A sense of entitlement?

Posted on | February 24, 2010 | No Comments

For some, the power motive is so consuming that the usual restraints on behavior posed by norms of morality or prescriptions of religion are readily set aside. For such power-obsessed individuals, even an intensely Catholic education in an elite school offers only permeable boundaries to what is moral or ethical. Actually, for these some, the very “eliteness” of certain educational environments tends only to reinforce the sense of entitlement that characterizes their ambition to acquire political power.

The above thought was triggered by a particular e-mail currently being blasted all over the Internet featuring the subject line “Who owns a house like this?” and consisting of exterior and interior photos of a gaudily opulent mansion. The purported answer to the subject question is given in a heading that reads, “This Mansion is in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA and belongs to Senator Manny Villar of the Philippines.” In truth, the mansion is a rather well-known one located in the Bel-Air area of Los Angeles that is often used by Hollywood filmmakers for movie and TV shoots. The very same mansion has, in the past, been variously identified as belonging to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, Nigerian military dictator Ibrahim Babangida, and several other infamous political figures.

Because the e-mail had been circulated before to attack Mugabe, Musharraf, Babangida, and others, producing the e-mail blast against Mr. Villar required no special expertise. One simply clicked “Forward” on, say, the Mugabe e-mail, changed the solitary line identifying the supposed owner of the subject mansion, entered the e-mail addresses of the desired recipients, and clicked “Send.” A vicious calumny would then have been produced and sped on its way to the computer screens of Filipino voters all over the world. The wonders of technology can propagate sin at the speed of light.

Apparently first sent by one Florante Castillo to the members of his Ateneo class of 1964 and then propagated by one Lito Demonteverde who seems part of a group calling itself “Ateneo for a better Philippines,” the slanderous e-mail blast is only one of several like it now wending their way through the Internet cloud. The sheer number of such e-mails — and text messages — that many of us can certify to getting every day points to an organized effort to demolish Mr. Villar by heaping slander upon slander on him in the apparent hope that at least one of these will stick in the public mind. That this effort may be spearheaded by people who apparently believe that their elite education gives them license to be free and easy with the truth in the interest of achieving “a better Philippines” is profoundly disturbing.

It is openly spoken about among the Jesuit-educated Ateneans that the alumni have been mobilized to elect only a “true-blue Atenean” — Liberal party presidential candidate Mr. Benigno Aquino III is one — for president. There is nothing wrong in this. What does pose a problem, however, is if some rabid alumni interpret this as a special mandate from God to pull out all the stops in order to acquire temporal power for themselves. The Jesuit motto is, after all, “Ad majorem Dei gloriam” (“For the greater glory of God”) and, perhaps, these misguided alumni might feel so intensely like God’s chosen that they consider any actions they take as sanctioned by God to promote His “greater glory.” In the name of God, all sins are permissible?

Well, at least one Atenean, bless him, doesn’t think so. What actually struck me about this particular “Who owns a house like this?” e-mail was that another member of the said “Ateneo for a better Philippines,” Mr. Domingo Guevara, Jr., felt compelled to send an e-mail apology to all those to whom he had forwarded the malicious e-mail, immediately after he discovered the e-mail to be untrue. In his e-mailed apology, he wrote, “I apologize for the INACCURATE & FALSE information I forwarded a few minutes ago…. I am correcting myself not because I support Villar but I wish to be FAIR TO ALL CONCERNED…. My apologies to the Villar camp (emphasis his).” By the way, being “fair to all concerned” is part of the Rotary Four-Way Test and Mr. Guevara is a prominent Rotarian. That he invoked that rather than the Jesuit motto might be significant.

One must admire Mr. Guevara for his quickness in admitting a mistake and for his courage in standing up for the principles of truth and fairness even when this would not advance the interests of his own preferred candidate. His behavior contrasts with that of the apparent original senders of the e-mailed calumny, Mr. Castillo and Mr. Demonteverde, who, as far as I know, have not expressed any contrition for transgressing the 8th commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

I have no doubt that most Ateneans (like my many Atenean friends) share Mr. Guevara’s convictions on this matter. What I do hope for, though, is that those belonging to the group “Ateneo for a better Philippines” do not generally subscribe to the notion that calumny and slander are acceptable sins if these give the elite beneficiaries of a Jesuit education the power to save the country from sinning peasants like the rest of us.

The elite sense of entitlement is, of course, hardly exclusive to the graduates of a particular school. In recent days, though, the Ateneo-educated Aquino seems to betray his hacendero-class origins and appears to expect special treatment from the poor working classes. He has, for example, gone out of his way to castigate a working newsman for a perceived bias in moderating a presidential candidates’ forum when all the newsman seems to have been guilty of was not praising Mr. Aquino lavishly enough. Mr. Aquino has also been pouting to the media that everything including the proverbial kitchen sink is being thrown at him when, in reality, the only things that have been thrown at him relate to the dearth of accomplishments in his public life and to the Hacienda Luisita case, both of which are legitimate campaign issues.

One hopes that it is not this sense of elite entitlement that might have caused Mr. Aquino to — possibly — authorize or condone the “dirty tricks” campaign being viciously mounted now by certain groups against the main obstacle to his political ambitions. If he had given his approval for such activities — even via a wink and a nod — then we voters must realistically reassess the true extent of his self-proclaimed virtue.

Strategic Perspective — By René B. Azurin

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