An Attempt to Mindhack the Indolence of the Filipinos
It has been 2 weeks since a huge typhoon hit the Philippines. As of writing, the death toll is 4011 and based on the article bearing the news, the government stopped the official count there. There are a lot more dead bodies in the streets but the government officially stopped counting.
It was November 7th when Typhoon Haiyan hit landfall in the Philippines at Guiuan, Eastern Samar and caused a series of catastrophic events on Samar and neighboring Leyte and other island towns in the Visayas. The most badly hit being Tacloban City and the focus of most relief operations, since one, it is a city – it has the largest of population affected, two, everything was wiped out – food, infrastructures for medical aid, everything, three, the people have gone into mass hysteria because of food shortage – a lot of looting and killing has taken place.
After the storm has passed and aids have gone in, the country was in the international spotlight as news teams, medical teams, and every sort of team from every country imaginable, were sent to cover the devastation and to send help.
It was sad to see the Philippines stripped in all its nakedness for the world to see – how the incompetence of our government was exposed – not only to us, Filipinos, but to the whole world. It wasn't only the government that had its moment of shame but the Filipino people themselves as they bashed the government and each other in social media channels with regards to personal views on what should be done on the current national crisis and sending antigovernment sentiments for the lack of leadership in immediately sending remedy to the situation. It is all nauseating.
I have always had this passionate anger against my country. Do not get me wrong. I am in love with the Philippines. It's just that different aspects play out that the love I have for my homeland is not conflicting with the hate I have for it. In fact, my sentiments, put together, actually make sense. If I had to explain this to a Filipino simpleton, the response I would get would either be of the following: 1. I don't make sense, 2. I'm a person who can't make up her mind (“balimbing” would be the local term), 3. I am not nationalistic. All responses I deem incorrect and illogical because most of the “nationalistic” fools I have talked to are unclear with regards to their definition of nationalism. Most “nationalistic” Filipinos I know define being nationalistic as: 1. supporting/buying local goods 2. jumping in the celebratory bandwagon when someone Filipino wins a sporting competition or gets recognized internationally. The nationalism most people here speak of is shallow and plain ridiculous. In fact, there is no clear common definition what it is. It seems to be a vague concept to me and to everyone else when the word nationalism comes up.
I have been thinking about this whole nationalism thing for quite a while now. I have been ranting antinationalistic sentiments every time I spot fake nationalistic hurrahs whenever a boxing match is won by Manny Pacquiao or whenever someone with Filipino lineage gets recognized for doing something. It's ridiculous to announce “Proud to be Pinoy” every time some person with Filipino blood (no matter how diluted) gets recognized for something. One, that “Filipino” got recognized for doing what he did excellently and has nothing to do with his being Filipino. Two, it's quite stupid to affiliate oneself with the person recognized by stating sentiments of “proud to be Pinoy” since you contributed nothing to his work. As mentioned earlier, his efforts is owed to his hard work and not to his lineage.
It bothers me why Filipinos are like this. Why Filipinos think this way. Be all nationalistic without even knowing the nature of nationalism. It is questionable me how someone can be so passionate about something that is vague to him. I'm not just talking about nationalism here. I think the idea holds true if you cross to other ideologies. Filipinos can be so supportive of an ideology or a cause without knowing or understanding the very nature of that ideology or cause. It is again, ridiculous.
First things first, I will define how I view nationalism. I adhere to the common definitions and I will add some personal insights as to why the concept of Filipino nationalism is skewed. Generic definition, nationalism is a belief or ideology of being attached to one's nation. That's pretty broad actually. Let me try to be more specific. Basically, when one is nationalistic, one identifies with his national identity – social constructs and individual behaviors that support his country's decisions and actions. That's from a modernist point of view. From a primordialist point of view, nationalism is a natural evolutionary phenomenon that organizes humans into groups basing on their affinity of birth (in behavioral biology and sociology, the idea of homogamy can explain this).
Basing on those two main perspectives on nationalism, I shall form the following conjectures. One, let's tackle the primordialist point of view. The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,100 plus islands. Although it is one nation, it's pretty much scattered into little separate islands. From a national point of view, ideally, people would tend to be nationalistic since they come from one country but break that country into a thousand municipalities and towns and what you get are regionalistic bastards who organize themselves into small groups. The tribal mindset is seen at play which prevents a common generic ground to be grouped into a national level.
Second, I believe the modernistic point of view roots from the primordialist view since a nation cannot form socially constructed perspectives and behaviors leading to a national identity if they don't identify themselves in a group naturally. So picking up from the previous argument, it is valid to posit that there is no national identity for the Filipino to attach to. In fact, it was Jose Rizal, our national hero, who pointed out that one of the causes of indolence is the lack of national identity.
Following the train of thought of the two arguments, I guess it is safe to say that the Filipinos have no idea what their national identity is. It is kind of sad to blatantly point out that we have no national identity. We have a sense of national identity but what identity it is, is nonexistent. In turn, it explains a lot why our sense of identity is only linked to Filipinos winning sporting events or when someone Filipino gets recognized by the world. We are still a young nation finding our identity. We look for clues of who we are through petty things that put our country in the map. We were not given the chance to develop our own. We were an infant raped out of our cradles when the Spanish and all the other Western people came to colonize us. We are nothing but a mongrel nation.
I had to go to Jose Rizal and review what he has written more than a century ago. After all these years, the Filipino has not established what he is to himself yet and it made me think, could it be that laziness is the root of this identity crisis? Could the Spanish and all other Westerners who accused us of indolence be right? In his sociopolitical essay entitled, “Sobre la indolencia de los Filipinos” (in English, On the indolence of the Filipinos), Jose Rizal defined what indolence is and set to defend that native indolence is a product of social construction brought about by the Spanish colonization.
Let us define the term for clarity. Indolence, to Rizal, is a word greatly misused to mean “little love for work and lack of energy”. Modern definition of indolence (or what we commonly refer to as laziness) is as simple as Wikipedia's description: “a disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to do so.”
In the first chapter, Jose Rizal made it clear that indolence is, in fact, undeniable among the Filipino people. He went on to say that it is an effect rather than a cause of our backwardness and trouble. In Syed Hussein Alatas' The Myth of the Lazy Native, he reinforced this by pointing out that the idea of the lazy native is a one-sided colonial denigrating view of the Southeast Asians by the Western capitalists. Them Western whites upholding the idea that they define the world and their values as a means to measure against the Southeast Asian natives. The idea of indolence is a product of ideological conflict between the dominating and subjugating groups. According to him, what was concluded or accused as indolence was in fact the disinterest of the Filipinos in conducting trade in the spirit of modern capitalism. Another simple ideation of this conflict as Jose Rizal pointed out is that an hour's work under the Philippine sun is equivalent to a day's worth of work in temperate countries.
The second chapter went on to enumerate what the natives have been doing prior to Spanish rule – the active trades they were involved in within and outside the country, the abundance they produced from farming and mining and other industries they were engaged in, some were even speaking Spanish – all signify that the Filipinos had activity and life. Something they would not have if they were, by nature, indolent. Jose Rizal went to ask what went wrong that the native Filipino forgot his productive past. Is indolence the symptom or the cause of cultural backwardness?
The third chapter listed and argued a number of reasons that could have caused the cultural and economic decline of the Filipino natives. Among these include invasions and insurrections in the communities and the decline of native population as many have been sent to Spanish expeditions and wars. Basically, the forced labor for Spanish endeavors have left the natives' undertakings unattended. Their farms, mines, and trade have been abandoned for the capitalist's enterprise. And Rizal considers this as a deep root for the so-called indolence.
In the fourth chapter, which for me contains a huge chunk of his argument, declared that the Filipinos “are not responsible for their misfortunes, as they are not their own masters.” The Spaniards came and conquered and along with this, they have discouraged trade and labor among the natives. Commerce communications with the Chinese, Malays, and Arabs have ceased as the Spaniards imposed a lot of restrictions. Thus, trade has declined. As the hardworking Filipino tended his crops, pirate attacks and natural calamities got in the way but in no way did the government help him to restore his farm. As the monks and encomenderos took over their lands, the Filipinos were forced to work for them and had to suffer abuses, which left them no choice but to abandon their own fields. Everything was monopolized by the Spanish government. If one wants to do business, there were a lot of red tapes to go through and a lot of bribes to deal with. Add the doctrines of Catholicism and the lack of opportunity to education and you have the perfect formula to build a lazy mind set that predisposes a negative attitude towards work and life. With the constant reminder of the church that the rich will never go to heaven, what value does work have in the place of the Filipino mind? Why should the Filipino work his ass off for the gain of the Spaniard? The system was built entirely against the Filipino. How can he be motivated to work hard if his effort is never rewarded? What motivation is there in laboring furiously only to enrich the other? The constant struggle with himself to try to make sense of his state as a rat in a cage inevitably led to the deterioration of his values. He has nothing left to hope for except that the God of the Spaniards would have mercy on him.
The fifth chapter summarizes all of Rizal's points into two factors. Firstly, he argued that education and training were not available to the natives as it was freely available to the foreigners. Instead, inferiority was taught to them and reinforced with discrimination. Secondly, because of the learned inferiority, the Filipino native was not given the chance to explore himself as an individual and as a collective thereby, the non-existence of a national sentiment of unity with his fellow natives. Since no national identity was allowed to form and since he is inferior, the Filipino was bound to submit to the culture of the foreigner and do anything, everything, to imitate it. Rizal ends his essay with the proposal of a solution that only education and liberty could cure this malady of indolence.
Here we are, 123 years later, still struggling with the same problem. The Spaniards and Americans have left but the values they have taught us are deeply ingrained (claiming Rizal's argument that indolence is a product of complex experiences). We have struggled for liberty. We have struggled for education. But still we are tied to the clutches of indolence. After all the defenses Rizal has argued for us, here we are putting his belief in us to shame. What happened?
The Philippines is now a democratic country, claiming its independence in June 12, 1898 and establishing self-governance in March 24, 1934. As of August 2010, there are 2,180 recognized higher educational institutions (HEIs) in the country (HEIs refer to colleges, universities, institutes, and other post-secondary learning institutions). Liberty and education were Rizal's prescription. We now have liberty and we have education. What went wrong?
Here is my own deconstruction of things: the brand of indolence in the Filipinos is not just socially constructed. Generations after the trauma under Spanish rule (also the Japanese and the Americans, etc.), indolence has become an evolutionary heritage, a behavioral non-adaptive trait that has afforded the Filipinos a kind of biological and societal insurance and resilience to varying environments. Unaware or not, I have come to believe that the Filipinos are fatalistic. They feel that everything will go wrong so there's no use in putting efforts to things. Anyway, there's always God and luck to rely on (“bahala na”).
The Filipino is not lazy per se, but lazy rather in his thought life. Go to the country side and you will see Filipinos tending their fields under the heat of the sun. You will notice that even at the most inconvenient hours, the Filipino is busy holding a broom with his hand, cleaning whatever clutter he sees around him. In terms of labor, the Filipino is happy to just go about the triviality of everyday work. He, in fact, takes pleasure in it. But let him think, challenge his beliefs, and you will get the most mundane answers. Ask him why he does the sign of the cross when he passes by a church, he will tell you that it's tradition. Ask him about his opinion on the government and you will get old maid story answers like an update on the president's current girlfriend. Ask him about the conditions of economy and you get personal insights that never compound to a higher ideological or objective view. Ask him about the current post-typhoon crisis and get his opinion on the government's course of action; he will most likely comment which celebrity gave more donations and which celebrity was such a hypocrite.
It saddens me that regardless of how free or educated we claim to be as a Filipino people, our minds are really never free or educated. The religious mind set that has crossed over to other mental boxes has killed and is still killing our creativity, and has been and is still putting a roadblock to our path to discover ourselves and our national identity. It is that internal narrator in our heads that always tells us what should be done instead of doing what we want to do – the idea of pursuing things that go out of the accepted beliefs/traditions could be a sin and the idea of eternslly burning in hell for it does not motivate at all. Add the power of inferiority that still lingers and you have the perfect concoction that limits us as individuals and as a nation.
Integrate technology to that idea of liberty and education and you have a modern mindless Filipino struggling for self-worth in the social media setting. Here comes modern Filipino making a cyber comment and he feels like he is actually contributing to society and affecting the world. Thus, reinforcing his laziness. He is too afraid to think for himself. The ghost of foreigner's past is always behind his subconscious leading him to imitate and please the ghost with regards to his opinions and thoughts. Whatever he thinks will be a popular opinion, he will acquire that or go entirely against it for a moment of self-worth. A moment of little self-worth elevation is enough to keep the modern Filipino going. So it has become a habit for him to observe events and comment first about it on social media, an opium for self-aggrandization. Because in reality, he is still the lazy Filipino too scared to do anything to affect the system he has grown comfortable with.
We are a free people with access to education and technology. We live in a time wherein information endlessly pours. It has now become a matter of pushing ourselves to actually start questioning things that were indoctrinated to us and start standing up for things we believe in. Cliche as it may sound, I think that in order to realize the Filipino national identity, we should start with knowing ourselves. Now that we understand the underpinnings of our neuropsychology and why we are wired into laziness, we now have the power to go against it.
I am not prescribing a solution but I am hoping that by way of this writing, I have shown you how it is to have freedom to think and to pursue a thought. I have struggled with laziness in the process of writing this but as I have said earlier, you can always go against the built-in laziness.
What I have learned from reading a lot of Maria Popova is to “allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.” Which leads me to what Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Let us change our minds. Let us not allow the Filipino people to become a nation of illiterate fools.
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