Beyond “Ikulongna yan” and outrage

During the pandemic a few years ago, there was talk in Cebu’s lawyer circles about a lawyer working at a constitutional body. It became talk within our small community because the lawyer’s action seemed to reject an unspoken norm. She resigned sometime during the pandemic after months of receiving a government salary with no meaningful work being assigned.

Most people would rationalize it, or wait it out. But not her. Her job at the constitutional office was the kind that can be done with a desk, a laptop, and a mind trained in the law. Much of it could have been done from a home office. Yet the system seemed content with administrative inertia, and she wanted no part of it.

That story became an urban legend of sorts, maybe true or too good to be true, and for the longest time I had no confirmation. That changed a few weeks ago when I met the person herself in Makati during the convention of Law professors in the country and a training on syllabus and curriculum design for Law schools.

I asked her about it, half-jokingly, telling her it had become an “urban legend” in Cebu lawyer circles. She did not exactly confirm it in words, but her understated non-denial, followed by a half-smile, was confirmation enough. I won’t mention her name here because I do not want to put her in the spotlight without her consent. But I can say this much: honorable people exist, and the stories we hear about them are real.

How is that kind of stubborn moral clarity even formed? What kind of social milieu produces people who would rather choose personal risk over collective silence?

We know it cannot be explained by personality alone. Culture, in the broad sociological sense, has something to do with it. Political psychologists frame this as the interplay between internalized scripts and external norms (Montiel, 2012). People absorb, often without noticing, what is considered acceptable, what is risky, and what earns approval or disapproval. In collectivist cultures like ours, the in-group matters.

So while the lawyer’s resignation felt like a deviation from the norm, it may be more accurate to say she was following a different norm, one planted and nurtured in her immediate moral community. Somewhere in her upbringing and daily circles, honor and excellence was treated as a real standard. Perhaps the people whose opinion mattered most to her --her husband, her closest friends, her fellow part-time law professors-- don't admire “diskarte” when it meant moral compromise.

In other words, she did what collectivist cultures often do. She acted in loyalty to an in-group. The difference is that her in-group had trained her to feel “hiya” or “ulaw” at the thought of receiving public pay without meaningful work. This is why President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s “mahiya naman kayo” line in his 2025 SONA felt like it hit the nail on the head.

For a long time, the loudest norm we have gotten used to in this country has been that of accommodation: living with corruption at the top, with fixers and favors, and with the little give and take at the bottom. Many have come to believe that nothing will change unless the corrupt in power are held accountable. “Ikulong na yan, mga kurakot!”

There is also another, parallel path, quieter and more durable than anger. Honorable acts are possible in this country not in spite of Filipino culture but within it, by building settings in our communities that train values like “hiya”, “pakikisama”, and “utang na loob” to point outward toward civic duty and nation-building.