Turn fear into strength

Fear is a primitive human emotion that has aided us to persist, survive and advance. It alerts us to the existence of threats and dangerous events. Meanwhile enabling us to take necessary steps for our survival — thus the dichotomy of xenophobia and ethnocentrism are, more often than not, considered to be useful traits. Therefore all of those people who reduced their exposure to intimidations or resorted to threatening others augmented their chances of surviving over the ages. Due to successively passing out the “fearing” genes to the next generation, our minds have the innate capacity to divide the whole world into the benign “us” and the suspicious “others”. Of the whole mechanism of fear passed onto us is the perseverance of prejudice against strangers.

This is the same fear that forced 51.9 per cent of Britain’s voters to vote in favour of Brexit. Trump took advantage of the self-same fear in winning the elections and became the 45^th president of the United States of America. For that the fear of immigrants coming in and taking over the blue-collar jobs of the natives, the distress of jobs moving to China and Vietnam, the horror among white Americans of becoming the minority, the alarm of cultural flux and the loss of their heritage proved to be the decisive factors in turning of the tables on November 8.

It is true that every country with immigration has the loophole of xenophobia. Viewing the whole incident of Brexit, after seeing the chances that British parliament may consider to not go for the decision because it has wounded them economically, it is proved that in the race of emotion versus logic, emotions are likely to win. And in that, fear is one of the most powerful emotions. The Americans including the establishment might be thinking why the electoral college made Trump president-elect; the same man who promised to construct walls on the Mexican borders, banning the entry of the Muslims into their country and the insulation of the country form the influx of globalising forces. He promised that he would “Make America Great Again”. If this all happens on the expense of their own people, America would have to suffer with criticism from the rest of the world. However one thing is true that this would then make us self-reliant, self-sufficient and less dependent on America and ultimately our fear of “what will happen now” would help us discover alternative options. Hence, in the long run this may prove beneficial for us.

Even if the case turns out to be otherwise, we need to be clear that America has already taken their decision on what kind of relations they want to keep with other countries — including us. And Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have been much support to Pakistan either. Nuclear proliferation, stability in Afghanistan and the fight on terrorism would be three issues on which America would feel at odds with us.

Furthermore it is true that our concern is also for more than three million Pakistanis who are residing in America at the moment and the kind of treatment they will receive in the coming months. It would be a blessing in disguise in a way that people of Pakistan will now place heavier focus on our internal affairs, the stock exchange and investing in the property and construction of our own country. We Pakistanis need to be internally coherent, stable and strengthened. We are dependent on others for so many reasons, which is the main reason that we are afraid of someone like Trump becoming another country’s president.

It should also be noted that Trump’s first speech after becoming the president was different from what he had been saying in his election campaigns. The coming days will provide more insight on Trump’s stance towards our country.

Fear is an involuntary surviving mechanism but when it is overextended, it could be damaging. Britain’s fear got them into trouble. America’s fear might also get them into turmoil. Pakistan is also experiencing the fear of “What will happen now”. We need to use the emotion to our advantage, motivating us to strengthen our policies, working on foreign relations, prioritising internal stabilisation, eventually dispelling that fear and imbuing strength forthwith.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 20^th, 2016.

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