Would discourse not be enlightening when individuals from every nation under heaven collect themselves in Angkor Wat, or Borobudur, or the Banawe Rice Terraces, or any other wonder in the world?

This planet-wide multiplicity is magnetized and levitates on the miscellany of households, clans, villages and tribes as well as that of cyber-communities, fan clubs, lightning rallies, holiday shoppers and concert goers. Each barangay, each city and each province offers a menu of identities and commonalties, and each club, crowd and class a parallel carte du jour of personalities. Ilocanos can congregate around the Leaning Tower of Laoag, Cebuanos troop to the Osmeña House, Davaoenos trek to Mount Apo, and visitors are welcome to partake of local life.

Like the Amazing Race, a person and his cronies can start from Jakarta, transfer to Insular Malaysia on Borneo, pass by the Istana in Brunei, fly to Manila for coffee, then shop in Bangkok, remember the victims of World War Two in Changi, pay homage to Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, picnic along the lakeshore of Nam Ngum, and stay overnight in Yangon.

Heterogeneity thus banishes monotony from public and private lives. More importantly, it underscores the primacy of free choice as the human value.

A person is born into a family, but selects his companions for life. He gets his basic education from the neighborhood school, yet seeks scholarship grants overseas. His milk language is mixed with English. He is baptized into his parents’ faith, but the road to Damascus is obscured by maya, waylaying him into the barracks religion. He can shift his abode from hemisphere to hemisphere.

A person’s ability and willingness to choose guarantees his inherent freedom to travel, express his likes and dislikes, associate with his fellows, and pursue happiness. His power to choose is best enjoyed in a system where he can exercise his rights and duties directly or through delegated authority.

In this system, ideally a democracy, the person can relate to others of similar creed, color, class and capability without fear or favor, or he can broaden his contacts to dissimilar beliefs, races, status and professions, or he can withdraw to the privacy of his homestead without ostracism or interruption from busybodies. He can even change his name, citizenship, or gender.

The resiliency to manage change is not confined to the territory of one’s home state. With Asean as the new framework, the individual can offer his services to ten Southeast Asian countries. He can, for instance, pen a column for his newspaper that then gets syndicated in the region. Thus, his freedom to write reverberates in the region.

A painter paints for personal edification. Yet his art is shipped from gallery to gallery and viewed in turn by Malays, Thais, Khmers, Vietnamese and Polynesians.

An environmentalist wants to raise popular consciousness about global warming by biking in selected routes across the Far East. His cause is facilitated in Asean since he can travel visa-free for 15 days at a stretch in each member-country.

Be it economies of scale or a cacophony of particularities, the solitary seeker encounters the Asean as an enlarged proving ground.

Can diversities be harmonized however?

The maverick, the ascetic and the psychotic may flourish in their aloneness in a democratic setting. But the mainstream man, the conventional and the conformist want stability in order to enjoy private freedom. Hence, to minimize his fears, the isolated soul gains a mind to unite with others into commonwealths.

Common consent, a standard of right and wrong, plain laws, rational governance and impartial judges make society an acceptable arena for the mutual preservation of lives and secure enlargement of estates.

For the citizens of the ten Southeast Asian states, the Bali Concord II of October 7, 2003, the Kuala Lumpur Declaration of November 27, 1971 and the Bali Concord I of February 24, 1976 provide the casing for the fulfillment of liberties and ambitions.

These Asean Declarations stipulate that Asean territory shall be one contiguous Asean Community by 2020, created a Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality in Southeast Asia, and identified three pillars of cooperation (political and security, economic, and socio-cultural).

It remains to be seen whether these regional pronouncements are robust enough to safeguard the Bill of Rights in the face of variable Asian capitalisms (guanxi, crony, ersatz, booty). The state capitalism wielded by the Dragon of East Asia, transnational corporations propagating genetically-modified organisms in drought-stricken economies, the heroin-producing Golden Triangle and fascist cults threaten both diversity and democracy.

Our brief excursion into the relationship of diversity to democracy was prompted by a re-reading of a Rizal biography. It was in his first trans-oceanic passage and first visit to a non-Hispanic colony when Rizal grasped the links among Western liberal democracy, the right to travel and free thought in an Oriental locale.

In Singapore, "Rizal saw a modern city for the first time. He was intensely interested in the improvements. Especially did the assured position of the natives, confident in their rights and not fearful of the authorities, arouse his admiration. Great was the contrast between the fear of their rulers shown by the Filipinos and the confidence which the natives of Singapore seemed to have in their government." [Austin Craig, "Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot," Manila, 1913]