Not at all impressed with M. Tan’s article. I can be humble but dignified. I read with a chuckle that an American clerk offering to buy the item for a customer and a Pinoy will interpret it as “yabang”. Get real. :)

now reflect on HK… ROTFLMAO!!!!!

********

having said that, benign0′s prescription could have been written two centuries ago in this manner:

To Thine Own Self Be True

Yet here, Laertes! Aboard, aboard for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay’d for.
There … my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion’d thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledg’d comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel but, being in,
Bear’t that th’ opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgement.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man;
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell; my blessing season this in thee!

– William Shakespeare

now reflect on HK… ROTFLMAO!!!!!

First he says poor minds talk about personalities, great minds talk about ideas (to that effect) then he goes on to talk about HIMSELF at great length…

…..which is why no one takes him seriously as regards to his mantra of it’s simple really (with matching trademark) because he fails to incorporate himself with his jargon-filled verbosity.

As the suicide bomber said to their great leader “Hang on a minute, how come YOU don’t practice what you preach”?

On the negative side is pride as boastfulness. “Yabang, angas, palalo”, marami tayong tawag diyan. And the negativity stems mainly from the act of putting down others at the expense of one’s pleasure (schadenfreude — lovely German word), which is exacerbated when the boastfulness is actually empty.

On the positive side is pride as sense of dignity and self-worth. “Taas noo, dignidad, paniniwala sa sarili” — same banana. This kind of pride is something that is earned through skill, talent, ingenuity, and other such traits. It is only truly positive when possessed by a person who does not gloat on the fact that he *is* all that.

As such I cannot blame those who sneer at benign0 for his claim to be like him, because many feel that he exhibits too much of the negative side of pride. And yes, at times he does. Which only tells us that he is nothing but human.

What Filipinos lack, however, is the second kind of pride, and it’s not because Filipinos do not have talent or a sense of self-worth. The problem is the way our culture de-emphasizes pride at all costs, harping at humility, guilt, and how the poor and downtrodden easily enter the gates of heaven. The problem is the way our culture de-emphasizes the value of genuine achievement, teaching us instead to respect feudal societal castes, encouraging us to “know our place” and align all our acts for the sake of “pakikisama”.

If being like benign0 means saying no to these cultural norms, that’s all fine and good. Just leave the bad bits behind, I guess. :P

all i said is that you don’t need to read the totality/wholeness of the essay to get “adopt a set of standards….” as an idea of the essay. he himself writes it in 1 paragraph near the end. however, in fact, he says more. so to get at the totality, we ought to consider the rest of it. and i think he’s serious about the rest of what he wrote, coz he hasn’t disowned it as a specific suggestion, as well as in reading his other work. yun lang naman.

yes. i like the generic idea of aiming for excellence. this point we all agree (at least i hope we do!) who wouldn’t? the difference is small, but potentially important.

the difference is “who validates a self imposed standard”. bening0 says the person, by himself does it. But thats not the only way a standard (moral, intellectual, or whatever kind) is enforced and determined. it could be a group standard, or an entire society.

now, thats something interesting to discuss actually… and the answer varies from case to case… not easy to pin down…

Ok? I used the word to refer to the wholeness of the essay, and not just to one sentence. I did not use the word to refer to Gestalt psych, ok, primer?

And gabby, it’s not as different as you make it out to be.

And solusyon mga kaibigan is maging katulad nya. Tall order I suppose.

Let me share my thoughts on irony and satire though: Satire and irony as literary devices have their limitations and are actually passe’ (they are so 19th or 20th century IMHO). Check what the late American writer DAvid Foster Wallace had to say about irony:

“And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”

“So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tried to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde. . .puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.”