Tribalism. This is the legacy, the pride and the problem of the Philippines. I am half Filipino, and all American. One day on a visit home to my family, my grandfather took the trouble to forgive me for being half American. As a former lawyer and teacher, he then led two lectures, one on what he termed the actual history of the Philippines (the battle of Manila Bay was a farce, how much he resented the Americans for displacing Filipino culture with Yankee culture), on another occasion he compared and contrasted the East and the West (the East characterized by the family, the West by the individual, and the presence of an American in the family was solvent to the glue of family).

I love my grandfather but he was cruel as well as loving. There were many occasions when I asked myself silently “If he loves us, then why was he so cruel?” I finally came to the conclusion that every tribe needs a chief and he was merely reinforcing his position by inflicting arbitrary fear. After his death, my family clan broke apart in internecine rivalry and to this day cycles of resentment and retaliation seem endless.

It is the ideal of the tribe and family as a basic social unit that is the problem in the Philippines, this is why corruption in government is so endemic there. It may take centuries to migrate to an individualistic mindset, but in the meantime the situation seems hopeless.