I just read caffeine_sparks’s Authenticity and Mar Roxas. I think I know now why the Philippines — a country of 90 million — cannot produce even one good president.

It’s because:

We expect so much from presidents and so very little from ourselves.

We expect presidents to be saints but cannot seem to find it in ourselves to stop urinating in public. We expect presidents to be brilliant but cannot seem to hold ourselves to world class standards of excellence. We expect presidents to be accountable yet cannot seem to hold ourselves personally responsible for our own prosperity.

In other words, we set up our leaders for failure by setting standards of such scope as to leave little for us to be responsible for. When a President becomes responsible for “creating employment”, for example, guess what: suddenly, it is not our fault if we cannot find a job. Their failure can absolve us of our own failure to make things happen for ourselves.

This is not too different from how, left to their own devices, “key stakeholders” in an IT systems implementation project tend to press for no less than a do-it-all system that “automates everything from end-to-end”. When the possibility of such a system being built is raised (say, during vendors’ dimwit sales pitches), all of a sudden there is an excuse for inefficiency, poor data quality, poor governance, and overall poor operational practices — because all of a sudden everything is manual and prone to error.

A society of true achievers can prosper despite their president.

Strip away all the nice-to-haves promised by our half-wit politicians and regard our society relative to other developing countries. We have our democratic rights, a free press, and a relatively open economy. Flawed as these may be, they are still a whole notch better than most. Vietnam and China on the other hand are both complete antitheses of these even to this day. Yet with a very small relatively recent relaxation of their once oppressively tyrannical central state control of their economies, a flurry of economic activity had overcome these two states. With just enough breathing space, business in these countries, flourished.

Compare that to the Philippines, whose idea of oppressive totalitarianism is Marcosian — a teddy bear of a regime compared to that of China’s and Vietnam’s back in their bad old days (and even compared to the ones they have today). Compared to China and Vietnam, we have always been economically free — even in the bad old days of Marcos’s rule. Yet to this day, after “winning” our “freedom” in several “revolutions” since 1983, we remain not just an impoverished society, but one that sees no clear way out of this impoverishment.

So there is something quite funny about the way we obssess — more like quibble — about the “authenticity” of our politicians; as if an incremental improvement in a sitting president’s niceness will mitigate a fundamental bankruptcy of substance in our society.

I.T.P.S.

It’s the people, stupid.

============
Join us on Facebook!

Fatal error: Call to undefined function p75HasVideo() in /homepages/39/d169067170/htdocs/voices/wp-content/themes/NewFV/single-default.php on line 57