The New Year 2019 holds a lot of promise — if Filipinos get rid of even just one frailty of character — hypocrisy. When Filipinos stop being hypocrites, then real work towards real goals can begin.
Hypocrites are generally people who lack empathy. They believe that it is their birthright to be sole judges of what is right or wrong or even what is good or “evil”. Because of that sort of thinking, they can preach one thing to a general audience and then, in private or amongst cronies, do or say things opposite to what they preach. They apply their personal judgement selectively to suit their personal convenience.
But Filipinos have signed up to a system of government that applies a quantitative measure of success to its participating politicians — popularity. Thus, a politician’s success or failure depends on how popular he or she is and this is determined by how many people voted for or approves of him or her. Whether a person is good or bad, saintly or “evil” does not matter. If she is popular, she wins.
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In this regard, it is an utter waste of time being a hypocrite. The sort of hypocrisy “thought leaders” of the Opposition engage in, for example, is exhausting and time consuming. Pretending to be good and trying to be not “evil” takes a lot of effort. All you need to be to succeed in a democracy is to be popular. And as is evident with the way things are going for the Opposition today, you don’t need to fake goodness to win an election. You just have to be real and authentic.
So, hopefully in 2019, a few lessons coming out of the past year 2018 will have been learned. The most important one is that, in democratic politics, hypocrisy does not pay.
Webmaster of Get Real Philippines