How to kill a drug addict: a modest guide

Step 1: Establish a consensual value system to shape a receptive audience. A consensual value system is composed of a repertoire of values everyone is willing to accept. It aims to be universal as well as encompassing by differentiating a set of favourable values from those unpalatable to the audience. We desire a drug-free Philippines. Who doesn’t?

Values legitimise a political action (be it human rights intervention or extrajudicial killing) by leading their audience to believe in simple binaries which masquerade as the “voice of reason”: equality/inequality, freedom of choice/coercion, firmness/weakness, impartiality/bias, responsibility/irresponsibility, honesty/corruption. The list goes on.

Although advocates will claim the list is universal and timeless, it is subject to historical exigency. In other words, some pairs may drop out and stay dormant until they regain political usefulness. Sometimes, new pairs replace them. Examples are drug-free nation versus narcopolitics, change versus business as usual, authentic language versus political correctness.

How is a consensual value system constructed? Begin with a positive list of values; from there form the contrasts. Yes, it sounds arbitrary. Yet it’s also impartial. Let’s take Scrabble as an example. If I win the draw to start a game, the word I construct limits the possible tiles my opponent can play. For example, OXEN can elicit words which only contain any of these four letters. My opponent can play FOG but not FIG, or KELT, not KILT.

A consensual value system appears democratic (and objective) by distancing itself from the agent who constructs it. If someone wants to play Scrabble, she must consent to its rules. I call the shots without calling attention to myself. It’s not me, it’s the law. Better yet, it’s common sense.

Step 2:  Strengthen the us-them dichotomy. Because of their arbitrary nature, consensual values may lose hold among the audience. To prevent potential resistance, draw a clear demarcation between positive and negative sets. Avoid nuance and hedging. They are complicated and politically inefficient. Instead, be reductive. Life is already problem-ridden, and you don’t want people to overthink.

Speed, process, and user-friendly are a few of the prevalent conceptual metaphors which work in your favour. People prefer speedy Internet and multipurpose phones. 

If a political action is translatable into a slogan, it has passed the propaganda test and is ready for deployment. To accomplish it, use fallacies generously: straw-man arguments, intimidation and so on. 

Such fallacious arguments help to construct an image of a common foe. An enemy functions as linchpin sustaining a political act’s rationale. If you can’t find an enemy, make one. Examples proliferate: national autonomy versus a meddlesome UN, citizens fed up with crime versus drug addicts, the president versus the media.

The last example has powerful resonance among supporters of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. 

Step 3: Avoid referring to drug addicts as citizens. Cue words like “addicts”, “drug pushers,” and “criminals” reactivate the schema of horror and perversity competing with other cognitive frames like citizenship. To prevent confusion among the audience, displace the citizenship narrative with criminality. Consistently refer to their crimes to inoculate the audience against contesting narratives.

Once addicts and pushers are semantically divested of citizenship, they become pariahs at everyone’s disposal – police, cartel, vigilantes – yet belonging to no one. Virtually dispossessed of citizenship, their lives have contingent value, like a bug’s.

Blaming Duterte and his acolytes for extrajudicial killings neglects a key point. 

The semantic construction of a drug addict is a national project, involving you and me. It won’t stop until it turns our unremarkable neighbour into an obedient Adolf Eichmann.

 

Cyril Belvis is asst professor of literature at De La Salle Araneta University, Malabon City, the Philippines.