Doublespeak and beyond

Societies presumably exist because their members share something in common. Without this sense of sharing, people could be together for a long time and yet remain alienated from each other. Their nominal community might exist, exhibiting numerous paper institutions and icons suggestive of a shared reality, but mostly everyone sees through the illusion and understands the grave need to bond with each other, to link so much more with other people so they may all have a stronger and more enduring community.

Nothing bonds people more than a common language, an instrument of universal communication that everyone comprehends and feels competent, even comfortable, wielding. Among Filipinos, the native term for society – lipunan, literally a conversing together – acknowledges this very reality. Without a shared discourse, their lipunan cannot exist; unable to intelligibly communicate, they must suffer the predictably tragic consequence, an abortion of the society that Filipinos could and indeed deserve to have.

The language one refers to here is not simply any ethnic Filipino language, not Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilokano, Ilonggo, Bikol, Ivatan or Pampango. It is not even the Filipino that people from Batanes to Jolo increasingly resort to when talking with those who do not come from their own ethnic stock. It is all of these and more. Even more natural than any of these natural languages, the language of those in a worthy lipunan has to be one whose vocabulary reflects an unimpeachable integrity of meaning. It is a language that means what it says, one that enables those using it to converse with much confidence, that assures people that however they agree or disagree, they are clear about what they are agreeing or disagreeing on.

It is not a language that confounds the speaker and the listener. Above all, it is not a language of raw power that enables the powerful to singularly define, dictate, distort or disembowel meanings when dealing with the weak. Among those who converse in a human lipunan, no one can arrogantly announce, as a creature in Alice in Wonderland does, that a word means precisely what he says it simply means.

In contemporary Philippines, many Filipinos – most of them among the most powerful and influential in this society – corrupt the very language that could effectively bond people in a functional lipunan. They destroy the integrity of meanings without which intelligent discourse cannot prosper. They confound the public discourse by cavalierly substituting merely "strong" republics for the far more demanding democratic regimes. Peddling purportedly democratic initiatives, they arrogantly clutter their language with terminologies that autocrats identify with. "Juntas" and "czars" – and"czarinas" for that matter – are an odd assortment of terms when lodged within a democratic frame.

These authorities and their lackeys do not facilitate the rise of a Filipino lipunan when their political discourse is confined to evaluating presidents as being either lame ducks or soaring eagles. Neither limping ducks nor soaring (souring?) eagles may be considered adequate in responding to the leadership challenges of Filipinos in these crucial times. Only a human president – one truly unencumbered by politicking agendas, by vacillation relating to an already forsworn presidential extension, by concerns for protective, rear guard actions upon leaving the seat of power — only a president driven by malasakit or concern for her long suffering people will do.

A bestiary approach to Filipino political governance grossly insults this nation. The pitiful duck, the predatory eagle, the wily fox and the roaring lion can never be conversant in the human language of compassion that Filipinos in a lipunan mode automatically effect. Only those who cannot transcend their brutal understanding of politics and governance fail to understand why a national leader needs to be more humane – and must come across as a sincere human being – in dealing with constituencies whose very humanity, given the trying times, is increasingly at risk.

Those who refuse to learn the basic language of Filipinos struggling to put together their lipunan, those who deliberately work to corrupt the sense of compassion that naturally attends this most human of languages, are the worst enemies of a democratizing republic. Left to themselves, they will go beyond Orwellian doublespeak and methodically inflict monospeak – tyrannical dictates — on their helpless constituency.

In this nightmarish setting, lipunan – conversing with one another – will be dealt with as a most heinous crime.