Does the messenger really matter?
Recently, I was able to spend a couple of hours with a colleague to discuss some insights regarding the goings-on in our organization. (Or, you can just say it was office gossip.) One of the blind items we chatted about was how one Senior Colleague, who was challenging some administrative procedures and decisions, was continually being rebuffed, if not ignored, by the counterparty administrators. Senior Colleague was known to be very big on integrity, transparency, and fairness, albeit being perceived at the same time as being bossy, pushy, insensitive, and even a tad self-serving. The administrators he was locking horns with have become tired of his latter set of qualities, so much so that they have begun ignoring the merits of his former set of qualities and corresponding advocacies.
In short, he had become a Cassandra: a prophet whom no one believes in. The difference is that while Cassandra was punished with incredibility for spurning a god, Senior Colleague was ignored as a result of people’s unflattering perception of him.
This brought my fellow gossiper and me to a more serious question: Does the messenger really matter? If the message is true, good, and righteous, shouldn’t it be accepted (or rejected) on its own merits regardless of who delivers it?
In my humble opinion, born out of my experience in various social milieus, I have come to realize that the messenger does matter. And it does because we are human, and our knowledge is not immediate nor perfect.
All knowledge comes to us through our five senses. Even the abstract concepts of math and logic, for example, and such virtues as love and justice, can be known and understood only through sensible signs and symbols — numbers, words, actions, etc. As we experience the world around us and the many abstract ideas such as those already mentioned, we tend to evaluate whether such experience — or knowledge as experienced — is pleasurable or not. A child who perceives his math teacher as a terror will forever have a bad relationship with the subject. However, one who has had a positive and inspiring math teacher will learn to love math, and might even consider a career that uses math!
This evaluation of experience is, to put it a tad simplistically, what perception consists of. Perception is a very powerful mechanism in our human constitution. We need it to survive, and eventually thrive. Through perception, we can gauge whether certain environments are safe or dangerous. Through perception, we can motivate ourselves to avoid pain, and instead seek comfort and pleasure. Through perception, we can begin building relationships with other persons. Even if we haven’t even begun any communication or interaction, we already have a positive feeling about certain persons, places, or things, simply by sheer evaluation of the available sensory data.
Then, it becomes a little bit more complex for sentient beings like us. Besides present sensory data per se, past sensory data, impressions, and information, especially those imprinted by powerful emotions (such as trauma, grief, or love), inform our current interaction with a person — and his or her message!
If that accumulated perception, if you will, proves to be positive, then the person’s message will be given its airtime, its day in court. People will listen, often favorably, to the message being delivered. It is difficult to criticize the message of angels.
In contrast, if that perception proves to be negative, with people perceiving the messenger as having an accrual of undesired qualities, the message will die on the messenger’s lips, or at best, reach deaf ears. No one listens to lambs in wolves’ clothing.
So, what can be done when the message is valuable, true, good, righteous, and meritorious?
Let the undesired messenger realize that someone else must take the soapbox and trumpet the truth. It would require quite an amount of humility and detachment to do so, but it must be done. Otherwise, to insist on being the messenger is simply stubbornness (if not arrogance), and the message becomes a noisy gong or a clashing cymbal.
Yes, I have come to believe the messenger matters, and we must choose our spokespersons well if we want our message to come across — whether that be Gospel truth, corporate visions, or business policy.
Denver Bingski Daradar is an assistant professorial lecturer and doctoral candidate of the Ramon V. Del Rosario College of Business of De La Salle University.
