Ruminations on ‘The Insatiables’

The past weeks’ series of events—the hearings at the Senate and the House of Representatives and the arrest of wanted persons—tests one ability to comprehend the insatiability of human beings to acquire, possess, and accumulate material goods for themselves at all cost as if everything is theirs for the taking. So shocking are the novel means they employ to get what they want, how much they want, all they want. Lives are lost, laws are broken, legal processes are disregarded, and these culprits get away with their evil deeds and their loot as if everything is okay unless caught. Our jaws drop to the floor.

The words “entitled” and “entitlement” pop up so frequently nowadays in conversations and discussions as negative attitudes equated with power and impunity. If unchecked, this feeling of entitlement among some public officials could grow until they think it is a birthright that endows them with power, pelf, possessions, and popularity. They become insatiable, addicted, obsessed. In Filipino, “walang kabusugan,” accountability and transparency be damned. Impunity, exemption from the consequences of one’s crime—getting away with murder, so to speak—is the privilege of the moneyed powerful. They think they are above scrutiny and the law.

And, if I may digress a bit, as in the case of an elected public official, who simply refuses to openly account or justify the use of the funds entrusted or yet to be entrusted to the office occupied. Is this an attitude problem? A character flaw? But where does the money go? That is all we want to know. A nose-thumbing is what we get.

Insatiability is “an excessive desire to acquire or possess, especially material wealth, more than one needs or deserves.” Desire in excess borders on the pathological. For people with this affliction, the biblical saying “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but suffers the loss of his soul?” is for sissies. (In keeping with gender equality, that applies to both men and women.) Their obsession feeds on power. Depraved and craven they are, like characters in a bizarre Hieronymus Bosch painting.

But we know they are not without enablers. As the marathon hearings in the Senate and the House of Representatives have shown, corruption in high places does not thrive only in the darkened corridors of power. The corrupt officials—elected and appointed—have illegal networks in government bureaucracies and agencies, networks that go far down to the underside of society where the grim and the gross in the manual of cruelty are carried out. Think of human trafficking, torture, murder, and abduction spawned by the Philippine offshore gaming operators (Pogos), mainly run by Chinese nationals, that got their official blessings from the Duterte administration. It was a descent into hell.

Think of illegal drugs, money laundering, falsification of documents. Think of Pogo-related fugitives—now-jailbird Alice Guo aka Guo Hua Ping, Cassandra Ong, Tony Yang, Sheila Guo, and a host of others who have been named—for now—on pieces of paper even while we wait for their official identification. Think of undesirable aliens gaining foothold in this country while a wanna-be superpower nation lies in wait at the gates, think of forgers and fakers in the Bureau of Immigration, the Philippine Statistics Authority, and the Philippine National Police who are in cahoots with criminal elements and look the other way. Think of …

We wait for the intricate network of enablers close to the seat of power to slowly come to light and for evildoers to be identified. Thanks to the hearings and social media apps, citizens have a ringside view of the live proceedings or have access to the recordings.

What sustains the appetite of the insatiable in the lowest to the highest rungs of the bureaucracy? How is insatiability checked and nipped before it legally becomes plunder? Where does the drive to accumulate enormous possessions by whatever means—fair or foul—come from? From what depths?

The corruption during the Marcos dictatorship was so enormous and unparalleled that the Presidential Commission on Good Government had to be established to recover ill-gotten wealth after the Marcoses were driven out by people power. But it is painful to believe that corruption is part of the Filipino DNA.

Filipinos already had a ringside view of how plunder was at work during the Estrada administration that caused no less than a president of the republic to be convicted and imprisoned. And two senators no less. Plunder, Inc. was the name of their game.

Insatiability is not only a character flaw or an obsession, it is also an addiction that therapists and spiritual counselors might be hard put excising from a person so afflicted with it. If prayers don’t work, perhaps prison walls will, another “P” added to power, pelf, possession, and popularity.

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