“Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forward.”
-- Soren Kierkegard, Danish philosopher and Lutheran Theologian
Kierkegard’s words can be taken to mean that if we as a people are not living positive lives forward, it can be that we are not aware of how our dark colonial past took away the wind from beneath the wings of a free people. I don’t know how Philippine history is taught these days but if Ferdinand Magellan is still the discoverer of the Philippines, if the Americans are still our liberators and if Marcos Sr.’s martial law was good for us, as Junior has succeeded in making many believe, these could explain why we find ourselves in the doldrums.
History is always written by the victors never by the conquered. As an African proverb puts it: “Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” From being unquestioned owners of our country, we got snagged into becoming subjects first to the King of Spain, next to the President of the US and finally to local political dynasties. Early in the process, we lost our self-esteem to powerful foreign conquerors, a mindset that is now keeping us from standing up to present-day hunters, the ruling political dynasties. We were the hunted, yet until today we continue glorifying the hunters with our submission and subservience to their schemes.
Catholic Spain taught us that all authority comes from God. The King of Spain’s authority, therefore, came from God and thus must be obeyed. We surrendered our country to the God of the colonizers. When we became a sovereign nation, we accepted the same kind of rule by a rich and powerful elite because, as woven into our subconscious, their authority comes from God.
In the late ‘60s, Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator, published “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” The opposite of a banking or regurgitative education, this pedagogy liberates previously colonized peoples like us who acquired the self-negating culture of the oppressed. Freire’s pedagogy rids us of the awe and consequent subservience to those above us. It enables us to stand up to those in authority as equals and to move forward as free and self-directing individuals. Above all, it stops us from glorifying the hunters.
We don’t have a liberating education, one that does not accept as normal and God-given society’s division into a rich minority ruling the poor majority. This was the social condition the colonizers left behind and that political dynasties are now perpetuating with a banking education. We need an education that gives birth to a new consciousness, one that allows us to actively participate in the promotion of just governance.
Our rulers are not likely to liberate us from our colonial mentality. On the contrary, it is to their advantage to promote a culture of subservience to God-given (?) authority. (The Catholic Church is not of much help either in debunking this fallacy). It falls on us to liberate ourselves and stop glorifying the hunters. To live our lives forward we need to understand how foreign “hunters” shattered our self-image. Only from that understanding can we move on to develop the new consciousness of a liberated human being.