NAGBAGO NA BA ANG MGA PILIPINO?

I was recently handed a two-page document from the Liga ng mga Barangay sa Pilipinas promoting something called #MagalangNaPinoy: A Filipino Values Revival Movement.

The question printed beside its QR code was simple:

Nagbago na ba ang mga Pilipino?

My first reaction was that I had heard this question before, only in different forms. What happened to Filipino values? Why are people angrier? Why has public conversation become so vicious? Why do children seem more violent? Why are people so comfortable humiliating strangers online? And almost inevitably, the usual suspects appear: Facebook, smartphones, gaming, artificial intelligence, materialism, weakened families, the internet.

The document itself makes many of those connections. But reading it brought me back to an old thesis of mine, one I have carried around for years and never completely settled.

I used to wonder whether Filipinos had a dormant capacity for violence and cruelty that we simply kept under control because society told us certain things were unacceptable. And then one president arrived who somehow gave people permission to stop hiding it.

I was thinking, of course, about Rodrigo Duterte.

That is a dangerous proposition to make casually, so before revisiting it I decided to ask a harder question:

What if I was wrong?

THE PROBLEM WITH SAYING DUTERTE CHANGED US

The easiest version of the argument would be this: Duterte became president in 2016, normalized violent language, thousands died during the drug war, political discourse became uglier, social media became more vicious, therefore Duterte made Filipinos violent.

Convenient, but also intellectually lazy, because the evidence tells us something uncomfortable.

Some of this was already here.

The World Values Survey asked Filipinos long before Duterte became president whether having a strong leader who did not have to bother with parliament and elections would be a good way of governing the country. In 2001, around 62 percent considered that fairly or very good. In 2012, it was still around 59 percent.

Duterte would not become president until four years later.

There was already a substantial Filipino constituency receptive to the idea of a leader unconstrained by normal democratic institutions.

Davao gives us an even more disturbing pre-presidency example. In 2015, an Ateneo de Davao University survey found that more than half of Dabawenyos approved of the existence of the so-called Davao Death Squad. Yet many of those same respondents also said they were worried about it.

Months later, shortly before Duterte assumed the presidency, another survey found that 60 percent believed the DDS could solve criminality while 68 percent believed the justice system was unfair.

People can be afraid of violence and still tolerate it. They can believe killing is wrong and still make exceptions when they think the justice system no longer works. They can believe in democracy and still be drawn to someone promising to bulldoze through the usual restraints.

So perhaps the original thesis needs to be revised. Maybe Duterte did not put something inside Filipinos.

Maybe he found something that was already there.

WHAT DUTERTE MAY HAVE CHANGED

Political scientists have been studying something very close to this question.

Nicole Curato described what she called latent anxiety surrounding drugs, insecurity, disorder and a justice system people did not trust. These anxieties existed before Duterte. His political talent was recognizing them, turning them into a national political issue and giving people an enemy around which those anxieties could be organized.

Other researchers examining Duterte's presidency found that his violent rhetoric was not merely random profanity from a foul-mouthed politician. A study of hundreds of his presidential speeches found evidence of what researchers describe as strategic priming: repeatedly framing crime and drugs in ways that helped build legitimacy for the policies being pursued.

This is where my old idea becomes more interesting. Perhaps the important change was not necessarily what Filipinos believed privately. Perhaps the change was what Filipinos felt permitted to say publicly.

Imagine someone who already believes that suspected criminals deserve whatever happens to them. Before Duterte, saying, “Patayin na lang sila,” might still carry a social cost. You could be considered cruel, ignorant or extreme.

Then the president himself repeatedly speaks about killing criminals. Crowds cheer. Officials defend him. His popularity remains enormous. Supporters repeat the language. Your friends repeat it. Your Facebook feed rewards it.

Suddenly the belief has not merely become expressible. In a large political community, it has become acceptable to defend publicly.

Cruelty can be recast as toughness. Disregard for due process can be recast as decisiveness. Threatening people can be defended as authenticity. Compassion can be mocked as weakness.

The idea existed before.

What may have changed was the restraint.

BUT FILIPINOS DID NOT SIMPLY BECOME BLOODTHIRSTY

There is another set of numbers that prevents us from turning this into an anti-Duterte morality tale.

At the height of the drug war's popularity, Filipinos repeatedly told survey researchers that they wanted drug suspects captured alive. In late 2016, roughly 84 to 85 percent were satisfied with the government's anti-drug campaign. At the same time, around 94 percent said it was important for suspects to be captured alive.

Large numbers worried that they themselves, relatives or acquaintances could become victims of extrajudicial killings. Many considered EJKs a serious problem.

That is not the profile of a country whose population suddenly decided killing was morally acceptable. It is the profile of a country wanting two things at the same time.

We wanted somebody tough enough to solve the problem, but we did not necessarily want what toughness could become once ordinary restraints disappeared.

That may also help explain why, years later, substantial numbers of Filipinos would say Duterte should be held accountable for drug-war killings.

The values were still there. They were competing with one another: justice versus vengeance, order versus due process, loyalty versus accountability, compassion versus anger, democracy versus the desire for someone who could simply get things done.

Perhaps Filipinos were not transformed so much as different values and impulses were being activated at different times.

And this is why the question on the #MagalangNaPinoy document interests me. If something changed, we first have to understand what changed before deciding how to change it back.

THEN FACEBOOK HANDED EVERYONE A LOUDSPEAKER

This is also why I am reluctant to blame social media for everything.

Facebook did not invent Filipino political anger. Research into Duterte's 2016 campaign found that much of his enormous digital support reflected genuine grassroots support that also existed offline.

The trolls were real. Organized disinformation was real. Political amplification networks were real.

But so were the people.

Social media did something else: it made expression incredibly cheap. You could insult someone without seeing his face. You could wish death on somebody and immediately receive hundreds of likes. You could discover thousands of strangers who shared an opinion you previously thought unacceptable.

And when enough people repeat something, the abnormal begins to feel normal.

So perhaps the sequence looked more like this: a grievance already exists; a political leader validates it and provides the language for expressing it; social media distributes that language; other people reward it; the behavior becomes normalized.

Then eventually nobody remembers that we once considered it unacceptable.

That is much more frightening than saying Facebook made us bad, because it means technology may only reveal and amplify what society has already permitted.

WHICH BRINGS ME BACK TO #MAGALANGNAPINOY

The Liga ng mga Barangay is now proposing a nationwide Filipino values revival.

Its document talks about respect, responsibility, compassion, discipline, integrity and active citizenship. It also points toward social media abuse, cyberbullying, gaming, artificial intelligence, violence among young people, HIV, teenage pregnancy and weakening relationships as signs of a society experiencing serious problems.

Some of those problems are undeniably real. The school violence that apparently helped trigger this campaign is especially disturbing, and we have now seen multiple violent incidents involving students, including killings.

There is nothing unreasonable about looking at those events and asking whether something deeper is happening in our communities.

But I have a problem with the diagnosis.

You cannot collect every disturbing statistic in modern Philippine society and simply place “declining values” underneath them.

A school shooting can involve values. It can also involve firearms access, bullying, psychological distress, family problems, school security failures or a dozen other factors.

A teenage pregnancy involving a very young girl may not be evidence that children have lost their values at all. It may be evidence that a child has been abused.

An HIV epidemic is a public-health problem. Turning it automatically into evidence of moral deterioration risks misunderstanding the very problem we are trying to solve.

AI can encourage people to offload more of their thinking when used carelessly, but it can also make an extraordinary educational resource available to somebody who previously had none. Gaming can expose children to violent content, but millions of completely ordinary, decent people also play video games without becoming violent. Facebook can spread hatred, but it can also expose corruption, organize disaster relief, reconnect families and allow ordinary Filipinos to participate in public debate.

Technology has consequences, but technology has no morality of its own.

People supply that. And leaders help establish what behavior society rewards.

WE HAVE TRIED MORAL RECOVERY BEFORE

There is an interesting historical comparison here.

In 1992, the Ramos administration launched a Moral Recovery Program. What struck me when I read the proclamation was what government considered part of the moral problem: graft and corruption, patronage politics, lack of accountability, apathy, indifference to the common good and lack of discipline.

The program did not simply look downward and tell citizens to behave themselves.

It looked at government too.

Later, Integrity Circles were established inside government because public servants themselves were supposed to participate in moral recovery.

That makes the current discussion much more interesting. Because if we genuinely believe Filipino values need reviving, why would we stop at children, Facebook users, gamers and families? Why not politicians, presidents, congressmen, barangay officials, government employees, bloggers , why not us?

A society does not teach values only through classrooms and parenting.

It teaches values by what it rewards.

When a corrupt politician continues winning elections, we teach something. When lying carries no consequence, we teach something. When political supporters defend behavior they would condemn if the other side did it, we teach something. When public officials humiliate people and society applauds, we teach something. When someone is killed and our first question is whether the victim deserved it, we teach something.

Children are watching all of that too.

MAYBE THE LIGA IS SEEING SOMETHING REAL

And this is where I surprised myself.

I began looking at #MagalangNaPinoy expecting to challenge the premise. After going through the research, I am not convinced that the premise should simply be dismissed.

It is difficult not to notice how coarse some of our public conversation has become, especially in politics and online. Cruelty can be expressed openly, people can be humiliated before enormous audiences, and death threats and dehumanizing language no longer seem as shocking as they should.

That is an observation, however, not proof that Filipino values as a whole have measurably declined.

Whether what we are seeing can scientifically be called a “decline in Filipino values,” I am not yet prepared to say.

But I understand why somebody would look at the Philippines today and conclude that we need to talk about values again.

Maybe we do.

What I would resist is reducing that conversation to good manners.

Paggalang cannot only mean saying po and opo.

Respect means respecting somebody's humanity when you disagree with him. Integrity means refusing corruption even when the politician involved belongs to your side. Compassion means recognizing that human rights do not disappear when the person involved is accused of a crime. Responsibility means verifying something before sharing it. Discipline means accepting democratic processes even when they produce an outcome we dislike. Citizenship means understanding that protecting institutions is sometimes more important than protecting politicians.

And if we are going to revive Filipino values, then accountability must be one of those values.

Especially for people in power.

SO, ANO ANG NAGBAGO?

I don't think the evidence gives us a simple yes.

The attraction to strongmen existed before 2016. Distrust of institutions existed earlier. Tolerance for punitive solutions existed earlier. Political patronage existed earlier. Cruelty certainly existed earlier.

But presidents do something ordinary citizens cannot.

They model permission.

By their words and behavior, they can influence what their supporters consider defensible, admirable or acceptable in public life.

Duterte may not have created the punitive and dehumanizing impulses we saw during his political rise and presidency, but I think there is enough evidence to seriously consider whether his leadership helped lower the social cost of expressing and defending some of them.

Social media then gave those attitudes unprecedented reach, and once society changes what it considers acceptable, putting the restraints back is much harder than removing them.

Which is why I find myself more interested in #MagalangNaPinoy now than when I first saw these papers.

Not because its diagnosis is already complete. I don't think it is.

Some of the research cited in the document also needs cleaning up, and the program still needs to explain clearly what it intends to do, how it will measure success and what evidence established the decline it wants to reverse.

But the underlying conversation is worth having.

Maybe even necessary.

Just don't ask Filipino children to recover values that Filipino adults refuse to practice.

And don't ask ordinary citizens to rediscover respect, integrity and responsibility while exempting the people who hold the greatest power to teach those values by example.

If #MagalangNaPinoy really wants to ask, “Nagbago na ba ang mga Pilipino?”, then let us answer honestly.

Maybe.

But before deciding how to change them back, we should first have the courage to ask:

What changed us?

And who did we allow to teach us that it was acceptable?