Who really shaped the way you think?
The story begins with Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and the master craftsman of persuasion. Bernays named his project the “engineering of consent,” turning psychology into a toolkit of social control. His *Torches of Freedom* march was more than a publicity stunt—it was a revelation of how entire populations could be nudged without ever being aware of it.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society,” he wrote. What Bernays staged with cigarettes and newspapers is now executed by algorithms: invisible, personalized, and relentless, pulling the strings of our attention, our beliefs, our very selves.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), an Austrian poet and novelist, once said of the modern soul: “We are pulled outward endlessly, and never allowed to rest.” While Bernays applied that persuasive mechanism on the human mind, Gramsci, Sartre, and Foucault warned their respective generations against the catastrophic implications of such developments.
Antonio Gramsci reminded us that domination does not always wear chains; it often enters as common sense. Hegemony works by making the limits of thought feel natural. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” he observed, describing a people trapped between recognition and renewal. One hears here an echo of Shah Latif’s travelers, stranded between desert and sea, uncertain whether the horizon is a promise or peril.
Michel Foucault, sharpening the critique, revealed how power is not just external coercion but also internal design. It categorizes, normalizes, and disciplines until we become our own jailers. Today, the prophecy has matured: algorithms measure, rank, and normalize with a precision that Foucault could only anticipate.
Plato’s cave now flickers with digital shadows, and Socrates’ demand that “the unexamined life is not worth living” is no longer optional—it is survival itself. The loop is merciless: data harvested at every click, optimization predicting our next weakness, amplification privileging the loudest emotions, normalization making repetition feel like truth.
Nietzsche had warned, “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” Today, that monster wears the face of personalization. Marcus Aurelius whispered, “You have power over your mind — not outside events; now even that citadel is under siege.”
Bulleh Shah, in his plea to tear away veils of illusion, would recognize in these feeds a prison draped in the garb of intimacy. Herbert Marcuse, in *One-Dimensional Man*, helps us diagnose the deeper wound. He argued that advanced industrial society collapses critical thought by offering endless satisfactions that bind us to the very system that exploits us.
The false needs created by consumer capitalism seduce people into confusing comfort with freedom. In our algorithmic age, Marcuse’s one-dimensionality is perfected: the feed does not just supply distraction, it shapes desire itself, reducing freedom to the choice between brands, ideologies, or click-bait emotions—all pre-selected by invisible hands.
What Marcuse called the loss of negative thinking—the refusal to accept reality as given—is precisely what is eroded when algorithms manufacture the horizon of possibility. To be one-dimensional is to believe that what you see in your feed is all there is to see.
Sachal Sarmast’s cry, “I am the rebel, I am the lover, I am the truth,” is the exact refusal that one-dimensionality seeks to erase.
In Pakistan, state institutions, political elites, and clerical authorities once managed narrative through television and newspapers; now, they do so through social media platforms that amplify outrage and drown dissent. Legal measures, presented as protections, risk becoming mechanisms of censorship. Civil society warns that these laws may suffocate free speech, narrowing the space for dissent into silence.
Meanwhile, disinformation storms rage unchecked through WhatsApp, TikTok, and Facebook, where emotion trumps reason and rumor travels faster than fact. In this space, the three instruments—state power, corporate platforms, and restrictive law—conspire to make hegemony airtight. The citizen risks becoming what Marcuse feared: one-dimensional, repeating narratives designed elsewhere, mistaking noise for truth.
Shah Latif’s warning of rulers who “offer sweet words but steal the grain” seems eerily close.
And yet, the struggle is not lost. The machine computes; the poem remembers. Algorithms compress; poetry expands. Ghalib’s candle keeps burning where winds howl; Rumi reminds us that “the wound is where the light enters.”
> In feeds we are filed, in metrics we are weighed;
> the scroll becomes a river and our names are freight
> a thousand mirrors show a hundred lies;
> one quiet question opens winter skies.
To pause, to doubt, to imagine otherwise are seeds of rebellion against one-dimensional thought. In a world that prizes quantification, the immeasurable silence, beauty, and reflection are the cracks through which freedom leaks back in.
From this struggle, six manifestos emerge—not as abstractions, but as tools of survival and renewal:
**1. Awareness**
We will not live blind. We will name the machine, expose the algorithm, and call out the markets and states that script our desires. Awareness is rebellion. To see the architecture of control is to begin dismantling it.
**2. Refusal**
We will not feed the beast. We will not forward the lie, amplify the hate, or reward the outrage. In the age of engineered speed, slowing down is resistance. Refusal is power. Latif’s lovers walked barefoot through deserts; refusal often feels like loss before it tastes like freedom.
**3. Education**
We will teach ourselves and one another. Media literacy is no longer optional—it is survival. In mosques, classrooms, cafés, and streets, we will learn to question, to doubt, to inquire. Education is freedom. As Sachal sang, “knowledge without courage is silence.”
**4. Demand**
We will not accept shadows for light. We demand transparency, we demand accountability. Algorithms must be open, laws must serve the people, not silence them. Demand is dignity. Like Rilke’s angel who terrifies yet awakens, demand unsettles before it liberates.
**5. Support**
We will hold up those who speak the truth when truth is costly. Journalists, poets, teachers, activists are vulnerable but vital. To support them is to defend our own breath. Solidarity is survival. In Bulleh Shah’s words, “to love the despised is the highest prayer.”
**6. Create**
We will not let the machine flatten us into data points. We will write, sing, paint, and imagine. Creation is resistance, creation is defiance, creation is the recovery of dimensions stolen from us. To create is to be free.
Shah Latif’s wanderers, Rumi’s whirling dervish, Ghalib’s restless ink testify that creation is survival.
Freedom of mind is not taken in one stroke; it is lost like light through shutters. Marcuse warned of societies where thought itself collapses into compliance. Gramsci, Foucault, and Bernays mapped the architecture of that collapse. But poetry—continental and local alike—reminds us that tenderness can be revolt.
Rilke mourned the broken gods, Latif sang of love as exile, Sachal turned rebellion into prayer. Together, they whisper: do not be engineered, do not be optimized, do not be reduced to data; reclaim your consent; reclaim your mind; reclaim your humanity.
https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/1346850-shadows-of-freedom
