Our culture of bullshit and the need to preach to the unconverted

If there is one fan letter that I quote from the most often, it is this one where the insightful author says:

when I was a kid (am now 40 [years old]) our elders never give us straight answer. one day while playing to my female friend, we were both taking a bath (nude and I was 5 [years old]) I shout “ay pepe” [and] my aunt scolded me for saying bad words.

another was, when I ask my aunt again how did I come out in this world. and without hesitation she said “galing ka sa puwet”.

there’s alot more lies and half truth i learn from my elders, when we went to US at my age of 10 [years old], I was so surprised how ordinary folks explain everything as if am talking to them as the same age as mine.

It is spot-on in all its grammatically-flawed beauty shot straight from the author’s heart, landing bull’s eye into the underbelly of Da Pinoy Psyche.

I wonder if the way we’ve regarded our youth for generations — how we routinely exclude them from the national debate, how we fill their heads with superstitious jibberjabber, how we instill in them a strong ethic of knowing their place, how we’d rather silence them than reason with them when they occassionally do make good points, among others — created and continues to propagate that tolerance for or (worse) dissentisization to bullshit that we see today. It’s almost as if Pinoys have been raised from birth to EXPECT and even CRAVE for bullshit from their elders and persons of authority.

We are constantly being bombarded by terrabytes of half-truths and newspeak, most recently ransom payments being passed off as “board and lodging fees“, congressional “hearings” that send across impressions that our legislators are “concerned” about the 800 dead in the latest Sulpicio disaster, and various cretins placing themselves on heroes’ pedestals.

Nick also echoed one of my own personal pet peeves — how government officials plaster their mugs and political slogans on public fixtures paid for by public funds. In any other society, such a practice would be more akin to rendering graffiti on public property (and therefore an act of vandalism).

Unlike Nick, however, my annoyance with this practice has since shifted from the politicians to the very people who use these facilities — the constituents of these vandals. Pinoys have come to see this vandalism as acceptable practice. Not only are constitutents oblivious to the institutionalised defacing of their public works by their politicians, their minds are wired in such a way that seeing the words “A gift to the people of Paranaque from Mayor XX” splashed across a pedestrian overpass evokes strong feelings of gratitude. An effective stimulus that so efficiently fires up the lethal cocktail of utang na loob and pakikisama juices that infect every Pinoys’ nervous systems.

So while we express and direct so much outrage at the bullshit being delivered to us by our “elders” in Government, the Church, and the Media, let’s pause to reflect first how well we really equip ourselves to regard said bullshit. Again, the familiar questions come up:

(1) Is Pinoy society a THINKING society?
(2) Do we have a culture where CRITICAL EVALUATION trumps supserstition?
(3) Do we merely defer to elders or CHALLENGE their “wisdom”?

Sad to say, the Pinoy masses only have television, traditional print media, and the billboards and posters put up by their politicians as a source of information. On the other hand, we in the intelligentsia now take for granted the vast network of references, people, and resources at our disposal to evaluate information. But what exactly are we doing with these tools? I finally caved and joined Facebook last week. Within days of opening my account, I had re-connnected to dozens of friends and acquaintances (these “social networking” sites don’t seem to differentiate between the two) from my earliest memories to recent times. What struck me was the realisation that the community that had become my comfort zone since I created “benign0” in 2000 represents a VERY SMALL section of the wired elite of the Pinoy community.

While some of us spend our precious bandwidth on kicking off Blogswarms against Sulpicio, the VAST majority spend their time “super poking” one another on Facebook. [Nick, I recently invited the very influential Jim Paredes to participate in our blogswarm - the comment had not been approved yet as of this writing].

In the same way that driving a car does not necessarily make one mechanically-savvy, the proliferation of technology does not necessarily make one any more cluey or any more substantial. I wrote in my book back in 2006 that:

Filipinos account for a significant share of session traffic in Internet chat rooms and message-based discussion forums. Despite Filipinos generating among the highest volume of text messages in the world and a significant chunk of Internet chatter, it is doubtful if this huge and rapid exchange of information is making an impact on the collective intelligence of Philippine society.

Indeed, at the time, my points of reference were MySpace and PinoyExchange. I found that:

[...] a huge proportion – 61 percent – of on-line discussions in PinoyExchange.com is accounted for by topics on Philippine cinema and television. It is a number that dwarfs all the rest [...]

Compare that to MySpace chatter (which presumably at the time was not as infested by Pinoys as it is now) where:

[...] two potentially intellectually-stimulating topics made it to the Top Five – “News & Politics” and “Religion & Philosophy”, [...] accounted for a total of 23% of posts. This is a decent figure, considering that MySpace.com is known for its largely teenage members. In contrast, no equivalent topic made it to the Top Five in PinoyExchange.com. The equivalent statistic for the PinoyExchange.com topics “Local and Foreign Issues” and “Realm of Thought” is utterly dwarfed by their MySpace.com counterparts both topics accounting for no more than 3% of posts and languishing in a far distant ranking of 10th and 16th places respectively.

When we get a bit angtsy about the bullshit that prevails in our society, let’s step back a bit, count from one to ten, and then reflect. Does the content and quality of the National Debate merely reflect the collective substance of our society?

Sometimes we are left scratching our heads, wondering why there is so much intelligence being exchanged within the little communities and networks we’ve built around ourselves; wondering why things that so make sense to us and our little circles simply escape the sensibilities of the wider community. I think it’s because we sometimes fail to see that there is a bigger sea of ignorance outside our pond that politicians really connect with and exact unquestioned loyalty from. Worse, in that bigger sea are people with backgrounds that are not too different from yours and mine that simply choose to use their vast resources to “super poke” one another on Facebook.

It’s time we got out of our comfort zones, extend ourselves beyond our “politically passionate” little network and start our own “super poking” at our less-than-enlightened peers. The next frontier lies just a click away in domains we ourselves in our little niche of the blogosphere have remained (or chosen to remain) apathetic to and even derisive of. If we think we in our little niche in the blogosphere disagree amongst ourselves, there is a bigger world out there who is not even aware nor even cares about what we debate!

Join us and preach to the unconverted!

If we want real change, we need to reach those who are in vastly stronger positions to lead change and set trends. They are the Silent, Apathetic, and Decadent Elites of our society, and while a few small minds here do the easy thing and simply dismiss them, we should take the approach more of understanding them and reaching them than simply judging them. To inject a bit of religion in the matter, that’s an approach Jesus Christ would have approved of.

Let’s get to the root of the problem and the root of the bullshit.

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