Religions, wars, deception, hatred and so forth have touched human existence ever since human beings went through what is called the Cognitive Revolution i.e. when humans gained the ability to imagine things and to lie about them and more importantly when they gained the ability to communicate. Some call it the gift of language. Alternatively, it could arguably be called the curse of language too.
Neil deGrasse Tyson says that if someday there ever would be an encounter between humans and some alien civilisation, from a distant planet, that is intelligent, the communication would only happen in math and science. Words would be useless in such a situation. Besides, words have brought troubles throughout human history in the form of wars, cultural misrepresentations, religious dogmas, racial and national hatreds and so forth. There is one crucial difference between words and numbers — only the latter doesn’t lie.
However, that truism is actually rather seriously not understood. Because here is the sucker: words are capable of speaking and showing the truth very well, but we don’t like words that are true. We can deal with 2 plus 2 equals 4 but we can’t deal with words calling us a thief even if we have spent a lifetime stealing things. No thief wants to be called a thief. You have heard that before. What you have never heard is 5 doesn’t like to be called 4. The mindset is that words are for storytelling and entertainment, let numbers take care of the truth.
The truth is that we actually like to get a good strong whiff of lies everyday otherwise we might feel empty. At the breakfast table, the disturbing news of someone’s brutal death on TV is quickly moved away from by changing the channel where we might come across some commercial ad using glamorous words and gestures to tell nothing but lies, which we find entertaining. Our Facebook posts are nothing but lies because true expressions will cause problems.
If you have seen the movie Liar Liar with Jim Carrey, you’d know that he attracts hatred and anger from people when he is incapable of telling lies just for one day. When words and truth combine, all kinds of unfortunate and explosive things happen. When a certain private channel tried to combine the two back in 2007, General Musharraf banned the channel. When Edward Snowden tried it, he not only had to run for his life but he continues to live in exile. Speaking of which, not too many changed how they communicate or make purchases but almost everyone wants to jump on the latest tracking device that Snowden warned about i-e the smartphone.
This week, words and truth were combined by Pakistani politician Shehbaz Gill. It didn’t end well for him. Recently, some journalists also tried to create an amalgamation of truth and words and they miserably failed too. Even the very popular leader Imran Khan is no longer in power because he dared playing the alchemist too and the result was a bad explosion.
Pakistan is but a weird nation. Words may not be able to move us but numbers aren’t a success story either. Forget India, forget PML-N or those who play the shenanigans in the shadows; the real and the most serious threat that Pakistan faces, and which is also a national security threat, is the threat of climate change. And numbers have been speaking to us about this threat. The noise about how serious the threat of climate change is comes to us in scientific and mathematical languages. However, it seems that the truth is the ultimate poison in Pakistan. Whatever it combines with, words or numbers, the result is a sorry state.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 11th, 2022.
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