In Pakistan, a paradoxical pursuit is actively engineered within the corridors of power: the cultivation of public ignorance. This is not a passive state but a deliberate strategy to shape consent, distort realities, and sustain systems that prioritize the interests of a few over the welfare of the many.
The Architecture of Engineered Consent
The core mechanism of control involves glossing over truth and justifying curbs on dissent. Throughout history, those in power have framed exclusive practices to perpetuate historical lies. They glorify national hardships faced by the people while simultaneously restricting critical thinking and fundamental rights. This engineered ignorance is designed to solidify the rule of particular groups, entrenched ideologies, and brute operational realities.
This raises critical questions about the nature of Pakistan's democratic promises. What purpose do slogans like "people as the fountainhead of power" truly serve when stakeholders actively work against public interest and truth? The spectacle of claimed public support—through social media campaigns, taxpayer-funded prime-time commercials, and statements by key functionaries—often reveals a phantom backing, orchestrated to navigate testing times.
Dynastic Despots and Unaccountable Institutions
The analysis points to two primary forces: dynastic despots, both institutional and individual. Each claims overwhelming public support, often to the detriment of the other and always at the expense of the common citizen. Since most of Pakistan's power structures have rarely been truly mandated for the people's ultimate welfare, they show little concern for the subjects they purport to serve.
Why would unanswerable individuals, dynasties, and institutions serve the people at their own detriment? Their sustenance is funded by the people's agonies, blood, sweat, and labour, yet their allegiance lies elsewhere. The statesmanship, therefore, aligns with the wishes of stratocrats, clergy, judges, courtier media persons, pirs, bureaucracy, and feudal leaders. Their collective role is to justify the existing order, divide the populace, distract attention, and persecute dissent—all under the guise of service.
The Three-Fold Servitude of the People
The public is made to serve power in three fundamental ways. First, the mere existence of a subjugated populace helps justify authoritarian practices under the label of 'democracy'. Second, the people provide a pretence of support, offering a lifeline of legitimacy through AstroTurf movements during crises. Third, and most crucially, the disadvantaged plight of the masses directly funds and sustains the power and prestige of the ruling structure.
Institutions like the bureaucracy, often misnamed "public servants," frequently enact policies more enslaving than emancipating. Similarly, the paid edicts of clergy, the judgments of superior courts, and the programmed narratives of media personalities largely serve their patrons' rule by perpetuating public ignorance.
The result is a population left to struggle in poverty, systematic persecution, and hopelessness. However, a significant shift is occurring. The people's awakening has begun to decode this putrid and tyrannical system—one that places itself above the constitution and law and is devoid of empathy, yet is encrypted as democracy and service.
This decoding renders the brute system increasingly unsustainable. It now faces only two possible futures: an eventual collapse under the weight of its own contradictions or a genuine, transformative democratization that places the people's welfare at its heart. The choice will define Pakistan's trajectory.
