Taking the signs down

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January 23, 2026 | 12:00am

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a speech that cut against the grain of polite multilateral rhetoric. It was neither a lament for a lost golden age nor a naïve plea for harmony. Instead, it was a measured and quietly unsettling challenge to the most dangerous habit of our time, pretending.

Quoting the ancient realist Thucydides, Carney acknowledged the prevailing mood of international affairs, great power rivalry, the erosion of a rules-based order and the creeping belief that strength alone determines outcomes. The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must. Increasingly, this worldview is treated as inevitable, as if history itself has returned to reclaim its dominion.

Carney’s intervention was to expose inevitability as performance. Performances, when repeated often enough, begin to masquerade as truth.

To make this point, he turned to Václav Havel and his essay. Havel’s parable of the greengrocer, dutifully displaying a slogan he does not believe in to avoid trouble, remains one of the most incisive metaphors for how unjust systems endure. Power, Havel argued, is sustained not only by coercion but by the daily participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

This is “living within a lie.” And it is not confined to authoritarian regimes or the past.

For the Philippines, this metaphor lands uncomfortably close to home.

As a middle power, geographically exposed and economically interdependent, the Philippines knows the temptation of accommodation. It appears when economic pragmatism is treated as value neutrality, when dependency is framed as inevitability and when rules are affirmed loudly in principle but diluted quietly in practice.

Everyone recognizes these contradictions. And yet the signs often remain in the window.

In today’s global order, the lie is more sophisticated and therefore more dangerous. It is the pretense that accommodation guarantees safety, that silence buys stability, that ambiguity can replace moral clarity. Governments perform allegiance to international law while hesitating to enforce it. Corporations issue values statements while structuring supply chains around opacity, labor arbitrage or single market dependence. Institutions speak of cooperation while preparing for fragmentation behind closed doors.

Carney’s call, “it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down,” is therefore not rhetorical flourish. It is a diagnosis. The greatest risk facing countries like the Philippines is not confrontation. It is the normalization of contradiction, where sovereignty is defended in speeches but eroded by choices, where democratic values are celebrated while convenience dictates alignment.

This matters because the old order is not coming back. The post Cold War assumption that trade would civilize geopolitics has collapsed. Trade has not prevented coercion. Technology has not guaranteed freedom. Growth has not ensured fairness. For the Philippines, this is tangible. Supply chains are vulnerabilities. Digital infrastructure is strategic terrain. Data, payments and platforms are no longer neutral utilities but instruments of power.

Nostalgia is not a strategy. But neither is pretense.

What gives Carney’s speech particular resonance for the Philippines is its reframing of agency. In a world dominated by superpowers, middle powers are often portrayed as objects rather than actors, forced to choose sides or retreat into caution. Carney rejected this framing. Middle powers, he argued, have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.

This is precisely the Philippine dilemma and opportunity.

The Philippines depends on open sea lanes, predictable rules, trusted institutions and interoperable systems. It benefits disproportionately from a world where law constrains power. That means it cannot afford to treat rules as optional or values as rhetorical. Credibility abroad is inseparable from coherence at home, in governance, in institutions, in the rule of law and in economic strategies that reduce dependency rather than deepen it.

Taking the signs down means different things for different actors.

For the Philippine government, it means naming coercion clearly and consistently, even when inconvenient. It means aligning foreign policy, trade, defense and digital infrastructure around long-term resilience rather than short-term quiet. It means building coalitions with other middle powers, because standing alone invites pressure but standing together shapes norms.

For Philippine businesses, the message is equally uncomfortable. Geopolitical neutrality is increasingly a fiction. Choices about suppliers, platforms, financing and data governance embed assumptions about sovereignty and risk. Performing compliance with ESG or ethics while optimizing solely for cost or access is its own form of living within a lie. The private sector does not merely operate within the system; it reinforces it.

For citizens, Havel’s greengrocer remains painfully familiar. Democracies rarely collapse dramatically. They erode through accommodation, selective outrage and the quiet decision to look away because speaking up feels futile. The illusion cracks only when enough people refuse to perform.

Critics will argue that this stance is impractical for a developing country, that moral clarity invites retaliation, that realism demands flexibility. These critiques are not wrong but they are incomplete. Power without legitimacy is brittle. Dependency disguised as pragmatism eventually extracts a higher price. The real question is not whether there will be costs but whether they are paid early and collectively or later and alone.

By invoking Havel, Carney reminded his audience that fragility is embedded in every system sustained by pretense. Removing the sign does not change the world overnight but it restores agency and expands what becomes possible.

The powerful will always have their power. The Philippines, like other middle powers, has something else, the capacity to stop pretending, to act with coherence and to build strength through alignment rather than accommodation. In a fractured world, that may be its most strategic choice.

Lito Villanueva is the Philippines’ leading thought leader in inclusive digital finance. As EVP and chief innovation and inclusion officer of RCBC, he has driven large-scale digital initiatives that advanced financial inclusion. He is the founding chairman of FinTech Alliance PH, representing 95 percent of the country’s digital retail financial transactions with an aggregate user base in excess of 100 million and the first global chairman of the Alliance of Digital Finance Associations. Recognized as a People Asia Men Who Matter 2025, Asia Trailblazer and AGORA Awardee, he continues to shape the fintech landscape in the Philippines and beyond.