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:
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Geopolitical competition - endangering our exclusive economic rights over fishing and and other natural resources
- 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:
- 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.
- 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)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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