Procrastination as a way of life

Why do today what one can put off for tomorrow? And why do tomorrow what might be done the day after? For many people, nothing is more exquisitely rational as procrastination. Anticipated delights soar a thousandfold beyond any grounded enjoyment and feared consequences are temporarily banished by yet another night, preferably many such nights, of soothing sleep.

Much of Philippine history yields to an analysis assuming procrastination to be the dominant way of life in this country. After more than three hundred years of Spanish rule, close to half – some would even say a full – century of American primacy and now at least five decades of native administration, Filipinos continue to bear with political regimes that do not serve them well, that are neither truly democratic nor effectively nationalistic.

The main reason is that the country’s common tao as well as the authorities tend to avoid any serious confrontation with their objective challenges of poverty, criminality, corruption and systemic oligarchy. Settling for paper resolutions that rhetorically address these concerns, ordinary Filipinos postpone their day of reckoning, moving from one day to the next with false hopes that their nation’s condition would improve – or, at the very least, stabilize – through propitious divine intervention or some other equally unfathomable and probably alien force. For them, procrastination is the inevitable consequence of a long history of their popular marginalization – of being systematically political disempowered – that has left them with little sense of efficacy in political life. They exist as objects, largely at the mercy of willful governors; they are not competent subjects able to contest or hold accountable their political wardens.

On their part, the authorities encourage the popular mindset as it frees them from constraints that responsible governance normally imposes. To ease somewhat the brutality of imperial rule, they provide their hapless public with the formal rituals of democratic elections and the illusions of the authorities being public accountable. The oligarchic substance of such rituals is betrayed by the role that guns, goons and gold and dynastic politics play in elections; the same thing might also be noted of solemn constitutional processes that are readily aborted when the influential and the powerful elites conspire to unseat a popularly elected, albeit probably already peter-principled president.

Additionally, the democratic charade is publicly sustained by diversionary exercises that feature sensational exposes of corrupt, criminal and even treasonous behavior by the most senior public officials. However, at the end of an extremely long day, after a long series of emotionally draining, dramatic performances by the high and the mighty – the investigators as well as those investigated – nothing is ever resolved, no closure is really ever effected. The public is thus left mostly dazed and even more confounded regarding the issues purportedly involved and the veritable character of their society and its overlords.

In such a context, for the conspiring authorities as well as for the emasculated general public, no premium exists in resolving any national issue promptly or effectively. Tomorrow is just as good and probably better than today; the days after tomorrow are conceivably even better.

The natural dynamics and consequences of this escapist orientation are predictable and manifest themselves much in the country’s actual history. Pious and delusionary readings of Philippine society and politics are standard offerings of the formal educational system; they mask society’s enduring oligarchies and social inequities with the elegant trappings of democratic governance and the ringing rhetorics of social justice. Young Filipinos are seduced into believing this illusion to be their functional reality. Most of them may eventually live a long life and lapse into merciful senility without ever suspecting that they suffer from a vicious socially transmitted disease – the deliberately implanted consciousness of their nation’s falsified history. It is this very perversion that conditions the citizenry into hopeful procrastination.

The few who somehow are able to recover from their pernicious contact with this mind-macerating socialization often become the incorrigible deviants of Philippine society. They stridently call attention to the miseducation of an entire nation, organize movements to waken and advance people towards an enlightened nationalism and, in the more desperate cases, may actually incite the citizenry towards more forceful alternatives in compelling a radical regime change. For them, the authorities understandably have little sympathy and hardly any tolerance.

Confronted by increasingly difficult, ominous times, some concerned Filipinos are openly speculating about the possibility that enough time has passed and sufficient learning has taken place to move actively towards regime change in this country. They believe that while most Filipinos are still caught up in their procrastinatory cells, a sufficiently large critical mass now exists to provoke a threshold political development – one that forces this nation to go through a historic crucible prior to its transmutation into a clearly more humane and just society.

It may be a sign of the times that this view increasingly finds support precisely among Filipinos with a sharp sense of comparative national histories, not only among those who tread their sixth, seventh or later decades in life, but also among people in their late twenties and early thirties. In their writings and in their public discourses, they may sound like Jeremiahs lamenting the times, but they also could be prophetic about a nascent order that most people are unable to recognize despite its already birthing in real time.

For the relatively few analysts who are able to conjoin hindsight, foresight and insight, procrastination obviously is the ultimate subversion of life. That must be why they are so bitter about those who would passively anticipate a rerun of history when there is a once-in—a-lifetime chance of changing history for the better.