Daily Times

“Today’s policies and political activity,” Rudolf Steiner says, “treat people like pawns. More than ever before, attempts will be made to use people like cogs in a wheel. People will be handled like puppets on a string, and everyone will think that this reflects the greatest progress imaginable”. While explaining the strings, Somerset Maugham adds that “money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets”.

Even puppets, Oscar Wilde suggests, have passions, but passions come at a price. Through suffering one must pay for them, or else they die of their own platitude. In olden days, people in the leisure and plenitude talked about their passions but the modern-day capitalist society has exchanged passions with ambitions. In the era of powerlessness, where self-preservation is the only rationale, the human impetuosity leads the individual to the solitary ambition of grabbing power – no matter how compromised it may be.

While subjecting the people to power relations through consent or otherwise, everyone regardless of their apparent commanding power position in the power structure has to obey the existing capitalistic power relations. The commanders too have little autonomy since the power they wield binds them to the same laws of the established structure. Despite having a coercive power structure with feudal ties, these relations continue to exert their authority even in Pakistan.

When the historic objective conditions do not favor a direct rule, there is no dearth of puppets offering their service to dance at the tune of their masters to advance their designs. It is interesting to note that despite the indifference of an electoral majority, power is already secured for them even prior to the elections. This makes the whole exercise dubious and even in an opaque democracy, where only powerful can compete, the emphasis remains on transparency.

The legitimacy of the whole process remains debatable even when the role of the favoured puppet is prematurely over, because either the soft ground under his feet is made to cave in or by growing in confidence, he begins to suffer an illusion of the firmness of the ground underneath. Those who help the puppet to stand up know when to pull the plank under its feet with a crown on the scalp while the neck is in a rope.

People can be convinced that the former finance minister was a man of integrity who refused to yield to the dictates of the IMF and, in the process, sacrificed his ministry

Power is not without tragedy. It makes the head dizzy either due to its intoxicating effect or for the generalized malaise that inflicts the person once the dream is fulfilled, alienating the ambitious from the masses. If the ‘manna’ falls on a person who inherently suffers from the paranoia of megalomania, power freezes him; he becomes a scarecrow. Yet he would like to make hay when the sun shines, and even when the Promised Land chosen for him to reign is a Pandora’s Box.

Akin to the chosen people walking in the wilderness for decades, the power smiled on our ‘man of destiny’ having everything on his side save destiny. “Desire is a malady or a madness, or both. One forgets that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has someday to cry loud on the rooftop” (Wilde).

Taking U-turns, a euphemism for lying, does not leave much credibility behind. It only shows that one is not the lord over himself, no longer a captain of his soul, if ever one was once. “Life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train”. If, to begin with, one accepts his position of a puppet, he is merely another object on the string, which eventually is bound to become his destiny and destination.

“The lie, once a liberal means of communication,” Adorno says “has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive… A man who lies is ashamed, for each lie teaches him the degradation of a world which, forcing him to lie in order to live, promptly sings the praises of loyalty and truthfulness.” In a chess game, the pawns, the king and the queen go into the same box but not the hands that move them; they plan another game with new pawns on a different chessboard. The recent shuffle in the Pakistani cabinet that deprived the ‘man of destiny’ of his economic wizard and the posting of several non-elected, unaccountable technocrats of the Berkley/Chicago Mafia have made the hands that wield real power visible again. Is the removal of the finance minister a prelude to launching a new puppet regime headed by a new pawn? People can be convinced that the former finance minister was a man of integrity who refused to yield to the dictates of the IMF and, in the process, sacrificed his ministry. We have another martyr at hand with an immaculate past -a figure of Mr. Clean who can be portrayed as a charismatic leader, an economic messiah. Lest we forget, for similar qualification Shaukat Aziz was selected for the prime minister’s office. They both were essentially non-political figures and could not have claimed the post and legitimacy unless given to them through the barrel of a gun. The former finance minister having military lineage is more trustworthy and can identify himself better with the dominant interests.

Despite carrying a tag of Mr. Handsome, the current prime minister has no political roots. His political strength carries an overt stigma of having a close association with the real and not-so-invisible power, which was never a secret though not a laudable one. Unlike the previous equally pedestrian prime ministers including the one, at the receiving end now— invariably found rubbing his shoulders with the guards in the past— the latest is handicapped for not having a political lineage; the room for the dynastic politics in his case is squarely absent. Once out of favour, no one will grieve on his political demise since, akin to Cassius and Brutus, he too is an ‘underling’. “To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination” (Adorno). Populism is an enemy of the masses; rather than offering solutions, it complicates the socio-economic problems. The failing economy, the overt control of the praetorian guards on polity and the growing isolation of the state to achieve an elusive strategic depth will further discredit an already discredited prime minister turning him into a scapegoat. Has the dustbin of history opened its jaws to receive another puppet?

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history