Gross national happiness
The stock market has been so depressing lately — especially if, like mine, your livelihood depends on its ups and downs. Unless you’ve been hibernating underground with seasonal bears, you have to know the world is no longer what it was a year ago or even what it was during the last financial crisis. Yet here we are, my beloved countrymen, happy as ever. Not to generalize, of course; surely someone somewhere is pulling his hair out from the rising cost of pandesal. But the majority of us continue to defy expectations. In Nielsen’s recent consumer confidence survey where the global average was 84 confidence points, Filipinos scored 102. The survey appendix notes that although we’re generally aware of a looming recession, this just isn’t enough reason for us to stop spending.
Last September, local car sales surged from the previous month. This as car dealerships abroad close down. As TV Patrol reports the fate of sinking international markets, bystanders on our streets flail their arms at the camera, grinning proudly in their one-second fame. Our malls are jam-packed with shoppers at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday — and we’re having the worst financial crisis in history? I once asked a Korean tourist guide why his people seem to be flocking our country. He said that in contrast to career-driven Koreans (who by the way scored lowest in consumer confidence globally with 36 measly points), Filipinos constantly manage to prove that life doesn’t really have to be so hard. Apparently, they find our happiness infectious.
Yup, we are a happy bunch in this country, all 90 million of us. And so will be the 2.5 Filipino babies being born every minute, the 12th most populous country in the world and certainly one of the least able to afford it. In 1972, Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck decided that his kingdom’s progress would be measured not only by the classic Gross Domestic Product (GDP) indicator but by something he called Gross National Happiness. Wangchuck said focusing only on economic growth eventually led to deep-seated problems in society. Maybe Wangchuck’s proposal wasn’t entirely outrageous. Rich nations do have a knack for developing all sorts of psychiatric conditions: when high school kids start shooting their classmates, you have a serious problem. Imagine, though, if happiness were really used to measure economic progress: how rich our little archipelago would be.
Yet we are not rich, not in the way that allows us to live comfortably and to assure our children of a shining future. Is it conceivable then that we score too high on the happiness index, and too low on everything else? Could it be that our disproportionate amount of Gross National Happiness is precisely what has caused our GDP to crawl like a snail stuck in its shell — and, vice versa, would a higher GDP take away the happiness that comes so easy to us as a nation? Horrifyingly, has our ability to withstand the bare minimum cost us the desire for something more, for something better?
We’re not lazy people — only citizens with a stable social security system and fallback pension fund can afford to sit on their golden arses all day. What we are, really, is complacent. It’s a vicious cycle that feeds on itself. We’re so easily contented with what we have, so grateful for the little crumbs sprinkled on our palms that we don’t feel the need to strive any harder. We’re so used to it being bad that we’ve come to stop expecting any good. It’s the opposite of being spoiled, which is what rich countries have inevitably become — and why we can’t understand what they’re making such a hullabaloo over. We shrug it off like dandruff. Nothing shocks us anymore; we’ve grown accustomed to a dumbing down of the sensibilities. How could we not? Just watch local television.
Economists have their theories. Our tropical climate is so conducive to growing food that we’ve never had to suffer a cropless winter. The Japanese, in comparison, have scarce seafood resources (thus the overflowing rice in donburi meals). This means the Japanese have to work harder so they can compensate for nature’s stinginess, making them some of the most determined, ambitious people on earth. Historians, on the other hand, believe that we continue to suffer the aftermath following centuries of colonization. We’re so used to being downbeaten and being told what to do that we’ve learned to manage our expectations out of life. Either theory may be correct or both could be wrong, but does it really matter? Do we really need to keep making excuses for our poverty?
While having churros on a sunny Florida day in Disneyland, I realized how most children back home will never know this experience. Our children have resorted to finding their own happiness, even while swimming in leptospirosis-infested floodwater. I could imagine the look on their faces as they bite on Mickey-shaped caramelized apples and watch the parade fireworks at night. Maybe it’s true that what they don’t know won’t hurt them — but how could you not want for them a piece of Disneyland, the happiest place on earth?
We are survivors, but that is precisely it: we are content with just surviving. Until when will it be enough? Because until we say it isn’t, that it shouldn’t be, this floodwater happiness is all we’ll ever have. Despite our countless talents, we will remain what we have been for too long: grossly happy and perpetually poor. We are forgiving to a fault (just look at our political record), tolerant of pains (malayo pa yan sa bituka), and work eight hours a day for minimum wage without complaint. And maybe that’s why we are unable and unwilling to fight for ourselves. We have too much strength and too little courage. We wake up very early each morning and go home to watch a little television in the neighbor’s house before sleeping at night. This is enough to make us happy. A celebrity sighting would make our whole week, our whole year. We snuggle into wooden folding beds, contentedly wrapping a holey mosquito net around our bare bodies. We have given up the one thing that remains free in this inflation-ridden world: our capacity to dream.
I’m not sure how long we can stay this way, so content with meager survival that we even have a name for: isang kahig, isang tuka. Maybe, hopefully, one day we’ll get tired of being the perpetual underdog we cheer for endlessly. Some part of me will be sad to see it go, this innocence and arguably shallow happiness that seems embedded in our cultural make-up. But a bigger part of me — the part that believes we are meant to do greater things as a nation — wouldn’t mind scoring just a little bit less on happiness and a little more on the future we build for our children.
Every condition of Darwin’s theory of natural selection says the Filipinos will eventually be selected against by nature. The laws of science indicate that we will be extinguished from the face of this planet as soon as the stronger races decide to run us off. But we are not a weak people; on the contrary we continue to surprise everyone with how much fight we have in us. With everything we’ve been through, we will probably survive a nuclear holocaust. I just wish we could dare want a little more for ourselves, because that is what we deserve — even when every fiber of our culture has made us believe we don’t.
Why not work harder then, why not breathe in and keep walking forward instead of staying stuck in our happy little rut? No matter how much we complain about government inefficiencies and the harshness of poverty, the truth is we do not want to change those things enough to do something about them. We’ve grown to be contented with what little we have, afraid to be given what we’ve never had because we wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway. We’ve evolved into a people hardened by time and rusted by history. And while the rest of the world argue about evaporating stock markets and credit crunches, we crawl into the old shells they leave behind, smiling contentedly, grateful — always, always, simply grateful.
