There is this urge to distill my thoughts around politics, democracy, and governance into a kind of manifesto, so that, one, it is easier for me to communicate my most important beliefs, values, and principles regarding these topics to other people, to facilitate our recognition of what we agree on, and of what we could still discuss or enlighten each other about; and two, as a reminder to myself, because this modern world is increasingly making us more forgetful.
I could try to hunker down and pore over readings and then meditate and reflect to produce the said manifesto, but that means I’ll likely never get around to doing it, so in this space I will just be writing tentatively about them one by one, as the ideas come to me. Today, I’m thinking about the value of focusing on issues over personalities.
In using this formula of “x over y,” I’m thinking of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, where the authors take care to explain that y is also valuable, it is just that x is more important. Indeed, it’s easy to say that when it comes to issues of governance and other important topics, one focuses on the issues rather than on the personalities, but we’re humans, not Vulcans, we’re social beings not immune to the workings of charisma and other features of interpersonal action. It would be lovely to see political chatter everywhere shift focus to debates on the complications and nuances of data-driven policy-making, but that is hard, and serious and boring; it is easier to talk about people.
Besides, issues and policies do not exist in a vacuum. These ultimately relate to people, and the ones who are most able to do something about them are the personalities of inevitable interest: politicians. And, oh boy, aren’t some of these politicians irresistible, their every word and deed scrutinized on the Internet and glorified or demonized (depending on which side of the political arena one is sitting on). Some of these personalities who have dominated national and global discourse so thoroughly in the past decade are perhaps to blame for the current political climate of nonstop anger and anxiety. But there are personalities who are walking beacons of hope too. This election season, for example, there is this young mayor from a city east of Manila who is worshipped in my online hangout spaces, who seems too good to be true, who is so decent that he makes his current electoral opponent look like the perfect caricature of traditional, backwards, third-world politics.
But I’m getting carried away. See? It’s a good thing that this same mayor makes sure to emphasize in his deliberately non-festive campaign sorties that the focus should not be on personalities, but on systems and institutions. As to whether he is succeeding in perpetuating this new, modern politics in his city remains to be seen. The pioneering sociologist Max Weber teaches that charismatic authority (of which this mayor has plenty) either eventually gives way to modern rational-legal authority, as this mayor would like to happen, or falls back to traditional authority, bringing back with it all its detrimental effects on social progress.
For the love of this country, I hope he succeeds, and that his success would spread and catch fire, ushering in our nation’s much-delayed transition into modernity.