Leaping into the Void

This post is guided by mlq3‘s thoughtful comment on my previous article. If my understanding serves me well, his aim in that comment was to highlight what we perceive to be our society’s increasingly atrophied sense of civic duty and that this situation calls for an even greater need for the courage to take “emotional leaps into the void” given the sensational corruption that Philippine society is world-renowned for. Unfortunately the only known channel for taking such leaps in the last several decades was of the ocho-ocho sort that people like Abe Margallo continue to stubbornly romanticise (actually, Abe does something even worse — he attempts to turn it into a science).

I think there is some element of lament in mlq3′s comment over my sustained attacks directed toward this most recent and enduring channel for civic indignation and outrage. After all…

What other option is left for the Filipino schmoe to latch on to given that the very people we entrust to serve and represent us consistently betray and disappoint?

… as the old cliche’d call-to-arms goes.

Setting aside our fixation on this tired channel, I think taking “emotional leaps into the void” is always a good thing. In fact our very failure to realise that greatness we’ve always imagined ourselves to posses goes back to the very thesis Nick Joaquin makes in his Heritage of Smallness where he cites our lack of inclination to take such leaps as a key factor contributing to our continued stunted state.

Suffice to say, “people power” that favourite Pinoy-style approach to “leaping into the void” has been reduced to a “tired old script”. For whatever “emotional leap” we encourage people to take when pitching the old ocho-ocho taglines no longer involves a leap into an unkknown “void” but rather a call to re-enact what is essentially a perversion of the original — a well-worn path that leads to a pool of shit rather than an oasis of promise. Indeed, those who instigate instances of it more often than not already have specific outcomes in mind. Compare that to D’Original in 1986, the outcome of which nobody could’ve foreseen.

As such I do not think there is an “atrophy” in Filipinos’ civic sense. I’m quite sure it is still there — alive and kicking. When a sick person does not respond to a prescribed medication regime, it does not mean that said person does not want to get better. It could simply be that the disease ravaging his body is consistenly being mis-diagnosed OR that the relevance of the original diagnosis (and therefore the treatment regime that was based on it) has lapsed.

Therefore, We should not make the mistake of construing as evidence of “widespread apathy” what we perceive to be an indifference to the “activism” (much less the sloganeered platitudes) of the usual bozos, the self-described “experts”, and the demagogues that currently monopolise the so-called “national debate”. This is what I meant when I wrote recently that there is nothing to be “won” — only something to be implemented. The old tagline of some sort of “Laban” (“battle”) has been milked dry of its efficacy as a compelling call to civic duty. If this whole “Laban” moronism were likened to a mother’s breast, one could picture Filipino society as an overgrown five-year-old bondying still suckling it.

Indeed, there is The Void out there to be faced. But first we need to let go; let go of the non-substsance of personality politics, the after-death scare tactics of feudal religion, and the pointless convolusion-brokering retrospectivism of “experts” like Abe, for example, who remains fixated on “analysing” the individual behaviours of a multitude of subset variables and elements (the comfy layer of traditional politics that such “experts” inhabit) which underpin what essentially was an emergent and unforseen behaviour (the original 1986 Edsa “revolution”) possessing of properties that find no direct individual causal relationships with individual elements in the underlying layer (to use a bit of the same verbose pomposity required in such arenas of “discussion”).

Thus we struggle to see the point in such “analyses”, and when we regard breathtaking specimens such as the snippet that follows we begin to understand why we have so progressively failed to engage the sensibilities of the average schmoe:

People Power was therefore not meant to be transformational. It would had been different had the Left did not leave itself out of the equation. Hence, although triumphant, the revolution proceeded to operate in the same old political economy and reality. Nonetheless, the Cory Aquino government that succeeded the dictatorship ushered in significant constitutional changes in rejection of the Marcosian ideal, foremost of among which were the curtailment in the 1987 Constitution of the powers concentrated in the executive in favor of the enhancement of the powers of the judiciary and the legislative branch and the textual germination of the People Power ideal in the Constitution through, among other provisions, the adoption of people’s initiative and referendum as legislative power-sharing mechanisms in the concept of people powered democracy.

BLAH BLAH Blah Blah blah blah…zzzzzzzzz…

All this just comes across as akin to the foolish effort of trying to understand human nature by studying the sequence by which individual neurons fire within a human brain — or questioning the spherical nature of a ballbearing on account of nanometric molecular irregularities on its surface.

Similar to the fundamental difference between the gut-driven approach to investment of the George Soros’s and Warren Buffets of this world and the spreadsheet formulaic Nobel-Prize-winning “scientific” approaches of “expert” “economists”, the risk management involved in facing The Void is usually undermined by our fixation on the fairy tales re-told in value-crushing volumes by resident court jesters. Such clowns make us believe that we are owed some kind of future greatness because of a handful of one-time products of serendipity that are used as evidence of the existence of some kind of ability-to-be-great of ours lying dormant. These are events that no one small subset of variables and factors can explain. Yet our pal Abe, here, not only identifies one such subset but goes on to actually tunnel further down and analyse this subset of factors with the hope (all of it lost, in my opinion) of implying some kind of People-Power-based roadmap for the Filipino people. Nassim Taleb calls this the narrative fallacy so called because it is an attempt at “creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have an identifiable cause”.

So in reality, gut investors like Soros and Buffet do not belong in the same sentence with so-called “economists” and their much-cherished “science” of formulating “economic theorems” out of serieses of events that most likely will never be repeated. Comparing these two classes of people will be like comparing Leonardo da Vinci to a draftsman. Some people simply have a talent that, when applied, results in a groundbreaking outcome. Those who do not possess such a talent use mechanical means to achieve a more contrived version of an artistic product. In a lot of cases, contrived products serves a more practical purpose. Most of us, for example, live in houses built out of an architectural template.

We currently already have such a template for governance. All we need to do is fill in the blanks, connect the dots, and colour all the numbered spaces. Why presume to be composers of great symphonies when simply playing off sheet music can be as beautiful? Not all of us can be a Steve Jobs who made his fortune churning out iconic groundbreaking products. Fortunes have also been made manufacturing and selling urinals and toilet bowls.

We just need to find our niche where success can be found. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that “revolution”, even of the sort that involves “banging on pots and pans” is not one such niche that works (because we tend to do these with a silly smile plastered on our mugs). Maybe we just need to get our issues with governance out of the way (just fill out the template) so that we can get to the real worthwhile effort of finding such a niche — the same way the Chinese consistently exhibit a talent for regarding politics and governance as a non-issue even as they quietly prosper.

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