A 'Development' Tragedy-Pakistan#9

On Being Small Fry

A retired UN worker sits across from me. He has the particular clarity that comes from being outside the machine but still able to see its gears. He asks questions I don't want to answer.


"Who is your customer in this contract?"

I name them. They are in Europe.


"Is this person understanding you?"

No.


"Do you have a plan to reform this organization?"

The question lands like a stone. No. I have no plan to reform them. I am one consultant on one contract trying to do one thing differently.


He doesn't say it, but I hear it: So why are you surprised that you're suffering?

"Having you write your own contract – that was laziness," he says. "Let's see what he does. That's what they thought."

I had imagined it differently. I had thought: they trust my expertise, they want my method, they're ready for something new.

"I have the impression that you use quite definite words," he says carefully. "It may prevent you from seeing allies. And bystanders – people who will not seek to harm you. They may think: here's another guy who doesn't know how the machine works. He doesn't harm my career."

He pauses and starts to represent their positions. "I'm building a home in Germany. It's quite expensive."

This is not a metaphor. This is the machine. People have mortgages. People have children in university. People have retirement plans that depend on not making waves.

"If people want to finance a house, they stay in the organization even if they don't believe in it," he says. "If you say 'I cannot, I lose my values here,' then you quit."

I tell him about the feeling – the sense that something is trying to break me. That there's a coordinated effort to constrain, to misrepresent, to close down possibility.


He looks at me. "It sounds like you're in a war zone. Are you sure? Why would they do that? You're small fry."


Small fry. The phrase is perfect and humiliating.

He's right. I am not important enough to warrant conspiracy. I am not threatening enough to require elimination. I am simply... inconvenient. An irritation. A dissonance in the system.

"There might be a minority that's trying to kill you intellectually," he allows. "But probably most are just bystanders. They're not seeking to harm you. They're just... working."

But there's something he doesn't understand. Or maybe he does and he's trying to tell me differently.

I use the metaphor: cancer cells. Not because people are cancerous. But because when a system selects for certain behaviours – for compliance, for efficiency, for measurable outputs – it creates an environment where certain patterns flourish and others get attacked like foreign bodies.

I am the foreign body.

Not because anyone is evil. Not because there's a conspiracy. But because the system's immune response is working exactly as designed. It is defending itself against complexity, against uncertainty, against anything that doesn't fit the existing pattern.


"You need a protector in the organization," he continues. "Like in the mafia. Someone whose career is safe enough that they can shield you while you do the work."

I don't have this. I have a twenty-day contract and good intentions.

"You can say 'I'm working for the Pakistanis,'" he offers. As though this were a shield. As though clarifying my allegiance would make the system more hospitable.

But I'm not sure I am working for the Pakistanis. I'm not sure I can claim that. I've been here for a couple of days. I don't speak the languages. I don't understand the histories.

Who am I working for?

Maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe the question is: what pattern am I serving? And is that pattern alive?

"But there is also something called diplomacy," he says. He quotes someone – Francis Amant, a biologist: "Transitions don't happen in one flip. The old world doesn't disappear overnight. We have to create a new world by being in the old one."


This lands differently. This feels true.

Because of my solitary position here, I have been increasingly treating this like a war. Old world versus new world. Their logic versus mine. Deliverables versus complexity. Control versus emergence.

But what if it's not war? What if it's just... transition? Messy, slow, contradictory transition where the old forms don't disappear, they just slowly become transparent enough that new forms can grow through them?


"You are evolving in the virtual reality of theirs," he says. "If you feel like they are trying to eliminate you, you cannot appreciate their strengths – touch their goodness. They just got caught in this system. They are not purposefully destroying Pakistan. They aspire to a greater good."

This is the part I need to sit with.

They still aspire to a greater good in some way. And yes, they are complicit in a system. These two things are simultaneously true.

The system selects for behaviors that undermine the greater good it claims to serve. But the people inside it are not the system. They are doing their best inside constraints I cannot fully see. Mortgages. Career trajectories. Institutional incentives. Cultural expectations about what "professional" means.

They are not trying to destroy Pakistan. They are trying to help Pakistan using the only tools they were given, the only frameworks they were trained in, the only metrics they're measured by.

That the tools are inadequate, the frameworks outdated, the metrics perverse – this is not their fault. This is the tragedy.

"We have to create a new world by being in the old one."

Okay. Okay.

So maybe the question is not: how do I work around this system? Or: how do I fight it? And definitely not: how do I reform it?

Maybe the question is: how do I stay alive inside it long enough to glimpse what wants to emerge?

And maybe that requires a different form of diplomacy. Not as compromise. But as the patient work of touching the goodness in people who are caught. Of finding the bystanders who might become allies. Of remembering that the system is not the people, even when the people enact the system's logic.

I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I have the diplomatic skill, the patience, the capacity to hold this much ambiguity. I acknowledge that I am conditioned by personified villain stories. And that it's hard to remain system-focused when being disciplined and micro-managed like I was an intern.

Transitions don't happen in one flip.

The old world doesn't disappear overnight.

We have to create a new world by being in the old one.

R.Z. – On Creeping and Other Forms of Belonging

"I'm a creeper," R.Z. says, and I understand immediately.

We sit in the botanical garden he built. Culture, environment, nature – these are not separate things here. They are woven. He tells me about caterpillars and plants. How understanding their relationship leads to appreciation.

I tell him my complaint: I cannot see their sites. I cannot visit the places where disaster risk lives in people's bodies, in the erosion patterns, in the ways mothers calculate whether to send children to school or keep them home when the rains come. The danger is that I don't have an accurate enough picture.


"They made the situation like this," he says. Not angry. Just factual. The consultancy that demands understanding without providing the conditions for it.

"We don't take the responsibility," he continues. "Let us build a nation of responsible people."

I hear the reversal in his words. Not: let someone fix it. But: let us build the capacity to respond.

Later, I talk to my friend in Zurich. The distance makes the conversation strange. We – people in Europe – make people have to flee, she says. Our comfort is built on others' displacement. She mentions the comparably small impact of Blatten, a Swiss village – a GLOF comparison. Glacial lake outburst floods don't respect national boundaries or development categories.

"Business as usual cannot continue," she says. "IMF dictating economic policies, imperialism, the English central bank leading to the US central bank, exploitation of nature, disturbance of communities. All of that has to end."


I think about R.Z.'s garden. About creeping. About the slow work of becoming responsible versus the violent speed of extraction.

The world is a complex system, my new friend said. Two seasons now where there used to be four. Birds, plants, animals have to adapt. Can they?

Can we?

She sends me a model later. The iceberg. At the tip: "Help nature." Below the waterline: "We need nature to save us."

As much as I dislike the iceberg model, this is the reversal that R.Z. was pointing toward. The reversal that the botanical garden embodies. We have the pronouns backwards. We have the direction of rescue backwards.

Nature doesn't need our help. Nature will continue, with or without us, in forms we cannot imagine. What we call "saving nature" is actually saving the particular assemblage of relationships that allows human life to continue in the forms we recognize.

We need saving. We need nature to save us. And nature cannot save us unless we stop trying to save it and start learning to participate again.

Vulnerability enforces multi-point optimization, my friend writes.

When you cannot control, when you cannot dominate, when you are vulnerable to the system you're part of – then you must optimize for multiple points simultaneously. Not single objectives. Not clear metrics. The messy, non-linear work of tending relationships.

But here I am. Flown in. Temporary. Not rooted. Not creeping. Expected to show something relevant about a place I cannot see, a culture I do not understand, a history I was not part of.

The absurdity is complete.

What if the thing to show is precisely this absurdity? What if the relevant insight is: this model cannot work. This structure creates the conditions for its own failure. The consultancy that prevents seeing. The framework that demands understanding without relationship. The timeline that makes creeping impossible.

Caterpillar and plant. They co-evolved. Millions of years of mutual learning. Caterpillar develops chemical sensitivity to plant's defenses. Plant develops new compounds. Caterpillar adapts again. Neither wins. Both survive through adaptation.

Understanding their relationship leads to appreciation.

Twenty days does not lead to appreciation. Twenty days leads to extraction dressed as expertise.

"They made the situation like this."

Who is they? The structure. The institution. The ghost in the machine that no one person controls but everyone enacts.

And who is we? The responsible people we need to become?

Maybe we is the creepers. The ones who move slowly enough to learn. Who spread horizontally. Who understands that appreciation comes from relationship, and relationship takes time no contract can capture.

Maybe we is the caterpillars and the plants. The mutual learners. The ones who know that survival is not individual. That adaptation is collective. That the only way through vulnerability is together.

R.Z. built a garden. Culture, environment, nature – woven. Not solved. Not optimized for a single metric. Just... tended. Over time. With attention to what wants to grow.

I cannot build a garden in twenty days. I can see that R.Z. is showing me something about time, about responsibility, about what it means to become indigenous to complexity rather than extractive of it.

I can stop trying to help nature and start asking how nature might save us.

I can creep.

Move slowly enough to notice. Spread horizontally enough to connect. Root shallowly enough to move when the ground shifts but deeply enough to hold when the winds come.

This is not what they hired me for. This is not practical. This is not measurable.

But maybe it's relevant.

Maybe the caterpillar and the plant have something to teach the consultant and the institution. We're still trying to climb. Still trying to reach the top. Still trying to win.

But the garden doesn't have a top. The garden has ground.

Two seasons where there used to be four. Can the birds adapt?

Can we?

The answer is in the slow, patient, horizontal work of becoming responsible rather than heroic. The answer is: stop trying to help. Start trying to belong.

But belonging takes time. And I have ten days left.