I was watching it on TV. A speech. Familiar faces. The crowd looked like my neighbors buying staples inside the 7-Eleven store.
Then Rodrigo Duterte pointed toward the crowd and said:
“Yung mga adik dyan, kayo na lang ang pumatay. Kung anak nya [pointing to some listener], ikaw ang pumatay. Anak nyang adik [pointing to another], kayo ang pumatay. Para hindi masyadong masakit.”
I froze.
The President of the Republic. Talking about killing someone’s child. Not a drug lord. Not a convicted criminal. Just an “addict.”
I waited for silence.
Instead—they laughed. Not a hesitant chuckle. A collective laugh.
And something inside me tightened. It wasn’t outraged yet that I felt. It was disorientation. The kind you feel when you realize the moral ground has shifted and you didn’t feel the earthquake.
That laughter has followed me ever since.
“There Must Be Fear”
Years earlier, in an interview with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa, Duterte was asked if it was important that people be afraid of him. He replied:
“Fear… there must be fear.”
There it was. Not whispered. Not disguised. Fear as doctrine.
As the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where he now faces allegations of crime against humanity, his defense would later frame his rhetoric as calculated—meant “to arouse fear and obedience… to instill fear in their hearts…”
Fear, they argue, was discipline. Fear was deterrence. Fear was governance.
The Philosophy of Fear
Fear of violent death compels human beings to surrender some freedom to a sovereign who promise order. But Hobbes feared chaos.
The fragile line is this set of questions:
When does fear of lawlessness become fear of the law itself?
When does deterrence become atmosphere?
When does rhetoric become oxygen?
When fear becomes ambient—when it fills the air so completely that citizens laugh at the mention of killing—something deeper is happening. Not mere policy. It’s psychology.
What Kind of Laughter Was That?
I have replayed that speech countless times. Was the laughter cruel? Was it agreement? Or was it something more complicated—more tragic?
In communities where institutions are weak, where justice crawls, where crime feels personal and immediate, a strongman voice can feel like a relief.
“Finally,” some may think, “someone decisive.”
But there is another possibility. When the most powerful man in the country speaks casually of killing, dissent feels dangerous. Silence is obvious. Laughter becomes alignment.
Laughter says:
Sometimes laughter is not amusement. It is adaptation. It is the body choosing sound over paralysis.
What’s Wrong with the Philippines?
On the international stage, commentators ask with a mixture of confusion and judgment: Why did so many approve? Why did many of the poor cheer? Why did democracy not recoil?
But perhaps the wrong question is being asked. Instead of “What’s wrong with the Philippines?" Maybe we should ask:
What happens to a democracy when institutions fail miserably? When court cases drag on for years? When drugs destroy neighborhoods? When police are distrusted but crime is feared? When political elites recycle themselves without reform?
Strongman politics does not descend from outer space. It grows in exhausted soil. Fear becomes appealing when order feels distant. And if fear promises speed where process promises delay, impatience can sound like applause.
What unsettles me most is not merely that the words were spoken. It is that they were received as performance. Once killing becomes rhetorical flourish, and rhetorical flourish become punchline, and punchline earns laughter—violence shifts from taboo to theater.
Now, in The Hague, translators parse transcripts. Lawyers debate intent. Judges examine patterns. But before the legal arguments, there was that sound. That laughter.
Our country is not only carrying out trials on Duterte’s crime against humanity. It is also confronting a question about itself: Can fear be the foundation of governance and still remain within the boundaries of humanity? Or does fear, once enthroned, slowly erode the more reflexes of our people?
A Nation Listening to Its Echo
I am just an ordinary Filipino who have watched that video clip and felt something shift.
And so, I find myself back where this began—in front of the TV screen, replaying a speech that once felt like just another spectacle of Philippine politics.
The suits in The Hague will argue about legality and jurisdiction. Historians will debate context. Supporters will speak of discipline, human sound in that speech swallowed something extraordinary and dark.
In that moment, it was not only a president on display. It was us.
For all I know, the most painful question is no longer what the world thinks of our country, but whether we are brave enough to listen to that laughter—and finally ask ourselves:
Why did it look and sound so normal?
Content and editing put together in collaboration with ChatGPT & Bing Microsoft AI-powered Co-pilot
Head collage photos courtesy of Getty Images, Vera Files, & Facebook
Still photos courtesy of Getty Images, Wide Open Spaces, & Shutterstock
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