Country as mode of being

BIMBO CABIDOG

Now, anybody knows wisdom is not the automatic possession of a graduate from college. A bachelor’s degree does not guarantee its holder to be wise or erudite. On the other hand, many of those who have gotten to the apex of life’s achievement do not owe it to a degree or diploma.

Some have become very successful, mainly because they failed in higher education. They took a different path and rose to great heights. Their stories are well known, among them the multi-billionaire Bill Gates, and IT magnate Steve Jobs.

The nation thirsts for wisdom and erudition, most especially at its helm. But all the millions of college graduates from its universities could offer is a narrow worldview that says life is just about making money. The outlook does not build a nation or raise a people from shallowness and mediocrity. It merely propagates selfishness and crab mentality.

An archipelago of crabs has no hope of attaining excellence in the international community, for it is just a sprinkling of isles pretending to be nation. It is a heap of purposes stepping on one another to claw to the top, but pulling each other down.

Millions of tendencies colliding can’t pull off the nation act. Yes, Filipinos should be competitive. But this should not be confused with seeking the downfall of the other guy, to triumph at his expense.

No country overcomes odds with its citizens just trying to outrace one another for his/her own glory. It soon splinters into individualistic goals and unravels.

Superficiality molds leaders who could not see beyond the goal of power over and above the rest. Their pursuit of personal wealth is confused as the interest of the public. Nothing is shallower than to take one family’s dynastic advancement as the good of everyone.

Leadership should be a product of shared vision. The country needs to be united on one compelling idea of the future, no matter if its population is already 105 million. But has education under the present system yielded such?

A national dream cannot emanate from a professional sector which is ultimately bent on getting a dollar-paying job abroad. Progress can never come to a country whose most able and skilled would rather work in and for another country, regardless if it is what will realize one’s dream of self-advancement.

A nation can only rise on the self-sacrifice of patriots for their native land. But what do people now care about nationhood? Asking it is not cool. Education seems to evade frank answers. It just says: we’re all in the ship. Not by choice anyway!

Like it or not, what happens as a result of purposes driving in opposite directions is still a shared future, a destiny everyone has commonly shaped and will commonly partake by rejecting collectivity. There is no escaping the collective result even if we escape collective responsibility.

Does education give life to living, working, fighting, and beating the unbeatable odds together? Yes and no. Yes, it promotes values of community, fellowship, connection and loving one’s neighbor. No, it champions individualism and the egocentric pursuit of self-excellence.

Individualism is the antithesis to nation and community. In fact, it trumps the individual that provides collectivity numbers, strength, role function, contribution and even uniformity. Indeed, collectivity is meaningless without the individual, for the whole will always be the sum of its parts, even if so much greater. But the individual that is not individualistic.

Worldview galvanizes individuals and cements collectivity. It sets them on a plane higher than themselves, than what meets the eye. Thus, they see not only the trees, but the forest. With the view, even the most disparate elements see a shared lot and a shared fate to work on as one.

Individual ambitions need not be selfish. They can be brought under a single unifying aspiration. This is when folks begin to see, not just the family but the community, not just the province but the whole nation.

In the end, selfish ambition defeats itself. Nothing in the world today is a product of a single craftsman anymore. Everything is already a product of social labor, the work of many. Everything can only happen through community and collectivity.

Communities do not succeed or survive by having every family box against each other or be mastered by the other for the prize of success. They do so by having everyone depend on each other, and so, work for each other.

What this means is letting the other in on the prize. It is not about going into the ring, fighting toe to toe for foothold, and bringing down the other guy to the canvass with a knockout punch. Here you see only an opponent. In the former, you see a fellow traveler and source of synergistic strength.

Instead of sending the other guy to the floor, you raise him up. Instead of stepping on him to climb to the top, you seek a ladder for both of you. Instead of grabbing his land, you help water it to yield a rich harvest.

The age of tribal warring, head-hunting and irrigating the land with the blood of the vanquished is long gone. Let it remain buried in that very remote past. This is the age of country, of people functioning as citizens for the wellbeing of all. Folks do not hack each other anymore for a means of a living. Country is the mode of living.

Let each one be the wind beneath the other’s wings. Then we can soar to the heights of our collective destiny: a prosperous society where every individual precisely by not being individualistic enjoys the good life in harmony with fellow human inhabitants of this planet, and in balance with nature.