This is, after all, a society that still looks up to clowns like Vice Ganda. Is it then any surprise that the “issues” that pervade in the “national debate” are no different to the ones that trended ten — even twenty — years ago? Wars on corruption and congressional inquires are the same circuses that entertain Filipinos, why not the same cross-dressing bozo, right? There is lots of money to be made selling Filipinos mediocre products!
Meanwhile a cancer of society worse than any Jose Rizal could have imagined is hollowing out the Philippines from the inside. It isn’t corruption. It isn’t criminality. It isn’t authoritarianism. It is none other than Filipino stupidity. Entire generations of Filipinos’ intellectual faculties are being stunted within the very institutions that are entrusted to nurturing young brains. It’s not as if all this upcreep of stupidity comes as a shock to anyone. Three years ago, the Inquirer Editor had already pointed out how “lack of proper nutrients in children’s diet, especially during the early critical years, hampers their mental and physical development.”
The Philippines ranked 111th out of 199 countries in the latest WPR measuring IQ scores defined as the “quality of education and resources available to people in their local geographic region.” It noted that areas with lower IQ scores were typically poorer and less developed, specifically in education. The Philippines scored 81.64, several percentage points below the average range of 85-115. Japan topped the list, while Nepal took the bottom. Among members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, only Laos (No. 114) and Indonesia (No. 130) ranked lower than the Philippines.
Filipinos are also amongst the shortest people in the world and, in southeast Asia, are taller than only the Timorese and Laotians. When one considers that brain function and bone and muscle growth (contributing to height) are among the most energy-intensive physical processes of the body, it does not take a rocket scientist to do the mathematics surrounding the progressive shrinkage of every aspect of the stature of Filipinos.
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Filipinos are hungry and sick. They lack essential nutrients in their formative years to provide the surplus of energy required to grow both physically and intellectually at the above average clip needed not just to catch up with their global peers but also to compete at international standards. Worse, they are being raised on poor knowledge products — substandard education, mediaeval values, and mediocre cultural capital. We see this in the brain-dead national “debate” that shapes Filipinos’ politics — the root cause of a national dysfunction underpinned by mind numbing sameness over decades of “democracy”.
Presidents (whoever bozo Filipinos choose in the coming elections) won’t save Filipinos. Only Filipinos can save Filipinos. When Filipinos stop their tingala mentality towards personalities and rely more on thinking like modern homo sapiens will their fortunes change. The alternative is to go on producing more and more poor stunted Filipinos over the coming decades. The choice is clear.
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