Dystopia

‘What you don’t know’ legend goes ‘can’t hurt you’. Safe to say, logic and rationale will never hurt us. On any given day in our beloved country, emotional and religious sentiment prevails over everything. And rightly so. Masses of a theocracy manifest their ideology through basing their arguments upon divine scripture.

Now couple this view with hordes of uneducated masses who have been conditioned to follow what they’ve been taught by zealots and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. In a world that is increasingly digitising every second, we are being left behind at a blistering pace due to the acts of those in power. But how do these people come into power? They come into power by manipulating such illiterate masses who have been deliberately kept like this in order to facilitate the ruling regime.

How do you curb ignorance and illiteracy and, in specific, how do you curb religious extremism? In a theocracy, the answer seems to be blowing in the wind and I’ll get to that in a second. Nonetheless, it is evident that the rulers of the land feed us lies every day. They manipulate the poor everyday in order to continue remaining in power and to continue enjoying the lavish lifestyles which they haven’t earned.

The current culture is of cover-ups, the epitome of fake it till you make it. Ranging from the lowest to the most elite, everyone seems to be looking busy but they’re doing nothing. Looking at the haste of many on the roads and in their lives, everyone’s running. They’re running but they aren’t getting anywhere. Ever wondered why? Because we’re like horses with blinkers, we’ve been taught by the failed system to keep running without any end in sight. It’s how the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. Something as simple as an unpaid internship, we’ve all been there, haven’t we?

The open and ugly secret is: we aren’t progressing neither as individuals nor as a society. As products of violent conditioning at the hands of crestfallen state actors, we thrive, we thrive as mindless creatures. Where useless thoughts of peace are met with rage, how do we expect things to get better? All those who dreamt about peace were shot dead. Be it John Lennon, Martin Luther King or Gandhi. Peace sells, it can’t be given for free. In a regime which operates on exploiting the poor and feeding the rich, can you even dream of progress?

I have said this in various pieces of mine and I will say it again. The system has failed. It has failed to achieve what it was supposed to achieve. It has willfully kept the mass population illiterate and it will continue to do so in order to retain the hierarchy and power. We talk about constitutional rights everyday, the rhetoric has been so widely used that it feels worn-out. But assuming we still operate under laws, what happened to the fundamental right to education? The state demands taxes, heightened taxes but where does the money go? Does it go to children of the elite who are studying abroad so they can continue exploiting our next generation?

Pakistan is yearning for a sound educational system. No progress can be made as a society if the masses are not educated. The ‘esteemed’ parliament can pass all the laws it wants, it can create as many green lines as it wants but the government has to realise that nothing will sustain a nation like an educated workforce.

Pakistan has not produced intellectuals, scientists, mathematicians in a depressingly long time. The minds this country possesses are more than capable of winning Nobel prizes if given the proper educational infrastructure. But why would they be educated? The day mass population receives quality education is the day the entire present structure crumbles for the good. Oh how we wish upon an anarchy of informed, educated elites. The only anarchy we need at this stage.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 29^th, 2022.

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