1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

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Ethics of Earnest Discourse

'Ukol sa Kasaysayan at Kadakilaan ng Pilipino

sa Galíng at Kalooban'

by Ed Aurelio C. Reyes

Lead Founder and Secretary-General, of both the Pamayanang SanibLakas ng Pilipinas and the Kapatirang DakiLahi para sa Pambansang Pagsasanib-Lakas.

This is excerpted from one of the two main articles in the pamphlet published in 2003 by the Kapatirang DakiLahi para sa Pambansang Pagsasanib-Lakas (DakiLahi) as the Pambansang Talastasan article. Titled Pambansang Talastasan and Pambansang Tangkilikan: Twin Imperatives for National Synergy-Building, Empowerment and Upliftment  (Makati, Philippines: SanibLakas, 2003), the pamphlet carries the second article, one on Pambansang Talastasan, by Tony Cruzada.

A. Introduction: Contexts and Urgent Need

1. Context: Past discourses have focused on the peoples of the Philippines, but from external viewpoints, accounting for a lack of consensus on the real nature of the Filipino and resulting in lack of unified direction for nation-building and development.  We are in fact moving in a slow-motion stampede heading towards complete national and social disintegration and destitution, with no effective leadership in sight to stop this trend; individual potential leaders have not come together to undertake the historic gargantuan task of addressing fragmentation the way they have been pursuing their respective advocacies in unrelated and even competitive ways.

The river of our people's sojourn has become shallow, murky and stagnant.

2. Urgent Need: Encouragement and empowerment of the "Silent Majority" to forge a strong consensus on the most basic of points: pride in Filipino heritage; confidence in Filipino creativity and tenacity to formulate and apply solutions; recognition of diversity among Filipinos as wealth for richer synergy, and not as a problem to be solved or suffered; love for the nation translating into genuine concern for the collective weal and woe, across the generations, including environment concerns.  

After all, whether we are conscious of this reality or not, the little streams streams and brooks of our persona and family lives we are all interconnected with the rivers and even the high seas of our national history, mission and destiny, and to that of the great Human Family.

B. A Comprehensive National Discourse Process

1. The Pambansang Talastasan national discourse process needs to be comprehensive in content coverage.  We need to delve deeply and comprehensively into our past history, including the debunking of factual errors and the popularization of hitherto marginalized/ignored/distorted facts, including but not limited to local histories with their respective internal periodizations (full respect for their internally-driven developments) and interlinkages; the spiritual, technological dimensions of the cultural histories of communities and the nation as collective creations-in-progress, local economic histories and present-day conditions (with interlinkages among local community economies), the role of state policies and the people's compliance or defiance (e.g., the "Lupang Tagalog" phenomenon, rendering artificial the hacienda system of Spanish rule over large areas), ethnic spirituality and indigenization of religion, with Hermano Pule and othe protest traditions.

2. The Pambansang Talastasan  national discourse process needs to be comprehensive in breadth of participation.  We need to draw in as active players and participants the broad majority of the Filipino nation, including those who have changed their political identification by altering their citizenship, and eagerly including those large sections of the population who have the tendency to keep away from substantial discourse for any and all of many possible reasons (lack of self-confidence to join what they might think is an impotent exercise of intellectuals, lack of interest/time to engage in what they might think to be inconsequential to their fate and livelihood; lack of knowledge of their community/clan/family/personal roots and histories that would be valuable contributions to the Talastasan process, etc. etc.)

3. The Pambansang Talastasan national discourse process needs to be comprehensive in forms and venues to be utilized, to match appropriately the great diversity of the subjects, the views (including feerlings!) and the voices that we need to involve and cover.

4. The Pambansang Talastasan  national discourse process has to be comprehensive in documentation and synthesis work, that would never really end.  Some of the facts considered minor and views expressed by the minority may not be given much attention immediately but should be recorded, anyway, for the possible eventuality as they get related with subsequently-discovered facts they may lead to further enrichment or rethinking of emerging consensus points.

Let the river system, with all its tributary streams and brooks, cover and permeate the entire mountain slope, the entire valley basin, the entire delta. This water holds our living unity.

C. Rootedness in History, Heritage and the Organic Wisdom

     of the Communities

1.  To know the destiny of a people, one has to open the book of its past (Rizal), one has to learn from history lest he repeat it (Santaayana) with all its errors and folly, and he who doesn't look back to where he came from will never reach his destination (old Tagalog proverb).  So we all need to have a keen interest in events, developments and events, developments, and frameworks of our past history not to memorize them but to draw lessons from them to apply these appropriately to present-day opinion leadership , problem-solving, policy-making and direction-setting (Kamalaysayan orientation), that would unite and synergize our people in really knowing ourselves and in discerning and performing our collective mission for human development and harmony (Lambat-Liwanag Network's empowering paradigm shift No. 4).

To know the water passing under one's own bridge, one mustfind out where that river has passed, and even where its water ultimately comes from.  Where does it spring forth clear and clean from the bosom of the earth?

2. The heritage of a community is its wealth; it breathes in the people's spirit, moves and nourishes their bodies, and prepares them for the future.  Historical events come and go, and what remain are treasures in the form of fond memories, of lessons, of wisdom that can be comprehended by all in the community, passed on by elders to succeeding generations much like valuable heirloom.  It holds much more than mere sentimental value, contrary to what many of the well-schooled but ignorant observers dismissively conclude.

Water moves under the bridge under the bridge but leaves images from its reflections, for those with clear eyes and minds to catch and ponder; lessons from the passage of the river build up one's profound wisdom.

D.  Special Players: Academe and Communicators, Indigenous Peoples, the Youth and the Elderly, unshackled Economists and the Broad Civil Society

1. The Academe has a major role to play in the national discourse process -- encouraging, coordinating, collating, popularizing, and even synthesizing all the primary and secondary research and documentation work that the discourse process entails.  But the Academe has much growing to do to be a positive contribution to this process.  It has to have an institutional "open mind," both in the sense of being open to ideas it has hitherto considered unacceptable, and also in the sense of being open enough not to be imprisoned in its purely-intellectual, purely-statistical and elitist patterns of thinking and behavior.  It must respect the organic wisdom of the unschooled, and reinvent the school, and reinvent the school as learning communities where teachers, no longer the ascribed source of knowledge and academic authority, would be learning facilitators and co-learners in the collective search and in the spread of the light of wisdom  (from Lambat-Liwanag Network's empowering paradigm shift No. 7).  The work of the Kamalaysayan in historical research needs the active participation of many organic intellectuals.

2. Communicators play a big role in discourse, sharing all the views among all the minds, emphasizing the points of unity and respect for all the points, affirming the positive in the Filipino and in the human as well as in the discourse process, and helping all other people become effective communicators themselves.  The promotion work of Galing Pilipino Movement deserves all the support it can get.

3. The Indigenous Peoples hold whatever is still left of our nation's wealth in living spirituality wisdom.  This upholds the fact, attested to since recently by Western scholars who have grown wise enough to seriously study and rightfully revere the indigenous knowledge systems of tribes around the world, while urban-based Filipinos have come to patronizingly condescend on our indigenous cultures, eager to supplant what has remained of their living heritage with what can be sold for cash.  And when the tribal elderly die, entire libraries of knowledge are destroyed forever, decaying as they do with the brains that held them.  Let us pay profound tribute to the creators of the Banaue Rice Terraces, the "8th Wonder of the World" that is superior to the originally-acclaimed seven because these terraces were created without slave-labor, and were community-controlled, community-operated, and sustainably productive for thousands of years.  Other indigenous peoples' cultures also deserve deeper study and appreciation.

4. The Youth has been called the "Hope of the Fatherland," but Rizal, to whom the description is ascribed, describes at the very ending of his El Filibusterismo which of all the young people he was referring to. The character Fr. Florentino was asking aloud where are those youths as he was describing and said the people were waiting for them. The youths are well known for their energy, spare time, and longer-term stakeholdership in the future.  What is not acknowledged is their sensitivity and organic wisdom that qualifies them to be full partners, not mere future successors, in leadership and discourse. 

This may stem reactively from observations that the youth of today are seemingly too shallow in thinking and sensibilities, to lackadaisal, too "childish" and flippant to be entrusted with participation on serious opinion-leadership and decision-making.  The youth are not intrinsically of this nature.  Their idealism may be fired to the extent of willingness to sacrifice comforts and even their very lives to help bring about a future much more sensible than what they can now foresee for their generations.  If the movements of decades ago had only involved the youth in more serious discourse in the 1970s, instead of making many of them mere shouters of slogans, repeaters of memorized clichés, and flag-waving warm bodies for demonstrations, much more of them would surely have matured by now or much earlier into really comprehensive and more socially- and culturally-rooted activists and advocates of real social change.  Let us make the youth of the land harbor a genuine respect for, and a keen interest in, the sensibilities of the Filipino, instead of allowing them to dismiss them as passé.

5. The elderly are the organic historians and keepers of heritage in every community.  Genuine respect for them would go well beyond kissing their hands and using the words "po" and "opo" when talking to them.  Respecting the elders is giving due recognition to their role as keepers of community wisdom that cannot be rendered obsolete by the most "amazing" of new technologies.  If only we would bother to listen, we could all learn  many valuable lessons from the experiences of the elderly.  Theirs is not a past value that we should only be grateful for; theirs is a present light, comparable to "many a gem of purest ray serene the dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear" or to "many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its fragrance in the desert air" (Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"), just because we have come to consider that their value to society is a past one.

6. We need economists whose hearts and minds have not been shackled to the training, motives and maneuvers of foreign economic and business interests.  Economists thus shackled have been manipulating economic indicator figures, making these irrelevant to the actual lives of the majority of the people and are prescribing economic solutions to problems they have only helped worsen over the years and decades or even caused in the first place. We need skilled economic analysts and strategists from among the organic intellectuals in the factories, fields. fishing waters and all the communities, whose economic thinking capabilities can grow from ground, up, along the praxis of associative local community empowerment and local economic development.  Both the econonomics of scale and the "small is beautiful" can be enjoyed together within Alvin Toffler's "Small-within-Big is Beautiful" paradigm.  The Sanib-Sikap Initiatives, NEPA, asssociated SMEs and real (synergetic) cooperatives havebig roles to play here.

7. The "Silent Majority" constitutes the bulk of the broad civil society.  More and more of them have to stand up, come forward and speak out to reclaim the name of the civil society and to actualize what democratic governance in the real sense is all about.  Organizations within the real society (which have been mistaken for "Civil Society" itself, for better or for worse), have the leadership responsibility to develop more and more assertive and empowered individuals in their respective spheres of influence, and make them all active players in the national discourse process, in the grandscale bayanihan process, in conserving the environment and in overall governance, for such governance to be validly called democratic.

E.  Ethics of Earnest Conversations for Human Development and Harmony

1.  Intellectual Honesty and Real Humility form part of the givens in all real discourse.  No one would be at real peace while fooling himself into accepting what one knows to be wrong or essentially inadequate (also wrong) information or analysis. The Pambansang Talastasan  process cannot afford to accommodate any intentional lies, distortions, tricks, or half-truths for any reason whatsoever; and will have to acknowledge what is at any point not yet really known or established. Therefore, humility in intellectual honesty is not the politeness of the hypocritical type, it is a genuine admission to self and public whatever measure of uncertainty actually exists. After all, "the more you know, the more you realize that you do not know."

Any information shared should be cited as to source and also labeled with its status of certainty, i.e., -- whether it is a proven certainty, a likelihood, a possibility, etc.   Because the Talastasan  needs reliable information, all who spread inaccurate data earlier claimed to be "certain" shall be made to lose their credibility; let not such dishonesty, or at least irresponsibility, be taken lightly, for such malpractices and misdeeds would tend to erode the credibility or even the validity of our discourse at least partially.  Because the Talastasan  needs the widest breadth of participation, it frowns upon immature impatience and elitist arrogance that would discourage many people from participating.  One who is secure about the validity of his own point can very well afford to speak his truth "quietly and clearly" and to refrain from condescending other persons' declarations or dismiss these points by arrogance.  Only those who cannot rely on the real merits of their own points are often tempted to resort to psychological, structural or other means to assert their point among those who remain unconvinced.  And while academic debates are useful for determining research and argumentation skills of the players, they do not convincingly resolve profound conflicts of ideas or solve real-life problems.

2. Collective Search for the Truth from Diverse Sources of Fact and Views.   The Pambansang Talastasan  is our nation's collective search for the Truth; if clashing is necessary, like in having two sets of irreconcilable data for the same question, event or circumstance, it should not mainly be a contest of persons or of groups of persons, but mainly a clash of  points of information and/or valuation.  Let us seek first to reconcile whatever can be reconciled, and then search together for truths that can resolve the clashes that are unavoidable.  In this grand team-up of diverse minds and motives to establish the common wealth of truth, real respect from one another's points of view is of crucial importance.  The collective search for the Truth cannot be pursued in earnest if we allow it to be derailed and eventually stopped by intellectual dishonesty which should be discredited as imprudent and anti-social behavior, by personalization and/or small-group partisanship over what should rightfully treated as conflicts of information and views, by the employment of psychological means (like intimidating arrogance, emotional blackmail and the like), or structural means (authoritarian, etc.) to force others into being "persuaded" and "convinced." We are not in a hurry to resolve issues instantly "by fair means or foul"; rather, we are determined to get the healthy process of broad-based discourse really going and gotten used to, and engaged in with enthusiasm

3. Directioning for Positive Affirmation and Change.  The entire Talastasan   process should be in the framework of a positive predisposition for change.  While we have to fully acknowledge after deep analysis some defective traits and patterns of behavior among our people, such acknowledgement should be towards changing for the better and attaining our upliftment.  They should never be used as an excuse for unproductive finger-pointing, defeatism, pessimism, and worse fragmentation.  The entire process should be leading to the strong affirmation and full actualization of the greatness of our lahi (from the archaic Tagalog word "la-í, our collective uniqueness).

F. Multiplicity of  Forms, Venues, and Centers of Initiative

1. Considering the profound complexity and breadth of all the topics and sub-topics to be covered, and the diversity of all the players to be involved, the Pambansang Talastasan  must creatively and appropriately use all forms and venues for the discourse, including conferences, workshops, fora, publications, lectures, broadcast media, solemn rituals (like the "Pagtitipon ng mga Anak ng Bayan" centered on the Kartilya ng Katipunan), tripping to historical and cultural "sanctuaries" (like the Pamitinan Cave in Montalban, Bahay Kwago and Bitukang Manok in Pasig, Banahaw, sites in the city of Manila, Banlat, etc.), and others.

2. We are calling upon all organizations and institutions whose nature gives them reason to join the Pambansang Talastasan  process to do so, to interlink efforts with one another, and to collate their findings and consensus (including minority views).  All formal and informal discussions on these matters (especially the 15 empowering paradigm shifts) may be considered organic components of the Pambansang Talastasan process for as long the ethics enumerated above are observed.  Let the Pambansang Talastasan  process be owned and pushed by all Filipinos, and also by the non-Filipino scholars on the Philippines and its peoples across the millennia.  From experience in actual participation, all the other centers of (personal, organizational and institutional) initiative may also contribute at any time to the efforts of the DakiLahi Movement to further enrich and refine this entire process, its components, and its output.