Why we often fail

Recently, a group of finance executives invited me to talk about our history from an anthropological perspective. Since I am an octogenarian with a mountain of hindsight, I thought I would be able to tell them about my observations with the caveat, of course, that hindsight is the lowest form of wisdom.

I said we often fail because we don’t think long and hard enough about what we do. This shallowness in our thinking may be traced to our past — we are not Buddhists or Hindus the way most Asians are. It is these two great religions with their philosophical traditions, their tenacious mooring in the past and ancestor worship which give them not just indelible memory but polished intellects.

Sure, Christianity itself has great philosophical traditions and more so if we connect them to Western thought, Judaism, the ancient Greeks and Romans; but such traditions are not taught in our schools in the manner that they are in Europe. Too, we are a very young country trying very hard to be modern but are seemingly lost and left behind by our neighbors.

Way back in the Sixties, I published a book of case studies on enterprises illustrating why they failed or succeeded. In the Fifties, for instance, an enterprising businessman told me he was setting up a dairy industry and that he would bottle milk and sell it like soft drinks.

With my peasant background, I told him it was not a good idea for the simple reason that Filipinos are not milk drinkers like the Americans or the Indians are, that Filipinos drink milk as they would medicine, that milk is only for babies. And besides, we did not have enough cattle to produce milk in volume for sale every day. Milk spoils easily unless it is refrigerated.

He did not listen to my objections. He spent millions importing cattle from India for crossbreeding with the native breed. He had a farm in Bulacan for the cows, and a bottling plant near Manila. Needless to say, the project failed; nonetheless, I admired him for his vision.

I was very much interested in agrarian reform. Magsaysay, who was then Defense Secretary, opened vast areas in Mindanao for resettlement. Many slum dwellers in Manila were sent to the resettlement areas. I thought it was all wrong because the settlers were not farmers. Sure enough, they sold their carabao, their rations and returned to Manila.

You visit South Forbes Park and you will note that the Park has no sidewalks because the area was planned at the top, and that meant that there were no pedestrians there since everyone had a car. Look at the buildings on Ayala Avenue — there are no air spaces between the buildings; the maximum use of space was the rule; avarice dictated that the buildings be built that way. And the Avenue is dead at night, just like Wall Street in New York, for this is what American cities have always been — the business district is purely for business, no people there.

If you drive around Manila you see buildings badly planned, maybe because the owners hired architects — relatives or friends — who did not know anything better.

And Manila’s major streets as they are now — the lighting on Roxas Boulevard, or in the major streets of Manila — how gaudy and tasteless they are, how extravagant and badly planned — and ditto with the lights on the bridges that span the Pasig. We see the waste and, therefore, the corruption.

Another reason for our economic woes is the often barnacled attitude of our businessmen. Most are seguristas without creative initiative, landlords who sit on their buttocks the whole year just waiting for the harvest, rent of their properties or profit from their stocks. They do not compete globally, they do not create — they promote consumerism instead. Go to the malls — how wonderful if some were factories! How much of the stuff in them, in our supermarkets is made here? Tanduay rum is better than those imported Caribbean rums — but I don’t see it in liquor shops in the United States, in Southeast Asia. Why aren’t there Filipino restaurants abroad the way Thai restaurants are everywhere? Tokyo, with so few Africans, has African restaurants. Thousands of Pinoys are in Tokyo — yet not one respectable Filipino restaurant there!

And our elite schools! They are part of the problem, not the solution.

The models for our elites to learn from are all around us: the modernization process as illustrated by Japan, economic development as shown by South Korea — colonized by Japan for decades, battered by the Korean war in 1951; though badgered by a recalcitrant North Korea, it has risen to be one of the top economies of the world. Sans the landmass of Brazil, Russia, India and China, South Korea is no bigger than Luzon.

And Singapore!

Exacerbated by this landlord syndrome, our elites do not have confidence in the ability of the Indio. Are they blind as well? There is Manny Pacquiao who rose from the dumps to be the athletic legend he is now. Manny competes internationally; can our businessmen do the same?

When many of our countrymen leave the stupor, lassitude and stifling culture of this benighted land, their true grit and genius are released.

In the last 400 years, we have had so many influences impact on us. The influence of the Chinese is such that it has become pervasive in our food, in our manners, and most of all, in our economy. From the Spaniards, the Americans, we have inherited so many virtues, but from the looks of it today, it seems we have inherited more of their vices.

This deserves another long discussion.

Before we start blaming colonialism again, let us dwell on this viral aspect of colonialism — the colonizer is not interested in developing a colony and making it into a nation because if it became one, independent and free, then it can no longer be exploited.

But to return to my stimulating encounter with the finance executives; after they finished grilling me, I said it was my turn to ask questions. I said I am tired of businessmen complaining about government. All over the world, there is an implicit understanding that government and business must work together. The military-industrial complex in the United States, the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Bank of Japan in tandem with the zaibatsus, the chaebols in South Korea allied with their government — why should our business people complain?

And that was when they started arguing among themselves. In the end, they came to the difficult but inevitable conclusion that it was also their collective fault that we have not progressed.

Always, when a new President begins his term, he makes all those grandiose promises. We have become cynical; we know it is just ritual cant without quite realizing that he is where we have placed him and that if he fails, our future is not in prayer, that we stop talking and merely consuming — we must now be genuinely creative and productive.

Listen to how the veteran New York Times correspondent Seth Mydans, describes us. I asked him in Bangkok last May to write about our volatile region whose magma convulsions he had witnessed for three decades. He said: “Filipinos have passion, ideals, creativity.”

To this I will add sadly: “But alas, not the iron will to change this archipelago of 95 million amoral, egocentric and tribal Filipinos into a nation!”

Sayang!

That, dear reader, is the reason why we often fail.