Compulsion for rumors

Noise. After all is said and done, rumors mostly reduce to no more than noise, starting with a barely audible rumble in the ruminant‘s rumen, passing on to its abomasums after a series of innards-shaking belches and finally exploding as an exquisite gas – mostly hot air with a decidedly uncivilized turn – through nature’s rear portal.

So why do we have a seemingly natural compulsion to chase after this kind of wind? Why is there such as huge interest in rumors and such delight in rumormongering on this country? Nature’s ways are hard to fathom, but the general rule is that what comes naturally enables a creature to survive better. There must be something in our instinctive turn for rumors and rumor-mongering that is vital for Filipino survival.

Rumors normally turn out to be false, as in false alarms. Yet, its poor historic record has not made us eschew rumor. On the contrary, most of us take to rumors as ducks to water, swimming delightfully in it and quite often resourcefully subsisting off it.

There is more than enough rumors to meet this nation’s basic need for the much less than true and that which is often easily falsified. Politicians are veritable rumor mills and – being jacks of all trades – fabricate everything? The less gifted among them must specialize on a few products, currently impending military coups and police restiveness. Often formally tasked with national security, the latter do not think twice before vesting their raw intelligence with the crowd-drawing mantle of rumormongering, eagerly mouthing ominous sound bytes of imminent coups to whomsoever would listen.

Private sector influentials likewise are ever abuzz with spectacular tales. Their amazing stories are bruited about to kill whatever confidence might still abide in a much-enervated economy. Practically all of these tales are spun out of the thinnest yarn and often exude a most sulphuric air.

Civil society’s multilingual groups are not to be outdone. The religious purvey rumors of what God and the vengeful archangels are about to do and drawing attention to the unmistakable signs of patently terminal times. The ideologically inspired also have their secular version of the religious rumors, with public outrage being substituted for divine wrath and social democrats annihilating the nation’s political scoundrels in some explosive exercise of genuine people power.

Media people too find much that is materially rewarding in purveying noise, rumors that drone comfortably in the background like silly, personal gossip as well as those that stridently compel us to take note and take a fight-or-fight stance.

Limiting oneself to an example of just the latter kind of rumors and reserving the rest for another column, "acoustical warfare" – tales of coups and coupmaking – happens to be a staple item in media’s repertoire of must-be, soon-to-be events, those things that – giving the poetic language of Gemino H. Abad a twist – might be said to comprise the ominous and the oracular in this country of anarchic feelers.

Among media people, a few tower above the rest in their facility for generating or disseminating great rumors. Among the most gifted synthesists this republic has ever produced, this breed integrates rumors from every source, from whichever group, and – authoritatively speaking for all peoples, all times and all climes – pass off their panoramic productions as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. (Columnists are the acknowledged masters of this highly creative art, but there are a few young, bright and enterprising reporters who may soon give them a run for their money.)

The rumor industry has always been a vibrant one in this country. It could not have thrived without a market of prolific products and compulsive consumers meeting each other. Historically discounting truth much, those who supply rumors and those with a compulsive need for them cannot be all that impressed that this is essential to the product.

Politicians, businessmen, civil society influentials and media people all have a clear stake in rumor-making and its dissemination. As stakeholders in Philippine society’s power game, each of these groups uses rumors to improve its power position relative to the rest. In a summary way, one may advance the thesis that rumors are used by each group to persuade others of its indispensability in enabling the self-serving power structure to continue and furthermore to draw attention to its own formidable political resources.

But why do most Filipinos who are not power actors have a compulsive need for rumors? Perhaps the paradox is that the powerless are also the ones who are in greatest need of what which is not true, that which will probably be falsified again, that which a rumor eventually would prove to be.

To most Filipinos, reality– the truth – is mostly cruel. Their truths hurt, as poverty, powerlessness and continuous victimization in their largely oligarchic society must hurt.

Rumors may be the ultimate defense of most Filipinos against oppressive realities. It is not that they approve truly of rumored coups and other equality alarming would-be possibilities. For a powerless people, there is an abject realization that their approval or disapproval counts for little, if at all.

They gain much satisfaction, however, in seeing some of the most powerful in society discomfited and, if possible, upset. If only for the briefest of times, the most powerful appear to be vulnerable and then most Filipinos dare dream truly dangerous possibilities. Rumors serve as opiates to most of our people. They distract and disorient our hopeless from the most cruel truths in this Republic.