The Society of Honor by Joe America

Comments

1. JoeAm says:

   May 29, 2026 at 8:34 am

   Fascinating brief. A nation run by committee, the restraints on Executive so severe, in fear of dictatorship, that government operations were weak. And I’d imagine corrupt, as Aguinaldo was known to have pillaged gold and cattle from the people as a revolutionary leader. There were intellectuals in those days. Today they are buried under nonsense from inane dynastic clowns (Marcoleta). The separation of church and state was profound. As was the recognition of democratic freedoms. Thanks Karl. Wholly enlightening.

   Reply
   • Karl Garcia says:

     May 29, 2026 at 8:51 am

     My pleasure and thanks

     Reply
2. kasambahay says:

   May 29, 2026 at 9:09 am

   this is what AI said about our malolos constitution:

   AI Overview

   The 1899 Malolos Constitution was not directly borrowed from the Spanish colonial government, but its primary author, Felipe Calderón, heavily based its framework on the constitutions of various Latin American and European nations, drawing specific structural and civil liberties inspiration from the Spanish Constitution of 1812 (the Cádiz Constitution). 

   While the revolutionary leaders sought to break free from Spanish colonial rule, the educated elite (ilustrados) drafting the constitution were deeply familiar with European legal traditions. The Malolos Constitution incorporated principles, structures, and ideas from multiple sources: 

   • Spanish Influence (Cádiz Constitution): The 1812 Spanish Constitution served as a major inspiration for the provisions on civil and political rights, as well as the concepts of popular sovereignty and legislative supremacy. 
   • Latin American Models: Calderón adapted much of his draft from the constitutions of Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Brazil—countries that had already successfully adapted Spanish and French constitutional traditions for newly independent republics. 
   • European Models: The fundamental design of a democratic republic with three separate branches of government (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial) was highly influenced by the French Constitution and the Belgian Constitution. 

   The finalized document resulted in Asia’s first democratic republican constitution, reflecting a blend of global democratic philosophies rather than a continuation of Spanish colonial law.

   Reply
3. kasambahay says:

   May 29, 2026 at 9:28 am

   here are critiques of the malolos constitution and why it failed to take root:

   AI Overview

   The Malolos Constitution was highly praised for establishing the first democratic republic in Asia, but it fundamentally lost favor and practical viability due to its extreme legislative dominance, exclusion of the masses, and inability to manage the urgent crisis of the Philippine-American War. [1]

   Why It Lost Favor and Its Main Critiques

   • Legislative Supremacy: The constitution vested immense power in the legislature (the Assembly) at the expense of the executive branch. Its chief architect, Felipe Calderón, intentionally sought to cripple executive power to prevent President Emilio Aguinaldo from becoming a dictator. [1]
   • Impracticality During Wartime: Apolinario Mabini, Aguinaldo’s chief adviser, strongly criticized the document for this. He argued that a nation fighting an existential war against the United States could not afford slow, bureaucratic legislative debates; it required a strong, unified executive to make swift military decisions. [1]
   • Elitist Representation: The drafters were primarily wealthy, educated elites (ilustrados) (such as lawyers, doctors, and landowners). As a result, the constitution catered to their interests rather than addressing the socio-economic needs of the peasant and working classes, creating a disconnect from the broader populace.
   • Over-reliance on Foreign Models: Critics noted that the constitution was largely a patchwork of European and Latin American constitutions (such as those of France, Belgium, and Mexico) rather than a document organically tailored to the unique historical, cultural, and immediate realities of the Philippines. [1, 2]
   • Contested Sovereignty: The constitution was ultimately overtaken by history. Because it was never fully enforced due to the outbreak of the Philippine-American War and the subsequent American colonization, it failed to gain widespread legitimacy among the general public.

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4. Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

   May 29, 2026 at 12:06 pm

   thanks for this summary Karl. I did ask Claude for a summary of who actually participated in voting during various Philippine elections as a practical test of what democracy really meant back then and got this:

   ———————————–cut with scissors—————————————

   The earliest formal election in the Philippine Islands under Spanish colonial rule took place on January 1, 1895, implemented through the Maura Law of 1893. It was an extremely limited affair — each municipality’s “electorate” consisted of roughly a dozen men: a handful of *cabezas de barangay*, a few former *gobernadorcillos*, and some prominent taxpayers. Only local positions were at stake, such as the *capitan municipal* and town councilors. Many of the Philippines’ roughly 800 municipalities never held elections at all, defaulting instead to gubernatorial appointments. By any modern standard it was barely an election, functioning more as a formal ratification by a tiny hereditary and propertied local elite.

   Two years later, on March 22, 1897, the Tejeros Convention in Cavite produced what historians consider the first presidential election in Philippine history — though the word “election” again deserves scrutiny. The electorate consisted of roughly 250 members of the Katipunan’s two rival factions, the Magdiwang and Magdalo, and no one outside that revolutionary brotherhood had any say. The positions filled were executive in nature: President, Vice President, Captain-General, and several cabinet-level Directors. Emilio Aguinaldo won the presidency over Andres Bonifacio, who rejected the results as fraudulent and declared the convention void. The episode is as notable for the bitter dispute it produced as for the election itself.

   The elections for the Malolos Congress, held between June and September 1898 following the declaration of independence from Spain, represented the first attempt at a national legislature. However, these were indirect elections — assemblies of select citizens in each town chose delegates rather than the general public voting directly. Large portions of the Visayas and Mindanao sent appointed rather than elected representatives. The congress that emerged then chose Aguinaldo as president of the First Philippine Republic on January 1, 1899, entirely by legislative vote. So while the First Republic had elections of a sort, ordinary Filipinos had no direct voice in who governed them.

   The 1907 Philippine Assembly elections, held on July 30, 1907 under American colonial administration, were the first genuinely nationwide direct elections in Philippine history. Under Act No. 1582, eligible voters had to be male, at least 23 years old, literate, and meet property or tax requirements — a franchise that produced around 105,000 registered voters out of a population of several million. The 80 seats of the Philippine Assembly (the lower house only) were up for election; the upper house, the Philippine Commission, remained entirely appointed by the United States. The pro-independence Nacionalista Party won a plurality, making the election something of a de facto independence referendum.

   The Jones Law of 1916 changed the Philippine Legislature into the Philippines’ first fully elected body. Where the 1902 Philippine Organic Act had provided for an elected lower house but an appointed upper house, the Jones Law provided for both houses to be elected, renaming the Philippine Assembly as the House of Representatives. The first elections to the Philippine Senate were held on **October 3, 1916**, immediately after the Jones Law’s passage. The Senate replaced the appointed Philippine Commission as the upper house, creating for the first time a fully elected national legislature. Each of the 12 senatorial districts elected two senators, with the first-place finisher serving a six-year term and the runner-up serving three years. Two seats from the 12th district, however, remained appointed by the American Governor-General. The Jones Law also lowered the voting age to 21 and expanded eligibility beyond the strict property threshold of 1907, though the electorate remained entirely male. The Nacionalista Party dominated, winning 20 of the 22 contested seats.

   The 1935 Philippine general election was the first general election of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, and the first direct election of both a President and Vice President — positions that had simply not existed in any popularly elected form before. Under the 1935 Constitution, the right to vote was initially limited to male citizens aged 21 or older who were literate and had met residency requirements. Manuel Quezon won the presidency and the National Assembly’s 98 seats were also filled. This was the first time a Filipino head of state was chosen by direct popular vote — a genuinely historic break from every prior system, in which the executive had been either a revolutionary figure chosen by colleagues or an American-appointed Governor-General.

   Women, however, remained entirely excluded from the 1935 election. The 1935 Constitution provided that the National Assembly could extend suffrage to women if more than 300,000 women voted affirmatively in a plebiscite. On April 30, 1937, that plebiscite was held, and 447,725 women voted in favour against only 44,000 against. Women gained full suffrage from that point on — meaning that every single election covered in this summary, from 1895 through 1935, had excluded half the population entirely by law.

   Taken together, the six electoral events trace a slow and heavily gatekept expansion of political participation across roughly four decades. The 1895 elections confined the vote to a dozen local notables per town. Tejeros handed it to a room of 250 revolutionaries. The Malolos process extended to hundreds of towns but remained indirect and incomplete. The 1907 Assembly election produced a real popular vote but one accessible to barely 100,000 men. The 1916 Senate elections widened the franchise modestly and finally created a fully elected legislature. The 1935 Commonwealth election introduced direct presidential elections for the first time but still barred women entirely.

   The consistent thread running through all six is that access to the ballot was determined at every stage by some combination of property, social standing, organizational membership, literacy, colonial policy, and gender. Each step was genuinely significant, and each was also genuinely incomplete. It was only from 1937 onwards — when women gained the vote — that anything approaching a broad popular franchise existed in the Philippines, and even then literacy and residency requirements continued to shape and limit who could actually participate.

   ————————————————–

   I also followed up by asking how many % of Filipinos were literate during certain milestone years and got this:

   The figures come from Philippine census data and demographic analysis. The key numbers across the three years you asked about are:

   **1937 (women’s suffrage year):** The closest census data point is 1939, which recorded a total literacy rate of roughly **49%** of the population aged 10 and over. The logistic curve model derived from Philippine census data gives a literacy rate of 48.79% in 1939 — so in 1937, when women first gained the vote, something close to half the population could read and write. Notably, female literacy in the Philippines in 1939 was around 41%, meaning women’s literacy lagged men’s by several percentage points, which made the literacy requirement even more exclusionary for the newly enfranchised half of the population.

   **1946 (independence year):** The same model estimates literacy at around 57.80% in 1946 — a meaningful increase, driven by the expansion of public schooling under the American colonial and Commonwealth administrations, though also somewhat disrupted by the devastation of World War II. Female literacy had also risen: the 1948 census showed female literacy in the Philippines at 56%, suggesting near-parity with men by that point.

   **1973 (when the literacy requirement was waived):** The census-based data shows a literacy rate of approximately 82.6% for the population 15 years and over in 1970, and by 1973 the modelled estimate reaches around **84–85%**. The overall literacy rate in 1970 was 82.6 percent, confirming this range. So when Marcos’s 1973 Constitution finally dropped the literacy requirement, roughly 15–17% of adult Filipinos still could not read or write — meaning the old requirement had continued to disenfranchise a meaningful minority up to that point.

   To put this in perspective: in 1937 the literacy requirement excluded roughly half the adult population from voting; by 1946 it still excluded over 40%; and by the time it was abolished in 1973 it excluded perhaps one in six. The requirement was always most harmful at the start — and women in particular, having just won the formal right to vote in 1937, faced a literacy barrier that many of them could not clear.

   of course if one looks at how much information people had even until the early 1970s when transistor radios were owned by most of the population, but many places in the provinces were still not electrified so all they had were battery operated radios and no TVs, one can see why the idea of Philippine democracy was very different from on the ground reality.

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   • Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

     May 29, 2026 at 12:22 pm

     I went even further and asked Claude for all significant metrics and got this:

     ———————————————————-

     

     Here is a narrative walkthrough of what the chart shows:

     **Radio (blue):** In 1946, barely 3–5% of households had a radio set. A survey around 1951 found only about 4.8% of households owned a radio, and many of those were inoperable for lack of batteries — rural people listened communally at the local store. The transistor revolution of the late 1950s and 1960s changed this rapidly, making sets cheap and portable. The transistor radio’s impact was felt most at the barrio level, reaching village folk who had been traditionally isolated from the outside world. By the 1990s radio was ubiquitous: it reached 85–90% of the population with over 25 million sets, and 10.2 million of the estimated 12 million households had one. Radio remains the floor of mass information access in the Philippines.

     **Electrification (amber):** In 1970, only 22.5% of the total population had electric service, and more than 86% of rural families had none. The 1970s and 1980s marked a turning point when the National Electrification Administration connected thousands of barangays and rural households to the grid. The World Bank’s earliest consistent data point (around 1993) places access at 65.4% nationally, with rural access at only 49%. The household electrification rate passed 90% in 2016. By 2023 it stood at 98%.

     **Internet (green):** World Bank/ITU data shows internet penetration was essentially zero through the early 1990s, reaching just 2% by 2000 and a still-modest 5–6% by 2005. Growth accelerated sharply after 2009, driven largely by mobile phones rather than fixed broadband. By around 2013 it had reached 36%, rising from just 2% in 2000. The pandemic years then drove a dramatic jump: from 43% in 2019 to 54% in 2020, 67% in 2021, 75% in 2022, and 84% in 2023. By 2024, internet penetration was estimated at around 89%, with the majority of Filipinos accessing the web through their mobile phones.

     **Literacy (purple, dashed):** The dashed line reflects that literacy data comes from census years rather than annually. As covered in the earlier discussion, it stood around 58% at independence in 1946, and was 82.6% in 1970, rising to 88% by 1988. By 1990 it was officially reported at 93.5%. World Bank data then shows it plateauing in the high 90s: 98% by 2015 and 2020.

     The most striking pattern is the sequencing: literacy and radio came first and enabled a baseline of informed citizenship; electrification followed more gradually and unlocked television and later computing; and internet access arrived last but has now leapfrogged all the others in its pace of change, going from near zero to near-universal in roughly 25 years — almost entirely on mobile.

     Reply
     • Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

       May 29, 2026 at 12:33 pm

       I asked a further question: how much % of Filipinos today had badly informed (either illiterate or without significant access to information) parents or grandparents, and to also consider how 2 million mostly middle class Filipinos left the Philippines from 1965-1985 to migrate to the USA – and got this:

       ——————————————–

       This is a question that deserves a careful, layered answer rather than a single percentage — because it actually contains several distinct questions bundled together, and the assumptions matter enormously.

       **First, setting aside the emigration question entirely:** who were the parents and grandparents of today’s Filipinos?

       The median age in the Philippines today is around 26–27 years, and about 46% of the population is under 25. This means the typical Filipino alive today was born between roughly 1990 and 2010. Their parents were therefore born around 1960–1980, and their grandparents around 1930–1960.

       Now apply the literacy data from earlier in this conversation. The parents’ generation — born 1960–1980 — grew up when national literacy was somewhere between 74% (1960) and 89% (1980). That means roughly **11–26% of their parents were illiterate**, depending on birth year and whether they were urban or rural. The grandparents’ generation — born 1930–1960 — came of age when literacy was between roughly 50% and 74%, meaning **a quarter to a half** of them were illiterate. And “illiterate” here understates the informational deprivation: even many technically literate rural Filipinos in the 1950s–60s had access to essentially nothing beyond a transistor radio, with electrification not reaching most rural households until the 1980s.

       So a reasonable rough estimate is that **somewhere between 40% and 60% of Filipinos alive today had at least one grandparent who was either illiterate or functionally cut off from mainstream information** — no electricity, no radio ownership, no newspapers, deep in a barangay — especially in Mindanao and rural Visayas where both literacy and electrification lagged the national average by 10–20 percentage points.

       **Now the emigration question — and this is where your framing requires pushing back a little:**

       Many post-1965 immigrants from the Philippines were highly skilled professionals. The Philippines experienced a significant brain drain in the 1960s when a large population of its professional workers emigrated to the United States. Filipinos who left were more likely to hold green cards through family immigration channels and had higher education and naturalization rates than the foreign-born population overall.

       This is the critical asymmetry: the people who left for the US between 1965 and 1985 were disproportionately the **already educated, already literate, already middle-class** — nurses, doctors, engineers, teachers. They were, by definition, drawn from the more informed stratum of Philippine society. Their departure did not materially change the literacy or information-access profile of those who remained — if anything, it slightly worsened it, by selectively removing the educated. The people left behind were, on average, more rural, less literate, and less connected to information networks.

       So the emigration to the US is not a significant factor in calculating the percentage of today’s Filipinos who had uninformed parents or grandparents. It actually sharpens the estimate upward rather than downward: the brain drain removed a portion of the informed class, leaving the remaining parental pool somewhat less educated than the overall statistics suggest.

       **A rough synthesis:**

       Putting it all together honestly, rather than with false precision:

       – Roughly **50–65%** of Filipinos alive today had at least one parent who grew up in conditions of limited information access — meaning either illiterate, or literate but without electricity or radio in the household, or both. This applies especially to anyone over 35 today whose parents were rural.
       – Roughly **70–80%** had at least one grandparent who was either illiterate or lived in conditions of near-total informational isolation by modern standards.

       These are not small numbers. They mean that the current Philippines — now near-universal in literacy, 98% electrified, with ~89% internet penetration — is largely a **first- or second-generation informed society**. The informational transformation depicted in the chart is not ancient history. For most living Filipinos it is within living family memory.

       ——————–

       this explains a LOT of the difference between discourse in the Third Republic and NOW I think.. the grandparents of many who are trolling in comment sections now were practically invisible in the Third Republic, maybe even their parents were barely visible in the Fourth Republic (Marcos Martial Law)

       that is the reality check we should always bear in mind..

       Reply