Daily Times

Diogenes was sauntering on the streets of Athens when someone stopped him and asked a question that merits attention: “What is the most beautiful thing in the world?” Diogenes averred: it’s parrhesia. Parrhesia is an intimate and visceral relationship with the truth. It is to speak the truth in its unadulterated form. To tell people about each and everything that concerns them. It’s an activity where telling the truth can bring disruption, disarray, and disorder. However, it will perpetuate the true essence of democracy and let people know everything.

Parrhesia is to say what something in essence is and present it to the populace without contrivance and fudge. Michel Foucault, during his lectures at the University of California in 1983, emphasised Parrhesia being sin qua non for democracy where leaders must tell the truth without disfigurement and travesty. He writes: “Parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself).” His idea pellucidly informs us about how truth-telling runs risks. But in the very process of truth-telling, there is the munificent act of helping people to live a life that is not manufactured, regulated, and ordered. Foucault was exceedingly suspicious of leaders who under the notorious guise of democracy beguiled people into subscribing to their tropes of free speech, liberty, and self-actualization. For democracy to thrive, adds Foucault, we must more and more practise parrhesia. It is the activity of parrhesia that will sift truth from misrepresentation.

Michel Foucault emphasised Parrhesia being sin qua non for democracy where leaders must tell the truth without disfigurement and travesty.

For democracy to truly function, parrhesia is not only essential to let people know how policies are formulated for them in their absence but to educate them on how it functions, in its insidious framework, at the expense of enormous amounts of disparities.

Doris Lessing, the famed British novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007, notes in one of her novels: “Very few people care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.” Democracy nonetheless needs a clear disavowal and recantation of perjury. But as Lessing notes, very few people possess the guts to evince the intrepidity to tell the truth. For a moment imagine: how many people who pull the strings for us have continuously thrown us in the abyss of delusions and benefited from our naivety? Of course a great number.

Furthermore, when it comes to Pakistan, the leaders seem to be far from parrhesia let alone ordinary people. The truth itself tastes incredibly unpalatable to them. If and when they muster up the courage to tell people that democracy in Pakistan is emaciated, enfeebled, and little less than a pantomime, elected leaders don’t call the shots, and politicians only contest elections to grease one another’s palms then many apples carts will be disrupted. This very process is what Foucault called parrhesia which is being brutal in telling the truth. Needless to say, it will entail substantial levels of disaster but in the longer run it will bring clarity to state affairs. People will know about how their leaders, crowned on upper echelons of power, make decisions for them.

We must expect our leaders and those who are contesting elections to tell us the truth. People must know how the US plays its role in the domestic politics of Pakistan and how their alleged involvement impinges upon sovereignty. China’s relationship with Pakistan is extolled to an absurd level. But do we know how China will operate in our domestic politics in the near future on a subterranean level deploying economic subterfuges? Similarly, our relations with Gulf countries are never clearly defined where religion supersedes truth. None of us are cognisant of what is happening. We don’t have an inkling of who rules the roost. This is because we have never been educated about the significance of parrhesia in democracy. For us democracy has invariably been taught as a form of government where people elect representatives. We have never been educated about the substance of truth in the process of election. Herein lies the grey area of deceit, chicanery, and duplicity.

It should be concerning that electables push all and sundry in the whirl of favours and to a considerable extent hide from them the real and odious picture of themselves where they are unabashedly indulged in malfeasance. Isn’t it high time to hold them accountable when they knock on doors with their alms tray to cajole votes?

Politics in Pakistan is always hanging in the balance where nothing seems certain and predictable which in consequence clears the road to military interventions. Every faux pas carries its concomitant problems. When we budge from telling the truth then injustice in variegated hues ensues. It needs to be emphasised that all actors that distort democracy are hand-in-glove. Political parties and political moguls don’t take people seriously for they never practise parrhesia and tell people the truth brutally. They either play hide and seek with people or perpetually embroil them in the carrot and stick game.

Being at the crossroads of elections, people in Pakistan must ask their leaders about themselves and their approach to how will they bring change and least of all ask them to tell the truth however risky is it. When truth-telling becomes a norm in mainstream politics then people will begin to take interest because of their cognisance of state affairs. Democracy gravely hinges upon people. And when people are thrown in ignorance by the political shenanigans, it would be a grievous disservice to democracy.

The writer is interested in literature and philosophy and is based in Islamabad.