Not my conversation, but I agree, with some grave reservations, when I try to relate your paradigm, @Nilgiri, to our own situation in India. It is terrifying.
Unlike the situation in Pakistan, we in India are faced by a very thorough and systematic movement, served by talented managers, though their ideation might not be up to speed. What is fearful is their ability to break down every obstacle into actionable portions, and then to put teams to act on those. Every obstacle, indeed, some social features that others might not have recognised as obstacles.
Not to take the conversation from Pakistan, so please ignore this outburst of mine.
I could indeed get into a huge amount on this topic alone....before they are specifically put into its contours and context for India (or China, West and then other parts of world I am not so up to speed on from the personal experience and reflection angle).
A) What are the great flaws (as these relate to political use) within social conservatism (especially its sinews from the upstream).
B) What is the basis for classical liberalism to not only establish in the elite but permeate genuinely to the larger population (in such things as taking religion off the table for politics conceptually at first and then systematically by long term proper execution)....as the greatest public good to then inherit sociologically long term.
C) What were the instances of cowardice regarding B....by those in the greatest position to implement them and set an example.
D) What are the great flaws (again especially within political use) within social liberalism (especially downstream)....especially if B and C were not resolved well or left voids to seep into, like they clearly have with the harnessing of A today and throughout history (given A's relation to the course and duration of history). One does not want to become the bizarro world dark-mirror equivalent of that he opposes.
E) How are these all to be resolved fairly and properly (how do we bring sufficient people into or back to B, whatever society's overall condition of progress and development).
There are many more aspects, these are just some.
These are all fairly clear to me for the Indian story....to explain the voids harnessed by the unprincipled.
My duty is to do my bit to get enough people thinking on these same terms by showing my work (not just the solutions), my logic, my moral edifice.
There is no space for fear here, we have what we have to do with the time we have and the responsibility we choose to act on. In end net sum of society is that it has to also learn from these cycles it experiences too....and I have seen it capable to do so, so I trust in that and play my part doing best I can the way I see I can.
The human world is extremely complicated and diverse in the end. There are an incredible number of layers....the closer you are to one, the more you see, but they are all very similar in the end from equidistant perspective. It must have been 10 years ago I came across a poignant African example I might get into later.
There are unfortunately things that "take over" in the human psyche when it wants to retain stratified order. It is why the CCP apologia reads very much like the RSS/BJP apologia, as different as they are in what they harness in specific ingredients....the soup comes to serve the same purpose.
You know the best arrows in your quiver for countering the RSS/BJP one.
I have mine for the CCP one as well (as I do for western political parties, but not so incisive as they have practiced more principles and have large working proof of it, as much as things erode and fray today in its cycles).
My dear friend's grandmom (who I had honour of meeting only twice unfortunately, all she did was observe me a strange brown boy in HK and ask my best friend to share the buns she had baked with me too).....only later in life would I learn from his mom (her daughter, my friends mom) the longer story (now that I was older).
What the circumstances were in Guangdong during the civil war, how that darkness came to visit them....what they had to leave, what they lost (grandpop, a mystery resolved only much later)....how they ended up in HK. It bore so many similarities to longfellow's Evangeline, it shocked me. It made her the toughest woman I personally met in life.
Suffice to say secularization, pluralism, republicanism are the best balances human enlightenment has come across (given what we are coming from, where we are, where we want to be), to counter all stages of autocracy, authoritiarianism and totalitarianism...(be they theologically, neo-theologically or anti-theologically based, all occupying the same deep spot in the realm of the human psyche of purpose/meaning for existence in first place).
But how to explain it and implement it best and establish it best...when there is so much to compete with it jostling from the past, present and future....that eternally appeals with "less logical and ethical work needed" and the absolutism this then reductively drives?