-to-haves” when fear, isolation, and grief are widespread. They are stabilising forces.
A population that is physically fed but psychologically fractured is not resilient. Defence planners know this. Armies have always known this. Morale is not abstract—it is operational. It determines whether people hold together under pressure or fall apart when circumstances stretch them too thin.
This understanding is embedded, perhaps more quietly than we realise, in Singapore’s Total Defence framework. Defence here is not just military. It is psychological, social, economic, civil, and digital. Each pillar recognises that a nation does not collapse only when its borders are breached, but when trust erodes, when fear overwhelms, when people stop believing in a shared future.
Art threads through all of this.
Psychological defence is about resilience, identity, and the ability to cope with adversity. Art gives language to emotions that are otherwise difficult to process. It allows grief, hope, anger, and solidarity to be expressed without turning inward or turning on one another.
Social defence is about cohesion—about people seeing themselves as part of something larger. Shared cultural references, stories, images, and performances create common ground. They help us recognise one another even across differences.
Economic defence is not only about productivity, but adaptability. Creative thinking fuels innovation. The ability to imagine alternatives, to see patterns differently, to respond flexibly to disruption—these are creative skills, not purely technical ones.
Civil defence relies on trust and participation. Public messaging that resonates emotionally, that feels human rather than mechanical, is far more effective in times of crisis. Art has always been central to how ideas are communicated and remembered.
Even digital defence, often framed in technical terms, depends on narrative. How we understand misinformation, how we interpret threats, how we maintain a sense of shared reality online—these are cultural challenges as much as technological ones.
To suggest that art sits outside these pillars is to misunderstand how societies actually function under stress.
History in Southeast Asia makes this especially clear. Long before widespread literacy, art was the primary medium through which ideas, beliefs, and values travelled. Religion did not spread through instruction manuals. Hindu-Buddhist epics moved across the region through temple carvings, murals, dance, and shadow puppetry. Moral lessons were embedded in stories performed and retold across generations.
When Islam spread through the Malay Archipelago, it did so not just through doctrine, but through stories, calligraphy, and architecture. Art translated belief into lived experience. It made the abstract tangible.
Even colonial powers understood this. They used architecture, exhibitions, language, and visual culture to assert authority and shape identity. Art has always been close to power because it reaches people at an emotional level that logic alone cannot.
Fast forward to modern Singapore, and the pattern continues. Over the years, our government has invested deliberately in integrating art into everyday life—public housing murals, community arts programmes, school curricula, public spaces designed with care. These were not indulgent gestures. They were acknowledgements that a resilient society is built not only on efficiency, but on emotional and cultural grounding.
The irony is that these investments are often most visible in peaceful times, which makes them easy to take for granted. But their value becomes clearest when peace is disrupted. During the pandemic, when routines collapsed and isolation set in, it was art—in all its informal, everyday forms—that helped people cope. People turned to music, baking, writing, humour, creativity. Mental health professionals encouraged creative expression not as distraction, but as a way to process uncertainty.
If art were truly non-essential, it would have been irrelevant then. Instead, it became a lifeline for many.
This is why the post I read in the MRT, stayed with me. Not because it was wrong in its concern for practicality, but because it revealed how narrow our definition of “useful” can become when we reduce defence to mere survival. Total Defence is not about defending our ability to stay alive at the lowest possible threshold. It is about defending a way of life—a society worth sustaining even when things go wrong.
So when we ask what is essential, perhaps the better question is not “what can we do without today?” but “what helps us endure tomorrow?”
Our government has spent a good amount of money and effort to weave art into our daily lives because they recognise it as a form of essential—not for bare survival, but for wellbeing, cohesion, and resilience. Let’s not waste that effort by dismissing art as expendable. If Total Defence is about protecting what matters, then we should be honest enough to admit that art has always mattered—not just in times of peace, but especially when tested.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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