We Want to Multiply

"We want to multiply, are you gonna do it?" (Powerstation)

(Warning: If you’re a Management major, don’t read this. Do something worthwhile with your life. Go on a hunger strike for the release of political prisoners. Make posters to legalize ganja).

After a semester in the kibbutz of Political Science, a former student decided to defect to the Management camp. By this time, I already earned a reputation of labeling these handful of defectors as traitors.

Before her departure, this student needed my signature. She got more. Hmm…what is dandy about young people is that they can’t detect pontifications when they see one. Or they just have the manners not to put a kibosh on the pontifications of older people (that's me).

Amazingly, this student fairly remembers my monologue on that slow, sultry afternoon. I said something like “This is an act of betrayal. On the day of reckoning, you know how traitors are dealt with.” And I go Argh! Sounded like Gen. Palparan, my favorite butcher. Maybe, I should apply as his speechwriter now that he' s in Congress. A dandy idea, hmm.

Allow me to explain why I was reduced to pontificating even if I wasn’t the Pontiff.

If that student shifted from PolSci to Physics (which I would have done if I were intelligent enough), Ole! But to choose Management over PolSci, you got to be kidding.

I asked a whole block of Management students why they were drawn to it. My questions were out of plain ignorance, be warned. From the arrogant: What is there to study in Management? Who are your philosophers? To the literally absurd: What is to be managed? Can anything be managed? Are your lives so mismanaged, you actually need to spend 4 years to study Management? Do you think your lives will be more well-managed than the rest of us? Somebody shoot me, please.

So when this traitor who has become a close friend confides about her love-bug, I gloat in morbid glee. Payback time, isn’t revenge sweet? License to go pontifical and when I am in that gay mood, hell could just freeze.

This is the diagnosis, I offered: Your problem started when you took flight from Political Science. Honestly, there is no correlation but as I said, I was in the mood to gloat. Look how Management ruined you, I continued: You have become anal, a control freak, “sigurista nga diri asya,” not besotted with philosophy, lacking appreciation of the intangibles and immeasurables, thinks “food for the soul” is something prepared in the kitchen.

Whew, that’s cold. That’s just Antarctica-cold.

Her fundamentalist religious views quarrel with her forbidden love. A woman is not supposed to love another woman. That’s tough. Even Political Science has no solution to that.

But at least, PolSci as a discipline, encourages you to free your mind and to make a stand. Conformism is denounced as individuality is celebrated. It’s intellectually promiscuous and morally ambiguous so there are no absolutely wrong answers as there are no right ones. This is where the discipline’s strength and weakness rest.

It’s not easy (however possible) for me to imagine my Management students transforming into Rimbauds and Sapphos. There is a certain rigidity and deficiency in philosophy in that course, I surmise. After all, it’s modern compared to the old tradition of Aristotle and Plato and all our forebears, a discipline fuelled by the requirements and needs of capitalism. Oh, boy.

What we become, how our worldviews are shaped, how we attack the challenges hurled by life owe so much to the course we chose. If I majored in Management, I would surely view the world from a different lens, be a different character.

As I snapped out of it, I realized that I did not abate a bit the emotional turmoil that student was going through. No one is listening. How many times have I said don’t come to me for love advice? Chances are, I would say the most inappropriate things, tell incongruent anecdotes, and disconnect the dots. How in the frak did I correlate her problem to her shifting majors?

Me and my titi-eories. Wait till you hear my dick-tionary. Sexual repression, go burn.