Denial cannot be a default setting; otherwise, we shall continually be confronted by a perfect storm – that can only get worse before it gets better as we know it.
Let’s do a shortlist of the why: (1) Our caste system; (2) The hubris aka entitlement that comes with the first one; (3) Our culture of impunity that punctuates the shortlist.
How did we become the regional laggard? From the mid-70s, or almost half a century ago, when the OFW phenomenon came to life, we have exploited over 10 million Filipinos. That we now own the “Dutch disease.”
Put another way; we did not move up from a service-consumption economy. Instead, we kept bragging about our management of fiscal and monetary policies.
That may be Greek to us? Because to react is our comfort zone while being proactive demands forward-thinking and presupposes dynamism. Why do we lag in infrastructure development, even in the basics of water and electricity?
Should we drill it down?
Recall that in the beginning, we acknowledged that the OFW phenomenon was a stopgap. But then we played deaf and dumb – as in “pwede na ‘yan” – that it has taken a life of its own.
Consider: To keep up with 21st-century technology, we created a DICT, and we want free Wi-Fi and gear up for 5G. We are a service-consumption economy, and we want to be in the big league?
Singapore may be a teensy city-state that can’t be an industrial hub, but it is in the big league because its GDP per capita matches that of the US; while we are a third-world country. And our higher education, like the economy, is the regional laggard.
Are we still surprised? Did we not want food security to define our efforts behind rice production? And we ended up at the exact opposite outcome being the biggest rice importer in the world?
What about water and electricity and infrastructure development in general?
In other words, do we know if we’re coming or going? It is about building an ecosystem – as in a virtuous circle, not kicking up a perfect storm or a vicious circle.
Then consider: Our income stream is not coming from our management of the economy. In private sector lingo, it is not from “operations.” And in the case of our economy, it is from the miseries of families that couldn’t make both ends meet they had to become OFWs.
The social costs are for all to see. Yet, we like to shout out that we’re the epitome of the holy family. Yes, because we are the present-day Padre Damaso. Forget about the broken families and that the country has one of the fastest-growing numbers of HIV cases worldwide.
We created eight listed companies that made it to the Forbes list – and a few billionaires. And we in the elite class are hunky-dory. But blind to the reality that we are the laughingstock of the region, if not the world. Not even the DICT and free Wi-Fi and 5G and the BPOs that came earlier can add up to right our abysmal structure as a third-world country.
Recall the prior posting on cause and effect. No amount of “pwede na ‘yan” can rapidly compensate and raise us from our pathetic income per capita. See above, building an ecosystem.
If we still can’t figure it out, God bless us!
How did our neighbors leave us in the dust? Aren’t they industrial-investment economies?
That is how they developed an innovation culture and global competitiveness, which are imperative to thrive in the 21st century. And we must not forget that these neighbors begged for foreign money and technology.
Sadly, it will take lots of doing before we question how we think, as in metacognition. For example, how did Singapore become more competitive than the US? And now Vietnam is poised to overtake even Singapore.
Recall how people move up in human development. It takes experience, and that’s what rapid economic growth gave the Singaporeans and now the Vietnamese. Because of the experience, they moved up beyond dualism or absolutism and into relativism.
For example, beyond “analysis” is “analytics,” and the latter presupposes forward-thinking and dynamism. Yet, it is not about one’s IQ or string of degrees but experience. Consider: Back in 2014, indeed, we saw an uptick in manufacturing. But that was driven by local consumption and the global supply chain (GSC.)
And because of our inward-looking bias – and failure to forward-think – we didn’t recognize that more impoverished Vietnam borrowed from the playbook of the Asian Tigers. And they then shamed our export performance and poverty rate.
Then consider: Why did we even kick out the US military? Yet, today, three wealthy nations keep them – massively. They are Japan, Germany, and South Korea. These people are miles ahead of us in development. Unsurprisingly, they also understand the universal law of “divine” oneness.
This universe we live in isn’t for aristocracies. It is a 24/7, dynamic phenomenon. And it goes back to the story of Eden – and when humankind saw the need to migrate from Africa.
Why are we out-of-step with reality?
Recall our instincts: We are parochial and insular. We value hierarchy and paternalism that we rely on political patronage and oligarchy that ours is a culture of impunity.
The evidence? From a failed war on drugs, we’re now into the war on terrorism? What about the longest failed war, the war on poverty?
What are the disciples of the status quo saying? That there is a conspiracy to undo the greatness of Marcos? God bless this country!
Let’s pause and again take a third-party example so that we are not jaded.
And this comes from a bona fide conservative, Peter Wehner. Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner) is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the previous three Republican administrations, a visiting professor at Duke, and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”
“The reasons the Republican base has shown such fidelity to Mr. Trump are multilayered. Many support his policy agenda and have a near-existential fear of what an ascent to power by a Democratic president would mean.
“Among Mr. Trump’s supporters, there is not just dislike but detestation for the left (and progressives reciprocate those feelings). Resentments and grievances over being the object of the left’s contempt have built up for years.
“The president’s supporters view him not just as their defender; they see him as their avenging angel. And on top of all that is the acute political polarization that characterizes this era. Those with a tribalistic mindset believe that refusing to support a Republican president is traitorous. So, they have stayed loyal to the president. That is through all the carnage, all the lies, all the appeals to our ugliest impulses.
“During the Trump presidency, Republican lawmakers who know better have been putting up propaganda signs in their storehouse windows in the name of party loyalty and self-aggrandizement. The price they would pay for honesty would be much lower than that of the citizen of a totalitarian regime. It’s not too late to take the signs down, break the rules of the game, and rediscover their suppressed identity and dignity.
“In his extraordinary 1978 essay ‘The Power of the Powerless,’ which comes up with some frequency during the Trump administration, the Czech dissident (and later president) Vaclav Havel famously refers to a greengrocer who puts in his shop window a Marxist slogan — ‘Workers of the world, unite!’
“The greengrocer doesn’t believe in the slogan, or the regime, built on lies. But he acts as he does, or at least abides the lies in silence. According to Havel, he doesn’t have to accept the lie; he merely needs to live within it. But what happens, Havel asked, if one day the greengrocer, among other things, stops putting up slogans merely to ingratiate himself?
“The president’s brazen assaults on truth were jolting at first. Today, however, we have grown accustomed to them — and to the fact that Republican officeholders have almost without exception stood behind him during the last three-and-a-half years.
“They calculated that giving voice to their consciences was not worth incurring the Republican base’s wrath. It was more comfortable, less wearying, and a lot less of a hassle to fall behind Mr. Trump. In one sense, of course, they were right. But doing so comes at a price.
“The president brings his degradation of the truth to new lengths, but the basic project has been the same.
“No president in the history of our Republic has been as disorienting as Donald Trump. His goal, even before he became president, was far more ambitious than to tell mere lies. It was to annihilate the distinction between truth and falsity, to make sure that we no longer share facts in common, to overwhelm people with misinformation and disinformation. It was to induce epistemological vertigo on a mass scale.
“Plato asks, ‘Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?’ Donald Trump’s supporters have been looking only at phantoms.” [Trump Has Made Alternative Facts a Way of Life, Peter Wehner, The New York Times, 13th Jun 2020]
Recall that the blog has compared Juan de la Cruz with Trump. Why? Because we both live in the past.
He thinks he can declare bankruptcy six times and still come out the winner. He lies as he sees fit and always comes out the winner.
We think we can abuse Juan de la Cruz, the overseas Filipino worker, and still come out the winner.
There is no free lunch.
Even the wealthiest country, the United States, knows that now. For example, the 2008 Global Recession’s greed continues to haunt them – and exposed by COVID-19. American exceptionalism is riding on the almighty dollar. And as history tells us, empires come and go.
For example, given we are now a multi-polar world, they can’t afford a double whammy in the person of Trump. Hubris will sink them deeper. We can see it with our eyes, Xi and Duterte engaged in a lovefest. And Putin and his former KGB friends trolling to influence the US elections once again. As if that’s not enough, Trump wants Xi too to get China to sway his reelection. Lock him up!
Still, autocracy and tyranny aren’t the ones in sync with the dynamism of the universe, but transparency, and oneness in the rule of law.
Unsurprisingly, within the Republic Party, there are several groups pouring money in this election season. Trump, who likes watching Fox TV, can’t hide his scorn to see political ads targeted against him paid for by people from his party. And the more he insults them, the more contributions they get – to pay for these ads for longer than they had planned.
But what about Juan de la Cruz? Let’s do a shortlist, and there he is: (1) Our caste system; (2) The hubris that comes with it – aka entitlement, as opposed to personal responsibility; (3) Our culture of impunity, which comes from our caste system.
Gising bayan!
“Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor. And where freedom and its blessings are a reality for a minority and an illusion for the many. Here is a land consecrated to democracy but run by an entrenched plutocracy, dedicated to equality but mired in an archaic system of caste.
“But the fault was chiefly their own. Filipinos profess the love of country, but love themselves – individually – more.” [Ninoy Aquino, Foreign Affairs magazine, July 1968; Stanley Karnow, New York Times Magazine, “Cory Aquino’s Downhill Slide,” 19th Aug 1990.]
“Why independence, if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow? Moreover, that they will be such is not to be doubted, for he who submits to tyranny loves it.” [We are ruled by Rizal’s ‘tyrants of tomorrow,’ Editorial, The Manila Times, 29th Dec 2015]
“True social reform has little to do with politics. To unmoor ourselves from the burdens of the past, we must be engaged in the act of continual and conscious self-renewal. All men are partially buried in the grave of custom. Even virtue is no longer such if it is stagnant.
“Change begins when we finally choose to examine critically and then recalibrate the ill-serving codes and conventions handed down to us, often unquestioned, by the past and its power structures. It is essentially an act of imagination first.” [David Henry Thoreau; American essayist, poet, and philosopher; 1817-1862]
“National prosperity is created, not inherited. It does not grow out of a country’s natural endowments, its labor pool, its interest rates, or its currency’s value, as classical economics insists. [A] nation’s competitiveness depends on the capacity of its industry to innovate and upgrade.” [The Competitive Advantage of Nations, Michael E. Porter, Harvard Business Review, March–April 1990]
“You have to have a dream, whether big or small. Then plan, focus, work hard, and be very determined to achieve your goals.” [Henry Sy Sr., Chairman Emeritus and Founder, SM Group (1924 - 2019)]
“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” [William Pollard, 1911-1989, physicist-priest, Manhattan Project]
“Development is informed by a people’s worldview, cognitive capacity, values, moral development, self-identity, spirituality, and leadership . . .” [Frederic Laloux, Reinventing organizations, Nelson Parker, 2014]
“Now I know why Paul dared to speak of ‘the curse of the law’ (Galatians 3:13). Law reigns and discernment is unnecessary, which means there is little growth or change in such people. When you do not grow, you remain an infant.” [Faith and Science, Open to Change, Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, 23rd Oct 2017]
“As a major component for the education and reorientation of our people, mainstream media – their reporters, writers, photographers, columnists, and editors – have an obligation to this country . . .” [Era of documented irrelevance: Mainstream media, critics and protesters, Homobono A. Adaza, The Manila Times, 25th Nov 2015]
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