A 'Development' Tragedy–Pakistan#6

When the System Defends Itself

Next day, I tried to sort out the mess I had gotten myself in. Yet it got worse. Already in the morning, the newly bought SIM card wouldn't work. Hence the car order app failed. I took a public bus and a motorbike taxi to reach the meeting. Open as I am I shared this with a colleague – not as complaint but as data point, as check-in about how it was going for me. She interpreted this message as threat and reported to her superior. An hour later I get called into a disciplinary conversation. Told I wasn't taking their rules seriously and got threatened with exclusion from workshops and site visits.

I wonder for myself if this is what a system's immune response is. Not through reasoned disagreement but through the conversion of information. The gap between formal structure (you should use the car service) and actual conditions (the car service doesn't work) becomes not a systems problem to solve but an individual failure to comply. The messenger becomes the threat.

In the meeting another sentence: "The military is the source of all evil. But we cannot say that."

I am surprised that they know. When mapping the actor landscape I had quickly noticed how many threads led back to the military – never mentioned openly, always there. They can articulate it behind closed curtains. But the knowledge must remain quarantined, never allowed to inform action. The sentence contains its own contradiction. Non-enacted knowledge that survives not through truth value but through its compatibility with [institutional] survival. The system protects itself by making certain truths unspeakable – when everyone knows them. A known unknown.

Another one: "Villagers know how systems work. They understand that land rights of the military have something to do with their problems."

The villagers are directly affected by the contexts we talk about. They live in direct consequence. And they speak up. But this knowledge cannot scale into the institutional apparatus because the apparatus depends on maintaining the separation between knowing and consequence. The villagers' systems understanding – contextual, consequence-aware – threatens the development organization's systems understanding – abstract, sectoral, and consequence-protected. Their annual report will look like a success, no matter what.

I feel fear. Anger. I feel like a lonely survivor on a god-forsaken island. Who can I talk to unfiltered? Filtering - assuming positions and playing a role - feels sociopathic. And their shift to become persecutors of my behavior borderline. These are ubiquitous psychological dysfunctions. Yet dishonesty within this structure is dangerous long-term.

Isn't there more important stuff to do than to tell off a tiny-tiny consultant?

The conversation continues. I tell them I'm simply taking care of myself. That reacting to context was needed. That my consultancy feels like acting on sinking ships – while they tell me off without support in any way. My explanation gets rebutted as a blame game – responses amplifying my defensiveness in a positive feedback loop toward rupture. I make that transparent, name the pattern. One colleague softens. The second remains cold. In another life she could have also been a professional serial killer, I think to myself.

I'm reminded of Max Frisch’s – a Swiss author’s – report on the racism of Swiss people during the labor-migration from Italy in the 50s: they asked for a worker, and they got a human. The sentence captures the fundamental fraud of the employment relationship. They want my labor, my expertise. They do not want my humanity if it's in contradiction with the system – my needs, my perceptions, my inconvenient observations.

When did humanity become inefficient? Humanity needs SIM cards that work and responds to transportation failures as systems data rather than personal failing.

Arne Naess comes to mind: "I want to be a respectable plague."

Do I? The plague that announces itself, that makes its presence known, that cannot be ignored but also cannot be easily expelled because it maintains just enough respectability to require reckoning with. Persistent irritation. Not dramatic confrontation but steady refusal to let contradictions become comfortable.

The inquisitional meeting ends and I walk out of the office. My gosh, this is stressful. I thought that being a consultant is structurally unsuited to activism – but to being human? So little time to build the relationships that would provide substrate for transformation. So little leverage because I can always be removed. So much dependency on maintaining credibility within the very system I want to challenge. The conflict today achieved at least a bit of honesty. This is the best available outcome in a structure designed to prevent honesty. The question is what to do with even a bit of honesty in a sea of enforced indirection. 

So far I had little direct interaction with my Pakistani colleagues. They told me that Pakistani culture was incredibly indirect, so I should learn more from the workshops than direct interviews. But I notice by having talked to R that the indirectness of national colleagues is much stronger – it is itself also a systems response. In a context where the military is called the "source of all evil" while one cannot say that, indirectness is a survival strategy. It's not cultural preference but adaptation to consequence. My directness, coded as Western, as privileged, as consultant, reads as either naivety or aggression because it doesn't account for the actual risks others face. I can leave. They cannot. This asymmetry structures every interaction.

I go into my accommodation and continue to reflect.

They understand systems as "connected problems/sectors." Already one step further than most people do. Yet there is more. How to have them take a more sense-making informed perspective? I don't know. Not because they're incapable but because the understanding I'm trying to get across would make their jobs impossible. To see systems as an ecology – circular causation, mutual learning, context-dependent adaptation, consequences feeding back – requires abandoning the interventionist stance that development work depends on. It requires admitting that the framework itself is part of the problem, that the separation between intervener and context is epistemological fiction, that the only way to help is to submit to being changed by what you're trying to help.

This is not teachable in a development cooperation workshop. The 'villagers' I am meant to meet - an abstraction already - probably already know it.

The development professionals are insulated from having to learn it, which is why they can continue thinking in terms of connected problems/sectors rather than ecology.

They will talk about pragmatism, adapting to the military. Pragmatism is the word used when the system has successfully made alternatives unthinkable. It's not pragmatic to adapt to the military. It's surrender dressed as strategy. But calling it surrender would require acknowledging that there was something to surrender, some other possibility, some stance that wasn't already compromised. Pragmatism makes the compromise disappear into common sense.

Common sense says: adapt to the military, it's pragmatic. And even the most simplistic systems thinking says: adapting to the military inscribes military logic into every outcome, makes military priorities the baseline against which all other priorities adjust. 

But systems thinking is not pragmatic. It's not rewarded. It doesn't keep you safe. To one definition of safety – increasing energy will be devoted to maintaining the fiction.

I am threatening the fiction by insisting on truth.

What remains possible?

I cannot transform the system from my position. I do not have the time, the leverage, or the cultural fluency. But I can refuse to be its unconscious instrument. Every moment I choose to name the pattern rather than enact it unconsciously is a moment the pattern cannot proceed automatically.

When they threaten me with exclusion from workshops, I can name what's happening: "You seem to be responding by treating me as the problem. I understand why you're doing it. I'm asking if there's another way to handle this."

These interventions won't transform anything immediately. But they insert friction. They make unconscious operation slightly harder.

The escalation I experienced and named – this is the pattern that will repeat. The system will continue to interpret challenge as threat and respond with escalation. My choice is whether to match the escalation (which leads to expulsion) or to name it and step sideways (which leads to being marked as strange, difficult, not-team-player, but possibly sustainable for a bit longer).

But I cannot be a respectable plague forever. Eventually the system will find a way to expel or absorb me. The question is what I do with the time before that happens.

Build relationships with the people who recognize what I'm doing. The ones who also see the contradiction in "we cannot say that." The ones who understand that villagers' knowledge is the knowledge that matters.

Document everything. Not for HR purposes but for learning purposes.

Every micro-interaction that shatters my views is data about how the system maintains itself. Write it down. Make sense of it. Share it with people outside the system who can hold the knowledge without needing to act on it immediately.

I accept that I will fail at transforming this particular organization. I can reframe success as: How long can I maintain honest perception within a structure designed to prevent it? What can I learn? Who can I connect with? What warm data can I preserve?

My assumed death on November first may come sooner than I planned. But between now and then, there's a choice.

In the evening I check my messages. My lover wrote me, despite me telling her that I would not want her to write me. She’s not committed, and so I did not want to interweave this experience here with her not being fully present for what could emerge from us. And yet she ignores this and shares about her processes, her family trauma and more. I start to feel angry. From where I am now and what I witness, the self-healing-paradigm in capital cities of Europe feels even more like a shitshow. I am all in for healing, yet most people seem to spiral in year-long personal happiness journeys, while ignoring a suffering planet and continuing to extract.

I close my phone. Every message from friends in Zurich feels so unnecessary, bordering to naivety.