400 years of servitude: the reason for Pinoy indifference?

It was a statement that stunned me into thinking, and right now, still without answers, it's on my to-study list.  During a break in a magazine interview which tackled a national lack of interest in developing our country potentials like tourism and its related branches, my interviewee, the CEO I was interviewing, said point-blank that the indifference was pervasive in us Pinoys, and cannot just be blamed our leaders.  The lady was a second-generation Tsinoy whose dad embodied the rags-to-riches story of a Chinese immigrant who rose from practically nothing.  Growing up, she found herself asking if she was truly more alien than what was obvious.

To describe it in corporate parlance, her dad raised her to have a sense of ownership in the things she was doing, regardless of the scope of the project or the task.  To have a strong sense of responsibility that would ensure that the project would not just succeed, it would flourish.  To have a strong sense of accountability that would not pass the buck to anybody else.  Others did not seem to feel as strongly.  They let work fell by the wayside or maybe did not fight as much for the things they said they believed in.  Her Pinoy peers were not in for the long haul.

"I didn't have that DNA of 400 years of servitude that the average Pinoy has," the lady said emphatically.

Servitude = slave mentality.  It means an ingrained sense of bowing down to colonial masters.  It means not possessing a firm sense that what you think you own is truly yours  - and as such can never be yours.  It means a subconscious attitude that you will never really succeed...so why be responsible and accountable?

How deeply entrenched is that attitude in our DNA?  Is the CEO right? Granted that there are individual exceptions, still, is that why our workforce has been labeled to have an 'employee' mentality, as opposed to an entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese, the explorer attitude of the Europeans or the gungho conquer-the-frontier mindset of an American?

As I said, this theory on Pinoy indifference  on my to-study list.  All I got are questions.  Let you know once I post the answers.