Karangalan, People Power and Positive Images of the Future

Editorial
Nicanor Perlas, 19 February 2005

This week the Philippines celebrates EDSA 1, globally known as People Power, the spontaneous peaceful revolution in 1986 that toppled the Marcos dictatorship and restored some semblance of democracy in the country. EDSA 1 is also the precursor to 2001 People Power 2 that removed a corrupt Philippine President from office.

Both, however, missed the opportunity to launch a genuine peaceful societal revolution that could have radically transformed the festering economic, oppressive political, and regressive cultural conditions that characterizes significant aspects of Philippine society today. The gains of People Power ultimately dissipated and traditional politicians continued to steer the country towards further decline.

The Philippines clearly needed to a new kind of people power. The new People Power would be sustainable. It would not fade away after the change in government. It would have profound impacts on the structure and direction of Philippine society.

Karangalan and A New Approach to People Power
The Karangalan idea emerged as a response to this challenge. It aims to mobilize People Power using a new approach. People Power would arise not by focusing on what Filipinos collectively do not like. One can stop what one does not like, a dictatorship, for example. One cannot create the future, however, on the basis of widespread criticism. For this will merely make people focus on the past. Furthermore, when the source of agitation is gone, fragmentation would rule since people would mobilized around a common enemy instead of a common vision of the future.

Instead of a negative approach, Karangalan aims to create People Power around what works, around what is already moving towards integral sustainable development. Karangalan knows that the creative powers of a nation are unleashed when one draws out and builds upon the positive experiences of a people. This approach also engages the long term commitment of its citizens because it draws upon higher powers that often remain latent in the human being. Time and time again, many studies have demonstrated the power and effectiveness of creating positive social change on the basis of a positive self-image and vision of the future and not a problem-solving approach that narrows the focus of one's creative energies.

Sometimes we hear cynical comments that the poor cannot eat visions or positive images of the future. Such comments point to the lack of sophisticated and updated psychological and social understanding. All behavior is mediated by the ideas and the internal images of the future we carry within. Human beings create their own realities through symbolic and mental processes, the products of which are ideas and images of the future.

When we have an inadequate idea about poverty eradication options, then we are doomed to carry out inadequate and ineffective efforts. Our idea about ourselves and our approaches becomes self-fulfilling, for better or for worse. The impotence of many decades of programs and initiatives in reducing poverty is testimony to the proliferation of inappropriate images and approaches to the future.

The Strategic Role of Positive Images of the Future
Many historical thinkers and doers understood the power of image to create the social future we are either doomed to realize (if based on self-defeating images) or are blessed to make happen (if based on visionary and realistic positive images). William James, one of the most respected psychologists of the 19th century already observed: "Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help you create the fact."

This statement of James echoes an earlier statement of Plato, whose ideas are widely known to have created the foundations for Western civilization. Plato wrote: "We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."

Modern scientific research bears out the wisdom of these insights. Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize for brain research in 1980. David Cooperrider, the founder of Appreciative Inquiry, has this interesting observation about the findings of Sperry and his colleagues.

"The "consciousness revolution" of the 1970s is well documented and represents, argues Nobel Laureate Roger Sperry (1988), more than a mere Zeitgeist phenomenon; it represents a profound conceptual shift to a different form of causal determinism. According to the mentalist paradigm [of neuroscience], mind can no longer be considered the opposite of matter. Mental phenomena, this paradigm contends, must be recognized as being at the top of the brain's "causal control hierarchy" whereby, after millenniums of evolution, the mind has been given primacy over bioevolutionary (Darwinian) controls that determine what human systems are and can become. In direct contradiction to materialist and behaviorist doctrine, where everything is supposed to be governed from below upward through microdeterminist stimuli and physiochemical forces, the new mentalist view gives subjective mental phenomena a causal role in brain processing and thereby a new legitimacy in science as an autonomous explanatory construct. Future reality, in this view, is permeable, emergent, and open to the mind's causal influence; that is, reality is conditioned, reconstructed, and often profoundly created through our anticipatory images, values, plans, intentions, beliefs, and the like. Macrodeterminisim or the theory of downward causation is a scheme, asserts Sperry, that idealizes ideas and ideals over chemical interactions, nerve impulse traffic and DNA. It is a brain model in which conscious, mental, and psychic forces are recognized as the crowning achievement of some 500 million years or more of evolution." (Emphasis added.)

Thus it is of great consequence how we view the future. Thru the image, the future becomes a causal agent of the present, not only in the very neurophysiology of our bodies but also in societies at large.

We can see this clearly in the speech of Martin Luther King. His "I have a dream" speech galvanized US society and propelled it into removing legal and institutional barriers against racial discrimination. This speech and the whole civil rights movement in the United States became one of the key foundation stones that have created and propelled more than a dozen social movements to change the societal landscape of the United States of America.

Images of the Future and Nation States
Cooperrider has another important observation to make.
"As various scholars (for instance, Markley, 1976; Morgan, 1987) have noted, the underlying images held by a civilization or culture have an enormous influence on its fate. Ethical values such as "good" or "bad" have little force, except on an abstract level, but if those values emerge in the form of an image (for example, good = St. George, or bad = the Dragon), they suddenly become a power shaping the consciousness of masses of people (Broms and Gahmberg, 1983). Behind every culture there is a nucleus of images—the "Golden Age," "child of God," "Enlightenment," "Thousand-Year Reign of Christ," or "New Zion"—and this nucleus is able to produce countless variations around the same theme."

Decoding Copperrider's observation, we can see that the creation and fate of the different nation states of the world was not a product of blind luck or chance. Nation states arose on the basis of the images of the future that their founding social movements had of them.

The State of Israel, for example, was not, in its inception, a political act. It was first a widely held cultural image of the future of a people scattered throughout the world. This image was held and cherished for hundreds of years. Although significantly modified by the geopolitical considerations of world powers at that time, this cultural force was the basis for the ultimate establishment of the State of Israel after World War II.

The state and the economy are ultimately the end products of a cultural revolution that finally found expression after years of struggle. This can easily be said of the birth, among others, of the State of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, present day South Africa, and even the birth of the Filipino nation. Visionaries like Rizal and Bonifacio first imagined the possibility of a nation, the Philippines, which then became a reality after decades of struggle.

Images of the Future and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
Given these facts, it is not surprising to learn the conclusions of Fred Polak who studied the dynamics of 1500 years of Western civilization. According to Cooperrider, Polak concluded that "the positive image of the future is the single most important dynamic and explanatory variable for understanding cultural evolution. . . . As long as a society's image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive."(Emphasis added.)

It therefore becomes important to understand how positive images of the future can successfully emerge in a society. Polak provides important guidelines for those who would seek to create a better society.

1. The societal atmosphere must be conducive for a free discussion on positive images of the future.

2. In the modern language of the multiple intelligence paradigm, cognitive intelligence is not enough. Emotional, moral and spiritual intelligence must also be used to construct the positive images of the future, thereby, pinpointing the key role of arts and spirituality, among others.

3. The strength of a culture can be gleaned from the intensity and energy with which the images of the future are discussed, disseminated, implemented and evaluated.

4. The positive image of the future is a self-fulfilling force. It influences and promotes the kinds of policies and programs we adopt in society as a whole.

5. When the highest aspirations of the people die, then the culture of that people also die. When the culture declines, then society as a whole deteriorates. It is therefore important to challenge acts of betrayal of the higher aspirations of the country, whether this is done by political, economic, or cultural interests.

6. Connected to #5, it is important to prefigure the future that we want to have by articulating and living it now, even if one is surrounded by current practices of decline. For history has shown that almost all the advances societies have made in the past were first articulated in some writing, often viewed as utopian given the current standards of a society. Prefiguration was a powerful strategic approach carried out by social movements in the 1970s and 1980s, movements that have changed the social landscape in their various societies.

Tragedy of the United States of America
There is book called, "The Empire of Reason" written in the 1980s. It clearly demonstrated that the United States of America was the product of positive images of the future that were first envisioned in Europe and then realized in the New World. The author observes that the European Enlightenment imagined the possibility of a new kind of society and the founding fathers of the USA based their constitution on this positive new image of the future. In a sense, Europe envisioned America. The people in America realized it.

It is part of the on-going tragedy in the USA today that the present Bush administration is slowly eroding the very foundations of the founding image of the USA. If Bush is to learn from history, he must rediscover the positive vision and role of the USA and stop advancing its counter image that he is inaugurating with unusual force. For in the end, he will not be presiding over a global empire that he wants to create. Instead he will be propelling the USA to its ultimate decline on the stage of world affairs.

Karangalan and the Future of the Philippines
The collective message of psychology, philosophy, neurophysiology, history, political science, sociology, and other fields of scientific endeavor, as can be gathered from the above discussion, is clear. Ideas are not ephemeral. They are constitutive of the world. Positive images of the future can revolutionize societies and power the rise of civilizations. Ideas create the societal institutions and structures which either advance or impede the pursuit of the higher ideals of humanity.

If we want to achieve positive action, we must have a positive image of the future, of what we want to create. And one way to do this is to create a collective imagination out of the many existing achievements Filipinos have as a people. This is the basis of the Karangalan approach.

When Karangalan and related initiatives successfully galvanize this collective will for good, then no power in Philippine society can withstand this collective force of transformation. Then a better Philippines will rise, energized by the current trials which are forging new organs for visioning positive images of the future and realizing them in practice.


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