The Futility of Caring: Philosophical Ramblings on Apathy and the Elections

I have consciously and intentionally refrained from publicly commenting or expressing my sentiments to an electoral cycle, which I do think is frankly pointless. I even doubt if I will even show up to the polls. And this is for a reason; the less our politics is transformative and the more we take these conditions that we have as unalterable, incapable of changing our lives and be sterile as a consequence, the more it becomes entertainment for people. And this is nobody's fault: we have not received the memo that our engagement within this sphere is largely performative, often for the benefit of the true kingmakers that drive most of the campaigns of the candidates that we are enchanted by. And for a lot of us, this venture is a matter of replacing who is in charge, and that's the end of it, with the same valence and repercussions as a Pacquiao fight. If Marx, in what I considered as his best work (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), once referred to the French who backed Napoleon III as a sack of potatoes (meaning, we are all atomized, individuated from each other and our relationship to the apparatus is indirect), in our context, we are for all intents and purposes, a stack of Piattios sealed in a plastic container. 

We are, however, aware of this glaring fact, that what we are seeing and feeling is the miasma of terminal decline, in which all of us are reckoning (thus horrified), no matter where we find ourselves, and whether we are comfortable or precarious. Unfortunately, basing our advocacies purely from a moral outlook will never square the circle or even resolve it, and we are terrified of this realization, most importantly in this ongoing conflict between the sadists (conservatives) and the masochists (progressives), who are fighting this bridge battle while the world burns and sinks into oblivion, learning nothing. This is the effect of a dead and a lumpenized social fabric experienced by the upper, middle, and lower strata, in varying stages of gravity and its accompanying pain expressed through cultural grievances. This, with a few exceptions, is the global condition for the moment. It is not a decline in the romantic sense, where we quickly witness the collapse of our foundations, but rather, it is a slow and gradual descent into a puddle of filth. 

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As such, a genuine response to this dislocation will and shall come outside of the Robredo-Failson (Alamano) mirage. It shall be propelled from the bottom as it has been in the 19th and the 20th centuries; class formation (the material basis, and not the effect of class) however, is yet to cohere once again, as it has been viciously disemboweled by the establishment for the past 30-50 years, be it from the professionals or from the workers. It shall be composed of a reinvigorated militancy, imposing its demands preferably from the tip of both the pen and of the sword, which is to be forged through struggle. It will be largely shorn of the cultural neurosis that posited itself from a largely idealist conception of the state, the market, the government and the populace, a residue from the largely professionalized 60s counterculture manifested on the Satanic panic of the 1980s and wokeness of our present epoch; therefore, demonstrating a credible threat to the established disorder in the years to come. 

Understandably, there will be those who will clamor beyond electoralism. But one cannot expect a direct confrontation to prosper, absent the pillars for mass participation and the necessary commitment to uphold it. Leody De Guzman's campaign for this year, which is focused on sending a message or a signal that this can be done, may be its catalyst, for it is the first anti-elitist movement to converge openly for more or less than a hundred years (the Lapiang Sakdal was the last of its kind; the rest existed as clandestine tendencies) and once I have sorted out my personal woes, I will gladly contribute to its inception and growth. And if this fails, the common ruin is our likely conclusion, and it will be the outcome of the lack of our vision for a future where we can finally get out of this bubble and start anew.

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As a further accompaniment to these musings, I can direct everyone who has read this piece to this YouTube video of ironically, a stand-up comedian who is more clear-eyed consciously of this apparent discontent, which differs from our unconscious obfuscation of this revelation: