Insight: How to turn collective voyeurism into a political weapon

During the dying years of the Marcos regime in the Philippines, I was fortunate enough to live in Manila to witness the tidal waves of street protests, rallies and demonstrations that eventually brought down the regime. What stunned me was less about the way the Marcos regime was brought to its knee than about various tactics employed by the regime to prevent ordinary people from actively engaging themselves in the mounting protests and joining street marches.

One of these subtle tactics was the lure of raunchy and pornographic movies. Every time broad-based rallies and demonstrations were about to descend onto the streets, a strange phenomenon was taking place in tandem. It was the flooding of public cinemas with raunchy movies, mostly featuring local screen actors and actresses. How these porn movies deflected public interest in the street protests is a question of causality that no doubt was hard to pin down.

But I was fortunate enough to be part of a research team observing and taking notes of the strange coincidence between the two. It was not unusual that inside the cinemas, crowds of spectators were riveted by the streams of salacious acts on screen, while the streets outside were deafened with all kinds of political chants and marching banners. The coincidence was simply too evident to be brushed aside. My point is not whether the tactic was done deliberately, but rather that beneath the mysterious workings of a society there is a vast continent of libidinal forces that can readily be exploited for any public purpose.

In the history of ideas, these forces have been conceived as part of a so-called “passion”, for example, an intense, driving and overpowering emotion considered to be opposed to “reason”. In St. Augustine’s times, for instance, it was thought to involve the dark triad of the love of lucre, lust for power and sexual passion. The point is not that these passions are vile in themselves, but that the overpowering and uncontrollable working of these passions was thought to easily wreak havoc not only to the possibility of social order but also of public civility. What may come from the apparently most trivial origins of human impulses could easily result in massive public disorder.  

That is why the history of political ideas was full of desperate attempts to contain or even curb the triad of these passions — hence a well known story of various moral repression known in history. In most cases, however, the issue was less about repression than about finding ways to channel or turn these passions into beneficial energy for public order.

It was the intellectual virtuoso of Machiavelli that turned a love of power into the drive for patriotic glory, while the ingenuity of Montesquieu, then of Adam Smith, had transformed the love of lucre into national prosperity.

Nevertheless, it is quite telling to learn that in the history of political ideas, the so-called “sexual passion” remains perpetually elusive, stubbornly escaping the attempts of any great thinkers who sought to explain and exploit its mysteries for the same collective purposes. And before long, under the banner of libertarianism, “sexual passion” slipped into a domain that is so private, to be touched upon by only the most delicate political hands.

The irony is, the more it struggles to stay private and hidden, the more potent it is to be used as a deadly weapon for public exploits. That is what seemed to be at work during the dying moments of the Marcos regime.

It is of course overblown to say that the latest ruckus on porn tapes allegedly featuring three celebrities (Ariel, Luna Maya and Cut Tari) is a ploy to divert the attention of the populace from many public controversies of the day. But the link, if any, is also never direct. With or without a causal link, it is not hard to notice that so much energy in the media has been squandered for popular voyeurism.

As expected, some groups of moral bigots have rushed to exploit the ruckus in their attempt to revive an old-age agenda of censuring even the most private morality. For the captains of the evermore tasteless infotainment industry who don’t even know how to distinguish between liberty and licentiousness, it is windfall news to continue stuffing the insatiable libido of the public. But perhaps the biggest beneficiary is no other than the likes of Golkar politicians, who have been embroiled in the notorious “aspiration fund” controversy, and whose boss’s family businesses have been allegedly implicated in the colossus of tax frauds.

Or, perhaps the tentacles of colossal corruption within the National Police that soon disappeared from the daily headlines.

Sometimes I am so tempted to define society as a web of libidinal forces. But of course it appears so only because the climate of our public life has been deeply shaped by the tidal waves of libidinal indulgence, to the point that we never cease to be weary of consuming the libidinal sides of other people as a form of entertainment. It is called “collective voyeurism”.

Voyeurism will never die, for it is after all only a degenerate variant of human curiosity. Its denizens may claim to be guardians of liberty, while in fact what is meant by liberty is licentiousness. Its inhabitants may claim to be custodians of culture, while in fact they are cultural dopes who can’t even tell that what they do is simply an updated form of the opium of the people.

It is this cultural climate that has easily fallen prey to any political rascals whose exploits struggle to stay away from public attention. Having lost the trust of the public, they assume that the only way to overcome public protests and cynicism is by hiding themselves behind anything that easily saps the energy of ordinary people.

As the love of money has been institutionally channeled into the capitalist system, while the lust for power has been institutionally canalled into the race for public office, the life-giving drive called “sexual passion” remains loose for the taking.  

Even if the political rascals do not deliberately devise a collective voyeurism that we are witnessing these days, they would only rejoice in its continuation. And the merrier the voyeurism, the deadlier.              

             
 The writer is a lecturer of the postgraduate program at the Driyarkara School of Philosophy, Jakarta.