Loob-tanaw and love for country

February is the month when I usually write about love in the View from Taft column. But this year, I want to write about something that might be love in its truest form: the capacity to see what is real.

The Filipino language has many words that touch on insight. Kaalaman for knowledge. Pananaw for perspective. Paliwanag for explanation, from liwanag, light. But I want to propose another: loob-tanaw.

Tanaw is to look outward, to gaze at the horizon. Loob is the interior self, the seat of will and feeling. Together, loob-tanaw suggests insight as seeing from within. Not information arriving from outside, but meaning emerging from engaged interiority.

This matters because insight is not the same as data. We can have all the reports, all the audits, and all the numbers, and still fail to see.

The flood control scandal did not erupt because Filipinos suddenly received new information.

The budgets were public. The projects were listed. The contractors were named. The marches at Luneta and EDSA were not demands for more reports. They were acts of collective loob-tanaw. We allowed the reality to enter our loob, and from that interior engagement, we finally saw what indifference had obscured. A student who begins to inquire, “If there’s budget for ghost projects, why is there no budget for the education sector?” is speaking from loob-tanaw. She has connected her experience of wading through floods to the billions of pesos that have vanished. The insight was not given to her. She drew it from her own loob.

This is why insight has that hugot quality. Hugot means to draw from within, to pull something true from lived experience. A borrowed opinion is not hugot. A copied slogan is not hugot. Genuine insight emerges from wrestling with reality, not from forwarding someone else’s conclusions.

The scandal persisted for 15 years because too many people’s loob was closed. Not ignorant, but indifferent. Not uninformed, but uncaring. Contractors knew exactly what they were doing when they mixed sand with cement. Politicians knew exactly what they were approving when they inserted projects into districts they had never visited. Their loob was oriented toward personal gain, sealed against the suffering of kapwa.

A closed loob cannot see truly. It perceives only what serves its interests.

Here is where love enters.

Why is love necessary for seeing clearly? Because attention requires care. We look closely only at what matters to us. Indifference produces glances, not gazes. When we care about nothing beyond ourselves, we see nothing beyond ourselves.

Insight also requires vulnerability. To grasp a situation truly, we must let it affect us. A closed loob, busy protecting itself from being moved, cannot perceive what is real. It mistakes its defenses for clarity.

And insight about human situations requires malasakit. Without care for the people involved, we see only abstractions. The flood control budget is just a number until we allow ourselves to be immersed in the pain of our neighbors’ loss of lives and homes.

Love, then, is not sentiment. Love is the orientation of the loob toward kapwa. When our interior is oriented toward others, we gain the capacity to see what a self-enclosed loob cannot perceive. Using this lens, corruption is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of love.

This brings us to tough love — the love our country needs now. Not sentimental nationalism. Not flag-waving and anthem-singing. But the harder work of opening our loob to realities we would rather not see. The poverty we drive past daily. The systems we benefit from without questioning. The small corruptions we tolerate because confronting them costs us something.

Tough love for country means refusing comfortable blindness. It means practicing loob-tanaw even when what we see disturbs us. It means allowing malasakit to crack open our interior so that we perceive not just private interests, but also our place in the larger whole.

This February, perhaps the love we need the most is not romantic. It is the love that moves the loob so that we can finally see. The love that refuses comfortable ignorance. The love that holds the nation accountable because it actually cares what the nation becomes.

Loob-tanaw. Insight begins with love.

Dr. Patrick Adriel H. Aure (Patch) is the founding director of the PHINMA-DLSU Center for Business and Society and an associate professor at the Department of Management and Organization, Ramon V. del Rosario College of Business, De La Salle University.

patrick.aure@dlsu.edu.ph