Daily Times

Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war —B H Liddell Hart

Hope is the one emotion all humans cling to desperately. A dying person hopes to see the next day, parents whose child has been missing for decades live on hope of his/her turning up. When all else is dead, hope keeps life alive. But what happens when hope dies?

Hopelessness is not a lack of hope but the total absence of hope. As if hope no longer exists. To be honest, I cannot even imagine such a state. It seems to me to be a state worse than death. A state where one is past desolation, past despondency, past helplessness, and knows that there is no hope.

For the past few weeks I have been doing something I haven’t done for some years — talking to the common man. My outreach can neither be as extensive or intensive as in the past, but it gives me a sense of what people are thinking. While among the poor in Pakistan, there has always been a large segment that lacked hope, I now get the feeling that among these a fair portion has crossed the Rubicon to hopelessness.

This should be no surprise in a country where women have few rights left, minorities fewer, where rural landlords still make people walk over boiling oil to punish them, where tenants can be tortured to death, their women raped, children enslaved. A country where urban elite can hold up traffic, including ambulances, unconcerned with deaths they might cause, where entire roads can be blocked permanently at the whim of the elite irrespective of consequences, where the poor and unpowered can be murdered at the whim of the elite.

A country where wealth, resources, and services are distributed unequally, where every development makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, where male members of a family kill female members for exercising their God-given rights of choosing their mate. And they do all this with total impunity, with absolutely no fear of the law. No wonder then that the oppressed turn to parallel systems of justice offered by known extremists and their organisations, like the ‘shariah courts’ run by the JuD. They seem to be the only people the elite fear and the only people who can impose their will on the cowardly elite.

Should it then be a surprise that the weak agree to support what looks like their sole source of hope for justice? And if the God that this source invokes is a God of vengeance rather than love, should that surprise us? Or if this God wreaks death and destruction on their tormentors or those who support them, will the oppressed not still support them? So if they have reached the final despair, hopelessness, it is no surprise. The surprise is that the same hopelessness is becoming visible in an increasing number of the middle class, the one class that exists on hope. If there is hopelessness there it is a matter of greater concern.

When this was finally driven home to me, I realised that I had already listed reasons for this in earlier articles. When I write that “our political horizon consists of asses, and we have to make do with the best one-eyed, deaf and lame mule available”, and added that they cannot be honest, but “only less corrupt” I had expressed their reason for hopelessness. In this environment, the army in General Raheel Sharif’s person offered hope. When I explained why people were losing faith in him, even as I explained the other side of the picture, I also elucidated why there was hopelessness. But then these are the very ingredients that give birth to revolutions.

Throughout history, when mankind lost hope it turned to an evil, stark god, a god of vengeance, of hate and revenge. Pick your religion or your portion of history and study it. You will find that my conclusion is not far from being correct. Is this then Pakistan’s destiny? To be ruled by a mediocre leadership, one merely ‘relatively less corrupt’, which leaves us to our own mercy, until finally the ISIS, or one like it takes over?

George Lucas said, “The secret is not to give up hope. It’s very hard not to because if you’re really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.” Geoffrey Canada stated, “People don’t believe or understand that a community can lose hope. You can have a whole community where hopelessness is the norm, where folks don’t have faith that things will get better because history and circumstances have proven over 30, 40, or 50 years that things don’t get better.”

Paula Deen muses, “When it’s said and done, the one thing I want to leave on this earth is hope. I have felt hopelessness, and it’s a terrible feeling. Hopelessness will destroy you. I want to bring hope to other people.” And in the world of Oscar Wilde, “The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.”

The writer is a retired brigadier. He is also former vice president and founder of the Islamabad Policy Research Institute