Pinoy elites and the fallacy of crab mentality

This is not to give any impression that I just could not move on from the food-bitching Agness Walewinder.  But let me start with her, or rather, from what transpired after I wrote about her in my most recent blog article entitled “Pinoy pride, food-bitching and the grateful foreigner” that appeared on this site, if only to set the context for my hunt for a bigger sinner.  

While ordinary Pinoys who were offended by what she wrote about Pinoy food, which she later changed to Pinoy “street” food, easily agreed with what I said in my blog, some of my friends in academe chastised me for it in private, and some readers criticized me in public through their posts. 

They argued that I should have just ignored the food-bitching Polish, since she is entitled to her own opinion.  Others even took her side and pointed out to me that I am just too sensitive about the truth. And one even said that I am no different from Agness, since I am just playing to the gallery, and in doing so, I demeaned my academic pedigree.  For some, my defense of Pinoy food culture has tainted my academic rationality and led me to descend to the world of the hoi polloi, the unwashed, and the “jologs.”  While they may not have said it to my face, they nevertheless gave me the impression that in writing a blog article against Agness, and her predecessor Claire, I have betrayed my allegiance to that great academic tradition of dispassionate scholarship and detached objectivity embodied in academic journal articles.

As if I care.

You see, we in academe are always measured in the rubric of academic publications.  Our be-all and end-all is to publish in refereed journals, preferably international and with high-impact.  And there is even a manner by which academic journals are rated according to their impact factor, which is a quantification of how often their articles are cited by other scientists.  This is academic elitism at its finest.

However, to an ordinary person, the true meaning of high-impact is to have reached as many people, that what you wrote would have seriously engaged them, and that it changed their lives and their perspectives.  I could not understand why a mere citation by another academic, whose career goal would probably be less to change the world, but more simply to get tenure and move up the academic ladder, would be more privileged.

I am not going to delude myself that my blog article would have dramatically changed people’s lives. However, I am conscious of the fact that it was read by people numbering to over 42,000, and has engaged them enough for them to share it.  This number humbled me, as I know deep in my heart that it has even surpassed by thousands the citations that all my academic articles have received in my entire academic career, and I am sure that the latter will never reach that number even after the day I die.

The criticisms I get are just symptoms of a systemic malaise that afflicts many of our intellectual and social elites, and is even worse in the cases of those who try so hard to be like them—the “pa-intelektwal” and the “pa-sosyal.” To get a sense of this malaise, one just has to conduct content analysis of the comments of those who consider the rage felt by ordinary Pinoys against the food-bitching Agness as evidence of misplaced Pinoy nationalism.  There is a tendency for them to demean the ordinary and the popular.  

In the face of the fact that many ordinary Pinoys agreed with me, and have joined the chorus of those who condemned Agness Walewinder, virtually burning her as a food-bitching witch, one can only but wonder how detached our intellectual and social elites are from the ordinary and the everyday.

I am now reminded by another controversy which revealed this seemingly-detached form of elitism.

In the after-math of Typhoon Yolanda, another woman became the object of the wrath of the ordinary Pinoys.  The only difference is that unlike Agness who criticized the Pinoy’s food, Korina Sanchez got the ire of many, and she was pilloried in cyberspace, for criticizing a foreign journalist, Anderson Cooper, who has effectively put to task the performance of PNoy’s government in his reports.

Korina angered a citizenry who was already dissatisfied with the slowness of the response of the government, of which her husband is an official.

Thus, one can rightly argue that the Pinoy’s anger is not necessarily always aimed at ungrateful guests. The Pinoy is not always defensive about everything Filipino.  Korina got the raps from cyber-citizens despite her defense of our government for the simple reason that the Pinoys considered the reporting of Anderson Cooper as credible, and looked at her stance as simply emanating from her self-interest to defend her husband.  

To the ordinary Pinoy, Anderson told the truth when he revealed the lack of organized response, and when he lamented the slowness of the relief to typhoon Victims.  The pain he felt about the agony of a mother losing all her children and forced to sleep in the streets besides their rotting and uncollected bodies have become powerful symbols which an equally angry public easily related to and felt affinity with.

And to the ordinary Pinoy, Korina’s dismissive statement that Anderson Cooper did not know what he was talking about reeked of elitism.  

It added fuel to the fire in the hearts of angry Pinoys, a fire that consumed her, seen in the angrier tweets, shout-outs and status posted in the internet.  Almost in unison, cyber-citizens simply pointed out what for them was obvious—that Anderson reported from the field, and that Korina was in an air-conditioned booth in her radio station; that Anderson is married to his profession and works for CNN that has no personal stake on the issue, and that Korina is married to Mar Roxas who is a government functionary as the secretary of the DILG, one of the main agencies at the fore-front of disaster relief efforts.

Amidst the popular anger aimed at Korina, a strong condemnation emerged from a section of the intellectual elites that went the other direction.  They aimed their criticisms at Anderson.  

This was seen in the many blogs and comments written by some academics and intellectuals both in the country and those in diaspora, who while not defensive of Korina but nevertheless took Anderson to task and accused him, and his cohorts in the international media, of being guilty of parachute journalism.  They criticized the alleged mercenary attitude of these global journalists, when they quickly and artificially embed themselves in troubled lands to get a scoop to be aired in their networks, only up to such time that they deliver the marginal increases in their overnight ratings.  They will quickly depart once the news is no longer worthy.

Indeed, the news industry is guilty of this, and it is not only the foreign networks.  Even local networks send their correspondents to cover breaking stories whose life will be only until the rating meter still ticks upwards.

But Anderson Cooper’s critical reporting, and his genuine gratitude to a people who, in his words, taught him and all the rest of the world how to live, provided an image that resonated with the Pinoys, as it also touched not only the donors who were galvanized to help, but also further exposed the ineptness of our government and our political elites.  To the ordinary Pinoys, Anderson was believable because he told the truth and, despite the transitory nature of his being in communion with us, genuinely showed affection and affinity with our pain, and has collectively personified our anger.

Hence, the issue of parachute journalism was totally an alien discourse to the ordinary Pinoy.  It only made sense among the academic intellectual elites.  They who had the space to problematize the legitimate presence and right of an outsider to represent our pain and anger, using a post-colonial theoretical lens, from the comforts of their secured tenure in Universities, or the safe distances of their exile as part of the Filipino intellectuals in the diaspora.  While not directly critical of the ordinary peoples, these elitist views by academic intellectuals were designed precisely to deflate what the ordinary Pinoys have accepted and are celebrating.

This brings me to a painful realization—that our social and intellectual elites, a class to which I belong, have the tendency to push down and delegitimize the speech, meaning systems and social constructs of the ordinary and the everyday Pinoy.
 
One of the elitist ways by which we dismiss and demean the ordinary and the lowly classes is to accuse the non-elites who rant against the elites as guilty of crab mentality.  Having an “isip talangka” is a derisive and critical commentary on how ordinary Pinoys behave in relation to upward mobility. In the world of the “talangka,” the crabs that dwell below would pull down those at the top, the upwardly mobile and those who have the ability to climb up the social ladder—that is, the elites and the rising neo-elites. 

In my incessant defense of the ordinary and the everyday, it is easy to brand me as part of the crabs whose mentality pulls society down.  In fact, somebody from the learned community has already accused me of harboring an anti-elitist and anti-intellectual stance, of being overly critical and obstructive, of being too angry.  I am now psycho-analyzed by some colleagues in the field as probably having a terrible life, or a bad childhood, as if only miserable people can become social critics.

This will not stop me from accusing those who deploy the metaphor of a crab mentality against the non-elites as people who don’t know what they are talking about.  They are even guilty of slandering the poor crustacean.  

I mean, the reference to crabs is not even warranted by evidence.  Try placing a bunch of unrestrained crabs in a “kaing” or bamboo container.  Far from pulling each other down, all if not most of the crabs will manage to escape from the container.  If indeed we have to grant potency to crab mentality as a negative social construct to refer to the flaws of those at the lower ladders of our social hierarchy, all the crabs should have remained inside the “kaing” and no one should have gotten out.  The fact that all or most of them escape should be reason enough for us to reject as a fallacy this metaphor used to criticize the behavior of the non-elites.

The elitist dismissal of the ordinary voices who criticized Agness, and the elitist attacks against Anderson Cooper to deflate the adulation he earned from grateful ordinary Pinoys, clearly reveal that it is not the lowly and those who dwell at the bottom of the social ladder who pull down the upwardly mobile.  In fact, it is the intellectual and social elites that push down and dismiss the views of those who dwell at the bottom, or those who dare climb up and challenge them.  This is shown by elitist views that tend not only to be out of synch with the way the masses think, but also have the tendency to delegitimize the views of the ordinary, and those who criticize them, as irrational and invalid.

Indeed, the rage of ordinary Pinoys is sometimes aimed at the elites.  It is true that ordinary “crabs” may pull down those who are already at the top or climbing at the top. But this is not in the context of envy, or of sheer malice, as the fallacious metaphor of crab mentality suggests.

In our social imaginations, where patron-client relationships, no matter how problematic, are prevalent, ordinary Pinoys look up to their socially and economically better-off relatives and kababayans as sources of social security during times of need.  A peasant looks up to the landlord and a worker looks up to the capitalists as sources of social stability.  

In the domain of politics, ordinary citizens expect their political elites to serve their interests.

These are akin to crabs looking up to those who are able to climb up the social ladder to pull them up as well,  The clients do not pull down the patrons, on whose fortunes they rest their own betterment.

And it is only when the upwardly mobile fails to deliver what has been promised, or when elites become abusive, or when those who succeed forget their affinity with those they are sworn to protect and help, that they will be targeted by the ordinary Pinoys.  And the rage will be as strong, if not stronger, as that aimed at ungrateful and food-bitching foreigners. 

Thus, the ordinary Pinoys aimed their rage at Korina Sanchez for the simple reason that, rightfully or not, she was seen as representing the voices of those who sided with a government who failed them.  Korina became the face of the political elites who betrayed the trust of those at the bottom they were supposed to pull up in times of crisis.  Anderson Cooper simply made a powerful point of comparison to reveal this glaring breach of trust.

This is not crab mentality. 

This is pure and unadulterated form of resistance, of righteous anger, if not revenge, by the abandoned and the betrayed.



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of this website.