The darkness and the void that engulfed the families of the martyred soldiers after the terror attack in Pulwama won’t come to us naturally – there’s no way we could possibly understand the totality of that misery. I could only hope that no one ever experiences that, again.
But we are angry and frustrated. It’s only natural we feel that way.
Anger is just a spontaneous reaction, it’s not necessarily a rational derivative of the situation. It’s a feeling. Rationalism never drives our action in society. Feelings do. Stories create the feelings – whether it’s the story of nationalism, story of liberty, story of religion – we need a story to invoke our feelings and thus drive our action.
Freedom fighters who sacrificed their lives for an independent India were driven by the story of human liberty, personal freedom. Bhagat Singh and Khudiram probably wouldn’t have sacrificed their lives if they didn’t believe that story. The feelings of patriotism their sacrifice invoked got people going with the freedom fighting for as long as it did.
One can argue that the feeling of an individual is based on evolutionary rationality. When we perceive a threat, we act with caution. It’s spontaneous. It’s not a complete irrational reaction. It’s an output of a biochemical process, evolved for thousands of years, in our neurosystem. The stories that are compatible with our evolutionary rationality make us work together.
The one reason feelings serve us well is because we are under the impression that feelings are a product of our very own inner self. No one has any authority over it. Hence, acting according to our feelings was compatible with personal liberty so long as it doesn’t interfere with others. The stories of patriotism, thus, accentuated our feelings to fight together for independence. It was compatible with evolutionary rationality.
But feelings can be manipulated too. Our minds can be hacked. With the advent of internet, widespread social media, the political discourse around fake news – the threat to our innate feelings has never been greater. In that light, it’s only rational to examine closely at our feelings.
The Cause Of The Anger
So, what’s the cause of this nationwide anger? Is it the untimely death of some of our very own?
More than a million children under the age of 15 died in India last year. In terms of child mortality rate, we are behind some of our neighbouring countries. That hardly causes any anger. Statistical regularities blunt our natural sensitivity? Possible.
What about the deaths caused by accidents and crimes? There are thousands of deaths reported every year. How do we explain the lack of nationwide anger when 24 school children died last year in a bus accident due to poor road and vehicle condition? Is it that the solution to the problem is too complex to invoke a spontaneous outrage?
Or do we care about the life and death of soldiers more than anything else? After all, their job is to put their life at risk for the safety of the citizens. That definitely calls for an emotion of different scale.
More than 100 soldiers resorted to suicide last year and most importantly the statistics didn’t improve, if you take a look at data compiled in the last few years. Experts argue that tremendous job-related stress and the deplorable life conditions could be some of the primary causes of soldier suicide.
These are the people who are putting their life in the line for the rest of the country and yet they do not get the necessary support from us to cope up with their own life. Arguably that should have frustrated us way more than the death of the soldier by an enemy’s bullet. Negligence from our very own hurts us more than the hatred from the enemies. How could we not shimmer in anger?
Or is it something else? Is it the perceived threat to the sovereignty of the nation and not the death of the soldier per se?
https://twitter.com/MallikaDua/status/1096754054158565376
One can argue that sovereignty of the nation is of primary importance. After all, the libertarian values we care about and fight for, everything we care about in improving the lives of the citizens, are being safe guarded by the security forces of the nation. It has been mostly true. It’s definitely truer for India than it’s for countries such as Belgium.
It was truer for USA or Japan during the Second World War than it is today. This is not to undermine the importance of safeguarding the border in today’s India. However, the biggest threat to India’s socio-economic liberty in coming decades, a rational assessment would reveal, is definitely not from Pakistan or from Kashmir. The biggest economical threat to the nation is not the Rohingya immigrants either.
The biggest threat to the economic stability of the nation would be from the confluence of the AI revolution and the biotech revolution. The biggest geographical threat would be from global warming. Nationalism, as a political narrative, would give way to global collaboration.
This is not to say that we should undermine the threat from our neighbours. But, if the perceived threat to the well being of the nation is of primary concern, then we must accept that this is not the only threat we need to deal with.
Our army is probably way more equipped to deal with the border problems than our country as a whole to deal with the economic instability we are about to face.
But then our reaction is not subject to a well-grounded rational analysis of reality, rather it’s based on how we feel about it. The story of nationalism, hence, skewed our feelings towards this incident. The stories need to be redefined to equip us to work better towards the problems we are about to face.
The problem in hand, though, is of a completely different nature. It has never been easier to manipulate our feeling as it is today.
Creating An Enemy
The reaction or anger or most importantly the depth of that feelings that we may consider ‘natural’ may not be quite so. Having a natural reaction of anger and frustration is considerably different from having been subject of a manufactured anger all day long.
Our feeling of anger is subject to the incident we came across. The terror attack drove our feelings. The issue with social media driven manufactured anger is that it works the other way around. It’s no longer anchored to the real incident.
The manufactured anger feeds to an augmented reality in which we tend to create our enemies. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the real enemy so long as it keeps our anger alive.
Social media is flooded with the messages to start a war with Pakistan. The absolutely humble people I know, men and women alike, who would think twice before killing an ant are calling for an all-out war with Pakistan. Was that much anger our natural reaction so as to risk the lives of thousands of our soldiers in the war?
It’s not just that we perceive the impact of the real threat wrong, we call for a solution that could only satisfy our ego and nothing else. One could argue that the social media anger starts and dies down in social media. It may not be the case for three reasons:
1. Politicians and administration could get influenced by the popular demand and they could take steps to cater to it. We witnessed how popular demand influenced the legislative change after the Nirbhaya rape case.
2. When people’s anger is manufactured through social media, it’s only natural for them to find a source to vent. Normal citizens are not going to get hold of someone they want to exact revenge from. But, they need someone to act on and that’s when they create enemies within their reach. That’s why Kashmiri students need to hide for their lives in Dehradun. Navjot Singh Sidhu gets banned from TV shows. People start abusing Aamir Khan, Naseeruddin Shah again. Minorities feel threatened.
3. The lasting harm it does is the fear it creates among other liberals. After the incident with Sidhu, who would dare put across their views? Aamir Khan nearly killed his career. Social media anger is not to be ignored.
It decides what will be spoken in today’s India, it determines what we will get to hear. There could be several viewpoints around one subject. I may feel strongly about one and you might feel strongly about the other. Having all the viewpoints on board is the backbone of liberal democracy.
Threatening and blocking the viewpoints that we don’t agree with are the basic tenets of imperialism. We don’t need to put a gun barrel on someone’s mouth, threatening to boycott someone’s TV show is just enough to create the fear among others. It’s intellectual terrorism.
The sovereignty of a nation is a concept, a story for all of us to work towards to achieve a liberal society. Nationalism is not an objective reality. The narrative of that concept is only valid so long as it protects the liberty of everyone within the nation – that’s the core objective.
Criticizing the people in power, criticizing government policies does not amount to any form of threat to any individual liberty. We should not be protecting nationalism – the concept of nationalism should rather be protecting us and our individual liberty.