Sick society brings forth sick people

The whole country is in the grip of serious diseases

The writer is a senior analyst based in Hyderabad. He can be reached at aftabahmedkhanzada@gmail.com

Friedrich Nietzsche has said: “The final reward of death, to die no more.” How will good and healthy people be born in our society and why innocent people are rapidly disappearing into the darkness of death? These are the fundamental questions that we are all facing today, at a time when our society has become old, weak and sick. It has become stinky and covered in complete filth. Now this society can only produce sick patients — and not healthy and good people. Such a society has only given birth to sick people over the last 76 years. These sick people have infected the surroundings with various diseases — the diseases that doctors, scientists, sociologists, intellectuals, philosophers and psychologists do not even have a cure for. It’s because the sick can be treated by healthy people, while the sick can never be treated by the sick.

Currently, the whole country is in the grip of serious diseases. Swarms of sick people are roaming everywhere and the few healthy people that are left are hiding themselves from these hordes. There can be no other nation more pitiful than Pakistanis. They are dying by their own hands; they are dying by their sick fellows; they are dying due to the evil intentions of their rulers; they are dying due to poverty, inflation, unemployment and ignorance; they are dying in the name of religion; and they are dying from greed, corruption and loot and plunder.

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In one of his poems, Hermann Hesse writes: “Abel lies dead in the grass, Brother Cain has escaped. A bird comes, dips its beak into the blood, starts up, flies away. The bird flies all over the world, his flight is shy, his voice shrill, he complains endlessly: About beautiful Abel and his agony, about the dark Cain and his soul trouble, about his own younger days. Soon Cain shoots his arrow into his heart, Soon there will be strife and war and death, Carry to all huts and cities, Will create enemies and slay them, will desperately hate her and himself, will she and herself in all alleys persecute and torment until the next world night, until Cain finally killed himself. The bird flies, out of its bloody beak screams death wails over the whole world. Cain hears him, dead Abel hears him and thousands of people under the heavens hear him. But ten thousand and more do not hear him, They don’t want to know anything about Abel’s death, nothing about Cain and his heartache, none of the blood that breaks from so many wounds nothing about the war that happened yesterday and which they now read about in novels. For all of you, the full and happy, the strong and the brutal is not there. Neither Cain nor Abel, neither death nor sorrow and they praise the war as a great time. And when the wailing bird flies by, then they call him a naysayer and a pessimist, feel strong and undefeated and throw stones at the bird, until he falls silent and disappears, or make music so that you can no longer hear it, because his sad voice bothers her. The bird with his little drops of blood on the beak fly from place to place, his complaint about Abel goes on and on.”

We are all Able. The only difference is that Able was killed by Cain at once, while we are being killed slowly and gradually by our own Cains. Therefore, our pain and torture are greater than Abel’s.

Voltaire has written, “Now he knows what is the reality of the human being that insects are sitting on loose soil and eating each other.” While Charles Bukowski has said, “Most people are dead long before they are buried, that’s why funerals are so sad. Most people quit too easy, they accept the short end, and they compete for small prizes and become small. I don’t expect everybody to be a genius but I never guessed that so many would rush to idiocy with such aplomb.”

Published in The Express Tribune, September 27th, 2023.

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