The rise of the hated

The truism that you cannot hate someone without knowing them is actually true. If I may shuffle the words a little, I can create a truer truism — you cannot know someone without hating them. A large chunk of the famous people nowadays are the ones that are hated by the people at the same time. Lo and behold, their fame cannot be denied. In fact, the more they are hated, the more we see a rise in their fame. And it would devastate me if my readers confused the word fame with popularity.

Aamir Liaquat, for example, has become a laughingstock, yet he is famous. The Powry Girl became instantly famous on social media due to an abhorrent act of indulging in a pretentious accent. Almost everyone on the same social media despises her. The list of the famous and the despised is long. It includes politicians, anchor persons, morning show hosts, and so forth. I cannot name all the names here but you know the people you dislike and they are very much there on the TV and social media, manifesting their presence, defying the hatred people have for them. Hatred and fame are mutually exclusive.

Someone once commented that Kim Kardashian is famous because she is famous. It was a precise and beautiful comment on the reality of not only Kim Kardashian but also on the psyche of the masses in general. Because the reality is that she has no claim to fame other than the vulgarity attached to her persona and her physique. Yet, the people pay attention to her. I can safely bet that the same people despise her for what she represents and what her stardom is all about. She knows it and she doesn’t care. Her income and lifestyle come from that fame, which comes from evoking those negative emotions.

Perhaps that is what fame has become at every level. In my university days, nobody knew the name or the face of the student who went to the university masjid to say prayers regularly and did his assignments on time. Everybody, however, knew the name of the student who had managed to have a girlfriend on campus. And everybody hated him too.

A friend of mine once suggested that on Twitter I should follow the people I disagreed with. When I asked why, he said that by reading the tweets of the people I disagreed with, I would get angry and in that mental state I would tweet a lot and generate a following from those who disagreed with me. I vehemently disagreed with him at the time. But in retrospect, I know he was right. We now know that Facebook and Instagram design their algorithm where people see things on their feed that create negative emotions and arouse them to fight. Facebook’s research has found that that is when people engage the most. Facing a decline in subscribers and usage from the existing subscribers, Facebook wants people to fight so that they can stay on the social media platform. Hatred rather than love, misinformation rather than information achieve hits and likes. Speaking of which, that is what this is all about. The word rating for channels is becoming obsolete. We are making a transition toward dancing at the commands of the algorithm.

When I was a kid, my father, like almost every Pakistani father, always advised me that I should become a doctor when I grow up. And then he would add that I should focus on becoming a surgeon. When I’d ask why, he’d say: “Well, because you will have the prayers of the people when you enter the operation theater to help save someone’s life.” He’d say that not only would I have a lot of money but also a lot of fame, love and respect. If I could go back in time, I’d tell my father that in the future, money would buy love but love wouldn’t make money. Hatred would.