IF THE core culture of our people assumes that we are all one, that all things are interconnected (The concept of kapwa), then our highest values will be connectedness, sharing, spirituality, pakikipagkapwa, kagandahang-loob and pakikiramdam. Realizing these values makes us highly skilled or “geniuses” in genuine connectivity, expressiveness, communicativeness, balancing opposites, flexibility, creativity and wellness.
We can draw upon the outstanding cultural strengths of our ethnicity to formulate a vision for the nation. Essentially, we can tap our kapwa-based genius for human connectivity and soulfulness as a people. We are perhaps the most highly relational in the world, with superb skills in healing and balancing polar energies, and passion for creative, participatory processes.
Clueless on Filipino Cultural Gifts
But many of our government officials and media practitioners are almost clueless about Filipino cultural gifts. We find our culture trivialized in such frivolous phrases as “its more fun in the Philippines” and anthropologically empty conjectures that our culture is a “mixture or hodgepodge of Malay, Chinese, Spanish and American influences.”
Philippine Ethnicity is a Unified, Coherent Whole
On the contrary, our shared cultural heritage is a set of philosophically and ideologically coherent set of premises and corresponding value-orientations, resulting in well-defined skills and patterns of behaviour that can make us truly proud of ourselves.
Indigenous Filipino Skills/Intelligence
Among these are our superior linguistic and communication skills, expressiveness, prowess in the performing arts, high degree of gender equality, psychic health, strong sense of humour, ability to rebound after trying times, nurturing qualities, interpersonal intelligence, social networking skills, excellence in service industries, strong family ties, passion for education, and creative versatility.
Filipinos Love to Connect, Especially to People
Among the most highly relational in the world, Filipinos are hardly alone. They are happy being together - when they eat, sleep, work, travel, pray, create or celebrate. They feel connected to the world, God and nature, but most of all to people. “Walang gustong maiwanan sa kodakan.”
Togetherness is Happiness
Filipinos hardly eat alone. Invite a person to your party, how many will come? Our hospital wards always have an extra bed because our sick relatives always have a bantay. We smile most of the time, often for no reason at all but just to connect to others. Eagerness for connections makes us number one in social networking in the world. For sometime now, we have been the texting, Facebook, and selfie capital of the world.
Loners More Prone to Heart Disease
Our core culture of human connectivity gives us an edge over other peoples in matters of health and well-being. Medical science has observed that people with lots of friends are usually the healthiest in the world. Lack of friends and close social ties are the hidden cause of heart disease. As social ties increase, mortality rates decrease. Married people, members of religious groups and the like often live longer. Social isolation breeds depression, which may lead to lower immunity to disease and even suicide.
Love = Survival
Also, creative, unselfish love enhances vitality, increases longevity. Thus, the lives of highly spiritual people are much longer than the average. Selfless love is absolutely necessary for the survival of newborn babies and for their healthy growth. For human immune systems function well only when basic emotional needs such as acceptance and love are met. Communities which preach love and where the members are united by a genuine feeling of kapatiran yield the lowest quota of delinquents, mentally sick persons and drug addicts.
Alienation from Our Sources of Cultural Energy: Thinking in Borrowed Forms and the Economics of Dependency
Up to the present time, our educational system remains colonial rather than culturally appropriate, causing a great loss of cultural energy. As a result, many of our schools do not produce people who are highly resourceful, creative and adaptable to a fast changing and extremely complex contemporary world. They encourage dependency, a job-seeking, employability mentality rather than originality of thought, entrepreneurial qualities and self-reliance on native skills, knowledge and strengths.
The Power of Indigenous Thought
Harnessing our own minds, understandings, definitions, categories and concepts is certainly to have confidence, power and control over our own lives. Economic power naturally follows from this. For instance, if we worship alien ideas of beauty—whose art works, music, fashion models and beauty products do we glorify and spend for? If we do not develop our indigenous pharmacology and healing modalities, how much do we spend for imported drugs and medicines?
Cultural Strengths that We Can Promote and Use as a Resource For Nation-Building and Sustainable Development
What are the specific cultural strengths that we can promote and use as a resource for nation-building and sustainable development? Being number one in expressiveness makes us excellent performing artists. Our genius in human connectivity gives us a great advantage in communication. We have superior facility for languages. We can be very adept in all forms of social media and ICT skills. Our curiosity about people is the basis of our wanderlust and passion for travel and mobility—the driver of tourism.
Filipinos, at their best, are a highly nurturing, caring, sharing people, with a strong maternal orientation, and definitely not loners. Because of our prowess in interpersonal communication and a nurturing, caring attitude, we excel in the service professions or industry
Devotion to the Home and Family
Filipino popular culture is the culture of devotion to the family and sanctity of the home, the family being our source of happiness because connectedness to one another is strongest within the family, especially in the mother-child connection. Perhaps the reason for the Philippines’ having the longest Christmas celebration in the world(from Sept to Jan) is the appropriation of the Mother Mary-Baby Jesus bond as mythical symbol of the sacred mother-child relationship in Filipino popular culture. In the same vein, we revere ancestors and the ancestral house has become a symbol of family continuity and stability.
Identifying Filipino Strengths
If Filipinos love to connect to people, then they will enjoy and excel in activities and making things that bring people together. The more an object, activity, or idea connects people to one another, the more Filipinos delight in it. Filipinos are very creative in things that bring people together, like furniture. Filipino furniture design is recognized internationally.
The Philippines is the World’s Most Emotional Country
According to an international study, “the heavily Catholic, Southeast Asian nation, a former colony of Spain and the U.S., scores well above second-ranked El Salvador, which is not even close.” Singapore is the least emotional country in the world.
“Singaporeans recognize they have a problem,” Bloomberg Businessweek writes of the country’s “emotional deficit,” citing a culture in which schools “discourage students from thinking of themselves as individuals.”
Countries Where People Feel the Most Loved
In another study to find out where the people feel most loved, the three countries with the very highest scores are, in this order, the Philippines (93 percent), Rwanda (92 percent) and Puerto Rico (90 percent). The region that appears to experience the most love is Latin America, followed by Southeast Asia and Western Europe.
Countries Where People Feel the Least Loved
Countries where the people feel the least loved, according to the study, are mostly former Soviet republics: Russia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the Caucuses region all consistently scored poorly. Interestingly, those countries also tend to have very high smoking rates. Other low-scoring countries included Burma/Myanmar, Yemen, and three African states: Ethiopia, Chad and Morocco.
Filipinos Like to Experience the Multidimensional Wholeness of Life
Filipinos do not like a partial, fragmented view of life. We respond to life synergistically, that is, a cooperative action of all the senses, faculties, or levels of being. That is why a Filipino is not happy just knowing another person’s name. He would also inquire about his work, hometown, relatives, marital status, even his salary!
We do not like to belong to only one side of a relationship because it is incomplete. Our kinship system is bilateral. For most parents, having two kids is enough as long as they are a boy and a girl. If not, the number of children may multiply indefinitely until the desired balance is attained.
In hosting shows, Filipinos traditionally pair a man and a woman rather than just have one or the other as in Western countries. The West is beginning to catch on but mixed gender hosting is still a novelty in the US.
Our desire for wholeness is very much reflected in gender equality in Filipino society, which is the highest in Asia-Pacific and one of the highest in the world. In the World Ranking of Women in Managerial Positions, we are always in the top ten.
Our holistic logic makes us psychologically healthy, relatively stress-free and not prone to depression and neurosis. We know how to balance the opposites of animus and anima, as strongly embodied in our myth of the first man and woman, Si Ka Lak and Si Ka Bay, emerging from a bamboo tube fully grown and absolutely equal, at least in principle.
Filipinos are Highly Participatory
Filipinos demand collective, equal participation in decision-making and self-determination. No one must have a monopoly of the decision-making process. In Filipino society, everybody is a participant or performer. Nobody likes to be a mere spectator. Thus, we prefer consensus as a mode of reaching decisions or settling conflicts. In this participatory culture, the norm is pantay-pantay, walang lamangan, pagbibigayan or sharing, interdependence, equitable distribution of resources. Violate this norm and pandemonium will ensue. Discipline in Philippine society is premised on fairness and justice. The privilege of one must be the privilege of all. Equal application of the law is a must.
Development as the Proliferation of Options
The deepest social aspirations of the Filipino are freedom, justice, and dignity. Monopoly, dictatorship and the curtailment of choices are anathema. Decision-making is participatory.
Arrogance is a No-no
The Filipino concept of kapwa (shared identity/goodness) and non-duality of life make people absolutely equal in principle and nobody has a right to regard himself as above or more important than others. Humility is highly-prized, at least outwardly. Even Manny Pacquiao is very modest about his skills. After his world title victory over Briton Rick Hatton, he said, “I’m just lucky… I hit first. A right hook.”
A Healing Culture: Life as a Celebration
* We are highly relational; social interconnectedness leads to longevity
* Expressiveness, especially through music and dance, releases harmful emotions
* Everyday creativity promotes well-being
* Touching as a way of life increases immunity to disease
* Deep belief in God makes Filipinos optimistic and provides meaning to life
* Strong sense of humor and joy of life enable us to rebound easily from any tragedy
Promoting the Local but Thinking National or Global: Human Communities, not the State, are the Ultimate Actors in the Development Process
We have to encourage celebration of the unique cultural identities of our cultural communities through various activities and expressive forms to provide for communication and sustainable development. Failure to do this may lead to violence, deviant behavior, depression, and suicide. Positive programs can encourage harmony and engagement in society. Underlying these programs is the attitude of tolerance and respect for cultural diversity. A nation’s development, then, can be viewed as proceeding along apparently divergent directions, one, towards a shared cultural universe at the national level and two, towards the greatest possible intra-cultural diversity at the local level.
Social Self-Images as Self-Fulfilling: The Need to Develop a Strong Shared Vision
It is the image a people create of themselves that is the psycho-cultural basis of their strengths and weaknesses, triumphs and failures. For a nation’s self-image tends to be self-fulfilling (Kenneth Boulding, The Image). If in our minds we think we will be defeated, we have already lost. If we think we are an inferior people, we will tend to lower our standards and be satisfied with good enough. Negative self-images, whether individual or collective, can cause untold social and cultural damage.
Social Self-Images as Self-Fulfilling: The Need to Develop a Strong Shared Vision
We have nothing to lose by creating and working for the most exalted and inspiring images of ourselves, especially because we are a highly relational, holistic, participatory and creative people with a strong nurturing and caring orientation.