‘Our Liberals’ and Minority Psyche

The problem with our so-called liberals is that an overwhelming majority of them is not even aware of the philosophical, political and historical foundations of liberalism. These people have become habitual of using the term to denote themselves; although it is ‘westernized’, which they are at their best. Interestingly enough of them were staunch leftists before the fall of Soviet Union.

We are not for liberalism as we regard it as both the seed and product of capitalism, and a faulty epistemology and concept of man. However even if our ‘enlightened’ class were true liberals; there would be some force and convincing ability in their words. Now what ‘our liberals’ represent is a lot of terribly narrow minded people, who are habitual of imported patterns of ideas, attitudes, behaviors and ways of life. They consider the west as the only possible way of existence and regard with fear and contempt all radical tendencies emerging to unshackle the bounds of west’s cultural hegemony, exploitation and neo-imperialism.

Unlike a true modernist, who must believe in rationality, objectivity and common sense, our liberals rely on ‘their life-style prejudices’ to criticize the religious and cultural patterns of the society. They suffer from the difficulty of their being a minority. Although they enjoy all the benefits of the society, they are the people who do not identify themselves with the majority of the people dwelling the country. Our liberal class is an island of the western world, based in the heart of what they regard as ‘an inferior, dependant and backward society’.

Being a minority placed in the sea of a people with ideologies, values and sensibility right opposite to their own, ‘our liberals’ have to live a life, which they hate with fathomless contempt. They find that society at large can not stand both their ideas and ways of life. However as they have still to exist in the environment most of them have to adopt a behavior which can be called nothing less than hypocrisy. Here it is interesting to see the frequency with which the word (i.e. Hypocrisy) appears in the articles of our hard core liberals. In very recent articles of Mr. Ishtiaq Ahmed (Daily Times 30 May) and Tahir Mirza (Daily Dawn 11 June), the society at large was declared ‘hypocrite’ for essentially different reasons. Freud says that each word expresses the biography of the speaker. This is particularly true for ‘our liberals’, who have an intimate experience of hypocrisy from their own personal lives.

The hypocrisy of ‘our liberals’ is manifest in their treatment with the things associated with religion and its culture. They vent their contempt for religion by deriding religious symbols. Their spiritual fathers in the west have coined for them the terms of ‘fundamentalism’, ‘extremism’ and ‘religious terrorism’, which they continue to jabber like mantras to disrupt the patterns of the traditional values and forces and mold the society according to their own life styles.

However hypocrisy is not the only characteristic of ‘our liberals’. A sizable portion of them also falls under the category of conspirators. They are working against the ideological foundations of the country and have aligned, under the leadership of Musharraf, to transform the society according to the political, economic but above all cultural agenda of the west. ‘Westernization’ is the goal of their lives, which they are rigorously working to achieve.

These people thanks to the ‘visionlessness’ of our religious leadership have been successful in gaining much power and influence. They enjoy great freedom in the country to express themselves and now having found a clear ground for their unchallenged ‘self-expression’, some of them have even started to have the sense of being the master of the land.

The classic example of such ‘ownership illusion’, is the above cited article of Mr. Tahir Mirza, who pinpointing the various new ‘hypocritical’ religious trends warns the liberal elements to keep on guard against them as they are signs of ‘insidious’ extremism and fundamentalism. This is just like a perfect irony; as in a country formed on the basis of two nation theory (of non compatibility of civilizations) it is the ideas, activities and influence of these people, which the public should be warned against. However as our conservative elements have decided to keep on sleeping, the country’s ideological foundations are being undermined in broad day light, while we see our national ideology and heroes dethroned and hang to death each day in open public gatherings