PART OF the tragedy of our times, especially in light of the pandemic, is that so much unthinking goes into the motion or action on governance. It’s no wonder there’s a lot of unanswered public questions, not to mention widespread confusion, if not fear.
There was a time, not too long ago, when the popular mantra in government boardrooms was ‘approved without thinking’. It was meant as a half-hearted joke. That part, of course, was risible; the other half, ridiculous.
Many heads in government these days seemed to have wrapped themselves up with this risky proposition like magnet sticks itself to even a rusty steel. The legislature, for instance, particularly the House of Representatives.
There’s a freshly passed bill in this (in)famous House that threatens to stand the Constitution on its head, particularly the Bill of Rights, the heart of the charter. The measure, approved by about 180 of its members, wants to do away with the presumption of innocence of persons believed to be involved in drugs.
How most of the House lawmakers have come to this very low regard for this Constitution can only be traced to what is known as herd thinking. There’s no more individual but herd. Maybe even a mob out there, and the American Nobel Prize author John Steinbeck warns against the social havoc that this beast can create. The irony is, according to Steinbeck, the mob can act reasonably — for the mob.
The bill comes along as the Supreme Court is tackling in aprotracted oral argument multiple opposition to the Anti-Terror Law, a brainchild (no pun there) of the Senate but adopted hook, line and sinker en toto – in other words, without thinking — by the House.
The law is widely assailed for its broad and bold attack onthe Bill of Rights, again. The consistency is both flagrant and fraught, the hallmark of the current dispensation. With a little more than a year before it becomes sad or bad history, it seems to be in a rush to shred the Constitution to smithereens.
In effect, there has been an insidious effort to amend the Charter by short-circuiting it through the legislative process. This is really a dangerous time for democracy in the Philippines. And many of our elected representatives who are there in the first place because of the Constitution do not seem to care a whit.
Centuries ago, John Stuart Mills had warned against this possibility. He said that in a representative system, politicians or leaders of low intelligence are likely to be voted into office where as Peter Drucker famously wrote centuries later some people rise to their level of incompetence. Their prescience is unbelievable.
Don’t ever forget the ABS-CBN franchise debacle. It’s either moro-moro or a zarzuela, but it showed that you cannot trust the words of many, if not most, members of this House that has, so far, lived up to its unmistakable reputation as a rubber stamp. If you look at the legislative mosaic, every piece fits perfectly with the rest of the dubious attempt to jettison democracy, A.S.A.P with time fast running out.
Part of the strategy appears to be to overwhelm the judiciary. As the High Court takes its sweet time to accommodate various sectors’ opposition to the Anti-Terror Law and try to placate somewhat the implacable chief executive, the legislature works like a law factory that cranks defective legislations whose aims are dubious, if not dangerous.
There’s a Machiavellian character to the trend, an antithesis to democracy. It’s the means more than the ends. Focus more on the results than on the motivation. The bottom line is more important than the headline, literally. After all, news fades away quickly, especially the true ones. Fake news stays forever on social media via trolls and the likes.
Thomas Edison once estimated that only 5 percent of the people think, 10 percent think they think, and 85 percent would rather die than think. Meanwhile, the Paretto Principle says 80 percent of an organization’s output comes from 20 percent of its members.
If you do math on the House output using both rules, arriving at the sum, product, difference or dividend doesn’t require the mind of a rocket scientist. The thing speaks for itself. Or as my lawyer-friend wrote on a piece of tissue paper, resipsaloquitor. Meant for the trash bin, eventually.
