THE astonishing ‘return of the prodigal son’ drama that unfolded last week in Karachi when former mayor Mustafa Kamal ‘revealed’ the foreign sponsors of Altaf Hussain and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) was followed by the equally remarkable re-emergence of Shahbaz Taseer after four years in captivity (by the mythical and seemingly omnipresent Taliban).

Despite the very meticulous manner in which both episodes were choreographed, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to gather that much more is going on than meets the eye. Indeed, it often feels like politics in Pakistan, at least that which is projected to us ordinary mortals by the powers-that-be, is a game of charades in which the dividing line between truth and fiction is inevitably blurred.

This is, after all, a country in which effective power is exercised by the men in khaki while elected politicians get all the heat for the many failures to which the system of power gives rise. This system features sophisticated ideological apparatuses operating at all levels of society — education, media, mosque, home — that ensure the compliance of the mass of the population. And this is why this system survives, its generals, money and mullahs in tow.

In some sense, we accept all of the twists and turns which play out like a bad movie on our screen because we have some kind of stake, however small, in the system. At least, we are made to feel like we have stake.

We accept all the twists and turns which play out like a bad movie.

If I have a job, no matter how precarious and exploitative, I will make sure I don’t antagonise my employer in any way so as not to lose it; if I am a small-time real estate agent, I rely on the patronage of patwaris and thanedars who champion the oppressive political and economic order at the lowest levels; if I am an adolescent girl that has experienced patriarchy from an early age I still desire to be married into a ‘good’ family so that I can live my life out in relative obscurity and without a threat to my ‘honour’.

Of course, there are examples of individuals and collectivities that resist co-option by deconstructing the totalising discourses that make oppressive social relationships seem normal. Ethnic nationalists, feminists, environmentalists — even those who struggle for the establishment of bourgeois democracy challenge entrenched ideas about the world in which we live and the social norms that mediate it.

But there is little doubt that the vast majority of ordinary people — the victims of class, gender, national and other forms of exploitation — even when they are aware in whatever measure of the reasons for their subjugation tend to be risk-averse, generally unwilling to put themselves (and those dear to them) out on a limb in the name of a prospective liberation.

Certainly, popular attitudes towards politics ebb and flow with the times. So while today those segments of the population who would benefit most from political and social transformation are somewhat cautious, cynical even, about engaging in political struggle, this has not always been the case. Indeed, it seems a very long time ago now but it was only nine years back that a critical mass of ordinary people participated in a popular mobilisation against the Musharraf military regime. Which is to say that what some commentators call the widespread ‘depoliticisation’ in Pakistani society is not a permanent cultural condition.

Yet political theory and the study of history help us understand human behaviour, including the question of political agency, only to a point. Many aspects of individual human experience often remain hidden from view, tucked away into the subconscious (or even unconscious) recesses of the mind. The study of the human mind, or what is known as psycho-analysis, helps generate greater insights into why human beings do what they do (or not do, as the case may be).

Ultimately all psychoanalysis starts from the premise that individual consciousness can be traced back to childhood experiences, and the memories that we carry with us from our earliest years. In effect, we develop fears and inhibitions as soon as our mind allows, and those fears and inhibitions then condition our behaviour for the rest of our lives — often without us being overtly conscious of them.

Psychoanalysts typically focus on how adult individuals mimic or rebel against the defining experiences of their childhood in their personal lives. It is generally considered difficult to observe any patterns between individual psychology and questions of collective political mobilisation. But what we can hope to understand is some of the collective problems that bedevil us, like the tendency to be submissive and accept our lot.

Only when individuals recognise this tendency do they come to generate the possibility for something beyond their self. In the final analysis, liberation of the individual and the collectivity either happen together or not at all.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2016