Towards Asking My Own Questions

Many people would like to believe that reality is simple. You just have to have the right intentions and right decisions will follow. So, Humanity would be neatly divided between those who are forces of good and those who are forces of evil. So, let’s all be on the side of good and be good and everybody will be happy, right? Wrong. Let me change that last word in the previous sentence: “No, I don’t agree; I don’t think so!”

Whenever I declare somebody’s statement to be “correct” or “true.” I have to be precise with what I actually mean. If I owned the laptop I’ve been using, and someone says I own it. I can be precise and say “He is right!” But what if the other guy expressed an opinion, a judgment? Could I simply say, “He is right!” Of course, I could say that and I actually often do. But in such times I am not speaking precisely, because what I should really be saying is “I agree!” (No, I won’t deliberately say “I agree with him, therefore he is right. I only fall into that line of reasoning whenever I forget that I am not a proclaimer of what is right and wrong for the whole world to listen and “be guided accordingly”; I am only a proclaimer of my own opinions that agree or disagree with other peoples own opinions.

You may say I nitpick now on a whole lot of semantics and rhetorics, and I can go along with such judgement (“Yes, you’re right!” hehehe!) but if I don’t go into self-questioning at least once in a while, I might actually forget and hear (mistake!) my voice as “speaking the divine last word” as the ultimate judge of right and wrong without even being anywhere near the Biblical Tree of Knowledge.

People are often very passionate and overconfident about our own personal or organizational opinions and there’s nothing wrong with that, unless we forget that no matter how passionate one is or how “sure” s/he feels, it is still his/her personal view, albeit perhaps a well-studied opinion of a proven genius! Many agonizing hours have been spent in fierce quarrels over whose personal view is the real “divine judgment” in the contention.

Recently, I expressed my vehement disagreement with a political party’s decision and its apparent premise and said without any qualifying words: “treason is on a higher plane than corruption!” Many expressed agreement with me. But to be complete and precise about it, I really should have said: “I strongly feel that they should have considered treason to be on a higher plane than corruption!” and carry no less passion and sense of confidence in the validity of my assertion. Or those who read me may have taken it as that, anyway. And it could have had the same effect as intended. Anyway…

A question asked in earnest should be followed by a question mark. In oral conversations, the question mark is of course invisible but it should be perceptible in the intonation, body language and overall behavior of the one articulating the supposed question. In many instances, however, it “looks” more like a question followed by a very angry platoon of screaming exclamation points (“Why!!!!”). This is often understandable but unfortunate.

In a many cases, the mouth can only be pronouncing the word “Why” but the mind is trying to accommodate at least two thoughts: “Oh no! It can’t be! This would have very disastrous effects! This angers me greatly” and “I wonder why it happened” and “Oh no! It can’t be! This would have very very disastrous effects! This angers me so much I could explode!” So, while the curious part gets articulated in the word why, the anger part builds up fast that in the few nanoseconds it takes the mouth to pronounce the monosyllabic word the question mark has transformed into an angry battalion of exclamation points. Now, the person is not prepared to hear any answer, because the question had been forgotten after getting drowned in a wave of judgments. Having no reverence for the unknown and bieng only terrified by it, we often have the tendency to dismiss as irrelevant what we still don’t know and proceed to judge because we For clarity of mind, therefore, we should remind ourselves to only ask questions with question marks – if we are still asking we do not know the answer yet; and if we are this angry, we might never know or understand it. And the ones being asked may have the tendency to overreact to the overreaction… so there goes your earnest conversation!

Many questions are asked and passionately debated where at least one side of the debaters tend to dismiss the nuances that figure significantly in the positions of the other. In debates, this is deliberately done; in earnest discussions this happens unintentionally. For the sake of all involved, the quality of the outcome of the argument or earnest discussion, simple statements should not be simplistic sentences – nuances ought to be looked into, understood well, and weighed judiciously, whether or not it appears at all in the net resulting summary of the analysis. Usually, the nuances that are considered in the decision-making are assumed by one side to be “obvious to all” and assumed by the other side as non-existent.

It takes time to find out exactly what nunces played in the decision-making and exactly how heavily they were considered and why. Again comes the charge of “nitpicking on petty considerations” and the more warhawkish among us grow impatient—“what are we waiting for? Where’s the rage? why are we not yet in a quarrel mood yet of ‘punishing mood’? Why are we not forming a lynch mob yet?” Those who are not afraid that a lynch mob can be formed and agitated to success may have the tendency to deny that any problem exists.

In the context of human tendencies so described, people in a misunderstanding tend to proceed more to the worsening of it rather than to solving it for the sake of peace and synergetic strength that a group would need to do its work or at least to exist in harmony. Some people feel that as long ay they can blame other people for a conflict situation within a supposedly friendly community they have no problem. Some others tend to thicken the wall between the contening sides by recruiting all invoved to take sides and be part of worsening the problem, instead of acting as living bridges of communication and dialogue and lead to resolution and reconciliaton.
Having reminded myself of all the foregoing points, and declaring my openness to be reminded of more, I feel ready now to proceed to ask my own questions on a wide-ranging conflict of views (that has spawned highly emotional judgments).

The nuances I will bring up concern the decisions already made and will still to be made by members of the Akbayan Party-List, the Liberal Party, the People’s Primaries, the Green Convergence for Safe Food, Healthy Environment and Sustainable Economy, Partido Kalikasan, and their respective members. I expect to finish my analysis for uploading by tomorrow, before I am scheduled to start actual work on a new book project on Philippine history. We live in interesting, historic times.

Since no one within the pro-people community is to be punished for murder or rape or plunder, although some have disappointed others for an ill-advised decision perceived to support de facto one unrepentant (so far) leader of the treasonous ratification of JPEPA, we can all afford to reject the temptations of haste and of the blame game, and instead join in a collective search for truth and wisdom. All the lessons, learned in mostly difficult circumstances, can be cherished as learnings for all, in the people’s historic march to higher levels of maturity and capability in contending comprehensively effectively with trapo politics. Trapo politics is the current local partner of indirect colonialism in keeping our country and people in control and in dire poverty.
to the busiest ones among us. i apologize for the length of this message.

thankful cheers!

ding reyes
of subic, zambales

(for some more points on the healthy conduct of discourse on anything, please check out the article on Ethical Discource linked to the opening page of http://lambat-liwanag.8m.net