As a country, we are teetering on the precipice of economic, political, and social disaster. And yet, the military-industrial complex continues to thrive, elite capture remains elusive, and the juggernaut of divisive politics continues to cause fissures in our cultural zeitgeist. A colossal amount of black money — Pakistan’s illegitimate parallel economy — remains unseen, unreported and untaxed. Whether we are a police officer or a judge, a petty officer or a general, a building contractor or a factory owner, we continue to lie, cheat and defraud others and our country on our way to achieving our goals. Our economy and our morality both are on the cusp of default. As a society, we cannot stoop lower.
If there is one trait that defines political leadership like none other, it is narcissism. In our frenzied political landscape, knocking at the door of the Supreme Court has become an obsessive-compulsive ritual. If our politicians don’t get what they want, they are quick to approach the highest bench. Regardless of which party they belong to, if the judges rule in their favour, they are hailed as honest and impartial; if the judgements go against them, the same judges are deemed as partial and biased.
On July 22, a letter was waved once again, this time in the chamber of the Punjab Assembly. This time, it was the Hamza-Elahi face-off. We were back to watching television news shows where uncouth tirades were interrupted by even more uncouth tirades hurled by so-called political pundits. But here is the gist of the problem: legal discussions on the constitutionality of a matter are enlightening, they’re a thing of beauty; but when polluted by partisanship, these same discussions lose their intellectual value.
Why are politicians so obsessed with hanging on to power? The answer lies in the question itself: power. And this brings me to the power paradox which simply means that we act with empathy and modesty at first but quickly turn to coercion, manipulation and exploitation as soon as we acquire power. Whether we are corporate executives or CEOs, monarchs or political leaders, or even patriarchs in a patriarchal society, the power paradox applies to all of us. Inherent within us is a proclivity for pathological addiction to power, vanity and self-importance.
Is greed a precursor to the power paradox? Is greed the driving force for success? Gordon Grekko, a character played by Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street, puts it bluntly when he says, “the point is ladies and gentlemen that greed is, for lack of a better word, good.” The fact remains that we are rats in a rat race. Greed feeds our egos. Greed also divides us between the haves and the have-nots, between the exploiters and the exploited. Karl Marx was prophetic about our fate under capitalism: “Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, human as well as natural, of its own values.”
Out of hope or despair, we follow political leaders only to be ushered to the innermost circle of hell. On the one hand, we have political clans that remind us of the Sicilian mafia, the Cosa Nostra. On the other hand, we have a self-aggrandising braggart who shares a passing resemblance with Mussolini. We gather in thousands and listen to them deliver inspiring speeches just like Hitler did about a hundred years ago or Donald Trump more recently. They promise to save our country, to restore our lost glory, our greatness and excellence, while they make secret deals behind closed doors in the dead of the night.
In Botan Doro, a chilling ghost story, a handsome Japanese samurai falls in love with a beautiful girl carrying a lantern who visits his town every night but disappears before dawn. Smitten with her charm, he chases her down. They begin to spend the nights together. One early morning, the samurai’s nosy neighbour sneaks into his house and finds him dead in his room with his body locked in a tight embrace with a skeleton. The woman was nothing more than a ghost, a seductress.
I wonder if we are all chasing a ghost.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 28th, 2022.
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