I checked out mlq3’s latest blog entry A Federalist appeal and am again reminded of the remarkable amount of debate going on about forms of government in general — specifically what form is best for Pinoy society.

I maintain — consistent to my usual simplistic take on Pinoy society — that the key to Pinoy collective prosperity does not lie in politics, political structures, and certainly not in politicians themselves.

The core fundamental source of our inability to prosper lies at the very fabric of our cultural character.

Take the Chinese. They CONSISTENTLY PROSPER AS A CULTURAL AND ETHNIC GROUP (and I can’t emphasise the preceding phrase enough – even in all caps and in bold) in just about ANY environment save for the most extremely repressive hosts.

Like Einstein said — the most simple theories are usually the most sound ones.

So far, there is no theoretical framework that makes a SIMPLE and DETERMINISTIC link between form-of-government and prospect-for-prosperity in the Philippine setting. I dare say, there probably is none (contrary to what a lot of political “scientists” would like us to believe). This whole form-of-government-as-silver-bullet topic has been debated since time immemorial. To be able to debate about this for so long and accumulating such volumes of text on the subject without any semblance of a theoretical framework crystallising out of all this to this day is a testament to the futility of this exercise.

The late Teddy Benigno wrote way back in 2003 when talk about change to a parliamentary form of government was the fashion statement of the chattering classes:

We are now constantly being bamboozled with the argument that if the Philippines is far behind many of its neighbor countries in East and Southeast Asia, it is because they have a parliamentary system. And we Filipinos, imbeciles that we are, have stuck over the generations to an outmoded presidential system. This system, we are told, has brought us nothing but mass poverty, corruption on an unprecedented scale, crime and violence that could have only come from the lowest pits of Hades.

That was in 2003. Replace the word “parliamentary” in the excerpt above with the word “federal” and the same critique applies in today’s debate (maybe replace ‘neighbour countries’ with ‘Malaysia’ as well).

For that matter for a representative government to work, a society needs to posses a culture of ideas. Unforunately, Filipino culture possesses no such approach to thinking.

Again, the Teddyman observed in that year:

Stable, policy-oriented or program-oriented political parties [are an essential ingredient]. Without such parties as an ideological glue parliamentary government in the Philippines would be a colossal sham.

Do not tell me Lakas-NUCD is such a party, or Laban, or NPC. They are no more political parties in the European parliamentary tradition as a slut crossing herself is the reincarnation of Joan of Arc.

True even today. The party names he cited above meant no more than any of the party names being thrown around today (much less the latest moronic concept/label of “Genuine” Opposition).

But I am willing to bet that as 2010 rolls in, the media, the blogosphere, and the bangketas will again be abuzz — yet again about the coming incarnations of the various political parties and political personalities scrambling for the lucrative public offices up for auction.

ABS-CBN’s Bandila will be re-directing its noisy bells and whistles (the only news show I am aware of that uses lots of sound effects) from the food queues back to the halls of power to dish out its usual hearsay “news reports” on the subject of political intrigue.

Shopping for a new form of government is just a subset of the political debate that the Pinoy intelligentsia chatter about. It is no more productive than the whole debate about the who’s, what’s and where’s of Philippine politics. It’s kind of like how executives in big corporations focus their debate on what consulting firm to hire to fix a business problem rather than focus on understanding the nature of the business problem itself. The consultants always win — happily laughing all the way to the bank — at the end of the day.

Same approach, same expected outcome.
If we do something differently, MAYBE a different outcome may result.

We’ve dicked around around with politics for so long. Maybe it’s time we do something differently and toy with our culture and character instead.

Now that is a simple theory and as sound a theory as one can come up with.

Anyone who’s used a five-year-old build of Windows and skirted the option of an OS re-build or re-install knows well enough that there is only so much de-fragging that can be done to improve system performance. At some point you will have to bite the bullet and pull out the OS at its roots.

The above paragraph is geek-speak for the Teddyman’s more down-to-earth snippet of wisdom:

I have said my piece. I say again what we need is not regime change, or change to parliamentary, but a change in our culture, a change in our hearts and minds, in our nature, in our character.

And that is the Philippines’ Inconvenient Truth.

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