Critical mass in Philippine politics

Physicists understand that for certain types of physical reactions to be sustained, or more precisely to be self-sustaining, there has to be enough critical mass materially capable of and necessary for the specific reaction. Beyond concep-tual understanding, physicists are comfortable with critical mass, confident that their science endows them with the requisite skill for controlling the rate of reaction in a mass gone critical. Between nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs, between energy for peace and energy for war, is the enviable confidence of physicists in their science and the regimen it demands of professionals in their field.

Recognizing the dynamics of democratic regimes is also highly dependent on understanding the concept of critical mass and – materializing as a political force – its skillful management. By critical mass, politicially speaking, we must understand a sufficiently large number of the citizenry who comprehend the essential features of a democracy and – possessed of such knowledge – will employ all political resources to inititate as well as sustain its political regime.

Democracies have two essential features, all others being no more than desirable secondary traits. In certain circumstances, these latter traits – the rule of the majority, the presence of free and clean elections, separation or fusion of powers and other features – might be temporarily waived without doing irreparable damage to a democracy. However, a democratic regime must at all times seek to serve its constituent public and uncompromisingly maintain a working system of public accountability for the authorities. Without these two characteristics, a democracy cannot possibly exist. At best, what one has is a paper version of a democratic polity, worth no more than the piece of paper listing its "democratic" claims.

The ability to gauge whether the public interest is being served depends not so much on the benign transparency of government as the functional education of the citizenry in political dynamics, in the citizens’ awareness of the dominant interests and their familiarity with the actual processes that define political outcomes in their society.

Beyond awareness lies organized action. Politically aware citizens do not constitute a critical mass until they learn to undertake organizational work and press their political claims as an organized group. Thus the political education of the citizenry must develop their organizational skills, from the most elementary ones like formally establishing an organization and electing its officers to the more critical forms of articulating and aggregating erstwhile disparate, even apparently conflicting interests, managing electoral and other political campaigns and setting up rallies, demonstrations, strikes and other concerted political action.

A citizenry with this kind of political education will inevitably create institutional arrangements for exacting responsibility from their authorities. However, the public accountability of the latter will not be exclusively dependent on whether the formal institutional arrangements work or do not work. When political institutions and the authorities consistently subvert the public good and regularly betray the public interest, public accountability will be exacted ultimately by citizens rising in common expression of their outrage and collectively resolving their most urgent national concerns.

Clearly, this kind of politically critical mass could be highly volatile. Like the physicists, politicians and political scientists must have a profound knowledge of the nature of the material they are working with. A superficial familiarity with their people and an ensuing contempt for the citizenry’s fundamental demands historically had inclined many political leaders to be feckless governors or reckless authorities. Machiavelli’s criticism is that in failing to build on the people, these leaders perilously build political regimes on foundations of sand.

In a democratic or democratizing regime, a prudent political leadership would assist in building up this critical mass and try to channel its vast political energies towards gradual and progressively equitable national development. However, where democracy does not exist and oligarchical authorities are obsessed with self-perpetuation, two political alternatives normally are availed of. One option is a fascist response seeking to abort an emergent critical mass using any means. The other option is political alchemy, the preferred craft of those who would fool all of the people all of the time. Historically, neither alternative has worked in suppressing the development of a critical mass for long.

The proportion of democratically-minded Filipinos going critical is definitely on the increase. The incredible folly of so many leaders, the perversion of so many institutions and the worsening material conditions of the people accelerate the processes by which a national critical mass develops. It will not be long before this critical mass compels democratic governance to prevail in this republic.