Of beautiful and lesser minds

A good film recently impacted well on the public, a happening that is cause enough for a double celebration. Still, one could ask of this film – A Beautiful Mind – whether it ought to have been titled Beautiful Minds. After all, perceptive viewers would have noticed that the intelligent and caring wife has much claim to a beautiful mind as her clinically schizophrenic husband, the genius who gains a Nobel Prize in economics. It is characteristic of beautiful minds that they are ever at work – tirelessly probing as it were – and willfully strong. One must also add that they are capable of so much love and compassion for at least one more human being beyond their personal selves.

Many figures in the sciences have shown others what beautiful minds are capable of. The Curies and the Durandts – the first in the natural sciences and the second in the social sciences – worked incessantly at discovering truths, at fashioning more credible images of historic and other empirical realities and provoking other minds into contemplating the dynamic possibilities of human life and its contexting universe.

No mind attains beauty without working hard for it. The intellectual and physical energies required to sustain a beautiful mind are so enormous that only the truly industrious stay willfully oriented to it. This truth is so obvious to those who are themselves possessed of beautiful minds. Homespun geniuses often acknowledge this truth and credit ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration for their impressive contributions to improving human life. Carver and Edison, two beautiful Americans compensating for all those who are not, made a habit of regularly associating their immense productivity with the unglamorous routine of work, work and yet more work.

Filipinos can learn a lot from beautiful minds, some of these being clearly native grown. Who can forget Rizal chiding Filipinos abroad for being so fun loving and cavalierly forgoing work for Philippine enlightenment? Or fail to be impressed with the tubercular Del Pilar’s capacity for sustained journalistic work? Closer to our times, would people ever realize that the senior Laurel started most of his nationalist efforts at three o’clock in the morning and kept a work schedule for the rest of the day that presidents now might well emulate?

Brilliant minds are not to be confused with beautiful minds. Scintillating intellects foisted Marcos’ New Society on the mostly trusting people of this country. Perhaps equally luminous mentalities are behind the idea that economically distressed Filipinos would benefit from having more holidays, from megamalling their sweltering El Niño days and touring their scenic Lakbayan spots a few more non-working days of the week. Improving the national income accounts by having a largely poor people frolic beyond their currently much-reduced means is a fear not even Houdini contemplated doing. Only the flashy and the tricky among the incredibly brilliant would dare sell such a scheme. Only a national leader with the appropriate IQ may be expected to fall for it.

A beautiful mind is a bright, working mind, no more and no less. If people who are normally bright developed an appropriate work ethics – one that demands sustained quality work of every worker in this country – there would be less people hang up on so-called high IQ’s. (Incidentally, with such people charisma would not cut all that much ice either.)

Filipinos are already hard workers in other countries. The challenge is to make them work equally hard here in their own land. Obviously, a higher and more just compensation is part of any strategy to effect this outcome. However, the greater part will always involve a systematic development of the workers’ capacity to work harder, better and longer here.

This imperative works for presidents as well as for janitors, for wives and husbands as well as columnists. A working president will not have to play politics as much, janitors will need to humor their bosses less, wives and husbands will not worry as much about bedroom performances and columnists – now fortified with hard data which they will work hard to get and inform their columns with – will be freed from the horrible need to be impressively, vacuously brilliant.

Beautiful minds? Start working on them.