What Do You Feel When Pinoys Get Bashed?

[donbuggy]

na-culture shock lang si Tiffany

she has to adapt

she has to learn how pinoys think

But what if our culture is the reason we're not successful? Should we change?

http://antipinoy.com/culture-and-destiny/

Culture & Destiny: Why Culture Determines Winners & Losers

Dr. Huntington also narrated in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress this very fascinating story:

“In the early 1990’s, I happened to come across economic data on Ghana and South Korea in the early 1960s, and I was astonished to see how similar their economies were then. These two countries had roughly comparable levels of per capita GNP; similar divisions of their economy among primary products, manufacturing, and services; and overwhelmingly primary product exports, with South Korea producing a few manufactured goods.

Also, they were receiving comparable levels of economic aid. Thirty years later, South Korea had become an industrial giant with the fourteenth largest economy in the world, multinational corporations, major export of automobiles, electronic equipment, and other sophisticated manufactures, and a per capita income approximating that of Greece. Moreover, it was on its way to the consolidation of democratic institutions. No such change had occurred in Ghana, whose per capita GNP was now about one-fifteenth that of South Korea’s.

How could this extraordinary difference in development be explained? Undoubtedly, many factors played a role, but it seemed to me that culture had to be a large part of the explanation. South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization, organization, and discipline. Ghanians had different values. In short, cultures count.”

The Philippines and Ghana almost share the same culture — the same irrationality, excessive conviviality or the propensity to feast that suggest that their societies are structured towards pleasure and the suppression of individualism.

Camerounian economist Dr. Daniel Etounga-Manguelle wrote a book entitled Does Africa Need a Cultural Adjustment Program? and set forth the following cultural obstacle to progress in most African countries including Ghana: present-time orientation, lack of concern in making efficient of time, subordination of the individual to the community, excessive conviviality and avoidance of confrontation, little saving and much conspicuous consumption, very short radius of identification and trust, and the subordination and abuse of women. He also highlighted Africa’s excessive conviviality which was very strikingly similar to our culture. Everything, he said, is a pretext for celebration in Africa: birth, baptism, marriage, birthday, promotion, election, a return from a short or long trip, mourning, as well as traditional and religious feasts. Whether one’s salary is considerable or modest, whether one’s granaries are empty or full, the feast must be beautiful and must include the maximum possible number of guests.

Does this not sound very familiar?

In the early 1990's Lee Kuan Yew stated that our country, the Philippines, was going nowhere because of our lack of discipline and excessive conviviality. We Filipinos, he added, possessed an “exuberant democracy” as we always have the propensity to feast incessantly with a bacchanalian attitude. It was in this particular instance that he advised us that instead of Democracy, Filipinos needed Discipline in order to build a successful society. Again, many Filipinos were incensed and infuriated including former president Fidel Valdez Ramos.