"Yes, Sir!"/"Yes, Ma'am!" Culture as a Reflection of Social Conformity

Every time another shooting rampage occurs in America, the first instinct of nearly anyone who hears about the tragic news is to blame the lack of gun control.  They somehow believe that more strict access to guns is the ultimate resolution of such problems.  While the author is just as much a proponent of gun control as the next leftist, he also believes that sort of random killing that occurred in a Connecticut elementary school says much more about how America's culture create lethal-minded deviants rather than how America's gun culture lead to lethal incidents.

It is as pro-gun people would say, "guns do not kill people, people kill people."  For those who are determined enough, stabbing, with a fruit knife sold in the local supermarket, a couple of dozen kids immobilized by their fear may prove just as easy and devastating as spraying bullets upon them with a semi-automatic rifle.  Even if kill rate is not high, the intent of killing, with a gun or with a fruit knife, is equally deadly and worrisome for the society as a whole.  And for the determined criminal, getting a gun illegally is no even that difficult, whether it be to smuggle them in or buy from crime syndicates.

By playing up the importance of guns as method of killing, the American populace is systematically downplaying the breakup of social fabric that is creating these gun-toting mass murderers.  To simply categorize them as rare, mentally ill insignificant minorities will one day stop convincing the majority of people as a legitimate rationale for explaining what seems to be endless accumulation of gruesome horror and tragedies incurred on innocents who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Their mental illness and determination to kill is not biological or psychotic, but socio-cultural.

And that brings the author back to his workplace in a gritty industrial suburb of Metro Manila, where warehouses and factories surround crumbling low-level street blocks housing hundreds of thousands of working class families.  Judging purely from appearance and the social classes of the residents, the neighborhood would definitely be a no-go zone for any self-respecting family, if the neighborhood is situated in any major part of urban America.  People will simply assume it to be a breeding ground for crime, delinquency, and forces that give birth to "nutcases" like the one who shot up Connecticut.

But walk in any warehouse or any factory in this similarly situated Filipino neighborhood and one feels that those assumptions made from an American perspective become near absolute lies.  Even as streets buzz with chaotic activities and are not even close to being pleasant in anyway, each building, and even a street-side food stall, becomes a sanctuary of order and stability, where work is done with quiet diligence and life goes on as peacefully as it does in any secluded high-end community.  The question is of why poverty, to put bluntly, does not cause violence here as it does in America.

Working within such an environment offers some firsthand clues.  The most common words uttered by your average Filipino is "sir" and "ma'am"...not just for respecting strangers/clients met for the first time, but as an everyday title for anyone of perceived higher status or position.  It is a vivid display of a culture of discipline, sprinkled with quiet subservience that, in many ways, implies a humble acceptance of one's lot, whether it be poverty or being socially below someone who, perhaps in the back of their minds, they do not see as worthy of that higher status.

Interestingly enough, this may be extrapolated to the political sphere.  Because of that Western liberal tradition that permeates American society, many of those at the bottom of the society, whether it be financially or otherwise, feels aggravated by lack of societal support when they seem to be perpetually down at the bottom.  They feel that the only way for their grave situations to be noticed by others is to turn toward extreme measures, as in the case of school shootings.  The same mentality does not exist here.  Being at bottom is taken squarely and without complaint, plainly accepted as the norm.

Maybe it is a version of the so-called "Asian values," or maybe the remanence of a long-standing mentality of subjugation instilled by centuries of Spanish/American, direct/indirect, political/economic domination.  By one thing is clear: the meekness symbolized by the "Yes, sir"/"Yes, ma'am" prevalence is a double-edged sword.  Yes, it does reduce the possibility of crazies taken revenge on an uncaring society.  But at the same time, it makes society stiff, regimented, and all-around static.  The energetic dynamism of entrepreneurship finds itself deeply at odds with the society where it tries to take hold...