Sunday, March 22, 2020

Dilawan: Rise and fall of the EDSA regime - Duterte and the Next Wave

            
If Marcos was the logical conclusion of the Old Republic, which was built on a feudal society, where “a few enjoyed the fat of the land, and the many suffered”, then the natural extension of our post-EDSA republic, with its monopolistic capitalist model, is Duterte. The internal contradictions of each society ultimately brought about the conditions for the emergence of these leaders.

The lost opportunity of EDSA was that rather than building a more just and humane society, we simply re-incarnated the old one with the result of entrapping many Filipinos into a life of servitude to the vagaries of the market, as we pursued a neoliberal model of development.

Return to first principles

            Aquino’s agapic vision for the country - Christian socialism - originated from Northern Europe, a different branch of the Enlightenment, a path to development independent of the Anglo-Celtic model of Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand of the Market.

            It was a post-Hobbesian view of the world, Remember Hobbes? The one whose book, Leviathan, was forged after the English civil war. He saw the chaos of royalists vs parliamentarians, similar to our post-EDSA reality, where a similar thing played out between Marcos loyalists and pro-democratic forces. The chaos of that time caused Hobbes to advocate for a social contract where a powerful state would be feared and put to end the war of all against all, and is what many find appealing today in Duterte’s style of governing.

            The North European model was neither Hobbesian, nor Lockean. John Locke’s version of the social contract was conceived to guarantee life, liberty and property, which was later reformulated as the pursuit of happiness - on which the American and French revolutions were founded. An atomistic view of the world, where individuals are given the burden of figuring out their own way in the world, without support from any community or tradition. This aimless pursuit has led us to the nihilism of the present.

            The misconstruing of happiness as subjective life satisfaction, the maximization of utility, which leads us as individuals to accumulate wealth, possessions, experiences, instead of searching for deep connections, and finding purpose, is what has led many countries in the world, including America to end up with populist leaders.

            Christian socialism was based on the agapic efforts of a benevolent, enlightened monarch in Denmark to educate his subjects, to liberate them from serfdom and create the conditions that would afford their full blossoming to reach their full potential. A human centred form of capitalism.

            This vision was obscured, post-EDSA by the standard orthodoxy of neoliberalism. The gospel of the Market with its Invisible Hand, guiding us to the Common Good, mediated by institutions of good governance. market-centric capitalism, requiring market-enhancing governance.

From a utopic and nostalgic dream, to an agapic vision for the future.

            EDSA is a tale of moving from a utopic vision of the future, to looking back with nostalgic fondness to the past, and now that we are at this juncture where the cultural blinkers have come off, we can retrain our eyes toward a new vision, perhaps that original project for agapic transformation, the Impossible Dream that one man dared to dream in the depths of despotic despair and despondency.

            In liberal democratic tradition the goal is to achieve economic and political development - to create conditions that provide for stability which then lead to investment attraction that raises our productive capacity for value and wealth generation - a having mode of existence, where the ultimate goal in life is to have things, a kind of techno-consumerist culture, having the latest gadget. 

This has led us to emptiness, meaninglessness, the revival of religious fundamentalism, terrorism, different forms of addiction, polarization, loneliness, and robs us of our human potential.

What we need is to aim for the collective co-creation of conditions that would afford the full development of our human potential both as individuals and as a people - a being mode of existence, where the ultimate goal is to have a sense of purpose and connectedness within our culture and community, apart from material well-being.

Freedom as development

            The Nobel economist Amartya Sen had an axiom that states ‘freedom is development’. He was referring to the building of human capacities for people to achieve their fullest potential. It is not just granting them rights and letting them fend for themselves. It’s about giving them every chance to succeed in exercising agency, to act and engage with the world, in ways that are meaningful to them and their peers.

EDSA restored our freedom, but left us unprotected from the predation of powerful forces from within and without, that kept us trapped in lower modes of existence. We had to fend for ourselves in a world of parasitic rent-seekers who extracted from the wealth of our nation, weakening its capacity for human development. Movements led by demagogues from both the left and the right have risen to power offering to liberate us from these parasites, but have often ended up engaging in parasitic behaviour themselves, or have squandered golden opportunities due to the intelligence of these parasites to reconfigure and confound strategies employed to find and catch them. 

            We are engaged in a two part battle: 

  1. Fight poverty, malnutrition, and other development traps - to reverse the cycles that keep us locked-in lower orders of existence. Poverty prevents people from exercising agency, because it strips them of capacity to act. It robs us of our freedom. Freedom from hunger, ignorance and preventable diseases, is one of the basic guarantees that we failed to provide to millions of Filipinos, post-EDSA. It was only recently that the state gained some capacity to provide welfare payments targeting the poorest in our communities, to help alleviate the most extreme forms of deprivation. This came about when we entered a virtuous cycle of growth and taxed consumption, that materialist, reductionist mode of existence based on the accumulation of things.
  2. Improve people’s capacity to reach their full potential - to avoid the condition spoken of by Roseau that, “man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” Once individuals and countries reach middle income status, this battle becomes the more salient, as material well-being can provide a base for subjective life satisfaction, but suffers diminishing returns, as additional income does not necessarily lead to higher satisfaction in life. This has been borne out by cross country comparisons, as well as studies on individuals.


This battle to preserve and extend the gains already made towards well-being is situated in a highly complex world with problems that pose significant challenges. These challenges could threaten the gains already made and prevent further gains.

5 Complex Challenges

Back in 2016, I wrote about the 5 challenges that the next president would face. I posted this on Blogwatch, and will provide the link in the comments below. Haven’t got time to discuss them in detail, but very briefly, they are:

  1. Fourth industrial revolution - threatening obsolescence of our labour force. The internet of things, 3D printing, automation, drones, driverless cars, robots, bots, machine learning and artificial intelligence all threaten to replace our workers. Our factories and call centers are all at risk. With pandemics threatening global supply chains, local sourcing may become necessary. Deglobalisation may occur.
  2.  Late demographic shift - placing demands on our resources. The Philippine fertility rate has fallen ahead of UN projections thanks in part to strong policy advocacy by NEDA chief Ernesto Pernia to make family planning services more accessible to those who want, but can’t afford it, namely poorer households which were responsible for the rapid growth of our population. This is why hunger and malnutrition is still a problem in the countryside. Due to malnutrition, the only type of work these children could do when they grew up was low skilled menial jobs in our agricultural sector. As mechanisation takes over, there will be lesser opportunities for them. This is why we need to make a demographic shift. 
  3. Severity of climate change - endangering lives and livelihoods. Severe droughts and typhoons, wiping out crops, making it harder to till the soil, killing and displacing people from their sources of livelihood. The Philippines is at the coal face in terms of feeling the effects of climate change. It will need to find ways to weather-proof its economy and protect its citizens from natural disasters.
  4.  Geopolitical competition - endangering our exclusive economic rights over fishing and and other natural resources
  5. Fanatical, ideological beliefs - undermining our safety and social cohesion. 
In addition to these five major challenges, I also wrote a piece on the 5 major transformations that were needed, which kind of matched these challenges. And they are, again very briefly:

  1. Agricultural transformation - to modernise and mechanise the ag sector, make it more productive, improve crop yields as well as diversify crops into higher value, drought resistant ones.
  2. Industrial transformation - upgrading technology, innovating and becoming more creative. As the fourth industrial revolution rolls in, we will need to upgrade both our software (skills, knowledge, creativity) and hardware (technology and infrastructure)
  3. Energy transformation - in line with the IoT, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, our electricity network needs to upgrade into a smart grid, to allow for low and zero carbon emitting sources, decentralised energy production, storage, including the use of electric vehicles for storage.
  4. Social transformation - as an educated middle class emerges, there will be many health challenges associated with a higher protein diet. Dealing with an obesity epidemic, and the chronic diseases this breeds, dealing with various forms of mental health problems, addictions, loneliness, and suicides. We will need to create healthier communities and greater social cohesion in a diverse country, such as ours.
  5. Political transformation - opening up political participation to ordinary citizens, improving how we enter into political discourse and dialogue with each other. Reduce polarisation, which breeds a post-fact world.

So we can see that when Duterte came into office, he had his work cut-out for him. How did he fare?

First test: war on drugs/Oplan Tokhang

Second test: TRAIN law/fiscal reforms

Third test: IS terrorism and Marawi seige

Fourth test: Expanding social entitlements

Fifth test:  Ease of doing business
Sixth test: Build, build, build

Seventh test: Inflation and rice liberalisation

Eighth test: China’s incursions in the South China Sea

Ninth test: Boracay and Manila Bay water sanitation

Tenth test: Transport modernisation

Eleventh test: Fertility rate reduction

Twelfth test: Coronavirus pandemic

How do we speed up the transition to generate transformative, creative solutions by applying collective intelligence to our complex problems?
            To do this we need to be open to dialogue with other citizens. That means being willing to truly listen, and understand different people’s perspectives without judging their propositional beliefs.

The last fifty years have been spent with opposing camps arguing Marcos was evil. No? Ah no the Aquinos were evil. Now it’s about dilawans being evil. No? They’re the decent ones? And the fascist DDS are the bad guys?

Memetic tribes (Peter Limborg). One side engages in cyber extortion. If you don’t endorse their # to #resist, s then prepare to be shamed. The other side engages in cyber terrorism. If you stand with the # then prepare for a knock on your door. We’ll come after your kids!

To reconcile disparate views there needs to be a shift away from insisting on such propositions. No one is completely good or bad. We cannot sanctify one and demonise the other. If we do that we fall into a trap of polarisation, which we can ill afford, given the challenges besetting the nation.

Duterte was a signal. He signified what was wrong with the EDSA view of the world. The dispensation anchored on neoliberal market ideology, which obscured its founder, Ninoy’s original agapic vision based on Christian socialism .

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