Why We Must Shatter the Myth of Eternal Struggle
📖 Abstract: The Infinite Cycle of Near-Success
The ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus—condemned to eternally push a boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down just before the summit—is not merely a metaphor for futility. It is the perfect allegorical template for the modern Filipino struggle.
Our national narrative often feels like a constant, exhausting expenditure of energy that resets every election cycle or every monsoon season. We are psychologically conditioned to embrace the climb as virtuous, accepting the inevitable fall as fate. This Sisyphean cycle thrives on the Comfortable Lie (as discussed in our previous analysis) that effort alone equals progress.
Artificial Intelligence enters this mythology not as a stronger pusher, but as a system analyst capable of calculating the exact angle, friction coefficient, and structural fault lines of the mountain itself. The question for the Age of AI is not how we push the boulder faster, but why we continue to accept the mountain’s existence. The ultimate political freedom is the realization that the Sisyphean task is a choice.
⚡ 1. The Mountain and the Boulder: A National Burden
In the Philippine context, Sisyphus’s burden is highly specific, high-friction, and eternally recurring:
- The Mountain (The System): The edifice of systemic failure—corruption, political dynasties, and the structural immunity of the elite. This unyielding landscape ensures the boulder must roll down.
- The Boulder (The Daily Grind): The overwhelming, cyclical burdens that consume finite human energy without contributing to sustainable progress.
Examples of this burden:
- Traffic: The daily, multi-hour commute that steals productive time and health, negating incremental economic gains.
- Vote Buying: The transactional exchange that ensures the cycle restarts, undermining every climb toward genuine reform.
- Ningas-Kugon: The collective bursts of enthusiasm for change (the rush to the summit), followed by inevitable burnout and reset (the boulder rolling down).
We are all Visible Pawns in this Sisyphean drama, our energy harvested by systems designed for perpetual exhaustion. We are trapped in a Grammar of Accountability that rewards visible effort over actual results.
🧩 2. The Satire of the Climb: Blind Obedience to the Myth
The darkest satire is that we have internalized the myth. We celebrate the Sisyphean grind—the early wake-up, the long queue, the patient endurance—as a moral victory. This is a profound act of Blind Obedience to the Algorithm of suffering.
We are so obsessed with proving our effort (the noble struggle of the climb) that we ignore the rational path to dismantling the system that requires the struggle in the first place.
The political class exploits this obedience. They do not need to solve the problems; they only need to promise a new, better boulder for us to push in the next election cycle. The Anti-Dynasty Bill, for example, risks being just a cosmetic change to the mountain’s face—a visible, low-friction effort that fails to address the underlying geological fault (see Anti-Dynasty Bill: The Comfortable Lie).
🤖 3. AI as the Systemic Dynamite
If Sisyphus had access to AI, he wouldn’t use it to optimize his lifting technique. He would use it to model the geology of the mountain and find the point of structural failure.
AI’s value in ending the Sisyphean task lies in its power to introduce the Uncomfortable Truth—the objective, data-driven analysis of why the boulder always fails:
- Auditing the Angle: AI can analyze public sector spending and policy efficiency, calculating the exact percentage of effort wasted due to corruption and administrative lag. This data exposes the actual forces pushing the boulder back down, replacing rhetorical blame with objective data.
- Targeting the Fulcrum (Vote Buying): As proposed in our New Grammar of Accountability, AI should be deployed to audit and criminalize the transactional nature of power. This targets the systemic financial incentive that resets the climb every cycle.
- Enforcing Shared Reality: AI must monitor the mandated utilization of public services by politicians (public transport, public hospitals). This ensures that the architects of the system are forced to live under the gravitational rules they create, making the failure of the system an immediate, personal failure.
The ultimate goal of using AI is to remove the Friction of Effort and replace it with the Friction of Accountability.
📢 Conclusion: Refusing the Burden
The Age of AI offers us the first real opportunity to break the Sisyphean curse—not through a miraculous legislative solution, but through rational, systemic leverage. We must refuse the Blind Obedience that romanticizes the struggle.
We are not condemned by the gods; we are restrained by a self-perpetuating system. Freedom is achieved when we stop focusing on the Sisyphean boulder and start using the analytical power of AI to calculate where and how to detonate the mountain.
The true sign of progress will be the day the Philippine political landscape stops demanding our eternal, exhausting submission.
Welcome to AIWhyLive.com, where we calculate the coordinates for national autonomy.
This AIWhyLive.com article tackles AI’s impact on politics, human-first, no “I asked AI…” gimmicks. For those, see “AI Philippine Politics: Read more
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