Revolution? No thanks

For over three quarters of a century, Pakistanis have pinned their hopes on the promise of a dignified life. They have placed those hopes in successive governments and in saviours of every stripe - whether emerging from the opposition or from the general public - all of whom have won the support of a desperate and repeatedly betrayed populace. Despite repeated betrayals of hope, people continued to wonder whether the successive regimes will finally deliver a dignified life and a viable future. Unsurprisingly, none did. Instead, each new leader, each self-proclaimed saviour, and each fresh promise only deepened the public's misery.

Notwithstanding repeated betrayals, hope survives - not because it has escaped being repeatedly stabbed in the back, but because, for a complicit population, hope rather than political agency remains the only thing to which it can attach its future. In doing so, people fail to recognise what Nietzsche suggested: hope is often the worst evil, an opiate that prolongs suffering. Today, three messianic hopes dominate public expectations: revolution, reform and collapse.

Why don't people get disillusioned by hope? Because they share in the culpability. Messianic hope not only absolves people of responsibility for their own lives but also unfairly serves them to the detriment of others. That is, we love every hope, every leader who costs society so that he and we benefit. Our hopes, too, are hypocritical. For a fraction of that benefit, we tend to become the courtiers of leaders, who sit atop the courtship hierarchy of brute power. Most among us, for vested interests, coerce our fellows so much that we too are upgraded to the positions of those we once prostrated ourselves to. This reveals two realities. One, the herd of saviours in every locality of the country ignites betrayed hopes of revolution in people's lives. Two, they flow from and are extensions of the brute masters. The saviours are so named, for they safeguard the system. Don't they?

By igniting hope for revolution, they kill the people's instinct for the same. And that is not an accident. Their rise is manufactured and self-styled and largely funded by the people's agonies. All saviours, revolutionaries and intellectuals prostrate themselves to power for the positions and posts and posit brute power as a saviour. We have Socrates and Mandela as canonised enablers of brute power. Aristotle as a preacher of barbarity. Paid promoters, like Prometheus and Rousseau, are dictating media's narratives against people. We have press clubs, media houses, labour and workers' groups, feminists, civil society and social activists, political and religious groups, nationalist groups, NGOs, think tanks and scholars, most co-opted by the dominant structures controlling people under the pretext of empathising with them. They voice people's pain to bargain a proverbial deal with the devil and secure their future and this system's future. A few with genuine empathy find themselves in and consumed by chains.

Reform remains second great illusion. Very few know that the brute system and its extensions operate through people's miseries. And a few know that reforms would result in the death of the brute system and its palaces. Nevertheless, it still reforms. But to subjugate the people – and the country.

The last best hope of the land remains the collapse of the system. A system, however powerful and brute, suffers inherent limitations in that its strength and confidence allure it to exploit people and indulge in follies unless it runs out of the same or gets exposed. The follies accumulated over the decades strip it of public support and confidence and instill dread in it for the potential retributions of all its barbarity. In our case, however, when the system seems to collapse, a brute successor takes over. More brute and ruthless, waiting, ready, in the wings. Yet, this remains the default hope today.

What's the way out, you might wonder? The way out rarely lies in reforms and revolutions - the two improbabilities under current conditions. Salvation therefore lies in rejecting added strength to the system by identifying traditional saviours and revolutionaries and firmly saying no to their rants and revolutionary rhetorics.