Pragmatism

If exporting pork earns Pakistan dollars, then Pakistan will sell pork.

Symbolic Nationalism: My dick is bigger than yours. Pragmatic Nationalism: Pull my dick and I’ll pull yours. Let’s grow together.

In times of national distress, many Youtubers like Shehzad Ghias and Syed Muzammil have cropped up who demean Pakistan and blame moral degradation for our economic downfall. They target everything from two nation theory to our societal fabric, sometimes for the right reasons.

A symbolic nationalist would be enraged: “How dare they!!!” A pragmatic nationalist, however, pauses to think. “Does digging old grave help?” Certainly not. The only things that differentiate us from India are the software exports and local manufacturing. Indians are far more bigoted than us, so our appalling treatment of Bengalis has nothing to do with our economic downfall.

So, a pragmatic nationalist should vilify these Youtubers like I have done in other chapters of this book, right? Wrong.

The fact is that most of their audience is from India. Nothing makes Indians hornier than anti-Pakistani content. From a pragmatist’s point of view, that means more ad revenue from India, which means more dollars from Indian advertising companies landing in Pakistan, which is a win-win situation for us.

So, Shehzad and Muzammil, if you need more inflammatory content against Pakistan to arouse the Indians, ping me.

People often ask me what is your opinion on the current political chaos in Pakistan. I will employ the art of anthropomorphism to comment on this. Other parties use animals like lions, cheetahs, sharks, shaheens, markhors to extrude sensational positivity. In contrast, we would like to think of ourselves as vultures, highly pragmatic animals that are commonly vilified in popular culture.

While the lions are busy fighting each other we will silently hover in the skies. Once the lions have mortally injured each other, we will feed off their carcass and the remains of the hunted animal they were fighing over. We have absolutely no interest in who stole whose underwear or who is whose agent. We'll let the Goliaths fight while we discuss policy and solutions.