A SUDDEN hunch turning into excited conviction is perhaps one of the clearest symptoms of the structural political illiteracy that Bangladesh, like many countries unable to provide their citizens with a stable and reassuring civic reality, continues to suffer from. The blame, however, cannot rest solely on the impatient citizen. Such impatience does not emerge in a vacuum, nor does it appear as an isolated moral failure in individuals who have simply forgotten how to think. It grows within state structures that, through kleptocratic habits and institutional indifference, allow disorder to deepen to such an extent that even educated citizens begin to wonder whether lawlessness itself might be the answer, since the system no longer appears capable of correcting itself. This creates a strange and desperate faith in the ‘inevitable’ force of the mass, sustained through endless rehearsals of reform while obscuring a fundamental truth: the failure of a system does not automatically sanctify every force that rises against it.
This is precisely where the danger begins. The recognition of systemic failure can easily turn into faith in destructive immediacy, the conviction that because the system appears broken, any action directed against it must already possess political legitimacy. Such thinking mistakes rupture for agency. It imagines the mass as an inevitable corrective force, almost a sacred remainder left behind after institutional collapse, while refusing to ask what kind of force is being mobilised, by whom, through what forms of information and toward what vision of order.
The truth, bitter though it may be, is that no political system has ever functioned perfectly, nor will it ever do so. Yet there remains a necessary distinction between recognising that political structures are corruptible and deciding, in moments of corrective rage, that political grammar itself is dispensable. Political mistakes still require procedure, accountability, concept and disciplined forms of correction because its absence is often filled by noise masquerading as necessity.
The reasons behind this growing condition are disturbingly simple. Despite possessing unprecedented access to information, modern societies are drifting toward a kind of mass aporia, armed with one of the most powerful political instruments available: ignorance. It is powerful precisely because it demands no skill, patience, research, or responsibility beyond the thrill of conviction. Anyone can wield it instantly and virality frequently rewards its use. Ignorance, in its contemporary form, is not merely the absence of knowledge. It has become a political posture shaped by speed, algorithms, spectacle and the intoxicating ease of becoming convinced before understanding anything fully.
Those who believe that the failure of institutions grants them similar authority are not merely responding to political breakdown; they are flirting with a pathological fantasy of political omnipotence. The situation becomes even more fragile in societies like ours, where self-contempt often enters public discourse so deeply that even the word ‘Bangali’ is frequently used as a term of ridicule by those who identify themselves as such. Beneath many forms of political outrage lies a profound uncertainty about who we are, what we are capable of and how collective life can actually be sustained.
In the name of resisting a broken system, many end up creating what might be called a ‘system of breaking.’ Those convinced of their own corrective righteousness — encouraged both by the visible corruption of the state and by the spectacle of moral certainty — often persuade educated and liberal sections of society to abandon the very procedural optimism they once defended. Procedure begins to appear weak, caution becomes indistinguishable from complicity and restraint is interpreted as cowardice. The older belief that political mistakes require political process slowly gives way to another form of faith: not religious faith, but faith in emotionally persuasive fragments circulating through social media, viral outrage and public performance.
The danger is not that everyone speaks. The danger is that the conditions under which people learn, react, repeat and perform concern are increasingly shaped by systems that reward conviction over understanding. Information no longer reaches individuals innocently. By the time it appears before us, it has already been selected, compressed, dramatised and channelled through algorithmic structures where partial knowledge can easily disguise itself as total certainty.
Even propaganda does not always require lies in order to deform judgment. Often it merely arranges visible facts so persuasively that the invisible whole begins to seem unnecessary. This becomes particularly dangerous among educated citizens who possess the language, prestige and rhetorical means to circulate concern before fully understanding the conditions producing it. They were expected to recognise that a broken structure cannot simply be repaired by unleashing another unexamined force upon it; that the mass is not a mystical solvent; and that anger does not become correct merely because its target is corrupt.
Undigested information, once repeated by educated voices, spreads quickly through society because those voices carry institutional and cultural authority. Thus the “system of breaking” acquires followers. In attempting to repair one broken order, societies risk producing another order that will itself demand further correction. The cycle then becomes self-perpetuating. Meanwhile, theorists, commentators and agitated intellectuals often find opportunities for endless performance — whether through punditry, casual political discussion, or the production of opinion itself.
Society therefore remains suspended between kleptocratic structures and corrective lawlessness, between institutions that have betrayed political grammar and public excitement that seeks to abolish grammar altogether. The real challenge is neither to defend the system as it exists nor to romanticise whatever attempts to destroy it. It is to recover the increasingly difficult discipline of correcting political mistakes without turning correction itself into another political mistake.
Hisham M Nazer is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Varendra University.
