Truth is caught in a vise whatever the situation

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan The Daily Star Asia News Network Dhaka

Truth is caught in a vise when everything is right and everything is wrong. Talk to anyone you like, and that is the impression you are going to get. Nobody is wrong in this country, yet nothing is right. Only thing right is wrong, and only thing wrong is right. Everybody blames, nobody claims. Everybody shows, nobody knows. We are all innocent and we are all guilty.

Pick anyone and engage in a conversation with him. He will tell you all about what this country needs to fix. He will tell you how politicians are corrupt, businessmen are greedy, and bureaucrats are wicked. He will tell you how teachers cheat, leaders deal, priests pretend and the scholars snitch. He will show understanding, he will show regret, and he will show a great concern for the future of this country and his children.

But try blaming him for anything, and he will recoil like an angry snake. Nobody does anything wrong, yet nothing goes right. We are strange people with absurd minds. We have problem not solution. We have ambition not hope. We have illusion not dream. We have emotion not vision. We have knowledge not wisdom. We have education not learning.

Talk to anybody, and he will remind you of Tennyson's famous quote in Idylls of the King The Passing of Arthur: "And the days darken round me, and the years/ Among new men, strange faces, other minds." Faces recede as forces proceed, animals roar inside rational shells, while every man hunts every other man, and turns society into a respective bargain for collective ruin. Everybody pretends innocence and everybody portends guilt.

Heraclitus wrote in 500 B.C., "One cannot step twice into the same river", because it is endlessly flowing, changing, moving with fresh waters. People change here all the time and you will never catch them saying the same thing twice. They shift all the time like moving targets. They elude truth before truth eludes them.

Ask anyone, he will claim to be honest. It is always the other man who is dishonest. He spends more than he earns, he buys more than he sells and he owes more than he owns. He is a contradiction unto himself, because he will criticize others for his mistakes. He never does anything wrong, the other man never does anything right.

Everybody refuses to take blame and everybody refuses to take responsibility, and truth falls through the crack. The criminals blame the police, the police blame the lawyers, the lawyers blame the judges, the judges blame the politicians and the politicians blame each other. There are many more circuits of blame. Students blame teachers, patients blame doctors, subordinates blame supervisors, husbands blame wives, and the list goes on.

"Everything which may be said of me in my relations with the Other applies to him as well", said Marquis de Sade. In Being and Nothingness, he described all human relations as conflict relations in which one seeks to enslave or possess another's freedom.

Ask anybody in this country, and he will tell you about his conflict. He wants to belong and possess at the same time, he wants recognition and revenge, and he needs others for his glory but wishes to erase them for his galore.

So everybody lives in himself and he dies in others. Truth is caught in that vise, because every man is as good as the other man is bad. Everybody wishes to be affirmed in his denial of others in a bizarre twist of what is comparable to the Archimidean Law. Ask anybody, he will tell you in so many ways that he would be as well off as the wellbeing of the person he liked to displace.

The society, therefore, is a contradiction, the collective pursuit of the individual. Everybody is right in that pursuit and everybody is wrong, depending on whose perspective you take, depending on whose side of the story hits you first. It's somewhat the vindication of Thrasymachus's famous doctrine that "might makes right". Everybody believes in might, because that makes everything right.

Talk to anybody you like, and you will never know who is right and who is wrong in this country. Oscar Wilde defines hypocrisy in The Importance of Being Earnest, "I hope you haven't been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time." Talk to anybody and that double life is other way around, he is pretending to be good and being wicked all the time. There is terrible erosion of trust in this country. Everybody doubts everybody else, each thinks the other is not what he appears.

It's doubt not trust that holds this society. Nobody is interested in the next man because he is trustworthy, but because it is interesting to know what he is up to. That is how government runs in this country. You vote it into power not because you know it will be good, but because you want to take a chance with it. You want to see how it does even though you know it will not do well.

That is also how you elect your member of parliament, your ward commissioner, your union council, your school committee, labor unions, everything and everybody needing your votes. You are not looking for the highest relief, but the lowest mischief and you have to play dice with your vote. Truth is caught in a vise, because none of the candidates must be trusted, and one of them must be voted.

Hence, people don't percolate politics, rather politics percolates them. Hence, everybody behaves in the politically correct way; right and wrong being not so important. And, politically correct politics offsets people, their power diminished by their own stratagem. Everybody claims to be right and nobody claims to be wrong. People are indistinguishable from their politicians.

The outcome is not unexpected, everywhere truth is missing, somewhat fabricated. Truth is sheltered in falsehood, right is rolled into wrong, and moral is molded into immoral, while vices are vaulted in virtues. Everywhere you turn, you see many epiphanies of truth, but the real truth is absent.

Greek philosopher Parmenides claimed that reality was a single, unchanging thing and change was only an illusion. Talk to anybody you like, and you will find him deluded from illusion to illusion. Everything he speaks, thinks, sees, and believes, everything he contends, pretends and attends, everything he preaches, teaches, and breaches, he only touches truth through a membrane of illusion.

Truth is caught in a vise between reality and illusion, between people and politics, between right and wrong. Ask anybody, you will find that in his doubts, misgivings and apprehensions. Everybody is an illusion to everybody else, and the society is a Magic Lantern Show.

Sort that out, and you will have sorted out half of your confusions.