The Power of Suggestions

The Power of Suggestions

One of the farcical things that the administration has done lately is to restrict to airing of the controversial tapes while ignoring the fact that traditional or downstream media isn’t the only source. Downloading the transcripts from the PCIJ (Philippine Center of Investigative Journalism), I was able to ken on the alleged ‘smoking gun’.

Before I continue, I would like to share you this analogy. For example, I show you a portrait of spiffed up svelte young lady, what would be your immediate impressions about her? Probably just as what you see. But if I tell you that this lady sells her pleasurable services you would probably conclude that she is a slut as I have suggested, presumably on the thought that I have this personal knowledge over my declarations. Moreover, a similar conclusion could be derived if I showed you first her picture, then an album of ladies belonging to a brothel. In other words, the lady’s stature becomes inconsequential and what shapes your thought processes would now be as what I have painted her to be…a hooker.

This I think is an example of the ‘power of suggestion’ or in behavioral finance called framing. According to Charles Baudouin a Swiss-French psychiatrist and author of Suggestion und Autosuggestion is ‘defined as the force that presses an idea toward realization through feelings and images that enter the subconscious from an external source’. Or have it another way, Nietschze’s lumpen denken or as Bill Bonner explains, ‘instead of thinking about things you know, you are thinking about things you cannot know and cannot explain.’ In other words, it could be a case of passing judgments on things that we hardly understand or have no authority to. It is the same argument that ex-justice Isagani Cruz mentioned in his ‘Moro-moro at the Senate’ argument where the public is treated into a spectacle where the rules of evidences as required by the courts of law have been totally disregarded.

I asked my mom who resides in Hong Kong, untainted by the political bedlam, to read the allegedly controversial transcripts of the President and the Comelec commissioner and to give me her impressions about it. She says nothing anomalous but rather of a normal rational conversation.

What I am trying to drive at is that if one has no personal knowledge about what the controversies are all about then one would have ignored the conversations as plain jejunity whereas if I suggested that the tapes are about the election fixing then our thought process would naturally hunt down words or phrases that would confirm these ‘framed’ biases.

I would urge you to read the following alleged conversations by the President and the Comelec commissioner from PCIJ by clicking on this link. However, before proceeding, since your thoughts have been geared toward searching for the ‘cheat’ associated words, my suggestion is to ask to yourself in each of every transcripts if it can themselves mean ANY OTHER THING ASIDE FROM THE PURPORTED.

If your answer is YES, then myriad things comes into play, aside from the polemics of the message, its authenticity, the source, the medium and others. If your answer is NO, then this means that the messages for you are stark clear, and heads must roll.

Now again in the same context, the ‘mother of all tapes’, please press on this link to download the pdf files (67 pages) shows that the messages of the President have been mixed with all the other messages (remember the album analogy).

While it is true that the entire script could be seen as obnoxiously corrupted as seen by the rent seeking complexities by a senator, some local officials and to even party lists organizations, this merely shows that the extent of government inefficiencies has fostered undue discretionary powers to an electoral official who could possibly engage in prestidigitation to serve vested interests. In other words, the possible wretchedness seen within the tapes could be a simulacrum of systemic inefficiencies that nurtures these rent seeking or ‘patronage’ and graft ridden complex that continues to hobble the country’s progress.

In my humble opinion, while the tapes could be a ‘wake up call’ to electoral reforms, a change of administration is not the qualified solution unless we address the systemic infirmities that go with it. Otherwise, all these repertoires of mudslinging could only be construed as simply politically induced or ‘setting up for a power grab’. Plus Ca Change, Plus C'est La Meme Chose or The more things change, the more they remain the same.