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Thursday, July 1, 2010

Community spirit: Filipinos have failed to internalise it

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rushEducation is a key ingredient to world-class thinking. But there is also something to be said of the underlying infrastructure in the Filipino Mind that supports how Filipinos think. It is the critical groundwork that would normally have been ingrained in early childhood and most likely a direct function of the nature of how one is raised. In a comment in AntiPinoy.com I glibly referred to this "infrastructure" as the "brain capacity to absorb" knowledge. Specifically I applied that phrase to describe how the collective intellectual faculties of the Filipino are so sorely lacking of many essential building blocks of modern-day thinking -- the sort of thinking needed not only to survive, but to thrive and succeed in the modern world.

The gaps in those building blocks that make Filipino thinking so rickety possibly stems from how Filipino children are not expected to think and, for that matter, discouraged from thinking to the extent that they are routinely lied to or misled by "elders" who seem to be of the mindset that they do not owe any explanation to people they see to be subordinate to them.

One of my favourite illustrative texts of this comes from an email sent in by a reader a couple of years ago from which I highlight this excerpt:

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. up to now am still wandering why we filipinos doesnt treat kids as intellectual and the future of our country, in the philippines, youth are deprive of ideas what is better for them.

You can see from the above where the stunted comprehension faculties of the Filipino seems to be rooted. It goes deeper than the quality of the education delivered by the public system. It goes down to the very bedrock institution of the society itself -- the family. Whereas our struggle to reform institutions normally brings to mind the usual suspects in government (specially so if you are one of those bozos in traditional Media and the Establishment Blogosphere), the one institution that seems to require the most reform sits within the walls of our own households! Indeed, even as we continuously whine about how our leaders routinely disenfranchise their own constituencies, we ourselves routinely deprive of intelligent engagement those who rely on us for The Truth -- our kids and our subordinates in general -- within our own immediate spaces. Small wonder that our society had become what it is today.

I also repeatedly highlight how, in many cases, the tools and knowledge needed by the Filipino to succeed already sit right under his nose. Trouble is, we simply are too inept in their use. In fact, in reference to these recently concluded elections, I describe how the way this one that recently transpired reiterates to the world how our elections are such powerful tools that are grasped by the unskilled hands of the Philippine electorate.

Indeed, our retarded abilities to capitalise on our resources and assets in a sustainable manner is world-renowned. Our denuded landscape, skilled workforce underutilised as servants abroad, and rapidly degenerating English proficiency ratings are all testaments to our talent for squandering wealth.

Tinapay na nga, naging bato pa.

Indeed, what was once bread turneth to stone under the Filipino’s watch. In the same way that our forests were turned to wastelands and college graduates exported to domestic servitude, democracy is already there but is grossly misused by Filipinos. The sharp edge in our governance framework is dulled by the ignorance of those who wield it.

Now we flick away what is essentially our collective accountability for the strength and quality of our institutions to the "evil" spectres and bogeymen of "electoral fraud". That’s just so convenient, isn’t it? Even as our well-regarded “expert” Establishment Bloggers and esteemed columnists in the Media point fingers at one or the other strawman in the vast field of dysfunction that is Philippine society, it is becoming increasingly apparent that all roads lead nowhere else but our collective character – our culture, that which can be encapsulated in the concept of the Filipino Condition. First of all, blogger BongV in his article Is the Philippines Becoming a Nation of Cheaters? demystifies the popular but utterly flawed notion that Filipinos are mere “victims” of cheating and thievery. In a skilful reversal of this traditional notion, he tables the simpler, more plausible and, to the Filipino Triumphalist, less savoury alternative that an inclination to cheating and thievery are inherent to our culture and that these transcend social classes and strata. Cheating and thievery in the Philippines is a tradition ingrained in the psyches of the most elite socialites golfing in suburban country clubs down to that vast pool of Filipino humanity known as “the masses”. My concurrence to that view is articulated in the same comment I made to that article where I wrote:

Cheating is but a component of a larger framework of an ingrained inability in Da Pinoy to recognise the thin line that delineates being resourceful and being compliant to accepted rules.

Resourcefulness in the context of navigating the complexities of living in a modern civilisation to some extent involves a bit of savvy applied to playing the rules. Trouble is Filipinos FAIL to get THE RIGHT BALANCE. Indeed, it seems Pinoys are more inclined towards impropriety and thievery and less towards fairness and community spirit.

As BongV puts it in the eviscerating way that he neglects mincing words: we cheat in school, we cheat in sports, we cheat in the workplace, and, yes, we cheat in elections. An observation that, quite frankly, is difficult to argue against. Our politicians merely reflect their constituencies.

Second, and this is related to that lack of brain capacity I cited earlier, is our retarded sense of place within the bigger social contract that we are born into as members of the community we call “the Philippines”. This is a more subtle aspect of the matter at hand and one that is devilishly difficult to impart widely when one considers just how shallow our grasp for such things truly is. Commenter on AntiPinoy.com HalleluyahHymen summarises our challenge in the following manner:

If one will be able to consider the amoral social contractual obligation of being a good citizen/firm and a useful labor unit/firm in an economy, there will be less probability of cheating and stealing.

A few books have been written about the science behind the overarching “social contract” that underpins how civic duty came to be a normal operating mode for individual elements (people and entities) within a society. Much of this science has to do with the mathematical field called game theory which, applied to social systems, attempts to explain (without resorting to established post hoc principles of morality and ethics) how senses of civic duty came to be embraced by individuals from which arose societal harmony, ergo that “social contract” we perceive ourselves to be bound to as elements of our society. In simple terms, the principle goes like this: We are all inherently greedy. But our predisposition to grab more than what we need is tempered by how the damage we cause to others would eventually come around to reducing our access to the very resources we seek to acquire.

Blogger BenK illustrates this quite well in his article Land of Weasels where he points out how the Filipino entrepreneurial approach is to make a quick and dirty buck without the accompanying foresight to build a sustainable long-term clientele through consistency in the quality of the product or service sold that builds trust. The result is that while there is a thriving enterprising spirit evident in how Philippine cities teem with mom-and-pop businesses (tricycles, jeepneys, sidewalk stalls, and street hawkers among others), the economy at the macro level remains anemic as capital-intensive enterprises routinely fail to emerge out of this entrepreneurial soup and take root.

Our tradition of fraudulent behaviour within the vast and profound complex of corruption in Philippine society follows this principle closely. A predisposition to improper and fraudulent practices in even the smallest of Philippine entities (and, indeed, down to the individual) results in the evolution of systems and procedural frameworks in the bureaucracy and even in the way organisations interface with the society that are convoluted and complicated -- an outcome of these being fraught with draconian control measures. This is because there is an underlying presumption of intent to defraud in the users -- the Filipino people -- to which these systems and processes seek to interface with.

As Jaime Licauco in an Inquirer article dated the 22 May 2001 put it:

A nation whose policies and rules are based on the assumption that everybody is a cheat and liar unless proven otherwise cannot long endure. Take a close look at our bureaucracy and its rules. It is burdened by elaborate and often unnecessary checks and balances so that nothing ever gets done in the process.

When one takes the perspective of that game theory principle I cited earlier cheating is really quite ironic. Presumably when one cheats, one seeks to attain something in an easy and expedited manner. Yet the act of cheating – even small-time cheating – has the effect of steadily accumulating small mitigation measures in the defrauded systems and processes . This what drives the progressive evolution of Philippine systems into complicated and convoluted behemoths that breed, get this, more corruption and more cheating. A relatively honest society enjoys relatively simple systems because these systems are not weighed down by excessive control measures to protect themselves against thieving and cheating users. When a Filipino travels to an advanced society, he or she can’t help but marvel at how these societies make it so easy to get things done. Perhaps the privilege to live “easy” can be bought at a relatively affordable price – honesty.

Thus, having shown that (1) cheating and thievery is ingrained from the top to the bottom of Filipino society and (2) this society is imprisoned in a loop of systemic complication and convolution in the way we do things that feeds off the cheating and thievery which themselves are bred by these complications and convolutions, we begin to appreciate the small-mindedness in the way we self-righteously point fingers at one another to skirt the real issue of our collective guilt in as far as how our sad society had turned out to be. We are indeed in a bind. The one salient point of the social contract that binds members of any society is that there needs to be a wholesale internalisation of an understanding of how one's individual actions could have ramifications over the broader community and ultimately back to one's self. That in essence is what community spirit means. It will take a lot more than prayerfulness and a promise "not to steal" to impart this spirit in the collective consciousness. Indeed, it will take a re-wiring of the Filipino psyche from the ground-up -- from the time a Filipino youngster first asks "how did I come out in this world?".

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[Acknowledgements: Thanks to commentary from AntiPinoy.com readers J.B., Jon Abaca, and HalleluyahHymen for inspiring this article and contributing most if not all the key concepts used in it. Image courtesy Ulf Buschmann]

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