Philippines being a disaster goes back from a long, long time of historical foul-ups that help shape the psyche of its people. Many events from the past to present shaped Philippines into what it is today. It didn’t help that it had a very different history compared to its other Southeast Asian counterparts, in fact probably pariah different from the rest of the world.
I have written varying answers here in Quora on several questions on why Philippines has come to this sorry state. But unlike the previous ones, this one will be a very, very long rebut to the long-running question of the failing of the Filipino.
- Different tribes, different regions, different mentalities.
Philippines is an island group of more than 7,000 islands and islets inhabited by 180 ethnic groups. Each of them — and I do mean each of them — speak different languages and making it more strange is they even have their own mentalities and mindsets. For starters…
The Ilocanos of Ilocos are known to be frugal and thrifty. This was due to the fact that the soil of the Ilocandia is rocky and does not allow massive farming and farms, unlike the fertile volcanic Central Luzon valley. Although the Ilocano people are spread out throughout Luzon and in central Mindanao, the two Ilocos provinces of Norte and Sur, both some of the oldest and most plentifully historic Philippine provinces, each could not even support a population that could exceed a million inhabitants by the time the 2010’s era ended. Agriculture was simply not enough to sustain the population size of the Ilocandia, not in a region that is full of rocks and massive tracts of sand and stone that hinder such activity. From whence, they have developed a mentality of thriftiness, to make the most of what is around them. To survive, they had to take and eat every single remnant of a vegetable including the root, branch and bean, every strap of meat and every inch of innards of a living animal, save every money that is earned to buy every necessity for the long term, for the markets are known to sell expensive goods that are imported from the far-flung parts of Luzon. That mentality is now a key trait that makes them instantly different from other Filipino ethnic groups.
The Tagalog-speaking inhabitants of the Central Luzon valley, the lands surrounding Laguna de Bay, the lands surrounding the lake and volcano of Taal, and all the lands west of the Sierra Madre benefited from their fertile volcanic soil hence it could support large tracts of rice farmlands and plantations of vegetables and fruits to support a large local population. And large population indeed did the provinces around them support. These are the same provinces that provided most of the manpower that is present in the Philippine Army during the Philippine Revolution and the war against the United States for ten years from 1896 to 1906. And today, these are also the same provinces that are some of the most progressive nationwide due to their proximity to the national capital and economic metropolis of Manila, all augmented by their huge population sizes. This gave them an attitude of industriousness but also the somewhat racist outlook of looking down on other Filipino ethnic groups, especially down south whom they thought as archaic, outmoded, slacking even.
The Cebuanos, like the Ilocanos, also inhabit a place that does not warrant too much agriculture. Such was only limited to growing rice wherever possible in the few fertile valleys of the mountainous and hilly island of Cebu which was mostly composed of limestone and giant rocks. But being inhabitants of such an island, they are surrounded by sea, but the island itself was also divided by many different petty kingdoms. Those are all before the birth of the Philippines firstly as an administrative unit by the colonials. It was so that even when Ferdinand Magellan arrived in Cebu by 1521, the entire island group of Cebu including Mactan was being ruled by kings and Hindu rajahs who each govern smaller villages strewn out throughout the island group. The cause of such disunity in the island, despite sharing the same culture and tongue, is due to the fact that each village-state was divided by massive forests and jungles inhabited by giant snakes and other dangerous wild animals and also that the natives, until the comeback of the Spanish about 44 years later in 1565, have no idea of centralized authority. The idea, let alone concept, of centralized authority could never be practiced by the natives in such a region where villages are as small as a mere petty group of families living in huts and sharing the common idea of every-day survival, with each village distrustful of each other out of fear of being massacred and wiped out in the dark of the single night and have their possessions looted; only the royals, very few of them, have the popular notion of possessing gold that “cures the sickness of a Spanish conquistador”, since possessing gold ware only signifies higher status in the social pyramid. To sort out petty conflicts between villages, duels between the best of warriors are performed, whether be it with weapons or hand to hand called sumbagay in Cebuano tongue, sometimes to the death — these were done to preserve the honor of each tribe be it a loss or a win on their part. That sumbagay tradition, however, still persist today because, like in the days of old, the Cebuanos are inclined towards honor to preserve their dignity.
Such disunity allowed the various Cebuano tribes, and other Visayan people such as the Pintados of Leyte, from performing raids against each other, but it also didn’t prevent them from launching seaborne raids against Chinese commercial shipping across the Visayas from 1100’s AD up to their colonization by the Spanish in 16th century. Not content with merely attacking commercial shipping, the Cebuanos and Pintados launched never-before-heard raids in cities and towns in the Chinese mainland coasts, mostly in what is now Fujian province, from 1174 to 1190 AD. Such raids were motivated by the apparent poverty of their disparate polities, but that acute poverty that they suffer in their villages also gave them the gifted ability of seafaring across the vast seas, not only for raiding other villages but also for fishing and doing trade with other tribes. Their ability of seafaring even in the most dangerous of tides and sailing to wherever they want to go gave them the attitude of being carefree, pasagad in Cebuano language, the somewhat narcissistic thought of being free to do whatever that person pleases.
The Moros of Mindanao, specially the Maguindanaoans and the Maranao people, only became Muslim when an Arab-Malay missionary, going by the name of Sharif Kabungsuwan, converted the natives of central and southern Mindanao into Islam, although when he came there were already a number of native tribes who professed the same creed. There was an initial hostility by the natives, but eventually they budged in and accepted Islam and with this Kabungsuwan established the Sultanate of Maguindanao in 1520 and founded the city of Cotabato the same year as his new capital. The Sultanate of Maguindanao which Kabungsuwan would later go on, even as the Spaniards who by this time have owned all of Luzon and the Visayas already have holdings in northern Mindanao, to occupy nearly all of mainland Mindanao albeit briefly. This feat, along with the fact that the Muslim Mindanaoan sultanates including the thalassocratic Sultanate of Sulu remained independent and intact until the American occupation starting 1899, would be a source of pride among the Moro people later on in their centuries-long fight against what they perceive as the threat to their existence as a people, from Spain to the United States down to the Philippine government itself.
But, after the said Islamic proselytization of the region, despite the Moro people professing the same religion, there are several small Muslim sultanates that were ruling different areas situated in the Mindanao River valley and the Liguasan Marsh, and they were fighting each other for territory and resources even as the threat of Spanish invasion loomed from the north since 1575 when the town now city of Iligan in northern Mindanao was first founded. The reason to this is although the Sultanate of Maguindanao was the ultimate authority of the land at least nominally, in reality the area was being governed by tribal chieftains who ruled their respective territories and have no motivation to give up their royal privileges as rulers of their own lands. These tribal chieftains either formed confederations, like in the case of Lanao, or became fiefs to the Sultan of Maguindanao to gain favors from their suzerain. Every Moro who serves his fief, in this case the Datu or Rajah, in the region is motivated to do jihad, holy war that is, even if it is directed against fellow Muslims who serve different fiefs if that is for them what it takes to go to Heaven. Even now, that mentality pervades today and is very evident by riddo familial and clan wars in North Cotabato, Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur, but the best evidence of this is the Ampatuan national election-related massacre of 2009 where both the victims and the perpetrator suspect, both of which candidates for local government positions, were descended from the old Moro royal houses who used to rule different tracts of land in the region even before the arrival of the Americans in Mindanao in 1899, given to them as rewards of war a la feudal land tracts by the Sultan of Maguindanao.
Aside from different traits dictated and shaped by their different historical backgrounds and the topography and geography of their respective regions, what do these disparate people, being divided by the islands, the seas, the steep mountains and the vast forests, had one thing in common?
They had no history of national, let alone regional, unity.
Unlike the rest of Southeast Asia, Philippines had no background of territorial unity ruled by a native entity, before its eventual conquest by the Iberian Europeans. The islands were divided between hundreds of kingdoms and chieftainships, and even a single island was divided between several kingdoms and chieftainships. While Indonesia had precolonial native unifying entities such as the Majapahit and Srivijaya, Malaysia had Malacca and Johor, Laos had Lan Xang, Vietnam being an empire of its own being ruled by an emperor, Cambodia had the Khmer Empire based in the grandeur of a capital city named Angkor, both Myanmar and Thailand each had different but unifying dynasties — Philippines had none, zilch, zero. Hence, while the rest of Southeast Asia can draw their nationalism from their prior history of national unity without the European colonial experience which only took place later hence a collective motivation to drive towards national glory and prosperity, Philippines when it finally became independent had to deal with different ethnic groups via an artificial and unstable notion of national unity that never beforehand existed, and for that to be achieved they will either model the Philippine history based on some old Hindu city-state of Tondo, which later became Manila that became the capital of the Spanish East Indies which included the Philippine islands, much to the offense of the Visayans and Mindanaoans; or outright they will look after Spain for cultural and historical reference since it, although European hence not native, was the only entity in the whole Philippine history that, with the exception of the Muslim sultanates of Mindanao, united and molded the disparate archipelago into a single political entity — all despite several flaws in its model that was inapplicable to the natives yet adapted by the natives nonetheless with local taste for the sake of national and cultural unity.
- The impact of Spain as the colonial master
The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 really is a boon for Europe, then a land of backward poverty and plague, to explore other routes of trade with the Orient to avoid the expensive tariffs over the selling of lucrative Oriental goods now monopolized by the Turkish sultan. It is from that exploration that led to the European conquest of the Americas and much of Asia, including the Philippines. Spain conquered the Philippines because they originally intended it as a trade outpost for their trade with China, an empire of vast riches and the envy of the world back in those days. But they now had to contend with people divided between different languages, cultures and beliefs.
So how did the Hispanic colonizers deal with such tribal and attitude divide in the Philippine islands?
For the Spanish, to make their governance of the land easier, they let the tribal chieftains continue ruling their petty lands but this time in the name of the colonial authorities. Sure, the Catholic proselytization of the natives by the Spanish missionaries was one icing in the crumbled cake aside from the natives now taking Spanish names and started wearing Spanish-Filipino hybrids of clothing, but the varying regional attitudes and mannerisms remained all the same. The Spanish government didn’t particularly care about this, except turning them from pagans and Austronesian Saracens into Catholics to make the control and taxation of the natives easier and streamlined, and as such they were thoroughly content on all that as long despite varying regional mannerisms as they were kept in line and are subjects of the King of Spain half the world away. As decades and centuries passed, all the old tribal chieftainships and kingdoms of the Philippine archipelago, hundreds of them, have been swept away by the unstoppable juggernaut of the Spanish conquistador.
Another inheritance the Spanish passed onto the natives is the system of feudalism. The Spanish government had to give rewards for their soldiers who fought hard to expand their imperial territories around the globe. Such rewards, if gold was not present, included land — “virgin”, yet native-inhabited, land. Lands that were given as rewards for the services of those subject to the Spanish Crown were turned into agricultural estates, with the defeated natives turned into serfs who were forced to till the land for their masters. It was not solely for Spanish blood though, native Filipinos who served alongside the Spaniards were also given such rewards for their services. Native landowners became the aristocrats while the peasants who work at the lands of the landowners were driven into the deep bottom of the social pyramid, powerless in the eyes of the government. Even the precolonial tribal nobility who had now swore an allegiance to the King of Spain and converted to Catholicism still got their precolonial aristocratic privileges preserved albeit with new titles, consequently becoming heads of newly founded towns in the name of Spain, but are only answerable to the Spanish governor general in Manila than to the native people they serve which, again, is mostly condemned by the higher authorities into serf labor on the parochial or military agricultural estates founded by the colonizers. This system has been going on for the entire 333 years of Spanish rule in the islands, and with the Filipinos having fully joined the Spanish social system for such a long time, it has become the key feature of the Philippine civilization, evidenced by the Philippine Civil Code which was itself copied from the Spanish Civil Code. From this, Filipinos would go toe to toe to compete, even kill, for straps of land, doing it either by purchase or, for the upper class and usually the political dynasties who earned power through immense feudalistic land ownership, using the instruments of the state to grab them by force and condemning the old, petty landowners either into rental serfs or forcing them to settle into cities which in turn causes the housing crises in the country’s major cities. The divide between the wealthy and the destitute only continues to widen thanks to the continuation of such socially sadistic system, and from that divide comes immense social instability.
With the now-landless peasants being driven into the urban communities as an escape from the clutches of their feudal masters and in search for a livelihood as recompense for their loss of their lands as primary sources of income at the hands of those in power, these people would have to cram their way into every inhabitable corner of the cities. If they couldn’t find a decent livelihood in the cities, since they had at 99.9% no way to return to the rural communities and turn back to their old rural life lest they risk turning into serfs again, they turn to crime. Being left to fend for themselves, they do not have much choice, it was every person for himself and herself. Add it with their respective regional attitudes, then it becomes a national free-for-all abyss. Philippines has become an individualist dirt mess due to this predicament.
Even the 40-year American occupation of the islands has done nothing to solve the long-running problem of Spanish-learnt feudalism, therefore impressing the entire event as if the Americans only conquered the land to teach the natives how to speak English. Before the Spanish, tribes were divided among cultural and religious lines; after the Spanish, people are united under one culture and system: worshiping Spanish-taught Catholicism, earning and taking Spanish names and honorifics, and practicing Spanish feudalism with either a pen or a bullet. But still, those at the base of the social pyramid are bound to kill each other just for a handful of rice and a parcel of land, themselves the victims of Spanish-style system. It was not only limited to the lower classes though, upperclassmen are also keen to compete with, even kill, themselves to garner social clout and political power and, with it, everything they wanted, including land.
With the Spanish having spread Catholicism, conservatism is also maintained with such brutal zeal by the masses. Philippines will never run out of religious bigots. People are being taught that doing anything that God doesn’t approve would lead to them earning events of bad luck and misfortune in their lives, hence they are willing to defend the system by whatever means necessary. That’s why anything modern and immodest such as wearing revealing clothes and birth controls as well as learning modern science are considered taboo in the country. Family honor will always be first above all, as in Catholic societies like in Spain and Latin America; it’s no surprising that the heads of the family will become toxic to their children by maintaining a policy of conservatism and toxic tradition therefore breeding a generation of altogether toxic mass of people who is unwilling to change the rotten system. Any forward-minded Generation Z person is sure to get ganged up by the conservative masses who content itself with the disadvantageous status quo that only favors themselves and not the country as a whole.
Then-Davao mayor, later the nation’s president, Rodrigo Duterte with the masses
Meanwhile the national elite would prefer the masses to be conservative and mentally feeble so that they were easy to be controlled and easy to be cheated on elections, and this is where yet another effect of Spanish-taught Catholicism comes into play: God complex. The common Filipino would always love a Messiah who could save the country from the problems that it currently faces. Such mentality paved the way for the election of populists and despots Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte as heads of state, and the people loved it till the very end. The reality is, the rise of strongmen such as them in the country are rooted from the country’s social instability brought out by the institutionalized inequality that the Spanish-introduced system have brought into the islands. Massive inequality results to social instability, and social instability gives birth to the rise of strongmen and dictators and political Messiahs in the country. This is why long-running political dynasties are so rampant in across the islands.
With all that, Philippines is de facto still stuck onto the Dark Age. But it should also not be forgotten that it was Spain that united the disparate islands into a one single entity thus making it possible, despite countless flaws, for the prime movers of independence to turn it into a one single sovereign country albeit still owing their independence derived from their breaking off of Spain as evidenced by the date which the country first declared its independence.
- The symptom of American imperialism
The United States of America is one of the most brutal empires since the days of Genghis Khan. Originally populated by settlers who have had enough with England’s royal and feudal brutality in the British Isles, its people lashed back against their colonial masters stopping their expansion and inched towards what they saw as God’s gift for them — some of the most fertile soils in the world thanks to the Mississippi River basin, something that most of Europe had been always lacking. At the expense of millions of Native American lives, the descendants of the settlers bloodied their way into what they became, so much that at least 75% of its existence was that of warfare.
That brutality spread as far and wide as Latin America, were millions died still under the auspices of American megacorporations paying off dictators. It finally had its first blood in Southeast Asia with the Philippines in 1899, under the excuse of saving it from other European competitors in the area. From 1899 to 1906, the American invasion of the islands, billed by Billy McKinley as a “civilizing” mission, two million people in the islands died, almost as many as the ones who died in Vietnam War, because they weren’t Caucasian and Christian enough to be worthy of civilization despite the fact that they have been subjected to Hispanic Catholic civilization tied to Mother Spain and Latin America for more than 300 years. But, of course, American history will always deliberately forgo the war from its history books, for it would taint their image of a benign power being the world’s ”good guys”.
As soon as the Americans dealt with the so-called Filipino “insurrectionists” and “bandits”, they began attempting to change the social system into one that is modeled after the American ideals of sheer individualism, extreme liberty and liberal democracy. They intended to do just that to show Asia that Western democracy is the way, while in reality it was just a ploy to make a footrest for American bald eagle claws of imperialism in the Pacific. But while the Americans would love to blame the Chinese government for its inability to introduce their own brand of democracy in Tiananmen in 1989, American policymakers in the District of Columbia will never, ever, admit the failure of their democracy while the Filipinos, the first Asian victims of conquest-induced American imperialism, wholeheartedly albeit naively embraced in the Reverse Tiananmen of 1986 which is the EDSA Revolution, which further turned the Philippines into nothing more than a chaotic mess celebrated with laughter by all of its international contemporaries.
Nobody talks about the EDSA Revolution of ‘86 lest America will be so embarrassed with what they created that they will lose face.
Due to the fact that it was literally snuffed out of its own sovereign national existence in 1902, the Philippines is the world’s most loyal American vassal, despite the fact that Washington no longer invests in the islands due to its political corruption stemming from its Spanish colonial history and its geographical uselessness in relation to keeping the balance of power in the Pacific, as South Korea and Japan sit more directly to the Chinese juggernaut and Indonesia and Singapore are far better suitable transit points from which the Americans could access the Indian Ocean and Middle East more so than some speck of islands that is constantly hit by typhoons and volcanic eruptions one of which destroyed the largest US Air Force base in Asia in the early 1990’s.
Filipinos seek validation from the Americans for their existence, lest other people treat them as mere garbage, the direct effect of its brutal conquest of the islands that took place at the nadir of Western global imperialism which contributed to their colonial mentality, the strongest in the world. Philippines will always follow Uncle Sam like a dog despite the fact that during its brutal conquest of the islands during the dawning days of the 20th century.
American imperialism in the islands that is continuing till today condemned the common Filipino into nothing more than a commodity, like drones with no sense of national pride, while worshiping the American white folk as if they are the personification of God. For the American government and its corporate oligarchic class, Philippines is nothing more than a banana republic and a dumping ground for municipal garbage from continental North America.
Why Philippines became a disaster, the democracy that the Americans brought to the islands played a huge part on it. It rendered the people nothing more than a directionless and degenerate mob of politically immature adult kindergarten schoolers who still could not figure out who they could vote someone with their best interests at heart. While they did a great job toppling a tyrant whose tyranny is the direct product of Hispanic-Catholic and Confucian influences, the reverse Tiananmen in 1986 that made it possible rendered the country into the deepest depths of the quicksand and quagmire of national incompetence and inability to assert itself in the international community. The American political-military industrial complex care much more on oil-rich Iraq than they do on dirt-poor Philippines, whose disaster could be attributed to the atrocities of its soldiers more than a century that passed.
Afam!
- The intellectual and moral malice of the tropical climate
Philippines is a tropical country that is located near the equator. Regions that are near the equator are known to be inhabited by people who are high in testosterone and fecundity but only average or mediocre in intelligence with some exceptions.
Average IQ by country, red and orange being lowest and blue and green to highest.
The equator and the tropic circles (Cancer and Capricorn) are the regions most hit by the Sun, and therefore regions situated in or close to it record the highest temperature anywhere in the world. The geography of regions had a role also in that they affect the distribution of the sun’s heat in an area. The human’s intelligence and self-power is affected by temperature the longer he and his people were inhabiting their own land. The cooler the climate, the less fertile and arable the land, the higher the intelligence of an average person as the cold-induced partial infertility of the land incenses that person to do more what is required to carry on with life, performing intelligently creative tasks to achieve the needed result. The warmer or hotter the climate, the more fertile the lands were, the less incentive left for the person to plan things ahead therefore becoming complacent in the process. Cold temperatures transfer the energy of a human into the brain, while warm or hot temperatures diverts the energy of a human from the brain into the immune system, sacrificing intelligence for better protection from bacterial infection; other bodily properties were complemented by diets respective of the regions they inhabit.
We must confess that indolence does actually and positively exist [in the Philippines]; only that, instead of holding it to be the cause of the backwardness and the trouble, we regard it as the effect of the trouble and the backwardness, by fostering the development of a lamentable predisposition.
Nature knows this and like a just mother has therefore made the earth more fertile, more productive, as a compensation. An hour’s work under that burning sun, in the midst of pernicious influences springing from nature in activity, is equal to a day’s work in a temperate climate.
— Jose Rizal
Since the Philippines was situated near the equator, endowed by a warm to hot climate with moderate rainfall, its people are more content to cultivate crop food without much of a problem other than the pests that ruin the crops, semiannual episodes of drought and flood that were always solved partially or wholly by irrigation structures, and the destructive power of the rather annually seldom events of tropical oceanic cyclones. They do not have the problems the farmers from the subarctic countries face, such as food crops being killed by winter and others. But complacency always clouts innovative and critical thinking. Complacency breeds incompetence. This is not to downplay the fact that Filipinos are indeed hardworking as evidenced by their willingness to husk coconuts in other countries such as the Emirates and Canada, but the situation and location that the Philippines is in dictates the mentality of its people.
Average intelligence quotient of Southeast Asian countries
Such a shame, despite compulsory and mandatory public education being enacted in the islands by a royal decree of Queen Isabella II of Spain since year 1863 — the first in Southeast Asia, Philippines was sorry in that it had the lowest average IQ in the region. Coupled with the present conservative culture taught to the masses by the Spanish long ago, this is the reason why the very existence of the Philippines is the biggest anti-intellectual movement of the 21st century. In terms of overall IQ, it was somewhat better than the countries of Africa and even the nation of India which invented the modern numerical counts and the propulsion rocket, but being below point 90 which means intellectually uninterested, the point 86 count for the Philippines means that most and not all Filipinos indeed think below the intelligence line.
Such mediocre mindedness always leads to performing violent acts and crime to name a few, such as theft, murder, scamming people in the internet, and performing rape to sate their testosterone and libido-induced sexual urges that is being furthered by the tropical climate that increases the chances to diverge into the “r” part of the r/K selection spectrum that determines who is intelligent and who is willing to intercourse like rabbits. It also reinforces hopelessness towards the overall situation that once again they are either complaining for the status they are in, to binge into resilience porn to prove that they are always resilient and stubborn no matter what issues they face, or they are willing to show up their God complex in the hopes of some Savior would appear and help them alleviate their daily problems, therefore contributing even more to the cultural conservatism that the country experiences since time immemorial. This is the reason why most Filipino politicians are incompetent.
Also, the tropical climate of the Philippines, its position in the Pacific Line of Fire, and its being astride in the common routes of oceanic cyclones guaranteed that its people would pray to whatever deity they had with them because they purposed that it will save them and their loved ones from the tragedies brought about by its geography. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, destructive typhoons, those were all natural occurrences in the islands that will always ensure the fear of its people of anything that could lose the things they loved the most like a bubble disappearing in thick air, and to get rid of that fear, they have to use religion as a conduit for them to have a counter for their fears; after all, such natural occurrences had caused so much deaths and destruction in the past that people are so traumatized they cannot get over their loss that they deemed inconsolable. Not even science could prevent those disasters, after all, being only limited to instruments of detection and forewarning. Such belong to an obvious warranty of the unfathomable strength of religious fanaticism in the country. Or if religion doesn’t work, the people will play resilient and just let the problems around them pass and pretend that they live in a different world where there wouldn’t be any hurt or bloodshed, sometimes even using dangerous mentally-affecting drugs to make it work.
For all the factors mentioned in relation to the mentality of the Filipino people as affected by the fact that they are inhabiting an inland group closer to the equator, it’s safe and yet controversial to say that science, the department that is supposed to work for it being already given a breadcrumbs budget by the government, has no hope to exist as a helpful entity in this country.
After all, is Philippines any different from most other Third World equatorial and sub-equatorial countries who had their equal share of tragic national experiences? One as to see for themselves.
- The relative irrelevance of the country to the world
For a foreign perspective, Philippines was good for nothing other than offering its people in body contact sports, beauty pageants and singing contests. Other than that, Philippines was meh, an insignificant flicker to the world which was only good in exporting overseas workers and green-carder prostitutes playing Dutch wives to foreigners who are wealthy yet clueless for what is to come to them when they get one as their wife. For Filipinos tired and sick of dealing with everyday problems such as crime and poverty, there is only one big and largest thing that can distract them from the harsh reality of Filipino life: Pinoy Pride.
Ipakita ang galing ng Pilipino! (Show the awesomeness of the Filipino!)
Just like the Argentinian military shogunate distracting the poor masses from the harsh and despotic reality of the Argentinian life by starting that stupid war with Britain over the possession of the Falklands to reinforces that pride of being Argentinian like the good old Peron days, just like today’s Greece and Greeks constantly flaunts of its ancient history to keep itself relevant internationally while forgetting that it has trillions of debt to be paid to the banks of Europe, the Philippine media and elite establishment is just as keen to attempt to lift up the tired spirits of the Filipinos by showcasing awesome talents even if that took place elsewhere like in the United States and Britain. All street and road traffic, work activities and even crime are put to a stop once events took place that showcase Pinoy Pride like the boxing matches of Manny Pacquiao and the beauty pageants that present the beauty and brains of the Filipina.
This whole country is a one big mess of a kindergarten, a bunch of kids discarded by their parents. Do you know what it feels like? Your whole life you were compelled to prove that you are able to take care of yourself, to prove that you can defecate, eat, have sex, drink, bleed, earn money, to prove to the world that you can do whatever it takes to survive until you die. Will you believe me if I tell you that I and your wonderful family that you were so anxious to leave are our nation’s only guarantee of survival? We are the backbone of this country’s economy, and only we can prove that this nation is alive and useful for anything!
— Vukmir, A Serbian Film
Pinoy Pride was necessary to improve Philippine’s relevance to the world, to make the Filipino people feel that they are not being left behind by the world and they are capable of doing anything just to prove that they are world-class and Philippines is useful for anything despite the serious issues it currently faces. Filipinos had to be hospitable to foreigners for the Philippines to gain a positive reputation in the face of the world. If there was no Pinoy Pride, foreigners would keep belittling Filipinos because they are useless, just like the Chinese, Cambodians, Indonesians, South Koreans and a number of Americans would often say in the internet and in real life, therefore rendering Philippines into a trash can of a failure of social engineering and further reinforcing the disillusionment of the restless Filipinos, who rather see other countries such as the United States, Japan and the countries of Europe as their source of inspiration owing to the magnificent grandeur and rich and glorious history of these countries in contrast to the buffoonery of a dysfunctional country which only has known hundreds of years of foreign subjugation and tragedies both social and natural.
So restless they are that many of them find migrating to America, Canada and New Zealand along with their families a more suitable option than staying in the jumbled mess that is called the Philippines. Many Filipinos find Philippines in a hopeless situation, fouled up beyond all reprieve, and it is all because of its horrible historical background that Philippines became what it is today. The Pinoy Pride is nothing but an empty promise of engrossing the reputation of a nation long forlorn by its own dirty state, whose people felt so irrelevant and morally helpless that they would betray it and migrate elsewhere to find a new lease in life without ever turning back, all without a second thought.
- The malevolence of the government
Ex-corruption convict and present senator Ramon Revilla, Jr. dancing in a political campaign
The overall culture, the antiquated social system inherited from Spain, and the overall attitude of the Filipinos across the regions that dictates their mannerisms always guaranteed that the Philippines will always be inept, inefficient and corrupt to the core. Those who are in power are unwilling to change the system in the fears that they will lost a lot, if not everything. They are the reason why oligarchs continue to exist, leeching upon the country’s natural resources while the poor toil on sweat and blood. Those in the government are themselves the beneficiaries of the Spanish-style feudalism in the country, being landowners of massive rural estates that they used as leverage and cash cow for their political campaigns and programs, and they are willing to do everything just to maintain their elite status by for starters forging laws that are mostly favor to them.
Filipinos are after all incentivists. They will not do anything that does not reward something for themselves. For them, sacrifice is of optional or secondary importance. This could be blamed for the unstable social system where the common people and politicians and the entrenched elite alike would kill each other for position, money and land, with the police force and the Army, themselves at the bidding of their local government units as per the system, often powerless to stop it and even joining in this social slaughter. Fear breeds greed. Surroundings and the everyday occurrences around a person can cause even the most innocent and the most generous to become an irrational selfish being.
As a result, the government often fails to deliver its services to the people. The government’s negligence to the voice of the people is so great that the people only think and look after themselves and not for the country, inasmuch that although there were laws put into place they would not follow them and would rather not care if they violate any law as they believed it runs counter to whatever benefits and comforts they seek from the crumbs of the shambles of the Philippine social system that is honed by years upon years of fouling up from the locals who were influenced by the methods of the past colonizers and the foreign imperialists alike. The whole political system of the Philippines was nothing more than a circle of close colleagues and potential and future enemies who opt to rather preserve the centuries-old status quo in the hopes of not losing what they have that they believed were acquired with greater effort in contrast to losing them all under a bubble disappearing in thin air in an instant, which was made possible by the cracked social system introduced by the country’s colonizers on end.
Failure, plus more failure, equals failure that everywhere we see.
Philippines has a history and culture that was distinct from the rest of the world. It was a group of islands inhabited by regionally distinct and altogether different people who have no prior experience of national unity nor, unlike the other Southeast Asian nations, a reminder of ages-past imperial grandeur to motivate them to do things better as high as the sky. It was cursed for its geography and location near the center of the face of the earth that helped shape the minds of the people inhabiting it into what they are since time immemorial until today. It was the only region in the world and none other that is conquered and ruled by three global superpowers in succession for nearly half a millennium, the first of which being responsible for bringing the culturally and linguistically divided massive group of islands together by a fragile and dysfunctional glue of societal system and culture. A country inhabited by a people with varying attitudes dictated by the very geography they are in and each divided between ethnic and lingual lines, being united only by a colonial entity that taught them of a unifying culture and system that ironically only keeps them in conflict with each other, and with no prior history of national unity and rather a history of subjugation by varying foreign entities: all of these can make the perfect recipe for a disaster as a nation.
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