Of Riding the Tiger and the Politics of Appearance:
Reflections on Power, Principle, and Survival
Before asking whether today’s loudest voices are truly against corruption—championing transparency, accountability, and justice—it is necessary to understand the political environment that has made such claims convenient. The sudden wave of indignation, erupting in synchronized chorus, signals less a principled stand and more a moment of political “joyriding”: a calculated attempt to ride public anger without sharing its ethical burden.
The recent demonstrations illustrate this phenomenon clearly. What should have been a sober reckoning with bureaucratic rot was instead seized upon as a stage for reinvention. Individuals who had long ignored institutional decay suddenly rebranded themselves as defenders of probity and nationalism. Their “patriotism” arrived not from conviction but from opportunity—the kind that flourishes when the public eye is elsewhere.
One would have said—were it not for the accident of his being Asian, specifically Filipino—that he could easily have passed for a pan-European ideologue of the Neue Rechte: a man whose rhetoric, posture, and provocation bore the unmistakable stamp of right-wing apologetics. His defenders cast him as a cultural critic; his detractors saw an opportunist in borrowed political clothing. Yet the contradiction remained: his identity marked him outside the European New Right’s ethnocentric fold even as his arguments aligned him intimately with its contours. That tension—between origin and aspiration—revealed not a thinker of conviction, but a figure searching for ideological shelter wherever it offered the most visibility.
It is in this context that this note return to Juan Ponce Enrile, who passed on November 13, 2025, aged 101 (or 103 according to some). At first glance, the statesman’s life may appear simply a series of political maneuvers, legal victories, and national controversies. But those who listened closely to his 2012 UP College of Law Alumni Homecoming keynote will recognize a deeper, almost prophetic pattern. In that speech, Enrile—then 88—spoke not merely to alumni but to the existential challenge of modernity itself.
Amid tributes to faculty, references to historic firsts in the Supreme Court, and recollections of his own formative years, Enrile invoked the Italian traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola. He warned that the forces of change—technological, political, and cultural—cannot be halted or resisted in conventional ways. Instead, one must “ride the tiger”: grasp the destructive currents of the modern world and let them carry you forward, remaining inwardly sovereign and unbroken.
Perhaps the speechwriter behind that work captured what Enrile truly thought: being in an advanced age, trying to ride the tiger, it would not be surprising if Enrile had never read Evola. Yet his experiences—of wars survived, regimes navigated, coups endured, and revolutions witnessed—embody an Evolan mindset. He stood in the ruins of a world increasingly unmoored, as if living in what traditionalists might call the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age where materialistic appetites and unbridled desires reign supreme. Without needing to know the texts, Enrile’s life enacted the very philosophy Evola describes: the disciplined, sovereign individual confronting the inexorable currents of a collapsing moral and political order.
Few men of his generation embodied this principle more literally. He survived wars, insurrections, coups, impeachments, and revolutions—not by fleeing, not by submitting, but by standing upright, mastering circumstance while retaining an unbowed interior life. The metaphor of the tiger, once philosophical, became autobiographical. The 2012 speech, in hindsight, reads as a quietly prophetic testament: a message to the legal mind, to the student, and to the citizenry—that survival in chaotic times requires discipline, clarity, and mastery of oneself.
Enrile’s life, like Evola’s tiger, reminds people that modernity is a force that consumes the unprepared. He did not merely cope with it; he transformed its turbulence into endurance. As Constantin von Hoffmeister might have observed, he enacted a form of “aristocratic lucidity”: a conscious alignment of the inner self with the demands of the outer world, even when that world had grown unrecognizably fast and complex.
And yet, as the political critique illustrates, such mastery is rare. Many today mistake proximity for principle, performance for conviction. The loudest voices in contemporary public discourse—rhetoricians of moral indignation—often ride the tiger of public sentiment without the internal discipline to survive its course. Their patriotism is borrowed, contingent, and performative; their courage, theatrical.
Enrile’s example stands in sharp contrast. He demonstrates that the tiger may be ridden without surrender, that chaotic forces may be transmuted into stability, and that enduring institutions—whether a law school or a republic—require individuals capable of confronting the tempest without being devoured.
The lesson is twofold: for the citizen, it is a warning to discern performance from principle; for the statesman, it is a summons to cultivate inner sovereignty. In a world of manufactured outrage, fleeting heroics, and ideological mimicry, Juan Ponce Enrile’s life and words remain a testament to a different mode of being: to ride the tiger, to endure, and to stand upright when all around him flails.
In reflecting on both his life and the modern political moment, we are reminded that the true battle is interior. And so, it is not surprising that there are those honor him not merely for what he did in politics or law, but for the formidable interior courage that allowed him to survive, thrive, and leave a legacy of philosophical and practical insight—one that challenges the rest to confront the tiger with the same steadiness and clarity.