This piece is about respect.

Bear with me.

The Philippine Mining Act of 1995, Republic Act 7942, is “An Act Instituting a New System of Mineral Resources Exploration, Development, Utilization, and Conservation.” It establishes that all mineral resources within the Philippines are “owned by the state,” and makes it so that mining initiatives are more easily directly regulated by the national government.

I’m not going to go into the excruciating details, but let it suffice to say that it boxes out small-scale mining and makes it much easier for big mining initiatives, particularly Multinational Corporations, to take control of enormous swathes of Peripheral territory (for example, in South Cotabato) by wheeling and dealing with elites in the Center (i.e., in Manila). Despite the “Spirit” of the Law being “for” the Filipino people, it ultimately enriches local and national elites, and the entities (usually foreign corporations) doing the wheeling and dealing. All at the cost of local lives and local ecosystems.

Local sovereignties are crushed by the sheer economic weight (and the violent force it enables) that both the national government and multinational entities wield. I will not go into details surrounding the farce that is the concept of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) for Indigenous Peoples either, but let it suffice to say that all of these legalities paper over the fact that guns, goons, and gold handily defeat local resistance to ecocide and human displacement with very few exceptions.

But now that I’ve established that, what does any of this discussion have to do with respect?

Story time:

I was in a coma from 2009 to 2012. That coma was called Law School.

(I was a terrible student, and I failed out of law school spectacularly. Given what the experience had done to my will to live, I would not be exaggerating when I say that I barely escaped law school with my life.)

Sometime during my first year, I got into an informal debate with a classmate about human rights, constitutional law, and the Philippine Mining Act of 1995. For the debate, my position was For the Mining Act, and my classmate’s was Against it.

However, even though I could not fully articulate it at the time, I’d fundamentally disagreed with the Mining Act even back then. The Act’s Top-Down approach was not coherent with my experience and knowledge around local battles to defend territory and ways of life. The way I saw it, the Act did not adequately respect the ways that people in a particular locality wanted to  interface with that locality’s “resources” –mineral and otherwise.

In fact, the Mining Act enabled a paper juggernaut, one that over-wrote and overwhelmed locals and local communities with bureaucratic violence. It forced people into positions that did not align with their experiences and expertises, and ultimately cowed them into submission to the wills of the more powerful.

As someone who had to argue For the Act though, I reluctantly took on the premise that local people –Indigenous and non-indigenous alike- did not have the capacity to properly understand nor manage their own resources, and that their decisions needed to be “managed” from above. I essentially had to debate from the position of Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons, with which I strongly disagree.

I argued from a position of fear and authoritarian control: “If we do not manage the mineral patrimony with the care and resources of Experts and Authorities, they will be exploited willy-nilly, and we’ll have done future generations of Filipinos a grave disservice!”

In my discomfort, I so internalized that position, that I did not actually listen to my debate partner. Instead, I began to demean and invalidate her arguments and her.

Suffice to say that my debate partner no longer wanted to debate me after that. 

Or be my friend.

And that’s the heart of it, really: I had severed any potential for a relationship between myself and my classmate in a way similar to how the Mining Act severed any potential for a relationship between those in power and those who are directly affected by the decisions of those in power.

Instead, their relationship is mediated by money and the ones who have the money: private enterprise. The ones who should have a say in the relationship are not in the relationship at all. Rather, they become the objects  of the relationship.

They are no longer people with their own interiorities and decisions. Instead, they are “constituents” and “beneficiaries,” inert, passively waiting for the decisions and agreements to be made between government officials and the mining companies.

They are no longer people.

Locals are un-personned.

Can you imagine how disrespectful that is?

To be looked upon, not as an equal, but as a thing?

A will-less, imagination-less means to an end?

The Philippine Mining Act of 1995, like many other national and international laws, works under the premise that people are selfish.

It presupposes that as “rational actors,” each of us would act solely in our own interests, to the detriment of the interests of others and the interests of the wider community. It follows then that there is a need for “management” by an expert few who purportedly have the interests of the many at heart, lest the unwashed masses’ selfishness run rampant before the “invisible hand” of the economy eventually “evens things out.”

That law, as many laws in many countries currently stand, is disrespectful of the direct relationality between individuals that knits our communities together. Of the altruism and kindness we are capable of. Of the un-plumb-able depths each human being –and we’re still only speaking of humans here, even though other beings are just as worthy of our respect and responsibility-to-self– possesses within themself. Of the wonders we are.

And these systems of laws create disrespectful structures that physically and substantively uphold the disrespectful premises that generated them in the first place. It allows for a person, legally recognized as sovereign and possessing of natural personhood –a form of legal personhood vested with far more rights than the juridical personhood of corporations- to die of starvation (and thus lose that legal personhood) in the streets of Manila while corporations (which are mere juridical persons) rake in exorbitant profits in New York. or Berlin. Or Amsterdam. Or London.

The human being, the natural person, loses their personhood when they die. They are un-personned. And it doesn’t matter because some humans are more human than others, apparently. And in this day and age, the “human” continues to be a contested space: one where the survival of an entire community in the Panay is substantively and practically subordinate to the decisions of executives who, in their “expertise,” determine that a mega-dam belongs in a particular location.

Why? Because that community is in a remote area anyway, and what happens to them won’t affect the larger polity.

And that community is poor.

That community is uneducated.

That community does not deserve respect.

That community is inferior.

That community is not human.

This logical progression of thought doesn’t feel good, does it? But we’re saying the quiet parts out loud.

So listen.

When we don’t respect someone, we un-person them.

When we un-person them, we disregard their needs and desires. Those needs and desires no longer exist for us. So we decide based on what we think is worthy to exist.

And the arrogance of thinking we can decide for others (who have their own choices and needs to consider, as well as the capacity to make their own decisions) is one that is enshrined in our bodies of laws.

And since we’re saying the quiet parts out loud today: the solipsistic childishness of that is really rather astounding.

We can do so much better. All we need to remember is respect.