(Excerpted from ODYSSEY of the Filipino Voter: Exciting Adventures, Little Progress, written by Ed Aurelio C. Reyes, and published in 2004, on the "eve" of that year’s presidential election.)
WRITING ABOUT the Odyssey of the Filipino voter practically on the eve of an exciting presidential election, this writer is tempted to indulge in scenario-building, which I can sprinkled with a good dose of details. But while I included here lots of details in elections past, because people are expected to have forgotten all about them by now, I choose now to talk about some basic underpinnings, before posing the question, “Quo Vadis? (where goeth thou?), Botanteng Pinoy?”
As surely as election issues associated with the names Harry Stonehill, Haruta, Moises Padilla, Ira Blaustein, Julio Nalundasan, and even the fairly recent Evelio Javier, and terms like the “Golden Orinola,” the “Golden Buddha,” have been almost completely forgotten by now, the current headline-making dramatic events concerning the current contest, and names like Jose Pidal and Jose Velarde will fade from our collective memory quite soon, to be replaced by another set of names, recycled charges, recycled promises, recycled excuses, and – yes, of course – recycled jokes!
The sub-title of this book describes the “Odyssey of the Filipino Voter” as a series of “exciting adventures” that have spelled “little progress.” For suffrage to be developed as a vital component for a fully working democracy, which we claim or wish to have for our country, we the voters must grasp in theory and enjoy in practice two relationships: our relationship with government and its functionaries, and our relationship with political power.
Government is our Servant!
Filipinos have had a long history of government functionaries lording it over them. Government functionaries often invoke the “eminent domain” prerogatives of the nation state, supposedly on behalf of the people and for our benefit. However, national officials often do this in serving their own interests or serving, directly or indirectly, the foreign-elite domination of our society as collaborators.
National government is not higher than local government. It is only the synergized, i.e. effectively facilitated, national constituency that is higher, actually larger, than any of the local constituencies taken separately.
When a group of households builds a synergy among themselves, they may set up a simple me-chanism to facilitate that synergy — mass meetings at the plaza, bulletin boards, a council of elders or of chosen leaders, to resolve conflicts and coordinate bayanihan-type efforts. With such mechanisms in place, the synergy may work very well to serve the needs and will of the people in the clustered households. Two or more such clusters can join together in a bigger and stronger synergy, called a barrio or baranggay, with more complex facilitation mechanisms, and two or more such baranggays can build among themselves what they might call a municipality, and set up a bit more complex mechanism to facilitate the synergy and serve well the needs and the will of all the people in these clusters of clusters of clusters.
Baranggay Poblacion where I live, is not under the City of Makati, it is within Makati. And this city is not under Metro Manila but within Metro Manila, which is not under the Philippines, but within the Philippines. Get the drift? Only monarchies and miitary command structures have hierarchies. Democracy, which is premised on the equality of all persons, is not supposed to have one. The equivalent word for democratic set-ups is holarchy, from the word holon which means an entity being simultaneously a whole of smaller synergizing parts and a part of a bigger whole.
As we go to wider and wider scopes, the mechanisms become more and more complex but the essence should remain the same. And that is, the mechanism at whatever scope should be serving the needs and will of the people in all those component clusters of clusters of clusters, not ruling them. Even the necessary discipline for basic order in society emanates from collective interest and will, not on the will or moods of any government functionary. This is expressed in the principle, “government of laws, not of men.”
These government officials and functionaries on various scopes of constituency are not in any hierarchy, only their respective constituent communities are (in holarchies). The facilitating mechanisms are tools of the people, funded by their money, with authority emanating from them as citizenry. These, being just tools (government instrumentalities such as councils, agencies, Houses of Congress, executive departments, Cabinet, Palace) cannot be higher than the people. It follows that the elected or appointed functionaries posted in them at any given time are not any higher than us at all, except perhaps janitors while cleaning towers or pilots while flying planes.
They are not monarchs or military dictators or benevolent despots although they may convincingly feel and play-act the part and be rewarded with usually-undeserved respect (with the title “Honorable” and its attendant protocols) and bloated opportunities for largesse and perks. Only by having performance records of competence and dedication as servants of the people can these persons ever deserve the respectability they so conspicuously seek. But even the competent functionaries of competent administions have no real right to swagger among the people, much less allow their underlings to do the swaggering for them. Only the ignorant and the hypocritical opportunists can be “impressed” by their airs of self-importance.
The complexity of the mechanisms for nationwide governance, the over-bloated bureaucracy, have had the effect of confusing all of us enough to forget the essence. A congressman should consult with his constituents not to ask them what their problems are but to ask them what their proposed solutions are to the problems of the nation, so the congressman can faithfully represent their voice in policy discussions within the national legislature. Basketball courts, waiting sheds, bridges, etc. are matters that should be the left with governors and mayors and barangay chairmen to address as executives.
A larger cluster is not more important than a smaller one. Plans and policies of local constituencies should be synergized to be the plans and policies of wider constituencies. The national government should therefore be a mechanism for synergizing the Filipino people’s own physical, mental and spiritual capabilities to serve their own needs and their own collective will. Contrary to what we have started getting used to, it is not supposed to be a mechanism to facilitate the control of our country, of our regions and provinces and towns and communities, neighborhoods and homes, by the powerful elite of Global Greed.
In birthing the Filipino nation, which was its more important historic function than successfully fighting and defeating Spanish rule, the Katipunan (the root word of is name is tipon) gathered and wove in a unified tapestry the diverse communities in this archipelago. That process is opposite the direction of the Spanish conquistadores who claimed the Islands wholesale, and proceeded to divide up the land into smaller and smaller parcels to vassals and sub-vassals and sub-sub-vassals. Each land parcel included the flora, fauna and native people living on it.
The building-blocks logic of the Katipunan should be promoted today. For this reason, local communities, instead of awaiting devolution of government functions (usually including many “unbudgeted items”), should assert their command over their collective patrimony, and be prepared to synergize with adjacent communities on larger perspectives of stakeholdership.
People’s Self-Empowerment
The hierarchy paradigm is promoted and maintained by national officials who seek to call attention to their so-called authority over smaller clusters while at the same time invoking pragmatism to justify their meek obedience the Trojan-Horse “recommendations” of foreign overlords represented by the World Bank-IMF, World Trade Organization and similar entities.
This paradigm is challenged by the People’s Self-Empowerment (PSE) paradigm, where the ideal of social justice is combined with “teaching a man to fish so he can feed himself forever.” And there are three distinct frameworks groups and individuals can choose from for attaining and enjoying empowerment in governmental power, in other words, political power. These are:
1) “Proxy empowerment” framework wherein an organized entity that is out of the corridors of power seeks to acquire and exercise political power in the name of the people and for the “objective” and “fundamental” benefit of the people, earnestness assumed;
2) “Dole-out and Token Empowerment” framework where wherein an entity and persons already in possession of power claim to empower the people out of their magnanimity. But sets limits to such empowerment so as not to put in jeopardy their own decisive hold on power and their very own agenda; and
3) “Direct self-empowerment of, for, and by the People,” both as individual human persons attaining full development of their respective individual human faculties and potentialities, and as groups of such individually-uplifted people synergizing their capabilities for collective self-determination and effective self-governance. In this framework, various entities and individuals can serve, or partake in embodying, the people’s self-empowerment process (institutions, agencies and NGOs can serve this process one way of another; and each PO can partake in embodying this self-empowerment).
It is up to each individual and to each group to choose the framework to pursue one’s own efforts. Indicators of success or significance of the efforts would include the approval and validation of these efforts by a growing percentage of the citizenry, and of course the actual impact of these efforts on the people.
The first framework is premised on building the strength and “ideological purity” of the entity that seeks to acquire power for and in the name of the people. Thus it naturally tends to require or encourage monolithic structures and practices which have the inherent tendency to stifle the initiative and creativity of many of the people involved and, in many cases, have even resulted in the actual disempowerment of these people.
I choose to be predisposed to give this framework an assumption of earnestness of intent to act, speak for, and serve the “objective” and “fundamental” benefit of the people. History has apparently proven me to be “too generous” for deciding to have such a predisposition. For this reason, traditional politicians in the Philippines or elsewhere, can only appear to belong to be working under this framework, but are more akin to the second one” token empowerment doled out to the people.
The second framework is hazardous, just like the first, because it creates illusions among the people and feeds on such illusions until such time that the people, who initially pin their hopes on it, pendulum-swing to the extreme cynicism. The “people empowerment” component of the reform program of a past Philippine administration spoke glowingly of guaranteeing the marginalized sectors of society inside-track access to decision-making bodies of government, but did not guarantee that such representation would go beyond window-dressing. The scheme tended to backfire on government in most cases where representatives of such marginalized sectors were patronizingly humored and officially heard but not really heeded in those decision-making bodies.
The third framework builds a well-founded confidence in the people’s capability not to lose sight of the need for fundamental changes and actually builds the people’s direct capability through synergism to effect such changes.
The people have to raise their standards as to which changes may be considered essential and beyond the cosmetic or palliative. This framework does not harbor or foment a fear of petty reforms, for many reforms and immediate gains can really be used as stepping stones in the people’s march to achieving fundamental changes in society.
Among the three alternative frameworks enumerated above, I subscribe to the third one, and I would even go to the extent of asserting that it is the only framework that can result in the people actually being empowered. I say this because the framework of people’s self-empowerment is direct, well-rounded and rooted in the empowerment of individuals making up the majority of our people. At the same time, the third framework can actually support, encompass, and check for earnestness and effectiveness, those working within the first framework and/or the second framework.
Governance by the People
Some people who shall have read this part would probably say I am very disrespectful of government. Well, history of governance in this country has not given me any reason to give it more respect than I feel it deserves to get now.
And the summary of my “personal policy” toward government is one of “maximum tolerance.” It taxes us to death while shortchanging us on basic public services (which are getting privatized), it sells us and our children and our children’s children down the river. It makes glowing claims and promises and shortly afterwards it justifies utter failure to fulfill or validate them, blaming the citizenry for “over-dependence” and blaming specific groups of people for engaging in “destabilization.”
Still I would not think of raising a call to overthrow it – that would be too much bother, and in that case all my time and energy awould be spent on fighting and hiding, instead of on helping solve the people’s problems the government should have prevented or solved to confirm the value of its existence.
No way! I would rather spend quality time and enthusiastic energy on helping the people attain direct self-empowerment through synergy-building. So that whenever government or one of its functionaries does something good, the people would be prepared to maximize on it, and whenever the government goes on its usual performance pattern, we will be able to resist or to cope whichever response the people deem to be more prudent at any given time.
As soon as the Filipino people can attain empowerment beyond protesting and beyond coping (which includes joking about everything), and revive the spirit of Bayanihan and the Katipunan in facing collectively the problems of communities we belong in, only then can we say we shall have arrived as voters.
Then the personalities and exciting dramatics shall have become mere sidelights and not main events in our periodic electoral exercises.
Can we all be determined to attain this status even very gradually? Or are we actually enjoying the hollowness of our exciting national pastime? The Odyssey of the Filipino Voter continues, and my faith springs eternal.
The Filipino can indeed rise above and beyond this, from the despicable abyss of traditional politics to the lofty realm of noble statesmanship.
Ed Aurelio C. Reyes
Author, ODYSSEY of the Filpino Voter: Exciting Adventures, Little Progress, 2004
Secretary-General, Lambat-Liwanag Network for Empowering Paradigms; and Head, Lambat-Liwanag Task Force on Civics & Democratic Governance (Paradigm No. 5)
Makati City, Philippines
January 23, 2004
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