From Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski’s book “Shah of Shahs,” about the last shah of Iran, which came out in 1982: “History knows two types of revolution. The first is revolution by assault, the second revolution by siege.”

As for the first kind, he wrote, “All the future fortune, the success, of a revolution by assault is decided by the reach of the first blow. Strike and seize as much ground as possible! This is important because such a revolution, while the most violent, is also the most superficial. The adversary has been defeated, but in retreating he has preserved a part of his forces. He will counterattack and force the victor to withdraw. Thus, the more far-reaching the first blow, the greater the area that can be saved in spite of later concessions. In a revolution by assault, the first phase is the most radical. The subsequent phases are a slow but incessant withdrawal to the point at which the two sides, the rebelling and the rebelled-against, reach the final compromise.”

On the other hand, “A revolution by siege is different; here the first strike is usually weak and we can hardly surmise that it forebodes a cataclysm. But events soon gather speed and become dramatic. More and more people take part. The walls behind which authority has been sheltering crack and then burst. The success of a revolution by siege depends on the determination of the rebels, on their willpower and endurance. One more day! One more push! In the end, the gates yield, the crowd breaks in and celebrates its triumph.”

What was the Enrile-Honasan plot but a coup d’état, imbued with the ambition of achieving a revolution by assault? And what was the Edsa revolution other than a revolution by siege? We called it people power, though the British journalist Timothy Garton Ash would later classify it as a “velvet revolution,” a negotiated revolution. A revolution, not in the sense the French, Russians, or Chinese would have understood, but in terms of what the British hail to this day: what they called their Glorious Revolution in 1688-1689 was a conservative revolution, a permanent, as it turned out, reduction in the powers of the monarchy and the accompanying permanent institution of the principle of parliamentary supremacy.

My thoughts always turn to Kapu?ci?ski, one of my favorite writers, every August since we commemorate the assassination of former Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, who wanted a negotiated transition to democracy with the participation of former President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. This, he felt, was the sanest alternative to either an outright civil war or the horrors of a communist takeover of the Philippines.

Curiously, it occurred to me that every 30 years or so, the national leadership as a whole reaches a point of complete bankruptcy: in 1893, the Maura Law reformed the Spanish imperial administration in the Philippines, but, as historians Jim Richardson and Jonathan Fast argued, demanding accountability from Filipino officials provoked them into eventually supporting independence (fostered by Freemasonry, whose Grand Lodge was also founded in the Philippines in that year); in 1923, the Cabinet crisis fatally hobbled the American imperialist administration, but also marked the first in a series of breaks (in 1933 and 1942, that smashed elite solidarity in the political class); in 1953, when the prewar era came to a definitive end with the election of Ramon Magsaysay; in 1983, when the dictatorship was exposed as a dead-end experiment by the assassination of Aquino; and in 2013, when the Million People March proved the last gasp of civil society (already fatally divided since 2006 because of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo), even as Supertyphoon “Yolanda” spectacularly demolished the claims of national and local leadership to building enduring public works (so that, in two years, the traumatic divorce of the Aquinos from the public because of Mamasapano ended three decades of solidarity between them).

Since then, we have been experiencing the aftereffects of 2016-2022, when the Duterte-Marcos coalition achieved the electoral repudiation of the 1987 Republic and its post-Edsa aspirations. All we have been doing ever since is witnessing each institution taking turns distancing itself from the 1987 consensus.

How long it will take for everything to reach its logical conclusion: the replacement of the current Constitution, which has proven impossible to amend, and thus, reform, if not improve, with another regime more suited to whatever our society claims are its new ideals, is impossible to predict. It isn’t so much a question of hitting bottom, but rather, blundering into a way out of the circular firing squad that is our current system of government.

Not least because another lesson lurking in the wild growth of our institutions is the possibility that what counts for change among ourselves is far less radical, in fact, not particularly radical at all, than those dreaming of a total reengineering of our society would wish. In one year, we went from legislators and officialdom in general not daring to engage in conspicuous consumption at Christmas, because their racketeering had been exposed, to everyone yawning away the damning evidence—hidden in mind-numbing legalese, thanks to a Senate terrified of the Supreme Court—excusing it, in other words, not risking taking accountability to its logical conclusion.