2. All the causes of indolence can be
reduced to two factors. The first factor is
the limited training and education
Filipino natives receive. Segregated from
Spaniards, Filipinos do not receive the
same opportunities that are available to
the foreigners. They are taught to be
inferior. The second factor is the lack of a
national sentiment of unity among
them. Because Filipinos think they are
inferior, they submit to the foreign
culture and do everything to imitate it.
The solution, according to Rizal, would
be education and liberty.
3. Nurtured by the example of anchorites of a contemplative and
lazy life, the natives spend theirs in giving their gold to the
Church in the hope of miracles and other wonderful things.
Their will is hypnotized: from childhood they learn to act
mechanically, without knowledge of the object, thanks to the
exercises imposed upon them from the tenderness years of
praying for whole hours in an unknown tongue, of venerating
things that they do not understand, of accepting beliefs that
are not explained to them to having absurdities imposed upon
them, while the protests of reason are repressed. Is it any
wonder that with this vicious dressage of intelligence and will
the native, of old logical and consistent as the analysis of his
past and of his language demonstrates should now be a mass
of dismal contradictions? That continual struggle between
reason and duty, between his organism and his new
ideals, that civil war which disturbs the peace of his conscience
all his life, has the result, of paralyzing all his energies, and
aided by the severity of the climate, makes of that eternal
vacillation, of the doubts in his brain, the origin of his indolent
disposition.
4. Don't aspire to be greater than the
curate.You belong to an inferior race! You
haven't any energy.
This is what they tell the child, and as they
repeat it so often, it has perforce to become
engraved on his mind and thence mould
and pervade all his actions. The child or
youth who tries to be anything else is
blamed with vanity and presumption; the
curate ridicules him with cruel sarcasm, his
relatives look upon him with fear, strangers
regard him with great compassion. No
forward movement. Get back in the ranks
and keep in line.
