When one starts hearing the educated elite complain about polio vaccine as a ‘conspiracy’ to control the Muslim population, when a country with the highest incidence of the disease sees its polio workers being mercilessly killed, when the attack on Karachi airport is placed at the doorsteps of Indians, when 9/11 is still denied and Ajmal Kasab is thought of as an Indian, it becomes clear that our sense of denial is complete.

But this is not the complete story. We survive on myths and it is easy to reinforce them through certain theories. Here are the myths we swear by: Pakistan is the fortress of Islam; Islam is a complete code of life; secularism is a conspiracy against Islam; Muslim Ummah will eventually form one state (Khilafah); Western civilisation is pitched against Islam.

From the claims of a moth-eaten Pakistan with an unfair division of assets and handing over of princely states to India to the angels coming to the rescue of Pakistani soldiers in the 1965 war, the direction of the fortress of Islam was well laid out.

What followed was a consequence of the fact that the state wanted to control the "flow of information" and "proliferate certain nationalistic, religious, and political narratives". These three narratives were combined by the dominant West Pakistan to reject the people in East Pakistan. This is being done in a slightly different manner once again in the case of Balochistan.

In our case, as Nadeem Farooq Paracha rightly states, the proliferation of mythical narratives is not the prerogative of the establishment anymore. Over the decades, he reminds us, "it has trickled down and is used by the political parties, religious outfits, and the electronic media to meet their goals". Thus, a majority of Pakistanis are nurturing conspiracy theories and feeding on these myths and ‘half-baked truths’.

In a system that breeds lack of introspection and retards questioning minds, it is so plausible that no Malala was attacked and no shot was fired at Hamid Mir. Read on to see how these conspiracy theories have harmed us.