The Philippine Congress is composed of millionaires, according to recent news. They’re there either to make big bucks or to protect what they already have. And add to it.
It’s no surprise to the people that many members of both houses of Congress here are rich beyond any ordinary man or woman’s wildest dreams. Even though the ethos is changing, Filipinos are still disturbingly tolerant of government officials looting the public treasury.
We still have a feudal society where people have a patriarchal attitude toward their public officials, whom they consider as their elders, and so grant them privileges like they’re lords of the manor with, as the stylish pundit and writers’ mentor Raul S. Gonzalez liked to say, expanded droit du seigneur perks. Meaning that public officials can take what they want as long as they leave the crumbs for the rest of us serfs to feast on.
(The dictionary limits the seigneur’s privilege to taking a vassal’s bride on her wedding night but the term is a metaphor for broad abuse.)
There’s nothing new with the elected branch of government consisting of wealthy people. This kind of setup has been around for hundreds of years around the world.
Society’s elites have ruled the world from time immemorial. He who has the gold rules. Money talks. Money dictates. Money controls. Money has the final say. Money makes things go. Money makes the world go round. Money rules.
Things have changed in many parts of the world. Egalitarianism has neutered and neutralized the traditional rulers, the lords-of-the-manor types, the old boys who had held sway over their domains for hundreds of years. In Europe, monarchical rulers have given way to more democratically installed governments. In the United States, democracy has more or less prevailed.
It’s only in feudal societies where the moneyed still have the people’s cojones in their grip, their necks in tight nooses, their lives in virtual hock forever with only a snowball’s chance in hell of extricating themselves from dismal poverty.
It’s only in feudal setups, where democracy exists on paper only, where money is almighty and the moneyed are gods. That is why such societies are called the Third World, defined by the dictionary as the aggregate of the underdeveloped countries of the world.
That is where we are, lumped in that dubious category of nations, the Third World. Because our country is still ruled by money, raw power and opportunists. The people at large have very little say.
The progression goes like this: power in government is held by rich people; those on the outside find ways to get on the inside. But before long the idealistic outsiders get corrupted and learn the ways of their “elders” in how to get rich in government. And so they too become part of the elite. And become part of the problem.
Meanwhile, the rest of society remains outside looking in, laboring daily to try to make both ends meet. Some do barely; others continue to marinate in poverty. Still others opt out of traditional society and, with idealism intact but misguided, join extra-constitutional movements on either side of the ideological spectrum through which they can carry out their advocacies, often violently.
The traditional rich and the pretenders to elitism and nouveau-riche-ness fight tooth and nail to preserve their grip on power and privilege. They keep anarchists and genuine reformers at bay, either by coopting them by buying them off, or by keeping them where they are, on the outside looking in.
The movements on the fringes of society that seek to demolish the elite have not succeeded over decades, in some countries centuries. The elite is simply impregnable because they have the means to purchase the resolve of even the most idealistic. The elite is like a wall that is impervious to penetration. It can’t be defeated because it yields to no one or nothing. It’s indestructible.
The elite has no other ideology but money. Look at the greed of people partaking of the current pork-barrel scam money here even though they’re already redundantly wealthy. They’re insatiable.
(A grand-scale scam here currently involves legislators allegedly misappropriating their pork-barrel funds and pocketing portions of it through a syndicate led by a woman named Janet Lim Napoles. One of her daughters lives in the United States and she used to boast on Facebook about their riches and ritzy possessions.)
Money is what keeps the elite in place. It’s what keeps it in power. Like the flame to the moth, it entices and seduces even those who are out to defeat and demolish it.
There are reformers and do-gooders here who want to change and reform society and the ways things are done. For the better. But they fail because they’re up against an impregnable wall. The wall of the elite.
The Philippine Congress is a rampart of that wall.****
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