Weekly Brief
Time for Filipinos to leave their echo chambers, ditch personal political loyalties, and discuss the bigger picture.
In review and in prospect
Blame it on the news cycle, pressure on media outlets to capture eyeballs and clicks, and the infamous short attention spans of the “millennial” generation. The idea that presidents can make Filipino lives “better’ by personally “fixing” things over timeframes counted in weeks — no, days — continues to underpin much of the Philippine national “debate”. It does not help that the range of “issues” that “thought leaders” use to frame these fixes almost entirely consists of mere symptoms of deeper-rooted systemic problems. These problems have histories behind them that span years — no, decades — and therefore transcend multiple presidencies. Most were outcomes of an incompetent civil service that mirrored Filipinos’ heritage of smallness over those periods.
The habit of the Opposition, under its current de facto leadership, of keeping said “debate” anchored in obsolete narrative — say, the “horrors” of Martial Law and “the poor” as “victims” — also contributes immensely to the impoverishment of the collective intellectual faculties of Philippine society. To these people, all that cause the issues of national consequence can be traced to that “regime” and all that is good necessarily has to do with “helping the poor”. They create false correlations between movements in economic indicators — say, the ebbs and flows of commodity prices — and whoever happens to be sitting in office and then spin a cause-and-effect narratives (e.g. “onion prices are skyrocketing because Marcos is president”). This is a fundamental dishonest use of “data” and “facts” to backward-engineer conclusions that fit a preferred political spin.
The foundations of dysfunction in Philippine society were not built in a day, therefore the solutions to these root causes cannot be implemented in a day. Basic things like opening and running businesses, public transport, food production and distribution, and health care, while taken for granted in most normal countries remain unnecessarily complicated and politicised in the Philippines. Untangling these messes involves long-term commitment and continuity beyond the scope and timeframes of any one administration. If the country's foremost “thought leaders” cannot think in those timeframes and, instead, quibble within the comfort zones of their echo chambers and tunnel-visioned thinking faculties, the Philippines will be unable to move forward at a rate that would keep it apace with its regional peers.
Last week's blog posts
January 30, 2023 by benign0
"In southeast Asia it is only the Philippines and East Timor that had, at one time or another, been parties to the Rome Statute. Not that there’s anything wrong with being an African country but being the first Southeast Asian nation to succumb to the 'authority' of the ICC..."