Analysis and Opinion
By Joe America
No, no, I don't mean the Filipino bakery. I mean the 19th century fairy tale in which a girl named Goldilocks, like a thief in the daytime, enters the forest home of a bear family and tries the chairs, looking for the one that fits best (too big, too little, just right), then samples the porridge, seeking the one that is perfect temperature (too hot, too cold, just right), then moves to the bedroom in which she searches for the perfect bed (too hard, too soft, just right).
Wiki: "Author Christopher Booker characterises this as the 'dialectical three' where 'the first is wrong in one way, the second in another or opposite way, and only the third, in the middle, is just right'. Booker continues: 'This idea that the way forward lies in finding an exact middle path between opposites is of extraordinary importance in storytelling.'"
But in life, the center path is generally as imaginary as is the fairy tale. And demanding it is destructive. Michele Obama made this point in her speech to the US Democratic Convention recently. She was warning people at the extreme left that trying to move the center their direction by criticizing other Democrats would weaken the unity required to beat Donald Trump.
The goldilocks syndrome illustrates how people striving honorably for their own goals can be destructive to their own best interests. The discipline of "letting go of my interests" to achieve a bigger success is hard to grasp, and hard to do. Well, successful business executives have no trouble defining the feeling that attaches to letting go because they experience it every time they delegate. They must trust that others will succeed even if they do things differently. It's hard to sit back and trust.
But it is necessary.
It is easy to see, here in the Philippines, how destructive it becomes when people can't let go of their own interests to achieve a bigger goal. The Aquino presidency was a masterclass of people unable to let go, unable to trust, and unable to win, in the end.
They voted for Rodrigo Duterte over Mar Roxas.
They hurt themselves, in the end. They could not stand imperfection. It was easier for them to back a complete fiction, that of a decent Duterte, than a known but "flawed" truly decent man, Mar Roxas. They preferred a perfect gangster over a flawed good man.
Our petulant demands are a problem holding the Philippines back. It's a universal mistake. It's everywhere. Few people seem to have the removed and dispassionate ability to do the hard stuff. To let go. To accept mistakes made with good intent. To trust CHARACTER, not drive for the impossible ideal that a President is there to do it "just the way we want"..
Being president is the most complex job in the Philippines. The hardest job. And generally thankless.
The craziness is that every Filipino thinks they know how to do that job better.
No. No, they don't.
They know how to whine. To be the crab. To pose that they have superior data.
This is endlessly destructive. It throws out good character for being imperfect, and it delivers bad character, guaranteed to be destructive.
Filipinos need to become less crabby and more circumspect.
Good will never be perfection. But it will always be good.
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Photograph from ABS-CBN article "Mar Roxas says to 'learn, work, love some more' after election loss"
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