Everything you don't know is a lie

Look. Listen. I get it, OK? The world is a scary and complicated place. To properly navigate it you have to learn all sorts of stuff, and not just the stuff they teach you in school. I mean, sure, it's important to know that South America is a continent and maybe someday the fate of the universe will hinge on your ability to recall Jibananda Das' exact birthday, but there's all sorts of stuff like empathy and critical thinking that you basically have to learn the hard way. Through experience, trial and error and often personal trauma. It's a lot of work and you'll never, ever, get it right and you'll spend a lifetime slowly trying to become a fuller, smarter, better human being.

Luckily you don't have to! Using the powers of malicious stupidity you can avoid all of these confusing, upsetting thoughts and events that force you to criticise and develop yourself. All you have to do is convince yourself that everything that challenges your views is a lie.

It's great. Really makes you wonder why we don't do it all the time.

"Why would anyone go through the trouble of lying to you like this? Look, these are journalists, right? They're basically all paid for by aliens to spread sedition.

There's a much-publicised and on-going rape case implicating several young men at an affluent part of the city, challenging your assumptions on sexual responsibility, consent and the rights of women to, you know, actually live their lives the way they want? Wow, OK, that's a lot of work, so how about it's all a lie and the women made it up or something? Yeah, that's a lot easier. Now you don't have to do anything at all. 

A statue in the Supreme Court depicting a universal symbol of justice? Someone said it's all part of a conspiracy to spread idolatry in Bangladesh through the vehicle of the long-dead Greek religion, so that must be… actually, hang on, this is much stranger and more complicated than the truth, are you sure you're doing this right? Try this angle: everyone wants the statue removed and only a few corrupt secularists want it up there . . . because secularists are very fond of religious idols, which is what this version of the story calls Lady Justice? Hmm. I think this example might have some serious structural problems, I'm sorry I wasted your time with it. Let's move on.

Aha! Here's a good one. All those photos you saw of adivasis being displaced from their homes in the southeast? Fake news! You don't have to think about the disenfranchisement of our fellow countrymen, you don't have to wonder about the effects of continuously conflating the Bangladeshi identity with the Bengali one, thereby slowly erasing the idea that non-Bengalis are supposedly full and active citizens of the country, you don't have to worry about other people losing their lives and livelihoods, and you certainly don't need to examine the socioeconomic forces driving people to demand more and more land, often at the expense of our society's most vulnerable. To do all of that you need to actually do some reading first and you also have to acknowledge that you and your people aren't necessarily the greatest things on Earth and maybe people who look and talk like you are doing some very bad things to people who don't. It's complicated, it's upsetting. It's unnecessary. Let's just pretend it's a hoax instead. Now your ethnonationalism is secure. What other cultures?

Why would anyone go through the trouble of lying to you like this? Look, these are journalists, right? They're basically all paid for by aliens to spread sedition. It's just the first step towards destabilising the world's governments ahead of the full and final invasion from Mars. You can't just trust someone whose actual job it is to find out what's going on and then explain it to you! That would mean women and minorities have rights or something, and who in their right minds would believe such a thing?

In conclusion: This might be a troubling challenge to your views and sense of self but it's OK. I'm a lying secularist feminist journalist so you shouldn't trust a word I or my alien lizard masters say. 

The writer is an artist who graduated in Economics from BRAC University, and is a columnist for SHOUT Magazine, The Daily Star. 

Email: zoheb.mashiur@gmail.com