Ostracize the crooks

There was this interesting article at The Washington Post last week about the alarming decline in the population of many countries. It cited a recent essay for The Financial Times by John Burn-Murdoch suggesting that the culprit is smartphones.

Burn-Murdoch’s data suggest that smartphones could be causing birth rates to decline because young people are spending less time together. They are simply substituting scrolling smartphones for the social activity that leads to babies.

The article asked: Because less socialization is a big part of the problem, what can we do about it? Should we ban smartphones? Should we sue TikTok to make its content less compulsively scrollable? Should we force single young people to attend mandatory speed dating?

Or, The Post op/ed piece by Megan McArdle suggested: why not change the culture around smartphones to limit their harm?

Communities, she wrote, could collectively decide to give kids dumb phones rather than smartphones… and “to generally treat the infinite scroll as something like smoking… it’s bad for you and kind of déclassé.”

Déclassé. Borrowed from French, it is often used to describe something that used to be fashionable, respectable, or high-class, but has since become unseemly, vulgar, or out of style.

Déclassé. Used to describe things or behaviors that are considered inferior or unfashionable.

The Post op/ed pointed out that social sanction can be much more effective than any law at deterring destructive behavior. I immediately thought, maybe social sanction can punish corruption in a way the Sandiganbayan has failed all these years.

“Few people shoplift, vandalize public property… because they’d be ashamed to violate the social contract – and even more ashamed to have the neighbors find out.

“It is possible to rewrite the social contract, constructing new social norms to handle new kinds of destructive behavior… But it takes a lot of work, because the social sanctions that reinforce the norms have to be applied (consistently!) by ordinary people going about their daily lives.”

That op/ed piece at The Post made a strong point about society working together to discourage bad behavior. For us, we could work together to make politicians and tycoons plundering the country social pariahs.

Doing so is justified in the Bible. God has always ordered his people to remove wickedness… In his words in several verses in Deuteronomy, “purge the evil from among you.”

Corruption and stealing from the national or sacred treasury are treated as severe moral and structural crimes in the Old Testament, and handled differently than common theft.

While everyday property theft was settled through financial restitution, institutional corruption by leaders, judges and priests was condemned by God as a nation-destroying sin.

Proverbs 29:4 highlights how systemic theft ruins a society: “By justice a king gives a country stability, but those who are greedy for bribes tear it down.”

The prophet Isaiah links systemic government corruption directly to the moral decay of the state. Just as ancient societies crumbled from within due to moral rot, modern nations fail when their corrupt leaders systematically plunder the national treasury.

That should be enough Biblical verses to convince the Bible-quoting Senate President he is walking on the wrong side. Jesus warned us about those who falsely claim to have been sent by him. Through their fruits, our Lord warns, we should know who they really are.

My main point today is the need for Philippine society to act decisively to purge the evil from among us.

It is tragic that we are a society blinded by money. Whoever has it and has plenty of it is honored and never mind how that wealth was acquired.

We invite them to be wedding sponsors. We beg to be invited to their parties. We do selfies with them which we proudly post on Facebook. We give them awards at the local Rotary Club. Corrupt public works contractors are interviewed on television showing their ill-gotten wealth and presenting them as models for our youth.

We must stop lionizing and start ostracizing politicians and business tycoons who we know couldn’t have become wealthy in the right way.

The late US President Harry S. Truman made it clear that “no man can get rich in politics unless he is a crook…” That means, if politicians are among the wealthiest people in a society, that society is fundamentally corrupt. Or put more simply: a rich politician must be a crook unless proven otherwise.

We should flood our giant billboards with that quote from President Truman so people will wake up.

Unfortunately, we have normalized corruption. Many of us, at one point or another, had been guilty of saying, lahat naman sila corrupt. “Basta may nagawa”/“As long as they share the money”.

Corruption in the Philippines is sustained by a public that applies accountability selectively. This inconsistency allows corrupt practices to persist, shielded by the very citizens who should be demanding reform.

Stop denouncing corruption if you are not ready to do something about it.

Will the top conglomerates stop contributing to the campaign funds of known corrupt politicians? I don’t think so.

Are the Makati Business Club, the Management Association of the Philippines and other similar business groups ready to lead a nationwide campaign to ostracize corrupt politicians? To treat rich and corrupt politicians as déclassé? Nope, they thrive in the same cesspool environment.

Everyone I talk to in high society lament our country’s state of corruption and claim to worry about the future of generations to come. Well, take one more step and do something. We can’t just blame the Sandiganbayan for this failure.

A national campaign to ostracize corrupt politicians will show we are finally ready to follow the Biblical command to purge the evil from among us.

The only problem is, our leaders have lost any sense of shame. Kapalmuks na ang mga ito. Hindi tinatablan ng hiya. Kawawang Pilipinas!

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco.