The possible ‘Hapax Legomenon’ of Pakistan

“I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”

― Patrick Henry

Often, I have seen everyone contribute via comments on how the government’s instabilities/incapabilities/incompetence is the root cause of all the issues that plague the only place that will call us citizens, the country to which we belong, Pakistan. And when inquired, mostly, there are a few categorical buckets that people reach out to rationalize why is such the case; and they argue lack of education, economic imbalance, the deep-seeded corruption, brain drain, small market size, bureaucratic climate, inability to manage investment due to lack of capital, and there are I am sure more you could contribute to listings of all the things that are wrong but everyone believes these issues to be individualistic and not intertwined to an unimaginably complex network of webs.

The image above is called ‘hapax legomenon’ something that I recently came across and I thought I would share it here in this context. It has been made to represent all the issues that are so interlaced with each other with a graphical representation that makes it easy to understand why sometimes things just do not work out. It shows all the different issues that were present in trying to govern Afghanistan and one of the groups that were tasked to write the detailed document developed this representation just to make it easier to understand. I believe that it is very much the case for Pakistan as well.

We want things better without understanding how complex the current situation is and how every ingredient that we tend to call ‘not fresh’ is already part of the broth and it is near to impossible to suddenly make it taste better with a single masterstroke ingredient. We might have become such with our solution-based thinking that everything needs a quick fix and we might have forgotten that not everything can be fixed with band-aids.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

― Buckminster Fuller

Image Source:

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34766.77123
Project: Afghanistan — A New Economic Policy for Change