By John Renzo J. Cabunagan
(Second of three parts)
The origins of the padrino system can be traced back to the Spanish colonial period, a time when social mobility was heavily restricted and based on one’s relationship with colonial authorities. Under the Spanish rule, political and social power was concentrated in the hands of a few elite individuals, including Spanish officials, friars, and wealthy Filipino landowners. To gain access to government positions, wealth, or social privileges, Filipinos were often required to secure the patronage of these powerful figures (Scott, 1994). The padrino system leads to clientelism, wherein political support is exchanged for material benefits (Dumalagan, 2020). Throughout the nation’s history, this has been the source of countless controversies and corruption, which remains a significant issue, with many politicians being involved in scandals. Efforts to curb corruption have been continuing, but political patronage lives on as an ineradicable resistance to change (Mendoza, 2017).
An additional point to consider is that the Philippines has a multi-party system. In the traditional sense, a political spectrum (left-right political axis) can be used to analyze the ideologies and policy positions as well as the social issues that are advocated by political parties. This is proven to be irrelevant in the Philippines as political parties are often ideologically fluid and loyalty to parties is weak. Parties frequently form temporary alliances based on personal and family interests rather than clear political platforms. This leads to a system where candidates often run on personal popularity rather than party affiliation (Rodriguez, 2017).
“With great power comes great responsibility,” you most likely learned this phrase from Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben in the Spider-Man comics and movies, although it should be pointed out that it was originally coined by the French author Voltaire. In spite of the numerous challenges, the country remains committed to its democratic framework, as exhibited by the high degree of public participation in the more often than not intense political campaigns and voter turnout during the elections (Magno, 2018). By “Philippine Political Theater” as the title of this section, what I really meant was the Philippine political landscape. But in a country where politics is dominated by political dynasties and popular celebrities (David & San Pascual, 2016), and where politicians switch affiliations as if one would change brands of detergent powder — on top of political scandals and telenovela-esque narratives that turn our eyes away from the important challenges that plague our country as a nation, to wit: corruption, poverty and social inequality (Agcaoili, 2019) — this poses the question: How can we, the citizens, make informed decisions in choosing our leaders?
Theory of the Collective Mind
The first half of November 2024 saw two celebrated figures in their respective fields hold lectures in Iloilo City on separate occasions. On November 12th, renowned historian and public intellectual Ambeth Ocampo served as the resource speaker of the 4th Kahilwayan History Talk. Held at the Casa Real de Iloilo, it was a joint initiative between the Municipality of Santa Barbara and the Provincial Government of Iloilo as part of the former’s celebration of the 126th Cry of Santa Barbara and the 24th Kahilwayan Festival. On Saturday of the same week, November 16th, prolific screenwriter and National Artist for Film and Broadcast Arts Ricky Lee gave a talk that served as the culminating activity of the CineMatahum 2024 screenings at UPV Cinematheque. CineMatahum is a film festival organized by the University of the Philippines Visayas with the goal of promoting Western Visayan films. My current employment as a web developer on a remote work setup afforded me the opportunity to be present during both lectures.
Ambeth Ocampo’s presentation was titled Early Mapping and the Emergence of the Filipino Nation. In which, he set out the vital role of early maps in the development of our nation and in forging the Filipino identity. In the middle of the lecture, I suddenly recalled the words of the historian Renato Constantino in his 1975 book The Philippines: A Past Revisited as he explained how our collective struggle is the driving force of social transformation, “Struggle is therefore the essence of life, whether of an individual or a society. An individual has no history apart from society, and society is the historical product of people in struggle.” This led me to remember a theory that I first learned in one of my communication subjects in college, the theory of the collective mind. In his paper titled Communication, Culture and the Collective Psyche, Dr. Alexander G. Flor (who was my former professor in UPOU) wrote:
Historians refer to it as the zeitgeist, the ghost or spirit of the times, determining social outlook and historical events. Psychologists, specifically those associated with the Jungian school of thought, call it the Collective Unconscious. Marxists allude to it as class consciousness. The concept of the Collective Mind is nothing new. It is an extension of the holistic principle that nature has a built-in tendency to produce wholes from the ordered grouping of units. It may follow that an “ordered grouping” of individual minds give way to a Collective Mind.
In Dr. Flor’s paper, he also put forward that the EDSA People Power Revolution of 1986 is quintessential of the phenomenon of the collective mind, being a demonstration of how social barriers can be transcended for the people, as a communal entity, to act as one out of the shared need and desire for change.
At the conclusion of Ambeth Ocampo’s presentation, the attendees were asked whether they had questions to put up for the guest speaker to answer. It was followed by dead air as no one stepped up. Considering where my thoughts had been over the course of the lecture, I sure did have something in mind. But I did not want to make a fool of myself in public by posing an abstruse question that I now like to think I already know the answer to, although I was not fully capable of articulating it at the time. It goes this way: At a point in history where there is no apparent collective struggle, how can the Filipino society, as a nation, move forward?
The Individual Mind
Four days later, I attended Ricky Lee’s talk at UPV Cinematheque, which revolved around his concept of taong panloob (inner self). He used this concept to set forth how his once unconscious desire to fill an existential void and mend the emotional pains of his younger years influenced his creative process and shaped his overall perspective toward life and society. Given the literary mood of the setting, listening to Ricky Lee’s account of the past experiences that in certain ways had an effect on his works reminded me of Proust’s madeleine.
In his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past), Marcel Proust introduced the concept of “involuntary memory,” where past experiences resurface unexpectedly, without conscious effort. He contrasted this with voluntary memory, which he believed lacks the depth of the former. A key example of this is the famous scene where the protagonist eats a madeleine soaked in lime blossom tea, triggering a vivid childhood memory of eating the same treat with his aunt. This moment leads him to recall his childhood home and the town where he grew up. A central theme in the novel, Proust explored how such sensory experiences can unlock profound and forgotten memories.
Afterwards, on the spur of the moment, I had a flashback of a minute detail in Ambeth Ocampo’s prior presentation. Before addressing the audience and commencing the lecture, he delicately placed a puppet-like figure that resembled a bespectacled old man clad in a business suit close to the edge of the left side of the rostrum. However, he acknowledged neither its presence nor its purpose during the lecture. Going over his Facebook page later that day, I learned that it was a miniature doll of the Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. Then came my epiphany, which also constitutes the very thesis of this essay.
For us to make informed decisions in choosing our leaders, our decisions must also be meaningful.
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory posits that our behavior, thoughts, and emotions are largely influenced by our unconscious drives, desires, and past experiences. Central to this theory is the structure of the mind, which he divided into three components: the id, the unconscious source of our instinctual desires; the ego, our conscious self that mediates between the id and external reality; and the superego, our moral conscience formed by societal and parental values (Freud, 1923). He also emphasized the role of our early childhood experiences in shaping our personality and behavior. In his writings — through the lens of human psychology, unconscious processes, and defense mechanisms — Freud also explored the relationship between the philosophical concepts of truth and reality.
According to Freud (1917), truth is often hidden beneath layers of unconscious desires, repressed memories, and psychological defenses. For him, we may not be aware of the full truth about our own thoughts, feelings, and motivations because much of it is repressed or distorted by our unconscious mind. Defense mechanisms, such as repression, denial, and projection, are ways we protect ourselves from confronting these truths (Freud, 1926). Moreover, he made a key distinction between external reality (the world outside of the individual) and psychic reality (the inner world of the individual). According to him, the individual’s psychic reality may differ significantly from the objective world. The psychoanalytic process is in part a quest to align psychic reality with external reality. Freud believed that individuals often develop psychological symptoms because of unresolved internal conflicts between the unconscious mind and the reality they experience. These conflicts can distort a person’s understanding of their true desires and the world around them, leading to emotional and behavioral dysfunction (Freud, 1911).
Unconscious truth can be viewed as a subjective reality that distorts an individual’s perception of the external world. Freud’s methods aim to bring this hidden truth into conscious awareness, allowing individuals to understand the sources of their symptoms and reconcile their inner conflicts, primarily through techniques such as free association, dream analysis, and the interpretation of defense mechanisms (Freud, 1900). At this point, I would like to make it clear that the goal of this essay is not to make a psychoanalyst out of each of us. The relevance of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory in this discussion lies in the fact that in order to make meaningful decisions, one must undertake the task of meaning-making, which is the process of understanding and making sense of the world around us, including life events, relationships, and the self (Tucker, 2024).
