OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT

In the spirit of the times, his speech spread like wild fire on social media. Not that he graduated summa cum laude from UP Diliman because he’s only one of the 305 students who received the highest academic honors. Not that he’s poor because every year, we hear identical narratives of some youth who defied poverty and came out a winner. 

Clearly, the remarks of Val Llamelo at the graduation ceremony of the College of Public Administration last July 23, 2023 departed from what he called inspirational and motivational types of valedictory speeches. Yes, he was no different from other youthful strugglers in life who had to find work to cover both his own needs as a student as well as those of his family members, some of whom lost their jobs during the pandemic. Juggling between work and the academe, he tried breaking the chain that shackled the minds of many that his and other similar stories were just “unusual.”

He admitted that “the privilege of having a UP education taught me to question why such a fundamental human right as education, which must be granted to each of us, is not a natural occurrence.”

He was correct to propose that it is not natural for anyone, even the impoverished among us, to have to hurdle those structural barriers. They are anti-poor. No government has any excuse for keeping this unjust situation because the budget can always be tweaked in favor of basic social and economic services like education and health, away from discretionary funds or bloated infrastructure budget. We might be instituting a culture that undermines transparency and accountability, the antithesis of good governance.

This breakdown of values in Filipino society should no longer be puzzling to us. We see their manifestations every single day. What is more puzzling is to see adult Filipinos still playing suckers to the antics of many of our elected leaders. They swallow hook, line and sinker what passes as strategic program of government rolled out by many appointed officials. Why, these games are replayed every year!

That brings to mind former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney who wrote Values: Building a Better World for All after his retirement from central banking. He argued, as Val argued for the Philippines, that our world is indeed full of fault lines like inequality, health and economic crises. In turn, these fundamental problems derive from a common crisis in values. To Carney, we must value fairness, health, human rights, the environment. The problem is that these sublime thoughts are now the casualties of the 21st century world, instead of our foundation.

Carney offered three risks coming out of his view against an economy where “the price of everything is becoming the value of everything.” He supports business that makes returns for shareholders but whose core purpose is to “improve our lives, expand our horizons, and solve society’s problems, both large and small.” 

First is market failure. This is the tragedy of the commons, that is, when individual self-interest holds sway over the society’s common good. Market fails when the spirit of indifference becomes all pervasive during election time, for instance, and we allow some political candidates to get away with buying votes or rigging election results through electronic means. Election protests rarely prosper because the system made them difficult and expensive.

And how we are surprised when one or two outsiders manage to get elected for sheer merit and unstoppable popular support.

Second is when human nature fails. People, including Filipinos, tend to adhere to ideas they hold dear even if they were subsequently proven wrong, or a new contrary information has emerged. We cease being more pro-active, we cease from being more anticipatory. To illustrate, Carney observed that despite eight centuries of financial crises, global banks continue to fail in building up enough capital buffers, or strong liquidity reserves. Closer to home, decades of chronic flooding do not seem to have nudged government enough to overhaul its flood control program. Only when the floodwaters are just around that we begin to evacuate residents from danger zones, only to let them return when the floods subside. We justify what happened by crying climate change. 

Do we expect the outcome to be different next time when we don’t institute systems to change the outcome?

Third is the flattening of our own values. In economic jargon, when decisions on pricing have to be made, market prices are simply summed up with little concern about priority or distribution. That which is outside the pricing system is ignored, as when we don’t assign any price to corruption in government, or environmental degradation. With this type of perspective, we become blind to trade-offs between gain today and loss tomorrow.

It could not be truer to say that the flattening of our values as a people is behind our commercial view of corruption. Corruption is endemic so should we just have to put up with it and be prepared to trumpet every small accomplishment? Government is sworn to good governance to achieve big, rather than feeble, goals for the sake of our people and future generations. We have a lot of catching up to do. 

Have we grown numb to what we have been giving away in terms of public assets like the hundred-million-peso-a-day earnings from Malampaya gas and condensate field while we scrounge for funds to finance our deficit or cover our desire for a sovereign investment fund, or rally the people to defend our sovereign rights over the West Philippine Sea? 

We protest, and thank God the Philippine Senate resolved to condemn, China’s intrusions into the West Philippine Sea. But do we need to be hosed again to realize China is all out to dominate the world, and discount the value of what would come out of our former head of state’s begging of Xi Jinping to “look kindly to the Philippines?”

And we find it extraordinary for Singapore with its founding fathers like Lee Kuan Yew who subordinated personal to state interest to have leap frogged from a per capita income of $500 in 1965 to $83,000 in 2022? 

Singapore’s values have not flattened, but steepened instead.