Honestly, I Don’t Want To Be Happy. I Want To Be Angry.
As 2020 comes to a close, the astronomical amount of changes to our world appears to me more and more exigent. The alienating consequences of this global coronavirus pandemic has deprived me of the rectitude of modernism. Social isolation seems to have stripped me of that humanizing, intimate relationship once shared between schoolmates; the exacerbated proliferation of fake news on various forms of media has deprived me of my belief in objective truth; the breakdown in major social systems has stolen from me the near-guaranteed promise of a comfortable life after graduation.
On the other hand, for the rest of the Philippines, 2020 is not only exigent — but providential. More than four years after President Rodrigo Duterte’s election into office, his administration’s promises continue to inaugurate that “change is coming” in order to mask sometimes miserably awkward and at other times criminally inarticulate policies such as the constant change in quarantine policy; foster a statolatry of the role of strongmen in “good” government such as by instituting a day for celebrating the Marcos presidency; and virtually enshrine social totalitarianism as a norm of government through pieces of legislation like the Anti-Terror Law that latently deprive us of our most cherished rights. The question of why the mass of Philippine society, even the youth through reactionary groups such as Kanan Kabataan and PragerUSTet, continues to support these lies has bewildered me on many occasions.
Pondering this on an individual level, I realize I exist, like many other youth, alone with my internal thoughts, amidst the most tumultuous era of our adolescent lifetimes, and of the country in recent years. The student-teacher relationship, upon which I once relied on for advice and guidance on matters both personal and societal — having degenerated into a mere parasocial relationship due to the online nature of classes — has left me, and frankly many others as well, and among many other factors that leave us so, without a north star.
To that end, it appears to me that in the absence of any meaningful community, a handful of astute Filipino students of this country, such as myself, have turned to carrying out political discussions online to explain the precarious situation we now find ourselves in. Some among this band continue to play the role of insouciant laggards by subscribing to the déclassé worldviews of moderatist ideologies that emphasize compassion, nationalism, and bayanihan as the only way to fight the alienation caused by the Duterte regime; but still, there are those willing to push the limits of the overton window and into mythic horizons by utilizing foreign ideas to illustrate a new and refulgent future for the Filipino people. These outstanding few pride themselves, rather than distraught themselves, with the death of objective morality, community, and certainty of the future.
As John Chrysostom wrote, “he who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins” — and in the hearts of these daring yet alienated, young, vanguard pioneers swells excitement, not gloom, for the situation of our country — the righteous excitement to anger in feeling themselves standing alone amidst the darkness of the times. It is this feeling that even I, today, find myself subscribed to; and it is of this ilk of postmodernist revolutionaries that I find myself a part of.
This energy I incline towards, and observe among my fellow youth, in contrast to the decadent state of our country and the nihilistic overtones of the controlled opposition that claims to fight it is not unfounded nor unprecedented. Western philosopher Machiavelli simply described this as virtù, or martial spirit; while Lev Gumilev, a relatively obscure Russian historian, made the case that this movement of peoples away from stagnation and into bursts of passion did not happen to societies at random — but was in fact a phenomenological pattern of history.
Gumilev, in particular, observed that history was not a morally-ascending progression of barbarism, and then reason. He observed that every few hundred years, migratory nomads would unite and sweep out of the steppes, plunder the flourishing kingdoms of Europe, the Middle East or Asia, and then vanish into history’s fog just as quickly as they had come — a cycle not necessarily to the betterment of the people living there, but as a sheer tendency of societies to band together for the common hatred of what the majority considered decadent. This, he called the passionarnost, or the passionarity: the tendency of a society not to move towards progress, but to endure suffering and destroy a common enemy.
As a HUMSS student, I am expected to give my constructive thoughts on resolving the critical issues that concern our country, yet I wake up every morning to the destructive cacophony of reactionaries: of people calling into question the legitimacy of former socio-political orders as a means of distancing themselves from the neoliberal failings of the past, claiming that the “Dilawans” have ruined the country; that terrorism and the drug trade have destroyed the social conditions of the Filipino people; and that these particular groups and movements should be destroyed in order to forge a just Philippine society. In each and every one of these worldviews, it would seem that the responsible ideologue’s hatred of a particular group is stronger than their actual constructive opinions; not necessarily moving towards the betterment of the country, but the destruction of its perceived enemies.
It is because of this observation, that just as Gumilev applied his theory in opposition to the idea that Russia could become a Western “civilized” country free of internecine strife; I have come to conclude that the instinctual desire of Filipinos to distinguish themselves from their political adversaries by partaking in these destructive tendencies, will ultimately take precedence over our desire to construct an inclusive and free thinking society regardless of how hard I or my companions in the HUMSS strand wish for a society of co-existence and rational discourse.
As deluded as this tendency of the Filipino people may sometimes be, political groups such as the “DDS” and Marcos historical revisionists ultimately represent the screams of pain of the alienated citizens of the Philippines — a pain which the intelligentsia, it seems to me, has never truly made much attempts to understand.
I know first-hand that there is no greater loneliness in the world than to be unheard. And there is no greater temptation for the unheard than to subscribe to any form of ideology endorsed by an entity greater than themselves, such as a government, regardless of its harmful nature, as a form of coping mechanism to replace the community they have been deprived of, or shunned from.
With all the indecision and uncertainty present in the lives of many Filipinos, a hateful anger seems to be the only constant. If this is the case, perhaps the intelligentsia should not mourn the human nature of the Filipino people, but harness it to fight for the common good. Or in the spirit of Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, I believe that even the cold and calculating works of the academe, like postmodern poetry, “must be a violent attack against the unknown forces, summoning them to lie down before man”.
In my 16 years of living on this planet, I have witnessed two major economic crises; a global pandemic; and a president who was personally and blatantly willing to compare the carnage of his drug war to the Holocaust. These are all consequential of the decadence that festers within the hollow corpse of the Philippine democracy. We know the names of the people who engage in corrupt activities — the evil that grips our society is not a faceless terror. No amount of books, essays, proposals, rallies, activist movies or theatre-shows, will extinguish this terror.
Community, objective truth, and certainty led us to this state of nonchalant decadence. Pursuing these virtues without quashing the hindrances to our achievement of them only weakens our resolve as a Filipino people to achieve triumph over our burgeoning adversaries.
I realize now that I no longer want to be happy, and even if I wanted to, I could never live with myself being so given the state of our society. By channeling the destructive tendency of people, rather than debating it or virtue-signalling towards being above those tendencies, I validate the suffering of our people. It is my ardent hope that many others do the same.
Let the blood of our people therefore boil into a righteous wave when they realize the injustices which the Duterte administration has assuaged against them. Let us fear not the end of history and the Filipino passionarity, rather, let us embrace it.
