Outsourced Intelligence

If one sees the literacy rate of the countries of the world, there will be very few who would argue against the fact that the European and American Homo Sapiens are way ahead than everyone else around the world, letting go some exceptions. But there has been an unexplained point in an educated population with respect to their Geo-political and international perspectives. An educated population has become increasingly the one, with an overwhelming twist towards a situation in which they are either unaware of the international or other Geo-political environments or if they have any acquiescence somehow and they are taken through a soul-search for meaningful argument, all of them have same perspectives on a given scenario (most probably provided by mainstream media). This is evident from many researches, most awful of which is a video from the US, where an educated street passer-by was not able to tell a male if he was the Prime Minister of Australia, while anyone having even a slight knowledge of the World would definitely disagree, because Ms. Julia Gerard, the Australian Prime Minister, is actually a charismatic female person.

The trend is horrible even in our society, when most of the educated lot of the community ‘rubbishes out’ any argument related to ideologies and principles, is way out of step with the current affairs, or has the same pathetic delusions as their primary source of argument, which are lavishly flowed down the stream by mainstream media, and due to the narrow range of knowledge they have, are either intolerant or aggressive towards any other perspective. For example, whole of the US population unquestionably agreed to the US war strategy in 2001 (which can be called an 'emotional outburst') and in 2003, which led to a horrific massacre of about 1.5 million people, and the US population is very sympathetic to the cause of Israel, and views Palestinians as ‘Terrorists’ although even an insane person who knows the ground realities would never agree to the hypothesis. If someone is bored of examples from the US, even our population unquestionably agreed to the proposal of ‘having talks’ with the Swati Taliban (The parliament unanimously passed a resolution to adopt ‘nizam e adl’regulation in this regard) and just in a matter of days, changed its perspective( to adopt, yet again, a unanimous resolution in favour of attacking the militants and capture Swat valley) the reason being a video showing beating of a woman by Taliban was run on a national TV channel. The video later described by the TV channel was a ‘fake’ and ‘forged’ one and thus an apology was filed by the channel against the public (with no one questioning them obviously).

Any independent analyst of the situation would have called the people of Pakistan a herd of cattle, so easily mocked away into a situation unquestionably alarming. The incident left many questions unanswered. How was just a video on a TV channel able to change the mind-set of the population? If there has been a forgery this time, can there be more out there which we don’t even realize? Why on earth, have our educated lot being taken into this trap while we keep on babbling out the idea that the US population is the one who is controlled by the media?  If we closely analyse the problem, most of the educated people of our own country rely heavily on mainstream media for their basic source of argument and philosophy. Be it anyway it is viewed; this is horrible and alarming situation, world over. The solution to this problem is not that complex, and while one analyses the scenario, finds it easily. People have stopped to think themselves. That is the biggest problem facing the intelligent mankind right now.

Be it argument on Capitalism or debate over Marxism, a subject of Globalization or a topic of Nationalization, we hear to the arguments fragmented in someone else’s brain, babbled out by some old-fool on a TV show, and taken by the argument-thirsty and Hollywood-inspired population as their primary choice of cannon fodder in a debate, while themselves, they think nothing.

For the thought process to evolve and nurture in a person, his personality must be equipped with a very fundamental aspect of human ingredient; Principles of his own. This praiseworthy aspect of a person is literally unimaginable in todays’ world. People, while getting material on some aspect of international or national politics or any other ‘strategic’ spheres of today’s world, do nothing while engulfing and digesting everything that is provided to them by the all-motivating and charming media persons. For example, if someone is a good Muslim, he will definitely be against the US attack on Iraq, Afghanistan or its ambitions against Iran. But what we see on the streets is that many educated people, who are so authoritative in declaring themselves Muslims, get into the lap of ‘the War on Terror’ and support it. Similarly, much of the Muslim and educated population of the country is in favour of carrying out operations in Wana, and other parts of the country, while deliberately ignoring the previous outcomes and price we paid in human and economic terms for following the US directives on our soil.

There can be a long list of arguments and examples, but the point is that it is imperative that we people, and especially the educated ones, stop this ‘outsourcing’ of arguments and intelligence whilst this media war mongering. We should have a set of principles, Nationalism or Religion for example, on the basis of which we should check and scrutinize our thoughts, while at the same time giving room to new thoughts and arguments that come head to head with our beliefs and principles. There should be a proper way by which we analyse the situation, otherwise we will become 'robots', programmed and directed by agenda-oriented media, and we will not be then called as Humans. It is about having our intellectual identity in our own hands and no one else. In the era of conspiracy theories and Governments forgery of facts, this is the best way to save one’s intelligence from going in wrong way.