What stopped Philippines from progressing?

I do think that the problems with our country is not the country itself but the people governing our country. We are rich in everything but we have no resources to do it. We have natural resources but we have no machineries that are capable of converting it into something useful. We still depend in other countries inorder for us to make used of such resources. We are moving backward rather than forward in terms of growth in education and also economically speaking although our economy is improving we could not still feel it because most of the people in our country are prone of crab mentality.

We Pinoys have yet to overcome some general mindsets in order to progress. First is crab mentality, which is intensified by the fact that other Pinoys are not united enough. We tend to bring each other down rather than help each other out. This is evident in the political situation where political bickering overshadows what the leaders actually do for the country. Next is colonial mentality where we are still stuck in a desperate effort to mimic what other countries do or have. This is not entirely bad if it leads us to development, but admiring foreigners too much tends to steer us away from appreciating our own culture, our own products, and our own potentials. Consequently, we are not able to use our capabilities as a nation enough to lead us to progress. And one other problem is overpopulation, where too many people don't get enough jobs or become underemployed, too many families go hungry and live in streets, wages are insufficient, leading others to leave the country and appreciate it less.

The leadership that has vested interest is the major problem. Cory Aquino accidentally became President of the Republic of the Philippines because of the failure of Enrile to take it from Marcos. Cory Aquino had no vision for Philippine progress and wanted to retain power and erase Marcos from the minds of the Filipino people and implemented the Provisional Constitution then the Constitution made by few people appointed by her. Her administration focused in erasing the memory of Marcos and was even unable to convict the culprits in the assassination of her husband being President for more than 6 years when they were shouting before that they have all the evidence. Ramos of course worked for his personal image and travelled around the world so many times in his tenure as President of the Republic of the Philippines. Marcos went outside the Philippines for major travels only 6 times for the period of 20 years. Erap undoubtedly won the elections but the oligarchs did not approve of such and naturally worked to oust him and seated Gloria as she was the Vice-President and so GMA for vested interests has been clinging to her post and trying to retain power and doing everything for that. So how could we expect our country to progress? We can do our individual parts for the progress of our country but we need a strong leadership sincere to envision and implement everything for the progress of the country.

What we lack is discipline, discipline and discipline. We are not law abiding citizen. We have very low standard of character. If we overcome these from ourselves and teach these to our children and then we will be ok. Plus, we need a lot of help. We need to be kick around to wake up.

Most of the factors are very well said by other comments here. I will just add most filipinos like the way of easy making business by means of giving money =( "padulas system". Lack of discipline in their home country but abide the law in other country. Lack of nationalism and patriotism, filipinos always love imports, that's why local suppliers are gone by now. Lack of government support to filipino inventors and genius, that's why these inventors tend to sell their inventions to other country. I don't believe that Philippines are lack of machineries, because Philippine can be able to provide it if they really wished to. PHilippines is trying to cope up with global industrialization and had not giving emphasize to its agriculture wherein it is where philippines is known, thus result of importing rice from other country =(.

DISCIPLINE!!! Thats what Filipino's lack. Even if they know they are not doing the right thing they would still insist doing it. Filipinos have this saying "Baka makalusut, lulusut". It's sad that we Filipinos have this mentality. I hope this would change not just for the people but for the entire country. If we have this then im sure the Philippines will be a very very rich and everything will workout very well for us. I also believe that the Philippines has potential to be a super power, it just lucks discipline.

Like Philiphines, India also rich in natural and human resources. For the overall progress of the country, human should use the natural resources more scientifically and efficiently.