If Chuck (aka “Cvj”, or whatever) has one particular talent it is this: He is very good at encapsulating — in the personal sentiments he routinely expresses all over the blogosphere — the particular aspects of the nature of the Pinoy mind that keeps its gearbox permanently shifted to Reverse.

Here is his latest truism:

It is the Middle Class (along with the Upper Class) who has the spare resources to step back and act if it chooses to.

That comment is such a classic example of the sentiment of the backward mind, the embodiment of our world-renowned Juan Tamad archetype, and the absolute antithesis of what I express in a 2003 article on self-reliance where I say:

We pester the elite of our society with calls for acts of heroism when the burden of extra hard work in reality falls on the shoulders of the poor masses.

Dark clouds do indeed loom overhead as we face a future in a society dominated by the primitivist thinking of the majority.

Our inspiration should be drawn more from the true “heroes” of our sad republic — the Filipino-Chinese. They expected NOTHING from their hosts, maneuvered around the same dysfunctional governance we complain about, came to terms with our vacuous culture, and in the process of doing all that, self-made themselves into the captains of our country’s industry.

Maybe our goal should be to TOP THAT ACHIEVEMENT — not lie on the ground and die with our mouths open while we wait for the perfect president to be elected.

We Filipinos have been imbued with the idea that our hopes for prosperity lie squarely on the shoulders of the elite, the “haves”, a handful of leaders and/or a few “extraordinary” individuals. Our society has come to (or, more appropriately never matured beyond) a penchant for giving heroic labels to these “messiahs”, as if the Philippines is constantly waiting for a hero to rescue her from her dysfunction.

We expect heroic efforts from the few and continued mediocrity from the majority.

We expect the low product of the majority to be subsidised by the execptional output of the minority.

Our prospects for prosperity, however, lie within ourselves — not in a messianic bunch of leaders and exceptional few who are yet to come and not in the altruism of the more fortunate. What we need is the courage and open-mindedness to understand clearly what we need to do to re-tool our culture, mindsets and thought processes, and approach to doing things so that a nation-building machine that is truly able to compete could emerge out of the collective and quiet achievement of the majority.

We’ve already had our fair share of heroes. It is clear today that, for many of them, the size of their sacrifice has not been commensurate with the willingness of the people they sacrificed for to help themselves.

Great nations were not built on good intentions. They were built on business sense. Real change in Pinoy society will never be achieved through the “sacrifice” of altruistic “heroes”. True change will be driven by people who find no shame in expecting a buck for their trouble.

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