Head of a tiger, body of a caterpillar: Our split personality as a people
The National Defense College of the Philippines asked me to prepare a lecture on “Leading Change.” I conceptualized a lecture on leading the transformation process and was going to use the analogy of how caterpillars turn into beautiful butterflies.
I was reviewing a series of pictures in Google images of caterpillars when I chanced upon this striking image. I was stunned! Look closely and you will see that the caterpillar has a tiger’s head and front body. Very clever!
It was, to my mind, a good analogy for what may have happened and is happening to us as a nation. I immediately change the flow of my presentation.
I decided to focus on the split personality of the Filipino people — on one hand a tiger wishing to establish its place in the sun, and on the other a caterpillar that moves ever so slowly and cautiously, clinging to the past with strong sucker pods.
We have different tribes or ethnolinguistic groups. We have people from different walks of life, different persuasions and different religions who seek socio-economic development like tigers (or at least tiger cubs). But their aspirations and attempts are thwarted by a caterpillar’s body that represents a great number of our people from other tribes, persuasions and religions, who for various reasons fear the aggressiveness, the daring of the tiger.
I am not talking about the poor, the less educated and the less exposed to global realities alone. I include the rich and the privileged who, content with what they have, and fearing change and what it will do to them and their current power, prosperity and popularity, will do their best to hold on to the present and the past.
Think about it. The poor, the less educated and the less exposed to world realities among us often have become the excuse for the lack of progress.
But more than this sector, it is our educated, privileged but timid classes who seem content with their lot in life that serve as the major barriers to change; for it is this these people with the education, the training and the power to make happen what they wish, make happen what they want.
These include not only politicians and the workers in our bureaucracies. They also include business people, professionals, academicians, church folk of all denominations and their satraps and clients. Saddled with a longing for imagined past glories and concern for their present privileges, they seem unable to think of the larger community and for the national future.
So, if we think it is only Presidents and other top officials that need to be removed, again, think more deeply and more extensively. Maybe it is really some of us who have been barriers because we revel in talk and talking loud but do not follow through with the needed actions clearly and decisively.
I have been reading, in the past two months, the latest biography of Arsenio H. Lacson by Amador F. Brioso, Jr.; Michael Cullinane’s Ilustrado Politics; Vicente Tirona Paterno’s autobiography, On My Terms; Amelia P. Varela’s Administrative Culture and Political Change; The Rulemakers: How the Wealthy and Well-Born Dominate Congress by Sheila S. Coronel, Yvonne T. Chua, Luz Rimban and Booma B. Cruz; Moorfield Story and Marcial P. Lichauco’s 1925 opus The Conquest of the Philippines; and A. Timothy Church’s 1986 Filipino Personality: A Review of research and Writings.
I also reviewed my own experiences as an officer in the Philippine government from 1971 to 1976, at the Commission on Population. I saw the wheeling and dealing within offices, among organizations and with cooperating and funding agencies, not necessarily for money but for power and influence and popularity.
I looked again at the researches I did for the Harvard University Advisory Group in the Philippines between 1970 and 1971 where I was able to take a closer and wider view of our sugar industry and our automotive assembling industries.
Our sugar industry is backward not for lack of vision and plans to attain that vision — Don Carlos Locsin had one in Project Foresight, initially for the Victorias Milling District, but eventually and ultimately for the whole industry in the country. It wasn’t poverty, or the lack of education and exposure to global trends that torpedoed the plan. It was the vested interests of influential planters, mill owners and their backers in government.
We are way behind Indonesia and Thailand in car manufacturing not because we lacked vision and a plan. There was the Progressive Car Manufacturing Program of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was present in several discussions on the program that involved some of the biggies in the industry and government.
It failed because vested interests wanted to control the whole program and eventually phase out effective competition in the country.
What comes out of these varied materials for me is a vindication of my own conclusions, reached while I was a University of the Philippines student, that:
Graft and corruption has been with us well before 1946. It was there during the Spanish colonial period, and has grown more shamelessly through the centuries.
Graft and corruption persist because wide and deeply rooted networks benefit in varying degrees from the evil work that they do.
Most of our poor are forced to support the network because they are made “offers they cannot refuse.”
Some of the poor are intelligent and smart enough to learn the system and create their own networks.
Many among our elite are deeply into the system, while making the right noises against these networks they help perpetrate and grow.
We who genuinely wish to change the system must learn to band together and find ways to fight the corruption more intelligently and smartly over the long haul.
I am reminded of what T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) told the character that was Sherif Ali in the movie Lawrence of Arabia: “So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel…”
While the quote clearly does not completely apply to us, yet the phrases “tribe against tribe,” “a little people,” and “a silly people” strike me
We have different tribes or ethno-linguistic groups. We have people from different walks of life, different persuasions and different religions who seek socio-economic development like tigers (or at least tiger cubs). But their aspirations and attempts are thwarted by a caterpillar’s body that represents a great number of our people from other tribes, persuasions and religions, who for various reasons fear the aggressiveness, the daring of the tiger.