Pseudoracy: From sublime to ridiculous
Pseudocracy being the rule of falsehood is fast spreading its roots and corrupting not only our polity but also our institutions, society and nation as a whole.
Pakistan has had a tumultuous relationship with effective and successful democratic governance right from inception.
If there were to be another term for politics in Pakistan it would undoubtedly be “pseudocracy”-rule of an autocrat in the name of democracy.
Will Pakistani politics ever get free from Pseudocracy of exploitive forces? Will our society ever be able to live its life in liberty and happiness without the lurking shadows of intrigues, ambiguities and duplicities?
The majority of modern liberal democracies have become increasingly oligarchic, suffering from a form of structural political decay first conceptualized by ancient philosophers.
Pakistan is no exception. The problem cannot be blamed only on the actions of shrewd, conspiring, conniving, dishonest and corrupt politicians but is built into the very fabric of our representative system which promotes systemic corruption and falsehood.
This tendency towards decay of the political culture in Pakistan is nurtured by the presence of large uneducated electorate, huge youth bulge aimlessly wondering the streets without direction and hope for a better and constructive future, living and surviving on the edge of poverty, ethnic and religious tensions and parochial differences threatening the delicately and carefully woven fabric of society, institutions vying for and competing for greater influence irrespective of the constitutional limitations and sphere of activity and responsibility, where it is nearly impossible to break the shackles of elite capture dictating all aspects of state at the cost of the disempowered teeming millions – the common man and unfortunately where the very ills that plague governance and society as a whole, have been normalized and generally accepted norms.
All this has only enabled but emboldened the politicians and other contenders of state and political power to fully indulge in and promote pseudocracy.
One of the most prominent features of the political and governance culture in Pakistan is the tendency and attraction for too much prattle.
Everyone knows this and yet each one of us contributes his share.As we tend to take the situation for granted, the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern.
We therefore, lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what prattle and nonsense means to us and how it affects our politics and governance and ultimately directly the people.
Most of us are rather confident of our ability to recognize untruth, falsehood, fabrication and deceit and yet repeatedly we are taken in by it.
Politicians hide behind prattle and misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars by deliberately making false claims about what is true, but rather nattering by deliberate misinterpretation of truth or by complete disregard of the actual facts bordering sheer nonsense.
What matters to them is their convoluted and repeated rendering of reality almost forcing people to believe that there may be some element of the truth in a particular negative narrative.
Contention, argument, and power have always been the tradition in Pakistani political talk. But in recent years we have seen the language of argument using particular words with specific, sometimes shifting, meanings.
To know what they are and what they meant over time is critical to safeguarding the truth and stopping Democracy’s rapid descent into pseudocracy.
It is true that politicians more often than not, use an understood meaning of a word, phrase or concept to enhance their actions.
We have increasingly witnessed that politicians and other influential segments of society seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true.
They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant.
The more an “ordinary” citizen feels empowered by politically rhetorical appeals and emotionally charged populist jargons, the easier it is for a politician’s to manoeuvre securing the person’s vote, extracting donations, and perhaps moving the person to abandon the couch and canvas the elections.
Most citizens have little idea what the pseudocracy is up to.In recent times we have seen the rise and mainstreaming of pseudocracy not only in Pakistan but also in Europe and the U.S.
A to the detriment of the people. Most politicians are now depending on for the success of their narrative on: a) the elimination and/or suppression of facts indefinitely in political debates, b) extending confidence-games indefinitely, c) multiplying roles and erasing boundaries in professional polity, d) campaigning permanently; or, governing-as-campaigning, e) making peripheral issues central, f) refusing to enter into accountable discourse and, g) making points of view or differences of opinion personal and extreme.
Deliberate falsification of facts, personalized acrimony coupled with mediocrity, scant wisdom, corruption and absence of performance accountability, are some of the key reasons for the quagmire we are stuck in.
All institutions that shape our national destiny are collectively responsible for the repeated self-created crises.
Democracy may be a word familiar to most, but it is a concept still misunderstood and misused at a time when dictators, single-party regimes, and military coup leaders alike assert popular support by claiming the mantle of democracy.
Yet the power of the democratic idea has prevailed through a long and turbulent history, and democratic government, despite continuing challenges, continues to evolve and flourish throughout the world.
Democracy is the institutionalization of freedom. In the end, people living in a democratic society must serve as the ultimate guardians of their own freedom and must forge their own path toward the ideal.
What is required is a cultural shift in the nation to allow for a democratic regime to take roots and flourish.
Democracy is more than just a set of specific government institutions; it rests upon a well-understood group of values, attitudes, practices and fundamental principles — all of which may take different forms and expressions among cultures and societies around the world.
There is however unanimity on the fact that democratic societies are committed to the values of tolerance, cooperation, and compromise.
An educated citizenry is the best guarantee for a thriving democracy. Transparent functioning institutions of law, security and free media reduce the probability that the system is captured by the “elites” or degenerates into pseudocracy.
This increasingly acceptable trend should ring alarm bells as it is threatening to push Pakistan towards chaos and fragmentation.
Unless the nation takes an urgent and conscious decision not to fall victim to negative and damaging influence of selfish and self-centred leaders, it may become too late to save our society from falling in the abyss of divisions, hatred, under development and pseudocracy.
It is therefore, time for deep introspection to understand the political, governance, economic and social mistakes made in the last 75 years of independence by the successive leaders, bureaucracy and other stake holders that has created a sense of deprivation and betrayal in the masses.
—The writer is former Ambassador, based in Islamabad.
