I had a thought once about how and why Filipinos seem ill-disposed to leftist agitation so far, even with many well below the poverty line. One may pin it on fervent Catholicism, the lack of a large and sufficiently dispersed industrial base to build a discontented proletariat (not that this stopped Mao, but that's a different story), etc.
But I think we also need to add striverism to this phenomenon. Similar how to the explanation for this in America is that it is common to regard oneself there as merely a ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaire,’ your average Filipino is proud and conceited enough not to ascribe to utopianist/revolutionary impulses when individual self-interest is well enough established to advance yourself. To go into the mountains requires an insurmountably high or deranged sense of self to overcome the desire to try and make it big somewhere. The downside to this is that this phenomenon is much more vulnerable to subversion given how parents or your average Juan isn't really going to give a damn about diversity, ESG scoring, or globohomo, and will even cheer for it depending on the circumstance, as long as they get paid.
Without the presence of a strong cultural/religious/political backstop to this bourgeois affectation, it leaves you with an extremely vulnerable populace that is especially prone to materialist consumerism and status signalling spirals. Most leftists, and mainstream academia, usually get lazy and attribute this to some mixture of capitalism and colonialism, without acknowledging it as an all too human tendency, a particularly persistent strain that bodes ill for people without the intellectual aptitude or low-time preference to temper it and make it socially beneficial. While I do think the ‘sipag at tiyaga’ sentiment is admirable, applying it to its full extent today - especially when divorced from higher principles - gets you into all sorts of dumb stuff. The vlogger/‘content creator’ becomes an admirable character. The sentiment now is cut off from its rightful end, as hard work is encouraged so that people can become rich and indulge oneself. Family is still tacked on, usually by boomers, after talking about money, but people don't even get to that part while daydreaming of becoming an American. The common and normie-effective answer is usually the lines of: ‘As long as they're having fun/trip nila yun eh,’ ‘They aren't hurting anyone/wala naman silang tinatapakan o sinasaktan,’ or its positive corollary of ‘At least they aren't stealing from anyone, unlike X (usually unsavory government official types)/marangal ang trabaho ko, hindi naman ako magnanakaw tulad ng iba ryan.’
Yet this sentiment is a close sibling of the blind worship of degrees, credentials, and education. ‘They can't take that away from you/hindi yan mananakaw sa ‘yo.’ The economic effects are something we regularly discuss and need no further elaboration. The social effects are equally as corrosive. The whole pandemic should make it crystal clear how this blind worship of the degree leaves people vulnerable to institutional capture and language control. Your dad can complain about the fags all day, but his kids are up to their eyeballs in videos where the rainbow mindset is inculcated under the framing of ‘tolerance’ and ‘anti-discrimination.’ It's one thing for the legitimization process to occur on the base level, where its fags that you see on TV that disarm public sensibilities, it's another when Dr. Goldblattbergstein from X Institute in America is giving a lecture on video that's being shown to HS students and their eyes glaze over while the rainbow programming is installed. The quaint sensibilities provided to you by your family are helpless simply because the other guy has been doing his studies with a lot of fancy graphs and credentials attached to his name. Suddenly, God, dad, and your inhibited sensibilities aren't enough to cut it anymore as credible sources.
You get some degree for anything and everything these days, but what is the exact value of this knowledge? A degree in STEM has far more practical and social utility than anthropology, but parents lap it all up all the same when they're kid gets that certificate not knowing or caring that their kid learned how to be a degenerate in college.
There seems to be an imaginary hope here that somehow, the kids are going to grow out of it and become a typical bourgeoisie salaryman. When you try explaining to them about the degeneracy that is to come, they shrug their hands and say that nothing can be done and the degree is still needed to make it in life. Worse, they try to diminish the problem and start defending their kids: ‘hindi naman siguro, alam ko ang ugali nyan’, ‘ganyan na ang panahon ngayon, kailangan mong makibagay’, etc.
And here we can trace these social conventions to Jose Rizal himself. I glean one example from his Noli to show what the government makes schools and universities teach. ‘You say that they have given us the faith and have brought us out of error,’ he writes. ‘Do you call those external practices faith? Or the commerce in cords and scapulars, religion? Or the stories of miracles and other fairy tales that we hear every day, truth?’
I get a sense of irony in reading Rizal's words through Elias in Noli. Father John Schumacher, SJ, just so happens to have a compilation of readings in Philippine Church history. From this collection, I can't help seeing here how those of Chinese descent were seen as the Eastern equivalent of the Jews, as the quote really reads to me as some kind of wedge screeching against the Faith, from a people that gave the country Feng Shui and entire shops dedicated to trinkets dedicated to warding off bad luck and evil spirits. At least the Church doesn't actually tell people to ‘buy X and Y’ or reorder/change the items your house to repel negative energy. I’m willing to bet that Chinese shops make far more money than the sum total of the religious article shops here in the country. More than that, I’m trying to parse together the problem here, and I can't help but think that this is cosmopolitanism breaking through.
Rizal goes on to speak through Elias. His argument against ‘superstition’ is interesting, since it reminds me of basic-tier Protestant objections to Catholicism. ‘Is this the law of Jesus Christ? A God did not have to let Himself be crucified for this, nor we assume the obligation of eternal gratitude. Superstition existed long before this; all that was needed was to perfect it and to raise the price of the merchandise.’ Other than these ramblings, there is also a part in Noli, I think in the first Tasyo chapter, where Rizal basically writes Reddit fedora dialogue to dunk on certain Church practices. Going by historical friar criticisms of folk Catholicism and dodgy priests as one could read from Schumacher’s collection, one would think in hindsight that Rizal and the friars would get along better. But no, Rizal is too committed to Third Worldist Filipino-as-virtuous-victim narratives to even consider how the Filipino shares in the blame for the Red Queen signalling race of piety. We at Pillar of Liberty have the tools and frameworks to see and understand this phenomenon now, but for countless other people, this garbage can somehow sound downright appealing, even if the proposal itself is nonsensical.
Rizal finishes his ramblings like so. ‘You will tell me that imperfect as our present religion may be, it is preferable to that we had before. I believe this and agree with you. But it is too expensive, because in return for it we have renounced our national identity and our independence. In return for it we have given its priests our best towns and our fields, and we are still giving our savings for the purchase of religious objects.’
If I lived in Jose Rizal's time, here's how I'd answer him: Who are you to renounce the sacrifices made by the martyrs and saints of the Church? To diminish their witness to the Faith and the blessings which they share from the divine? Yes, the sacrifice encompasses all of the articles of the Faith, material and spiritual, but rather than denounce the thieves surrounding the Temple, you assail the Temple itself. You insidious vipers talk of independence and national identity, and yet forget basic Scripture, ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’
Ryan Mello is a scholar in the humanities, and writes when not working. He has seen the professional-managerial caste’s decadence and haughty arrogance towards the working caste from youth, and flirted with Third Positionism. He found himself in the Dissident Right from discovering Neoreaction. He studies Philippine institutions and society, and the Reactionary Right’s frameworks and analyses have opened his eyes about how Philippine society really works. Follow him on Twitter @melryanmello.