The need for independent judgment

Eleanor Pinugu’s column, (see “Unfriending over Politics,” 5/18/26) accurately captures a painful reality: political disagreement is increasingly treated as moral defect, and personal relationships are collapsing under the weight of partisan litmus tests. Her call for empathy and continued dialogue is humane and necessary.

Yet the problem runs deeper than social media or emotional dysregulation. What we are witnessing is the logic of capture politics—a system that converts genuine disgust and moral sentiment into raw material for allegiance, recruitment, and identity. In such an environment, the pressure is not merely to disagree, but to be claimed: to align fully, visibly, and permanently.

In this context, remaining in conversation across divides, while valuable, encounters a structural limit. When affiliations demand total conversion and treat revision or independence as betrayal—“walang paninindigan”—dialogue itself can become another arena for performing loyalty rather than pursuing truth.

Political agnosticism—the refusal to be fully claimed by any faction while remaining engaged—offers one path through this. It allows one to stay appalled by corruption and indignity without surrendering judgment to the faction eager to harvest that revulsion. It is not indifference. It is the preservation of independent judgment in a system designed to colonize it.

Pinugu is right that unfriending corrodes society. The discipline is not to disengage. It is to engage without being consumed.

Nolivienne C. Ermitaño, nolivienne@gmail.com

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