Voices of stray dogs

The real reason and will to freedom lies in an instinctual drive of the primordial being in a complex world of abstraction, distortion and structural strangulation of the right to expression.

This primordial ingenuity in a Heideggerian sense of experience to live at will is best manifested in the community of stray dogs. The stray dogs’ vengeance can be a new addition of phrases to English lexicon to describe the action of those infringed social groups who dare to resist the discourses of the control of mind and soul and who defy the normal and the mundane with the primordial and genuine feeling of living beyond the confines of social, political and intellectual conditionings.

In an era of post-ideology, the human is reduced to a disengaged and disconnected lot who can be tamed, controlled and moulded through structures of enslavement with a diminishing possibility of emancipation and imagination of supplanting political and social domains of coercion. The stigma of living a life of enslavement is uglier than being a stray dog with the privilege to live at will with a full realisation of instinctual and primordial freedom.

The mode of living of stray dogs is enviable for those who strive to defy the abnormality of the normal, the mundane and the inexpressive living of timidity. Enviable indeed is the space of expression, the sense of togetherness and the solidarity that emboldens stray dogs to bark; they also bite the insensibility of the surliness of our human of the era of post-ideology.

Ideology is not dead indeed but it has lost the gadfly of Socrates with its potential to sting the sluggish into life. The ideology of the corporate world to control human behaviour has become more articulated today than the ideologies of the so-called era of modernity of grand narratives. The postmodern choice of democracy is farcical because it tends to impose choices of commodities upon a disengaged consumer whose ability to think as a citizen for political choices has been denuded by manufacturing consent, in Chomsky’s words, through corporate sponsored media. 

The choice between various soft drinks is not a democratic choice. Rather, it is an outcome of marketing an unhealthy carbonated drink to sell to a depoliticised and ill-informed consumer. Real democracy lies in the ability of citizens to make political choices through co-creation of knowledge, the ideology of change and to imagine the best possible society to realise the freedoms of expression, association, action and wealth creation. There has never been any era of post-ideology for the powerful and affluent class, which rules with its tentacles of ideological control sharper than ever to penetrate deep inside the social, political, spiritual and psychological domains of the ruled.

The spirit of the antithesis of dominant ideology is diluted and dissipated in the face of the ideology of consumerism where choices can only be bought but not exercised at will in a global society of accumulation of economic, social and political resources by a tiny unrepresentative class. In the ugly world of profiteering, democracy, choice, equity, pluralism and tolerance are the euphemisms used to dislodge the ideology of resistance and transformation because this ideology of transformation and its proponents pose the fundamental question of equal distribution and ownership of resources.

Stray dogs live together, share their food, defend their spaces and do not let a few powerful wild animals control their way of living. They fight till their last to protect their right of ownership of the spaces and resources of their survival. In the era of post-ideology, humans have lost their instinctual behaviour of will to freedom. And our tragedy continues when corporate-sponsored pseudo intellectuals  produce research to justify alienation as individualism and freedom of choice.

What happened in the recent American elections was that Hillary Clinton, with all her political correctness and euphemistic expression, lost to a wild card like Donald Trump. In the absence of a community of stray dogs to defy structural coercion, Trump played smartly with the instincts of millions of Americans who found in Trump a challenge to powerful corporates; this resonated well with people’s instinct of freedom.

The most damaging part for Hillary Clinton was her years’ long association with the American establishment; she did not offer any prospects of change, despite being the favourite of the politically correct American corporate media. For all his follies, filthy language and unacceptable behaviour for the politically correct segments of the middle classes, Trump’s ability to bite at the forces of the establishment catapulted him to the heights of popularity.  Trump’s politics of far-right populism of emotions and identity worked well in the US where the working class experienced a fear of losing jobs and identity because of immigrants.

The fears and insecurities of the working class was capitalised better by Trump than the discourse of the Left for workers’ solidarity above identity and collective action to fight back their rights of access to affordable social services. Trump’s political motives are detrimental to the possibility of a social welfare state because they will divide the bargaining power of the working class, and hence will reinforce the unaccountable economic exploitation of unbridled capitalism.

Having said that, Trump will never be able to play as a stray dog to lead his people into a community of free thinking – in defiance of American capitalism – because it would take someone like Fidel Castro to free the corporate enslaved Americans. One of the most pronounced proponents of freedom from contemporary American imperialism and its structural violence and ideological hegemony has left us for his eternal abode.

Fidel Castro was abhorred by those who did not have guts to jettison political correctness for fear of being stigmatised. It takes a community of stray dogs again to place the spirit of freedom above all mundane considerations of stigma, fear of losing civility in a cruel world of profiteering and losing lucrative material pursuits. Only such people can speak for icons of transformative politics such as Fidel Castro.

The concept of a stray dog is a powerful one as it unleashes the human potential for being the epitome of defiance to the order of control by giving way to freedom of association. It encapsulates the spirit of resilience, opens up the possibility to speak the mind and heart and it helps nurture a new tradition of critical thinking that we have lost in pursuit of an alienated mode of living.

The reader may find it disgusting to compare human free will and spirit of defiance with stray dogs but it is about biting our insensibilities which impede the possibility of transformation and to awaking our instinct of freedom.

Stray dogs defend their territorial spaces, their freedom of movement, their way of expression and their resilient character to recoup under the odds. The human must learn from stray dogs about how to protect social and political spaces, how to dislodge the order of control and how to secure and enjoy freedom. Our rationality and scientific progress have failed us. Our only hope is the instinctual predisposition for freedom to achieve the goal of liberation of mind and heart and to create the social, political and economic order that serves our social needs. 

Pakistan needs those who have the spirit of resilience to survive, the spirit of freedom to express and will to dislodge the tyrannical rule of fear, bigotry and suppression. We must learn from stray dogs to defend our spaces in an era of shrinking spaces for critical thinking and dwindling writ for freedom-loving Pakistanis. The notion of stray dogs is no more a derogatory term in our age of terror, bigotry, cannibalism and annihilation for money and resources – thanks to our demonic pursuit of a few bucks at the cost of human freedom.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: ahnihal@yahoo.com