Intelligent responses to survey findings

Up to May 2004, nothing will excite, titillate, infuriate or simply provoke more discussion than survey findings relating to the nation’s forthcoming elections. Partisans can be expected to openly praise or criticize these findings as the latter promote or undermine the political fortunes of their principals. To the most resourceful, manipulative and hopelessly partisan, surveys and their findings represent a major electoral challenge. Beneficial survey results must be tremendously magnified, often even to the point of distorting the objective realities they reflect. Negative survey findings, on the other hand, must be either fully suppressed or given a twist that dissipates much of their critical impact. In both instances, those who attend to their partisan task rightly gain the dubious title "spinmasters".

The more intelligent Filipinos view public opinion surveys and their findings differently. Confronted by credible, academically-respectable survey research, their reaction to survey findings is quite predictable. Whether partisan or non-partisan, they regard these human artifacts as effective monitors of how the general public perceives and reacts to their shared realities. There is much hopefulness in anticipating that public perceptions and sentiments may reflect their own smaller group’s views and preferences, these latter resulting from a keen appreciation of the nation’s objective realities. Where the survey findings actually validate a conjunction of their group’s views and those of the general public, intelligent Filipinos predictably find much to be satisfied with and, in some cases, even to be happy about.

The acid test, however, is not when there is this conjunction of perceptions, opinions, beliefs, sentiments and attitudes between the general public and those who comprise the smaller class of truly intelligent Filipinos. While one may argue convincingly that popular views and intelligent assessments have actually consorted often enough in this country’s history, it is where they deviate much that one’s personal commitment to an intelligent way of life gets to be tested most.

At some point in time, the public perceptions may or may not be consonant with society’s objective realities. (An urgent national concern like runaway population growth might have been cavalierly ignored by the public. A predatory national leadership might have been romanticized by a citizenry inclined to political idolatry. A honey-tongued rhetorician might have sweettalked people into handing him the presidency.) Given some sensible standard of logic or reason, the opinions, sentiments and attitudes of the surveyed public relating to these realities may or may not be logical or rational. The public could be absolutely wrong in believing to exist what in fact does not; the same public could also be irresponsible in continuing to hold on to sentiments and attitudes that are contraindicated by objective evidence that have become available to them.

Even in such trying circumstances, the more intelligent among this country’s citizenry will not fault an academic survey and those who undertook it for probing the public’s view of their society, its governance and – in the specific case of pre-election surveys – the contemporary profile of people’s voting preferences. Instead, they will appreciate being able to gain access through the survey to the public mindset and being able to relate their individual orientations and preferences to the general or communal one(s). Their sincere commitment to a democratic order inclines them to view any additional insight into their people’s character, any further knowledge pertaining to the nature of their sovereign demos, as an inestimable and vital gain.

Intelligent Filipinos will refuse to treat even demonstrably wrong public opinion with contempt or derision. Faced by survey findings indicative of public ignorance or immaturity in addressing governance issues and leadership choices, they will seek to discover the wherefores of these democratic handicaps and the means by which they could be progressively eradicated. Ridicule, insults and curses are not the trademark of intelligent and mature Filipinos building a strong democratic republic; they are more characteristic of intellectually-handicapped, psychologically-insecure and oligarchically-bred characters who graduate from first to second childhood without the mediating effects of responsible adulthood. It is most unfortunate that too many of the latter clutter Philippine society’s public and private sectors. Civil society itself is not spared their nefarious presence and academe has its normal share of those who automatically distrust the l public and consider most of the people as incurably vulgar and lowly.

Whatever survey findings emerge, intelligent Filipinos try to context them democratically, with the people’s interest foremost in mind. "Our people right or wrong, when right to be kept right and when wrong to be set right" is their unswerving civic orientation. With this demanding mindset, a nation’s continuing education on the meaning, merits and responsibilities of democracy is assiduously pursued. Intelligent Filipinos understand that academic surveys and their findings are contributory to the successful pursuit of this educational process, one that no nation can forgo for long without imperilling its democratic claims.