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The Patriarchy Paradox - the controversial video

Imran Khan's Naya Pakistan and a soothsaying beau

Irfan Husain in The Dawn

WHATEVER people might think about Imran Khan’s words and antics, nobody can deny that he brings a lot of colour and macho swagger to politics.

By making bizarre accusations against rivals, he succeeds in putting them on the defensive while deflecting any criticism of his own course of action. And, like Trump, he shrugs off attacks from the tiny minority of liberal, secular critics who quaintly seek the truth in our political discourse.

And so the PTI circus rolls on from one triumph to the next, lights ablaze and trumpets blaring. In fact, it’s the only show in town, with other parties and politicians providing the chief showman with a series of easy targets. Nawaz Sharif is hit with the charge that he handed over state secrets to the Americans. Proof? That’s a 20th century concept with no relevance to contemporary Pakistani politics.

With just a few months to go until the general elections, you would think Imran Khan would be burnishing his party manifesto, and highlighting the achievements of his party in KP province. Far from it: judging from media coverage, the whole country is fixated on the Great Khan’s marriage proposal to his ‘spiritual guide’.

Frankly, I couldn’t care less about who Imran Khan marries: what happens between two consenting adults should be strictly their business. However, the fact that a national leader, and a serious contender for the country’s most powerful civilian job, should need the crutch of a resident soothsayer is disturbing.

According to breathless media coverage, it was the lady in question who advised Khan to go to the mountain resort of Nathiagali while the Panamagate trial was going on. But do we really want a prime minister who is so gullible? However, Khan is not alone in his superstitions: according to reports doing the rounds at the time, Nawaz Sharif sought guidance from a pir known as Dewana Baba in Mansehra.

We are informed through a report in Dawn from a couple of years ago that Asif Zardari probably managed to complete his term in office thanks to the powers of Pir Ejaz. Apart from this major triumph, he also claims that he was instrumental in enabling Zardari to access the $60 million sitting in Switzerland, and frozen by the authorities pending an investigation.

And let’s not forget the goats: apparently, one animal was slaughtered every day for the duration of the Zardari presidency. The same gent had advised the PPP head honcho to stay near the sea to ward off the evil eye, as well as other supernatural attacks launched by his enemies.

During her second stint as prime minister, Benazir Bhutto was reported to seek guidance from Dewana Baba, Nawaz Sharif’s seer. You’d think that after Sharif’s unceremonious departure, BB would have seen the light. No chance: once bitten by the oracle bug, the victim seeks to guard his spiritual flanks against attacks from the dark side.

It is often insecure leaders who seek the advice of oracles and seers. Lacking confidence in their own decision-making powers, they look to higher powers to guide them. And once you start believing in jinns, you need to counter hostile spirits with your own unseen troops.

But as we know all too well, soothsayers often get it terribly wrong. Just look at what happened to Rajapakse, the Sri Lankan ex-president: there he was, solidly entrenched with well over a year to go in his term of office, when he suddenly called for an early election. Overnight — and much to everyone’s surprise — a fractious opposition coalesced into an effective election machine, and defeated Rajapakse.

It later emerged that he had been advised by his resident oracle that the alignment of his stars predicted victory if he were to call the election a year earlier than they were due. Big mistake. When asked to explain what went wrong, the soothsayer replied that he had guided Rajapakse to victory twice before, and “two out of three” wasn’t a bad record.

In fact, while we pretend to be impervious to such superstitious rubbish, we surreptitiously glance at the horoscope columns in the newspapers to see what the stars say. Many supposedly rational leaders have sought spiritual help in gaining an edge over their rivals. Ronald Reagan’s wife regularly consulted a Californian syndicated horoscope columnist.

Mankind has always looked for help to ward off the terrors of the night when spirits stalk the land, and ghouls and zombies await the unwary. Most belief systems make mention of them in one form or another.

 

So in this wider context, does it matter that the man who would be prime minister believes in this mumbo-jumbo? Actually, yes. Many years ago, Imran Khan rubbished Darwin’s theory of evolution, overlooking the mass of accumulated evidence that supports it. Is this the man who will give us a ‘naya Pakistan’?

Even Amazon will be swallowed up by the free market – and there's nothing Jeff Bezos can do about it

Even the most successful companies are merely small boats bobbing on the surface of a great and treacherous ocean

Ben Chu in The Independent

“The Everything Store” sounds like a pretty brutal place to work. An in-depth report by the New York Times on Amazon last year exposed a culture of borderline harassment from line managers, stupidly long hours, vicious evaluation sessions, a high staff turnover rate and a cult-like atmosphere personally imposed by the internet firm’s founder Jeff Bezos.

“Purposeful Darwinism” was one word used to describe the Amazon culture by a human resources director. Amazon contested the bleak picture painted by the report. And yet Amazon’s boss Jeff Bezos sounds like he’s rather pleased with it.

“People self-select” he wrote in his letter to shareholders last week, in an indirect reference to the New York Times report. “Over the last two decades we’ve collected a group of like-minded people. Folks who find our approach energising and meaningful.” In other words, the unsuited get selected out of existence at Amazon.

There’s something about the idea of Darwinian natural selection as a description of the business world that people who lead companies (particularly those in the fast-changing world of consumer-facing technology) find compelling. And one can see why. They are often faced with an array of strong competitors; consumers can switch their spending easily and quickly; a company has to be better, perhaps more adaptable, than the rest of the pack if it wants to make a profit. Bosses must feel as if they are in a constant battle for survival.

Yet, as a metaphor for business activity, this is rather misleading. In Charles Darwin’s great hypothesis it was random phenotypical traits resulting from genetic mutations that gave certain creatures an advantage in the struggle for survival in their particular natural habitat. So, for example, if a finch happens to be born with a certain shaped beak well suited to cracking open nuts common on a particular island that bird will survive, reproduce and pass down its genes. And over the generations the island may, ultimately, become populated by a species of finch with that particularly useful shaped beak.

It wasn’t that original finch’s brains, or anything it had control over, that gave it an edge, or meant it got “selected” to pass on its physical traits to future generations. The idea that it is the smartest, or the most energetic, or those with the best culture, that thrive and survive owes more to the pseudo-science of “social Darwinism”, as outlined by 19th century sociologists such as Herbert Spencer, than anything from Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

Free markets are Darwninan in a truer sense, in that selection is often much more about luck than judgement. Andy Grove of Intel wrote in his book, Only the Paranoid Survive, that: “Most companies don't die because they are wrong; most die because they don’t commit themselves. They fritter away their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is in standing still.”

Grove, who died last month, was a truly exceptional businessman, but on this point he was wide of the mark. Most companies, over the long run, die because technology moves on and patterns of consumption shift – and there’s nothing their managements can really do about it. It’s story not so much about the quality of leaders or their innovative corporate cultures, but the inexorable disruptive power of markets.

Nothing a manufacturer of horse-drawn carriages had done upon the invention of the car would have saved the businesses (in its original form) from oblivion. Look at the composition of a stock market index of the world’s largest companies. It has changed almost beyond recognition over the decades.

Some firms are undoubtedly better run than others. Some are more innovative than others. But even the most successful are merely small boats bobbing on the surface of a great and treacherous ocean.

One day they will all be capsized. And others will take their place as new markets open. It will happen to Intel. It will happen to Amazon, too. And when it does, it’s unlikely to be a result of a lax corporate culture or employees who weren’t prepared to work weekends.

To be fair to Bezos, he readily admits in his letter that “luck plays an outsized role in every endeavour and I can assure you that we’ve had a bountiful supply”. He also stresses that Amazon’s culture is not the way all firms should be. It’s simply the one he believes will deliver the best results for Amazon.

Perhaps he’s right. He can certainly point to his company’s stunning rates of growth from zero in 1994 to today’s $275bn behemoth as evidence to support his methods. But he may well be wrong.

Perhaps different methods would actually produce better results. There’s evidence that workplaces in which people have a decent work-life balance are more productive and innovative. We can never really know.

The good news for those looking for a job in the technology sector is that the defining feature of competitive markets is diversity; meaning there are always lots of different firms and potential employers. It may feel like “The Everything Store” has become the everywhere store, but Amazon’s global workforce is still only 230,000. Compare that to the 1.5 million people who work for McDonald’s worldwide.

Thankfully, no one has to work at Amazon, or any place where the law of the jungle reigns.

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Colonised and coloniser, empire's poison infects us all

Ideas that underpinned Britain's imperial project led not only to torture in Kenya, but war and catastrophe in Europe

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• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 8 October 2012 20.30 BST

'The ideology that led to Hitler's war and the Holocaust was developed by the colonial powers.' Illustration by Daniel Pudles

Over the gates of Auschwitz were the words "Work Makes You Free". Over the gates of the Solovetsky camp in Lenin's gulag: "Through Labour – Freedom!". Over the gates of the Ngenya detention camp, run by the British in Kenya: "Labour and Freedom". Dehumanisation appears to follow an almost inexorable course.

Last week three elderly Kenyans established the right to sue the British government for the torture that they suffered – castration, beating and rape – in the Kikuyu detention camps it ran in the 1950s.

Many tens of thousands were detained and tortured in the camps. I won't spare you the details: we have been sparing ourselves the details for far too long. Large numbers of men were castrated with pliers. Others were raped, sometimes with the use of knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels and scorpions. Women had similar instruments forced into their vaginas. The guards and officials sliced off ears and fingers, gouged out eyes, mutilated women's breasts with pliers, poured paraffin over people and set them alight. Untold thousands died.

The government's secret archive, revealed this April, shows that the attorney general, the colonial governor and the colonial secretary knew what was happening. The governor ensured that the perpetrators had legal immunity: including the British officers reported to him for roasting prisoners to death. In public the colonial secretary lied and kept lying.

Little distinguishes the British imperial project from any other. In all cases the purpose of empire was loot, land and labour. When people resisted (as some of the Kikuyu did during the Mau Mau rebellion), the response everywhere was the same: extreme and indiscriminate brutality, hidden from public view by distance and official lies.

Successive governments have sought to deny the Kikuyu justice: destroying most of the paperwork, lying about the existence of the rest, seeking to have the case dismissed on technicalities. Their handling of this issue, and the widespread British disavowal of what happened in Kenya, reflects the way this country has been brutalised by its colonial history. Empire did almost as much harm to the imperial nations as it did to their subject peoples.

In his book Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist shows how the ideology that led to Hitler's war and the Holocaust was developed by the colonial powers. Imperialism required an exculpatory myth. It was supplied, primarily, by British theorists.

In 1799 Charles White began the process of identifying Europeans as inherently superior to other peoples. By 1850 the disgraced anatomist Robert Knox had developed the theme into fully fledged racism. His book The Races of Man asserted that dark-skinned people were destined to be enslaved and then annihilated by the "lighter races". Dark meant almost everyone: "What a field of extermination lies before the Saxon, Celtic and Sarmatian races!"

Remarkable as it may sound, this view soon came to dominate British thought. In common with most of the political class, W Winwood Reade, Alfred Russell Wallace,Herbert Spencer, Frederick Farrar, Francis Galton, Benjamin Kidd and even Charles Darwin saw the extermination of dark-skinned people as an inevitable law of nature. Some of them argued that Europeans had a duty to speed it up: both to save the integrity of the species and to put the inferior "races" out of their misery.

These themes were picked up by German theorists. In 1893 Alexander Tille, drawing on British writers, claimed that "it is the right of the stronger race to annihilate the lower". In 1901 Friedrich Ratzel argued in Der Lebensraum that Germany had a right and duty, like Europeans in the Americas, to displace "primitive peoples". In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained that the German empire's eastward expansion would mirror the western and southern extension of British interests. He systematised and industrialised what imperial nations had been doing for five centuries. The scale was greater, the location different, the ideology broadly the same.

I believe that the brutalisation of empire also made the pointless slaughter of the first world war possible. A ruling class that had shut down its feelings to the extent that it could engineer a famine in India in the 1870s in which between 12 million and 29 million people died was capable of almost anything. Empire had tested not only the long-range weaponry that would be deployed in northern France, but also the ideas.

Nor have we wholly abandoned them. Commenting on the Kikuyu case in the Daily Mail, Max Hastings charged that the plaintiffs had come to London "to exploit our feeble-minded justice system". Hearing them "represents an exercise in state masochism". I suspect that if members of Hastings' club had been treated like the Kikuyu, he would be shouting from the rooftops for redress. But Kenyans remain, as colonial logic demanded, the other, bereft of the features and feelings that establish our common humanity.

So, in the eyes of much of the elite, do welfare recipients, "problem families", Muslims and asylum seekers. The process of dehumanisation, so necessary to the colonial project, turns inwards. Until this nation is prepared to recognise what happened and how it was justified, Britain, like the countries it occupied, will remain blighted by imperialism.