Our weak nationhood makes defeating corruption a herculean task

IN his recent best-selling books “Sapiens” and “Nexus”, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari expounds his central thesis: That mankind’s ability to cooperate in large numbers, even if they do not know or meet each other as in primitive societies, is because they share stories, fictions, which include religions, legal systems and even economies.

“These create a nexus of meaning that binds societies together,” Harari noted.

Zoom in to the most important level of social organization in the modern era, the nation. Harari’s insight was earlier advanced by Benedict Anderson, the late Anglo-Irish political scientist, historian and scholar of Southeast Asia, in his 1983 pioneering book, “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.”

Anderson defines nations as “imagined communities” because members of a nation will never know most of their fellow citizens, yet they feel a deep sense of belonging and connection. “This sense of unity is constructed through shared myths, symbols, language and media rather than direct personal relationships,” Anderson explained.

For the United States, many would claim that its nexus is the story, that the US was established by British and other Europeans escaping the oppression of King George III’s monarchy, and that this made America the champion of freedom and democracy all over the world in this era. The story is also that landless, poor Americans bravely conquered the Wild West, the areas beyond the northeast and became rich, creating the myth that America is the land of the American Dream. That may not be the US reality (which is that it is really the modern Roman Empire), but Harari and Anderson’s point is that Americans deeply believe this story, which forms the glue for their nation.

China’s, the Communist Party’s Mao-led decades of the masses’ struggle and eventual victory against the Japanese aggressors and against the “reactionary” Kuomintang; Vietnam similarly by the Vietnamese Communist Party’s victory, first against the French and then the US and their “running dogs” of the South.

Unfortunately for us, we were robbed by the US of such a revolution-based defining moment that could have been a powerful nexus binding us as a nation, when it stopped with ruthless force our forefathers’ momentum for independence started against the Spanish colonizers.

Nexus

What emerged as our nexus, our “imagined community” was basically of two dimensions, one created by our first colonizer, the Spanish, and second by the Americans.

The first dimension was that Filipinos are only superficially citizens of the Republic but subjects of the Kingdom of God, of the Roman Catholic fiefdom. It was the Spanish who laid the foundations for such a myth; their colony here only had a skeletal military force, as the friars managed to frighten the natives into submission with their tales of hell. The central infrastructure in all towns, still obvious to this day, is the church, with the smaller municipal government building nearby. Indeed, one term for the nation — sambayanan — a portmanteau of pagsamba and bayan, is a term referring to the faithful’s worship at the church every Sunday and during Catholic Church holidays, practically the only time when they assemble and see almost everyone in the town.

The second dimension is the “little brown brother myth,” which the American rulers etched in our minds, that we were replicating in this part of the world the US system of democracy and capitalism, the American way of life.

Since we are America’s little brown brothers, many of us have migrated to the surrogate mother, the US, for Filipinos a seamless transition in terms of language and culture. Among my high school class at the Ateneo, the educator of the elite, half have migrated to North America, while the other still think like sacristans, and require a Mass devoted to the Virgin Mary in our reunions.

Root

This is the real root of corruption, the lack of sense of belonging to a real nation, without the nexus glue, so much so that even senators and congressmen do not see anything wrong in their ransacking government coffers.

I discussed last Wednesday the successes of China, Singapore and Hong Kong in eradicating corruption, which was the result of strong authoritarian rulers (Mao, Lee Kuan Yew, the British governor, respectively) creating a compressive system to make corruption unattractive.

This is clear if we also look at our fast-rising nearest competitor, Vietnam. Its story as an ancient nationalistic people defeating the two mightiest of modern empires, France and the US, is the cultural basis propelling its dynamic economy.

I was simplifying though in my Wednesday column: an essential dimension of at least China’s and Singapore’s success in eradicating corruption was their people’s very strong sense of nationhood and community. We don’t have that now. Former president Rodrigo Duterte was moving toward creating a strong sense of nationhood — his latest meme for this has been “I’m not a Filipino for nothing.” That makes defeating corruption a herculean, near-impossible endeavor.

The Americans as they did in their colonization of the country in the 1900s and the communists unfortunately have succeeded, through Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s capture of power, in aborting our creation of a strong sense of nationhood. Perhaps Duterte’s daughter can.

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I have put on hold my series on the five lies on which Benigno Aquino III and Marcos Jr.’s hostile stance against China are based, as I hope Antonio Carpio, who manufactured and disseminated these lies, will respond to my claims. At any rate, I have already written extensively on the two remaining lies, that the arbitration panel invalidated China’s sovereignty claims in the South China Sea and that China’s nine-dash line is the basis of its territorial assertions, in my book “Debacle,” available at amazon.com and Fully Booked bookstore. On the arbitration, readers may access, among several other columns, “The US-PH hoax on 2012 South China Sea arbitration,” published on July 11, 2025; and for the nine-dash line, “Understanding the nine-dash phantom line” of March 15, 2023.

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Our weak nationhood makes defeating corruption a herculean task
Source: Breaking News PH