A protest at Parliament Square on March 2018 following the Cambridge Analytics and Facebook data scandal with Christopher Wylie and Shahmir Sanni | Photo via Wikimedia Commons
After all, lesser evil is evil in the same way. The greater harm may not be choosing between two evils but accepting that there is no other choice. That is the most insidious of all when people of power, wealth, and authority can make everybody else believe that there is no other alternative but the lesser evil—greater or lesser.
The subtle moves to make evil acceptable are to compare two evils and make the lesser one seem the better choice. That is how evil is maliciously deconstructed into parts and colors that blur the fact that evil is evil, period. This insidious process makes us grudgingly accept evil in some form by making it appear overwhelmingly difficult for any other option to be impractical or unavailable.
Ever-advancing technology and massive social media platforms combine to provide those with vast amounts of money to spend a treasure trove of information on the behavioral quirks of individuals and groups – and how to influence them towards specific advocacies or personalities.
Remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Cambridge Analytica was a data analysis firm that accessed the personal information of millions of Facebook users without their consent. I remember that Cambridge Analytica extracted 87 million users’ data through a third-party app.
Cambridge Analytica’s sales pitch was that it could provide its political clients (at that time, the Trump campaign) detailed psychological profiles of every American voter so that campaigns could tailor their pitches from person to person (consequently, from sector to sector). It now seems normal—except for one crucial factor. Cambridge Analytical used individuals’ personal data without their consent.
The scandal rocked America and caused Facebook to pay a $5 billion penalty and Cambridge Analytica to close the company. However, in the not-so-private rumor mills of political circles, Cambridge Analytica, with its illegally obtained data and efforts to use it to influence elections, did help Trump win the presidency.
Cambridge Analytica, the company, may be gone, but the people behind it, the technology, and the tactics are alive and much improved by now. Even in our 2016 elections, there was much talk in the inner circles about how Cambridge Analytica (it was still operating) was hired by a national candidate to guide his campaign. We can all be sure that Filipino people, in different age brackets and belonging to other sectors, are being profiled constantly and, ultimately, become targets of behavioral shifts.
It used to be that opposing forces, as well as businesses and politicians, would use research and advertising to target their audiences and move those audiences toward specific decisions. But the times, then, and those who offered these services would follow an ethical course. Cambridge Analytica opened a new door to this work, and traditional parameters were discarded.
“A dysfunctional society with its attendant degraded value system will necessarily produce a poverty of learning. We understand that to mean our students, but we forget that it has already made many Filipinos less capable of discerning between facts, truth, lies, and disinformation. Why else would all kinds of scams abound in our midst?”
With all we have witnessed in the last 20 years as communication research technology, including the present artificial intelligence phenomenon, I know that national political forces, like business conglomerates, are availing as much information as possible with expert analysis and recommendations. Way before the World Bank and PISA results of key educational statistics on learning poverty and most of the world leaving us behind in the academic preparation of our youth, top politicians and businessmen already knew about this alarming learning crisis.
If it suited them, meaning those who run our government and the billionaires who control our economies, they could have led the crusade to reverse the bleeding of societal intelligence. But the rich and powerful have their children study in our premier universities, many of them in the most coveted learning institutions abroad. That is one reason why they are less concerned about learning poverty and what it does to create an incapable and unproductive workforce. In other words, it is not happening to their children.
However, the history of the elite in the Philippines is not so generous except to themselves. This is evidenced by how Filipino billionaires can grow their wealth almost three times faster than our national growth—while the bottom 50% of the population still suffers food insecurity. And I am not even talking about our perennially hungry citizens. Yet, without any meaningful and dedicated program to arrest and reverse the learning poverty of 90%, some members of Congress can think of opening economic opportunities for foreign universities.
A dysfunctional society with its attendant degraded value system will necessarily produce a poverty of learning. We understand that to mean our students, but we forget that it has already made many Filipinos less capable of discerning between facts, truth, lies, and disinformation. Why else would all kinds of scams abound in our midst?
Worst of all, our dysfunctional society has no firmer understanding of good and evil, right and wrong, and true and false. Not only have they suddenly become stupid, but their lifelong scarcity of the essential elements required for development has stunted them badly enough that their academic incompetence has become visible and measurable.
The next step, where we are today, is the national acceptance of the lesser evil. Evil seems to become more acceptable by being called lesser to a greater evil. Compromising values and principles will be the lesser evil—better than your family going hungry or not being able to afford medication for the sick. Growing the ayuda by the hundreds of billions by incessant borrowing seems to be the lesser evil—and the most effective way of staying in power.
But wrong is wrong, and evil is evil. When the consequences come, they will not be measured from lesser standards, only from what we should have done but did not. Sadly, they will affect not only those who manipulate but also we who allow them.
