In nearly all the public hearings of investigative committees in either the Senate or the House of Representatives, the Battle of the Brains — which was in vogue in the 1990s — has fast come alive. It was said to be “one of the most culturally influential locally produced shows” of that era.

The way resource persons are quizzed viciously and repeatedly purportedly in aid of legislation seemingly reduces the inquiring legislators’ level of intelligence, nay, cognitive performance to be far below that of elementary, high school, or college level contestants. Unfortunately, the invited personalities — either subpoenaed or arrested here or abroad — are high profile figures in top government offices, big multinational corporations, from transnational criminal syndicates or drug triads.

Whereas, as a universally viewed entertainment show, Battle of the Brains appealed to the higher social classes, its poor prototype in both chambers of Congress prove an inferior, disconcerting, second-rate copycat. In the latter, the honorable legislators so-called don’t have in their hands the question-and-answer cards, instead trying vainly to project themselves as geniuses or gurus in the field of epistemology or “theory of knowledge.”

Furthermore, while “nudging” the people is a concept central to good governance, it is contentious to suppose that our good senators or congressmen know the meaning of “nudging” by the unrefined way they go about questioning their resource persons to ferret out the truth. There’s probably nothing in the literature that could best describe the conduct of these committee hearings except they are a grand zarzuela.

Up to now, the senators and congressmen are in a maze going back and forth in an endless and futile pursuit of testimonial confirmation that indeed one Alice Guo is not a Filipino but a Chinese national. Yet some law enforcement agencies had discovered about 15 local civil registrars unlawfully issuing improper birth certificates, some 200 to Chinese nationals.

When almost all agencies of government down to the local and subnational levels turn their offices into a profitable cottage industry, that’s when bureaucratic paralysis begins to weaken all social, economic, moral, legal fronts of the body polity toward its own demise. How could this malady be stopped in our political ecosystem that is fast choking itself to death?

There’s quite a circuitous pattern of senators and congressmen being elected over and over ad nauseam even though, in truth, they stink of rotten fish. In other words, James Fallows was right when he described Filipinos as having a “damaged culture,” something altruistically indisputable.

Corruption permeates the highest levels of government from the President down the line. The rank and file at the bottom of the pyramidal hierarchical structure that we call in the discipline “street-level bureaucrats” also trade their little regulatory power for cash or favor.

The last days, weeks and months-consuming investigations conducted by both the Senate and the House as mutually exclusive political circuses only showcase how institutions and guiding legal norms are being bastardized wantonly and with an absolute sense of impunity. Truth has turned black, justice has been crippled beyond recognition, the level playing field has been bulldozed.

It has put to shame every revered doctrine espoused by Alexander Hamilton, John Hay and James Madison of the US Federalist Papers from which our leaders were supposed to have derived our “ideals of justice, the general welfare and the rights of individuals.”

All these almost useless rituals rendering resource persons as inferior and powerless subjects and stripping them of every revered right imaginable (i.e. due process, right against self-incrimination, privacy, presumption of innocence, human dignity) only graphically means that rights are systematically swept into the huge congressional dustbin of oblivion.

Abraham Lincoln would have erred to believe that the “people are the rightful masters of Congress and the courts” because they have, in fact, become un-rightful slaves of a bureaucracy gone berserk.

Every man dreams of order, never of dehumanizing chaos.