Falling expectations and historical outcomes - CHASING THE WIND by Felipe B. Miranda

In the 1950s and 1960s, one of the most frequently used clichés – "a revolution of rising expectations" – referred to the upbeat sense of people in most developing countries as they anticipated improvements in their overall quality of life and development in their economic and political systems after the devastation of the Second World War. Their optimism was reinforced by the apparent retreat of imperialism in the face of resurgent nationalism, accelerating democratization and the almost universal calls for creating a more just and humane world.

The 1970s, and 1980s saw this bubble of international optimism burst. Many people admitted by the end of the 1980s that the oligarchical character of most national societies and the structural inequities of an implacable international order remained despite the ringing rhetoric of freedom and humanization across the decades.

By the end of the 20th century, candid assessments of the human condition – within nations as well as across national societies – reflected much disappointment. Even among those who tried hard to be positively minded, as in the case of multidisciplinal experts who prepared the United Nations’ 1999 Human Development Report and proposed a strategy of "globalization with a human face", tracing the historic course of socioeconomic development led to the painful conclusion that a worsening of inequality had taken place globally as well as within most countries.

Using national incomes as a primary indicator, the authors of the Report noted that world income distribution had actually worsened from the 1820s to the 1990s, with the ratio between the richest and poorest countries being 3 to 1 in 1820, 11 to 1 in 1913, 35 to 1 in 1950, 44 to 1 in 1973 and 72 to 1 in 1992.

At a more personal level, the same authors pointed out that the assets of the 200 richest people in the world are more than the combined income of 41% of the world’s people and that between 1994 to 1998 the same 200 richest people had a consolidated group income of about $500 per second or, for each of these 200 individuals, $2.50 per second.

Most international agencies often use $1 a day – an unreasonably low estimate – as a reference figure for establishing an individual’s poverty income. At least 1.2 billion people, one in every five persons worldwide, have to make do with this income, according to more aggressive analysts who contend that so far most development efforts come with no more than "a human mask." When properly analyzed – unmasked, say the authors of a more recent United Nations report (Visible Hands: Taking Responsibility for Social Development) – so-called human development reveals itself as much too dehumanizing in far too many occasions for far too many people.

One might indeed be reminded of Rousseau’s classic definition of a well-developed, enduring human society – one where no one is so poor as to be forced to sell himself and no one is so wealthy as to be able to buy another. In a world where 200 of its richest people make in one second what 1.2 billion others struggle to earn in two and a half days, it is easy to understand why there is so much political instability and violent conflict and why they keep recurring.

Global conditions and national histories find their parallel in the Philippines. Like other people, Filipinos had also been very optimistic about the presumed inevitability of their national development and their eventual entry into some promised land. Having endured a post-war history similar to those of other people, Filipinos have also dramatically revised their expectations of their institutions’ and their authorities’ ability to deliver even on the people’s most basic needs. Much disaffection and growing restiveness have been reflected lately in Philippine society.

With national pessimism at its highest level in the last two decades, with public distrust democratically distributed among all the country’s most prominent national personalities, with ever-recurring forecasts of imminent economic breakdown and with increasingly strident calls to divide the nation among those who are with Satan and those who presumably are with the Archangels, one might wonder whether Filipinos are not finally, inexorably, moving towards some political Armageddon, a long-delayed resolution of the many ambiguities in this nation’s culture as well as its history.

Wishful thinking, no more no less. Rising or falling, Filipino expectations appear unable to force unambiguous outcomes in the nation’s history. This is the reason why however the Senate decides on the impeachment trial of the President, there will probably be no closure of this vital issue of a national leader’s public accountability.