By:Dr. Nasser Hussyn Bukhari
Published By:ANI News Agency
There is a particular kind of darkness that does not fall from the sky but is manufactured, deliberately, in press conferences and television studios, in the curated outrage of social media timelines. It is the darkness of despair and in Pakistan today, it has become a political currency more valuable than any manifesto. To understand our present malaise, one must first understand that hopelessness, far from being an accident of circumstance, is often a strategy, and that its target is not merely our politics but our psychology.
Politics, at its noblest, is the art of imagining a better collective future and organizing people toward it. But a grim inversion has taken hold in our public life: politics as the art of convincing citizens that no future is possible at all. Failure is narrated, not merely reported. Every currency fluctuation becomes proof of civilizational collapse; every institutional friction, evidence that the state itself is a doomed experiment. This is not analysis; it is dramaturgy and its authors understand precisely what they are doing: manufacturing a public mood so bleak that citizens stop believing renewal is even conceivable.
To grasp why this is so corrosive, we must turn from political science to psychology, for the politics of despair does not merely shape opinion that rewires the mind. The American psychologist Martin Seligman, in his foundational research on what he termed "learned helplessness," demonstrated that organisms repeatedly exposed to conditions they cannot control eventually stop trying to change their circumstances, even when escape becomes possible. The lesson generalizes disturbingly well to nations: a citizenry told, year after year, election after election, that every institution is irredeemably corrupt and every leader equally treacherous, eventually stops believing that voting, protest, or civic participation can alter anything at all. Seligman's later work on "learned hopefulness" offers the inverse lesson that agency, like helplessness, can be relearned, but only when people are shown, concretely, that their actions produce results. A political culture addicted to gloom denies citizens precisely this evidence.
The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl who studied the human capacity to endure suffering under the most extreme conditions imaginable, arrived at a related conclusion: those who survived catastrophe psychologically intact were rarely those who denied their circumstances, but those who retained some thread of meaning and future orientation even amid devastation. Frankl's insight was that hope is not a luxury emotion reserved for comfortable times, it is a psychological necessity, without which even material survival becomes difficult to sustain. A politics that systematically strips citizens of that thread, that insists the future holds nothing but repetition of failure, is not merely uninspiring. It is, in the clinical sense, a public health hazard.
Nor does the damage stop at apathy. The psychologist Albert Bandura, whose research on social learning and aggression remains foundational to our understanding of collective violence, showed that hostility is often not spontaneous but modeled and absorbed from the environment, rehearsed, and eventually normalized as a legitimate response to grievance. When political discourse consistently frames fellow citizens, institutions, or ethnic and sectarian groups as the source of one's despair, it does not merely describe division; it teaches it. Bandura's concept of moral disengagement ,the psychological mechanisms by which ordinary people come to justify harm against others helps explain how a steady diet of blame and dehumanizing rhetoric can quietly lower the threshold between political frustration and actual violence. Pakistan's own history of politically inflamed mob action and sectarian unrest did not emerge from nowhere; it was, in no small part, rehearsed in words long before it was enacted in the streets.
The social psychologist Gordon Allport, writing on the roots of prejudice, observed that societies under strain often resolve their anxiety by locating an enemy, a scapegoat onto whom collective frustration can be discharged. Political parties that relentlessly narrate national failure, without offering a credible path toward repair, do precisely this: they convert diffuse public anxiety into targeted resentment, whether against a rival province, a religious minority, an institution, or "the system" writ large. This is how despair curdles into something more dangerous than cynicism.
None of this is destiny. It is, rather, the predictable psychological consequence of a specific political choice and choices can be unmade. This is why our politicians bear a responsibility heavier than they seem to grasp: the words they choose in press conferences are not merely rhetorical weapons but psychological interventions, for better or for worse, young minds still forming their picture of what this country is and can become. A leader who chooses relentless negativity is not simply scoring points against a rival; he is, whether he intends it or not, teaching an entire generation the grammar of helplessness and grievance.
Pakistan's youth are not asking for illusions. They are asking, in the language Seligman and Frankl would recognize, for evidence that agency still exists that effort produces outcomes, that voice still matters, that the future is not already written. That evidence will not descend from the heavens. It must be built, deliberately, by a political class willing to trade the easy currency of despair for the harder, slower currency of credible hope. The politics of despair may be Pakistan's present affliction. Psychology teaches us it need not be permanent and it must not be mistaken for our destiny.
