The citizens states produce

The states, or political elites, throughout the world, are successful: they have come to control almost all the aspects of individual citizen’s life in most of the countries.

They control the “creation and cultivation” of human beings!

They do this:

1. By capturing the state and its institutions; 

2. By establishing ministries of information and communication (and things like that);

3. By controlling education, especially by deciding what is to be taught in schools, colleges, universities, and other educational entities;

4. By establishing public sector education;

5. By regulating private sector education;

6. By controlling print and electronic media;

7. By setting up their own print and electronic media entities;

8. By regulating print and electronic media;

9. By setting up their own news agencies;

10. By inserting intellectual and ideological strictures in their constitutions;

11. By instituting plethora of such laws, rules and regulations which reduce the day to day life of the individual citizens to a Sisyphean routine of meaninglessness;   

12. By designing such state machinery which is the greatest exploiter and the blood-sucker of the ordinary citizens and the like of which human history has never witnessed;

13. By prepossessing this or that intellectual, cultural, literary, artistic heritage;

14. By establishing cultural, linguistic, literary, and such institutions and academies;

15. By not endowing such institutions, academies, and entities with autonomous status;

16. By running a continuous stream of insidious propaganda against this or that imagined enemy and fanning militarism against it;

17. By sanctifying patriotism, nationalism, localism, tribalism – while qualifying these ephemeral enclosures with transient political boundaries;

18. By politicizing religions and beliefs of their citizens;

19. By erecting groups and organizations to serve their hidden or open agendas;

20. By strengthening these and such entities to fight other views, trends, and philosophies;

21. By following agendas of such and other un-democratic groups and organizations;

22. By belittling, harassing, besieging, subjugating and subduing the individual citizens;

Last but not least:

23. By denying individual citizens their innate freedom and fundamental rights.

By doing all this, the states, or political elites try to produce the type of citizens who suit them, their agenda and their interests. And, to a larger extent, they have succeeded.

They are producing mindless citizens, intellectual robots, and political toys.

Additionally, they have succeeded in producing a new class of citizens; call them: Pro-Elite individuals. (For details, see my Urdu book: The Rise of State Aristocracy in Pakistan) In Urdu, I have termed this class as Ashrafiya-nawaz, meaning Pro-Aristocracy, or Pro-Elite.

They are the born supporters of the State Aristocracy. They spend their whole life aping the ways of the elites, and the greatest achievement of their life is to reach the peripheries of the state power and taste it and they know well for this to happen they need to follow slavishly in the footsteps of the State Aristocracy.

In short, their burning desire is to be like the Master, the Indifferent Ruler; an avatar of the Elite.

So the states which aim at producing such citizens deny any personal freedom to their citizens. And almost all of the states indulge in such “creation and cultivation of citizens.”

On the one hand, the states which bestow their citizens comparatively a greater degree of personal freedom are on the path to gaining total control of their citizens’ lives on this or that pretext.

On the other, those which used to exercise “total quality control” over their citizens are under ever increasing pressure to loosen the noose.

A real dilemma, on both sides!

Here is an instance, the latest one, from China about the quality of citizens such states produce:

Beijing - man beaten for driving Japanese car files suit

The lawyer for Li Jianli, who was badly beaten in Xi’an for driving a Japanese-made car during anti-Japan protests in China last month, said on Friday that Mr. Li had decided to file a lawsuit against the local police on grounds of “serious negligence.”

In the complaint submitted to the Lianhu district court, Mr. Li accused the police of failing to respond quickly and effectively to the violence during the protests. He is seeking compensation of 500, 000 renminbi, or about $80, 000 from the police to recover his medical expenses and property damage costs. Mr. Li suffered a smashed skull and is slowly recovering.

Mr. Li’s attacker, Cai Yang, is also believed to have sustained head injury, which he may have received when Mr. Li in trying to protect his car against the mob, threw a brick into the crowd, according to a report in the newspaper Southern Weekend. Mr. Cai has been arrested and is awaiting trial.

[International Herald Tribune, Pakistan Print Edition, October 13-14, 2012]

Finally, let me add:

Two things matter:

1. The state is not an end in-itself; it is an instrument to protect individuals from other individuals and groups of individuals. It is not to be used for any other purpose whatsoever.

2. Individual human being is the ultimate unit of all analyses, and is a value in-itself, an end in-itself, as Kant put it. He ought to be the One for whom and for whose facilitation the whole apparatus of the state machinery exists.

Let us see how many citizens are there where we live who are allowed to enjoy power over their selves and who are free to cultivate themselves, and how many citizens are there which the state and its non-state-actors have produced and cultivated.

In the last analysis, the quality of citizens’ life depends on this indicator.

Of course, the counting may be difficult, almost impossible; and it would be inhuman too.

So let us examine the ways states behave with their citizens, like authoritarian and totalitarian parents, or as protectors of the rights and freedoms, and the life and property of their citizens.

Let us try to confine states to their original protective function!

Hopefully, this may restore individuality and uniqueness to each and every individual life!

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