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Saturday, July 3, 2010

The sort of nation the Philippines should have been

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mcmansionFilipino logic makes sense at small scales -- at the barangay level. Blogger Joe America knows this all too well. Joe is an American living in the Philippines who had gone down the bumpy road of coming to terms with the mind-bending reality of living in a culture that runs atop its own brand of "logic". It is a logic that seemingly runs counter to the logic that governs the Western mind as Joe attests to...

Now my well-ordered Western mind did battle with this for about two years, then I started to cave. I started not to care about the rules for this or that. I drove on either side of the double yellow line, ran over a dog and kept going, peed at the side of a road, tossed my baby's used diapers into the bushes, and switched from beer to tuba. Instead of bitching about the Barangay Hall's super-loud sound system, I started grooving to the music, went out into the streets, chatted with the neighbors, and enjoyed the energy. I didn't worry about the ATM being shut down, because everybody here always owes someone something and pays when they can. I became a casual debtor like the rest of the crowd. I burned my trash like everyone else, sending those resins and carcinogens skyward in hopes that the cloud will dull global warming and keep the sea in check. Logic like that is important around here, and I have become expert at it.

And I, having been a part of all that for the majority of my life, can see where Joe is coming from. You need to embrace the chaos and flawed logic to some extent to lead a happy life in the Philippines. Filipino natives are raised within its context and the majority of us grow up with the wiring of our brains so entangled in it that we remain inherently unable to step out of it and regard it from an outside perspective for the remainder of our lives. A small minority of us, though raised and immersed in the culture for most of our lives somehow manage to gain enough insight to ask the right questions (which for the most part are the hard ones) about the culture that had defined our identity and framed our thoughts for much of our lives.

And then there are people like Joe. They grew up in a society that works, and apply their "well ordered Western mind" (an outcome of beauty that is the result of growing up in a society that works) to make sense of the world much the same way Filipinos apply their small chaotic Filipino minds to make sense of a relatively bigger contextual frame -- such as, say, Adam Carolla's humour. In what he reveals above, it seems Joe managed to find the sweet spot of his life as an alien resident in the Philippines.

Filipino "logic" works at the barangay (small community) level.

Perhaps Joe did not really "cave" in the sense that the system he was forced to embrace defeated him. It could be more about him gaining an appreciation of the rules of living and thinking that apply to the sort of society the Philippines should have been. So what sort of society did the Philippines become instead? The trouble with the Philippines is that we became a "nation" in a manner that outpaced our ability to regard ourselves as one. We increased our numbers and the intensity of our demands to levels that require "Western logic" to sustain. Western logic is what underpins the vast scales and robust structures modern societies need to apply to enable them to manage their enormous populations and the inflated demands of individuals within those populations.

The trade off in building to such vast scales is that small communities need to subsume themselves to the bigger system. In exchange for that relinquishing of a certain amount of self-sufficiency of these small communities, the bigger system in principle accords (1) improved efficiencies to said communities and (2) opens opportunity for them in the form of access to the network of value the bigger system hosts. Both are enabled by way of the infrastructure the bigger system builds to facilitate flow of goods, services, and information at efficiencies and scales that make it worthwhile for the small players to hook up and become a cog in it. That is all in principle of course; the whole point of the "bigger system" -- the nation.

As Nick Joaquin observed -- an agglomeration (collection into a mass) of little things does not necessarily make a powerful sum. Only when agglomeration becomes conglomeration (achievement of cohesion within said mass) does real power emerge. You can see this plainly in how whatever achievement a nation of 90 million such as the Philippines can cough up collectively can be utterly dwarfed by a nation with less than a tenth of its population (such as, say, Singapore and many small European states).

Going back to Joe's example, households burning their own trash is a mindset that befits a self-contained community that cannot afford to pile up rubbish in its own backyard and cannot rely on anyone else to process it for them. Joe's succumbing to the local debt market because of unreliable ATM services is an acknowledgment of a local economy and trust system that works at that pygmy scale. The very same ability to self-sustain is, in a way, what hinders a much needed phase transition of Philippine society to modernity. Indeed, modern nations derive their awesome power from an ability to leverage their size. Those that succeeded have turned their enormous numbers and the multiplicative effect of each of their citizens' escalated demand for goods and services into their strengths.

Where does that put the prospects of the Philippines? Perhaps we should have thought twice before ballooning our numbers a hundred-fold over the last several decades. Sustaining those numbers at the very least -- and, at best, turning such numbers into strengths -- requires the application of Western logic. Modern medicine, modern supply chains, modern infrastructure, and modern governance are the only ways such enormous numbers of people can be sustained. All those modern disciplines and measures are products of what Joe refers to as "Western logic" -- the approaches to thinking that underpin the awesome might of Western civilisation.

Democratic governance is one such approach that the Philippines aspires to mastering. It seems though that the Filipino is not up to the task. Perhaps we are inherently an undemocratic people. Time and again we have proven that we as a people are intolerant to variety and deviation, averse to engaging in the critical thought essential to soundly evaluating options, and slack when it comes to taking ourselves and our officials to account for results. Note then that variety, options, and accountability (the three concepts highlighted in the previous sentence) are properties and, one can argue, privileges we enjoy as a result of the freedom democracy has granted us.

In a sense, we have committed ourselves to managing a country of 90 million without considering our inherent capacity to meet said commitment. Our capacity to step up has, time and again proven to be not up to scratch. Indeed, that is how I had defined poverty in an article I wrote a while back:

Poverty is the result of entering into a commitment one is inherently unable to honour.

It is too late now to go back to a time when it was still possible to recalibrate our aspirations so that the commitments these entail fit our inherent capacity to honour them. For as so far seen, Filipinos have proven to be inherently incapable of honouring their commitments. The Philippines should have been a smaller country (both in population and in aspiration). That way, we would most probably have lived within our means and, as a result, now lead a far richer existence than we do today.

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