From Ethical Selfhood to Survival Rationality: The Pakistani Form of Life

02-01-2026

Societies languishing in endless crises experience a terrifying sense of tiredness. It is not this type of shock which roused nations to reform, but a more subdued one, an extinguishing of hopes, a gradual withering away of the hope that was lifted and disappointed again. It is this fatigue that has led to something even more than despair in Pakistan. It has entered as a mode of thinking: as a Canadian form of rationality of survival, which replaces the prospect of ethical selfhood unutterably. The question is no longer about what a good life is but about how to cope with the malfunction of today. This is not a change of practical necessity but is a transformation of morality itself.

Classical philosophical thought - from Aristotle to Kant and then to virtue ethics roughly - had assumed that ethical reflection is central to human flourishing. They said that human life can be fully lived only when explored, when personality is consciously made, when moral issues are weighed and given time. Yet in the Pakistani form of life, that space has been taken over by what might be described as survival rationality: practical thinking aimed at short-term adaptation, at immediate fixes, and at coping with constant systematic dysfunctions. It is not heroism of survival in conditions of extreme magnitude; it is the normalization of crisis. Life itself is redesigned for coping.

Nothing can explain this transformation better than a single sentence “system ne majboor kar diya”, the system drove me. The government official that accepts a bribe, the student cheating on a test, the shopkeeper watering down goods, the citizen dodging tax talk the speech. It does not simply justify evil; it ranks among its philosophical interests that it restructures moral agency. Outward responsibility is outsourced. It will turn into a minimization of harm as an ethical calculation, and not a moral commitment: it would appear folly or even suicidal to act ethically under the corrupt system. This psychology can be observed in surveys: only 3% of Pakistanis believe that they can trust political institutions (Gallup Pakistan, 2022), and over 60% of young people say that they want emigration to be their main aim in life because Pakistan cannot fulfill any of their needs (British Council Youth Perception Report, 2021). These statistics are not just points in dissatisfaction with the economy; they are moral retreats of belonging to the community.

It is a radical change in the kind of technologies of the self which Michel Foucault defined as practices whereby people define themselves as moral subjects. The practices included self-examination, discipline and conscious building of character in ancient philosophy. The everything-was-alright believer who studied the conscience, the Stoic who surveyed what Schopenhauer called the path caused oneself to be a morality project. In Pakistan, on the other hand, there have been technologies of survival to supplant these technologies. What could be used to develop ethical character is taken up in managing daily life: making ethical preparations before load-cutting, having to dodge red tape, calling friends to get a medical appointment, or finding out who the authoritative figure in the administration is due to take a bribe.

Jugaad (the resources of improvisation) is the use of cultural economies of survival. It is imaginative, elastic, and it is impressive, without any doubt. but it is at the same time a silent submission. Jugaad finds solutions to problems, at the same time making sure that they will reappear. When we get electricity with the help of a generator, the government will not experience any pressure to repair the national grid; when children go to private schools, we will silently pardon the unsuccessful work of the public education system. Instead, each workaround saves life today while silently allowing dysfunction to continue tomorrow. In this way, survival replaces ethics and crisis replaces expectations. The moral issue is no longer whether we will or should have to live like this, it's merely how to survive to the end of the day.

Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus explains the way this rationality becomes generational. Habitus is the inherited dispositions according to which people interpret and behave in the world - an embodied history, which defines what is perceived as possible. The habitus of Pakistan has been shaped with the onset of decades of institutional failure, political instability, and lack of social trust. Children are seldom given lessons in justice or citizenship; they are given lessons on how to "manage" the system. Schools give much more importance to memorizing rather than thinking, training students not for learning, but for qualifications. According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER, 2022), 45% of the Grade-5 children cannot read a Grade-2 sentence, however, the school attendance is high because degrees-not understanding-is the currency of upward mobility. Political speeches almost never include visions of a fair society-they pledge marginal economic relief. In such a landscape, resignation is a virtue and cynicism passes for wisdom.

Survival rationality even ends up taking the form of political maturity. Those who talk of justice, rights or the common good are waved aside with a knowing smile - 'you don't understand how things actually work'. For often to be used so that realism forms a code-word for surrender. What is called practical wisdom is often the internalization of one's own subjugation. The very people who can demand change are taught that if they expect more, it is childish.

This kind of thinking can be seen best in the citizen-institution relationship. Schools, courts, hospitals, and government offices - ideal expressions of the concept of a shared social contract - are perceived not as resources to be used by all, but as obstacles to be overcome or as resources to be mined. The guiding question is not, "What is this institution meant to do?" but "How do I make it work for me?" This is not some cynicism; it is learned pragmatism from repeated betrayal. But it also guarantees that institutions will never become legitimate, they will never reform and they will be forever fragile. It is like a self-perpetuating loop.

Pakistan's past - especially the independence movement - provides a specific contrast. It had principles and caught inspiration in the language of morality: rights, justice, dignity, common purpose. Today, that language has been replaced by managerial jargon - delivery, reform, development - technical words that eliminate questions of meaning. Ethical imagination has been bracketed out of public life.

Survival rationality does however carry its own costs. A society organized around short-term coping is unable to sustain trust and without trust, no large-scale cooperation and no development can succeed. Economists come up with a figure of over USD 48 billion that is lost to corruption and inefficiency in Pakistan every year (UNODC, 2022). Individuals pay again, through private replacements - private education, private healthcare, private water, private security - creating a dual burden from taxes for systems which do not work, and personal payments to the alternatives that replace them. The psychological burden is yet of another, more profound kind: it is some kind of pain based on the meaninglessness: living planned on coping rather than prosperity, living planned on persisting rather than living.

Whether or not this cycle can be broken is a tough question. Change cannot come just from policy or institutional reform. It requires a reconstitution of the collective imagination - the recovery of the ability to ask, "How should we live?" Educational institutions need to be transformed into places where it is possible to think, where it is allowed to be questioned. Public spaces should provide space for substantive deliberation. Cultural production must once again produce other futures not as replicas of the now. Political mobilization must speak to principles and not just allocate patronage.

Above all, survival rationality needs to be recognized for what it is - not realism, but a shared illusion. It comforts by providing a wrong sense of being well-versed - "I can cope." I can manage.” But a life organized only by survival is a form of non-life. Ethical selfhood must be restored by refusal - refusal of that give and take of justice as measure on the one hand and with adjustment on the other, refusal of the life at last ahead that everywhere is blindly confined to coping.

Pakistan will be held suspended in its peculiar limbo till such refusal happens - not just individually but collectively. Today, everyone is surviving. Almost no one remembers what it is that they are surviving for.