I believe in government. Governments sprouted side-by-side with civilization to create order, as did belief, religion, and the study of natural sciences. The first “government officials” were those who displayed qualities of being ahead, for example, hunters of extraordinary prowess, priests, shamans, or those supposedly ordained by a god—pharaohs, emperors, prophets, etc. Ultimately, governments arose out of our need to make sense of life: social life had to lead somewhere, hopefully to a better end, or else, what’s the point of living with one another?

Government—coming in various forms—is human life’s answer to that. It is essentially an idea that a group of people, a “nationality” (an idea that sprouted much later), agrees upon and pools their time and resources (i.e. taxes) into so that, as a big(ger) group, they are able to surmise solutions to problems they could not solve as mere individuals. Simply put, big problems require big solutions.

We replicate this idea and delegate responsibilities in smaller sizes in the companies where we work, in the institutions we rely on, in the teams that we meet with from Mondays to Fridays, in the families we share the house with every single day. But for every nation, there is no bigger structure than government. In our case, the Philippine government is a more massive and powerful institution than SM, Ayala, Filinvest, San Miguel, and Vista Land combined. At least, it should be.

My father was in government from 1974 to 2017, roughly 43 years, climbing up the ranks from being a Project Officer at the Development Academy of the Philippines to become one of the Senate’s Deputy Secretaries. Both my parents, my five siblings, and I studied in UP and some of us have proceeded to teach in UP, too. Four of us have worked in government. We have, perhaps, as a family, felt government on more auspicious terms than most.

For our family, the idea of nation is inseparable to everyday life. When I was little, breakfasts had the un-harmony of my mother preparing powdered milk, utensils touching plates, the AM radio on, and my father, commenting on the state of affairs while he read different newspapers, comparing the different angles reporters and editorial writers took on a single issue. He wouldn’t spare words and would say it as it was to my mother, he didn’t mind if he were clashing with an Angara, a Villar, a Guingona, an Estrada, a Sotto, a Lapid, or a Pacquiao, at 5:20 in the morning.

Again, our idea of government was big. It put food on our table and sent us to school, perhaps in the same way that it did for ten million other Filipinos. But what our parents also boxed us in was that government was not these persons, per se, but an idea—one that is alive—created in the hopes of making the lives of its constituents, Filipinos, better.  Of course, this would be challenged, one, by the bigwigs at work Papa would be at odds with, and, two, by the politicians who wouldn’t fit Mama’s Catholic judgment, like Erap Estrada juggling his wife and girlfriends with jueteng money. It was always like that in our household: government was not immaculate because it was ultimately ran by mortals. At this age, with the six of us, siblings, past 30, we would sometimes be on each other’s necks.

This idea of government has changed, in depth and breadth, laterally and lengthwise, from my years growing up in the 90’s to today. Apart from the fact that it grew bigger and bigger with the population it serviced growing exponentially, government became more and more real for me with TINs being issued, ITRs being filed, licenses being applied for, etc. etc. Parallel with this was coming into a consciousness to societal forces and the material conditions which are inextricably tied to government: state subsidies for education, land titling laws that affect the lives of farmers and subdivision developers, regulations on jeepney fares, new one-way re-routings in Makati, Manila, and Quezon City, etc. etc.

Instead of government being a colorless version of Voltes V, out to fight monsters from outer space, the picture began to look more like a network of neurons and synapses—interconnected and in-motion, dependent on other systems at play. This nervous system was, of course, where ideas came to form and action and, in this system, there were also uncooperative cells, cells of degrading quality, cells that needed help, entire organs that need transplanting, etc. Government, I realized, was complex. And because of that, government was beautiful if only it worked the way it should and served the people it should serve.

What’s unfortunate today is that this idea of government seems to be stuck in a weirded-out episode of Voltes V for many, including many government officials and employees themselves. Many hold a view of government that is one-dimensional or robotic. I don’t know whether to credit this to something as meta as the Law of Entropy or an educational system that has worked with CSR arms for too long, but what we see online now is a one-dimensional view of government, somewhat comparable to a charitable organization whose services are only given to those who “deserve” it, in other words, the rich and powerful.

Worse, just as it has been for the past 3 years under Duterte, any view that is contradictory to the administration’s view—or even those that run parallel but hardly intersect with theirs—are deemed uncooperative, even rebellious. I hesitate to use the term “authoritarian” with Duterte because his administration possesses neither authority nor creativity the way an “author” should. More fitting, perhaps, is to call it a dictatorship. And while in the realm and vacuum of ideas a dictatorship shouldn’t be automatically wrong, especially since there are advantages to a dictatorship during disasters, the sad thing about Duterte is that he dictates towards oblivion where there are no clear directions, no, there are contradictory directions, and the orders coming from him is that exactly for that—chaos.

The idea government has of itself today, especially in the time of COVID-19, is one that is largely and solely for the creation of order. But with the problem as big as COVID, the solution is not merely a medicine or an antidote but systems as big government. And in applying government’s fullest powers, the processes will necessarily be more complex than keeping loyalties with the party, setting up impromptu barricades and imprisoning curfew violators, pissing on the virus, and eating bananas. Government now needs to be nuanced, needs to be porous, needs to listen, because it’s clear that it doesn’t know everything there is to the virus, and how Filipinos—in our precarious, congested, heavily policed and poverty-stricken condition—react to it.

All the more is it important to call out government’s mistakes now because Duterte himself is not even functioning as his own style of governance requires him to. He is not thinking straight. He is not thinking in terms of systems. He does not have the military or his cabinet moving towards a singular direction. As much as we would like to be alert and in a disaster mindset, it’s difficult with a government that hardly has itself coordinated. There’s a way out of this but it would require clear-headedness, bigger brains in which to fit bigger ideas, and a flexibility to move faster than the crisis does.

Perhaps, they can start by postponing the tax deadlines. Surely, everything else will follow. ***