How long will it take an Arab — male or female — to become socially and politically mature in the eyes of the state?
I ask this because the more I read and listen, the more I understand that beneath the sociopolitical veneer there exists a powerful current that actually rules our lives and makes what the world sees us doing so baffling.
Our malaise is not simply political tyranny: This would be too easy an answer. The Communists believed the state knew more than the individual and the party knew more than both.
Hence the relative ease with which the demise of the USSR was brought about since the idea itself was alien to the society it sought to control.
We, on the other hand, lived under Big Brother long before Lenin was born. The state wanted and succeeded in controlling what we ate, how we dressed, what we studied and how we used (or did not use) our brains. Everything in the daily decisions that makes us human was relegated to someone else.
At home the father took out his tyranny on his children, male and female. When the males rebelled and left, the females were left to shoulder the burden. It was always the patriarchal figure who ruled and not the tyrant. There is a difference here of course in semantics but not in behavior.
On the broader spectrum of the social canvas, the state filled the patriarchal niche quite effectively. For example, the state does not see itself “banning” you from reading a certain novel; instead it is “protecting” you from its bad influence since you do not know any better.
Benevolent dictatorship is dictatorship nonetheless. Over the centuries a culture of submission calcified into layers of behavior that became canon. Society itself went on to do the state’s dirty work for it by shunning and condemning those who actually dared to read the banned novel.
You have writers who, without thought or remuneration, harp on “tradition” and “culture” as if those were things that can be neither changed nor challenged. To help fertilize the scene, the state supports mediocrity and actually helps make it the banner of its cultural existence.
This isolated and xenophobic approach to life has been shattered once and for all by the technology of modern communications. It is not ideas that matter these days. There are no major ideologies making the rounds from South America to Mongolia.
What we have is an openness that gives people the chance to see a plethora of ideas interacting in a speck known as a television or a computer screen.
Yet the old guard holds on to its own myths. That is why we still have state television stations that are redundant.
They still think we need their pre-digested fodder. Worse, they still think the fodder works. More sinister, however, is that the state does not think its population is “mature” enough to cast a vote. The state will have elections and the result will be a spectacular 99.99 percent in favor of you-know-who.
So long as we do not see the reality of a situation, the outcome of our actions will never satisfy our genuine needs. The mindless actions we see today are the reactions of those whom we produced in a pressure cooker that has finally lost its top.
