The Useless Cares of Public Life According to the Epicureans Or Why There is Pinoy Brain Drain

Note: My initial blog is meant for my students for the second semester of School Year 2010-2011 whom I challenge to react as part of a graded class participation. Nevertheless, interested bloggers outside my classes—Social, Economic and Political Thought and Science, Technology and Society—are also welcome to join.

One of my first year college students in Social, Economic and Political Thought remarked smartly that the reason Pinoys professionals prefer to work abroad is that like the Epicureans of Hellenist Greece, they did not find working in our polis a source of ultimate bliss or a consummation of the Aristotlean happiness. To a great extent he is right. Our best scientists, professionals, philosophers of all kinds who migrate for a lucrative practice abroad are supposed to belong to the gold-coded class in Plato’s social classification of the political society. They could have figured out that with their first-class minds they could attain the same intellectual and economic prestige in their country. But like the skeptic Epicureans, they, or maybe their parents—who prepared for their migration—did not count  staying home and serving their people equal to the quality of life—and therefore, happiness—they could make abroad.

Reading the comments from overseas Filipino professionals generated by Prof. Solita Monsod’s lecture on how students of the University of the Philippines should pay back the country for their subsidized education—I noted skepticism on the country’s human resource development policy. The skepticism springs from the gap between policy pronouncements on encouraging the best and the brightest and the actual mobilization of public resources to make them stay. In the workplace, one migrant professional lamented, such encouragement does not exist. The high-paying jobs—especially in government—are only for the closely-connected individuals. And when good ones with no close connections—or are suspected to have voted for a political opponent—are hired they should swim or sink on the job for all the managers care.   

In the Golden Days of Athens, the Athenians drew lots in order to give a chance for all the citizens to fill government posts. While this is actually contrary to Plato idea of work specialization, the principle is useful in as far as biases in favor of the well-connected are controlled. If we are to apply the same procedure in our civil service, a drawing of lots to place the best and the brightest by category of specialization and levels of specialization may be considered to fill posts in the bureaucracy.

In the private sector, very few firms—many of them foreign—conduct research which could employ the scientists while many reserve highly-technical positions to consultants brought here from the company’s mother country. No wonder we lost the very few we have trained in such fields as geology, meteorology and aviation engineering. And there has been declining enrollment in agriculture, fisheries and forestry.

The Epicureans were led to believe that human beings could create or order their own world apart from the polis and still attain happiness. This thought arose from their disillusionment from discourses by the philosophers of the day on the good life amidst the crippling realities of economic insufficiency of the city-states and wasteful effects of invasions and wars. This is exactly what our compatriots did—to create their own world abroad in search of happiness their polis was incapable to give.

The diaspora of Pinoy manpower should be made as indicator of our people’s happiness. When overseas employment was made a conscious policy of the state in early 70s, it was formulated as a stop-gap measure only to solve the unemployment problem. A new education and training as well as employment policy is long overdue and must be a fresh feature of P-Noy’s new five-year development plan.