Last week’s column observed that there is no national vision around which nationalists might unite and blaze a trail of genuine national development. This has several consequences, some more obvious than others.
Without such a vision, and without buying support, how could the opposition in 2007 have possibly lined up candidates and constructed an organization to mobilize the electorate in 219 electoral districts? And how, once elected, is a politician to be disciplined unless he or she is a member of a party with a serious program of national development over which the members of that party have a sense of ownership, and around which the people have been mobilized?
The absence of vision itself seems to be a direct result of the sickness affecting the political and economic culture. While many may argue that the symptoms of this sickness have been more virulent of late, its roots are not to be found in the current period.
The sickness exhibits an array of symptoms. In a land saturated with formal religion, there is an inability to subjugate the self for the benefit of the greater good.
Individualism is rampant and, for the time being, uncontrollable. Rather than pressing for the genuine development of the national economy, for example, local business, rather like the ilustrados vis-a-vis Spain, approaches government on single issues, and seeks accommodations with each incoming regime.
Yes, corruption is fueled by poverty on the one hand and greed on the other, but it, too, is a form of individualism, springing from an urge to improve one’s own circumstances regardless of the consequences for others or society as a whole; and, the sickness being of epidemic proportions, whatever peer pressure exists is ineffective, as the institutions that should play a part in curing the sickness are themselves infected with it.
Mainstream political parties exist only to deliver their leaders into office, enjoying a long hibernation before each election, at which time the only question the electorate will be allowed to answer is who will take charge of the status quo. And even then, as we have seen in 2001 and 2007, the result may be ignored if the winner is not to the liking of the elite, or if successful candidates decide that their longer-term advantage is served by bartering away the popular mandate.
Even on the left, while some splits arise from genuine doctrinal differences, it is difficult to believe that its serial schismatic activity is free from the influence of individualism.
The sickness is complicated in that alongside the symptoms of individualism we can identify those of colonial consciousness. Too often, Filipinos lack self-belief, the confidence that they are capable of resolving their own problems and charting their own destiny, and they therefore seek "protection" — often of God, or the USA, or both.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to see that, over the centuries, colonialism has unwittingly subjected the consciousness of Filipinos to the "bad cop, good cop" treatment. First the virtual theocracy of the long Spanish regime, followed by, after a brutal conquest, the relatively liberal American years; then, in December 1941, the entry of an even worse cop than the Spanish friarchy and, three years later, the return of the Americans on their "liberating" mission.
It should, therefore, not surprise us that the USA was able to continue its control of Philippine economic and foreign policy long after formal "independence," or that, despite its horrendous consequences, "guidance" from the IMF and the World Bank has been welcomed by the latter-day ilustrados. Sometimes, "nationalism" has consisted of little more than a choice between colonizers — on several occasions, Filipinos have asked this outsider whether the Philippines might have fared better if it had been colonized by the British!
Just as colonial consciousness was born of centuries of foreign domination, individualism and the failure to forge a national vision also have an objective basis (or, possibly, two). The archipelagic nature of the country has not assisted the cultivation of a national identity, and strong regional loyalties persist, despite the fact that well over four centuries have passed since the Spanish first brought the various language groups together as "Las Filipinas" — and, of course, the Muslim separatists constitute a special challenge.
But more than geography, the nature of the economy has also retarded the development of a collective, truly Filipino mindset. According the Labor Force Survey for April 2009, no less than 34.9 percent of the workforce is classified as self-employed, while 13.1 percent are "unpaid family workers." Only 51.9 percent of the workforce is described as wage and salary workers.
Just as the country is atomized into 7,100 islands, so the workforce is to a very significant extent atomized among a host of small and medium-sized workplaces (where it has a workplace at all) and largely solitary pursuits like fishing. Such circumstances are hardly conducive to the development of collective consciousness.
The nature of the Philippine economy has also led to a situation in which the country can, at least compared to some of its neighbors, be said to be in a permanent state of crisis, and this, too, is a result of the factors outlined above.
If the sickness had been more virulent in the closing years of the 19th century, the Philippine Revolution may never have occurred. But their material interests rendered the ilustrados more prone to the malady than were humbler sections of the population, and the accommodations they reached with the intervening Americans meant that the antidote — an economy and institutions that would have been conducive to the forging of a more collective, more Filipino world-view — was never developed.
And thus the sickness spread.
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