Honesty

For years, Filipinos have been known to be honest people. There has been no shortage of news about cab drivers returning cash or other valuables to their passengers, usually foreigners. Another instance though hardly newsworthy, is when someone finds a wallet in the street or somewhere else, and takes the extra effort to find the owner and return it. I have first hand experience on this, when I conducted an experiment for my psychology class back in college.

Upon the instruction of my professor, me and my classmates bought several cheap wallets and put 50 pesos’ worth of cash inside each of them, along with our contact information. We then dropped the wallets in random places around the campus. To our delight, some of my classmates received phone calls that night. The next day, we went to the guidance counselor’s office to check the lost and found section. We were pleased to find that majority of the wallets have been deposited there. Of course, a number of wallets weren’t returned and my classmates dismissed those who found them as crooks. Until now, I always thought that my psychology professor just pulled a fast one on us and in the guise of giving us an assignment, instead harvested some of the dropped wallets and used the cash for beer money. But that’s another story, or blog.

Nowadays, however, the Filipinos’ honesty has been suspect. Perhaps it might have to do with the growing poverty, which would urge many self-respecting citizens to throw all that godd*mn honesty out the window just to fill their bellies. But I suspect that the Filipinos’ growing dishonesty has more to do with having a president who is leading by example.

I read with amusement Conrado de Quiros’s column about the recent accusations of the people from Thailand that the Philippines cheated in the just concluded SEA games. De Quiros says that whether the accusations of the Thais were true or not, the painful truth is that other nations do not have much respect for us anymore. To them, our honesty is suspect because our president brazenly cheated in the elections and we don’t give a damn about it.

I must say I do agree with De Quiros. It seems that we have grown accustomed to cheating that we let someone get away with something more serious than murder. More so than that, we don’t even show any outrage about the iniquity committed. Just like the fact that we didn’t show any outrage when the Thais accused us of rigging the SEA games results.

Just like De Quiros suggests, I think the first thing we have to do in order to get back our lost integrity as a people is to get rid of that dishonest creature in Malacañang.

I do believe that the Filipino is still inherently honest. Just take the case of the Jeepney. Unlike some countries where you have to deposit some change to ride a bus, you can actually ride a jeepney without paying (in Visayan, we call this term “mamukong”). But majority of us do pay for a jeepney ride, and those who do not are either the desperately poor ones or the ones with particularly thick hides.

Ah, but this example wouldn’t stand as an argument when put in the same context as congressmen scrambling to get their pork barrel allocations or those highly-paid actors and actresses who earn millions but don’t pay their taxes.

“Honesty is the best policy” is perhaps one of the most popular cliché phrases around. Change “honesty” to the word “panlalamang” and you’ll get the most popular phrase in the Philippines.