In my opinion (unlike some people here I do have one, and it ain’t humble) there is only one way, and that way is my way.

It’s simple, really™ — though obviously not for the small-minded; which is why I thought I’d elaborate a bit more.

How it is currently done.

The thinking that underpins the popular and more appealing approach to regarding the challenges that face us as a nation is quite straightforward:

Big Bad Government is responsible.

I can understand the psychology behind the appeal of this kind of thinking. We simply do not want to be told that we are responsible for our own success or failure. Our track record of utter failure is staring us straight at our face: more than fifty years of slow but steady and consistent decline. If we note how politicians, personalities, an assortment of “heroes” and forms of government, have come and gone over those fifty years, what would be the logical conclusion that would jump out at us? The conclusion, quite simply, lies in what remained consistent over those fifty years: not our politicians, not our forms of government, and certainly not our “heroes”, but our character as a people.

This truth — that our chronic failure to launch traces its roots to the very fabric of our character as a people — is, to be fair, difficult to swallow in the same way that it may take an entire lifetime for a junkie or a wino to admit to himself that he is a substance addict. Anybody who’s had the misfortune of having to deal with a substance addict would be familiar with The Attitude. Such losers are predisposed to align and surround themselves with people who validate their mistaken belief that their own failure is somebody else’s fault and, worse, that their prospects for success is somebody else’s responsibility.

Indeed, I wrote back in 2007:

Perhaps we Filipinos find a personal need to remain focused on our presidents, our politicians, and their politics because of our chronic inability to take responsibility not only for our bad fortunes but also for our good fortunes. To us a president is merely an extension of our deeply-ingrained addiction for scapegoats and providers in our lives. Philippine presidents are burdened with wearing both hats simultaneously. A Philippine President both (a) is to blame for poverty (scapegoat hat), and (b) is expected to “create” employment for the jobless (provider hat).

So between “experts” who keep harping about how Government, the descendants of old colonial masters, or the present “neo-Imperialists” continue to “victimise” our hapless lot and realists who remain consistent with the simple message that we are ultimately personally responsible for our success, who would you rather go to bed with? It depends on what part of your brain you are using to evaluate your options. Between your reptilian brain stem that has anywhere above half a billion years of evolution headstart taking over your thinking faculties, and your frontal lobe that’s been around for only a hundred-odd thousand of those, chances are most of us would succumb to the earlier thinking system — where our most primal urges emanate.

This provides a convenient seque into what a lot of people seem to be holding their breaths for (drum roll)…

How else should it be done?

(with a nod to our resident expert Primer for formulating this brilliant question)

This is the hard part — the part that requires human-grade thinking; the kind that our frontal lobes are best at.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, it may help to jump off from an article I wrote back in 2003 that originally set out to expose the flawed thinking Filipinos apply to our regard for “democracy”. I highlight this excerpt specifically:

The Electoral Process is just one element of the democratic equation and should be put in the proper perspective of our democratic duty. It is our duty to:

(a) Select the right leaders;
(b) Use the system to hold them accountable; and,
(c) Hold ourselves accountable for the quality of the leaders we choose using the system.

It would be fair to hazard a guess that this whole “love of freedom” sloganeering associated with the practice of “democracy” is the work of a political machine averse to accountability. The point of democracy is not freedom as many of us were foolishly led to believe. The point of democracy is the practice of a system that enables us to hold our leaders to account. One can therefore understand why this, by now, puzzling obssession with “freedom” is prevalent today. Who else but our politicians are the biggest trumpeters of the “freedom” we enjoy under “democracy”?

We will note that an utter lack of understanding of the simple principles above have manifested themselves quite a number of times since.

In 2005, for example, when yet another presidential impeachment bid fell flat on its face, Filipinos retreated back into that all-too-familiar droll and unintelligent style of rhetoric:

And now if there was one stupid question we could choose for 2005, this would be it:

“Saan tayo pupunta pagkatapos pag wala na yung impeachment complaint?” (“Where do we go if the impeachment complaint is voted down?”) asked former education secretary and Liberal Party leader Florencio “Butch” Abad. This was echoed in the PCIJ Blog article “A Black-and-White Day” further quoting Abad: “What path do people take once the impeachment option is slammed shut in their faces?” Excuse us, but who exactly slammed the impeachment option in our faces? How quickly we forget that the very slammers we love to hate were voted into office by the slammees themselves. As Neal Cruz of the INQ7.net aptly put it in a 24 Aug 2005 article:

We are a representative democracy and congressmen are elected to represent their districts in the House. They are supposed to follow the wishes of their constituents who are their employers. But look at what they’re doing. They are disobeying their constituents and pushing Charter change just because of the ambition of their leader who wants to become prime minister by hook or by crook because he knows he cannot be elected president.

Who votes disobedient representatives into congress in the first place? Would a smart (or at the very least sane) person appoint a pedophile to watch over her kids? A government officiated by fools in a democracy merely reflects the fools who exercised their rights to vote to put them there. This is but another bout of this selective amnesia that Filipinos are world-renowned for. The “enlightened” wash the stupidity of the masses off their hands, proclaiming “I did not vote for those fools”. Ironic, that the very same elite who are among the most die-hard defenders of “democracy” and “free” elections would shrink away from accountability over the outcome of the very system they worship.

To be able to hold people to account for success or failure, we need to have it clear in our minds what success means to us. Any moron can make a call for our politicians to exercise a bit of “integrity”, “honesty”, and “leadership”. But ask said moron what he would expect this hypothetically virtuous politician he is calling for to deliver to society specifically? I doubt that he can come up with anything more detailed than over-sloganeered “objectives” like ‘more employment’, more ’social justice’, and abstract concepts like ‘rule of Law’, level ‘playing fields’, and the like.

An absolutely crystal clear and substantial understanding of what we can expect of our politicians, should come from a deep grasp of the issues at play. It may be a tall order to expect this of the Philippine masses, but it can be quite reasonable to expect of the “intelligentsia” and those who exert much influence over our society’s belief systems to take this approach. As implied earlier, our belief systems are flawed. Therefore it requires systemic thinking to fix.

To be able to get rid of a flawed system you need to build a new system to replace it. But how can we if our political parties, the kind of “debates” we engage in, and the issues we highlight and “analyse” are all ultimately built around personalities, the sensational political issue of the day, and the Government that we are made to believe “embodies” Philippine society’s ills? We need to look no further for evidence of the lack of substance around our regard for this challenge than our political parties. What do they stand for? What are the underlying ideologies (at least) or philosophies (at best) that define those vying for a piece of the public awareness?

Philosophies and ideologies are systems of thought. And unless we can attribute such systems of thought to our political parties and, by association, to the politicians affiliated with said political parties, we cannot hope to fix or replace the current dysfunctional belief systems — the pwede-na-yan and bahala na attitudes, and the like — that infest the very fabric of our society and culture ultimately from which our chronic inability to prosper as a people springs forth.

What do the people whose pork barrels, junkets, spending habits, posturings, hairstyles, fashion sense, and soundbites our “experts” constantly scrutinise, speculate on, and blabber about really stand for? And if we get a bunch of slogans and bullet points in response to this first question do we possess the substance to challenge these bullet-pointed and sloganised assertions and seek clarity by asking the right questions?

And here’s my punchline question:

For that matter, what does the Filipino stand for?

If we cannot answer this question convincingly and with conviction (and by all accounts, we do in fact monumentally struggle with this), then I find it quite laughable that we as a collective of “expertise” presume to be critical of our politicians, their political parties (if ever), and our Government.

How should it be done then?

The first step is knowing what we are as a people. And what we really are as a people is apparently not an easy truth for most of us to handle so far as I have seen.

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