The merits of selfishness

When I returned from an off-island trip last year, a couple of office girls from the Philippines asked me: “So what did you bring us?”

“Nothing,” I replied. “I didn’t bring anything back for you. Why? Was I supposed to bring something back?”

“You are supposed to bring us something back,” one of the women said. “It is a Filipino custom to bring back gifts for your office mates whenever you go abroad.”

“But you are not my girlfriend,” I protested. “I only bring back gifts if I have a girlfriend, or if there is a special woman I am trying to court. I rarely even bring things back for my own family. Because of the enormous inconvenience, I hate to travel with a whole bunch of check-in baggage.”

Besides that, except for spending for my own personal benefit, I tend to be extremely cheap, or “kuripot.”

“Kuripot” is a pejorative term in Tagalog. It means “extremely cheap or stingy,” and, contrary to my initial belief, it doesn’t carry any of the positive meanings of thrift, discipline or responsibility–as in the Benjamin Franklin “virtue of frugality.”

According to my friend Ron, an expert on Filipino culture, “Kuripot” is an insult–a badge of shame and dishonor. And yet all along, I thought it was a compliment, as in “thrift (kuripot), hard work, and sobriety”–e.g., the old Horatio Alger virtues.

But the Filipino culture is group or other oriented; it does not exactly extol the virtues of Western rugged individualism.

To give yet another example: I was particularly shocked when some of my kabayan co-workers expected me to treat them on my birthday. Apparently, this is yet another tradition that leaves Western individualists like myself completely dumbfounded.

“Do you mean to tell me that you actually expect me to spend my hard-earned money to treat all of you to pizza and Kentucky Fried Chicken on my birthday? Why, that’s preposterous. Surely you must be out of your mind. You are the one who should be treating me!”

The same thing happened to me when I was in sales. When I exceeded my sales target for the month and received a special bonus, my Filipino co-workers expected me to treat them all, in celebration of my accomplishment. Again, I thought that this was absolutely insane: There was no way I would part with my money that way, without receiving any product or service in return.

Such is the scourge of collectivist culture: it encourages everyone to feel obligated to each other; it turns the virtue of thrift and frugality into the pejorative to-be-avoided label of “kuripot.” It discourages the merits of selfish individualism and thereby promotes poverty. After all, as the old saying goes, in order to be able to help others, you must first help yourself.

As my friend Ron attests, in the Philippines, it is considered awfully rude to ask someone to pay you back for the money you let him borrow in the first place. And it is not socially acceptable to turn down friends or relatives in need. In other words, free market capitalism–the only sure way to wealth and prosperity–is not exactly encouraged.

We should all be more selfish. It would do society good.