And I thought it was bad enough that the Philippines already is a mediocracy. BongV’s recent article highlights the inescapable reality of the Philippines’ descent into an idiocracy. “Idiocracy” is a term used as a title in the 2006 movie by Mike Judge where (quoting from a movie review by Mike Adams) the world seen five hundred years into the future…

[...is] a world populated and run by complete idiots — the result of 500 years of reverse natural selection, where the stupid people fornicate the most, and the smart people stop having children.

To echo BongV’s sentiment in his blog post From Mediocracy to Idiocracy, that scenario rings a bit familiar when regarded from the Philippine setting, doesn’t it? More so that those who actually can not only produce less offspring, they leave too!

Technology’s enablement of unprecedent participation is also actually a double-edged sword. It enabled a never-before-seen variety of views to be exchanged but at the same time also provided access for idiocy to acquire an equal shot at capturing popular sentiment.

Even conventional mass communication channels — Old Media — in their desperate efforts to compete with New Media today are also for their part relaxing, down-grading, and compromising the very standards that once made them trusted sources of information.

[NB: To be fair to ABS-CBN's videoloid Bandila, I saw their news program this morning and they actually reported an Eight-People-Dead bus crash ahead of the ocho-ocho politics they usually put first in their playlist. They gave the accident report ample airtime too, for a change.]

Ironically, that cynical view of what the future holds already grips the advanced world (the movie Idiocracy was obviously produced there). There’s actually a book with the title Triumph of the Airheads by Shelley Gare. In the book, Gare speaks among others of how style over substance increasingly prevails and how a a diminished effort to understand the consequences of one’s actions is becoming a norm.

Political correctness and the rise of coffeeshop cultures, some have argued, is eroding the competitive edge and killer instincts that were the pillars of development of today’s advanced societies. Yet from the perspective of one who grew up in the Third World, the history and track record of achieving racked up by the advanced world is already set in stone and robustly capitalised at the very fabric of their socieites. So the process of softening up (if it is indeed underway) in the First World can still be reversed. If indeed advanced societies are declining, they will be from a +100 base to, say, a +90 level but still will have that well of social capital (the +90 they still possess in this thought experiment) to mobilise towards arresting the decline.

In the case of the Philippines, however, we had gone soft even before achieving anything of consequence. We are starting from a zero-base, going into the negative, and have a deficit of resources to arrest the descent down into negative oblivion. Even if we achieve a +20 ascent from our zero baseline, that is still a sorry 70 points short of the +90 level the advanced world may decline to in our little experiment.

Achievement is not a compromise, and losers measure it in relative terms rather than in absolute terms.

If we set a +100 base target for ourselves, it means that achieving +20 is nothing to celebrate about.

So it is with the coming elections. Achieving a “clean and honest” election can be likened to achieving +20. Because we have gone so soft, we forget that the whole point of elections is to seat a good leader in Malacanang (the +100 standard, so to speak). Executing it “cleanly” and “honestly” is not an end in itself.

An election can be as squeaky clean and as honest-Eddie as we want. But if we have that then elect another bozo into office, that “achievement” will come across as just another pwede-na-yan achievement that Filipinos have become world-renowned for.

Let’s not forget The Whole Point of elections and elect a good leader.

And be very afraid, for (as BongV concludes)…

[...] if one looks at the platform of the Philippine presidential candidates, it is a list of motherhood statements. View the Political ads of each candidate – it is mind-numbingly moronic. But for the Philippine idiocracy – the ads are perfect [my boldface].

Achievement becomes a simple business, when we simplify our targets, standards, and aspirations.

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