Zeitgeist | Sun.Star Cebu | Dec. 4, 2009

THERE'S a rather esoteric study that goes by the title, “Dynamics of emotions in political game theory.” In one breath, you know it’s a crack at merging the disciplines of psychology, political science and mathematics.

The attempt pretty much succeeds—it had quantified emotions and systematically configured their contagiousness in a certain populace. The study, a joint effort of an eclectic clique of professors from the University of Berkeley, was able to draw a line between emotional response and political circumstances, something we know only too instinctively, but this time pinned down to the level of theory.

Someone raised an ante over an infomercial for its emotional overload, and one can’t help but find that rather naïve.

What can you say or do in a thirty-second TV ad, anyway, but drive the dagger into the hearts of voters?

The Democrats in the US learned their lesson well, and for the first time changed tack during the Barack Obama campaign.

Many credit his victory to the thousands of volunteers who walked the talk, but I think the value of emotions in the campaign was pretty much underrated. For years, the Democrats loaded their campaigns with policy debates, statistics and facts, and most often put an entire town hall to sleep.

Drew Westin, a clinical psychologist who doubles as a political strategist, found that despite how the Democrats’ belief are in line with most of the Americans’ feelings, the party repeatedly failed in translating that capital into electoral success.

Westin suggested during the campaign that the Democrats should better drop its “laundry list of issues,” and begin speaking in terms of passion.

Those single-worded campaign posters with Obama’s face make sense to me now. A friend of mine gave me a campaign shirt with the word “progress” under an image of Obama. The other posters also carried the word “change.” It was a matter of paring down otherwise complex issues into what feels right in the guts.

You listen to Obama’s speeches, and you’ll find how he cuts to the chase with what is household and basic, fanning the fire of the body politic with the simplest of words.

At home, this is the kind of tack we saw in most of our infomercials. But Westin added that there is no substitute for telling the truth in the “marketplace of emotions.” Nothing, he says, is more compelling than a candidate who is “genuine.”

So we have these theories—political game theory, emotions, and passion campaign—on the plate, but as Sigmund Freud said, “The theories are there, but it does not stop the world from happening.”

What possible emotions can hit the Filipinos right at the breadbasket? In the age of innocence, you think the elections are pretty much the turf of political scientists and forget that all the other fields that use every breathing human body as a specimen are just as valuable. Even literature, and all its discourse analyses on the grand narratives of good versus evil or the forgettable creation story of Malakas and Maganda.

You look around and these mythologies come alive in our political terrain.

Do they work? Of course, they do, which is why Greg Sanchez doesn’t quite fit in the scene of a creation story. You bet, the storyline, in all its mutations, will sell like a real road show in the proper season.

My friend Radel says some sort of spirit permeates in the course of history. I remember the term “zeitgeist,” which means “spirit of the times.” Zeitgeist you can add into the Berkeley boys’ theory, and you’ll find a way to make sense of why, despite how some candidates strain their neck in the political plunge, still fall behind the race.

That, while others are simply buoyed by zeitgeist.