“We can’t solve today’s problems with the mentality that created them.” -- Albert Einstein
In the same manner that we have to find a common thread to unite us as humans, we must also find a common thread to unite us as Filipinos so we can solve our nagging problem of mass poverty.
Centuries of colonization have failed to forge us into one nation. We remain Ilocanos, Tagalogs, Visayans, Indigenous peoples etc., with some tribes acting superior and looking down on others. More to the point, colonization erected social structures that systemically produced a few rich and powerful political, economic and religious superiors that decide on the fate of the poor and voiceless many.
A colonial mentality (subsumed in the medieval doctrine of the divine right of kings) accepts superiors as representatives of God whose decisions subordinates must accept as coming from Him. This mentality, that a religion of acceptance to God’s “will” continues to promote, has prevented us from protesting against unjust, hence inhuman and unchristian, social structures.
Yet, following Einstein’s logic, we cannot solve our problems today unless we discarded the colonial mentality that created them. We have to undergo a cultural revolution to acquire the new mentality needed to solve the problems created by the old mentality.
Cultural revolutions are usually waged in the two fronts of religion and education, the main elements of a nation’s culture. Unfortunately, neither in religion nor in education is there any attempt to open the minds and hearts of Filipinos to new and relevant ways of coping with the harsh realities of life in the country today.
This is to be expected as the rich and powerful few that have been favored by the current economic and political systems are in control of both religion and education and using them to shield those systems from any radical change.
Filipino-style Catholicism continues to be a religion of acceptance of God’s will. It teaches that Jesus’ death on the cross was unquestioning acceptance of the Father’s will. Catholicism’s privileged position in the current social structure keeps it from teaching that Jesus paid with death on the cross for his life of protest against hypocritical laws and practices of the Jewish state and religion. It rarely encourages its faithful to do anything more than pray for deliverance from a life of abject poverty.
Schools, for their part, generally educate (?) students for material success. Thus, we have “successful” businessmen and politicians who do not care to reform our inequitable economic and undemocratic political systems and, worse still, violate basic human rights to defend those structures by tagging all reformists as violent and godless communists.
Albert Einstein is right. To solve problems created by a colonial mentality Filipinos must grow a new mentality or culture. Culture, the problem, is also the solution.