THE political opposition is calling for people to speak out in defense of truth. An admirable call no doubt, for truth must always be defended. It sets us free.
Soon, however, one realizes that the call is to defend Maria Ressa’s truth, not the complainant’s nor the government’s. They are freely hurling Maria Ressa’s truths at the President; it can only mean they are asking us to defend that version of the truth.
Truth has not liberated us from our collective darkness and this nation is going nowhere because we are all defending our individual truths, our family’s truths, our institution’s truths. We are not speaking up against the indefensible truth that is keeping this country mired in physical and moral poverty.
What needs to be exposed, not defended, is the truth that the Philippines is at bottom a feudal society. Changing its name to Maharlika only compounds the convenient lie that it is a democracy, albeit a dysfunctional one. This country is run by heads of political dynasties who operate practically like medieval feudal lords.
The truth for these feudal lords is whatever helps them win positions of control. Hence they brush aside the inconvenient truth that they spend more than their net worth for election campaign ads. But they aggressively use their version of the truth about Maria Ressa’s arrest as a handy weapon against administration candidates who, to be sure, are also feudal lords in their own right.
Listen to feudal candidates criticize deplorable social conditions like that of Tondo. Yet, the truth is it’s really been a long-standing problem fellow feudal lords have done nothing about. They criticize lord rivals just so they can win their turn at steering a floundering ship from their luxurious upper-deck quarters while ordinary passengers are packed in dark and dank holds below.
The final proof that we are not a democracy is the absence of a true opposition. This comes when serfs, the masses, unite to push for structural change. But what happens is these are content to choose which feudal lord to support as their care-giving patron. Thus feudal lords are opposed only by other lords not by the people they take turns in marginalizing.
Schools are doing nothing to open students’ eyes to the evils of feudalism. Catholic bishops and clergy, the original feudal lords, also do nothing but take sides with feudal lords that leave them alone to enjoy their privileged social status.
Feudal lords want us to defend the convenient lie that we are a democracy that only needs tweaking to become fully functional. When will we face up to the ugly truth that we can never progress in step with our Asian neighbors unless we move away from our backwardness as a feudal society?