This article challenges Eleanor Pinugu’s Phil Daily Inquirer’s commentary: WHAT HINDERS CREATIVITY, June 24, 2024 (https://opinion.inquirer.net/174649/what-hinders-creativity).
PDI published Edwin’s response to Ms. Pinugu’s article ( https://opinion.inquirer.net/175085/the-invisible-gorilla-a-metaphor-for-phs-regressive-path ) on July 11. Below is the complete version of my response.
The invisible gorilla that Eleanor Pinugu talked about in her latest commentary, “What Hinders Creativity,” PDI, June 24, 2024, an experiment that illustrates “a selective brain attention” is an apt metaphor in the state of the country’s regressive trajectory.
Ms. Pinugu’s assertion that this experiment “shows that preconceived ideas about how the final answer should look impair our ability to consider other possibilities.” She is one of many who consistently does not address the “elephant in the room”, one that runs this country by an ideology that weighs us down like a grounded child. Like the invisible gorilla, her “mind is overly focused on one thing and overlooks something else”— her words. Either it is that, or she is, in my opinion, another casualty of the entrenched ideological dead end of religion, the antithesis of creativity, a “possibility killer.”
Our vaunted attachment to religion has been a death blow to our natural innovative capacity and vision. The PISA results show that even our young people are beginning to exhibit signs of falling into the abyss of religious paralysis, unable or unwilling to find answers beyond what the padre says on a Sunday morning. Generations before have consigned them to be submissive and accepting. Deep in his hippocampus, a voice says, “Stifle yourself!”
As a boomer, I have gone through 14 years of Catholic education, and critical thinking skills never got into the mix. It has never been in the ruling class’s interest ( aka, government ) and Church to stoke the citizenry with clear and rational thinking. Like our nutritionally challenged school children, our institutions have long suffered the “stunting” complications of a “fixed mindset” instead of a growth mindset— a matter that Ms. Pinugu’s article pointed out. What she did not tackle was the source of this ongoing national decrepitude. I believe it all started when Magellan planted a cross on the shores of Cebu in 1521.
Here’s what I wrote in the PDI in 2017: Religion: “A dying Dinosaur.” Our historical preoccupation with religion and the Church’s influence on our values have disadvantaged us. Obedience, subordination, and subservience are hallmarks of organized religion and the antithesis of modern economic success. It is no accident that we make good clerks, caregivers, and domestic helpers. But it won’t create a Samsung or a Tesla or make us a significant player in the coming AI industrial revolution if we are constantly bombarded with sinning and self-doubt.
The fear-mongering rubbish drilled by the Church in our childhood lasts a lifetime. This oppressive environment has made us risk-averse, timid and ambiguous. Self-reliance and resourcefulness continue to erode as we constantly delude ourselves into “Hail Marying” through economic downturn and poverty. After 500 years of living, breathing and eating religion, shouldn’t we be in a better situation than we are now? We can’t even claim a high moral stature with our religiosity. The long-lasting impact of religious indoctrination underlies our perennial laggard position in the region. Folks, it’s a delusion if you have yet to notice.
Why do we fall to a single spiritual narrative and immediately “take it to the bank”? We take all kinds of time, listen to all views, and study the opposition on the most mundane issues but would not spend a minute to question what the padre is saying. He tells you, “You are going to hell,” and without batting an eyelash, you are down on your knees, asking for forgiveness. Think about it: how did humanity cease to be rational at the mere mention of spirituality? Why do we behave so differently as soon as Joe puts his “collar” and a giant cross around his neck?
Fear and intimidation work best at the most vulnerable time of our lives. Childhood has always been the time, across all cultures, when religious indoctrination begins and is then sustained every step of the way. Families and communities nourish a singular belief until we are totally inside a bubble. Humanity only saw an alternative view outside sectarianism in the Age of Enlightenment.
Three hundred years since is no match to an entrenched spiritual mindset thought to have begun in 3500 BCE. We are going to be on this religious fixation for a long time until the forces of logic and reason take over this memetic predisposition. Established orthodoxies ( Vatican ) and theocracies ( Iran ) are hard at work trying to hold onto a worldview that is now severely challenged by secular forces. None of us and the immediate coming generations will be around to see a complete secular transformation throughout the world, but the West is on the cusp of a trend that is taking root in the rest of a progressive world.
So now, besides showing our youth’s illiteracy, Pisa also indicates a fallback on our intuitive affinity for ingenuity, one of many adverse consequences of dogmatic overexposure. Absolutism and fixed religious ideology are a bane to creativity.
Our movers and shakers are tone-deaf to the realities of a sectarian influence. Many things that we dislike in the state of our country are a cumulative fallout of generations of our preoccupation with an afterlife, an “intersubjective reality” at best. Corruption, the timidity of the masses, and inbred dynastical politics continue to plague our chance for a brighter future. Our childhood attachment to theological fantasies has tenaciously clung to our consciousness. We cannot seem to learn from the ongoing volatility of the intolerant Abrahamic-inspired Middle East. If you think the continuing Palestinian-Israeli war started on Oct. 7, you have not paid attention and have no clue about the 2000-year history of religious hostilities. One can only hope we don’t start one with our Muslim brothers in the south.
It takes seeing the elephant in the room and witnessing a populace determined to rid itself of this albatross to bring us to a forward-thinking mindset. Are we too dense to learn from Scandinavia, or now, how about a secular Vietnam?
