Part of the confusion about Charter change or constitutional reform (the better word) has to do with a misunderstanding of the word oligarchy. In my opinion, most Filipinos, when they use the word oligarchy refer to persons — the superrich of the Philippines — who can be named and counted with their fingers.
The word comes from the Greeks and was used to describe a form of government where the few, usually 20 percent of the population rule. It is similar to plutocracy that is the rule of the rich. The way I understand it though — oligarchy is a wider political concept and includes persons who may not be superrich but are powerful enough to direct how society is governed. It includes the military as well as the Church. In that sense, oligarchy is a system of government as well as a culture.
The Philippines is referred to by political analysts either as a plutocracy or an oligarchy, I think it is more accurate to say that it is an oligarchy. Some Filipinos who would never think of themselves as “oligarchs” in fact march to its tune. They, especially politicians all want to be as rich or as powerful as the real super rich oligarchs. It is a more vicious form of the American way of “keeping up with the Joneses”. That is one of the reasons why corruption thrives. Our culture is so deeply imbibed with the ambition for wealth and power. So when we blame oligarchs for the sorry state of our country, we must also look into ourselves and say yeh, but we also want to be oligarchs or be friends with an oligarch because that is the system. Otherwise we are lost.
Dynasties are one of the effects of oligarchic culture. It is expected that like royalty, positions of power and wealth should be inherited like pieces of expensive jewelry. So it should not surprise anyone that in the last two governments we have had children of past presidents, one of them from a very wealthy family. And if we are to believe the seers, we will soon have another in the near future after the present one.
The trouble is that all this is done under cover of democracy. We delude ourselves that we are democratic and we have elections to prove that. There will be few who will accept that if we were to think it through, elections merely vote in or vote out leaders from the same small pool of oligarchs or would-be oligarchs. Sometimes, we do get candidates who project a poor boy image like a former mechanic or an actor who are catapulted to political power because of their popularity but the promise of change is superficial. As my grandson loves to say about fairy tales or ghost stories — it is only pretend.
Happily, the perception is growing that elections are often the tools to perpetuate oligarchic culture no matter if they anchor their campaigns on their concern for the poor. We need to break out of this vicious oligarchic circles. Unfortunately we can only do that by changing our Constitution or launching a revolution hopefully not a violent one.
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For readers of Belinda Cunanan formerly of Daily Inquirer, she can now be read every Tuesday and Friday at www.polbits.blogspot.com. She hopes to find a more tolerant audience in cyberspace. Internet has been hailed as the most democratic medium.
With her announcement she also sent me the article “The trouble with righteousness” by by Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino. Although I agree with most of the things he wrote about in the article, I wish to correct an item in the article that referred to me. “But why have Carmen Pedrosa and Bel Cunanan stopped writing? Did they so desist of their own accord, or was some pressure brought to bear on them to set aside their powerful pens (or laptops!) for the sedate life of a journalist’s retirement?” As you can see, I am still writing for the STAR and hopefully to do so for some more years.
But to go back to the Internet, I think that its power to change attitudes in Philippine society is being underestimated. There is a new generation growing up with only the internet as their vehicle for communicating their ideas to the world and conversely, what the world means to them. In his book “ Attitudes and Longitudes” Tom Friedman of New York Times writes:
“I am a big believer in the idea of the super-story, the notion that we all carry around with us a big lens, a big framework, through which we look at the world, order events, and decide what is important and what is not. The events of 9/11 did not happen in a vacuum. They happened in the context of a new international system – a system that cannot explain everything but can explain and connect more things in more places on more days than anything else. That new international system is called globalization. It came together in the late 1980s and replaced the previous international system, the cold war system, which had reigned since the end of World War II. This new system is the lens, the super-story, through which I viewed the events of 9/11.
He said globalization has one overarching feature – and that is integration. “The world has become an increasingly interwoven place, and today, whether you are a company or a country, your threats and opportunities increasingly derive from who you are connected to. This globalization system is also characterized by a single word — web, the World Wide Web. Everyone in the world is directly or indirectly affected by this new system, but not everyone benefits from it, not by a long shot, which is why the more it becomes diffused, the more it also produces a backlash by people who feel overwhelmed by it, homogenized by it, or unable to keep pace with its demands.
He talks about is the balance between individuals and nation-states. The world wide net has simultaneously wired the world into networks, it gives more power to individuals to influence both markets and nation-states than at any other time in history. . .Individuals can increasingly act on the world stage directly, unmediated by a state.
So you have today not only a superpower, not only supermarkets, but also what I call “super-empowered individuals.” Some of these super-empowered individuals are quite angry, some of them quite wonderful - but all of them are now able to act much more directly and much more powerfully on the world stage.
Jody Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for helping to build an international coalition to bring about a treaty outlawing land mines. Although nearly 120 governments endorsed the treaty, it was opposed by Russia, China, and the United States. When Jody Williams was asked, “How did you do that? How did you organize one thousand different citizens’ groups and non governmental organizations on five continents to forge a treaty that was opposed by the major powers?” she had a very brief answer: “E-mail.” Jody Williams used e-mail and then networked world to super-empower herself.
Nation-states, and the American superpower in particular, are still hugely important today, but so too now are supermarkets and super-empowered individuals. You will never understand the globalization system, or the front page of the morning paper — or 9/11 — unless you see each one as a complex interaction between all three of these actors: states bumping up against states, states bumping up against supermarkets, and supermarkets and states bumping up against super-empowered individuals - many of whom, unfortunately, are super-empowered angry men.”