On Angrezon ke zamane ke jailers

Author Ece Temelkuran. Pic/AFP File

Whether you're part of team sport, or in a family of four. Or if you're a kid, going through school that places premium on discipline. Later, an adult employed with a firm that dictates your day and its decisions. Is there any aspect of what constitutes most of your life that you can call a ‘democracy'?

By which I mean your voice is equal to everyone else's, at every point? No. So why then do we expect democracy in public/civic life, or state, as it were? Because unlike the fascist father, tyrannical teacher or bozo for a boss, we actually elect a political leader.

There appears to be no way better to decide who is the first one among equals termed citizens. The leader, in turn, has to keep up the pretence of democracy - for, how did he get there in the first place? Sure, once he gets to power, there is the inevitable controlling impulse to go after those who oppose. Because he can.
This is how dictatorships have been imposed in modern times - the same moments from 20th Century that people dig for clichés like Nazism, populism, etc. to inaccurately describe the present.

The cover of Temelkuran's book, How To Lose A Country: The 7 steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. Pic/Amazon

But, what if people actually want dictatorships imposed on themselves? And wittingly or unwittingly, but actively, work towards it? Going from blind or opportunistic participation, temporary denial, to submissive acceptance, in real time of shrinking history? Even supposed intellectuals initially cheering on this disruption, assuming it will create space for something new, since the exclusive, corrupt status-quo could do with a mighty fix?

The delightful Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran lists precisely this journey in her evocative book, How to Lose a Country: The 7 steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. It's both her story and her country's, 2002 onwards, with solid parallels to make it seem like the world's, as we know it. Although surely all countries, cultures and histories aren't alike. Humans, by and large, are! What are these seven steps you ask?

Step One: Create a movement. Which represents whom? The "real people", leaving others flummoxed enough to believe if they are indeed out of touch with reality. Out of vacuum (so much of it also on the Internet), emerges a cause. How do you achieve that? Through "manufactured victimhood."

In Turkey, it was religious people oppressed and humiliated by a secular elite. Other countries can have their own blockbuster stories, with resonating conflicts. "The content doesn't matter, because in later stages it changes; constantly replaced in relation to emerging needs and aims of the movement, once the identification of the masses and the movement with the leader is complete. The only North Star in an ever-changing political environment is the unquestioned leader."

How do you get there? Step Two: Disrupt rationale; terrorise language. And Step Three: Remove the shame; immorality is ‘hot' in the post-truth world. This is where you aggressively play into fantasies and imagined anxieties through what Donald Trump once described as "truthful hyperbole - an innocent form of exaggeration, an effective form of communication."

Once that's sorted and permeated, ‘argumentum ad hominem' can take over - basically attacking the character of the adversary, rather than the substance of the argument. The role of the troll is anyway to terrorise the communication space. No holds barred.

The upholders of objective truth, on the other hand, namely the media (both social and mainstream) can hold victim or weak to the same level of interrogation as the powerful or the perpetrator, who talk in realpolitik, reducing the out-of-touch ‘naïve' to irrelevance, tending towards obsolescence.

Great, then? Step Four: Dismantle judicial and political mechanisms. Wait, does that not work against the very people clamouring for its decline? Not, if a leader's brute supporters' powers are deemed to be greater than the establishment's, and indeed the old state, and its fogey institutions'. Self-preservation is supreme.

Temelkuran writes of Turkey for almost two decades, "There is no election, but not a day passes when we are not subjected to propaganda, as if there's one in a few days. For, when democracy shrinks to being no more than a voting process, then the destiny of a country becomes inseparable from its single ruler's political existence."

Inevitably then, since you can only be for or against a leader's supporters, whether or not any of this affects your normal life - which is just to be, and live as you wish to - it's time to get to the real task. Step Five: Design your own citizen. Okay, you know who you are. Of course, there is free speech and expression. The price you pay for it is yours alone!

Step Six: Let them laugh at the horror. The response of Joe public that's still not reeling inside the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, is that of a joke - directed at what the world/people are dishing out at them. Soon, it becomes a joke on themselves - yeh kahaan aa gaye hum type!

Because there is Step Seven: Build your country. "Everyone else is welcome to leave." What happens thereafter? Do we just go quiet? Live in our sombre pessimism? Since there's nothing left to save? Turkish Temelkuran, currently in exile in Croatia, doesn't say.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14

Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper