Friday, June 27, 2008
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Inferiority Complex: A Filipino Malady?
by Barth Suretsky
____________ _________ _________ __
The unedited article below was written below by an American friend, Barth Suretsky. This will still be edited but you will get the gist. I find his observations interesting. I hope this will make an impact on the Filipinos who read this article as I greatly lament the worsening situation of our country. - Frank Woolf, Vice President for Development, I-Quest Corporation
6th Floor, World Center, 330 Sen Gil Puyat Avenue, Makati City 1200, Philippines
Creators of WorldRoom, Tel: (632) 867 8460Fax: (632) 867 8077
____________ _________ _________ __
My decision to move to Manila was not a precipitous one. I used to work in New York as an outside agent for PAL, and have been coming to the Philippines since August, 1982. I was so impressedwith the country, and with the interesting people I met, some of which have become very close friends to this day, that I asked for and was granted a year's sabbatical from my teaching job in order to live in the Philippines. I arrived here on August 21, 1983, several hours after Ninoy Aquino was shot, andremained here until June of 1984. During that year I visited many parts of the country, from as far north as Laoag to as far south as Zamboanga, and including Palawan. I became deeply immersed in the history and culture of the archipelago, and an avid collector of tribal antiquities from both northern Luzon, and Mindanao.
In subsequent years I visited the Philippines in 1985, 1987, and 1991, before deciding to move here permanently in 1998. I love this country, but not uncritically, and that is the purpose of this article.
First, however, I will say that I would not consider living anywhere else in Asia, no matter how attractive certain aspects of other neighboring countries may be. To begin with, and this is most important, with all its faults, the Philippines is still a democracy, more so than any other nation in Southeast Asia. Despite gross corruption, the legal system generally works, and if ever confronted with having to employ it, I would feel much more safe trusting the courts here than in any other place in the surrounding area. The press here is unquestionably the most unfettered and freewheeling in Asia, and I do not believe that is hyperbole in any way! And if any one thing can be used as a yardstick to measure the extent of thedemocratic process in any given country in the world, it is the extent to which the press is free.
But the Philippines is a flawed democracy nevertheless, and the flaws are deeply rooted in the Philippine psyche. I will elaborate. The basic problem seems to me, after many years of observation, to be a national inferiority complex, a disturbing lack of pride in being Filipino.
Toward the end of April I spent eight days in Vietnam, visiting Hanoi, Hue, and Ho Chi Minh City. I am certainly no expert on Vietnam, but what I saw could not be denied: I saw a country ravaged as no other country has been in this century by thirty years of continuous and incredibly barbaric warfare. When the Vietnam War ended in April, 1975, the country was totally devastated. Yet in the past twenty-five years the nation has healed and rebuilt itself almost miraculously! The countryside has been replanted and reforested. Hanoi and HCMC have been beautifully restored. The opera house in Hanoi is a splended restoration of the original, modeled after the Opera in Paris, and the gorgeous Second Empire theater, on the main square of HCMC is as it was when built by the French a century ago. The streets are tree-lined, clean, and conducive for strolling. Cafes in the French style proliferate on the wide boulevards of HCMC. I am not praising the government of Vietnam, which still has a long way to travel on the road to democracy, but I do praise, and praise unstintingly, the pride of the Vietnamese people. It is due to this pride in being Vietnamese that has enabled its citizenry to undertake the miracle of restoration that I have described above.
When I returned to Manila I became so depressed that I was actually physically ill for days thereafter. Why? Well, let's go back to a period when the Philippines resembled the Vietnam of 1975. It was 1945, the end of World War II, and Manila, as well as many other cities, lay in ruins. (As a matter of fact, it may not be generally known, but Manila was the second most destroyed city in the entire war; only Warsaw was more demolished!)
But to compare Manila in 1970, twenty-five years after the end of the war, with HCMC, twenty-five years after the end of its war, is a sad exercise indeed. Far from restoring the city to its former glory, by 1970 Manila was well on its way to being the most tawdry city in Southeast Asia. And since that time the situation has deteriorated alarmingly. We have a city full of street people, beggars, and squatters. We have a city that floods sections whenever there is a rainstorm, and that loses electricity with every clap of thunder. We have a city full of potholes, and on these unrepaired roads we have a traffic situation second to none in the world for sheer unmanageability. We have rude drivers, taxis that routinely refuse to take passengers because of "many trappic!" The roads are also cursed with pollution-spewing buses in disreputable states of repair, and that ultimate anachronism, the jeepney!
We have an educational system that allows children to attend schools without desks or books to accommodate them. Teachers, even college professors, are paid salaries so disgracefully low that it's a wonder that anyone would want to go into the teaching profession in the first place. We have a war in Mindanao that nobody seems to have a clue how to settle. The only policy to deal with the war seems to be to react to what happens daily, with no long range plan whatever. I could go on and on, but it is an endeavor so filled with futility that it hurts me to go on. It hurts me because, in spite of everything, I love the Philippines.
Maybe it will sound simplistic, but to go back to what I said above, it is my unshakable belief that the fundamental thing wrong with this country is a lack of pride in being Filipino. A friend once remarked to me, laconically: "All Filipinos want to be something else. The poor ones want to be American, and the rich ones all want to be Spaniards. Nobody wants to be Filipino." That statement would appear to be a rather simplistic one, and perhaps it is. However, I know one Filipino who refuses to enter a theater until the national anthem has stopped being played because he doesn't want to honor his own country, and I know another one who thinks that history stopped dead in 1898 when the Spaniards departed! While it is certainly true that these represent extreme examples of national denial, the truth is not a pretty picture. Filipinos tend to worship, almost slavishly, everything foreign. If it comes from Italy or France it has to be better than anything made here. If the idea is American or German it has to be superior to anything that Filipinos can think up for themselves. Foreigners are looked up to and idolized. Foreigners can go anywhere without question.
In my own personal experience I remember attending recently an affair at a major museum here. I had forgotten to bring my invitation. But while Filipinos entering the museum were checked for invitations, I was simply waived through. This sort of thing happens so often here that it just accepted routine. All of these things, the illogical respect given to foreigners simply because they are not Filipinos, the distrust and even disrespect shown to any homegrown merchandise, the neglect of anything Philippine, the rudeness of taxi drivers, the ill-manners shown by many Filipinos are all symptomatic of a lack of self-love, of respect for and love of the country in which they were born, and worst of all, a static mind-set in regard to finding ways to improve the situation.
Most Filipinos, when confronted with evidence of governmental corruption, political chicanery, or gross exploitation on the part of the business community, simply shrug their shoulders, mutter "bahala na," and let it go at that. It is an oversimplification to say this, but it is not without a grain of truth to say that Filipinos feel downtrodden because they allow themselves to feel downtrodden. No pride.
One of the most egregious examples of this lack of pride, this uncaring attitude to their own past or past culture, is the wretched state of surviving architectural landmarks in Manila and elsewhere. During the American period many beautiful and imposing buildings were built, in what we now call the "art deco" style (although, incidentally, that was not a contemporary term; it was coined only in the 1960s). These were beautiful edifices, mostly erected during, or just before, the Commonwealth period. Three, which are still standing, are the Jai Alai Building, the Metropolitan Theater, and the Rizal Stadium. Fortunately, due to the truly noble efforts of my friend John Silva, the Jai Alai Building will now be saved. But unless something is done to the most beautiful and original of these three masterpieces of pre-war Philippine architecture, the Metropolitan Theater, it will disintegrate. The Rizal Stadium is in equally wretched shape. When the wreckers' ball destroyed Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, and New York City's most magnificent building, Pennsylvania Station, both in 1963, Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architectural critic of The New York Times, wrote: "A disposable culture loses the right to call itself a civilization at all!" How right she was! (Fortunately, the destruction of Pennsylvania Station proved to be the sacrificial catalyst that resulted in the creation of New York's Landmark Commission. Would that such a commission be created for Manila...)
Are there historical reasons for this lack of national pride? We can say that until the arrival of the Spaniards there was no sense of a unified archipelago constituted as one country. True. We can also say that the high cultures of other nations in the region seemed, unfortunately, to have bypassed the Philippines; there are no Angkors, no Ayuttayas, no Borobudurs.True. Centuries of contact with the "high cultures" of the Khmers and the Chinese had, except for the proliferation of Song dynasty pottery found throughout the archipelago, no noticeable effect. True. But all that aside, what was here?
To begin with, the ancient rice terraces, now threatened with disintegration, incidentally, was an incrediblefeat of engineering for so-called "primitive" people. As a matter of fact, when I first saw them in 1984, I was almost as awe-stricken as I was when I first laid eyes on the astonishing Inca city of Machu Picchu, high in the Peruvian Andes. The degree of artistry exhibited by the various tribes of the Cordillera of Luzon is testimony to a remarkable culture, second to none in the Southeast Asian region. As for Mindanao, at the other end of the archipelago, an equally high degree of artistry has been manifest for centuries in woodcarving, weaving and metalwork.
However, the most shocking aspect of this lack of national pride, even identity, endemic in the average Filipino, is the appalling ignorance of the history of the archipelago since unified by Spain and named Filipinas. The remarkable stories concerning the Galleon de Manila, the courageous repulsion of Dutch and British invaders from the 16th through the 18th centuries, even the origins of the independence movement of the late 19th century, are hardly known by the average Filipino in any meaningful way. And thanks to fifty years of American brainwashing, it is few and far between the number of Filipinos who really know - or even care - about the duplicity employed by the Americans andSpaniards to sell out and make meaningless the very independent state that Aguinaldo declared on June 12, 1898. A people without a sense of history is a people doomed to be unaware of their own identity. It is sad to say, but true, that the vast majority of Filipinos fall into this lamentable category. Without a sense of who you are how can you possibly take any pride in who you are?
These are not oversimplifications . On the contrary, these are the root problems of the Philippine inferiority complex referred to above. Until the Filipino takes pride in being Filipino these ills of the soul will never be cured. If what I have written here can help, even in the smallest way, to make the Filipino aware of just who he is, who he was, and who he can be, I will be one happy expat indeed!
---------
My friend, a VSO volunteer in Mongolia forwarded the above message with this note:
some of you might have heard me in the past say thatthere's a big possibility that in 10 or so years time, mongolia will overtakephilippines in terms of economic growth and development. ..baka nga in 5 yearslang eh. you know they have this overwhelming sense of pride for beingmongolians, sometimes to a fault, that filipinos don't have. so where have oursgone? anyway, please read the article below. i think it's interesting. you may notagree to all the points made here by the author but if it makes us startthinking about them, then i think it's a good one. - margie
this article is from this site: http://stuartxchange.org/InferiorityComplex.html. check it out for comments/reactions to this article.
____________ _________ _________ __
The unedited article below was written below by an American friend, Barth Suretsky. This will still be edited but you will get the gist. I find his observations interesting. I hope this will make an impact on the Filipinos who read this article as I greatly lament the worsening situation of our country. - Frank Woolf, Vice President for Development, I-Quest Corporation
6th Floor, World Center, 330 Sen Gil Puyat Avenue, Makati City 1200, Philippines
Creators of WorldRoom, Tel: (632) 867 8460Fax: (632) 867 8077
____________ _________ _________ __
My decision to move to Manila was not a precipitous one. I used to work in New York as an outside agent for PAL, and have been coming to the Philippines since August, 1982. I was so impressedwith the country, and with the interesting people I met, some of which have become very close friends to this day, that I asked for and was granted a year's sabbatical from my teaching job in order to live in the Philippines. I arrived here on August 21, 1983, several hours after Ninoy Aquino was shot, andremained here until June of 1984. During that year I visited many parts of the country, from as far north as Laoag to as far south as Zamboanga, and including Palawan. I became deeply immersed in the history and culture of the archipelago, and an avid collector of tribal antiquities from both northern Luzon, and Mindanao.
In subsequent years I visited the Philippines in 1985, 1987, and 1991, before deciding to move here permanently in 1998. I love this country, but not uncritically, and that is the purpose of this article.
First, however, I will say that I would not consider living anywhere else in Asia, no matter how attractive certain aspects of other neighboring countries may be. To begin with, and this is most important, with all its faults, the Philippines is still a democracy, more so than any other nation in Southeast Asia. Despite gross corruption, the legal system generally works, and if ever confronted with having to employ it, I would feel much more safe trusting the courts here than in any other place in the surrounding area. The press here is unquestionably the most unfettered and freewheeling in Asia, and I do not believe that is hyperbole in any way! And if any one thing can be used as a yardstick to measure the extent of thedemocratic process in any given country in the world, it is the extent to which the press is free.
But the Philippines is a flawed democracy nevertheless, and the flaws are deeply rooted in the Philippine psyche. I will elaborate. The basic problem seems to me, after many years of observation, to be a national inferiority complex, a disturbing lack of pride in being Filipino.
Toward the end of April I spent eight days in Vietnam, visiting Hanoi, Hue, and Ho Chi Minh City. I am certainly no expert on Vietnam, but what I saw could not be denied: I saw a country ravaged as no other country has been in this century by thirty years of continuous and incredibly barbaric warfare. When the Vietnam War ended in April, 1975, the country was totally devastated. Yet in the past twenty-five years the nation has healed and rebuilt itself almost miraculously! The countryside has been replanted and reforested. Hanoi and HCMC have been beautifully restored. The opera house in Hanoi is a splended restoration of the original, modeled after the Opera in Paris, and the gorgeous Second Empire theater, on the main square of HCMC is as it was when built by the French a century ago. The streets are tree-lined, clean, and conducive for strolling. Cafes in the French style proliferate on the wide boulevards of HCMC. I am not praising the government of Vietnam, which still has a long way to travel on the road to democracy, but I do praise, and praise unstintingly, the pride of the Vietnamese people. It is due to this pride in being Vietnamese that has enabled its citizenry to undertake the miracle of restoration that I have described above.
When I returned to Manila I became so depressed that I was actually physically ill for days thereafter. Why? Well, let's go back to a period when the Philippines resembled the Vietnam of 1975. It was 1945, the end of World War II, and Manila, as well as many other cities, lay in ruins. (As a matter of fact, it may not be generally known, but Manila was the second most destroyed city in the entire war; only Warsaw was more demolished!)
But to compare Manila in 1970, twenty-five years after the end of the war, with HCMC, twenty-five years after the end of its war, is a sad exercise indeed. Far from restoring the city to its former glory, by 1970 Manila was well on its way to being the most tawdry city in Southeast Asia. And since that time the situation has deteriorated alarmingly. We have a city full of street people, beggars, and squatters. We have a city that floods sections whenever there is a rainstorm, and that loses electricity with every clap of thunder. We have a city full of potholes, and on these unrepaired roads we have a traffic situation second to none in the world for sheer unmanageability. We have rude drivers, taxis that routinely refuse to take passengers because of "many trappic!" The roads are also cursed with pollution-spewing buses in disreputable states of repair, and that ultimate anachronism, the jeepney!
We have an educational system that allows children to attend schools without desks or books to accommodate them. Teachers, even college professors, are paid salaries so disgracefully low that it's a wonder that anyone would want to go into the teaching profession in the first place. We have a war in Mindanao that nobody seems to have a clue how to settle. The only policy to deal with the war seems to be to react to what happens daily, with no long range plan whatever. I could go on and on, but it is an endeavor so filled with futility that it hurts me to go on. It hurts me because, in spite of everything, I love the Philippines.
Maybe it will sound simplistic, but to go back to what I said above, it is my unshakable belief that the fundamental thing wrong with this country is a lack of pride in being Filipino. A friend once remarked to me, laconically: "All Filipinos want to be something else. The poor ones want to be American, and the rich ones all want to be Spaniards. Nobody wants to be Filipino." That statement would appear to be a rather simplistic one, and perhaps it is. However, I know one Filipino who refuses to enter a theater until the national anthem has stopped being played because he doesn't want to honor his own country, and I know another one who thinks that history stopped dead in 1898 when the Spaniards departed! While it is certainly true that these represent extreme examples of national denial, the truth is not a pretty picture. Filipinos tend to worship, almost slavishly, everything foreign. If it comes from Italy or France it has to be better than anything made here. If the idea is American or German it has to be superior to anything that Filipinos can think up for themselves. Foreigners are looked up to and idolized. Foreigners can go anywhere without question.
In my own personal experience I remember attending recently an affair at a major museum here. I had forgotten to bring my invitation. But while Filipinos entering the museum were checked for invitations, I was simply waived through. This sort of thing happens so often here that it just accepted routine. All of these things, the illogical respect given to foreigners simply because they are not Filipinos, the distrust and even disrespect shown to any homegrown merchandise, the neglect of anything Philippine, the rudeness of taxi drivers, the ill-manners shown by many Filipinos are all symptomatic of a lack of self-love, of respect for and love of the country in which they were born, and worst of all, a static mind-set in regard to finding ways to improve the situation.
Most Filipinos, when confronted with evidence of governmental corruption, political chicanery, or gross exploitation on the part of the business community, simply shrug their shoulders, mutter "bahala na," and let it go at that. It is an oversimplification to say this, but it is not without a grain of truth to say that Filipinos feel downtrodden because they allow themselves to feel downtrodden. No pride.
One of the most egregious examples of this lack of pride, this uncaring attitude to their own past or past culture, is the wretched state of surviving architectural landmarks in Manila and elsewhere. During the American period many beautiful and imposing buildings were built, in what we now call the "art deco" style (although, incidentally, that was not a contemporary term; it was coined only in the 1960s). These were beautiful edifices, mostly erected during, or just before, the Commonwealth period. Three, which are still standing, are the Jai Alai Building, the Metropolitan Theater, and the Rizal Stadium. Fortunately, due to the truly noble efforts of my friend John Silva, the Jai Alai Building will now be saved. But unless something is done to the most beautiful and original of these three masterpieces of pre-war Philippine architecture, the Metropolitan Theater, it will disintegrate. The Rizal Stadium is in equally wretched shape. When the wreckers' ball destroyed Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, and New York City's most magnificent building, Pennsylvania Station, both in 1963, Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architectural critic of The New York Times, wrote: "A disposable culture loses the right to call itself a civilization at all!" How right she was! (Fortunately, the destruction of Pennsylvania Station proved to be the sacrificial catalyst that resulted in the creation of New York's Landmark Commission. Would that such a commission be created for Manila...)
Are there historical reasons for this lack of national pride? We can say that until the arrival of the Spaniards there was no sense of a unified archipelago constituted as one country. True. We can also say that the high cultures of other nations in the region seemed, unfortunately, to have bypassed the Philippines; there are no Angkors, no Ayuttayas, no Borobudurs.True. Centuries of contact with the "high cultures" of the Khmers and the Chinese had, except for the proliferation of Song dynasty pottery found throughout the archipelago, no noticeable effect. True. But all that aside, what was here?
To begin with, the ancient rice terraces, now threatened with disintegration, incidentally, was an incrediblefeat of engineering for so-called "primitive" people. As a matter of fact, when I first saw them in 1984, I was almost as awe-stricken as I was when I first laid eyes on the astonishing Inca city of Machu Picchu, high in the Peruvian Andes. The degree of artistry exhibited by the various tribes of the Cordillera of Luzon is testimony to a remarkable culture, second to none in the Southeast Asian region. As for Mindanao, at the other end of the archipelago, an equally high degree of artistry has been manifest for centuries in woodcarving, weaving and metalwork.
However, the most shocking aspect of this lack of national pride, even identity, endemic in the average Filipino, is the appalling ignorance of the history of the archipelago since unified by Spain and named Filipinas. The remarkable stories concerning the Galleon de Manila, the courageous repulsion of Dutch and British invaders from the 16th through the 18th centuries, even the origins of the independence movement of the late 19th century, are hardly known by the average Filipino in any meaningful way. And thanks to fifty years of American brainwashing, it is few and far between the number of Filipinos who really know - or even care - about the duplicity employed by the Americans andSpaniards to sell out and make meaningless the very independent state that Aguinaldo declared on June 12, 1898. A people without a sense of history is a people doomed to be unaware of their own identity. It is sad to say, but true, that the vast majority of Filipinos fall into this lamentable category. Without a sense of who you are how can you possibly take any pride in who you are?
These are not oversimplifications . On the contrary, these are the root problems of the Philippine inferiority complex referred to above. Until the Filipino takes pride in being Filipino these ills of the soul will never be cured. If what I have written here can help, even in the smallest way, to make the Filipino aware of just who he is, who he was, and who he can be, I will be one happy expat indeed!
---------
My friend, a VSO volunteer in Mongolia forwarded the above message with this note:
some of you might have heard me in the past say thatthere's a big possibility that in 10 or so years time, mongolia will overtakephilippines in terms of economic growth and development. ..baka nga in 5 yearslang eh. you know they have this overwhelming sense of pride for beingmongolians, sometimes to a fault, that filipinos don't have. so where have oursgone? anyway, please read the article below. i think it's interesting. you may notagree to all the points made here by the author but if it makes us startthinking about them, then i think it's a good one. - margie
this article is from this site: http://stuartxchange.org/InferiorityComplex.html. check it out for comments/reactions to this article.
How I Survived Kidnapping from UP & Six Economic Theories
By Robina Gokongwei-Pe, UP School of Economics
Sunday, May 25, 2008
(This is the speech of Robina Gokongwei-Pe posted at the UP School of Economics website. Robina was the guest of honor during their Recognition Day last April 25.)
Thank you very much, Prof. Dante Canlas, for your wonderful, wonderful introduction. Dean
Emmanuel de Dios — Dean de Dios was my professor of international trade way back in 1981, and it is not only because he gave me a grade of 1.5 that I agreed to be your guest speaker for today. It is hard for me to remember all my teachers in college, but Dean de Dios was someone I remembered very well, because I couldn’t imagine how one so young could be so brilliant. He was personally chosen by UP President Emerlinda Roman to be one of the speakers at the UP Centennial Lecture Series. He will speak on “Secular Morality and the University” on May 7 (plugging, plugging).
By the way, President Roman says that noted filmmaker Behn Cervantes keeps reminding everyone that it’s pronounced “centennial” with a short “e,” and not “centeeeennial.” Former
Dean Raul Fabella — it’s unfortunate that I missed Dean Fabella in college. I think he was in the US when I was a student. College Secretary Oggie Arcenas — Di ko rin inabutan si Prof. Arcenas, but then he must’ve been still in high school when I was at UPSE. When I saw him, I came to the conclusion that UPSE college secretaries are all boyish-looking because the college secretary during my time, Prof. Cayetano Paderanga, who incidentally taught me Econ 101, had the same features. (During my time, there were two cutie pies — Professsors Vito Inoferio and Cayetano Panderanga.)
Professor Dante Canlas, who taught me Econ 181. He was the only professor man enough to give me a grade of “1” even if I didn’t take his midterm exams. I will tell you about that later.
Professor Solita Monsod — the irrepressible Winnie Monsod with her sexy legs, miniskirt, booming voice, cigarette and iced tea in tow. Prof. Monsod taught us Econ 11 and Econ 101, and she explained everything so clearly it made economics less scary than I thought it would be. One morning during a class in the auditorium, she said, “Hey, who’s been spreading the news that this glass I’m carrying every day to class contains scotch? Of course I don’t bring scotch to class. It’s iced tea!”
Professor Manny Esguerra — Sayang, di ko naging teacher si Prof. Esguerra.
Professor Benjie Sandoval of the College of Business Administration — Benjie is executive director and my barkada at the UP Centennial Commission.
Tita Eden Bautista, former administrative officer at SE 101, who gave me my honorable dismissal in 1981 when I unexpectedly left UP in my senior year. If I need someone to remember where I placed all my things, it has to be Tita Eden. In fact, she is right now holding my handbag for me.
Joaquin Teotico, president of the UPSE Alumni Association; academic personnel, administration personnel, parents and graduates: Good afternoon.
I’m very happy to be back in the university that I never graduated from but wish I had. I am simply one lucky bitch to be speaking on your recognition day. Thank you to the UPSE Student Council, led by Sarah Adan and Jances Parado, for inviting me. In their letter, Sarah and Jances asked me to share my experiences and insights into being an instrument of meaningful change in society. And if could please bring in the concept of economics as an instrument of change and progress.
I gave Dean de Dios a call and said, “Dean, it’s a wonderful topic but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” and he told me, “Let’s have lunch with the students and talk about it.”
And so I did, and I met Sarah, Jances, and other student reps Mario Garcia, Nica Maloles and Jelain Reyes, plus Dean Fabella, Professors Arcenas, Monsod and Jack Teotico. I asked the students what they would really, really be interested in. They asked “Can you talk about what’s in store for us after economics?” The faculty said, “How about entrepreneurship?” or “How about matching economic theories with reality?”
And so I decided to put everything together, as chop suey as it may sound. Let me start with economic theories or concepts or terminology, whatever is the right way of calling them.
The first theory is the ubiquitous law of supply and demand. The reason I failed to graduate from UP was that I was kidnapped on the way to school in September 1981, and guess what, right on the day I was supposed to take Prof. Canlas’ exams.
Contrary to the 2000 movie Ping Lacson, Supercop, I was not jogging on the grounds of UP wearing a midriff when I got kidnapped. In the first place I didn’t have the body then to wear that outfit and never will. By the way, the actress who played me in the movie was Angel Locsin, and I hope you didn’t invite me to make this speech because you thought I looked like her. (Of course, deep inside, I wish I did.)
By the way, yes, it was then Lt. Col. and now Senator Ping Lacson who rescued me after seven days in captivity. He literally kicked and broke down the door, just like you see in the movies.
At that time, 1981, the kidnappers demanded P7 million in ransom money. Nowadays, any Tom, Dick and Harry would kidnap you for as low as P300,000. And that’s the law of supply and demand. The price has gone down to P300,000 because there are so many unorganized criminal gangs who are willing to take anything, and the victims are more willing to give since it’s not worth your life trying to haggle if it’s only P300,000.
You must be wondering whether the kidnappers were caught. Which brings me to the second theory: the theory of competitive advantage.
The mastermind was the son of a judge from Cebu. The judge from the lower court found him guilty, but when the case came up to the Supreme Court, the justices acquitted him. It’s only in the Philippines where you see the mastermind of a kidnapping gang get acquitted, and I wonder whether it has to do with his being the son of another judge. That is what you call competitive advantage.
The third theory is cost-benefit analysis. In 1989, we acquired the venerable national daily Manila Times from the Roces family. Sometime in 1998, my editors, who incidentally came from UP, wrote a headline that annoyed then President Joseph Estrada.
The story was about how the government was unwittingly led to sign an anomalous contract with IMPSA, a foreign group. Take note, this was in 1998, so if you’re thinking that this is ZTE, this is not ZTE.
Anyway, I didn’t even know what the story was all about, as my policy was to leave the editors to do their job while I handled the business side. I ended up getting sued by the president of the country, and for several nights, I thought hard about the future of the paper. As an economist would say, “Do a cost-benefit analysis.” The benefit was that it was a well-respected paper with a well-respected staff. However, the cost was that I was sure to die early, thinking about getting sued day in and day out. I didn’t want the staff to deal with a boss suffering from a nervous breakdown, and I didn’t want the readers to think that we were now forced to change the newspaper’s ideals to avoid any more lawsuits, so with a heavy heart, we sold the paper.
Running a well-respected paper was part of my efforts at being an instrument of meaningful change in society. So much for the effort. I figured, hay naku, magtitindera na lang ako.
Anyway, five years after, the government ended up suing that same foreign group, IMPSA, for leading them to sign that anomalous contract. By that time, I was already leading a less-turbulent life managing our retail group, and I left my sister Lisa to continue with publishing. She was smarter than me. She put up the highly successful Summit Publishing, which includes some staples such as Cosmopolitan and FHM. This is where I can say that when it comes to sex, the demand is always greater than the supply.
The fourth concept is about monopolies and oligopolies. A UP alumnus recently branded our family as oligarchs in the airline industry. In my economics textbook, an oligopoly happens when only a few players dominate the industry and set the price of goods unreasonably high. I do not know how we can be oligarchs if we give opportunities for people to travel more often by providing one-peso fares. Setting the price of goods with one-peso fares? Maybe he wants us to lower it to 50 centavos.
Let me go on to the fifth and sixth concepts, which I believe are the most important because they have to do with what you are going to do after graduation. Specifically, what you think you can do after obtaining an economics degree. In truth, you can do anything you want.
In fact, I asked the student reps over lunch why they majored in economics, and they said it was because they had the impression that you can do anything with an economics degree, and I told them they were right.
In fact, I wonder who among you were like me and decided to major in economics because you wanted something close to business but not take up business administration, and you thought that economics and BA were almost the same. It turns out that they’re related in some ways, but in most ways they’re totally different, and it’s a good thing I didn’t major in BA: I barely passed accounting.
My dad didn’t force me to take up BA after I graduated in high school in 1978 because he said that I would learn business anyway when I entered business, so I should go learn something else. If I had the choice, I would’ve gone into anthropology or veterinary medicine, but then it was uso among the Chinoys at that time that you either majored in pre-med because you were going to be a doctor, or in business because you were going to work in a bank. It seemed that Chinoys were headed to only two professions at that time.
I was the typical Chinoy who just followed where everyone went.
Anyway, back to my fifth and sixth theories — the theory of opportunity costs and the law of diminishing marginal returns. I know that when you start looking for a job, you will do two things — you will compare what each company is offering you, and you will compare your pay with your batchmates. Taking the first job offer that comes your way implies an opportunity cost of losing the chance of making more money. You wouldn’t want to lose that opportunity to make more money, would you?
Six months into the job, either one of two things can happen, or the two may happen at the same time. Either you will be thinking about whether this is the job you really want and you will keep on meditating about it to the consternation of your boss, or another company will try to poach you by offering better pay and benefits, or both.
Now take note that you belong to Generation Y, which the latest issue of The McKinsey Quarterly describes as people “born after 1980 — whose outlook has been shaped by, among other things, the Internet, information overload, and overzealous parents. HR professionals say these workers demand more flexibility, meaningful jobs, professional freedom, higher rewards, and a better work life-life balance than older employees do.
“People in this group see their professional careers as a series of two- to three-year chapters and will readily switch jobs.”
Emphasis on “readily switch jobs.”
So on to theory No. 6, the law of diminishing marginal returns. Being a member of Gen Y, you may have the habit of moving from one job to another, always grabbing the one that will pay more. You have the right not to miss out on these opportunity costs, but take note that if, by the time you’re 30, you show this three-page résumé listing that you had 12 jobs in eight years, you can be sure that you will experience firsthand the law of diminishing marginal returns. On your 13th job interview, you will be worth what your rate was when you were 22. No employer will dare hire you, because he thinks you will just run off again after six months.
Assuming (which, by the way, is an economist’s favorite word) that you decided to become an entrepreneur instead of seeking employment, then bravo, you made the right decision.
Entrepreneurship is a topic that Dean de Dios wanted me to talk about, but I told him that I wasn’t an entrepreneur. I am only managing one of my father’s businesses and using company money, not my money. But Dean said that, in any case, he knows more people who have spent all their fathers’ wealth and run the business into the ground much faster than it took me to build my father’s business. So, thank you for your kind words, Dean.
I am not an entrepreneur — it is my dad who’s an entrepreneur — but let me say something about it. I think the reason few people go into entrepreneurship especially when they come from top-tier schools like UP is that when they want to open their own taho cart, for example, people around them would tease them and say, “Ano ka ba, galing kang UP, magtataho ka lang!”
My answer to that is “E ano?” At least you have something you can call your very own.
You are not beholden to anyone but yourself, and yet you bring joy to society because you give people a product that they like. After all, big businesses started by being small once. Big business didn’t start out big: there’s no such thing.
Let me give you, though, one tip about running a business, and one more economic theory to go with it.
It’s about the theory of market competition. There’s such a thing as fair competitors, and there’s such a thing as desperate competitors. Both are troublesome, but you know fair competition is part of free enterprise. As for desperate competitors, you worry if this country is retrograding.
You were not born yet when the story of my kakambal na ahas who was half-woman, half-snake came out when we opened our second Robinsons Department Store branch in Cebu in 1985. My kakambal was supposed to be the source of our wealth as she laid golden eggs. She was supposed to be hiding under the floor of the fitting rooms, and every time a beautiful woman would enter, the floor would open and she would land right inside the mouth of my kakambal na ahas.
I have no idea who started this incredible story, but I have to tell you that some people believed it and even started staring at my legs to see if there were any signs of snakeskin. A few people still ask me about it, and I have to tell them na naging handbag na ho sa Robinsons Department Store.
Thank goodness there was no Internet yet at that time, or you would start receiving photos of me with a snake’s body and my kakambal na snake with a woman’s legs.
How do you deal with these dirty tricks? Nothing, just keep quiet and let the story fade away. Or better still, make a joke out of it.
And that is what you are going to face on a regular basis once you step out of school.
Someone will be out to kill your product, out to get your job, out to grab your boyfriend.
And if you’re an unlucky bitch, maybe all at the same time! But in the end, you will come out a stronger person, and better still, end up with a much better boyfriend.
Thank you and congratulations!
Sunday, May 25, 2008
(This is the speech of Robina Gokongwei-Pe posted at the UP School of Economics website. Robina was the guest of honor during their Recognition Day last April 25.)
Thank you very much, Prof. Dante Canlas, for your wonderful, wonderful introduction. Dean
Emmanuel de Dios — Dean de Dios was my professor of international trade way back in 1981, and it is not only because he gave me a grade of 1.5 that I agreed to be your guest speaker for today. It is hard for me to remember all my teachers in college, but Dean de Dios was someone I remembered very well, because I couldn’t imagine how one so young could be so brilliant. He was personally chosen by UP President Emerlinda Roman to be one of the speakers at the UP Centennial Lecture Series. He will speak on “Secular Morality and the University” on May 7 (plugging, plugging).
By the way, President Roman says that noted filmmaker Behn Cervantes keeps reminding everyone that it’s pronounced “centennial” with a short “e,” and not “centeeeennial.” Former
Dean Raul Fabella — it’s unfortunate that I missed Dean Fabella in college. I think he was in the US when I was a student. College Secretary Oggie Arcenas — Di ko rin inabutan si Prof. Arcenas, but then he must’ve been still in high school when I was at UPSE. When I saw him, I came to the conclusion that UPSE college secretaries are all boyish-looking because the college secretary during my time, Prof. Cayetano Paderanga, who incidentally taught me Econ 101, had the same features. (During my time, there were two cutie pies — Professsors Vito Inoferio and Cayetano Panderanga.)
Professor Dante Canlas, who taught me Econ 181. He was the only professor man enough to give me a grade of “1” even if I didn’t take his midterm exams. I will tell you about that later.
Professor Solita Monsod — the irrepressible Winnie Monsod with her sexy legs, miniskirt, booming voice, cigarette and iced tea in tow. Prof. Monsod taught us Econ 11 and Econ 101, and she explained everything so clearly it made economics less scary than I thought it would be. One morning during a class in the auditorium, she said, “Hey, who’s been spreading the news that this glass I’m carrying every day to class contains scotch? Of course I don’t bring scotch to class. It’s iced tea!”
Professor Manny Esguerra — Sayang, di ko naging teacher si Prof. Esguerra.
Professor Benjie Sandoval of the College of Business Administration — Benjie is executive director and my barkada at the UP Centennial Commission.
Tita Eden Bautista, former administrative officer at SE 101, who gave me my honorable dismissal in 1981 when I unexpectedly left UP in my senior year. If I need someone to remember where I placed all my things, it has to be Tita Eden. In fact, she is right now holding my handbag for me.
Joaquin Teotico, president of the UPSE Alumni Association; academic personnel, administration personnel, parents and graduates: Good afternoon.
I’m very happy to be back in the university that I never graduated from but wish I had. I am simply one lucky bitch to be speaking on your recognition day. Thank you to the UPSE Student Council, led by Sarah Adan and Jances Parado, for inviting me. In their letter, Sarah and Jances asked me to share my experiences and insights into being an instrument of meaningful change in society. And if could please bring in the concept of economics as an instrument of change and progress.
I gave Dean de Dios a call and said, “Dean, it’s a wonderful topic but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” and he told me, “Let’s have lunch with the students and talk about it.”
And so I did, and I met Sarah, Jances, and other student reps Mario Garcia, Nica Maloles and Jelain Reyes, plus Dean Fabella, Professors Arcenas, Monsod and Jack Teotico. I asked the students what they would really, really be interested in. They asked “Can you talk about what’s in store for us after economics?” The faculty said, “How about entrepreneurship?” or “How about matching economic theories with reality?”
And so I decided to put everything together, as chop suey as it may sound. Let me start with economic theories or concepts or terminology, whatever is the right way of calling them.
The first theory is the ubiquitous law of supply and demand. The reason I failed to graduate from UP was that I was kidnapped on the way to school in September 1981, and guess what, right on the day I was supposed to take Prof. Canlas’ exams.
Contrary to the 2000 movie Ping Lacson, Supercop, I was not jogging on the grounds of UP wearing a midriff when I got kidnapped. In the first place I didn’t have the body then to wear that outfit and never will. By the way, the actress who played me in the movie was Angel Locsin, and I hope you didn’t invite me to make this speech because you thought I looked like her. (Of course, deep inside, I wish I did.)
By the way, yes, it was then Lt. Col. and now Senator Ping Lacson who rescued me after seven days in captivity. He literally kicked and broke down the door, just like you see in the movies.
At that time, 1981, the kidnappers demanded P7 million in ransom money. Nowadays, any Tom, Dick and Harry would kidnap you for as low as P300,000. And that’s the law of supply and demand. The price has gone down to P300,000 because there are so many unorganized criminal gangs who are willing to take anything, and the victims are more willing to give since it’s not worth your life trying to haggle if it’s only P300,000.
You must be wondering whether the kidnappers were caught. Which brings me to the second theory: the theory of competitive advantage.
The mastermind was the son of a judge from Cebu. The judge from the lower court found him guilty, but when the case came up to the Supreme Court, the justices acquitted him. It’s only in the Philippines where you see the mastermind of a kidnapping gang get acquitted, and I wonder whether it has to do with his being the son of another judge. That is what you call competitive advantage.
The third theory is cost-benefit analysis. In 1989, we acquired the venerable national daily Manila Times from the Roces family. Sometime in 1998, my editors, who incidentally came from UP, wrote a headline that annoyed then President Joseph Estrada.
The story was about how the government was unwittingly led to sign an anomalous contract with IMPSA, a foreign group. Take note, this was in 1998, so if you’re thinking that this is ZTE, this is not ZTE.
Anyway, I didn’t even know what the story was all about, as my policy was to leave the editors to do their job while I handled the business side. I ended up getting sued by the president of the country, and for several nights, I thought hard about the future of the paper. As an economist would say, “Do a cost-benefit analysis.” The benefit was that it was a well-respected paper with a well-respected staff. However, the cost was that I was sure to die early, thinking about getting sued day in and day out. I didn’t want the staff to deal with a boss suffering from a nervous breakdown, and I didn’t want the readers to think that we were now forced to change the newspaper’s ideals to avoid any more lawsuits, so with a heavy heart, we sold the paper.
Running a well-respected paper was part of my efforts at being an instrument of meaningful change in society. So much for the effort. I figured, hay naku, magtitindera na lang ako.
Anyway, five years after, the government ended up suing that same foreign group, IMPSA, for leading them to sign that anomalous contract. By that time, I was already leading a less-turbulent life managing our retail group, and I left my sister Lisa to continue with publishing. She was smarter than me. She put up the highly successful Summit Publishing, which includes some staples such as Cosmopolitan and FHM. This is where I can say that when it comes to sex, the demand is always greater than the supply.
The fourth concept is about monopolies and oligopolies. A UP alumnus recently branded our family as oligarchs in the airline industry. In my economics textbook, an oligopoly happens when only a few players dominate the industry and set the price of goods unreasonably high. I do not know how we can be oligarchs if we give opportunities for people to travel more often by providing one-peso fares. Setting the price of goods with one-peso fares? Maybe he wants us to lower it to 50 centavos.
Let me go on to the fifth and sixth concepts, which I believe are the most important because they have to do with what you are going to do after graduation. Specifically, what you think you can do after obtaining an economics degree. In truth, you can do anything you want.
In fact, I asked the student reps over lunch why they majored in economics, and they said it was because they had the impression that you can do anything with an economics degree, and I told them they were right.
In fact, I wonder who among you were like me and decided to major in economics because you wanted something close to business but not take up business administration, and you thought that economics and BA were almost the same. It turns out that they’re related in some ways, but in most ways they’re totally different, and it’s a good thing I didn’t major in BA: I barely passed accounting.
My dad didn’t force me to take up BA after I graduated in high school in 1978 because he said that I would learn business anyway when I entered business, so I should go learn something else. If I had the choice, I would’ve gone into anthropology or veterinary medicine, but then it was uso among the Chinoys at that time that you either majored in pre-med because you were going to be a doctor, or in business because you were going to work in a bank. It seemed that Chinoys were headed to only two professions at that time.
I was the typical Chinoy who just followed where everyone went.
Anyway, back to my fifth and sixth theories — the theory of opportunity costs and the law of diminishing marginal returns. I know that when you start looking for a job, you will do two things — you will compare what each company is offering you, and you will compare your pay with your batchmates. Taking the first job offer that comes your way implies an opportunity cost of losing the chance of making more money. You wouldn’t want to lose that opportunity to make more money, would you?
Six months into the job, either one of two things can happen, or the two may happen at the same time. Either you will be thinking about whether this is the job you really want and you will keep on meditating about it to the consternation of your boss, or another company will try to poach you by offering better pay and benefits, or both.
Now take note that you belong to Generation Y, which the latest issue of The McKinsey Quarterly describes as people “born after 1980 — whose outlook has been shaped by, among other things, the Internet, information overload, and overzealous parents. HR professionals say these workers demand more flexibility, meaningful jobs, professional freedom, higher rewards, and a better work life-life balance than older employees do.
“People in this group see their professional careers as a series of two- to three-year chapters and will readily switch jobs.”
Emphasis on “readily switch jobs.”
So on to theory No. 6, the law of diminishing marginal returns. Being a member of Gen Y, you may have the habit of moving from one job to another, always grabbing the one that will pay more. You have the right not to miss out on these opportunity costs, but take note that if, by the time you’re 30, you show this three-page résumé listing that you had 12 jobs in eight years, you can be sure that you will experience firsthand the law of diminishing marginal returns. On your 13th job interview, you will be worth what your rate was when you were 22. No employer will dare hire you, because he thinks you will just run off again after six months.
Assuming (which, by the way, is an economist’s favorite word) that you decided to become an entrepreneur instead of seeking employment, then bravo, you made the right decision.
Entrepreneurship is a topic that Dean de Dios wanted me to talk about, but I told him that I wasn’t an entrepreneur. I am only managing one of my father’s businesses and using company money, not my money. But Dean said that, in any case, he knows more people who have spent all their fathers’ wealth and run the business into the ground much faster than it took me to build my father’s business. So, thank you for your kind words, Dean.
I am not an entrepreneur — it is my dad who’s an entrepreneur — but let me say something about it. I think the reason few people go into entrepreneurship especially when they come from top-tier schools like UP is that when they want to open their own taho cart, for example, people around them would tease them and say, “Ano ka ba, galing kang UP, magtataho ka lang!”
My answer to that is “E ano?” At least you have something you can call your very own.
You are not beholden to anyone but yourself, and yet you bring joy to society because you give people a product that they like. After all, big businesses started by being small once. Big business didn’t start out big: there’s no such thing.
Let me give you, though, one tip about running a business, and one more economic theory to go with it.
It’s about the theory of market competition. There’s such a thing as fair competitors, and there’s such a thing as desperate competitors. Both are troublesome, but you know fair competition is part of free enterprise. As for desperate competitors, you worry if this country is retrograding.
You were not born yet when the story of my kakambal na ahas who was half-woman, half-snake came out when we opened our second Robinsons Department Store branch in Cebu in 1985. My kakambal was supposed to be the source of our wealth as she laid golden eggs. She was supposed to be hiding under the floor of the fitting rooms, and every time a beautiful woman would enter, the floor would open and she would land right inside the mouth of my kakambal na ahas.
I have no idea who started this incredible story, but I have to tell you that some people believed it and even started staring at my legs to see if there were any signs of snakeskin. A few people still ask me about it, and I have to tell them na naging handbag na ho sa Robinsons Department Store.
Thank goodness there was no Internet yet at that time, or you would start receiving photos of me with a snake’s body and my kakambal na snake with a woman’s legs.
How do you deal with these dirty tricks? Nothing, just keep quiet and let the story fade away. Or better still, make a joke out of it.
And that is what you are going to face on a regular basis once you step out of school.
Someone will be out to kill your product, out to get your job, out to grab your boyfriend.
And if you’re an unlucky bitch, maybe all at the same time! But in the end, you will come out a stronger person, and better still, end up with a much better boyfriend.
Thank you and congratulations!
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