We have always been a nation on the lookout for a hero.

You see it most clearly when we vote. We do not choose a leader; we conduct auditions for a savior. We look for the one who will rescue us from poverty, from the economy, from the traffic jams, from the inefficiency, from the corruption, from the floods, from natural disasters. We want someone to solve all of it for us. The mentality runs so deep that we will hand the country to men and women who have never governed anything, only played heroes on a movie or TV show. We watched them save the day in a screen, and some part of us decided that was qualification enough — that what they did onscreen, they will do the same for us when they are in office.

But the savior hunt does not stop at the ballot. It lives in the office too. Something goes wrong between two people, and instead of talking it out, we file it with HR, as if HR were a priest who could absolve the whole mess. We build anonymous feedback channels that were meant to help as, well, feedback channels, yet they fill up like cesspools of grievances that one honest conversation could have solved. We look at our CEOs and our management the way sailors once looked at saints, as if they were handed some magical dust that lets them steer the ship through any storm and dock it, somehow, in the land of profit.

I have come to believe that this “save us” mentality sits at the root of most of our problems.

Yes, we lack systems and institutions that run without friction and red tape. Yes, we lack leaders with the gumption to actually fix things. We lack a great many external things, and it is fair to name them.

But here is the part we keep skipping: We have a choice — and we are the ones choosing.

However, when we choose, we choose saviors. We choose the ones we believe will be kind and generous, the ones who will dole out cash from public office, the ones who will share their power with us because we knew them. We choose the ones who handed us five hundred pesos on the way to the voting precinct. We choose the ones who promised us heaven and earth for the length of a campaign and forgot us by the first week of the term. We choose by personality, by whether the candidate looks like us and talks like us and walks like us. We choose them because they look like our dad or our uncle or our moms or our sisters.

Then we act surprised when nothing changes.

It is getting tiring.

And I will be honest with you. I do not know the way out. Is it more education? A good university degree? Critical thinking as a subject? Voter education drives before every election? Continuing voter education throughout the year? Better social media tools? More laws to curtail misinformation, disinformation, and faje news? More punishment for the corrupt and the unjust? Better salaries for the government officials? Professionalizing the government and really looking for educated, with-experience candidates as part of the vetting process for candidates?

I have turned these over and over and over, and none of them feels like the key that fits the lock. It feels instead like a cycle we cannot break, the same disappointment on a loop, election after election. It feels like a vicious cycle — a downward spiral towards god-knows-what.

I read somewhere once that democracy only works when the people are informed and think for themselves. BUT… in an age of misinformation and disinformation and a collective gullibility that grows faster than any correction, can we honestly say we are informed? Can we say we are thinking critically? I am not sure we can.

It is time for change, they keep telling us. Fine. But which change? Name it. Perhaps naming it will somehow help. But what change are we really looking out for, in the first place?

So yes, sometimes I feel hopeless. I feel like there is no progress to point to. I feel like there is nothing I can do that would matter at the scale of the problem.

You know the story of the boy on the beach, throwing stranded starfish back into the sea one at a time. A man tells him he cannot possibly save them all, that he is not making a difference. The boy throws another one in and says it made a difference to that one. It is a lovely story, and I believe it. But there is only one me, and I suspect there are very few of us who even feel this way, and the tide is very large and the beach, endless.

Here is the one thing I keep returning to.

Gabriel Marcel taught that hope is not a room you sit and wait inside of. Hope is active participation. You hope, and then you move. You do something on the strength of that hope.

Our grandparents knew this in fewer words. Nasa Dios ang awa, nasa tao ang gawa. The mercy belongs to God, but the doing belongs to us.

Yet, somewhere along the way we kept the first half and let go of the second.

We are still hanging our whole lives on the awa. We have thrown away the gawa.

We handed our agency to the next man who promised to save us, and we called it faith.

It was never faith. It was surrender.