Is there really such a thing as "political wisdom"?
This is what I think -
Political wisdom is not seated in the mind of an individual. It is a virtue of a political community.
It is like military intelligence that some people say is an oxymoron - a self-contradictory term.
Some minds tend to accept the term and its attributions as if springing from individual (personal) virtue, take the worst possible example of military or political leadership, and apply it as a failure of the whole organism.
Military intelligence has nothing to do with personal intelligence quotients as some people like to think.
It has everything to do with intelligence as a function of command. Will and Outcome are what it serves and manages not brains and smarts.
A superior commander with clarity of intent guides his or her intelligence to accomplish a given mission in a manner that preserves unit initiative and in a way that preserves the advantage to overall strategy.
A political leader likewise retains to him or herself what is personal and will freely seek to augment it as necessary through his or her political community - with the broadest political community being that of the national community.
The national whole in the context of the State is a body politic.
It would behoove us as the Filipino citizenry to work to demystify the politics of our own Republic.
The civic exercise of the political is a primary power and responsibility of the Filipino electorate. We must have a sense of the political - of what serves the better interest of our communities in the public sphere and we must duly represent them - through officials after our own hearts.
The civic exercise of political authority reaches its summit whenever we vote.
It is not our politics to forever participate in its distractions in the government of the State. Some of these distractions are necessary but some shall be extraneous... we shall leave this matter for another time as a matter for platform politics.
Suffice it to say, we through our democratic interactions in the State, enlighten each other in the nation, in a sense. And from this humble enlightening, we become wise in all our ways as a body politic.
It is political to simply know what is fair unto other human beings - and to apply it as a citizen for the good of thy own neighbor is civic virtue.
Things like personal wisdom plays a vital part - but on its own, or tainted by the vice of intellectual pride - a good leader stands to gain nothing from the mind of a community
If
one should think the self to be a constellation
- in and of itself -
capable of accurately navigating the heavens
above the soul of the nation
on its own.
For
The Republic Sky is like the sky above our heads...
it shares of itself freely, is meant to be shared,
and therefore, must be shared.
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