Could it be that our business culture is undergoing a purging of the old feudalism (and accompanying cronyism) that built the great prewar fortunes, and the 1960s mania for adventurism (and accompanying destructive confrontation between labor and capital) of the union-busting ?taipans? [tycoons]? Are old and (relatively) new money trying to modernize? Or do they remain in the thrall of the siren song of cronyism? Do they see that the best and brightest that must staff their offices are going abroad, and that, if they are to keep on making money, they must now invest in attracting citizens formerly trapped in a captive market?

Must the creators of wealth, continue speaking a different language from those who believe a nation?s riches lies in political values and not just the gross domestic product? If both could understand each other, could we then foster consensus, achieving the kind of unity that fosters innovation? Our nation is not a failed state; not a basket case; not yet, anyway. Where we are, says economist Michael Alba, is at a fork in the road. If we continue as we?ve been doing, we will become a failed state.

Where should we look to borrow ideas as the Japanese did? A positive model is not the authoritarian and essentially corrupt cultures of Asia, or former colonial overlords like America, but rather East Asian models like India that have tried to stay on the democratic path, and essentially Western neighbors like Australia, with its meritocratic and egalitarian political and business culture.

This is why my interest lies in the University of Western Australia?s MBA program (www.uwamanila.com). Sitting in on a class, the absence of hierarchy, of petty professorial tyranny, which is so much part of the local landscape, is a refreshing change. So is the obvious attention to current trends, a truly global perspective accompanied by particular attention to local conditions. So is the scheduling, which makes it truly practical for a working person to study without imperiling one?s current work.

For 20 years, we warmed ourselves at the twin funeral pyres of feudalism and 1960s radicalism. The fall of the dictatorship was truly a pyrrhic victory in a civil war between contemporaries: Almost immediately, the World War II generation, the contemporaries of Ferdinand Marcos who toppled him, passed from the scene, and victory turned to ashes, too, for their political heirs. Like Ramon Mitra Jr., they received their inheritance when they were already exhausted, embittered, thwarted.

Since then, we have essentially been in limbo, our squabbling leaders all past their prime. An entire generation, the radicals of the 1960s, has ended up as a Lost Generation. They were swallowed whole by those who overstayed?the Ramoses and Estradas long past their prime when they came to power?and who were leapfrogged over by the generation of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, too young to be at the forefront of the ferment of the 1960s but old enough to imbibe the Marcosian style, almost by osmosis. For young and old alike, the primary lesson of martial law was a corrosive one: It?s not how you play the game; it?s the winning that counts.

We see it in the likes of Jose de Venecia, upholders of the old feudal order, which at its best was touchingly paternalistic, and at its worst so callous and self-satisfied. He is surprised to discover that he has leaped from being merely endangered to actually being on the verge of going politically extinct.

We see it in the supposedly progressive elements in our country that are as fiercely hierarchical as the very hierarchies they set out to exterminate in the 1960s. This is particularly true in colleges and universities, the places where new ideas were born in the 1960s but have become gnarled relicts since, haunting departments where senior faculty remain engaged in intra-office politics that would make a congressman blush. Very little real research is done, while proselytizing takes up professorial energies. The formerly young, having become old, have become as obsolete as the elders they once questioned. The task then becomes replacing the Mao-inspired ?creative destruction? mind-set of the 1960s still prevalent in our political and intellectual classes, and adopting a more positive, problem-solving, institution-building orientation.

Our elders react in horror to discovering that the Old Obediences?the cozy, intertwined network of authority engendered by church, club and school?the old ties that bind?are disappearing. If you view the fading away of the Old Obediences as something positive, as I do, there remains the problem of having a positive role-model for the egalitarianism that should replace it. One shouldn?t greet liberation from bigotry, for example, by embracing the tyranny of political correctness.

Beware of those whose orientation is revolutionary instead of evolutionary. Our revolutionary experience has been derivative and essentially destructive. We were the last of the Spanish colonies to revolt in the 19th century; and it became a revolution led by those who viewed leadership as theirs by right; our First Quarter Storm came two years after the rest of the world was convulsed by student rebellions in 1968 and shocked the rest of society into embracing martial law; and we are among the last nations still blighted by a Maoist revolutionary movement: in both cases led by those who believed in the primacy of zealotry.

It is in democracy-building that we?ve been cutting-edge; we were the first of the colonized nations to peacefully reestablish our independence; we gave the world People Power to ?restore democracy by the ways of democracy,? and so we must, in turn, be among the first to transform People Power into something that strengthens, and doesn?t weaken, democracy.

This realization, I believe, lies at the heart of our not having an EDSA People Power IV.