Shifting Personalities
Randy David, in his Philippine Daily Inquirer column, offered with obvious hesitation an explanation for the tendency of Filipinos to immigrate to other countries. In The shift to nursing, David states that “(t)oday’s immigrants are different. They seem more desperate about being able to find a future at home… Many have reached a point of indifference… No one inspires them anymore… They refuse to waste their youth in a society that offers them nothing on which to anchor their hopes.”
He concludes by writing:
I am sure there are many deep personal reasons behind the current exodus of our people. But I think of it as societal entropy. A term from thermodynamics, entropy refers to “the amount of energy unavailable for useful work in a system undergoing change.” Applied to a society, it is a measure of disorder in the system. In plain language, it simply suggests that the present system in the country is such that it can no longer absorb talent. That’s one way of looking at our problem.
I understand Randy David’s point on societal entropy. It results in a restless society trying to find places to fit individuals in need of usefulness. Despite the common assumption that patriotism is dead in Filipino immigrants, only a few immigrants I’ve talked to will agree. A lot of them look back to their motherland with bittersweet memories and know in their hearts of hearts that if there was an easy choice of going back, they would. But several of them have found ‘their place in this world’, finding a usefulness that benefits their direct and indirect families back home. And anything that benefits ‘people back home’ benefits the beloved country.
I do not agree, however, with his paraphrased suggestion. It is not that the country can no longer absorb talent, it is that the country prefers to absorb personalities rather than talent. We now have a country that values popularity more than intelligence, surveys more than debates, press releases more than long-term platforms. Gone are the days of Claro M. Recto, Ninoy Aquino and Jovito Salonga, where politicians were popular because they were good leaders. Now, we have government officials who became politicians because they were popular.
Our country has a severe ‘personality disorder’. It is a systemic problem that puts actors, rehashed politicians and sons and daughters of political clans in positions of power. That is why we have criminals making our laws, nitwits formulating national policies and old hacks planning our new future. And, despite the widely-held belief summarized by Joseph de Maistre that ‘every country has the government it deserves’, some will not sit still in silent desperation. A government that doesn’t serve its people deserves to lose them.