Daily Times

Day in day out, at individual level and collective level, life pits us into uncharted territories, and gives us a choice to either conform to its vicissitudes or morph life to how we want it to be. The latter choice has been bestowed to humans because of willpower. Willpower can be defined as “the ability to do what you need to do, even if part of you does not want to”. Yes, it is the willpower through which humans, across the history, have fascinated the world at both individual and collective levels by finding solutions to all the nagging problems and treading into uncharted territories of human exploration.

Last week, I came across an interesting book, The Will Power Instinct, by Kelly McGonigal who is a health psychologist. The book is an interesting account of what constitutes will power and how it can be honed for success in life through various strategies which she has listed at the end of each chapter. She says that, for will power challenge, one needs to be aware of the choice that requires will power.  Then, one needs to know that one has two selves at play, while one is confronted with will power challenge, comprising impulsive self and reasonable self. Challenge of will power, according to her, exists in three forms that comprise “I will”, “I won’t” and “I Want”.  “I will” refers to all those things that, as an individual, one wants to do, but is unable to do either because of procrastination or any other indulgence. “I won’t” refers to all those things that one does not want to have in life in order to succeed at something. “I want” refers to that part of willpower which reminds you what you want to be in future, and stops you from indulging in impulses. In short, McGonial says that will power is about harnessing the three powers of “I will”, “I won’t” and “I want” to help you achieve your goals. Moreover, will power is just like a muscle. The more one trains it, the more it can become strong enough to bear the strains of life.

While I was done with the first chapter of the book, and was delved into an introspection about all those choices of the past that I had made in the above three forms, and had floundered in following them in letter and spirit, I, simultaneously, thought about how as a society we lacked will power to face our nagging issues head on. Let’s have a bird’s eye view of one of the most frequent issues that makes headlines in our dailies with each passing day in more heinous permutation, and take a dissecting  account of the will power challenge hitherto exhibited by the society at large vis-à-vis extremism through  McGonagall’s formula of “I will”, “I won’t” and “I want”. Here I am referring to growing menace of extremism.

There is no denying the fact that Pakistan has been severely bearing the brunt of policies introduced during General Zia’s regime in the form of extremism for the last three decades; however, there is no resolve so far manifested from the state policies to deal with the issue squarely. Every now and then, we are roused from our slumber by incident like 12/16 which took lives of innocent children, but, then again, we latch on to inertia of complacency and inaction.

With respect to extremism, the nation wholly lacks will power, especially the will power challenge of “I will” which means what as a society we pledge to do in order to counter extremism. Pathetically, we, as a society, are so far unable to locate the problem i.e. extremism, in its proper frame. While cornering the few causing the problem, we find some among us to be supporters of those who we are being cornered.  To strengthen will power of the society, first the society needs to understand what the problem is; which is what we are failing at as the society, at large, is still confused about extremism.

Failed in tracing the roots of the problem leading to confused pledges to counter extremism has failed us as a whole in grasping the will power challenge of “I won’t” which suggests what are things that we need to avoid in order to counter extremism. Day in day out, we find people among us, instead of refraining from financing militant outfits through their charity, without any confirmation, fill the coffers of militants through their charities, considering that they are obliged to do that according to Islamic injunctions.

Knee-jerk reactions on the part of society as a whole with respect to countering extremism has stopped us from becoming serious to will power challenge of “I want” which suggests that what kind of a society we aspire to have. Having diverse social fabric, an ideal Pakistani society should reflect pluralism but what observe is about face; case in point is the treatment that is meted out to minorities in Pakistan.

When pitted against the dissecting framework developed by Kelly McGonigal for will power, Pakistan utterly fails in proving that it has will power to counter extremism. Prior to working on “will”, “won’t” and “want” part of the will power, like the first thing in any will power challenge that is to identify the problem, Pakistan needs to clearly define what in the name of extremism it wants to battle with, and then should work on the “will”, “won’t” and “want” of its will power vis-à-vis extremism.

The blogger is a graduate in Social Sciences from Government College University, Lahore. He can be reached at uinam39@gmail.com