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Chapter 8:
Deep Ecology and Harmony
HUMAN
BEINGS are in grander synergies as they build all sorts, scopes and sizes of
human groups and communities. We are all
in still much grander synergies as members of the ecosystem where we live, as
part of our collective planetary home, of continents, of landmasses and
islands, etc. etc. in a closely-knit crucially interdependent family of plants
and animals and rocks and earth and air and water and all dynamic combinations
of these.
1. Dependence and Destruction
The humans depend on all these for its emergence and
survival on this planet. It is however a
disappointment that the species styling itself with the word “sapiens” or even
the double-qualification “Sapiens-sapiens” is apparently not yet substantially,
much less fully, contributing its unique “sapiens” capabilities for exalting
or even just preserving the common planetary home.
The ongoing ecological destruction has been aptly described
as a mindless but egocentric (anthropocentric or homocentric, which is an
extension of being egocentric) aggrandizement and over-acquisition, which is
tantamount to a slow-motion suicide.
The underlying ignorance here is the misreading of the
supposed “human stewardship over nature” as to own and the
latter’s “corollary right” to control and abuse. And, against
all logic, to destroy. This has
been observed in the last quarter-century and is being addressed by a growing
number of persons, organizations and movements who have seen the light of interconnectivity
and foresight to work out the concept of “sustainable development” and, beyond
this utilitarian paradigm, gradually developed and promoted the paradigm of
deep ecology and harmony with nature, of loving life in all its incarnations.
During all this time that the overly-intellectualized human
had forgotten love and respect for Nature, the indigenous peoples, specifically
the dwindling survivors of destructive total aggression from their
fellow-humans, have been keeping to organic philosophies and lifestyles
reflecting such inner wisdom in honestly and humbly acknowledging the human as
just a part of the greater holon that is Nature. Sad to say, majority in so-called ‘sapiens’
communities allow or even abet the death of the indigenous communities and
their respective cultures that are the last repositories of such inner wisdom.
Their obliteration by the forces of greed glamorizing modernity, is a most
unfortunate development that should make us pity not the indigenous peoples
alone who are dying, but more so the entire human species whose very survival,
on the longer term, depends on the reemergence and mainstreaming of the
indigenous knowledge systems.
While saying “You are a child of the Universe; no less than
the trees and the stars you have a right to be here,” Desiderata
is also in effect saying the trees and the stars have that right in the first
place.
Aside from respect for respective rights as humans, trees
and stars, we have reason to appreciate the reality that we all are actually in
this together. Especially the humans, along with all our
animal cousins, and the trees, along with all their plant cousins. Full comprehension of the crucial tieup between our pulse and our breathing ought to include,
as well, a full comprehension of the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen cycles in the
teaming up of respective respiratory, circulatory and digestive systems of
plants and animals that make these two large groupings of organisms literally life
partners.
How can we not acknowledge the plants as our
life-partners? All the food that we get
to eat (the fruits and veggies as well as all the second-hand vegetables called
“meat”) comes from those plants, specifically the leaves where all that
solar-powered food production for the world takes place. And practically all
the oxygen comes from the underside stomata of these leaves. And yet we allow the massacre of trees in
logging and clear-cutting for various purposes. And we even trim leaves, and
even the branches from which they grow, just to shape bushes along the cubism
style of human aesthetics!
The book Biped on the Blue
Ball: The Supposed-Sapiens Who Laughed at the Dodo, which I wrote in
1990 and reedited and republished in 2000, calls humans “Bipeds,” calls Earth
the “Blue Ball,” and describes the human folly:
“The profit-greedy Bipeds can
never be expected to stop the mad destruction of the Earth or even just to stop
and think about it in earnest.
“And the rest of the Bipeds?
Well, they're trying to survive from day to day, so busy they cannot
afford to stop and think about their survival with the Blue Ball. Quite understandably they ignore the ominous
Wails of the Banshee, and the clarion calls raised for
all to help rescue the environment.
“Many of these Bipeds have
harbored a predisposition to defeatism.
And who can blame them? Do not
the powerful profit so much from the continuing, if not accelerating
destruction of the Browned-Blue Ball?
And are they not powerful enough to meet and crush any Quixotic endeavor to save the Blue Ball at the expense of
their profiteering? Rhetorical questions
these have become, indeed!
“The majority of the Bipeds have
barely coped with the crisis, magnifying, and being paralyzed by, a sense of
powerlessness. This sense of defeatism
has flowed into apathy, even fatalistic resignation.
“This sense of fatalism has somehow
combined with their propensity for small-group mentality, for
parochialism. They are now trying to
ignore the fact that we are all together in this perilous predicament, the fact
that the scourges to be unleashed by environmental destruction will not, and
indeed does not, see differences in race and color, citizenship and
nationality, creed and ideology, sex and age, and income bracket.
“They are indulging instead in
the faint and utterly unrealistic hope that the planet's destruction would not
affect specifically their own country, their own
state or locality, their own
grouping or clan or family, their
own bodies. Surely the Thinking Biped, the Two-Legged Genius of the
Blue Ball Earth, could be capable of more rationality than this!
2.
Rays of Hope
“Meanwhile, the honorable bunch
of environment-defending Bipeds have been a growing but still very tiny
minority. Shouting their throats hoarse,
their have been a lonely voice in the wilderness of passivity and inaction. And destruction.
“Their small Greenpeace rafts and boats have
succeeded in blocking the paths of poison-carrying or whaling ships of the
powerful.
“Their declarations of concern
and letters of protest have started to spread especially during "Earth
Day" and "World Environment Day" commemorations. In some instances, these have drawn support
from some powerful Bipeds, including those who are themselves guilty of
environmental destruction. In some other
instances, these get echoed in the august halls of legislation. But again, a chasm almost always yawns wide
between enactment and enforcement
of whatever environment laws result from their efforts. The fate of environmentalist laws and agreements have had to
hang in the balance of struggles between the powerful and the majority in each
country, and between the powerful countries and the rest of the world.
“These environmentalist groups
have needed more and more volunteer human-hours just to be able to keep track
of environmental battlefronts.
Apparently, most of the other Bipeds have been too busy even just to
listen in earnest. Much less do they
have the time to assume the pose suggested by Rodin
and decide to join in concrete action.
“And so, the Biped continues with
his lucrative enterprises and hectic labors, slowly but surely destroying the
Blue Ball, barely noticing, or, worse, noticing without recognizing, the present-day creeping effects of such
destruction -- a warmer, "Greenhoused"
global atmosphere that slowly melts some polar caps and raises inch by inch the
sea level, much longer and hotter summers, droughts that cause duels over
irrigation ducts and daily cursings before dry and
silent faucets, and electric power shortages.
Not to mention the fast-paced extinction of countless plants and
animals, the erratic schedules of the seasons, the storms and floods that would
remind us of Noah's
“The Biped continues to look at
the tree as a profitable commodity. And,
finding glamour in feigning concern, the officialdom agrees to impose selective
logging bans, where tree-cutting would henceforth be allowed only in areas
where there are some trees still left, and logging would be totally banned in
areas where there are no more trees. The
Dodo may be laughing aloud somewhere out there about this!
“And so, the Blue Ball turns
brownish as tropical areas are shaved by electric saws to become patched-up
deserts, as coastal cities are gradually reclaimed by the sea, and erosion
slides down to cover ocean floors with what used to be mountains most
majestic.
“We are not called upon to worry
about the Balance of Nature. There is
absolutely no necessity for worrying about this, for balanced she will always
be. It's just that the balance of Nature
at some near-future date might no longer include the Thinking Biped at all or
as we know him now.
“Changes
in the environment may just spare the species, but in a somewhat altered
form. The Biped, for example, may very
well fulfill the ‘Riddle of the Sphinx’ in a bizarre way well beyond the wisdom
of Oedipus Rex -- the smoothskinned Biped, well into
the dusk of his existence and evolution, may just possibly mutate into, and
survive as, a thick scaled Triped.
“Of course, even in such a shape,
his innate Narcissism can definitely maintain sel-esteem.41Well…!
“Nature has always been, and will
always be balanced in each of the other planets in the Solar System, where the
Biped of any of his distant cousins can never hope to exist. Nature will always
be balanced on Blue Ball Earth, with
or without me and you or any of our cousins.
“The super-resilient cockroach
may yet have the last laugh on the Biped who shall have completely poisoned
himself with the insecticides he had invented, which destroyed his life-support
systems, all for monetary gain.
“After the Thinking Biped shall
have perished, who shall put to use all the money he shall have adoringly
accumulated? The pesky pest, of
course! Legal tender bills and financial
certificates may all taste delicious to the ever-gnawing cockroach, until he
himself has to perish.
“Behold! The Blue Ball spins and travels around
Fireball Sol, against the vast expanse of black emptiness. The fate of the Thinking Biped,
and all of those close and distant cousins he has likewise so mindlessly
imperiled, still hangs in the balance, as a growing global movement strains to
overcome formidable difficulties and rescue the Earth for all of them.
“Will the Thinking Biped and all
his cousins on the Browned-Blue Ball be able to ‘live happily ever after’ for many more years?
“Baby Bipeds now "cooing and
gooing" in their cribs may indeed live and grow
up, but perhaps not exactly very happily.
“For the mind now staggers at how
much worse our environmental problems could have gone by the time they grow up
and try to live on, and make a living from, this very same Blue Ball Earth.
“These cute and helpless infants
are now silently but forcefully demanding from their parents a more confident
assurance on their future even
as we chase after the clock all day everyday for short-term survival.
“It won't be long before they
learn of the word ‘Why?’ and start using it in endless strings on us, their
Biped parents.
“ ‘Why don't we see around anymore any
of the trees shown here in these beautiful pictures? Why did they all die? Why did those people kill the poor
trees? Why were they allowed
to do it? Why…?’
" ‘Why do we always have 'seas' in the
streets? Why does all that water rush
down from the mountains? Why…?’
" ‘Why can't we drink water from the
faucet? Why do we all have to keep wearing these breathing masks all the time? Why…?
" ‘Why?
Why? Why?’ the Biped babies of
today will be asking us quite soon.
“And, no thanks to us, chances
are they won’t be able to "live happily ever after."
“A nightmare… this is nothing
short of a nightmare just waiting to unfold before our eyes that are widely
awake because we have not been able to escape the haunting ghost of Malthus…”
Upon the suggestion of a beloved
friend, Prof. Anna Ma. S. Torres of
“Of course it doesn't really
have to happen just this way. No, not at
all…! The nightmare can be turned into a
dream of paradise regained. That is, if enough Thinking Bipeds the world over
validated the word sapiens on
the name of the species…
“For starters, nations of the
world must come together as one to stand before the rest of the bio-diverse
citizens and elements of our living planet Gaia, and take full responsibility
for past and present environmental destruction.
The critical mass is building up for this, especially with such efforts
as the Earth Charter process and a successful series of worldwide Earth Day and
World Environment Day commemorations (around the world).
“Yes, the Thinking Biped should
be saying sorry not only to his yet unborn babies, but to all his close and
distant cousins and their babies. He should fully grasp in theory, policy and
actual behavior the drive for Sustainable Development -- which means ‘meeting
the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet theirs.’ -- and rise even beyond such
framework. As a fully thinking, and
actually spiritual being, the Biped is fully capable of Deep Ecology. It is only the matter of having too many
blinders now that prevents him from pursuing even just the framework of
Sustainable Development.
“Deep Ecology goes beyond
Sustainable Development. It is about respecting and preserving all life forms,
loving all incarnations of all life forms, wherever they are and whatever they
look, not only because we need them but more so because we are awed and
overjoyed to be part of this great Symphony of Life itself.
“A person steeped in the
philosophy of Deep Ecology would be concerned with the sufferings of the sea
birds now awash in oil slicks from spills, or with the elephants being
slaughtered for tusks they would leave behind, anyway, when they die, or with
whales being beached in big numbers, as much as they would be appreciative of
the plants and animals right around them, as much as they'd smile at
butterflies -- and at future
butterflies -- and lovingly fondle each baby leaf within reach
of their fingertips.
“Not many people have reached
this level of consciousness, although the number is growing. The Biped is gradually discovering an
internal synergy of mind and heart
“On this basis, enough Thinking
Bipeds can lovingly commit a conscious synergy of efforts to rescue and heal,
con serve and exalt, our Mother Earth.
Now, that would be a giant leap for Humankind right back to the bosom of
our home planet, undoubtedly a euphoric historic event that would herald a new
way of life for all Earthians. It will be no less
than a paradise regained where all on Blue Ball Earth can benefit from
holistic progress in philosophy and science.”
3. Synergize the Local Movements!
“Think Global, Act Local!” This slogan was widely-welcomed when it gained currency among environmental movements in various
countries in the last two decades. But the “think global” part can stand
clarification. The “thinking global” must be done by local communities and by
synergies of local communities. If nation-states and inter-governmental
mechanisms genuinely represent the views and policy positions of such synergies
of communities, then national-level policies and programs, and the resolutions
of inter-governmental mechanisms such as world summits can legitimately answer
for the “think global” part. The problem
is that they rarely ever do.
Even non-government organizations usually seek to get their
act together on the “national” level, with all their feet firmly planted on the
clouds, and send out or, worse, “send down” their analyses, resolutions,
guidelines and directives for the local communities to comment on, validate,
and obey. Especially those NGOs that design their prioritizations and programs
according to the likelihood of getting funds from international and national
funding entities, and implement approved programs according to the timetables
set by such funders, the local communities are rarely
taken into full account, if at all, as the ultimate source of mandates and
originators of initiatives that the national government and the “national-level”
clusters of NGOs should heed and act upon.
The top-down approach to environmental advocacy and
activism runs parallel to the top-down approach of Globalized
Greed being rammed through by international business elite circles that
acknowledge accountability only to their stockholders and ignore or even crush
whatever accountability nation-state governments acknowledge having to their
respective citizenries. These two top-down approaches were horribly
demonstrated in the World Trade Organization’s obviously-strong suasion over
the proceedings of the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development, which,
by and large, backtracked on the pro-environmentalist resolutions of the Rio
Summit a whole decade before.
What can happen now is that both the government and the
non-government entities in the various countries would be pressured to take
their respective signals from the same WSSD documents, with the governments
tending to invoke these in washing their hands over continuing destruction, and
the non-government entities would seek to maximize on whatever victories were
gained. Directives from the two sets of entities would soon be expected to rain
on the heads of the same set of local communities and the latter will be placed
in a reactive position and be flooded with an avalanche of guidelines and
educational materials “from above.”
The communities, therefore, should acquire the full capability
for proactive thinking and acting local and synergizing with all other communities
to globalize both the thinking and the acting. National-level NGOs and clusters
of these would do well to facilitate this synergy in information-sharing,
resources-sharing, capability-building in decision-making, and other forms of
support for the community-based movements.
I have had the occasion to write an editorial for the
journal (of May 2002, p. 3) of a monthly environmental forum called “Kamayan para sa
Kalikasan,” and the article says this in part:
“ ‘Think
global, act local!’ is a good 1990s call
for remembering and pondering today. Think and talk global is what the heads
of state will surely do a lot of during the (WSSD in August that year). They
have many questions to address: what has been accomplished in the full decade
after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED, also known as “Rio Summit”)?
After the UNCED hammered out Agenda 21, has this been
translated into country-specific programs and policies? What has been the
impact of this on the environment, if any?
“In our case, a joint government-NGO council immediately
came out with Philippine Agenda 21, had this blessed with the
power of policy from the national government, and made to undergo a process of
particularization in the regional and provincial contexts, before it apparently
lost whatever momentum it had at the start.
What about impact on the environment here? Did it have any?
“Of course, it must have had some impact. But as we would
always like to remind reporters on the “environment beat,” the Philippine
environment is not in the office of the Secretary of Environment and Natural
Resources or in any building of his entire department, and neither is it in
the national and regional offices of all environmentalist non-government organizations
(NGOs) combined. Much less is it in filing cabinets where copies of PA21
and minutes of discussion meetings on it are being kept. The environment is in
the very lives of the people in neighborhoods and villages and in clusters of
these. Apparently, all talk of PA21 stopped short of reaching
these “low” levels of living reality.
“Still, there was concrete action in the communities
where the local people themselves decided to protect their lives against
environmentally-destructive ‘development’ projects, and then managed to draw
in support from city-based advocacy groups. There are actually organic
environmentalists in the communities, and many of them can be interlinked in
coordinative bodies that they can fully claim to be their own.”
There are, indeed, many organic environmentalists, organic
leaders, organic intellectuals in the local communities, and these are much
closer to the natural environment than desk-bound city-based government and
non-government functionaries can ever hope or pretend to be.
These people, being “organic,” are in the best position to
take direct lessons and inspiration from living ecosystems all around them, the
synergy of symbiosis, where the trees have the broad point of view while their roots
are deeply and firmly planted on the ground, and no one has to take the word of
the pigeons, hawks or vultures as the complete Gospel truth on anything.
The challenge to all environmental advocates and activists
is to break free from the human-needs-centered utilitarian sustainable
development paradigm for environmentalism and the politics-based hierarchies or
funds-driven programs in thinking and acting.
Instead, adopt and live from day to day the supreme love
for, and the faithful emulation of, the magical dynamics of Life itself. We cannot fully serve the natural
environment, the great Nature Holon that humans
belong to, while ignoring the full glory of its Innate Wisdom.
J J J
Chapter 9:
Stable Tripod for Sustainable Development:
C-N-E Resources
WHILE the
human-centered sustainable development framework can never suffice to fulfill
the highest human quality and aspiration in dealing with Nature, it is an
obvious minimum when it comes to economic management. It should be a real
concern for all players in an economic ecosystem of whatever scale that the
economy in that scale is managed prudently and effectively for sustainable
development. There is a need for an
overhaul of economic theories that have taken care of the people’s needs only
in theory, using macro-figures and hi-fallutin’
terms designed to be well beyond the victims’ ken.
1. A Bold Indictment from a Non-Economist
Considering the dismal conditions of the majority of the
people in the world, where 80 percent of the world’s resources for consumption
go to only 20 percent of the world’s population and 20 percent of the resources
have to be shared by 80 percent of the population, I dare accuse here and now
the mainstream economic theorists and policy-makers behind these realities of
being an irresponsible and incompetent lot. Some are more irresponsible than
incompetent and others are more incompetent than irresponsible. This will likely be viewed as a rather heavy
charge for a non-economist to make. So, I clarify what I mean exactly: I
dare accuse here and now the mainstream economic theorists and policy-makers
behind these realities of being an irresponsible and incompetent lot. If you think that my clarification is a
mere repetition of my original charge, you must have failed to notice that the
entire repetition is italicized. Need I clarify some more? I dare accuse…
About my being a non-economist, I admit it so proudly and
thankfully, because if I were one, I would have become more vulnerable to the
temptation to apply economic theories that take care of the people’s needs only
in theory, and drop a lot of incomprehensible terms, so that everybody will be
assured that I know of those theories and those hi-fallutin’
terms. If I were an economist I would be tempted to use various macro-figures
to tell the hungry and the destitute that contrary to what they actually experience
there is enough statistical evidence to prove that they are not at all hungry
and not at all destitute. If I were an economist, I would be tempted to behave
like all those adults heaping lavish praise on the invisible robe of the naked
emperor, instead of being more like the innocently-honest child in that story.
Fortunately for the interest of truth, the child had not yet reached the “age
of reason” and could therefore speak out with much sense before being promptly
silenced.
I am confident of the validity of my accusation.
Acknowledged experts in various areas of human concern, including those who
deal with major factors that are well beyond human control, exude more
determination and optimism that obstacles can be hurdled to improve the state
of affairs in their respective fields of real expertise. In contrast, mainstream economists have
upheld fatalism, akin to saying “economic imbalance in the world has been fated
upon man by all the gods of Olympus and we can’t do anything about it but
analyze and cope, and pray for economic miracles” Either all the more intelligent
humans have flocked to all the other fields except economics or the reason why
these economists are the mainstream economists is because they please and keep
in power the powerful economic elite of the world with their pronouncements
that confuse and paralyze the people.
(Of course there are economists who are of more earnest and
more competent minds, but they are obviously kept marginalized by the powerful
elite, lest they redress the gross imbalances and disturb the elite’s lucrative
business systems. In the
When one claims, categorically or indirectly, to be an
economist for a national or local community, one claims to be competently
serving such community. If actual performance shows that these people are
actually advisers or apologists or both, for a narrow
exploiting elite, there is a lie being perpetrated. It’s time the people, the
stakeholders, expressed the truth of their economic conditions, studied basic
economic principles without the hi-fallutin’
trimmings, and claimed ultimate command over policy-making that affects their
lives. In such efforts the people can be helped to a very large extent by the
economists who are really on their side.
2. Separativeness is Ignorance
Ultimately it all boils down to ignorance, because
those who abet the grossly unfair and unsound economic policies, whether by
active hi-fallutin’ encouragement or by defeatist
sufferance, are not enlightened enough by truth and wisdom that in harming
their publics they harm and even devalue themselves. For we
are all one. Moreover, all human potentials for better behavior and
performance mandate their full actualization and utilization for the benefit of
the whole of humanity. So we just have to ask “Father, forgive them for they
know not what they do, but please don’t expect us to respect them even just a
bit for their dismal performance.”
It is also the problem of ignorance behind the behavior of
many external investors in forcing or stealing their way into national or local
community economics. The problem with these very powerful players is that many
of them do not act earnestly as stakeholders in these economies. After
extracting all the resources they can while playing their active roles, they
abandon these same economies after their intervention in them start showing
signs of destructive effects. After exacting cooperation from local
stakeholders on the basis of glorious promises of progress, they eventually
leave these stakeholders deep in debt and with no natural resources left to
live on.
The handling of the debt is such that the debtor nations or
communities are forced to agree to implement counterproductive “recovery”
programs that leave them in increasingly worse conditions, in what former
International Monetary Fund director Robert MacNamara
has called the “Debt Trap.”
All these schemes may, at best, pay lip service to the
concept of sustainable development, while in truth ensuring that there is only
sustainable stagnation if not sustained impoverishment. As a result, entire communities are being
forced to “sacrifice for development” that serve only the business interests of
these powerful elites. Moreover, they cause the opposite of development to be
called “sustainable development” and for oppositors
to such schemes as anti-development.
Real sustainable development in a community requires the
effective management of the balanced interplay among three types of that
community’s real resources. Why I
qualify these resources as real? Because many mainstream economies, molded in
the old-school belief that economics is an exact science that takes
consideration only of precisely measurable quantities, and would largely ignore
natural resources in the real sense, and would totally disregard cultural
factors. It is this pattern of thinking that accounts to a large extent for all
the real destruction brought by “development aggression” to bear upon people’s
communities the world over.
To ignore the holistic interrelationships among all these
real resources is ignorance. Humans,
especially mainstream economists, still have a long way to go in learning well
that all things are interrelating parts of a whole and in learning well about
honest humility in the pursuit of the truth that will set us free. (It may be argued that these “motherhood
statements” are useless in effective economic decision making, as it can also
be argued that all the glowing statistical figures and hi-fallutin’
terms being bandied about have not redressed – and have in fact served – the immoral perpetration of gross economic
imbalance throughout the world.)
3. Three Types of Real Resources
To be real, development has to benefit the lives of the
people at all scopes of the human communities. One cannot speak of real
national development if the component communities of the national communities
are not benefited by it. The glowing or “not-that-bad” figures cannot paint a
rosy the picture of the national economy unless the people at levels of the
community holarchy (neighborhood, village,
municipality, district, and provincial) cannot see and feel a rosy local
translation of the rosy national picture. The glaring disparities between the
charts and figures presented as the “national economy” and the actual lives of
the people are sure indicators of simulations of progress based on artificial
paper transactions undertaken to uplift confidence and save face.
To be real, Sustainable Development requires prudent
management with proper foresight to provide adequately for the needs of present
generation without compromising the needs of future ones
Sustainable Development has to take a full accounting of a
community’s real resources, and conserve them for posterity, while using their
full regenerative potentials. This depends on effectively managing the balance
of three types of resources, so they all contribute to development and they are
effectively conserved according to the real pace of their regeneration.
The three types of community resources that have to be
maintained as a stable tripod are: (1) Economic Resources – all properties and
possessions that come from the exchange system for goods and services; (2)
Natural Resources – all resources freely available to the community and to any
member of the community directly from Nature; and (3) Cultural Resources – all
assets and possessions making up the community’s social capital, like common
heritage, shared sense of weal and woe into the future, mutual trust,
traditions like “bayanihan,” and the like.
For his doctoral dissertation, Dr. Ernesto R. Gonzales, who
heads the
The inflection point identified in the study conducted by
Gonzales (2002) was the fast-pace and massive influx of industrialization into
the once idyllic but reasonably progressive town, which influx has since
focused very narrowly only on the economic resources and allowed the other two
types – natural and cultural resources – to be drastically destroyed.
Therefore, from being a comfortably dense population in
what was then a much larger territory, with a productive economy, a river
system teeming with life, and a throbbing sense of community and ethical
values, Pateros has become a shrunken and overcrowded
town with a commerce-dependent economy, surrounded by dead rivers and radio
transmission antennae.
If this continues, Pateros would
not be able to afford much longer even just a semblance of economic progress
from the overfocusing on economic resources and
allowing natural and cultural resources to be thrown out the window. All three
legs of this cultural-natural-economic tripod should be balanced, stable and
productively interplaying. In all the community constituencies of local and
national economics, these three types of capital ought to be handled well in a
synergy-oriented strategy.
4. Reviewing the Meaning of ‘Development’
Dr. Sixto K. Roxas
gives 68 numbered paragraphs in his monograph on Sustainable Development
and the National Interest: Intra-Country Regions and a Four-Quadrant
Eight-Level View of Local Integration (May 18, 2002), the first ten items
of which seek to clarify the meaning of the word “development”:
“ ‘Development’ is the most used and least understood word in contemporary
discourse. Economists use it to describe what is really mere
growth. Psychologists refer to the evolution of the individual’s
cognitive functions, his self and his personality. Anthropologists apply it to
the evolution of culture, sociologists and political scientists to the
formation of social patterns and political and governance systems.
“ ‘Development’ in fact does involve all those processes. Its meaning that
becomes dominant in a country depends on the power position of the
practitioners from different specializations. The dominance of the business and
economics in the Philippine political scene has meant that in this country the
term will mean primarily growth – in production, in sales, in incomes, in
domestic and foreign trade, in investments.
“But growth in particular rates, patterns, and quality is
merely the external result of a whole complex of other forces external and
internal, individual and collective, psychological, ideological,
organizational, of worldviews held and values maintained that determine
behavior in the homes, farms, factories, offices, market places of the country.
“Communities, political units, organizations are made up of
individuals that constitute their leaders, managers and constituents. Each of
these individuals has gone through a process of personal development and is at
a particular stage in that process, physical,
biological, psychological, mental, spiritual – acquiring beliefs, ideologies,
worldviews, values, behavior patterns and habits as a result of nature and
particularities of his nurture. Combined into families, clans, tribes,
communities, organizations of various forms and purposes, they endow the
collectivities they form with particular cultures that exhibit specific
patterns of organization, operation and performance. As the individuals change
and develop over time and in specific geographical environments, so the collective
groups manifest behavior and performance patterns – of which economic variables
are an important but not the sole aspect.
“Scientific economics has developed its rigorous models by
drastic and heroic abstractions from these complex processes to “explain” the
behavior of key economic variables and succeeded in crafting elegant
theoretical structures that presume to depict reality adequately for purposes
of management of entire systems and individual units constituting them.
“Such models over time became not merely analytical models
to understand systematically the way real economies work and predict their
performance but blueprints for reorganizing real communities and organizations
and forcing them into the theoretical molds. Where this transformation
succeeded, the analytical models seemed to work satisfactorily for purposes of
practical management.
“But in countries that were of earlier stages of
development, all manner of pathological dislocations have become evident. The
Does Dr. Roxas, the first
Filipino president of the Asian Institute of Management (AIM), simply dismiss
the mainstream economists of the
“The country has not lacked professionally-trained
economists and other social scientists, organization and management experts
rigorously trained in world-class business schools. But the repeated failures of diagnosis and
prescriptions seem to demonstrate the inadequacy of the economic, social
science and managerial paradigms either to explain to explain our condition or
prescribe an effective strategy and protocol of action.
“The difficulty in the analysis seems to lie in the
materiality and importance of the factors that the abstractions of economic science
leave out of the equations: specifically, the ideological, sociological,
political and spiritual elements that are cavalierly lumped together and
labeled ‘non-economic’ variables. The ‘devil’ is in those details.
“We need a more rigorous framework, however, for subsuming
all the psychological, ideological, sociological, political and spiritual
elements that go into behavior and performance. One such framework combines the
‘organizing generalization” (i.e., viewing all realities as holons)
devised by Ken Wilber for understanding the whole process of human evolution
and development, and the work of Don Edward Beck using a
bio-psycho-socio-logical schema originally put forward by the late Professor
Clare Graves, the ‘spiral dynamics.’ ”
SKR’s explanation of Wilber’s holon-centered
system appears near the end of Part One of this book. Beck’s “spiral dynamics” is something I still
have to comprehend.
5.
Building-Block Synergies in Associative Economics
Associative Economics—the framework where global and
national economies are cultivated in synergies of local economies in a
ground-up (not “trickle-down”) sort of building and operating systems. The “trickle-down” way of Globalized
Greed control national economic policies and programs “from above,” and bring
the policies and programs “down” to the level of the local constituencies and
instrumentalities.
This pattern renders all pretenses for democratic
governance as pure hypocrisy. “Economies
of scale” which is almost always invoked by apologists for the arrangement,
carry the presumption that the magnified volume is a synergy of the smaller
component parts, in which case the governing entity involved would be
accountable to this synergy of constituencies.
Invoking the principle of economies of scale where there exists no
synergy of small economies is at best intellectual dishonesty, if not outright
stealing.
Accountability across all the existing levels of the holarchy of community should be real in any democracy;
faking it, especially in the service of external intervenors,
is an exploitative maneuver that should not be countenanced in the conscience
of every stakeholder, servant or leader.
Associative economics best illustrates the paradigm spelled out by
Alvin Toffler (The Third Wave), which asserts that
Small-Within-Big is Beautiful.” Toffler is countering the logic of “economies
of scale” where the full merger of entities results in monolithic arrangements
where the avowed leaders are able to conveniently forget about their
accountability to entire communities. At
the same time, Toffler also criticizes Schumacker’s
“Small-is-Beautiful” framework.
The “Small-Within-Big Is Beautiful” framework abets the
proliferation of many enterprises and entities that are small enough to afford
a working intimacy between the leaders and the led; thus maintaining the
members’ and stakeholders’ close supervision of the policies and operations of
these entities. At the same time, because the “Small” is “Within
Big,” this proliferation of team-ups and linkages is synergized by the
mutually-beneficial networking involved. The operations of primary coops within
federations, and of independent business owners (IBOs)
within Jim Dornan’s Network Twenty-One, are
examples of this.
Engr. Faustino G. Mendoza, Jr., who heads the National Economic
Protectionism Association (NEPA) and is presiding over the revitalization and
expansion program of this 69-year-old organization, expresses his faith in
associative economics. In an article prepared for the Lambat-Liwanag Conference on
Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development, held at the
Associative economics is not a new concept. It is as
old as socio-economic democracy. It antedates the cooperatives, the type of
organization that breathes synergism. What is new is the degree of urgency for
unconnected enterprises and community economies to interphase
and link up, in the face of the fast-growing scourge of Globalized
Greed. The most effective way to thwart
the designs of a monolithic tyrant is to build a synergy among component parts
and respect fully its synergized will.
A non-industrialized country like the
Since the entire population is a stakeholder in such
process as a real industrialization of the country and not just located within
the country’s territorial boundaries, any such “patriotic elite” should stop
being elitist and work to draw in the substantial participation of a large
section of the population, of the people themselves, whose small amounts can be
synergized in closely interlinked capital build-up and closely interlinked
transactions that gradually mechanize production processes and start producing
small but numerous kinds of machines and machine parts.
The masses should not be relegated to the unproductive role
of rooting in rallies for a national industrialization led by and dependent on
any such “industrializing-elite”; the people have to pool their resources and
build up their own industrialization-oriented enterprises, especially agri-based ones, starting realistically at the grassroots
and attaining economies of scale by an orchestrated widescale
enterprise-interphasing. The strong cooperatives
across the archipelago have shown signs of readiness to play a vital role in
what would likely be a long ground-up process.
For this to commence as reality and march
on to triumph, there should be real rural reconstruction and
industrialization. In his book, Towards
a New Economic Order and The Conquest of Mass Poverty
(third printing, 1986, p. 101), nationalist economist and writer Alejandro Lichauco gives us three conditions for rural development.
Writes he (emphasis his):
“The reconstruction of our rural areas should be based on
three elements. There are (1) land justice, under which land shall be owned by
the tiller; (2) industrialization, under which the rural economy shall cease to
be based simply in land but shall, in addition, incorporate the machine
process, so that productivity becomes a function of both land and
manufacturing industries, small, medium and large-scale; and (3) economic
democratization, under which opportunities for livelihood are opened to the
powerless and not restricted to a limited few who are endowed with capital
and have monopolistic access to economic
resources.
“The key to the implementation of the third element lies in
the development of cooperatives as a democratoppic
mode of ownership. A real program of agrarian reform must include reserving to
cooperatives specific categories of economic activities. Only by such monopolies can the powerless in
the rural areas be effectively induced to mobilize collectively and be ensured
that their livelihood ventures are effectively protected by a monopoly status.
“There is nothing wrong in giving the poor economic
monopolies that would ensure them of livelihood.
“This is an instance where monopolies are indispensable to
economic democratization. The poor must be given monopolies provided they
organize themselves into democratic cooperatives.”
Lichauco, who spoke at the same Lambat-Liwanag
conference with
But with preference for quick solutions, people who wait
for such an earnestly “industrializing elite” to have enough resources to push
for the industrialization of the country may have to be ready to wait
forever. Led by
Already, a spokesperson for cooperatives-driven progress
for the
“(T)he
National Credit Cooperative can go into partnership arrangements with
deserving ventures of primaries needing bigger investments. In this way will
the poor get a chance to lift themselves out of poverty.
“If enough grassroots
cooperatives all over the country can be imbued with the genuine essence of cooperativism, of self-reliant joint enterprise of members
who are highly motivated and rewarded for disciplined productive effort, and
are assisted by their own mechanisms for interlinkaging,
namely the secondary cooperatives, and financial institutions that they themselves
own and govern, there is no reason for their members to go hungry, there is no
reason for their communities to go hungry, and there is no reason for this
nation to go hungry.
“Can Philippine cooperatives make
that quantum leap for self-overhaul and empowerment? Can Philippine
cooperatives start a good system and maintain it beyond the usual life expectancy
of ningas cogon?
Of course! The people of Tubao, La
“The most important thing is the
resolute decision to do it. To save the poor from poverty, to save the hungry
from further hunger, to save the children from a future of dark uncertainty,
worsened poverty and destitution. To save our national economy from its
worsening addiction to the illusory gains from dependence on foreign
investments, there must be a resolute decision to find solutions everywhere
else, like in grassroots developments that can be mainstreamed nationwide,
like our success in Tubao.
“Can the Philippine cooperatives
make that quantum leap? I’m proud to
inform all of you that a fast-growing number of cooperatives in this country
have already started out on that process.
Can the Philippine economy be made to quantum-leap away from the
Manila-centered and foreign-currency-dependent programs and policies that have
only proven to be counterproductive over the past decades, having been a major
part of the cause of the problems these are supposed to be solving in the first
place?
“Many people, especially the
economists in the national government and the policy-makers in higher echelons
of our society, may continue debating its desirability and its very
possibility. They may continue debating, while Tubao
Credit Cooperative works and self-replicates to eventually answer that question
convincingly, not in words but in terms of success stories.
“Some of you may also think of
ways to support us in this effort. One
easy way is to spread the word about us: that there is a growing ray of hope
for the Philippine economy, and it is in the growing number of healthy
cooperatives validating their claim to the name.”
A clear vision for a “Pambansang Tangkilikan” (National
Mutual Patronage) economy is articulated by SanibLakas
Foundation’s Tony Cruzada in the pamphlet, ‘Pambansang Talastasan’ and ‘Pambansang Tangkilikan’: Twin
Imperatives for National Synergy-Building, Empowerment and Upliftment,
issued early in 2003 by the SanibLakas-convened Katipunang DakiLahi (underscoring
in the original):
“Rather than an economy dominated by a narrow elite,
foreign investors and favored importers, a nationalist economy that is in the
hands of millions of the common tao. An economy that
protects Filipino enterprise, utilizes Filipino ingenuity, develops Filipino
industries, operating nationwide and across the globe. Not dependent on foreign
investment or borrowing but on the talent, labor and savings of millions
consolidated for strategic investments. All the elements of this Economy of the
Taongbayan are already present in the hundreds of
pilot programs that have been designed, developed and tried out by numerous
people’s organizations (POs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), small
and medium industries, cooperatives, and socially responsible media
organizations, the churches and the Academe. All that is needed is to integrate
the best and most equity-building of strategies and programs into a
coherent system to be
adopted by communities. The integration
of process will be guided by the new principles of Associative Economics and
the much hidden potential in the cooperative system. National economy built on
thriving local economies.
“The national invigoration of the economy will be
accomplished through the thousand units of synergistic action at community level,
orchestrated through a complex of institutional linkages. Integration,
consolidation and synergy building will be nationwide through convergences
creating concentric circles of energy at all levels from the Barangay, Municipality, Province, and Region. All of these
will be grounded on local empowerment, giving primacy to Primaries, i.e.
community-based economic units formed by households in a neighborhood.”
Cruzada, who is Katipunang DakiLahi’s overall coordinator for Pambansang
Tangkilikan, talks about a local drive:
“To consolidate the initiative and energy provided by indigenous,
organic leaders, entrepreneurs and economists who instill faith in self and in
the community, faith in the Filipino’s capacity to reform and triumph. Leaders
who will generate hope that we can break the cycle of failure brought upon us
by uninspired leadership and policies, and finally build the nation we can be
and want to be. Lakas ng loob and bayanihan spirit will
propel the needed action. Intensive mobilization will be easier if centered on
ensuring stable employment and adequate income since these will enable families
to meet their basic needs, provide a wider range of options and satisfy other
aspirations.”
This local drive, he writes, brings forth local solutions:
To raise the level of productivity of every household and
participation in community planning and decision making and the overall
empowerment process. Installing local mechanisms for savings and investment
that enable jobs to be multiplied and local resources optimally utilized, based
on best practices from numerous pilot projects. Business groups will be
alerted to their productivity potential and possible net worth. On the basis of
potential productivity, savings will be invested in groups, and ventures that
show dedication and promise, and products that are of high quality and marketability.
Capacity building, especially management will be given priority to ensure that
the planned ventures succeed.”
“Local
Synergies, he says,” will be created “to coordinate the diverse elements
that must come into interplay at the community level. Attention
will have to be paid to the synchronization of the cultural, natural and
economic capital, to everwidening circles of
collaboration, involvement and participation in diverse forms. Programs on
jobs and savings will be linked with social security, family planning, health
care, housing, utilities and environmental concerns. Finally, preparing the
next generation will be an essential part of the integration process.”
To summarize, the C-N-E Tripod in Associative Economics
for Sustainable Development is good management of the interactive synergetic
dynamics of cultural, natural and economic resources in the holarchy
of cooperatives and other business enterprises within the attainment of
nationalist industrialization, and in the holarchy of
community economics, from village-wide to nation-wide. It takes full
consideration of all human needs, and of synergizing well all human capabilities
and natural resources for addressing those needs, from the scope of the local
community to the scope of much bigger holonic
realities.
On the other hand, associative economics is the synergism
principle’s answer to the forced centralization of labor forces, markets, nay
entire economies worldwide, for the narrow interests of Globalized
Greed. Associative Economics operationalizes Toffler’s assertion that Small-Within-Big
is Beautiful, empowers all active stakeholders, and puts more sense to the
human-needs-and-resources management systems, called “economics.”
With the abundance still all around us in terms of natural
and human resources, there’s no reason for the natural resources to be
destroyed and for the majority of the Homo sapiens to go hungry for long
stretches of time. We have had enough of
technocratic gobbledygook! It’s time to demand some honesty and common sense in
the way we handle our economics!
J J J
Chapter 10:
Trans-Generational Bonding
HUMANS of
any generation are very important players in a synergetic relay, in a process
of wisdom accumulation, in a process of collective growth from generation to
generation. This is the inter-generational bond that embraces us all along the
full timeline from the time the first humans emerged until the last humans
perish.
1.
Mandates and Accountabilities in the Flow
Our latter-day discernments on human dignity, as enshrined
as recently as only half a century ago in a Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948), have to impact on our rightful valuation of
human dignity from the time of the proverbial Adam and Eve, Noah, etc.. Transgenerational
bonding mandates that we value the “primitive” memories and ideas of our
elders and ancestors, and it mandates likewise that we hold ourselves
completely accountable to all the generations still to come after us in
upholding such dignity of all members of the human race regardless of time,
place and other circumstances.
The Lambat-Liwanag empowering
paradigm pertinent to sense of history puts it in synergetic tandem with the discernment
of a sense of mission.
An empowered sense of history creates a wholistic
appreciation of process of history through stages of suffering and triumph,
through stages of disunity and of consolidation as a community, through stages
of progression and of stagnation or even regression, and seeks the mandates of
the past achievements and lessons for present-day generations to pursue and
fulfill for the sake of generations yet unborn.
This is the full appreciation of the continuity flow of
history, a wholistic framework that militates against
the eclectic and trivial handling of historical matters. Such a collective sense of history – a sense
of shared heritage and shared fate -- and such sense of mission contribute in no
small measure to the cultural resources of a community, big or small, and
therefore to its synergy.
This continuity flow is the second in a set of three
dimensions in what I have come to popularize as the “three-D” view of history.
The first D stands for detalye, the
Filipino word for details of information about specific historical events; the
second D stands for daloy, the Filipino
word for flow, which seeks for each event answers to questions of causality
(why did that happen?) and consequence (so what if it happened?); and the third
D stands for diwa or spirit, which
covers matters of intellectual honesty, point of view, and philosophical
underpinnings (whether basically dissective or
integrative).
Modesty aside, this “3-D” view of history has made more
alive, deeper and more interesting the study of history on the part of a
growing number of students. This
framework shuns rote memorization and encourages independent critical thinking
and analytical valuation.
2. Synergies from Shared Evolution
Strictly speaking, whenever we talk of our ancestors, we
should also be looking back in tribute to our ancestors as life forms, like all
those ancient mammals, reptiles, and fish and mono-celled beings clustered in
cell colonies. All the evolutionary lessons in those species are lodged as data
in each of our cells’ DNA. And our bodies evolve in a very similar path right
inside our mother’s womb and shortly after we get born.
The most important elements of growth of human
consciousness is a series of discoveries and realizations of pre-existing
realities that the human sciences like anthropology and archeology can only
hope and seek to chase after. The sooner human science removes its
human-imposed limitations in terms of its tools (like limiting these to
measurements of what the “five only” human senses can perceive, the sooner can
the humans be ready to avail themselves of the full enjoyment of the grand
realities that have always been there.
Then we shall all outgrow all tendencies towards divisiveness and its
resultant self- and mutual-constriction.
Needless to stress, all the other organisms in the great
ecosystem, are also celebrations of synergies among earlier forms evolving,
more or less among the paths studied by
Brian Swimme writes in The
Universe is a Green Dragon (Sta. Fe, New Mexico: Bear and Company,
1984, p. 100):
“Consider a mountain goat. These animals have the ability
to stand on a tiny ledge of rock with the wind blowing and the rains crashing down
on them. Their hooves, in particular the outer shell of the hoof surrounding
the inner pad, allow them to get a hold on a small rock as if they were
grabbing it with pliers.
“What we have to appreciate is that this adaptation
required millions of years. The ancestors of the present-day mountain goats
lived on mountains, adapting to the mountain’s shapes, the difficulties of
gravitational pull, and everything else. Those shapes that were most successful
in fitting into the mountain’s reality were selected for survival, so that what
we see how contains all that previous experimentation. The hoof is the memory of the ancestral
tree. It didn’t show up accidentally; it was shaped by the accumulated
experience of millions of goats.
“The point is, matter remembers
the elegant hoof. The genetic sequence enabling such a hoof to be fashioned
becomes dominant in the gene pool, passing the hoof around to all members of
the species. So, you see what I mean when I say the hoof is permeated with
memories from the past. From this standpoint, the hoof is those
memories.
“Just as hoof is memory, the human body is memory. Think of
how many creatures are involved in the ancestral tree for the creation of our
fingers! When you lift your hand, you are lifting all the vast experimentation
that led to that hand. There before you is the history of the great events in
the universe: the biological exploration, the supernova
explosion, all the significant moments of the last twenty billion years are
remembered.
“Matter (does the remembering). Matter in
the form of molecules. The sequence of molecules that make up your DNA
is a sequence of memories. … We can only look with astonishment at the
genetic sequence of molecules captured – remembered – by the DNA in all cells.
… Think of how many billions of creatures were involved in the accomplishment
of (creating) the animal eye.”
J J J
Chapter 11:
Governance and Social Development
IN Maps of the Mind (Collier Books, NY), Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist and poet, is credited with introducing the idea of synergy into social science, wrote: "From all comparative material the conclusion emerges that societies where non-aggression is conspicuous have social orders in which the individual by the same act and at the same time serves his own advantage and that of the group." (Maps of the Mind, Charles Hampden-Turner, Collier Books, NY, page 148.)
It is therefore ironic that when groups of people created states and governments, the latter creations have been using conspicuous aggression in imposing “peace and order” among the citizens, lending credence to the Marxist-Leninist definition that “state is the coercive instrument of class oppression.”
1. The Basics of Governance and Politics
The word “politics” has long
acquired a negative meaning in the
Governance is the management of
community needs and resources in all areas of social concern, and it covers
ensuring the assertion and protection of the constituents’ individual and
collective rights (economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights as
enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and in the
international covenants flowing from it).
The claim to exercise governance and to collect taxes for such exercise
is validated only by the people’s mandate on the basis of the degree of actual
performance of the service functions flowing from the people’s inalienable
rights.
For example, government builds
roadways and operates (through regulatory contracts called franchises) public
transportation systems, in order to serve well the citizens’ right to freedom
of movement. It operates state and
public schools and exercises supervision over private schools to ensure that
the citizens’ right to education will not be served only on paper.
Politics pertains to all acts to
determine or at least influence how to prioritize all the needs, how
to sustainably utilize the resources for benefit of
all the constituents, how the synergies are to be played out, if
at all, and who among the people are to be mandated to perform
the role of orchestrating and who among the people are to be mandated to perform
what other roles in the orchestration. The role of orchestrating is played
through a machinery for governance (called
government).
The word politics does not have
to be as dirty as most people have come to know it; after all, we are all
engaged in politics whenever we assert the citizens’ right to influence government
policies and performance. The question of who acquires, and who retains
decisively influential positions in machinery called government, the question
of winning electoral mandates and useful appointments are important in
politics. But so are acts of influencing
the substantial and executory shape of formalized
social policy (called laws and ordinances) and influencing the quality and degree of
implementation by all quarters.
2. The Holarchies of
Governance.
Aggression of one group of humans against other groups usually involve the perceived need of the former to make the rest of society bow to inequitable distribution of goods and services and the inequitable enjoyment of human dignity and the basic economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights that innately flow from such dignity.
Filipinos have had a long history of government functionaries lording it over the citizenry and using aggressive intervention in private citizen affairs as if they had the “divine right of kings” to invoke. Such government functionaries are often invoking and appropriating for their own use the “eminent domain” prerogatives of the nation state, supposedly on behalf of the people and for their benefit. However, they generally do this in performing in direct or indirect service of foreign-elite domination of our people, for which domination they are well-compensated accomplices.
National government is not higher than local government. It is only the synergized, i.e. effectively facilitated, national constituency that is higher than each of the local constituencies. When a group of households living near one another builds a synergy among themselves, they may set up this or that simple mechanism to facilitate that synergy—mass meetings at the plaza, bulletin boards, and a council of elders or chosen leaders to resolve conflicts and coordinate bayanihan-type efforts. With those mechanisms in place, the synergy may work very well to serve the needs and will of the people making up the clustered households. Two or more such neighborhood clusters can join together in a bigger and stronger synergy, called a barrio or baranggay, and have a bit more complex facilitation and coordination mechanism, and two or more such baranggays can build a synergy among themselves to form what they might call a municipality, and set up a bit more complex mechanism to facilitate the synergy and serve well the needs and the will of all the people in these clusters of clusters of clusters.
As we go to wider and wider scopes, the mechanisms become
more and more complex but the essence should remain the same. And that is, the mechanism of whatever scope should be serving the
needs and will of the people in all those clusters of clusters of clusters, not
ruling them. These government
officials and functionaries on various scopes of constituency are not in any
hierarchy, only their respective constituent communities are. The
facilitating mechanisms are tools of the people, funded by their
money, with authority emanating from them as citizenry. Tools (government
instrumentalities such as councils, agencies, Houses of Congress, executive
departments, Cabinet, Palace), and the functionaries posted in them at any
given time, cannot be higher than the people.
They are not monarchs or military dictators or benevolent
despots although they may convincingly feel and play-act the part and be
rewarded with undeserved respect (with the title “Honorable” and its attendant
protocols) and bloated opportunities for largesse and perks. Only by having performance records of
competence and dedication as servants of the people can these persons ever
deserve the respectability they so conspicuously seek. But even the competent
functionaries of competent administrations have no real right to swagger among
the people or allow their underlings to do the swaggering for them. Only the
ignorant and the hypocrytical opportunists can be
“impressed” by their airs of self-importance.
The complexity of the mechanism for nationwide governance,
the overbloated bureaucracy, has had the effect of
confusing all of us enough to forget the essence. A congressman should consult
with his constituents not to ask them what their problems are but to ask them
what their proposed solutions are to the problems of the nation, so the
congressman can faithfully represent their voice in policy discussions within
the national legislature. Basketball
courts, waiting sheds, bridges, etc. are matters that should be the left with
governors and mayors and baranggay chairmen to
address as executives.
A larger cluster is not more important than a smaller
one. Plans and policies of local
constituencies should be synergized to be the plans and policies of wider
constituencies. The national government should therefore be a mechanism
for synergizing the Filipino people’s own physical, mental and spiritual
capabilities to serve their own needs and their own collective will. Contrary to what we have started getting used
to, it is not supposed to be a mechanism to facilitate the control of our
country, of our regions and provinces and towns and communities, neighborhoods
and homes, by the powerful elite of Global Greed.
3. People’s Self-Empowerment
The hierarchy paradigm is promoted and maintained by those
who seek to call attention to their so-called authority over smaller clusters
while at the same time justifying why they have to obey like meek lambs the
Trojan-Horse “recommendations” of foreign overlords represented by the World
Bank-IMF, World Trade Organization and similar entities.
This paradigm is challenged by the people’s empowerment
paradigm, where the ideal of social justice is combined with the lesson from
this quote: “Give a man fish and you feed him for a day’ teach him how to fish
and you feed him forever.” And there are three distinct frameworks within which
groups and individuals can relate to the people and the matter of attaining and
enjoying empowerment in governmental power, in other words, political power.
These are:
1) “Proxy empowerment” framework wherein an organized
entity that is out of the corridors of power seeks to acquire and exercise
political power in the name of the people and for the “objective” and “fundamental”
benefit of the people, earnestness assumed;
2) “Dole-out and Token Empowerment” framework where wherein
an entity and persons already in possession of power claim to empower the
people out of their magnanimity. But sets limits to such empowerment so as not
to put in jeopardy their own decisive hold on power and their very own agenda;
and
3) “Direct self-empowerment of, for, and by the People,”
both as individual human persons attaining full development of their respective
individual human faculties and potentialities, and as groups of such
individually-uplifted people synergizing their capabilities for collective
self-determination and effective self-governance. In this framework, various entities and individuals
can serve, or partake in embodying, the people’s self-empowerment process
(institutions, agencies and NGOs can serve this process one way or another; and
each
It is up to each individual and to each group to choose the
framework to pursue one’s own efforts.
Indicators of success or significance of the efforts would include the
approval and validation of these efforts by a growing percentage of the
citizenry, and of course the actual impact of these efforts on the people.
The first framework is premised on building the strength
and “ideological purity” of the entity that seeks to acquire power for and in
the name of the people. Thus it naturally tends to require or encourage
monolithic structures and practices which have the inherent tendency to stifle
the initiative and creativity of many of the people involved and, in some
cases, have even resulted in the disempowerment of these people. It also abets a simplistic aversion to
working with agencies and officials of the government. It even tends to
simplistically polarize or dichotomize between cause-oriented organizations
and the government or make them oppose whatever the latter does or supports,
which is not really very principled.
I choose to be predisposed to give this framework an
assumption of earnestness of intent to act, speak for, and serve the
“objective” and “fundamental” benefit of the people. History has apparently
proven me to be “too generous” for deciding to have such a predisposition. For this reason, traditional politicians in
the Philippines or elsewhere, can only appear to belong to be working under
this framework, but are more akin to the second one” token empowerment doled
out to the people.
The second framework is hazardous, just like the first,
because it creates illusions among the people and feeds on such illusions until
such time that the people, who initially pin their hopes on it, pendulum-swing
to the extreme cynicism. The “people
empowerment” component of the reform program of a past Philippine administration
spoke glowingly of guaranteeing the marginalized sectors of society
inside-track access to decision-making bodies of government, but failed short
of guaranteeing that such representation would not merely be
window-dressing. The scheme tended to
backfire on government in most cases where representatives of such marginalized
sectors were patronizingly humored and officially heard but not really heeded
in those decision-making bodies.
The third framework builds a well-founded confidence in the
people’s capability not to lose sight of the need for fundamental changes and
actually builds the people’s direct capability through synergism to effect such
changes.
By raising the people’s standards as to which changes may
be considered essential and beyond the cosmetic or palliative, this framework
does not harbor or foment a fear of petty reforms, for many reforms and
immediate gains can really be used as stepping stones in the people’s march to
achieving fundamental changes in society.
Among the three alternative frameworks enumerated above, I
subscribe to the third one, and I would even go to the extent of asserting that
it is the only framework that can result in the people actually being
empowered. I say this because the framework of people’s self-empowerment is
direct, well-rounded, and rooted in the empowerment of individuals making up
the majority of our people.
At the same time, the third framework can actually support,
encompass, and check for earnestness and effectiveness, those working within
the first and/or the second framework.
The program thrust of the SanibLakas
Foundation for National Synergy-Building is fully within the framework of people’s
self-empowerment through building synergies all around. On varying scopes, like primary cooperatives,
local communities and the synergy of these in the national community, diverse
but orchestrated efforts are pursued in all the components of the Stable Tripod
for Sustainable Development, that is, in the natural,
cultural and economic resources of the people, cultivated and tapped for
Associative Economics.
Along the lines of building actual synergies under this
program thrust, this work has entailed organizing people into organizations
and organizing various organizations into networks. SanibLakas-created
organizations have also been called “program organizations” but these
organizations have had their own leadership bodies composed of a combination
of Foundation members and non-members, the latter being considered as co-equal
individual partners of the Foundation.
In each of the organizations we create and networks we
convene, the role played by SanibLakas Foundation at
the start is that of convenor. But the direction is
toward spinning off all these organizations into autonomous entities, where
the role of the Foundation would shift to that of concept guardian, organization
development consultant, and provider of supportive resources.
J J J
Healthy Organizations and True Leadership
A GREAT number of people are involved in organizations. But
many of these people are apparently missing the point on the essence of
organizations to the extent that their confusion and rampant malpractice are
giving the very concept of organizations a bad name. Same goes for archaic concepts of leadership,
the personality-centered idea of leadership that often splits up organizations
instead of solidifying them.
1. Essence of Organizations
The essence of organization is in synergizing the unity of
purpose, of determination, of views, and, therefore, of action of individual
elements (member persons or member-organizations) synergizing on the basis, and
for the enhancement, of such unities.
The magnitude of synergy in any organization depends on the
magnitude of commitment and energy of most if not all of the individual
members. This is the “Basic Elements” aspect,
which pertains to the quality and also to the quantity of the individuals
making up the organization. Specific interrelationships are worked out for
optimized synergy determined by the organizational design and by the quality
of its leadership. This is the “Leadership and Management” aspect.
Three Synergies are underpinnings of healthy organizations:
Synergy of the Minds for policies and decisions, which covers an understanding
by the members of the needs and problems being addressed by the organization
and also the intellectual consideration by them of the options available for
approaches and methods;
Synergy of the Hearts/Spirit, which covers the mutual reinforcement among members of
their levels of conviction and determination, as well as morale; and
Synergy of the Muscles/Actions, which covers unified and coordinated actions that fulfill
and enhance the full potentialities of the sum total of the capabilities of all
the active members.
It should be noted that synergies in all three aspects
correspond to what are generally described to be the triune facets of the
full human: body, mind, spirit.
This implies that organizations of humans are best synergies of the full
humanity of the members, and not synergizing only the muscles of most of the
members, the minds of only a handful of formal or de facto leaders who decide
how to deploy the muscles of all the members, and ‘never mind the spirit.’ Such organizations survive all right but they
are not as effective and powerful as they can be, and they do not really
function as empowering entities for members who join in.
All of these three synergies form the essential underpinnings
of organizational processes, like consensus-building and policy-making,
coordination, etc.
The setting of general and specific principles, approaches,
activities, policies, programs, and plans should proceed from the scientific,
philosophical and organizational principle of synergism, where the total
capability and actual output of a set of people working closely together is
much more than the total capability or total output of the very same people if
they are working separately.
Finally, the structures (bodies, job descriptions,
criteria, methods of recruitment/hiring selection/election; methods of recall,
etc.) should only follow and not be determined ahead of these. And this is where true leadership
is very important.
2. Synergetic Leadership: From ‘Bagani’
to ‘Balani’
True leadership, in the context of contemporary human
synergies, does not refer to the function of making the most important
decisions on behalf of the members, or doing all the work for the members while
transforming them into a fans club. True
leadership is serving the members by facilitating and orchestrating well their
synergy, by drawing all of them to overcome any tendency to act separately
and instead to maximize the value of deciding to associate by acting as a
big team—in decision-making, in purpose-setting, in working, and in enjoying
together the fruits of their work.
True leadership does not call attention to itself, but builds the capacity and confidence of the
members, their faith in themselves and in the great power of their togetherness.
And in doing this, leadership expands itself among more and more members to
have this same conscious predisposition and capacity to unite the parts
of the whole more and more closely behind what is the collective will at any
given time. This has to be done
without those representing the whole having any feeling of being above those
parts. Any leader who starts behaving
condescendingly, even if unknowingly, automatically stops being
a leader.
Leadership consciousness should be centered on the function
of leading, of being an active part of the centripetal force, and not
on the identities of specific persons making up the formal leadership
bodies. Imbued with the synergetic
spirit of such consciousness, even the losing candidates for executive officers’
positions in ticket-mode elections can still be counted on as earnest teammates
of the winners in the broader leadership force within the organization. After all, we should be in a position to
assume that officer-caliber members of an organization, which they all claim to
be, at least tacitly, by running for office, are real leaders and not just
popular personalities.
The Philippine concept of leadership has evolved over the
centuries with the development of social structures, affected by the archipelago’s
colonization by Spanish and American regimes.
Thousands of years of freedom and natural evolution saw the
brand of leadership akin to that of champions like David and Goliath were for
their respective sides. ‘Bagani’ is one of the old native words for warrior and ‘bagani’ leadership is the kind where the leader is one who
would do the brunt of the fighting or do the commanding for other warriors to
obey. That worked for a period of time
characterized by frequent inter-group wars.
Then there emerged the ‘bayani’
leadership. The word ‘bayani’ in the major Philippine
language started out as a verb that meant serving the community through
collective work that expects no equivalent material compensation. The nearest noun-form to this was ‘bayanihan’ or community action on one another’s tasks, like
planting and harvesting rice or moving houses from one area to another. (About a century ago, the word ‘bayani’ acquired a new sense, referring to heroes and
heroism.) “Bayani”
leadership can therefore describe the leadership factor that draws the
participation of community members to such specific collective efforts in the
spirit of the synergetic “bayanihan” philosophy,
which is part of our nation’s proud heritage.
A new brand of leadership is now emerging in the world
since the advent of the new millennium, in the stream of what has been called
the “Age of Aquarius.” This is the
leadership factor to bring people to awareness and appreciation of our
essential oneness as spirit incarnated in separate bodies with distinct
histories.
Although gathering, reflecting and sharing the light,
through writings and oral discussions have been part of the means employed by
these leaders, the latter do their work mainly by “living and being the light,”
that is, by bringing the essential reality of our oneness in their consistent
behavior in the most challenging of milieus.
As Walsch writes of ‘God telling
him’ (Conversations, Book 3, 1998, p.182): “Bring your awareness
to others. Not by proselytizing but by
example. Be the source of the love which I am in the lives of all others. For
that which you give to others, you give to yourself. Because there is only One of Us.”
The very being of these new-type of leaders, and the
consequent behavior flowing from that being, produces fields of awareness and
appreciation akin to magnetic fields produced by each magnet and affecting
objects all around each magnet. Thus I refer to this leadership as “balani leadership,” ‘balani’
being the Filipino word for magnet.
“Bayani” leadership builds strong
synergies behind specific tasks at hand. But as the pattern for such
collective behavior is established and strengthened, it gets imbibed by the
greater mass of the participants and it goes well beyond the concerns of
specific tasks and gets established as these people’s mode of living and
existence, individually and collectively.
‘Balani’ leadership is thus
attained by those who habitually see commonalities and points of unity in the
most antagonistic of configurations, those who are ever-predisposed to do the
following as individuals and as teams, whatever area of human interaction is
involved: link up the unlinked,
coordinate the uncoordinated and act as a living bridges among organizations or
sections of the population that are not relating enough or at all, or are even
hostile to one another. They are the conscious synergizers
or synergy-builders. (Our
synergism-oriented SanibLakas Foundation is seeking
to synergize in its membership and activity-oriented life the consistently-active
conscious synergizers; those who are unable or
unwilling to be consistently-active are very much welcome to join the broader
but less-compact community called Pamayanang SanibLakas.)
“Balani” leadership can only grow
from “bayani” leadership. But they have a big
difference: Bayani leadership discovers and
actualizes the value of parts coming together in synergy, and Balani leadership rediscovers that we are all one in the
first place, before the seeming separation arising from the forgetting.
As of this writing, much refining has yet to be done on my
integrated description of “bagani,” “bayani” and “balani” leadership,
and I welcome all shared experiences and ideas for further working it out.
3. Collective Will and the Matter of Discipline
Healthy and strong are those organizations that synergize
their individual members’ will and skill, their motivations and capabilities,
instead of having to cultivate these in them in the first place. A strong organization is one where the
members are firm on their respective personal decision to band together, really
band together, and make this banding together really work for the sake of their
synergized aims. The healthy organization cannot and would not accept members
who had not applied for membership or categorically manifested a choiceful personal decision to pursue their personal
purposes which the organization would only facilitate for synergetic pursuit.
But members, as all humans and other holons,
feel both the tendency to be a good and firm team-players
and uphold the team-play, and the tendency to go it his or her own way as an
individual with very individual motivations and capabilities. Discipline is therefore the mechanism for an
organization to be stable by drawing its members to consistently behave as team
players. Rules are made collectively for collective gain, and rule-breaking,
the acts of spoiling the team-play, is an offense not just against the rule
enforcers but against the organization itself. Reeducation is therefore the
best remedy for breaches of discipline, and even practically-consequential
sanctions, like fines and penalties and even expulsion, should primarily aim
for education of the general membership.
In the book, Hungry No More (National Credit
Cooperative, Philippines, 2002, p. 83), Conrado L. Baltazar gives this valuable input on discipline:
“Let me go back briefly to the matter of discipline. Some
people might take this term in the sense of its usual use especially to justify
martial-law, authoritarian and regimented practice where righteous behavior is
motivated mainly by fear of punishment to be meted out on offenders by
authority figures and bodies. Is the
effort to instill discipline, of this sort, compatible with The Cooperative
Way, the way of synergism, the way of service-orientation and volunteerism, the
way of associative economics…?
“Apologists for authoritarianism
and command systems have unfortunately been allowed to monopolize, to own, the
term, and the others who use it in healthier sense do not clarify their own
sense for the education of their leaderships and audiences.
“Effective penal sanction systems
– with heavy penalties, effective monitoring to flush out offenders and
effective prosecution/judicial systems can indeed make for very effective
discipline among a group of people. But under the principles of cooperativism, discipline in the cooperatives should
emanate from within each person.
“Each member should be developed
in enough personal maturity to comprehend the just logic of the rules, and to
connect their own individual interests inextricably with that of the
cooperative, they would each exert best efforts not to commit acts that would
weaken the cooperative. Only the matured can see the imprudence of
breaking the rules of a system that are placed for their own collective
interests. Only the matured can grasp intellectually and practice in a living
way the principle of synergy that has to operate if the cooperative is to
fully serve them and to continue serving them.
“Joining the cooperative is
voluntary. All voluntary acts of matured persons are expected to
be conscious voluntary acts. They join a coop because they know
that it is prudent to do so for their individual and collective interests. And common
sense would tell them that cooperatives can only work to serve those individual
and collective interests if and only if all or even most of them make it
work, by going along fully with the systems they have agreed, out of collective
common sense, to adopt. It has been
observed among many cooperatives that members are not conscious of this logic.
We don’t want to assume that they joined the coop to ‘put one over the coop.’
“Inner and conscious sense of
discipline is therefore not only compatible to The Coop Way, it is The
Coop Way. It’s something like no one
committing any crime even if the policemen are nowhere in sight. It’s like people who’d refrain from
defecating in the middle of the community plaza not because somebody might see
their private parts, someone might see their act and discredit them or some
policeman might see and arrest them. They simply won’t do it because they don’t
want to foul up the air being breathed by the entire community including
themselves and their loved ones. A matured cooperative member, who knows the
essence of cooperativism and not merely the
intricacies of some coop activity or other, would refrain from participating in
the slow slaughter of the goose that lays the golden egg.”
Baltazar’s explanations of discipline are rooted in decades of
successful practice of their credit cooperative in Tubao,
La Union, in
J J J
Chapter 13:
Cooperative--Social Synergy of Personal
Enterprises
MANY COOPERATIVE
leaders and members are familiar with the definitions of both the terms
"synergism" and "cooperatives." However, there
is need for focused education on both of them because familiarity is never
enough to meet the challenge of dynamically applying the principle of
synergism. Such application should be done consciously in appreciating the very
essence of cooperativism and in the lifepulse
of the Philippine coop movement as a whole and of every single cooperative.
There is need to focus some attention on the very essence of a
cooperative: individual entrepreneurs decided to pursue their enterprises
together, and really and fully together. The cooperative is the
social synergy of these personal enterprises. Real and full
togetherness translates into the narrowing of discrepancies in equity
investment and into insuring equal vote in decision-making. And the full
togetherness goes beyond mere joint ownership but in all joint efforts possible
to make the cooperative enterprise. Each member has a stake and keen interest
in the entire working of this business enterprise. It is this real and full
togetherness that distinguishes a coop from a bilateral partnership or from a
corporation.
Upon this essence of cooperative stand the Seven Basic Principles of
Cooperative Identity as formulated and promulgated by the century-old
International Cooperative Alliance (ICA).
These principles serve to operationalize the
essence.
1.
Comprehension Needs Deepening
On both concepts, textual and theoretical understanding has to be deepened and validated by experiential knowledge, something that cannot be acquired within the four walls of a seminar room and within the time span of a few days.
On matters regarding the building, formalization, registration, consolidation and operation of cooperatives, the standard education courses and modules would seem to suffice or even exceed the basic needs for these aspects of cooperative life to flow. But we submit that there has been almost nothing, if not indeed nothing, when it comes to focused education on the synergism principle itself.
Because of this, cooperative life goes on, as it obviously does go on, but leaves much to be desired in terms of quality operations and growth, precisely because the very soul of the needed dynamic unity is not really there. It is therefore not at all surprising that for many cooperative leaders and members it is quite all right that their cooperatives have been built and is continually running, mainly on the basis of resources accepted or even begged for from external sources.
They do not realize that this kind of dependence, no matter how lucrative it may be for the cooperatives concerned, negates their very identity as cooperatives and that it has even stripped them of the right to keep calling themselves cooperatives.
Lack of education and lack of application of the synergetic essence of cooperatives is also at the root of common situations where only the officers are active while the members would not even attend regular meetings.
Certain privileges are accorded cooperatives under the Cooperative Code
of the
Contrary to what many cooperative leaders and members have
become convinced by decades of experience, the basic and therefore most
important unit of the cooperative sector is the primary, the synergy of
individual persons, the cooperators, who have each decided to pursue one’s own
respective entrepreneurial endeavors together “and really together” with the
others (that is, in the “cooperative way”).
On the basis of this synergy essence of the cooperative,
the SanibLakas Foundation’s Cooperative Education on
Synergism (CES) Program launched in the middle of February 2003 a mini-poster
and handout campaign (with the same two-page material) for discussion, distribution
and posting on or before March 10, 2003, the 13th anniversary of the Philippine
Cooperative Code (Republic Act 6938).
This material starts with the following in bold and enlarged letters:
“In commemoration of Philippine Cooperative Day on
2.
Your Will Be Done… What Will?
Two paragraphs deliver and explain the whole point of the
campaign, points that we requested cooperatives to discuss among their members:
“Voluntary membership” means the application and acceptance
of members lies in their personal will (voluntas)
to bring together their savings and enterprises and band together fully,
for magnification of their capabilities through synergism. Members who live by
their own decision to band fully together really feel, assert and perform joint
stakeholdership and democratic control in the
affairs of the coop. They are aware that
they did not come in as beneficiaries of a social welfare agency, nor as clients of a borrowers’ club. They are really entrepreneurs,
making full use of all the opportunities and prerogatives asserted and upheld
by the Seven Principles of Cooperative Identity (promulgated by the
International Cooperative Alliance) to make the joint enterprise grow and
serve the community. Filipino
cooperators are also honoring our common heroic heritage by living the Bayanihan spirit, where our concept of, and even our
word for, heroism are ultimately rooted.
The members and the officers decide together how to make the cooperative
enterprise work and sustainably grow.
“The power of cooperativism in the
“The cooperative sector can be enabled to perform much
better, and at last be popularly and officially recognized, as one of the
major pillars of the Philippine economy that we all want to move towards
recovery and sustainable development.
“That, after all, is the noble intent and challenge of our
‘cooperative revolution’. ”
3.
Some References
“The classic definition of cooperative was articulated by
renowned historian Julius Otto Muller: ‘(cooperative is) a term used where a
number of people join together for a common project, because joint effort
makes possible an amount of strength greater than the sum of the individual
amounts of energy.’ In this context, cooperation
is synonymous with synergy. [Source:
Roberto “Obet” Pagdanganan,
An Urgent Call for Cooperative Revolution,
2002, p. 3. (Emphasis ours)
“The International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) Statement of Identity defines a cooperative as ‘an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.’ While intentionally crafted as a minimal statement, which could embrace the vast array of cooperative organizations throughout the world, the statement emphasizes some important characteristics of cooperative enterprise. These include the following essential features: enterprise, autonomy, voluntary nature, needs being met, joint ownership and democratic control. [Source: Ann Hoyt, “And Then There Were Seven (Cooperative Principles Updated),” Cooperative Grocer, January/February 1996 issue published by Dave Gutknecht, P.O. Box 597, Athens, OH 45701 University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives (From Internet; Emphasis ours.)]
“Article III of the Cooperative Code of the Philippines (Republic Act 6938) defines ‘cooperative’ as a “duly registered association of persons with a common bond of interest who have voluntarily joined together to achieve a lawful common social or economic end, making equitable contributions to the capital required and accepting a fair share of the risks and benefits of the undertaking in accordance with universally accepted cooperative principles. Article IV states that, ‘Every cooperative shall conduct its affairs in accordance with Filipino culture and experience, and the universally accepted principles…’ [Source: Roberto Pagdanganan, An Urgent Call for Cooperative Revolution, 2002, p. 3.]
“Two elements have to be stressed in applying the synergism principle on the very definition of cooperatives: one, there are members each with resources to contribute to a common enterprise and readiness to face risks in substantial stakeholdership; and, two, these voluntarily band together, and really do band together in earnest, bringing in substantial amounts of human and material resources, to make the enterprise work and grow. [Source: Ed Aurelio C. Reyes & Joydee C. Robledo, “Cooperatives and the Challenge of Synergism” in pamphlet of the same title, 2nd Edition, published by the SanibLakas Foundation – Cooperative Education on Synergism (CES) Program, Cooperative Month 2001, p. 5. (Underscoring mine.)]”
4. ‘Silent Soul’ of Cooperativism
Without clarifying the deepest rationale, or the deepest
premises of the rationale, the textual, even if very accurate, comprehension of
this definition cannot suffice to give us the essence. And if it involves
mobilizing many people and uniting them firmly around the operationalization
of the definition, such efforts may be lackluster. Or we may fail because there
are no useful indicators on desired impact that the formulators of the
definition had decided only to imply. If a cooperative is unhealthy, one has
only symptomatic indicators pertaining to the consequent points, including any
of the Seven Principles, to look into.
Symptomatic cure is not real cure, so “coop doctors” have to have more
clarity on essence to guide them.
The
This paragraph just quoted explains the brevity and
simplicity of the definition. It is up to the readers, the dedicated students
of cooperative essence, to spot the unspoken but vital premises of the
definition, with best efforts to be careful and responsible in doing so.
What would be unspoken premises in the
The word “voluntary” is a very heavily-loaded word. This
comes from the Latin word “voluntas” meaning “will,”
and “will,” in turn, carries the matter of free and informed choice, a serious
decision, and the matter of strength of character of each person involved to
firmly stick by his or her own decision as any strong-willed adult should.
Among all the premises here, the deepest one is that
persons would really find it prudent to decide to band together,
to really band together, and to stay banded together, to meet their common
needs and aspirations together -- because there is a value-added to be
had, a magnification of capacities to be attained, in a well-managed
joint effort. On the clarity and fulfillment of this promise lies the very
basis of this definition, although it is left unsaid.
Many people are somewhat familiar with this
magnified-capacities principle, because it works in nature, in sports, in
medicine, engineering, and other human enterprises, but few know that it is
called ‘synergism.’ This is the ‘silent soul of cooperativism.’
It makes it prudent for large numbers of people decide to join really
together and remain as active majority members of strong coops.
Muller defined a cooperative as “a term used where a number
of people join together for a common project, because joint effort makes
possible an amount of strength greater than the sum of the individual amounts
of energy.” This is the cited context of Roberto Pagdanganan
for writing in his An Urgent Call for Cooperative Revolution
(2002) that “cooperation is synonymous with synergy.”
Without understanding and appropriately applying this
synergy, cooperatives would be poor shadows of what they are supposed to be,
and unable to deliver sustainably on its basic promises,
and their recruits would all be a frustrated and disillusioned lot. In that
case, all there would be, and only for short stretches of time, are inactive
majority members of weak cooperatives on the path of dormancy or extinction.
Before they were asked to decide whether or not they want
to join a cooperative, were these members fully informed about all the options
available for all who want to meet their respective individual needs (that
happen to be common with the need)? Were they informed fully what advantages
are there in meeting these needs together with other people, and how come these
advantages are actually there in the cooperative option? In the first place, is it fully understood
how this system can actually work sustainably?
If we were so much in a hurry to get more and more signatures on our membership application forms without ensuring the backing of some honor and firmness for those signatures, and if membership applicants were also in much hurry to secure loans without bothering to understand fully where the cooperative’s resources should sustainably be coming from, our coop is doomed to be a very weak one, a disgrace to the real definition of “cooperative.” We cannot afford to “educate them later,” because they need to know fully the essence of the commitment of both sides before they can make an informed, free and firm decision whether or not to join our coops. That is the serious standard if we want to use the word “voluntary” and actually mean it.
5.
Primacy of Primaries
There should be a felt primacy of primaries. Clusters of
primaries, namely the secondaries, and clusters of
clusters of primaries, the tertiaries, exist to serve
the primaries, and to do the bidding of the primaries’ memberships.
Under the basic cooperative principle of members’ democratic control, the members
of any primary coop should not allow themselves to be controlled by even their
very own facilitation mechanism called the Board of Directors, and no primary
can be legitimately dominated by a secondary coop with which it is affiliated.
The individual cooperators who have banded together in
primary cooperatives should very obviously be in control of these primaries and
of all the clusters of primaries and of all the clusters of clusters of their
primaries, their very own enterprise-synergizing tool. It is, after all, a synergizing tool created
by the synergy of their individual personal will, choosing this community-oriented
mode over other modes of pursuing successful enterprise.
6. Coops as Teachers of Synergism
With the cooperatives successfully applying the
synergism principle, resulting in the members’ individual and shared
prosperity, the cooperatives can perform the task of educating the broader
population of the local and even the national community on this principle, as
contemplated in this call raised by Joydee Robledo as executive director of SanibLakas
Foundation, in a talk before the 1998 General Assembly of the Visayas Cooperative Center (VICTO) in Tagbilaran
City, Bohol:
“The Cooperative is the ‘cutting edge,’ achieving ‘breakthrough
experiences’ in effecting ways and means in actualizing synergism in the
broader Philippine society. As each cooperative becomes more and more efficient
and effective in responding to the needs of the times, growing successfully in
numbers and strength, and reaping rewards from their achievements, the
celebration can only move no other way but forward. …
“As these cooperatives go on realizing their goals and
increasing their capabilities, more and more things are accomplished along the
way. The cooperatives become successful one after another. Society becomes more
conscious of the roles of the cooperatives in a larger picture. This is also where economic power becomes
visible and thus gives the people the opportunity to be heard, to have
political power, to be properly represented, and have cultural power as well.
The list of positive results may go on and on as one can imagine the ripple
effect of it all.”
The coops do not just have to talk about synergism in the
broader community, the cooperatives have to live synergism, they have to be living synergies, within the community,
for their own empowerment and shared prosperity and society’s own.
7.
Coops as Players in the Grandest of Human Synergies
As synergetic local socio-economic ecosystems, with healthy
cooperatives at the core, stand up as strong building blocks of empowered
socio-economic ecosystems in larger scopes of human community, human
development and harmony shall advance and converge everywhere for the profound
enjoyment and upliftment of Humankind. Because humans
are the conscious bearers of divine awareness for the entire holarchic universe, this is the grandest of all the grand
human synergies!
All contributions
to the attainment of this, both big and small, – yours, mine, ours, everyone’s – are precious components of this grand
unfolding of reality!
J J J
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