THE Philippine Council for Foreign Relations recently had economist Calixto Chikiamco as its guest speaker. In that meeting at UP-BGC, Chikiamco walked the audience through the march of history whereby the country’s dismal economic record, from the Commonwealth era to the present day, was attributed to the clashing agendas of the left and the oligarchy for economic control. Our overvalued peso compared to other currencies, protectionist policies, and rent-seeking DNA principally suppressed our competitiveness.
The persistence of those inward-looking, self-gratifying practices led to the systematic shrinkage of our agricultural and industrial sectors; stunted economic growth and development; and deterioration of democratic values, our quality of life and public service delivery. Political dynasties are subverting nation-building. Our shattered educational system keeps producing moral and intellectual pygmies. Runaway institutional corruption is sabotaging the national interest.
We lost our way while other countries pulled together to place national interest above their personal interests. While corrupt practices are ever-present, patriotic fervor saw to it that corruption did not get in the way of public service and civic duties. We lost sight of our national values, and with it our moral moorings. In time, we developed defective attitudes and behavior that placed self above all else. We’ve become an irresponsible society that neglected nation-building imperatives.
Elections were corrupted placing the wrong people in charge of our lives. Political parties turned into transactional power-wielding syndicates. Policy gaps favored the oligarchy over the people. Policy implementation has been consistently dismal. What we have today is a society that’s trapped in its own weakness. Institutional failure has made it easy for criminals and malign foreign actors to easily infiltrate the corridors of power and live freely among us while killing us softly with impunity.
All that, plus the steady erosion of our competitiveness and national power, are now seriously impacting on national security. The bottom line is that our country is at grave risk. Its trajectory is headed for failure and collapse. So what to do? Filipino reformists often say that we should change the “system” through constitutional reform. A constitutional convention must be called to remove the obstacles to national growth and development. Enabling laws banning political dynasties, purifying the electoral system, and adopting modern technologies to reduce corruption are among them.
Get the latest news
delivered to your inbox
Sign up for The Manila Times newsletters
By signing up with an email address, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
There’s no disagreement there. I would argue, however, that our political, social and economic problems resulting in a Gordian knot cannot be resolved unless there is a fundamental change in our attitude and behavior that make all those problems possible and unsolvable. This is one of the hardest truths reform movements avoid because it’s uncomfortable and deeply personal. No constitution can save a people who refuse to change themselves.
Yes, we must change the “system” — the Constitution, the form of government, the allocation of powers. That’s right. The system matters. Structures matter. Rules matter. But here’s the inconvenient truth we keep dodging: No system can redeem a people whose attitudes and behavior continuously poison it. We’ve tried changing rules before. We have rewritten constitutions. We have overthrown dictators. We have elected reformists, technocrats, messiahs. And, yet, corruption persists, incompetence regenerates, dynasties endure, and poverty remains stubbornly intergenerational.
Advertisement
Why? Because we keep attempting national transformation without self-transformation. We want clean government while bribing traffic enforcers. We denounce corruption while asking for a padrino. We curse political dynasties while voting for familiar surnames. We demand discipline from leaders while excusing our own small dishonesties as “diskarte.” This is the Filipino Gordian knot — not merely institutional, but cultural and moral.
A constitution is only ink on paper if the citizens who live under it lack civic virtue. Laws are meaningless if obedience is conditional and morality is negotiable. Federalism, parliamentarism, or any other grand redesign will simply redistribute dysfunction if the same values, habits, and incentives remain intact. We cannot out-engineer a character problem. Our deepest national crises are not legal, they’re behavioral; not structural, but attitudinal. Every failed reform is a mirror we refuse to look into. This is not a soft or spiritual argument. It’s brutally practical. We suffer from a quiet epidemic of moral shortcuts: the normalization of rule-bending, the tolerance of mediocrity, the rationalization of abuse, the expectation that someone else will fix what we ourselves enable.
Self-transformation rejects that culture of entitlement and replaces it with responsibility. It means choosing competence over connections, duty over convenience, truth over tribal loyalty. It means raising children who respect rules even when no one is watching, and adults who do not outsource patriotism to slogans and elections every three years. Nations that succeed do not do so because they found the perfect constitution. They succeed because enough citizens internalized discipline, trust, accountability and long-term thinking — values that no law can impose, only a people can embody.
Reform that does not begin with the self is cosmetic. Revolution without moral renewal is just a change of uniforms. Yes, let us debate constitutional reform. Let us modernize institutions. Let us redesign governance. But let us stop pretending that salvation lies in blueprints alone. The real revolution begins when Filipinos decide — individually and collectively — that excuses are over, that integrity is nonnegotiable, and that the nation we want must first be lived, not legislated.
Advertisement
Until then, we will keep cutting at the Gordian knot with sharper swords while refusing to loosen the hands that tied it in the first place.
Rafael Alunan III is a former secretary of tourism and of interior and local government. He is currently a governor of the Management Association of the Philippines, and chairman emeritus of the Philippine Council for Foreign Relations.
