Godly Journalists, A Recipe For, Broken Window, The Virtue Of Defect, Quotable Quotes, God Is Alive & Extending The Analogy

Godly Journalists, A Recipe For, Broken Window, The Virtue Of Defect, Quotable Quotes, God Is Alive & Extending The Analogy By Dr. Sohail Ansari

Conceived and worded by DR Sohail Ansari (originality of concepts and originality of words).

He believes that there can never be a zero scope for improvement and appreciates criticism if it is not for the sake of criticism.

{Bravado is scoffing at caution as a character failing}   

{You reconcile to the realities of an advancing age by agreeing to something your younger self has always refused}

{Every talk of a professor is an enlightening lecture if it becomes a bit longer}.

Journalists are godly

·        The press is neither on the side of the angels; nor on the side of the devil. Press is only human and its commitment to humanize the world reflects in its refusal to be tied to the apron-strings of truth, or coiffed with the night cap of silence; its refusal to submit to such a fate in the age of a cheap ink and oratory, lends our world color, character and attraction. Honesty of thought and speech is a jewel; but celibacy makes us angelic and distorts the very purpose of our being; we are created as a human and must live as a human.  Journalists are on the side of God to do all that is humanly possible: the press is holding the world on the saying of its many tongues; glibly producing sensationally spurious things to protect us from the soporific effect of truth; thus enabling us to protect the humanity of ourselves.

A recipe for proving doctrinal superiority

·        Your doctrine must serve as its own referent and thus certify its own superiority as a doctrine to all systems of thought. From the standpoint of normal adequacy, a philosophical justification for grading is needed: weighting the truth value of different ideologies. You must refrain from it.

Broken window fallacy in politics

·        My followers as media term ‘a herd of rampaging monsters, on the orgy of destruction after being routed in the election’. Victory was stolen from us so the rage was spontaneous. We, however, are always on the side of people; we in destroying properties generated income for all those who would repair them. This is the expression of love through destruction.

The virtue of defect

·        Every closed intellectual system has the compulsive logic characteristic. The virtue of this defect is that it can successfully deal with what Emerson says: All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

Quotable Quotes

·       Attracting criticism by provoking it is the recipe of mediocre to stay in the limelight.

·       The devotional believers coin stories to justify devotion to their gurus.

·       A newspaper is not for reporting the news as it is, but to leave people blaze with rage and hatred.

·       You can be with all the people all the time except politician: ‘I am with you, my people’.

·       When politician says to his audience, ‘I am with you’ every one thinks it is so, and everyone is wrong.

·       Memories never leave you alone. They stand with you when you are alone or in a crowd like a crowd.

God is alive

·        ‘The realm of social morality should not be left only to religion’ implies the existence of an alternative source of morality; in fact there is none except Machiavellianism as the guiding principle of making decision. The failure of the custodian of churches: spiritual fathers, their yielding to seductive lures of pomp and glory resulted in God is dead theological rhetoric. God was, is, and always be alive. One needs to approach him independently of any medium.

Extending the analogy to the point of absurdity by focusing on hypothetical scenario

·        If a pen of a writer is like a sword of a soldier; journalist must use their pens for parry and thrust.

What shaped the culture of Pakistan?

Present research is directed into probing cultural, philosophical, psychological and historical factors that have shaped the culture of Pakistan and attitude and measures of ‘democratic’ leaders and of dictators that, on the one hand, deprived democracy of its substance in democratic period and on the other hand further strengthened the force of culture and history.

For analytical appraisal of historical and cultural factors; the period from earliest to colonial phase and of attitude and measures of different rulers and the impact of them on society and institutions are covered. Study is divided in two periods: pre 1988 and post 1988 up to 2002. 

Alexander (1941), one of America’s foremost psychoanalyst and psychiatrists in his “Defeatism Concerning Democracy” concludes that ‘two factors menace, above all, the prospects of democracy: the first is the latent regressive tendency toward dependence, and the second is economic insecurity. The first factor is subjective, emotional, and universal in the sense that every human being protests to some extent against growing up and wishes to continue the existence in which someone else takes care of him. As man grow up, he is expelled from his Garden of Eden, and is driven into the cold world where he must struggle for himself. This emotional tendency towards dependence is strengthened by an objective social phenomenon, economic insecurity: economic insecurity increase the flight from responsibility and independence and mobilize the latent longing (which everyone carries in himself) to go back to the Garden of Eden, to be cared by some earthly or heavenly father. Totalitarian systems demand obedience, but offer their citizens security and the comforts of not having to assume civic responsibility.

There is empirical evidence to show that feudal societies condition individuals toward the non- acceptance of democracy; uneasiness with democracy reflects in endorsing ‘strong’ personalities (feudal, generals) and that testifies to never growing up emotionally, and longing to return to infantile dependence and irresponsibility’.

Desire to revert to authoritarianism is related to the conception of the world and man’s place in it. Totalitarianism owes its existence to the desire of submission and obedience. Muslim lived under monarchial rule but philosophy of Islam can make no contribution to understanding of Muslim politics. No parallelism about which William talks about exists between basic philosophical and political conception because ideal Islamic polity simply facilitates behavior in accordance with religious laws; favor individual freedoms and the capacity for religious choice; rulers and ruled are governed by the Sharia. The role of state as facilitator and submission by all to Sharia make Islamic polity democratic.   

Islamic philosophy is not only democratic in essence, but had also its manifestation in the time of Prophet and in the rule of the first four Caliphs_ periods that serve until today as the touch stone, a gauge to evaluate any government. ‘But by the late seventh century political practice was no longer in accord with Islamic political theory.

The office of Caliph had become a dynastic legacy’ . The aristocratic rule was the violation of the dictates of Islam but it was consistent with authority orientation of tribal system. Such system by its nature relies on military power which created a political role for itself and this role was legitimated over centuries in the absence of any other workable alternative .

THE COLONIAL PHASE:

From the end of the 19^th century until independent the dominant theme of Britain’s mission in India was to keep order; Indians were not exposed values like pluralism, concept like popular sovereignty and representative government because of the different styles of the colonial rule and the different type of prevailing political culture in the mother country. ‘Long monarchial and colonial rule shaped in large part Muslim political consciousness and caused Muslim societies to evolve in the opposite direction __ toward the loss of individual autonomy and total submission to the community and the state. ‘Pakistan’s political culture was naturally a strong product of its past, including its people’s earlier history under the British Raj’.

Nation’s return therefore to military rule time and again was natural ‘Nation-states are the inevitable result of collapsed empires. Nation-states were spawned in the popular revolutions that challenged and defeated aristocratic and alien rule. Nation-states are vehicles or the realization of mass politics. Self-government, the inherent right of a citizenry to choose its leaders, to demand their accountability, and to establish the limits of their prerogatives, lies at the heart of the process defined as constitutionalism. But becoming a nation- state and being a nation state are not similar occurrences. How then is one to think of Pakistan as nation-state? Pakistan was removed from the womb of one of the most successful imperial system in human experience, but it began its life in an ambience totally out of phase with its incubation. Born from an imperial mother, Pakistan was not genetically structured for the world of republics and federations that dominated the thinking of the post-world War II era. A clone of a yet untested species, its surrogate birth provided little if any nurturing, and virtually no guidance. Given existence as a nation-state, Pakistan was, from the beginning, the antithesis of such expression. The embryonic origins of the new entity were rooted in Islamic tradition and the country never escaped the legacy of its colonial past. Had Pakistan chosen monarchy instead of the inclusive nation-state, it would have been a more appropriate choice. Had the predominantly Muslim nation chosen theocracy in fashioning its political system that too would have been more in keeping with the nation’s exclusive self-image, The Muslim League leaders, however, the persons most responsible for the creation of Pakistan, rejected the distant as well as the most recent past for democracy……….but neither Jinnah nor any of his imminent circle was moved to lay out on paper the blue print for the state they intended to create….Jinnah opted for the more familiar colonial system, Pakistan was rush to judgment’  

PHASE FROM 1947 TO 1970

‘Muslim League was formed to spearhead the struggle to form the Muslim majority state,  not to run it, and further to make matter worse it had almost no support in the area that constituted Pakistan; therefore, the legal authority  was conferred upon those who were not, and had never been, rulers. Because they were made the recipients of the legitimate symbols of power did not mean their legitimacy superseded that of long-established local authorities. Kinship, tribal, filial, and landed interests wove the fabric of traditional leadership and governance in the different regions of western Pakistan’.

Even Muslim league had will, it had no clout and those had clout definitely they had no will to bring about democratization to replace traditional arrangement of power. Unwillingness of the successors of Jinnah to establish democratic norms and institutions was due to little popular pressure against a system that offered scant opportunity to effect representative government respectful of majority rule. Willingness of ordinary citizens to be off the politics and determination of rulers to do so was the part of historical continuum as Ayub Khan drew on colonial history to justified his limited representative system designed to keep ordinary citizens out of politics by ‘claiming that because the Muslim in the subcontinent had historically never known real sovereignty, they would take long as Pakistani to adjust psychology to their new born freedoms.