The Cure for Identity Crisis and Cognitive Dissonance

Rene Descartes

The question "Who am I?" is a difficult question to answer, especially if you are not yet sure of what "identity" you really belong.

Are you a Tausug, a Bangsamoro, or A Filipino?

The why's of existence

Even our existence is really difficult to prove, unless we rely on the age-old wisdom accumulated thru the years. 

The philosopher Rene Descartes had had numerous nightmares, too, trying to figure out the answer to the conundrum "Who am I?" Until finally one day, he did find it!

"Cogito ergo sum!" he exclaimed. "I think, therefore I am!"

Faced with the difficulty of finding the solution to the existence conundrum, many people have learned to sought refuge on religion to have peace of mind, to have one less problem to bear.

Peaceful State of Mind

It is in this state of peace that life becomes auto-pilot, like doing routinary task, walking or washing plates, for instance. Just imagine if you have to think where to step on every step that you have to take. It should take hours, nay days, before you will arrive to the opposite side of the room!

We learn to simplify things to help us cope up with life easily. It is in these stages of life that we learn to put everything in a database-like compartments deep within the recesses of our minds. Those database are filled with hard-to-change schema.

"In psychology and cognitive science, a schema (plural schemata or schemas) describes an organized pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them." (Wikipedia)

"It can also be described as a mental structure of preconceived ideas, a framework representing some aspect of the world, or a system of organizing and perceiving new information." (Wikipedia)

People who can't have well-organized schema, however, tends to hold two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time. This is called in psychology as cognitive dissonance, a very discomforting experience.

"This stress and discomfort may also arise within an individual who holds a belief and performs a contradictory action or reaction." (Wikipedia)

We have really that problem, that mental stress, my friends.

Cognitive dissonance in Sulu

The Muslims, the predominant people in Sulu, need to live their lives in accordance with the Muslims' way of life. It is difficult to do that, however, inside the Philippine colonialistic and centric government.

The Philippine government strongly advocated the separation of the Church and the State, but the Muslims' ideals are founded on the idea that Islam is a way of life. Therefore, Islam encompasses all, including governance. So it is ideal that Shariah be made the ultimate justice system in the Muslim's system of governance.

Alright, the MNLF-GPH agreement had attained milestone in that, some portions of the Shariah were respected and institutionalized, but most of the Muslims demand for more. Thus, the Muslims seem not to respect the existence of local government units because they looked at them as the extension of "kuffar" Philippine government.

Are we going to accept part of the Shariah and then neglect the other parts?

The effect of the mental stress

Some people have really cope up with this problem successfully. But the majority have been having dire consequences of side-effects and withdrawal symptoms!

People with these symptoms are exhibiting violent behaviors and harboring sinister ideas. To these people, there is only one reason of existence: "to kill, kill, and kill!" until the Islamic governance finally succeed in its entirety.

The so-called "ASG", the revolutionaries, the other rebel groups and their supporters are included in these type of mentality.

They will do everything, by hook or by crook, for the Muslim governance to finally install itself in this troubled South.

Justifications
United Nation's General Assembly Resolution No. 1514, December 14, 1960, states that: "All people have the Right to Self-Determination, Decolonization and Independence. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status, or freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development."

And, Tausug people are people of the Tausug Nation.

What is Nation?

A people, or aggregation of men, existing in the form of an organized jural society, inhabiting a distinct portion of the earth, speaking the same language, using the same customs, possessing historic continuity, and distinguished from other like groups by their racial origin and characteristics, and generally, but not necessarily, living under the same government and sovereignty. 

OK, Quo Vadis?

"No matter what type the government we have," said a fruit vendor in KM2 in Tausug, "as long as I can still freely sell my fruits, I do not really care."

That is exactly how the majority of the Tausug people feel. As long as unity between every Tausug is elusive, we can only but dream of a brighter tomorrow, but dream we should not stop doing. Allah is still here, listening to us all.

The cure for the mental stress
Earlier, we established that the majority of the Tausug could be suffering from "cognitive dissonance" and we also described the level of recovery of each Tausug from the mental stress. But what really is the practical cure of the mental stress?

The radical way that could be a little less stressful is to go sailing on our separate ways together, to accept our differences, rejoice from it, and learn from it. For who knows, despite of our travelling on different waters, we shall still meet at the same destination someday, somehow.

It is just a matter of understanding each and every positions we have, their differences and their commonalities. Then work together, instead of being so antagonistic with each other. Everyone is dreaming for the same objective however disparate her means of achieving it.

Simply, tell the other person your thesis or intellectual proposition. Let her react to it. Then finally, solves the conflict between them by reconciling the common truths between your differing ideas and forming a new thesis that should be acceptable to both of you. If not, repeat the process until there would be smile on your faces, meaning you finally find an amicable settlement.

Life is too short to be filled with all the negative things -- rancor, hate, envy, jealousy, name it!

Let's join hands, therefore, and strengthen our love, friendship, and understanding within the sphere of our Tausugness. The Tausug are tough but lovable and fun-loving race in the world.

So wear that beautiful smile in your face all the time!

The Reasons it Floods in Manila Could also be the Same Reasons why it Floods in Sulu

10 reasons why it floods in Manila

CITY SENSE By Paulo Alcazaren (The Philippine Star) | Updated June 15, 2013 - 12:00am

Manila has been flooding for hundreds of years yet we never learn from the past.

Floods do not respect political boundaries and will flow from one city to the next yet we continue to address flooding (as well as all other urban problems) within the confines of individual LGUs. It does not make sense.

It’s raining season once again and we face the yearly problem of flooding in Metro Manila. I keep getting calls from broadcast media asking for interviews about the problem, its historical origins and urban redevelopment solutions. Giving these interviews I feel like a broken record enumerating the reasons for floods in the metropolis, so I figure it would be good just to list them once and for all.

This list may not contain all the reasons but these, in my opinion, are the major ones:

1. It floods because it rains; the rains and the typhoons that bring them have increased in magnitude. Yes, it’s climate change. To deny this is futile. It’s here now and it makes all historical flood levels, well, history. The paths of typhoons have also become unpredictable (not that we have enough weather men to predict them — many of our good ones have left for better-paying jobs overseas). Typhoons now cross parts of the archipelago that did not use to have them regularly and so people are caught unprepared. Despite these changes in patterns, Metro Manila still gets dumped with rain, especially since its total area, and population in this area, is equivalent to or larger than most provinces and many regions in the country.

2. It floods because of population and urbanization. Metro Manila has a population of 12 million and counting. Urbanization, specifically urban sprawl is a manifestation of all these millions living together and needing houses, buildings, roads, parking lots and infrastructure. All these cover ground that used to be open and able to absorb much of the storm water that fell on the metropolis. In our lifetimes we’ve seen fringes of the metropolis gobbled up and transformed from cogon and rice fields to thousands of subdivisions, hundreds of shops and malls, hectares of paved-over parking lots, dozens of business districts. All this hard covering serves to channel all the storm water much faster into an already inadequate drainage system designed when the reality was much more open land and much less rain. The open ground before served to mitigate the volume of rain that flowed into these drains, esteros and our rivers. We also had more plant cover and trees in the metropolis to help sop up all this water.

3. It floods because the rain comes down from denuded uplands. Metro Manila floods come from elevated surrounding regions, all the way up to the Sierra Madres. There, we have lost almost all of our original forest cover from illegal logging. All this forest cover lost makes millions of hectares of upland a bald watershed that flows freely into the metropolis. This situation is repeated around almost all major urban areas in the country. The source is upstream and this is where solutions should start, although it is among the longest-term solutions. We need to recover our forest cover to reduce the amount of rain that floods our low-level metropolis.

4. Metro Manila is not only low but it is sinking. Ground water extraction due to deep wells is causing major areas of the metropolis to sink. The north section of CAMANAVA and the southern cities from Pasay onwards have sunk from a foot to over a meter and this has made those areas more vulnerable to floods and storm surges. Scientists have pointed to the fact that this flattening has increased the reach of storm surges from the seaside to as much as 20 kilometers inland. So we get it from both ends in a perfect storm — from the mountains and from the sea. The ground is also sinking due to the weight of all that concrete, buildings and infrastructure mentioned in reason no. 2 above.

5. It floods because we have less drainage than before. Reports have it that we have lost almost half of our metropolitan esteros and canals. We used to have over 40 kilometers of them and now we only have about 20. Many have been lost to development, disappearing without a trace (now it regularly floods where they used to be of course).

6. It floods because many of those esteros, canals and waterways of our metropolis we have left are chock-full of informal settlers. Because there are no alternatives for low-income mass housing, desperate people settle in desperate areas. These settlements have little by way of solid waste management and sewers. All these go to the waterways, filling many of them so solid that dogs can cross over them. And we wonder why it floods. Many of these drainage ways and easements were identified in the several master plans made for Manila and Quezon City. Planners had allocated as much as 50 meters of space on either side of these but greed set in and these easements disappeared and what little was left are now our favelas teeming with millions.

7. It floods because the main flood control system started in the ’70s was never completed. The Manggahan floodway was only one half of the picture. It was meant to channel floodwater into Laguna Bay. The lake was meant only as a holding area and the excess water was to have been flushed from there to Manila Bay via the Parañaque spillway. That spillway was never built. To build it now would cause trillions and urban sprawl has seen its path covered with more millions of people and thousands of structures.

8. It floods because what little left of our drains and flood control infrastructure is ill-maintained.Reaching many of them is a problem because of informal settlements. Overlapping jurisdictions of local and national agencies conspire to dissipate responsibility and funding for this vital task of ensuring our drains are unclogged and free. It’s just like homeowners not cleaning their gutters of debris before a rainy season. When the typhoons come, the gutters overflow.

9. It floods because urban development is unplanned and unfettered. Mega-developments that see clusters of 30 to 40-storey towers on retail podiums surrounded by hectares of parking cause havoc in districts planned with drainage infrastructure meant for low-density development. Because there is a lack of planning context (actually a lack of any planning at all), all drainage, road and traffic infrastructure is useless to carry the additional load — that’s why most flooded areas are also traffic-clogged.

10. The final reason it floods in this short list (and there are many other reasons) is politics. Metro Manila is made up of 16 cities and one town (Pateros). Floods do not respect political boundaries and will flow from one city to the next yet we continue to address flooding (as well as all other urban problems) within the confines of individual LGUs. It does not make sense. Politics also conspires to keep informal settlers where they are because they represent votes.

The overlapping jurisdictions is also exacerbated by another layer — that of national government and yet a third layer, that of the MMDA. The ultimate fourth layer of discord is the fact that the source of floods is beyond the political jurisdiction of Metro Manila and in the hands of the provinces around it. Any sustainable solution to flooding must be at this regional context and the assumption that, within the metropolis, governance is rationalized to address this one big problem as one effort, not the effort of 17 government units, the MMDA and national agencies. Politics has divided and conquered us… and it is also drowning us in yearly and constant floods.

* * *

Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.

Reblogged from http://www.philstar.com/modern-living/2013/06/15/953965/10-reasons-why-it-floods-manila.

A Video Essay: Jolo is the Prosperous and the Cleanest city in the World?

When we proclaim that Jolo is the prosperous and cleanest city in the world, we are always met with "Duhhh?"

The MILF peace deal with the government is also misunderstood.

Then, solving frequent flood in the Jolo town. . . .

. . . . angered some people, but I think, after everything is complete, they will thank the Provincial and Municipal government for the changes.

Robin Padilla believed in Sulu and its people. Believe in us, too. Believe in our power. The Tausug must work as one.

Little initiative will always go a long a way if we clear our minds of our prejudices and bad perception against other people. Let's learn to trust one another for peace and prosperity.

Apply the "Pygmalion Effect", not the "Golem Effect. We can do it.