MCGI Cares: Simulation and Simulacra

At first glance, it’s a kind gesture. Someone offering bottled water through a car window. But look again. The driver says no. And that quiet refusal reveals everything.

This is not charity. This is simulation!

A volunteer from MCGI Cares serves free lugaw and water to a passerby—part of a campaign designed to attract middle-income recruits seen as future financiers of the group’s charity arm.

French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulation and simulacra argues that in late-stage media cultures, symbols and representations replace reality itself. Over time, these representations no longer refer to anything real, they become hyperreal. A copy with no original.

Applied to MCGI Cares, what we witness is not genuine charity but a hyperreal performance of kindness. The image of a volunteer handing out water is not about hydration or human connection. It’s a visual product meant to affirm the organization’s benevolence, regardless of actual impact.

The shirt, the camera, the choreography, all simulate virtue while obscuring the absence of real compassion. In this framework, charity isn’t practiced. It’s performed.

Because in MCGI, lugaw has become a currency for recruitment. Good works are given with the expectation of something in return. Charity has become an exchange value. And every human soul has become a tradable commodity.

The volunteer wears a shirt reading “MCGI Cares: The Legacy Continues,” but what legacy is that exactly? When public service becomes a photo-op and kindness is packaged for branding, the whole meaning dissolves.

What’s left is a performance, carefully staged, tightly framed, and broadcast for effect.

But here’s what adds to the hypocrisy. The driver isn’t a struggling pedestrian or a street vendor. He’s clearly an upper middle class, sitting in a clean, brand new Hyundai hybrid car.

This wasn’t outreach. It was targeting.

The act wasn’t driven by compassion, but by strategy. They weren’t trying to help someone in need. They were curating the appearance of help to someone who looked like a juicy prospect—someone with influence, stability, or money.

This is where simulation becomes simulacra, a fake version of benevolence, offered not out of love, but with the hope of conversion or camera capture.

A bait. A prop. A photo-ready moment built for optics, not outcomes.

And the refusal shattered it!

It was a soft “no” to manipulation, to cultic branding, to the false idea that goodness has to be branded and broadcast. When charity is aimed not at the needy, but at the marketable, it stops being charity at all.

That’s when simulation fails.

And the mask slips.