Problems associated with the act of governing are complex ones. However, and as James Scott has theorized in his book Seeing Like a State, governments are notorious in simplifying complex problems, and would rather opt for the quick and easy simply because they are politically expedient, and in many cases, are popular. Faced with a demand for solutions from usually expectant and angry citizens, governments opt for quick fixes that pander to populist sentiments. Scott argued that governments would like to make the complicated social world legible or easily readable, and this has led to a procession of costly and disastrous interventions in history.
Take the drug war, for example. Social scientists from all over the world have already empirically established that the problem of drugs is not just a criminal problem that needs to be arrested by the state, but is a much more complex social malaise that requires a more comprehensive approach, from using the police power of the state to deploying rehabilitative and developmental social intervention programs. Certainly, unleashing a bloody drug war can shock, awe and eliminate criminal human agents, but as President Duterte himself has found out, it is not enough to make the drug problem disappear. From his campaign promise to eliminate drugs in six months, he has revised his promise and admitted that it will now entail six years, or at the end of his term.
Imposing the police power of the state on the drug menace is definitely the quicker way to address the problem. However, focusing on the convenient targets that are easier to identify, contain and neutralize, such as the poor drug couriers and petty dealers who are merely at the lower end of the drug food chain, may disrupt the underground narco-political economy. But the problem will not be significantly addressed if the narco-politicians, protected by rogue members of the police and armed forces and enabled by corrupt government bureaucrats, and with transnational connections are not contained. We will end up with a mounting body count, some of whom may have been killed extrajudicially, but also watch the spectacle of billions of pesos worth of drugs getting in through the Bureau of Customs, undetected and pouring into the streets.
It is indeed much simpler to deal with the underclasses and the petty-bourgeoisie in the drug trade than with the narco-politicians, even as it is even more complicated to deal with the social, economic and cultural roots of the drug problem. But if there is any indication that the problem is not going away easily, and that the quicker, simpler solution just does not cut it, it is when the President himself admitted that Isidro Lapeña was helpless in preventing the entry of the illegal billion-peso drug shipment into the country.
And the President is doing it again, and is now going for the simple, quick and easy when he opts to hamlet the Lumad as an anti-communist insurgency strategy. The President hopes that this strategy of forcibly relocating the Lumad away from their homes and into controlled villages or hamlets would deny the CPP-NPA-NDF the opportunity to terrorize them, or recruit them to join the communist insurgency. What this strategy fails to consider is the socio-cultural complexity of the Lumad worldview, where their attachment to their ancestral abodes is a primordial need that feeds their moral economies. The root of Lumad discontent is very much attached to the insecurity they feel regarding their ancestral lands. They join the CPP-NPA in rebellion against a state which they perceive to be on the side of the capitalist plantation owners and mining companies that stole their lands from them. For the government to adopt a simplistic strategy of uprooting them from their lands and relocating them to controlled hamlets will only aggravate that perspective.
During the Vietnam War, hamletting as a counter-insurgency strategy has miserably failed in containing the rise of communism in Vietnam. The then South Vietnamese government, aided by the US, thought that forcibly relocating the rural population through the Strategic Hamlet Program would pacify the countryside and reduce the influence of the communists from North Vietnam. But far from achieving this goal, it only further fueled the resentment of the people towards, and contributed to the eventual downfall of, the US-sponsored South Vietnamese government.
Taking shortcuts is dangerous because it usually doesn’t address the complexity of the nature of the problem, to a point that a wrong diagnosis is made. One case in point is when Bureau of Corrections Chief Nicanor Faeldon Sr. announced that he plans to end the existence of gangs in the Bilibid prison. His idea on how to achieve this is to abolish the system where prison gangs have their own territorial spaces inside the national penitentiary, and would implement a system where members of rival gangs will be forced to cohabit with each other. Not only is dangerous because it will increase the risk of gang violence, it also doesn’t reflect a full understanding of the real problem.
Faeldon should have conducted an ethnographic study of the prison culture. If he had done so he could not have missed the fact that this system has provided a grounded mechanism for maintaining order. The existence of gangs with de-facto territorial jurisdictions provided an organic way by which self-governance among inmates was enabled. Hence, instead of abolishing the system, Faeldon should even think of harnessing its organically rooted power, logic and influence in more positive ways. The problem is not the existence of gangs and their having their own territorial spaces inside the prison complex per se, but how the prison authorities can ensure that prison gangs do not become conduits for criminal activities. Forcing rival gangs to cohabit in common spaces will not abolish gang culture and instantly exorcise the inmates of their loyalties to their groups; it simply makes it more difficult to keep track of and govern them, even as it increases the probability of gang violence. And there is no assurance that it will put an end to the criminal activities of the inmates.
Simplistic solutions do not always yield optimal results. Taking shortcuts and quick fixes may appeal to the political base, and may for a moment and in the short run feed the political narrative and optics of someone engaged in action, and not just in words and in debilitating academic discussions deploying some inconvenient and irrelevant theories and concepts. The dislike for social scientists and academics, which we see in the anti-intellectualism of the agents of populist politics, is symptomatic of this aversion towards complexity. But in the end, history has never failed in reminding us that the road to hell is full of shortcuts and quick fixes.
https://www.manilatimes.net/simplifying-the-complicated-2/486358/
https://www.manilatimes.net/simplifying-the-complicated-2/486358/
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