Beyond conspiracies: Learning to think politically

Theory is not an escape from reality rather it is an attempt to understand reality. Social sciences give us conceptual tools with which we can examine institutions, class structures, political authority, nationalism, identity, collective action, and almost all other aspects of political affairs. They do not provide perfect answers, but they allow us to ask better questions. And in pursuit of any political inquiry, asking the right question is, perhaps, more valuable than possessing a confident answer to the wrong and misleading questions.

The conspiratorial mind dislikes such uncertainty. It prefers certainty because certainty is emotionally satisfying.And is reasonably due to the easy categorization of actors into binaries; villains and heroes, patriots and traitors, victims and conspirators. In this way conspiratorial practices offer a world that is easy to comprehend merely on moral grounds.

But human beings are rarely so convenient. A person may be simultaneously sincere and mistaken. An institution may produce both justice and injustice. A political movement may contain both legitimate grievances and opportunistic actors. A government may make decisions from a mixture of principle, fear, incompetence and self-interest. Reality does not owe us a morally tidy narrative.

Perhaps this is why conspiracy theories are so persistent. They give us something that serious political inquiry often cannot: the comfort of knowing who is to blame. Yet a society that always knows whom to blame may never learn what went wrong.

Existence of conspiracies is not the fundamental problem, today, we are confronted with in our discussions. The most immediate concern is their transformation into an excuse for abandonment of investigation and inquiry.

If a movement is foreign-funded, demonstrate it. If an institution has interfered unlawfully, establish how and why. If a political actor has committed wrongdoing, provide evidence. If a grievance is genuine, understand its causes. And if the available evidence does not permit certainty, intellectual honesty requires us to say so.

This may appear less satisfying than the usual political argument. It is nevertheless the beginning of political maturity. Pakistan does not suffer from a shortage of explanations. It suffers from a shortage of explanations that are willing to survive contact with evidence.

We need to move from suspicion to investigation, from accusation to argument, and from convenient stories to uncomfortable facts. The purpose of political thought is not to provide us with enemies. It is to help us understand the society in which we live.

Until we learn that distinction, we shall continue to discover conspiracies where there are institutions, agents where there are citizens, and enemies where there are merely human beings responding to the conditions in which they find themselves. And a society that explains its problems in this way may find, eventually, that its greatest conspiracy is the one it has constructed against its own capacity to think.