Too Many Closed-minded Filipino Intellectuals

Orion Perez D

It is sad that for the longest time, closed minded "intellectuals" have actually been the key reason for why the Philippines has been mired in deep manure. Luckily, Overseas Filipino Workers (like myself) are much more OPEN-MINDED when it comes to learning best practices from abroad, because we have no choice. We are constantly forced by what we see to admit that the way we do things back home sucks balls. Some of the host countries we live in - like Singapore and Malaysia - which back in the 50s and 60s were worse off than we were have now since overtaken us because we stupidly continued to stick to old and outdated ways of doing things.

The article by Dr. Tacujan even shows that while Japan's protectionist system of national-industrialization was touted within the Third World as the model to follow back then, it quickly became obvious to the rest of the TROPICAL Southeast Asian countries, that looking at what Singapore did - attracting foreign direct investors - actually worked much better and much faster than how Japan's protectionist model worked.

To begin with, Japan's model had a few major prerequisites for their model to work: an already high savings rate embedded in a culture of thrift and frugality, an extremely naturally self-disciplined people, and a group of business-savvy rich people with extremely strong patriotic fervor. Japan had that. So did South Korea. And the "high savings rate" and "extremely naturally self-disciplined people" requirements are more easily found in temperate countries which experience cold winters than in laid-back happy go-lucky tropical environments where people naturally tend (though not irreversibly) to be more spend-thrift, less forward-thinking, and - sadly - lazier.

Waiting for a population in the tropics to just spontaneously develop these traits so that the Japanese/Korean style protectionist model would work entails a really long wait, and that could mean many people starving. The protectionist route is also littered with way too many examples of failure. Even cold countries that tried protectionism didn't necessarily succeed when they tried it out.

In fact, even Soviet Russia (an extremely cold country) which first tried a protectionist Communist route had major issues at first, and so Lenin actually changed tack and went with the Soviet "New Economic Policy" (not to be confused with Malaysia's New Economic Policy.

This New Economic Policy by the Soviets meant opening up to FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTORS! Would you believe that? The RUSSIAN COMMUNISTS decided to open up to foreign investors! Yup... They got the Germans, the British, the French, the Americans, etc to come in and invest in companies to build cars, airplanes, and even got Americans to come in and build dams, hydroelectric power plants and railways.

That's how they acquired the technical know-how to build cars, airplanes, and the other stuff they had later on...

In fact, after WWII - partly as thanks for being their allies, it was the British who gave them the gift of a Rolls-Royce jet engine for them to dissect and learn from, and that gave them the ability to have jets during the Korean War. And in building the Soviet Union's Space Programme, they had lots and lots and lots of help from a lot of German scientists they had captured from WWII and co-opted to help engineer and build their spacecraft and rockets... ...Which the American also did...

Reliance on foreign-expertise, if not actual foreign direct investment has been a common theme in the development of countries' technologies.

Sadly, way too many outdated and closed-minded Filipino "intellectuals" are allergic to the notion of learning from foreigners or even tapping foreign direct investments.

Just look at how so many of them both try to ridicule any suggestion to learn from other countries. Mention Singapore, and many of them will whine about how SMALL Singapore is, ignoring the fact that larger countries, including Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, and yes, super-mega-gigantic CHINA learned from teeny-weeny Singapore.

Wala eh. Too much aversion to learning from others.

Sariling atin daw. Sariling KAWALAN NG KAUNLARAN, kamo...

But I digress.

I do hope that all closed-minded "Filipino intellectuals" (notice that most of the closed-minded ones are not even coming from technical fields that deal with science/engineering/other technical fields, business, or economics, but come mostly from humanities backgrounds) ditch the stubbornness and the unwavering commitment to lofty & mostly useless ivory tower ideals.

One thing I learned from Singapore is that practicality and pragmatism actually trump intellectualism. Singapore's leaders are - first and foremost - pragmatic problem-solvers FIRST and idealistic intellectuals SECOND.

You hear very little from them in terms of lofty high-fallutin' ideals, and instead, their townhall meetings and national day rallies (their equivalent of our SONA) sound more like corporate business meetings which assess growth targets, where they do a lot of SWOT analyses and present challenges and solution-proposals.

This is what makes a country successful. Moreover, their parliament is composed of a majority of engineers and other technically-trained people. (One of their presidents who used to be deputy prime minister and member of parliament - Tony Tan - was a scientist/Physics PhD)

Even Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loongg himself is a mathematician and computer scientist (same background as me for the latter). Indeed, the Singapore parliament's strong culture of science and engineering, business, and other technical fields of expertise brought in by majority of their members of parliament causes even those parliamentarians from humanities and law backgrounds to end up talking like engineers, scientists, and businessmen.

PRACTICALITY/PRAGMATISM necessarily beats Intellectual Idealism.

And we have too much of the latter in the Philippines.

Pragmatism/practical-mindedness is what our society's "intellectuals" lack. We have too few of the necessary problem-solving technical skills and mentalities among our intellectuals, influencers, and movers. And it's not like we don't have them, we do.

It's just that whenever the pragmatic and practical-minded intellectuals do speak, they are overshadowed, out-shouted, and out-voted by the old-school closed-minded "idealistic intellectuals" who love to talk more about lofty high fallutin' concepts as opposed to finding practical solutions that would quickly and immediately produce tangible and solid results that truly benefit the majority of our people.

These “intellectuals” are just way too enamored by idealistic intellectualism. They place the idea of keeping foreign investors out because of the lofty ideal of "national patrimony" over and above the practical need for the vast majority of our people to have immediate gainful employment, never mind that these jobs are created by foreign companies. Singapore got over that hang-up and prospered. So did Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. And let's not forget super-mega-gigantic China.

The Philippines needs to wean itself of its protectionistic anti-FDI mindset and understand that foreign direct investments aren't evil.

The sooner we get rid of that mindset and the sooner we get rid of all of the anti-FDI restrictions in the Constitution and streamline our laws to have less restrictions and make them easier for foreign investors to understand, the sooner we will progress.

The Duterte Administration is already pushing for this. Let's hope that the vast majority of Filipino "intellectuals" get with the Programme and stop trying to block the necessary reforms.