by Raffy Gutierrez
For more than five hundred years, we’ve been conditioned to endure. To adjust. To keep our heads down and make do. We learned how to survive colonizers, occupiers, patrons, politicians, and systems that never truly trusted Filipinos to think for themselves. Survival became our national reflex. Dignity? Optional. Usually postponed. We even glorified the word “resilient,” convincing ourselves it meant strength—when in reality, it often just meant we learned how to tolerate what should never have been acceptable in the first place.
This isn’t about blaming the past for everything that’s wrong today. It’s about recognizing a pattern that never really ended. We adapted so well to broken systems that we stopped questioning them. We line up for hours just to get medical treatment in government hospitals—if we’re lucky enough to get treated at all. We fill out endless forms to obtain a single, meaningless number. We spend an hour just to move one kilometer because traffic has been normalized as daily punishment. We are asked to submit absurd requirements like two valid government IDs when many of us can’t even secure one. Some of us have even waded through floodwaters that reached the second floor of our own homes and told ourselves this was normal. Somewhere along the way, inconvenience became routine, incompetence became acceptable, humiliation became standard, and corruption became tolerated—because it felt like there was no other choice.
Let’s be clear: Filipinos are not stupid. We are not inherently lazy. We are not lacking in talent or creativity. Anyone who has worked with Filipinos abroad knows this. What we lack—collectively—is intolerance for dysfunction. We complain privately but comply publicly. We joke about inefficiency instead of demanding its removal. We shrug and say “ganun talaga” as if dysfunction were a law of nature. In doing so, we accepted a reality far below what this country could have been if our systems were not fundamentally broken.
That mindset is the real darkness. Not poverty. Not lack of resources. Darkness begins when people stop expecting systems to work. When citizens feel lucky just to receive what they already paid for—or worse, scraps of what they should have been getting in full. When asking for basic service starts to feel like begging instead of exercising a right. When this becomes normal, decay follows.
Technology should have broken this cycle. Instead, too often, it has been reduced to theater. Shiny launches. Big words. Nice logos. Press releases. Then silence. Government apps that look modern but do little more than redirect users to agency websites. “Digital solutions” that make announcements faster but accountability harder. We are sold progress as an image, while the lived experience of being a Filipino citizen remains painfully outdated.
This isn’t just a technology problem. It’s a culture-of-execution problem. We love plans. We worship intentions. We applaud vision statements. But we get uncomfortable when it’s time to measure outcomes, audit failures, and hold people accountable. We announce reforms without redesigning incentives. We celebrate beginnings and quietly ignore endings.
And yet—something is changing.
You can feel it in conversations about working from home, upskilling, AI, and stepping away from broken systems instead of waiting for them to be fixed. You see it in ordinary Filipinos quietly upgrading themselves—learning new skills, managing money better, building alternatives. Not because they hate this country, but because they’re tired of being limited by systems that refuse to grow up.
This awakening isn’t loud. It doesn’t always protest. Most of the time, it studies. It observes. It asks uncomfortable questions. Why does this take so long? Who benefits from this inefficiency? Why are citizens treated like suspects instead of partners? Why are people placed in charge of systems and departments they don’t even understand?
Real freedom isn’t something you celebrate once a year with speeches and flags. Real freedom is boring, unglamorous, and practical. It looks like systems that work even when no one is watching. It looks like competence being the baseline, not the exception. It looks like citizens who know their rights—and their responsibilities—and who refuse to lower their standards just to keep the peace.
We don’t need miracles. We need adulthood. National adulthood. The honesty to admit what’s broken. The discipline to fix things properly instead of cosmetically. The humility to learn from what actually works, even if it bruises our pride and exposes the hollowness of fake “Pinoy pride.” There is nothing patriotic about defending failure.
This year, I want to push a different conversation. One that refuses slogans. One that connects technology, governance, work, money, belief systems, and personal responsibility into a single, uncomfortable but necessary picture. Not to rant. Not to preach. Not to posture—but to strip away illusions. To break free from the delusion that has kept this country in darkness for over five centuries.
Because clarity is dangerous—to broken systems. Once people see clearly, they stop begging. They stop romanticizing suffering. They stop confusing resilience with tolerance for abuse. And when enough people stop playing along, change stops being a promise and starts becoming unavoidable.
We’ve mastered survival. That chapter is long overdue to end. The next one is about dignity—and it won’t be written by those who benefit from keeping us small.
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Rafael “Raffy” Gutierrez is a Technology Trainer with over 25 years of experience in networking, systems design, and diverse computer technologies. He is also a popular social media blogger well-known for his real-talk, no-holds-barred outlook on religion, politics, philosophy.
