To technocracy and beyond

yesterday I attended the diliman governance forum on reengineering the bureaucracy. If not for the overcrowded and humid venue, everything went pretty ok. I felt really light-headed especially since I had just about 3 hours of sleep the night before due to salubong a balikbayan relative ritual.

Whenever I attend these kinds of fora and lectures, what sticks on me more than the lecture itself are the presentors themselves. I always get mesmerized by how intelligent and insightful academicians and experts are. For some reason, I am more impressed by scholars blabbing how to make the world a better place to live in than by news of businessmen who happen to conquer yet another money-making bonanza. Earning millions sure is gravely satisfying and empowering but being able to put the world order into sentences and equations and moreso articulate it is sort of more enticing for me.

It’s not that I believe that having some other people invest in you just to show to the world that the country’s poverty alleviation program has, for the nth time, failed the people is so much better than taking risks and investing your own money in something that, in your belief has a great chance of succeeding (but even if the business idea flops, you only fail yourself, not an entire government or nation). There is just something about intelligent people that charms me like a person under a spell. That even if I don’t understand anything of what they’re saying, I still find myself daydreaming talking the same way, pointing at the white screen with the laser pointer in the same way and even telling “for ivy league grads/postgrads only anecdotes” in yes, exactly the same way.

I remember going to a forum on poverty at the ADB last year with some thirty to forty people in attendance from around the world. Little did I know that almost all of them knew each other from the academe and the policy research world and that everyone has a master’s degree at the very least. And so when the speaker refers to one particular author, everyone seemed to relate to it. I think it’s really cool how these experts actually understand each other using the universal language of research, math. and when the open forum starts, things get more exciting. I am really amazed at how they talk about the economy and social constructs in profound terms that seem that this is how they really converse on a regular basis. I have always put so much premium on being and looking intelligent.

I think I have made myself believe that my niche is the research and technical writing world. I told myself that when the time comes that I’ll be introduced before an audience my CV will be as impressive as armand fabella’s (I know..that goal-setting is too late). The man has western-educated/technocrat written all over him. but I guess what I really want is to be able to command and speak authority the way dr. fabella does. Man is he cool…