Whether it’s your traditional newspaper or social media, the content nowadays is riddled with Pakistan’s political and economic problems. The country is indeed in a state of freefall. We are facing a dead-end job market, terribly low ease of business, and insanely high cost of electricity; yet nobody seems to have any solid plan for the country’s recovery.
But this is all that you would already know. My aim in this article is not to highlight how bad things are economically or politically, not to regurgitate what has already been discussed ad nauseam, but to take your attention to the very thing that enabled this in the first place: our culture.
Pakistani culture seems harmless on the surface. It is not self-evident how the ways of the domestic public could lead to problems on a bigger level of economics and politics. But here, I unpack my opinion that there is a trend of risk-aversion, resistance to social progress, and love of passivity and stability in the public which worsens our more concrete problems.
Let us start with the issue of innovation. The Pakistani public remains deeply without a sense of innovation, and that in turn, I believe, is due to their aversion to risk-taking. What I have observed in the masses, whether it be in their family lives or their workplaces, is that they have a “default reaction” of fear to most new or unknown things. Can this be proved statistically or with some survey? Not really. But this is the lived experience of almost everyone. Not having innovation means being stuck in the olden ways of living, and as the world around you moves forward, you are often left in the dark.
This lack of innovation is not limited to economic progress; it is also closely tied to social progress. For example, consider the backlash from the public at events such as the “Aurat March.” One can see it is clearly very moralistic. However, I doubt that morality is the core issue here. Moral problems exist throughout Pakistan, in all spheres of life but they do not get the same backlash, even when people openly recognize them.
What is disguised in the form of morals is actually a fear of the new and unknown. This can also be proven by the way the word “liberal” is used in a derogatory manner. People use it to label those who speak of any kind of social or cultural reform. They remain reluctant when it comes to actual progress, yet are sharp in criticizing others who try to fix things.
This glorifies passivity and denigrates those who are active. Anyone familiar with the work of Nietzsche would sense a kind of “slave morality” here, which is his term for the way of life that lacks personal power. The “slave” has a resentment for the strong, and then uses a deliberately constructed moral code to criticize those who display real ambition. I could not think of a better concept to apply to our situation here.
Moving forward, let us see another problem associated with this kind of fear–it is the love of safety and security. This is a peculiar idea because the modern, or shall I say postmodern world, is specifically very unstable and fluid. This puts us at odds with how the rest of the world functions.
What are some symptoms that prove this mindset? Well, there are plenty. Our focus is on gathering assets in the form of real estate and cars; judging other individuals based on such assets rather than any personal development. Even education is being taken only as an end goal of making money rather than human development. The list goes on.
The same mentality is reflected in business practices. Profit-making seems to be the sole driver for the existence of most businesses, with little to no focus on sustainability, eco-friendliness, or responsible citizenship in general. All those socially responsible elements which are part and parcel of businesses internationally, are mostly absent from our setups.
Now we need some clarification here, as this is not an exclusively Pakistani problem. I would agree that such a mindset is dominant in many other places of the world as well, including developed countries. But what separates us from them is the fact that counter-forces exist in those areas. Those counter-forces and sub-cultures balance out these issues or give the public an outlet to make things right. But here, they are simply not enough. When some do rise, they are stifled or demoralized, as we already discussed earlier.
In a nutshell, our obsession with making financial and social stability our ultimate goal is precisely the same thing that, paradoxically, has hindered us from getting any true comfort or stability.
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