‘I am not sure if the Filipino as a collective will ever trust again. Even if they vote regularly in elections.’
IT’S been years since I read the book of Francis Fukuyama with this simple title but I remain enthralled by his thesis. It’s countries where the circle of trust is wide that much progress is achieved. Where the circle is small, then society as a whole progresses at a snail’s pace.
Where the circle of trust is wide, the cost of social and economic transactions is low. You trust people outside of your circle of family and close friends. People follow regulations because regulations make life easier. Handshakes take the place of lawsuits in enforcing agreements. The benefit of the doubt is granted to the other party and the other party justifies the grant. Things work mainly as they should.
You can easily imagine how the opposite would look like. (Just look around you? Hehe).
Now those old enough can equate the collapse of our circles of trust and EDSA 1986. At that time the Filipinos who took to the streets for idealistic reasons believed that it was time to restore — or it was time to install — a mindset where the circle of trust was wide.
Where we could believe in our government and in each other and together work to achieve a better future, one that many foreigners would always say was something we could achieve if only we worked to deserve it. Because yes we needed to put in the hours as a better future would not be served us on a silver platter.
And so while a majority of Filipinos stood by while a million or so in some parts of Metro Manila took matters into our own hands (I was part of it) and determined the political future of the rest of the country, that majority eventually acquiesced, accepted the new reality and moved on.
Only to experience three decades where the basis for hope and the justifications for dreams turned sour. To discover that people in power changed in name only but the general tenor of governance remained the same: achieving the greatest good for the ruling class.
Because plunder continued to happen. Some very obviously, most very subtly. So much so that today we know of people in power who have become so obscenely rich because, well because they have been (and still are) in power.
Trust? I am not sure if the Filipino as a collective will ever trust again. Even if they vote regularly in elections.
