Recently, two Filipino political influencers with fancy university degrees have been feuding about the present administration's foreign policy. What started out as a debate about international relations quickly degenerated into grifting accusations, not to mention a pissing contest about their credentials.
It makes me wonder if they’re using their squabbles as a distraction from more pressing issues to advance certain political interests. That’s not a far-fetched idea. Despite their tirades against each other, these two influencers openly support the PDP-Laban, a Philippine democratic socialist party that has deep connections with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They refuse to denounce Rodrigo Duterte for opening the Philippines’ borders to illegal Chinese immigrants and to people claiming to be “Afghan refugees”. They also do not decry Duterte’s massive pandemic lockdowns despite the harm that they’ve caused.
Interestingly, both influencers are also soft in their stance on the woke tyranny from the West that’s creeping into the Philippine education system. One of them is all-out woke in his worldview, while the other one purports to have a laissez-faire approach that seems like a cover for supporting the excesses of militant LGBT groups.
What pains me is that these two Filipino alumni of foreign universities have the luxury to flee to high-income countries should we suffer under the demagogues that they’re supporting. This just goes to show us that formal schooling alone cannot be the ultimate panacea to any country’s woes. It can actually make you detached from reality, and give you the weapon to destroy others.
In real life, influencers like them harm the Philippines by wielding their credentials to compel people to embrace tyranny. In fiction, Crisostomo Ibarra best exemplifies the Filipino intellectual elite’s failures.
“Love Builds Up”
If you’re like me, your high school and college instructors taught you that Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo are about the immorality of vengeance and the need for Filipinos to undergo formal schooling to deserve liberty. Even the TV series Maria Clara at Ibarra (MCI) promotes this interpretation.
While it’s true that Rizal advocated for education and the Philippines’ annexation to Spain, his novels do not offer the quest for academic credentials as the panacea to the Philippines’ social cancer. In fact, the efforts to establish schools for native Filipinos failed spectacularly in both novels. How then should Filipinos address their society’s ailments?
In El Fili’s final chapter* (that the writers of MCI omitted), the good priest Padre Florentino tells Ibarra, “Only love brings in the end marvelous works; only virtue can save!” Not Ibarra’s European education, not the schools that will teach Spanish to Filipinos. Rather, it is love that conquers all.
Why is virtue the antidote? Padre Florentino explains, “From that ferment of vices could only surge revulsion. True, the vices of a government are fatal to it, cause its death, but they also kill society in whose bosom they unfold. An immoral government assumes a demoralized people…like master, like slave; like government, like country! With Spain and without Spain, they would always be the same, and perhaps even worse! Why independence if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow? And they would be, without doubt, BECAUSE HE LOVES TYRANNY WHO SUBMITS TO IT.”
The School of Suffering
Ibarra then asks what can be done to free the Philippines from oppression. Padre Florentino replies, “To suffer and to work!” He goes on to say that God is just for allowing the country to go through a period of suffering because “We tolerate and make ourselves accomplices of vice; at times we applaud it. It is just, very just, that we must suffer its consequences and our children must suffer them too! The school of suffering tempers. We must win (freedom), deserving it, raising the intelligence and the dignity of the individual, loving the just, the good, the great, even dying for it, and when a people reach that height, God provides the weapon, and the idols fall like a house of cards and liberty shines with the first dawn.”
In other words, once Filipinos acquire enough virtue, they themselves will fight for the freedom to be virtuous and God will hand them the victory. While formal education is part of the process of becoming a better person, academic credentials alone will not save the country. Ibarra was the most educated character in the Rizal novels. Yet he used his intelligence to propagate “crime and iniquity”, which harmed his countrymen even more.
That’s basically the story of the Philippine intellectual elite. Like Ibarra, many intelligent Filipinos think that their countrymen are ignorant plebs that they’re entitled to brainwash and control. Filipino intellectuals struggle to consider how their intellect and connections are unleashing wickedness that is far more damaging than what the unwashed masses can ever wreak upon society.
And if you think I’m only after left-wing intellectuals, you’re wrong. It has been said that establishment rightists will compromise their values at the right price, especially the professing Christians. As a right-wing Evangelical Christian, I can attest that that is true.
*Based on Soledad Lacson-Locsin’s English translation
(Photo by Jeshoots.com)
Sadly, that is correct even a number of professing Christians do buckle under the pressure to conform. And it is not always in exchange for some a monetary prize. For many of them, maintaining peace thru the status quo is worth the pain of being branded as the weakest link. In so doing, proving that they are indeed such.