As I stand before you today, I am aware that I am facing the leaders of the financial sector of our economy, a segment of our society that is unquestionably at the cutting edge of our national development efforts.
And yet precisely because of its strategic vantage point, you represent what is both the best and potentially the worst in the paradigm or success within a democratic free market economy.
You represent the best because your financial acumen and control of financial resources are necessary companions to any undertaking for national progress. The nature of your operations enables you to offer compensation packages and challenges that attract the most talented young professionals coming out of the educational system; in so doing a self-perpetuating elite of competence is assured. And because of the global nature of finance, you are a respected member of that clannish but international financial community, standing shoulder to shoulder, with common terms, common tools, and common motivations with those in the financial centers of the world. And because of the fleeting nature of given financial conditions, you have to be currently up-to-date and state of the art in the technologies which give you a glimpse into the next century.
But your very strength may also be your fatal weakness. There Is the danger that you will be more at home on the trading floors of New York and London than in the rice fields of Pampanga or the fishing villages of Iloilo . You would then be strangers in your own country, finding common cause more with bankers abroad than with fellow Filipinos. There is the danger that in the preoccupation to keep current and to pull yourselves into the future, you leave the vast majority of Filipinos mired in their subsistence level feudal economy, burying them deeper and deeper in poverty; this can only worsen the already appalling bifurcation of haves and have-nots in our already socially unjust societal structure.
There is above all the danger that you will see profit a your goal and not as a necessary precondition for your goal; to see profit not as the vehicle to expand, advance, give employment, bring our country forward, but rather to pursue it for its own sake, as a power-tripping end in itself.
There is no question that-save for a few selfless or heroic individual exceptions-profit and financial gain are the major sustainable motivating forces that drive a free enterprise society. But their power to motivate for effectiveness and success increases rather than decreases when seen as a means rather than an end, or better yet when seen in the context of a larger framework or motivations and values.
In the end it is to this paramount task that members of FINEX and captains of industry must apply themselves to: how to locate the motive and value of profit within a larger set of values so needed by Philippine society today; how to find and fashion the formulas that will shape their work and their efforts towards not just the few but the many; how to expand the consciousness beyond the balance sheets to the poorest 30% of the country; how to prove that profit and success need not be at the expense of others, for they are not finite quantities and it is not a zero sum game.
It is my hope that you bring to the task of locating profit within a larger sense of values, of locating our professional goals within larger national goals, the same competence, the same dedication, and the same success so evident in the work of your financial transactions. You have proven your expertise in doing things right; the time has now come to concentrate on doing the right thing.
I have said at the beginning that your work puts you at the cutting edge of the future. As the Philippines stands on the brink of the twenty-first century, you have given us glimpses of that future, and the things that future will demand of us: a high degree of technical competence, the necessity of accuracy, speed, and precision; dovetailing with global informatics and technology; perpetual dissatisfaction with and improvement of the status quo; a constant attitude of doing and being the best possible, and reaching out to do more and be more.
But as Polak once said, the future must not only be perceived, it must be shaped. And before we can shape it, we must understand it and forsee the society we want to have, and plan for it, and make the decisions needed to make these plans come true. Not only does the past determine the future; but our vision of the future determines what we do and decide at present.
Thus our vision for a preferred future, for a twenty-first century Philippines that is free, peaceful, and prosperous, must be ever clear in our thinking and in our decision making. We must not let anything cloud that vision, not the petty stories of intrigue and bickerings that fill our newspapers, not the siren songs of other countries and other governments, not even the tedium of our day-to-day work. We must on the contrary strengthen that vision, nurture it with a growing commitment to a larger common good, feed it with the lessons from our glorious historical past.
In conclusion, let me leave you with a passage from a speech that General Aguinaldo delivered to the nation leaders after the birth of Philippine independence; I hope it affects the direction of today's financial community as it affected the direction of the Philippine nation at that time:
Let us all remember that....
"Let all of us Filipinos reflect that we are all sons of a single mother: Mother Filipinas, for from the time of our birth and coming forth from the womb.she has sheltered us under her protection, presenting us with all the fragrance of her surroundings; she has enlightened and animated us with the light of her sun, and has nourished us with the fruits of her soil. For this reason, all the natives, all the Spanish mestizos, as well as all the Chinese mestizos of Filipinas are sons of God in this land; and in each one of them I see an image of the Divinity and a brother of mine."
