I’ve been so busy extolling how so many of the issues that plague Philippine society are really so simple that it never occurred to me to ask another equally simple question:

Is it that hard?

That’s a question I credit to commenter BongV who asks in a recent comment:

For example, corruption. How hard is it not to have personal responsibility for not committing corruption? Is it really that hard?

Another example, choice. How hard is it to select a competent forward looking candidate? Is it really that hard? If one is saying , yes, it’s that hard? I ask has the gene pool suddenly become bankrupt that pinoys have no other choice but to vote for the same political families – Roxas, Araneta, Gordon, Santiago… Are these the only family names that have a brain between the ears in the Philippines? I find that hard to believe and yet, the Senate and the House of Representatives are filled with the same old family names – new faces, same old scripts.

Ganun na ba karetarded ang talent pool ng Pilipinas? Is this hard to answer?

Really. Is it that hard?

One of the things I don’t understand is the sheer amount of energy expended by the “intelligentsia” on micro-analysing and micro-speculating on the minutiae of the suspect motives, suspect sentiments, suspect decisions, and suspect actions of the who’s-who of Philippine political circuses. In the middle of all this is The Media and other brokers of information such as the Social Weather Stations. These elements are always wont to swoop into any fray to lap up little factoids for re-packaged profitable re-distribution to those lower down in the food chain. That’s what they do, because that’s what they are, and they are laughing all the way to the bank each time.

There’s also quite a few laughs to be gained by sitting back and watching what are supposedly the most “intelligent” of consumers of the information brokered by those business entitites clumping around to feast upon their products like ravenous pigeons milling around a handful of breadcrumbs thrown out by a passerby.

Maybe that’s what makes it so hard. Too much focus on the narrow channel of awareness created by an “intelligentsia” with too much dubious “expertise” for their own good — much the same as how a lawyer could know The Law down to the letter and still not get the spirit behind it; and much more famously, how a bunch of be-credentialled Ivy-League-educated MBAs and “economists” could run entire economies aground with their misguided “analyses” and “forecasts”.

Yes. It’s too hard when you are up to your nose in the very same horsemanure that one prides one’s self in being so proficient at scrutinising.

I recently took one of those mandatory Fraud/Security courses that are prescribed to us annually here. One of the principles that was emphasised was this:

Honest people generally fail to suspect fraudulent activity going on around them.

In other words, it takes one to know one.

So in considering this, we now get a bit more light shed on the predisposition of Filipinos to regard one another (whether it be their intentions or actions) with suspicion, as if to validate that we are indeed a people imprisoned by our culture of crime.

As the esteemed Jaime Licauco wrote back in 2001…

A nation whose policies and rules are based on the assumption that everybody is a cheat and liar unless proven otherwise cannot long endure. Take a close look at our bureaucracy and its rules. It is burdened by elaborate and often unnecessary checks and balances so that nothing ever gets done in the process.

…an elegant observation I cite in, where else, a piece I once wrote on the root of all corruption.

Indeed, in fairness to Filipinos it may be in fact too hard — too hard to be honest, and too hard to expect honesty in one another.

And saddest of all: Too hard to achieve and succeed.

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