The Indolence of the Filipinos published in La

Solidaridad, Madrid, Spain, July 15, 1890September 15, 1890.

Rizal wrote the article to defend the Filipinos from

the charge that they were born indolent.

It is desirable to study thoroughly this

question without contempt or sensitiveness,

without bias and without pessimism.

The word indolence has been greatly misused in

the sense of little love for work and lack of energy,

but ridicule has covered the misuse.
In the Philippines ones own and anothers faults,

the shortcomings of one, the misdeeds of another,

are attributed to indolence.

The Filipinos who can stand beside the most

active men of the world will doubtless not

challenge the admission. It is true that they have to
work and struggle much against the climate,
against the nature and against men; but we should
not take the exception for the general rule and we
should seek the welfare of our country by stating
what we believe is true.

Those who have yet treated of indolence,

with the exception of Dr. Sancianco, have

been content to dent or affirm it. We dont
know anyone who studied its causes.

The warm climate requires quiet and rest for the

individual, just as cols incites him to work and to

action. The very Europeans who accuse the peoples
of the colonies of indolence.
The fact is that in the tropical countries severe

work is not a good thing as in cold countries, for

there it annihilation, it is death, it is destruction.

Man is not a brute, he is not a machine. His object

is not merely to produce despite the claim of some

white Christians who wish to make of the colored
Christian a kind of motive power somewhat more
intelligent. His purpose is not to satisfy the
passions of another man but to seek happiness for
himself and his fellowmen by following the road
towards progress and perfection.

To foster the good ones and aid them, as well as

correct the bad ones and repress them would be

the duty of society or of governments. The evil is
that the indolence in the Philippines is a
magnified indolence, an indolence of snow ball
type. If we may be permitted the expression, an
evil which increases in direct proportion to the
square of the periods of time, an effect of
misgovernment and backwardness as we said and
not a cause of them.

When the condition of the patient is examined

after a long chronic illness, the question may arise

whether the weakening of the fibers and the
debility of the organs are the cause of the malady's
continuing or the effect of the bad treatment. The
attending physician attributes the entire failure of
his skill to the poor constitution of the patient. As
it happens in similar cases then the patient gets
worse, everybody loses his head, each one dodges
the responsibility to place it upon somebody else;

Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic

malady, but not a hereditary one. The

Filipinos have not always been what they
are, witnesses being all the historians of the
first years after the discovery of the Islands.

We have already spoken of the more or less latent

predisposition which exists in the Philippines

toward indolence, and which must exist
everywhere, in the whole world, in all men,
because we all hate work more or less, as it may be
more or less hard, more or less unproductive. The
dolce far niente of the Italian, the rascarse la
barriga of the Spaniard, the supreme aspiration of
the bourgeois to live on his income in peace and
tranquillity, attest this.

A fatal combination of circumstances, some

independent of the will in despite the efforts of men,

others the offspring of stupidity and ignorance, others
the inevitable corollaries of false principles, and still
others the result of more or less base passions has
induced the decline of work, an evil which instead of
being remedied by prudence, mature reflection and
recognition of the mistakes made, through deplorable
policy, through regret, table blindness and obstinacy,
has gone from bad to worse until it has reached the
condition in which we now see it.

Add to these fatal expeditions that wasted all the

moral and material energies of the country, the

frightful inroads of the terrible pirates from the
south, instigated and encouraged by the
government,

When we see the pious but impotent friars of that

time trying to free their poor parishioners from the

tyranny of the encomenderos by advising them to
stop work in the mines, to abandon their
commerce, to break up their looms, pointing out
to them heaven for their whole hope, preparing
them for death as their only consolation?

Man works for a purpose. Remove the purpose and

you reduce him to inaction. The most active man

in the world will fold his arms the moment he
learns that it is folly to be so, that his work will be
the cause of his trouble, that for him it will be the
cause of vexations at home and of the pirate's
greed outside

It is very true that we have once said that when a

house becomes disturbed and disorderly, we

should not blame the youngest child, nor the
servants but its head. Especially if his power is
unlimited. and the Filipino people, not being free,
are not responsible either for their misfortunes or
woes.

Fearing the frequent contact between the

Filipinos and other individuals of the same race

who are independent and free like the Borneans,
the Siamese, the Cambodians, and the Japanese
people whose customs and feelings differ very
much from those of the chinese has looked upon
them with great mistrust and treated them
harshly.

The Filipinos were not allowed to go to their work

or farms, unless with the permit from the governor

or the provincial governors and justices and even
of the priests.
Then without the means to defend himself and

without security, he is reduced to inaction and

abandon the farm, the work and indulges in
gambling as a better means in gaining a livelihood.

The miserly return that the Filipinos gets

from his labor would in the end discourage

him.
This state of affairs has lasted a long time

and still exists, despite the fact that the

breed of encomenderos has become extinct.

the high and noble functions he performs are nothing

more than instruments of gain. He monopolizes all
business and instead stimulating around him love of
work, instead of curbing the very natural indolence of
the natives abusing his authority, his thinks of nothing
else but destroying all competitions which might bother
him or attempt to share in his profits. Little does it
matter if the country is impoverished, is without
education, without trade, without industry, provided
the Governor gets rich quickly.

Yes.

Trading with China was not only prejudicial to

Spain but also to the life of her colonies.

In fact, the government officials and private

citizens of Manila, finding an easy means of

enriching themselves, neglected everything.

The dislike for manual labor began when the

rulers are taking advantage of their workers.

No.

The Spaniards introduction of different

form of gambling to the Filipinos.

The fact that the Filipinos were much less

lazy before the word miracle was introduced

into their language.

The facility with which individual liberty is

curtailed, the endless worry of all from the

knowledge that they are liable to secret report, an
administrative action, and to the accusation of
rebel or suspect, an accusation which does not
need proof or the presence of the accuser
necessary to produce the desired result. With lack
of confidence in the future, that uncertainty of
reaping the reward of labor, as in a city stricken
with the plague, everybody yields to fate.

The apathy of the government itself toward

everything in commerce and agriculture

contributes not a little to foster indolence. There is
no encouragement, at all for the manufacturer or
for the farmer; the government furnishes no aid
either when poor crop comes, when the locusts
sweep over the fields, or when a cyclone destroys in
its passage the wealth of the soil;

The fact that the best plantations, the best tracts

of land in some provinces, those that from their

easy access are more profitable than others, are in
the hands of the religious corporations, whose
desideratum is ignorance and a condition of semistarvation of the Filipinos so that they may
continue to govern him and make themselves
necessary to their hapless existence, is one of the
reasons why many towns do not progress in spite
of the efforts of their inhabitants.

Add to this lack of material inducement the

absence of moral support, and you will see

how he who is not lazy in that country must
be a madman or at least a fool.

The education of the Filipino from birth until he sinks

into his grave, the training of the native is brutalizing,

depressive and antihuman. during five to ten years the
majority of the students have grasped nothing more than
that no one understands what the books say, not even
the professors themselves; and during these five to ten
years have to offset the daily preachment of the whole
life, that preachment which lowers the dignity of man,
which by degrees brutally deprives him of the sentiment
of self-esteem, that eternal, stubborn, constant labor to
bow the native's neck, to make him accept the yoke, to
place him on a level with the beast a labor aided by some
persons, with or without the ability to write.

The ancient writers, like Chirino, Morga and Colin,

take pleasure in describing them as well-featured, with

good aptitudes for any thing they take up, keen and
susceptible and of resolute will, very clean and neat in
their persons and clothing, and of good mind and
bearing. Our writers today, we say, find that the Indio
is a creature something more than a monkey but much
less than a man, an anthropoid, dull-witted, stupid,
timid, dirty, cringing, grinning, ill-clothed, indolent,
lazy, brainless, immoral, etc.

Alas! The whole misfortune of the present Filipinos

consists in that they have become brutes only half-way.

The Filipino is convinced that to get happiness it is
necessary for him to lay aside his dignity as a rational
being, to attend mass, to believe what is told him, to
pay what is demanded of him, to pay and forever to
pay; to work, suffer and be silent, without aspiring to
anything, without aspiring to know or even to
understand Spanish, without separating himself from
his carabao, as the friars shamelessly say, without
protesting against any injustice, against any arbitrary
action, against an assault, against an insult; that is, not
to have heart, brain or spirit:

Now it falls to us to analyze those that emanate

from the people. Peoples and governments are

correlated and complementary: a fatuous
government would be an anomaly among
righteous people, just as a corrupt people cannot
exist under rulers and wise laws. Like people, like
government, we will say in paraphrase of a popular
adage.

We can reduce all these causes to two classes:

defects of education and lack of national sentiment.
The very limited training in the home, the tyrannical and

sterile education in the few educational centers, that blind

subjection of the youth to his elders, influence the mind so
that a man may not aspire to excel those who preceded him
and must merely be content to follow or walk behind them.
Stagnation inevitably results from this, and as he who
devotes himself to copying fails himself to develop his
inherent qualities, he naturally becomes sterile; hence
decadence. Indolence is a corollary derived from the
absence of stimulus and vitality.

There is one who will work for us; let us

sleep on!

Nurtured with the stories of anchorites who lead a

contemplative and lazy life, the Filipinos spend

theirs by giving money to the Church in the hope
of miracles and other wonderful things.

You cant do more than old So and So! Dont aspire to

be greater than the curate! You belong to an inferior
race! You havent any energy!
The child or the youth who tries to be anything else is

charged of being vain and presumptuous;

The curate ridicules him with cruel sarcasm, his

relatives look upon him with fear, and strangers pity

him greatly.

The Filipino follows the most pernicious of all

routines a routine, not based on reason, but

imposed and forced.
What he lacks principally are freedom to give

expansion to his adventuresome spirit and good

examples, beautiful prospects in the distance.

Convinced through insinuation of his inferiority,

his mind bewildered by his education with only his

racial susceptibility and poetical imagination
remaining in him, the Filipino in the exchange of
usages and ideas among the different nations,
allows himself to be guided by his fancy and selflove.

The scarcity of any opposition to the

measures that are prejudicial to the people

and the absence of any initiative that will
redound to their welfare.
Deprived of the right of association,

therefore he is weak and inert.

Love of peace and the horror many have of

accepting the few administrative posts that

fall to the lot of Filipinos on account of the
troubles and annoyances they bring them,
lead to the appointment of the most stupid
and incompetent men to municipal posts.

Every attempt is useless which does not

spring from a profound study of the malady

that afflicts us.

Without good education and liberty, no

reform is possible, no measure can give the

desired result.