Bernadette Soriano

We are all corrupt. Not because we’re ensnared in scandals or tangled in grand conspiracies, but because we allow the smallest wrongs to fester as justifications. The real corruption begins here—in the silent corridors of our minds.


It’s not the politicians in suits. It’s not the billion-peso contracts or the clandestine deals. Corruption is born in our thoughts, in the moment we tell ourselves that a little compromise won’t matter. When we let small injustices slip, we transform them into something ordinary—until they become part of us.

We see it in the employee who takes office supplies and says, “They won’t miss this—I’ve worked hard anyway,” or the student who pastes blog content into a paper and shrugs, “It’s not even a major requirement.” These aren’t outliers. They’re familiar reflections—quiet, subtle, disturbingly normal.

At the heart of this argument lies Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory, which posits that individuals possess a fundamental need for harmony between their beliefs and behaviors. When this balance is disturbed—when we do what we say we would never do—we do not always correct our behavior.

More often, we revise our beliefs to suit the behavior.

Just ask the nurse who once swore to uphold patient dignity but now skips hygiene checks to beat the shift time. Her discomfort fades with a single thought: “At least I’m not as negligent as the others.”

We do not rise to meet our ideals; we lower our ideals to meet our convenience.

In this light, corruption is not an alien virus infecting an otherwise upright system. It is a psychological reflex—a defensive instinct to shield one’s choices, however indefensible, with a veneer of rationalization. It is not an external threat imposed upon the system but an internal decay that mirrors our own compromises.

A public official pocketing a bribe and a student sending AI-generated essays to a professor operate under the same mental scripts: “Everyone does it.” “No one will notice.” “It won’t make a difference.” The magnitude differs; the mechanism does not.

In this way, personal compromise and public corruption are not separate phenomena, but reflections of each other. When we dismiss our own unethical choices as negligible, we normalize the very logic that sustains institutional malpractice.

Consider the neighbor who litters and says, “It’s just one bottle,” unaware that this same minimization of harm is echoed in congressional halls as, “It’s just one contract.” The student who cheats and consoles himself with “I deserve a break” rehearses the same justifying script as the tax official who says, “I deserve a bonus.”

Corruption, therefore, is not a singular act—it is a shared vocabulary of excuses.

We see this logic seep into our everyday language. A barangay officer adds a “processing fee” to a free certificate. A vendor overcharges a tourist and calls it “diskarte lang.” And on the street, a jeepney driver stops mid-road for faster passenger pickup, muttering, “Ganito na talaga sistema.”

It all sounds like survival, but it is actually surrender. It is not resistance—it’s routine.

What makes corruption so effective is not its boldness but its subtlety. It hides in plain sight. It borrows the language of survival: “diskarte,” “para-paraan,” “gan’yan talaga dito.” In doing so, it does not threaten our values directly—it coaxes them into flexibility. It turns resignation into a ritual and indifference into doctrine.

Even our personal health decisions mirror this decay. The World Health Organization reported that over 2.5 billion adults are overweight, not due to ignorance, but because knowledge does not always translate into behavior. “One cheat day won’t hurt,” we tell ourselves. And in saying so, we replicate the logic of policy-makers who greenlight wasteful spending under the guise of necessity.

The repetition of rationalization, regardless of domain, creates a feedback loop: when dissonance is consistently resolved through justification rather than change, values cease to be anchored.

They become decorations—evoked when convenient, discarded when not.

If corruption were only about lost money, it would be solvable with ledgers. But its true cost is more abstract and more dangerous: the erosion of public trust—the invisible currency of civic life.

Trust is not restored by rhetoric, but by systems architected to intercept justification before it calcifies into custom.

When Manila adopted the No Contact Apprehension Program (NCAP), traffic violations plummeted by 90%, while road accidents declined by 62%—not due to a sudden moral renaissance among motorists, but because the usual avenues for rationalization lost their utility. The once-convenient alibi—“It’s quicker to pay under the table”—lost traction the moment the table itself was taken away.

This, then, is the role of structural reform: not to purify people, but to warrant rationalization inoperative.

Yet structures alone cannot fix what psychology allows. A clean system cannot function if its operators are habituated to dirt. We must confront dissonance not only when it offends us publicly, but when it seduces us privately.

When we discipline ourselves to throw trash where it belongs—not because someone is watching, but because we are—when we say no to shortcuts, even if they save time or effort—when we stop romanticizing the phrase “gan'yan na talaga”—we do more than behave ethically.

We rewire the culture.

Corruption is not a monster. It is a mirror.

The first step in dismantling corruption is not exposure. It is interruption.

We must interrupt our habits of self-deception. We must notice when we rationalize. We must notice when the dissonance becomes too quiet to hear—because it means we have stopped resisting. In this discomfort lies our only hope. As Festinger suggests, the moment we feel conflicted is not a failure—it is a signal that we still care.

Because the most radical thing we can do in a corrupt society is to live as if we are not part of one.

It begins with the small rebellions—the ones too easy to overlook. The vendor who overcharges, the office pen that disappears, the paper passed off as your own. They whisper justifications, but don’t be fooled. These are the quiet thefts that, unchecked, build the system we claim to despise.

Corruption doesn’t collapse in a single blow. It fractures quietly, imperceptibly, where no one’s looking. It only takes the decision to act differently, to choose integrity in those unnoticed moments. Even when it’s inconvenient. Even when no one applauds. Fracture it anyway.