Sickness of the Soul: The Psychological Prison of Pakistan’s Youth
“Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar”
This is the first line of the German Constitution which translates into: ‘the human dignity shall be inviolable.’ The word ‘unantastbar’ can be broken down into its prefix (-un) meaning ‘not,’ suffix (-bar) meaning ‘capable of being,’ and the root word (-antast) meaning ‘to touch or lay hands on.’ The choice of this word demonstrates the sacredness of human dignity to such an extent that no hand may even touch it.
Throughout history, the sanctity of human dignity has stood at the heart of political revolutions and movements for social change. During a 1963 speech titled ‘I Have a Dream,’ Martin Luther King Jr. described the struggle of the Civil Rights Movement as one fought on the ‘high plane of dignity and discipline.’ Referring to the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, King reminded each one of his 250,000 supporters about the unalienable rights promised to them.
But why did King not simply call upon the government to fulfill these promises? Why did he instead turn to ordinary black Americans, urging them to recognize their own dignity regardless of whether the state was willing to acknowledge it?
Young graduates of Pakistani universities today face a similar predicament, needing a reminder of their inherent worth and dignity. Their tale unfolds in a fairly predictable way: by the final year of their undergraduate studies, they find themselves desperately scouring the market for whichever high paying job they can find. Right or wrong becomes irrelevant. Future ambitions become irrelevant. Passion becomes irrelevant. The ‘reality’ of the job market and the language of ‘survival’ become convenient excuses even to graduates whose educational and socio-economic privilege affords them far greater financial freedom than most. By framing decisions taken solely on economic grounds as ‘necessities’ rather than ‘choices,’ they sidestep the more uncomfortable but important question of whether the line of work chosen is in any sense ‘meaningful’ in the grand scheme of things.
“The reduction of an individual’s identity to their economic function has been normalized to the point where success is exclusively a name for salary and prestige at the workplace.”
However, this trajectory is far from inevitable. No matter how hard they try to bend this decision as a necessity, they have, in fact, made a choice: to pursue one path and not many others. Other paths being those they could wholeheartedly accept as their calling, work that no one else could do as well as them because it draws upon their passions and intrinsic motivation. Paths which are much more relevant to the needs of their community and society. Such paths, ironic as it may sound, may even have led them towards greater financial success precisely because they would’ve been authentically rooted in who they are and what they could uniquely contribute to a world where everyone is competing for the same thing. However, in their desperateness, they fail to see this and make a hasty choice.
It is this choice that ultimately determines whether these young graduates will find themselves engaged in a meaningful line of work with unending room for passionate learning or sow the seeds of a particular kind of sickness: one where they consciously trade their dignity for a paycheck.
Why call this a trade of dignity?
According to Oxford Review, the word ‘human dignity’ refers to the intrinsic worth and respect that every individual deserves simply by being human. Although this dignity is inherent, it is experienced and reinforced through different aspects of life, perhaps the chief among which is one’s profession, which not only takes up most of their time, but also constitutes the primary mode of contribution into the society. Workplace dignity, therefore, is the self-recognized and other-recognized worth acquired from engaging in a work activity. A close examination into the phrasing of the definition implies that it is in relation to work that this workplace dignity is nurtured. It is not received as a compensation for the job done but acquired in the process of engaging with the task at hand and with fellow workers.
However, when you speak to a young Pakistani graduate about their job, it takes surprisingly little effort to see how weak their relationship is to their work, specifically when monetary compensation was the sole reason for undertaking it in the first place. This happens due to a number of reasons:
First, questions of personal interest and passion are pushed aside when the decision to choose a career path is motivated just by the pursuit of wealth. Over time, this reduces the individual to a replaceable cog in the machine because their work is no longer an expression of their talents but is merely transactional, creating a fundamental rupture between the individual’s unique capacities and the work they perform.
Secondly, individuals making career decisions based on the best financial package are less likely to question whether they personally subscribe to the organization’s motives and worldviews. Consequently, it is increasingly common to find young professionals in corporate workplaces who feel profoundly disconnected from their employer’s missions, convinced that the work they perform contributes little to the common good as they understand it.
Harmless on the surface and repackaged as an ideal case for ‘work-life balance,’ this is a psychological disaster. For an action to be produced in a certain direction, it must rest upon a particular set of beliefs and values. Therefore, for an individual to carry out a task with integrity, they must, at some level, believe in the value of purpose that task serves. Consider a simple instruction: “Recording inventories accurately to ensure the monthly sales KPIs are met.” An employee executing this action must believe that these KPIs have some kind of significance. This means that even to perform something as trivial as replacing an empty tissue box in the workplace, an individual must regard the organization’s mandate worthwhile to some extent.
“Work is reduced to a source of income, completely severed from deeper questions of every individual’s purpose, responsibility, and identity.”
At the same time, the individual’s personal self and their intuition constantly reject the worldviews held by their organizations, regarding its motives as meaningless and of little use. This belief, contradictory to the one held by their professional self, must also inevitably produce some action. This resistance then surfaces in the form of passive disengagement with their work and quiet hostility towards their colleagues and the institution as a whole.
These socially dignified individuals then end up selling the very foundation of their workplace dignity, namely the integrity of their relationship to their work and the institution they serve. In return, they end up with two contradictory systems of belief. The first requires them to be in agreement with the organization’s mission just enough to perform their role with competence. The second is their private conviction that their organization’s purpose is unworthy and disconnected from their values, therefore devoid of meaning. These two systems of beliefs, completely cut off from one another, pull the individual in opposite directions and produce a state of internal conflict that fragments the self. Over time, this psychological disintegration does not only erode their character but also their capacity to live a whole and meaningful life.
In his dystopian novel ‘1984’, George Orwell coined the term ‘doublethink,’ where the infamous slogans of the Party: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength” were used to psychologically manipulate the civilians. In a modern workplace, the individuals take up the role of a totalitarian dictator themselves by giving up their agency and learning to profess values they do not genuinely believe in. Such compartmentalization first compromises their individual integrity and ultimately distorts their view of reality.
The situation facing young Pakistanis today is very similar in its structure. The reduction of an individual’s identity to their economic function has been normalized to the point where success is exclusively a name for salary and prestige at the workplace. The question of purpose and meaning is treated as secondary and even looked down upon as something irrational. In corporate settings, this arrangement serves the elite who benefit from their institutions populated by highly skilled yet extremely detached workers. In public settings, institutional decay spreads like a dirty mold, entrenching itself into every sector to the point that even the most basic necessities can no longer be ensured.
Confronted with such state of affairs, a question arises: why is this happening? Why do those entrusted with public office fail to perform their jobs? The answer lies in the realization that these people do not see their work as an expression of their dignity or as central to their understanding of success and a meaningful life. Instead, work is reduced to a source of income, completely severed from deeper questions of every individual’s purpose, responsibility, and identity.
Thus, when Martin Luther King Jr. undertook the task of leading his people out of perpetual slavery of white supremacists, he chose to address the ordinary individual. This is because common black people bore the humiliation and injustice of the system in Civil Rights America. The political and economic elite, being its architects and beneficiaries, were never going to question the system. This meant that any action to change the course of these events had to emerge from those living under its weight and it did. Similarly, if things are to change in Pakistan, here too it is the young people who will have to reconsider the path they have taken in their lives. Otherwise, the future is simply going to bring more of the same.