The Society of Honor by Joe America

---

By Karl Garcia

“Kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap” is one of the most repeated lines in Philippine public life. It sounds right. It feels moral. It gives us a villain and a solution in a single sentence.

But it gets the sequence wrong.

The harder truth is this: mas mahirap maging korap kung walang mahirap.
Corruption does not recede because people suddenly become virtuous. It recedes when society becomes harder to exploit.

Morality does not operate in a vacuum. It competes with hunger, insecurity, and fear. When survival is the daily concern, ethics becomes negotiable—not because people are bad, but because systems push them there.

This is not a defense of corruption. It is an explanation of why moral preaching fails as policy.

In poor societies, power concentrates easily and oversight remains weak. A population under stress cannot consistently demand accountability. Institutions lack capacity to enforce rules. Elites face little resistance, and incentives skew toward short-term extraction.

Asking for integrity under these conditions is like demanding discipline from a system designed to reward shortcuts.

This is why Filipinos have a brutally honest performance review for governance:
“Puro ka kuwento. Wala namang kuwenta.”
All talk. No value.

It sounds like an ad hominem. It isn’t. It is what citizens say when institutions refuse to measure themselves.

We love stories—of reformers, of sacrifice, of national destiny. We are fluent in rhetoric because rhetoric costs nothing. Measurement costs power. Narrative allows discretion; metrics impose accountability.

“We cannot manage what we cannot measure,” Kaplan and Norton warned. What we do not measure, we moralize.

Our neighbors illustrate the point. Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand are not morally superior societies. Their corruption scores are comparable to ours. Yet they are materially ahead—higher incomes, stronger manufacturing bases, larger middle classes.

Their advantage is not virtue. It is sequencing.

They built productive capacity first. Jobs, industries, and incomes came before sermons. As citizens became less desperate, accountability became enforceable. Institutions matured through use. Corruption did not disappear—it became riskier, more constrained, and more visible. In short, harder to get away with.

The Philippines insists on reversing the sequence. We demand moral perfection before material progress. We legislate virtue before building capacity. We design accountability systems for institutions that cannot yet sustain them.

The result is predictable. Reform stalls.

We pass laws faster than agencies can absorb them. We add procedures in the name of transparency, increasing friction until informal workarounds become the only way anything moves. Builders are pushed into compromise not because they lack ethics, but because the system punishes those who insist on doing things straight.

Then we condemn the behavior we structurally incentivized.

This is the central failure of narrative governance. We treat laws as endpoints, not experiments. Plans as achievements, not hypotheses. The State of the Nation Address becomes theater, not a report card. We count activity—laws passed, budgets released, projects announced—but not outcomes achieved.

No ex-post evaluation. No binding KPIs. No public dashboards for justice, infrastructure, education, or health. When results fall short, plans are replaced, not refined.

And so citizens fall back on the only metric available:
“Wala namang kuwenta.”

The problem is not that Filipinos are uniquely immoral. The problem is that poverty creates conditions where morality is fragile.

A hungry worker tolerates abuse to keep a job. A small business pays under the table to survive delays. A local official extracts rent because oversight is weak and alternatives are few. None of this is noble—but all of it is predictable.

This is why anti-corruption, by itself, cannot be the national development strategy. Treated as the primary battle, it crowds out harder but more important work: building industries, fixing logistics, lowering energy costs, improving productivity, and creating stable employment.

We obsess over redistribution while neglecting production. We argue endlessly over who gets what, while failing to grow what there is to distribute.

Real accountability emerges when citizens are no longer desperate. A middle class with skills, savings, and options can afford to be principled. Institutions with capacity can afford to enforce rules. Elites behave better when abuse threatens reputation, legacy, and power.

This is not cynicism. It is how societies evolve.

The task is not to abandon morality—but to stop treating it as the starting point.

Build a society where fewer people are poor. Build systems that work often enough to be trusted. Measure outcomes, not intentions. Fix production before sermonizing.

Because when poverty recedes, corruption loses its oxygen.

And then—finally—it becomes harder to be corrupt than to be honest.

That is the moral Philippines worth building.