FIRST some good news.

I’ve been to many countries—and I can tell you there are many countries, including nearby ones, where the driving is worse. In Thailand and Indonesia, I’ve been in taxis that tailgate the vehicle in front, all this on an expressway with speed limits of up to 100 kph. Visit Vietnam, where the greatest tourist adventure is crossing a street, with motorcycles coming at you like herds of stampeding elephants. During rush hours, they go at you even when you’re on a sidewalk.

I hope I’ve consoled you, but yes, I do agree that there’s much we can do to improve the driving here. Traffic management experts throughout the world have talked about the three E’s needed to do this: education, enforcement and engineering. It’s a good framework to use, but as an anthropologist, I’d say culture plays an important role too. To make culture fit in with the other E’s I mentioned, let’s use a fancy term, ethos, which refers to a disposition, attitudes and values that we have.

We’re not born bad drivers; we learn to become bad drivers. Part of it is really in the education - many drivers, not necessarily uneducated, don’t know what the rules are in the first place. But even if we know what the rules are, we don’t observe them because many Filipinos actually believe that laws, especially those that have to do with road traffic, are only “suggestions.”

But there’s more to this strange interpretation of the law. From childhood, we’ve tried to enforce good behavior by tying it to authority figures. We live on a “lagot” ethos because in early childhood we are told “Lagot ka!” when we misbehave. But rather than explaining why what we did was wrong, the “lagot ka” was always followed by a threat of punishment from an authority figure.

And what if Daddy, or the policeman (or the Bumbay, for that matter) isn’t around? Well, we argue lamely, God knows and God will punish you.

Fast forward a few years. The kid’s now old enough to drive (or old enough to fake his age to get the license). He might even know the rules but he’s also learned that you follow the rules only if, lagot ka, there’s a policeman or a traffic aide in sight. It’s become almost ridiculous because now the traffic enforcers are playing a Tom and Jerry game, hiding behind posts to tempt motorists to break the rules, so they can pounce on them, no, not to give a traffic ticket but to extort bribe money.

And God? He has better things to do than deal with our traffic, and really now, will He really send you to hell (or purgatory) for running that red signal?

Our traffic ethos is to behave if someone’s watching—but wait, even when someone’s watching, notice that the enforcement is inconsistent. Admit it, how many times has your heart skipped a beat because a traffic enforcer raised his hand and you thought he was flagging you down, only to find out he was about to scratch his head? You slowed down though, even if you were sure you didn’t violate any rule, because in the Philippines, these hoodlums in uniform can think up new rules.

Then you have the enforcers who change the existing rules. A red light means stop, right? Wrong. How many times have you been urged to drive on by the traffic aide because there weren’t any cars coming in on the “go” lane? How many times too have these aides forced you into an instant counterflow lane, sometimes even with huge “No Counterflow” signs, only for you to find you have to merge back into the main lane with drivers who have been waiting for half an hour, ready to turn homicidal?

Our driving ethos carries over values and mores from daily life. Our penchant for taking short-cuts, for example, is multiplied many times each day on the road. I’ve seen cars missing an expressway exit and trying to make their way back by driving in reverse to get back to the exit.

To complicate matters even more, the Metro Manila Development Authority loves short-cuts, short-term solutions to traffic problems, reconfiguring the entire engineering of main thoroughfares like EDSA and Commonwealth and, in the process, throwing out important traffic rules and regulations. The bad habits created by these reconfigured roads—encouraging U-turns, disregarding traffic lights, speeding through intersections—will be passed on to several generations of Filipino drivers, a distorted ethos that will take years to undo.

The best engineering and education falls apart when enforcement is contingent on power. Once, a relative’s chauffeur was driving me around; he was so reckless I finally had to request him to drive more carefully. His answer floored me. His boss, he explained, was “malakas” and had given him calling cards of generals that would protect him, no matter what he did.

I suddenly remembered this same relative at family reunions, ranting about bad driving, bad Filipinos and roaring, “What we need is discipline.”