A 'Development' Tragedy–Pakistan#4

Night

At night, I reflect. Nothing happened today. And everything happened. The micro-glimpse into R’s work shattered me not through drama but through her NGO’s accumulated weight of patient kindness operating within madness. Genuine work hidden behind a huge veil of extraction masked as help, seemingly invisible – at first sight.

In the afternoon I had again been in the 7 star hotel office. The dynamics between national and international staff struck me in particular after having talked to R. In-groups and out-groups. Already being white makes me an in-group of power here. Another expert from Switzerland. This is how the membrane maintains itself.


Why do I not speak up? In many conversations, I felt muted. And screaming inside. The dynamics seem designed precisely to make right speech impossible. Not through overt suppression but through sophisticated absorption. Because I had spoken up in the beginning conversations on a possible consultancy. I had even refused their work offer at first. I had researched with minutiae how to do things different this time – they never turned me down. Any alternative approach and constructive critique I had raised in the past months was politely acknowledged, appreciated, and then integrated into the next timeline, the next framework, the next deliverable. Is this the genius of late-stage institutional capture? That it has learned to metabolize its own critique?

I am reminded of a statement: "We do study tours to Germany. […] The government employees always ask for mountain workshops for better concentration". Childish questions masking corruption and racketing, but the mask itself is semi-transparent. Maybe because they consider me in-group, or maybe because they feel more at peace with their contradictions when they have a witness. 


I start playing with an existential question – what if November first stood on my tombstone? Business class flights to Bangkok on weekends are technologies for not-dying, for floating above consequence, for deferring the confrontation with finitude that would make the present intolerable. I thought this business-as-usual would be impossible in the context of collapse. And the system "be like: watch me." I thought everyone would have seen. Yet seeing is not the only necessity. The epistemology that makes seeing inconsequential is the problem.

And there’s many good people here – and yet they become transmission vectors for harm. Not through inherent malice but through the understandable human desire to remain in relationship, to not disrupt, to be kind. But distinction is critical here – the difference between the kindness that maintains pathogenic comfort and the care that allows systems to feel their own consequences. When you smooth over the contradiction, when you don't speak up, you are not avoiding conflict. You are choosing which conflict to participate in. The one you avoid (interpersonal discomfort with colleagues) or the one you enable (the continued operation of systems that are literally eating the Himalayas).

It seems like the neo-colonial development apparatus we have grown since the establishment of the UN has systematically destroyed the conditions under which genuine differentiation of right and wrong could be recognized. There is no feedback loop that could constitute accountability. Consequences are externalized to villages that will flood next, to mountain ecosystems, to other species and to future generations. What remains is credentialing, process, legibility to donors – and super good payment.

This is not authority. This is a simulation that has forgotten to connect to what it simulates. Yet we need accountability to consequences.

So how can I be of help here? Does my throw-back experience to a life in development cooperation have nothing more in stock than seeing the pathologies more clearly? How to not be enabler or amplifier? There is no clean position. I am already in the system. The money that pays for my presence, the infrastructure that supports my work, the institutional legitimacy that makes my speech legible – all of this is built from the same pathogenic logic my whole being opposes. And what it boils down to is that I feel entrapped. When under high pressure, the only way to not play is to exit, but exit means abandoning whatever small leverage I have. The only way to stay with the chance to be heart and met is to compromise, but compromise means becoming the compromise. Is it?


What I can do is to refuse to let the compromise become invisible. The shattered views are the signal. The sleeplessness is the feedback – from a source deeper and more entangled than my mind can perceive. The felt sense of dying happening in and around me is my organism responding appropriately to a relationality-denying context. I feel deeply depressed here. And it seems to me that depression, often only seen a pathology in and of an individual, is an appropriate response. If I would not allow myself to feel that, to shove it away, I would increase numbening to life itself, to have achieved the professional detachment that the system selects for.

But feeling it is not enough. The depression must become directed. Not toward self-destruction but toward refusal. Refusal to let the contradictions smooth over. Refusal to participate in the fiction that frameworks and change of mindsets are responses. Refusal to let the study tours and mountain workshops pass without naming what they are. Not dramatic confrontation – that can be absorbed – but persistent naming of the patterns.

The framing of a workshop: "We know this is not about learning. What are we actually doing here?" When the colleague mentions the perverse donor dinner, my response even as a bystander should not be silence. The response should be: "What does it mean that we continue after noticing?" These interventions don't change the system. But they make it impossible to operate the system unconsciously. They insert friction that demands either transformation or explicit choice to continue anyway.

In the Garden

I really cannot sleep. So I go outside. Barefoot, to hug the tree again. My mind ruminates on: Where is nature in all this? The dying Himalayas are not elsewhere. They are constituted by the accumulated consequence of these micro-interactions, these choices to smooth over, these study tours and mountain workshops, these business-class flights and cost-savings framed as efficiency. The serene glacial valleys – this is the aesthetic that allows extraction. Nature as scenery, as resource whose protection can be claimed and financed without actually doing so. Never seen as the living context within which your breathing is embedded, never as kinship but as the chance of having a problem to solve.

The more I reflect, the more I want out. I notice that there's a huge degree of suffering in me, as my mind starts to ideate death. I am deeply disturbed. What does that mean if my mind and body keep living, at least to a performative degree? 

These are not metaphors. The biological fact is that I am temporarily organized eddy of matter within the larger flow of an ecosystem that is currently undergoing catastrophic simplification. A mould threated to be squeezed into a cookie-cutter. My grief is not psychological dysfunction. It is accurate perception. The question is what kind of agency remains possible within this state.

And yet I still feel and see what is happening. This means I still have the capacity for response – for responsibility. The depression cannot be the endpoint. It must be the ground for a different kind of engagement. Not the engagement that believes it can fix, not the engagement that maintains optimism through denial, but the engagement that operates with full knowledge of current trajectories while refusing to accelerate any of them.

I wonder about the international colleagues of the project which I have met so far, the ones who see me as an in-group. Why does no one seem to care about the most big and meaningful missions? Because caring at that scale requires confronting complicity at every scale? Because it requires feeling the serene glacial valleys not as beautiful scenery but as living tissue currently being dissolved by systems we participate in? It requires acknowledging that the morning coffee, the flight to Bangkok, the mountain workshop, the salary – all of this is metabolized harm? 

It seems like most humans cannot sustain this awareness. 

The psyche has immune responses. It finds ways to "not-know" what it knows.

The system selects for those who can maintain the separation. This is why this ‘work sector’ looks the same three years later after I left. Those who couldn't maintain the separation left. They will be replaced by other young careerists wanting to ‘help the world’.

But now I came back. 
I cannot fight the system. Fighting is mostly useless and requires an outside position I don't have. But I can refuse to be its instrument. I can insist on making visible the contradictions it depends on remaining invisible. I can ask the questions that bypass institutional absorption: What if November first stood on your tombstone? What are we actually doing here? What life is possible with a burdened consciousness?


I can negotiate the meaning I give to things. I had always imagined that by learning more about myself I would develop some sort of an immunity to pathology. But what I notice is more a quality receptivity. Not to continue within the same pattern, but to continue toward something the pattern cannot accommodate. What if November first stood on your tombstone? What are we actually doing here? What life is possible with a burdened consciousness?


Finding Allies

These questions don't have answers. They have consequences. The consequence is that those around me must either engage at the level I'm wanting to meet them or explicitly choose not to. Either way, the unconscious operation becomes impossible. The membrane thins. Some will attack me for this. Some will avoid me. Some – the ones with skin still in the game – will recognize what I'm doing and know they're not alone.

Find the others – there are always others – who are also awake, also unable to sleep, also carrying the weight of seeing. We have to build different kinds of relationships, different kinds of speech, different kinds of practice that don't require the institutional membrane.

Stop expecting the system to transform by having a better model and start creating pockets where different rules apply step by step. Temporary autonomous zones of actual accountability, actual consequence, actual care. These don't scale. They're not meant to. They're meant to preserve the capacity for response while the larger system exhausts itself.

The Himalayas are dying. I am dying. You are dying. These deaths are related. What remains possible is choosing how you die.


This is not optimism. It's something else. The choice to remain "response-able" within catastrophe.