Hardheaded, soft-hearted Filipinos

Given the innumerable and apparently interminable difficulties that Filipinos have had to cope with, it is a wonder that only one in five among them would admit to feeling hopeless as regards this country. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts and other natural calamities have taken their toll of Filipino optimism but they have not succeeded in making Filipinos despair about living here. Hopelessness comes only when people consider their collective history and see it as largely a series of failed responses to the challenge of sustaining human life in their community.

For hopelessness to abide, a people must acknowledge that their community’s institutions, its leadership and the citizenry no less have been unable to cope with the challenges posed by social existence.

In all societies, people have to be bonded by a sense of their collective or common welfare. Without this sense, society and all its structures and processes are reduced to being paper realities. Neither political governance nor economic management – or, for that matter, religious fellowship – is possible if people are unable to internalize this sense of identification with their "imagined community".

Lacking this sense of community and its integral notion of a common weal (the basic wholeness and well-ness of a community which the more popular term "commonwealth" obscures), people become dysfunctional in situations calling for social cooperation. Whether it be vehicular traffic, garbage disposal, flood control, crime prevention, market operation, tax collection, popular election, political administration or overall national governance, people without this sense of community egoistically pursue their individual interests and generally end up corrupting the common or public good.

To arrest anarchic tendencies and redirect them towards social collaboration, it is vital that those who lead a community are generally perceived to be themselves acting to serve the public interest. The most telling criticism of contemporary Philippine society appears to be in the very area of a decently performing and confidence-inspiring national leadership. Whether one alludes to political governance, economic management or religious involvement in the nation’s most pressing concerns, Filipinos find it difficult to have confidence in the sincerity and competence of their leaders. Given the country’s deepening poverty, enduring insurgency, deteriorating public safety and recurring economic and financial difficulties, this sentiment is of course quite understandable.

Furthermore, in these admittedly critical times, murky policymaking, wobbly decision-making, Orwellian doublespeak and widespread graft and corruption had discouraged numerous Filipinos from reposing trust in their national leaders. Part of the nation’s tragedy now is that hardly anyone gets to be trusted by a majority of Filipinos. (A puzzling thought: it may not be surprising that most politicians are seen by the public to be fork-tongued, but why should the most exalted among those charged with the country’s faith and morals suffer from the same ignominy? )

One more dimension of Filipino hopelessness needs to be summarily explored. Media is the most powerful among those forces mediating objective realities and the public’s perceptions of such realities. Filipinos confront a daily barrage of media presentations which underscore the brutality of most Philippine realities: the unscrupulously transactional character of politicians, the gross opportunism of economic and financial tycoons and the naked interventionism of politicized religious leaders. On a daily basis too, most people in this country suffer real-time, real-life experiences which pervert human life or which threaten to extinguish any form of life, human or otherwise. Subjected to such relentless assaults, how long can a people keep from seeking relief and considering leaving even their own country?

Media portray much that is true and Filipinos experience much of that truth. The wonder is that as of April 2002, so few of them would even consider leaving.