Nobody HATES the Philippines More Than Filipinos

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]The Philippines might be the most patriotic country on earth. Filipino flag in three different time zones. Many Pacquiao posters from Dubai to Toronto.

[00:00:08]>> Nobody takes us Canadian seriously.

[00:00:10]>> To a town in Nevada you've never heard of. Filipino nurses in 20 hospitals telling you they're Filipino before they tell you their name. Half of Filipino Tik Tok is just other Filipinos asking fellow Pinoies where you at. But when I made a video called Why everyone hates the Philippines, the worst comments did not come from foreigners. They came from Filipinos. There are three things I hate about the Philippines. the heat, the humidity, and the politicians. No one hates the Philippines as much as its own citizens. They sounded like people who love the country too much to let it get away with anything. All of this patriotism might be more like disappointed patriotism, and it might be the most Filipino emotion on the internet. Filipinos will defend Filipino food, nurses, basketball, karaoke, hospitality, and Filipinos abroad until there is nobody left in the comment section to fight. Then, in the same breath, the same people will describe their own government like it's a restaurant that gave them food poisoning twice and is somehow still open. One viewer summed up the entire country in 20 words. A very rich country with very poor people. very friendly yet very hostile, determined to show the world how competent we are, yet desperate for validation. Because Filipinos are not confused about what they love, the people are not the problem. The food is not the problem. The beaches, the jokes, the nurses, the seafarers, the aunties, the Christmas songs that begin in September.

[00:01:31]>> Um, excuse me. What the actual are you doing on my >> None of that is the problem. So, the real question is not why do Filipinos hate the Philippines. The real question is what exactly are they angry at? And why does that anger sound so much like love? Before we get to corruption, floods, or politicians, there is one fact that explains why Filipino self-criticism sounds the way it does.

[00:01:51]The Philippines is the only country in Asia colonized by both Spain and the United States. 333 years of Spain, 50 years of America, then independence.

[00:02:00]That's the operating system the country runs on.

[00:02:04]Psychologists actually have a name for what those four centuries left behind.

[00:02:08]They call it colonial mentality. When Filipino Americans are tested indirectly, more than half automatically associate inferior with Filipino culture and superior with American culture. It shows up in four ways. Denigrating Filipino identity, denigrating Filipino faces, accents, skin tones, looking down on Filipinos who are less westernized, and the hardest one, quietly accepting historic and present mistreatment as normal, a trained tolerance for being treated badly. That is what 380 years of colonization installs. Not just Spanish surnames and Catholic guilt and the tradition of the family meal. A reflex.

[00:02:43]The reflex of measuring yourself against the colonizer and coming up short before the conversation has even started. That is why Filipino comments often arrive pre-apologized. Sorry for my English.

[00:02:53]Sorry for the chaos. Welcome to the Philippines. Sorry it's like this. A country apologizing to a stranger on the internet for itself. So when Filipinos seem unusually harsh about their own country, remember they did not invent that voice on their own. It was taught for 14 generations. They are now the first generation seriously trying to unlearn it. That is the soil. Everything else grows from there. Filipino identity runs on a very precise split. On one side, ordinary Filipinos who can turn disaster into logistics, boredom into karaoke, and a family group chat into a 24-hour mutual aid network that also happens to ask why you are still single.

[00:03:29]On the other side, the layer above it.

[00:03:31]Political dynasties that treat provinces like inherited furniture. election seasons where the campaign posters change but the surnames keep returning.

[00:03:38]A state that can look democratic on paper while feeling at ground level like a rotation of the same families with new slogans. And of course, there is the small part that subscribe to rice degree. Please be on the good side. On paper, it's a democracy. In practice, more like a monarchy. That is why Filipino criticism sounds different from foreign criticism. A foreigner says the Philippines is corrupt and it sounds lazy. like they watched one travel vlog, saw traffic in Manila, and decided they understood a country of more than 7,000 islands. When a Filipino says it, the complaint usually arrives with a location attached, the unfinished road, the mayor whose relatives keep winning bids, the project that existed long enough for a ribbon cutting photo and then disappeared back into mud. Because here's the rule, and every Asian family knows the rule. I am allowed to insult my mother. You are not. The Philippines is beautiful enough for a tourism ad and frustrating enough to make its own citizens sound like investigative journalists with personal grudges. Pride and shame do not cancel each other out.

[00:04:33]They live in the same house. They eat at the same table. They are probably arguing over who forgot to buy rice. But what is it with their government? Why is it always coming up? Most countries treat corruption as a scandal, something shocking, something that gets investigated, something that theoretically ends. In the Philippines, viewers describe corruption the way other people describe weather. Annoying.

[00:04:53]predictable, seasonal, and somehow always arriving right after someone promised it wouldn't. Then 2025 happened. Auditors and investigators began uncovering what is now being treated as one of the largest corruption scandals in Philippine history. Flood control projects that allegedly did not control floods because too much of the money disappeared before it ever reached the ground. And that is what makes it so obscene. This was money meant to keep water out of people's homes. The scheme was not cinematic. That was the ugly part. Budgets got padded before concrete reached the ground. bids inflated.

[00:05:22]Kickbacks moved through people whose job titles sounded official enough to make the theft look like procedure. Everyone gets a slice of the dyke that was never built and in some cases the dyke literally was not built. Alazer reported on a flood control project in Bulakon Province where according to the paperwork, the structure was complete.

[00:05:39]According to the actual ground, a section was missing. While the budget said the project was finished, an insurance agent named Ryan Mano was paddling a boat to his own front door because his neighborhood floods chest deep for months at a time. Then a typhoon in November 2025 killed more than 200 people. Filipinos did not have to invent the connection. The only flood control was the flood of money in their bank accounts. The fallout climbed fast.

[00:06:02]The house speaker, also the president's first cousin, resigned and was later pulled into major corruption allegations and Zaldi Co, named in multiple reports as a key figure, was arrested in Prague after entering the Czech Republic without proper documents. Flood control money vanishes and one of the central names in the story surfaces in Prague.

[00:06:21]That detail almost feels written for satire. Then the newly appointed public works chief went on Alazer and called his own department probably the most corrupt agency in the country. Imagine taking over a building and introducing it as the crime scene. That is why Filipino self-critique hits so hard.

[00:06:36]They are not shocked. They are tired.

[00:06:38]They feel the frustration of living in a country that has the resources to be one of the greatest, but incompetence and corruption is holding it back. That ain't hatred. That is someone staring at the gap between the country they know is possible and the country they have to keep surviving. The damage is not only that corruption exists. Corruption exists everywhere. The damage is that people now plan around it. Families budget for it. Businesses price it in.

[00:07:00]Citizens expect the workaround before the service. It is not a broken system.

[00:07:04]It is a system that works exactly as designed, just not for the people paying for it. There is a type of anger that still believes. It protests. It posts.

[00:07:14]It argues with relatives. It writes long comments that begin with as a Filipino and end somewhere between therapy and a congressional hearing. But there is another stage after anger, indifference.

[00:07:25]And that is much scarier. You can feel the mood in the way Filipinos talk about these scandals. Now people are angry, yes, but underneath the anger is a darker question. What are they supposed to do after being angry for the 10th scandal in a row? That is what apathy looks like when caring has become expensive. Every country has corruption.

[00:07:42]But in the Philippines, the deeper problem is that corruption has been normalized into daily planning. People do not only complain about it, they route around it. They assume the road will not be fixed properly. They assume the paperwork will need an unofficial shortcut. They assume the public official is already auditioning for the next Dynasty photo. They assume the project will be announced three times and finished halfway. When dysfunction becomes routine, life turns into a checklist of things you expect to go wrong. That is why taxes hit the nerve so hard. They hate paying without seeing their life improve. And this is what gets dangerous. Filipinos have become fluent in disappointment. They know how to work and joke around it. Filipino resilience is one of those phrases that sounds beautiful until a politician says it. When ordinary people say it, it means something real. Neighbors sharing food after a typhoon. Families abroad sending money before the government has finished forming a committee. People turning a flooded street into a joke because the alternative is screaming.

[00:08:37]That resilience is not fake. It is one of the reasons the country survives. But survival can become dangerous when leaders start treating it like infrastructure. The joke goes that the Philippines slows down typhoons on their way through Southeast Asia like the country is taking one for the team.

[00:08:50]Funny image, but a dark reality because the country really does absorb disaster after disaster.

[00:08:57]Typhoons, floods, earthquakes, shortages, broken agencies, family separation. And every time ordinary people adapt faster than the system reforms. Then it goes one step further.

[00:09:08]When COVID hit, the Philippine government passed an emergency powers law granting the president sweeping additional authority. They called it the Bayanihan to heal as one act. Bayanihan, the centuries old Filipino concept of neighbors literally lifting a house and carrying it to a new spot together. The single most beautiful word in the Filipino political vocabulary. The word that means we all carry this. That is the word the state stamped on its own emergency powers. Filipino scholars have a phrase for this now. They call the resilience narrative something that normalizes suffering and fosters toxic positivity. Because if Bayanihan means everyone carries the weight, it can also mean the people carry it and the state takes the credit. The state did not just bank on resilience. It rebranded its own laws using the cultural vocabulary of mutual aid. People should not have to be national superheroes to survive a rainy season. There is a difference between admiring someone for carrying a heavy thing and designing a country where they never get to put it down. Almost every Filipino family has a version of this story. An aunt in Dubai, a cousin in Canada, a mother in Hong Kong, a father on a ship for 10 months. For individual families, leaving can be love.

[00:10:13]Remittances pay tuition, medicine, houses, and school fees. No serious person should mock that. But the Philippines does not just have people who leave. It has a system for leaving.

[00:10:23]In 2024, overseas Filipinos sent home more than $ 38 billion in personal remittances, about 8% of GDP. And that is the trap. The state can fail to build enough good jobs at home while the economy is kept alive by the people who had to leave. So the OFW story becomes two things at once. A family survival story and a national indictment. A mother becomes a video call. The system still makes life harder for the people holding it up. The country exports its people, builds an economy on their remittances. That is why Filipinos are proud of OFWs and furious that OFWs have to exist at that scale. Because when leaving becomes the best way to love your family, staying starts to feel like a luxury product. A country should not need to export its children to prove they are worth something. So no, Filipinos do not hate the Philippines more than anyone else. They just know exactly where it hurts because they are the ones still living in the house.