Inside the Red Zone: Truth about lies

On the truth spectrum, where does the chairman PTI lie? A loaded question this is not. At least not entirely. What it is though is a rhetorical concern about what he says, what he means and what it ends up being in actuality. If you think the biggest problem with Pakistani politics today is its toxicity, wait till you hear the real bad news.

At this time of great polarization and zero-sum politicking, our deeply divided electorate has been force-fed a diet of the ‘here-and-now’ conflict. The national discourse is today framed around the date for national elections, provincial dissolutions and who is meeting whom, when, where to deliberate on these quasi-substantive issues. The sum total of our political universe appears to begin now and end in August. Or September. Or October. Beyond that, who knows?

But here’s what we do know. We know that President Arif Alvi is struggling to produce outcomes from his shuttle diplomacy; that Chairman Imran Khan is struggling to generate clarity from his political gymnastics; and Chief Minister Pervaiz Elahi is struggling – mightily so – to convince his coalition leader to desist from diving into a dissolution disaster. On any given day, this triple whammy of individual and collective struggles would be sufficient to occupy the shortening attention spans of a digitally-delusioned electorate, but for what actually lies beneath this superficial crisis.

What does lie beneath then? For this, let us borrow two paragraphs from a writer at Esquire magazine who was of course writing for a different audience but a similar context:

“So, if you don’t know what’s true, you can say whatever you want and it’s not a lie.”

Or,

“Truth is…whatever you can get enough people to believe. The contours of reality can be bent to your needs and desires.”

It is this mishmash of truth and lies, and truth about lies that is now re-arranging the social and cultural norms of our electorate as it busies itself in embracing the zero-sum-ness of power games. Gone is the sacredness of truth and vileness of falsehood. Strange this, given the deep-rootedness of such values in our social and cultural landscape. Or were we just fooling ourselves? And now that the mask is finally off, we recoil in horror at the image in the mirror?

If this be so, credit must go where credit is due. Imran Khan has successfully demolished the walls of facts with the sledgehammer of fiction – and he has done so at a scale that can take your breath away. Unmoored from the burdens of verification, an overwhelming majority of his supporters find solace in the warm glow of fictionalized stories that aim to validate their closely-held beliefs. My truth, they say, is better than your truth because my truth makes me feel better about myself than your truth ever can. So each to our own truths, and may the universe be at peace.

Except, that it is not.

How can it be when millions of Pakistanis find themselves untethered from the binds of verifiable reality? When they are willingly depriving themselves of the ability to sift fact from fiction, and truth from lies? When they are allowing themselves to be led up a garden path through hollow verbosity wrapped in illusions of grandeur? We are sleepwalking into a manufactured and choreographed disaster whose toxic effects will far outlast this election. Or the next one. Or the one after that.

Look around you. Almost every single aspect of the PTI chairman’s narrative has come undone under the powerful glare of truth. From the fantasy of the so-called US conspiracy for ‘regime change’ to the PTI-coordinated and synchronised Daily Mail wild accusations against Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, to the malicious charges against Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah to the inflammable finger-pointing at the civil and military leadership after journalist Arshad Sharif’s tragic murder – everything he claimed as ordained truth has turned to dust.

But here’s the real red flag: to the peddler, all these untruths were known to be untruths before he peddled them, but the peddler peddled them as truths all the same in the belief that these untruths will survive the heat of truths and provide dividends far outweighing the cost of knowingly peddling untruths to a truth-challenged support base.

Truth be told, that is.

White lies, bold-faced lies, compulsive lies or pathological lies – they all extract a cost. More so when they are fired like salvos in a low-trust society. But the cost becomes truly catastrophic when such lies are weaponized to construct a self-serving meta-narrative by a trigger-happy self-acclaimed populist. The scars of this cost are evident in the damage done to personal reputations, institutional dignity and inter-state relations.

Why would the peddler peddle such falsity while in full knowledge of its destructive impact on our society? One, because he gains. Two, because he can.

He can because his politics finds traction in an era when emotions are overtaking fact as the determinant of political communication. Lies trigger emotions; bigger lies trigger an avalanche of them. The cascade that ensues binds the peddler of the lie, and the receiver of it, in a strangely intoxicating embrace that is devoid of reason but drenched in fervour.

This fervour is fanned further by another convenience that you can witness among the PTI support base. Their burden of carrying the weight of facts and truth – whatever burden there is left nowadays – is lightened by the ability of the party leadership to make untruths like the US conspiracy fairy tale resonate louder through multiple platforms available in this digital age of information overload.

The process unfolds like this.

Step one: Germinate an untruth from the seed of an event.

Step two: Dress it up with a fanciful theory and garnish it with a selective choice of convenient facts.

Step three: Connect the untruth based theory to a sense of victimhood and select a person/group/institution to blame.

Step four: Bring all party ‘assets’ into the ‘Lie Loop’ and coordinate its dissemination through all available platforms.

Step five: Repeat ad infinitum.

Step six: Declare the untruth as the truth.

But the real truth about the imagined truth is that it exists as a perceived truth inside a bubble of alternate reality engineered by the original peddlers. The supporters of the party live smugly inside this bubble pretending that theirs is the real matrix. Cocooned in this shell, they reinforce their collective beliefs through the validation that comes from living inside an echo chamber. With time these bubbles grow into hatcheries of untruths that draw sustenance from the Big Lie peddled by the peddler. Social media algorithms do the rest by feeding the cocooned with a constant diet of content that nourishes the untruths into bigger and bigger falsities.

It is happening in front of our eyes. And it is weakening the foundations upon which our society is built. If there is one real collective challenge we face today, it is not the mundane concerns about the timing of elections and dissolutions, but this: how to overturn the deluge of orchestrated untruths that are increasingly driving our politics towards the edge of the cliff, and how to push back against those who believe they can attain power by riding a wave of popularity fuelled by an explosive cocktail of small and big lies that resonate loudly inside an alternate reality.

And you thought the battle was just about votes.

The writer is the special assistant to the prime minister on public policy and strategic communication. He tweets @fahdhusain