The Reasons for Our Enslavement!

People who seek military glories and who see dignity and honor in militaristic terms only are not going to bother about the humanitarian costs of their adventures. Hence, the fate of the civilians in Lebanon, the hundreds of thousands of displaced Shia in particular, is left to other civilians to worry about. Neither the Lebanese government nor Hezbollah, currently all too preoccupied in its quest for glory, are providing any assistance.

Meanwhile the devastation continues ad absurdum, ad nauseam, ad nihilum, following the usual dictate that calls for creating desolation, and then calling it peace.

Peace has never been on anyone’s mind in the region. We are all too narcissistic and messianic to really give a damn about peace, not to mention the human cost of war. Our real preoccupation is with glory, vengeance and domination, a matter that applies to both peoples and leaders.

For, while it is tempting to think that the people will be more preoccupied with security, in one sense or another, even if at the expense of other people’s security and sense of it, in reality, the desire for glory, vengeance and domination is the real thing that runs so deep inside the souls of so many of us as to transform us into willing tools in the hands of the ruling elite, be they democratic or not.

As such, the regimes do not enslave us, our unreasonable desires and expectations do. We speak of justice when we want revenge, we speak of security, when we desire domination, and we speak of oppression, when our real motivation is to simply become the oppressors.

The more conflict we generate, inside of us and in our midst, as a result of these contradictions, the more intricately enmeshed they will become in our psychological fiber, we become the contradictions, the contradictions become us in a self-perpetuating cycle of mayhem and bloodshed that will go on and on, indefinitely perhaps, or until something completely new, miraculous even, intervenes changing the entire dynamics of the situation.

For we can never outgrow this thing in some automatic manner, nor can we be exhausted or totally consumed by it, as there are always new generations that have absorbed all our justifications of it. Nor can an external player, in the geographic sense, bring a closure to it, because the world has grown too small and interlocking for any player to be truly external. Somehow, somewhen new ideas need to emerge in order to change and revolutionize everything, else we are doomed to repeat and rewitness this the most dumb and uninspiring of tragicomedies that any imagination has ever mustered or can ever muster.