“Be nice,” is the parent’s admonition to a child who is unabashedly frank and candid with his or her comments about people, whether young or old, and of things he notices around him. For example, when the child asks why his godmother’s breath stinks, the parent immediately shushes him and tells him to keep it to himself lest his godmother gets offended and ends the delivery of Christmas presents. This is expected in a culture where complaining and being forthright are deemed negative and considered as a sign of weakness and lack of solidarity with the pathetic many who relish their slave-like situation since suffering for them is a Christian virtue that reaps rewards in the afterlife.

Being nice means, it is taboo to speak ill of relatives, even if that relative abuses one’s own children or in-law. Being nice means not to be cantankerous about the corruption in government to avoid being red-tagged by rightist propagandists who crucify in social media those who dare shake up the status quo riddled with incompetence, impunity, delusions and misplaced priority in government.

Instead, children are raised to think positively in dealing with whatever depraved things happen in their lives. One must keep a positive vibe to keep the bad luck away. One should not give in to their emotions. It is weakness to cry and show anger. One must put it behind and just move on. This is what is called toxic positivity. It denies reality that needs correction and rectification.

Dr. Susan David, author of Emotional Agility, said that, “toxic positivity” is forced and false positive. It may seem innocuous on the surface, but when you share something that is difficult for you and the other person insists that you look for the positive in it, what they are really saying is, “my comfort is more important than your truth.” Toxic positivity is the excessive and ineffective “overgeneralization” of a happy optimistic state to all situations. The process of toxic positivity results in the denial, minimization, and invalidation of the true emotional experience of a person.

In human history, what sets us apart from Artificial Intelligence is our emotions. Emotions are not bad because they are the reason we are human that forces us to act one way or another. Once the field of robotics figure out how to equip robots with emotions, there would be no limit anymore with what robots can accomplish in transforming human society.

Politicians need to do a lot of glad-handing and crowd-pleasing to get elected. Both candidate and voters resort to toxic positivity to get what they want from each other. The hard questions are cast aside for the sake of niceties. Ridiculously absurd promises like P20 per kilo of rice and eradicating illegal drugs trade in six months are lapped up by the credulous public who are splurged with loot bags of relief groceries and cash gifts or social service aid.

As a consequence, we tolerate a 20th century model of a shoddy education system that is PISA bottom ranked, bear a justice system peppered with inefficiencies, croak from crappy public health services, remain underfed by inflationary food prices derived from mindlessly fragmented agriculture strategies, lose unreturnable hours in traffic conveyed by a junky public transport set-up, and prop up an economy that satiates rapacious political dynasties and their ravenous cohort of businessmen that crowds out the poor from receiving an equitable share of the nation’s rich natural resources. Truly, we Filipinos find our nation rotting away because we are “nice guys” who finish last.