WHY ARE MARCOS SUPPORTERS IMMUNE TO FACTS?

 

The striking question above is Joel Ruiz Butuyan’s PDI column title which caught my eye and has stirred me up to take a crack at the answer. Let’s do it. Caution: this is a mind-blowing and soul-stirring article.

Numbers don’t lie.

P174.2 billion recovered in ill-gotten wealth

P125.9 billion in pending cases

P203 billion in unpaid estate taxes

$2 billion in damages awarded to almost 10,000 human rights victims

P10 billion in compensation to more than 11,000 human rights victims

Despite the serious accusations against Marcos Jr. and his family, proven by government records, evidenced by court decisions, and even institutionalized in laws passed by Congress, die-hard supporters act dead-ma to such accusations of corruption, human rights violations, and charges of lies. Virtually, Marcos Jr. supporters typically reply: “Basta.”

My FB level-headed friend Luis has been caught off guard by such in-your-face apathy as conveyed by his following blunt comment on the FB post about the 1970s brutal murder of the 16-year old Boyet Mijares after his father wrote an anti-Marcos book:

“SURPRISED! is an understatement of my feeling when I read through the comments from my friends and brothers who are dear to me, esteemed engineers, university scholars, uniformed personnel, and academicians, who are all WITNESSES to the times during martial law, YET how they differ so contrastingly of their own perceptions of the events that happened! O TEMPORA O MORES!”

Luis’ highly educated circle of friends and brothers points to the very nature of the crux of the problem: it is not just rational. It digs deeper than that: it is spiritual – “God’s light came into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light.” (John 3:19)

One peculiar mark of this spiritual crux of the problem is the spate of hate: darkness hates the light, badness hates goodness. In my previous ATABAY article “Someone Is In For A Big Surprise” I wrote:

Based on the data of Tsek.ph (a fact-checking collaboration of 34 academe, media, and civil society partners) covered since the filing of the candidacy up to mid-February, the election disinformation has targeted mainly VP Leni receiving negative messaging while Marcos Jr. earning positive branding.

“Robredo’s quotes have been mangled, twisted, [or] fabricated to make her look like she is spouting nonsense. She has been called, rather harshly, Madumb, Lutang, tanga, utal-utal.” (Yvonne Chua, journalism professor, and Tsek.ph’s project leader)

The distribution of disinformation appears to be coordinated which jibed with the Digital Public Pulse study on “networked political manipulation” carried out by highly influential yet dubious social media accounts. Right on such an issue, Twitter suspended more than 300 accounts from the supporter base of Marcos Jr. for violating the company’s platform manipulation and spam policy.

As I hit my keys in composing this article, the drift of today’s Bible passages in Wisdom is serendipitous:

“Led by mistaken reasons they think…

‘Let us set a trap for the righteous for he annoys us and opposes our way of life; he reproaches us for our breaches of the Law and accuses us of being false to our upbringing…

‘He has become a reproach to our way of thinking; even to meet him is burdensome to us. He does not live like the rest and behaves strangely.

‘According to him we have low standards and he keeps aloof from us as if we were unclean. He emphasizes the happy end of the righteous…

“This is the way they reason, but they are mistaken, blinded by their malice. They do not know the mysteries of God or do they hope for the reward of a holy life; they do not believe that the blameless will be recompensed.”

In the above passages, if we replace the pronouns ”he/his/him” with “she/her,” and deem “they” as haters of a person who embodies “goodness,”  we could relate the gist of those passages to our present political context.

In the same manner, Mother Teresa got the worst of such hate from the atheists. One atheist wrote a book entitled “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice” – an extreme hateful attack on the Nobel Peace Prize-winning nun.

David Aikman in his book “The Delusion of Disbelief” wrote that the atheist author “is proud of his distasteful and sophomoric title because he says it is a triple entendre, as though the achievement of verbal cleverness always excuses a sneering sexual innuendo.” The atheist calls her “an ambitious Albanian nun,” "the ghoul of Calcutta,” “dangerous,” “sinister,” “fanatical,” “an obscurantist,” and “a demagogue.” (Such demeaning misogynistic name-calling sounds familiar in our ongoing election campaign.)

It is worthy to note that Mother Teresa, in her work among the poorest of the poor of Calcutta, Aikman wrote, she “literally picked up people abandoned to die on the streets and gave them a place to spend their last few days or hours on this earth in peace and dignity. In the early years, she sometimes used wheelbarrows and personally carted desperately ill people to local hospitals, where she simply refused to budge until they were treated.”

Back to the banner question: Why are Marcos supporters immune to facts? Answer: It is spiritually rooted. Follow-up question: Is there a way of solving this problem?

In the book “The Becomers,” the author Keith Miller wrote about Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who founded analytical psychology that could pave the way for the remedy we seek. Miller wrote the following:

“Carl Jung said that in the face of the very real powers that dominate us, only an equally real power or encounter can offer help. No intellectual system, but direct experience only, can counterbalance the blind power of our seemingly intellectual course.”

What is this “direct experience” Carl Jung referred to? It is the experience of Christian spiritual conversion. Miller explained:

“’Opening the door (of one’s personal life) to Christ.’ John Stott spells out the difference between this specific opening of one’s self and other religious activities when he says that ‘this step is the beginning and nothing else will do instead. You can believe in Christ intellectually and admire Him; you can say your prayers to Him…; you can be religious and pious; you can have been baptized and confirmed; you can be deeply versed in the philosophy of religion; you can be a theological student and even an ordained minister – and still not have opened the door to Christ. There is no substitute for this.'”

Finally, there’s the rub: spiritual conversion is a solitary one. Miller stressed:

“Preachers, teachers, witnesses, books, and friends can provide information about God and recite inspiring and highly motivating case histories, including their own. But if we are candidates for conversion, we finally reach the point where only we in our aloneness can make a reply [to God].”

In light of this predicament, it is comforting to know Butuyan’s ventured estimate -- only 20 percent are die-hard Marcos supporters.