Lebanese People Deserve their Misery

When you talk to the average Lebanese these days, the conversation inevitably concludes in a hypocritical blame addressed at the ruling establishment.  Hypocritical, because after the six disastrous years of Michel Aoun, the 2019 uprising, the collapse of the country's institutions, the continued lies and incompetence of the various administrations, and all the ills that the country is suffering from, it is the average Lebanese who voted the ruling Mafia back to power in last May's elections. 

The Lebanese people had a chance to topple the ruling class, but they didn't. With only a 10% renewal in the makeup of Parliament - only 12 new "reformist" MPs were elected that have yet to coalesce into an effective challenge to the establishment - the bulk (116 out of a total of 128) of the elected MPs were the same ones who have managed Lebanon's descent into destitution for years, if not for decades. The same political parties, the same corrupt servants of the feudal sectarian lords who waged the war of 1975, who came back in 1991 with a general amnesty they granted themselves after the war to resume their rape of the country, and who continue to be beholden to foreign countries, are in Parliament today. 

What can 12 new, and disorganized, reformists do in the face of entrenched mentalities from the late 19th century? The masquerade of unproductive presidential elections that has been on display in Parliament for nearly two months shows that nothing has changed and the Lebanese people can only blame themselves. The Lebanese people deserve their misery.

The voters in this country have been cowered by textbook examples of control-by-fear politics. The life of the Lebanese cannot be worse. Nothing works here. No courts. No administrations. No public life. No services (electricity, water, Internet.... ). Life in Lebanon is a life on hold. Waiting. Waiting. After decades of mismanagement and corruption to which the Lebanese have had ample time to adjust, they no longer want change. They have found their comfort zones inside the abysmal concentration camps created for them by their politicians, in a gargantuan Stockholm syndrome. The Christians of Bassil hate the Christians of Geagea, and vice-versa. They both hate the Christians of Frangiyeh, and they all hate the Muslims, and the Muslims evidently reciprocate. The Shiite Muslims hate the Sunni Muslims, both hate the Druze, and the stupid religious hatred merry-go-round goes on. The Muslims by and large vote like a herd of brainwashed camels without any desire to change their leaders because the latter tell them that it would be un-Islamic or un-Arab to do so, brandishing the specter of an outside world constantly conspiring against them and causing all the ills they are suffering from. "It's not us", say the politicians, and depending on which outsider is paying them, they blame "the Christians, America, Israel, the Saudis, the Iranians, the West, etc.".  Shiite Muslims brandish the Saudis on top of their list of conspiring enemies, while Sunni Muslims top their list with the Iranians.

The Christians for their part, though identical to the Muslims in the backward way their community is organized (feudal, sectarian, mercantile, individualistic, corrupt...), show some diversity in their political class. There are four or five Christian political poles, but when you look carefully, their differences are not based on ideological grounds. They are not, as it is elsewhere in civilized countries, divided into Democrats, Socialists, Liberals, Communists, Greens, etc. who operate over the same territories and across the country. They are all conservatives and are identical to each other in every respect, except perhaps for their treacherous relations with foreign countries: Each is a tribe with its lord, his extended family, his vassals, and its own geographical territory, in what amounts to a medieval fiefdom that can be extremely difficult to undo. Lebanon is pretty much stuck in the Middle Ages, primarily because religion is in the background of all this, just as it was in the rest of the world many centuries ago.

And beneath this social-sectarian-political structure survive a people who are educated but uncultured and chained by archaic beliefs. The Lebanese in general can read and write, but there is no cultural or scientific literacy beyond the minimum needed to get a job, to emigrate, or to show off and brag. You will never see a Lebanese reading a book in public. There is no intellectual creativity that can transcend the hellish status quo of their pathetic incarceration inside their sectarian concentration camps. Many new ideas or ways of thinking about the world are imported, albeit often distorted and haphazardly implemented, and never carry the seeds of transformation or evolution beyond the established religious-feudal order. That is what the religious orders, both Christian and Muslim (nuns, imams, priests, etc.) teach Lebanese children every day in their schools: Learn just enough to get a job or emigrate, but don't believe any of that western stuff that make you sin against God and his holy books. Science is only good to make you an engineer, but don't let mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology deviate you from the unfathomable ways of God and his true religion(s), which are any one of the 18 Bronze-Age religious cults that the primitive Lebanese constitution recognizes and the primitive Lebanese people adhere to. Instead, let your brains be immersed in fables of prophets, saints, mahdis, disappearing imams, messiahs, and other such doom-tellers, fortune-tellers, mediums, and charlatans. 

The height of the winter season's holidays for the Lebanese consists in sitting glued to their television sets on New Year's eve to listen to any one of a number of mind-numbing "predictors of the future", like Michel Hayek, who tells them, with spooky Hollywood music in the background, what he "sees" happening around the world over the coming year. And the Lebanese take his words very very seriously. Never mind that this pagan ritual goes against their religious convictions. It's serious stuff. This is what happens to people who live in complete intellectual - and nowadays material - destitution, under a constant threat of war and unrest, abandoned by their decrepit government and the very representatives they elected, with nary a thought to self-organize in solidarity and take their lives in their own hands. They expect God, messiahs, prophets and, of course, others to come to their help.

Sometimes, the world-traveling Lebanese bring new ideas from their countries of exile, but they try to implant them in Lebanon as occasional isolated bursts of shallow creativity, in a sort of a cultural me-too imitation of western memes. They do not understand that it is an entire ecosystem that has to change before such ideas can deliver on the ground of their daily lives. That is why you suddenly see islands of pseudo-civility or pseudo-intellectualism popping up here and there, without any coordination with other one-off islands, only to die soon afterwards without the sustenance of an ecosystem that could ensure their longevity. I will not dwell on the hyper-bragging by the Lebanese when they see or hear about such individual successes, going so far as to constantly claim Lebanon as a haven of freedom, democracy, culture, enlightenment and such hyperbolic claims of grandeur, however much they may be wading in a sea of garbage, pollution, archaic beliefs, social and religious repression, mismanagement, aggressiveness, and hostility to members of one's own community, let alone to those of the other communities.

A few years ago, a Lebanese-American friend of mine in the US was eager to run for elections in Lebanon. He had money and enthusiasm. He had tons of ideas from his American experience that he wanted to instill in Lebanese politics. He asked if I could help him and I agreed. But his very first agenda item for his campaign was to - and this is where I flipped out and walked out - visit with, and pay respect to, all the religious, feudal, political neanderthals of the district where he wanted to run as a candidate. I couldn't convince him that he is basically running against these people, so why would he want to have their blessing? In the end, he failed lamentably, earning a number of votes you could count on your fingers, even though his ideas could at least have brought fresh blood and ideas into the system. He never ran again.

It is very hard to change mindsets fashioned by Bronze Age beliefs, especially those grounded in fear. The Lebanese have no genuine solidarity with one another. Not within their families, not within their villages, and not across their own community at large, and therefore not with the other "alien" communities. Solidarity is an "effeminate" character for the patriarchal macho culture of this country. If a member of your community tries a novel approach to problem-solving, you do everything you can to ensure his failure. Covetousness, jealousy, me-too-envy. Then when he's down and fails (they generally fail, otherwise this country would not be the fossil that it is), you kick him hard. But if he succeeds or looks like he's succeeding (typically on his own, and often by unorthodox ways), you crawl like a slave and beg at his feet hoping for some benefit to reap. There is no empathy among the Lebanese. Every other Lebanese is a competitor, never a collaborator. And if you see media coverage of non-profit and charitable actions, it is more often than not from either religious entities (who in fact are the source of all the miseries by keeping their human herds in check and in fear) or "socialite" personalities who are often the wives of politicians whose wealth and beneficence derive from all the corruption they have engaged in over the years.

Every Lebanese individual is a kingdom. Every Lebanese is a political party. Every Lebanese is a general, never a soldier willing to do the hard work. Getting two Lebanese to work together toward a common goal is much more complicated and harder than sending a manned spaceship to Mars. How could a people like this have come together to make a country? The simple answer is to imagine a cage, just one cage, in which several wounded animals of different species have been crammed together. This is Lebanon, a cage in which several (18 according to the fluid Lebanese constitution) injured minorities in this diverse Near East have come to live and shelter since the Bronze Age. If you can show these animals that collaborating together would heal their wounds, I'll nominate you for a Nobel Peace Prize.