LAST November, key education and regulatory agencies gathered with a shared urgency to confront diploma mills and begin building an online national registry.
The scene was familiar: officials on stage, folders aligned, cameras flashing, applause punctuating carefully worded speeches. By day’s end, the Joint Memorandum Circular had been signed, sealed, and duly recorded for public viewing.
To a foreigner, such moments can feel quietly baffling, even faintly comic. A ribbon is stretched across a newly unveiled space—a modest room, a multipurpose hall, sometimes, astonishingly, a freshly paved parking area. Politicians line up, smiles rehearsed. Public relations teams hover, documenting the occasion as though history itself has paused. Flashbulbs pop. Captions are polished. Attendance is memorialized.
Outside the Philippines, such spaces simply open. A door unlocks. Cars park. Life moves on. Infrastructure is treated for what it is…functional, useful, unremarkable in its arrival. No speeches, no ribbons, no tarpaulins announcing presence over purpose.
But in our culture, we love the cut of a ribbon. We consecrate even the ordinary through ceremony, transforming utility into spectacle. A structure is not complete until it has been witnessed and celebrated.
The ribbon does not merely mark an opening; it confers legitimacy, visibility, and belonging. In the Philippines, nothing truly exists until the scissors close and the applause follows.
Public rituals in the Philippines are not simply about optics. They are embedded in a relationship-oriented culture where agreements are sustained not only by documents, but by shared understanding and social accountability.
A private contract satisfies legal requirements. A public ceremony satisfies cultural ones. Once an agreement is witnessed, photographed, and made public, it goes beyond a simple transaction and turns into a shared social obligation.
Social scientists have long noted that societies differ in how trust is built and maintained. In contexts where institutions are strong and stable, trust rests largely on systems: contracts, courts, and predictable enforcement. In societies where institutions are uneven or continuity is fragile, trust shifts toward people and relationships.
The Philippines sits closer to the latter. Visibility, therefore, becomes a substitute for certainty. What is seen is what is trusted.
This helps explain why public MOA signings matter. When leaders sign their names in front of colleagues, partners, and the cameras, backing out carries a real cost, not in legal terms, but in social standing.
There is hiya, a quiet but powerful sense of propriety, at work. To fail publicly is to lose face. In this way, ceremony becomes a behavioral regulator, reinforcing accountability through social norms rather than formal sanctions. (To be continued)/PN
