"Tell truth to power"

This is the forceful advice of Milan Kundera, the great Czech-born novelist who is better remembered as a willful freedom fighter. (After all many great novelists did not concern themselves with freedom even as they might have freely expressed personally inspiring, often romantic thoughts.) Our own Rizal in El Filibusterismo and Lope K. Santos in Banaag at Sikat are prime local examples antedating Kundera who dared tell truth to power. The authorities did not make life pleasant for Rizal, Santos and Kundera.

Those in power have always had a problem with the truth. Where they attempt to project reassuring illusions for those they govern – conjuring democracy, material well-being and social justice – truth simply breaks down the concocted images and starkly reveals the oppressive oligarchy, poverty and injustice of most people.

Where the authorities bask in self-serving images of patriotism, competence, selflessness and social concern, truth unmasks their undeniable treason, incompetence, selfishness and social neglect. Where they pass off insignificant public gains as towering achievements of a super-achieving administration, truth provides a merciless reality check which undermines superlative claims and reveals their unmistakable hollowness.

When those in power at times realize the inadequacy and increasing fragility of their political bases, a compulsive drive to project self-assurance and control over a problematic situation takes over and they employ rhetoric suitable for enhancing their chances of political survival. Such times, truth unforgivably intrudes and exposes the authorities’ critically limited and rapidly eroding support base. Truth often goes further and in revealing the internal panic which a regime’s strident rhetoric tries to hide, provokes those who have been victims of the regime into organized opposition and eventually even self-liberation.

There is hardly any political regime where truth is not viewed problematically. Even in functional democracies where venerable institutions facilitate political transparency and thereby enhance the probability of public accountability by the authorities, truth often inconveniences and could hurt those in power. Objectively suitable government programs may need a modicum of confidentiality — often during the earliest stages of their conception and/or implementation — to do well and attain their targets redounding to the public good. Sensitive financial policies and delicate national security measures often require this kind of quiet initiation. Premature revelation and indiscriminate dissemination of these things imperil their success and often — given the intervention of sufficiently influential vested interests — distort their very substance and original objectives.

Still, even in these exceptional cases where the authorities indubitably serve the interests of their citizenry, the greater hazard would be in holding back truth. Where the truth could be distorted to serve sectors working against a community’s interests, the challenge of the authorities would be in designing measures to prevent truth’s corruption or in minimizing the costs of its premature disclosure or dissemination. Since the authorities’ opposition in this case is the nation’s clique of vested interests and its ally would be the vast majority of the citizenry, ultimately the authorities would prevail and the national interests would be served.

Unfortunately, authorities historically have not been democratically or patriotically biased. They — those with overwhelming state power at their disposal at least for the moment – have normally opted for what appeared to be the easier and more effective way. Either cavalierly calmly ignore the truth whenever possible or – when their political interests appear to be fundamentally threatened by it – suppress it. History records the authorities to be mostly comfortable in employing as much violence as they saw fit to neutralize truth and its dangers to their regime.

Thus, telling truth to the authorities is necessarily risky. Only citizens and leaders who have been properly educated in the values of democratic governance and the necessary linkage between democracy and truth telling will hazard regularly confronting authorities with the truth. In this country, it would be best to work soonest and most diligently on this task of political education for the citizenry. There is no more urgent challenge than this one problematically. Even in functional democracies where venerable institutions facilitate political transparency and thereby enhance the probability of public accountability by the authorities, truth often inconveniences and could hurt those in power. Objectively suitable government programs may need a modicum of confidentiality — often during the earliest stages of their conception and/or implementation — to do well and attain their targets redounding to the public good.

Success will be properly rewarded by the Filipino people earning the right to a better choice than simply EDSA Dos or EDSA Tres. The first aborts institutional development without which a democracy cannot endure. The second is a dangerous invitation to anarchy. Filipinos must insist on truly better choices and discontinue this historical abomination of forced choices between the bad and the worse.