jamahir
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This essay is taken from Escape to Hell and Other Stories, translated from Arabic by Pierre Salinger; Published by John Blake Publishing Ltd.; Text copyright 1998 Stanké, New York
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jamahir's note - a great work of philosophy, simple-worded and wide in its understanding of human behaviors in any society and the effects of this on political structures... one of the best philosophic/political texts i have read.
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Poor incapable ones, how far you are from the bitter truth! You are truly envied, for you take the easiest of paths in life, and take on no hardships. You require no explanation or interpretation of anything that you care about. Everything is clear for you; there is no vagueness. You take on no responsibility for thinking about your lives, nor do you make any change in your customary and limited ways of behaviour. You easily decline anything involving difficulty, sparing your bodies and your consciences any effort. You fool yourselves extremely easily, and make light of any criticism of what you do or believe. Your opinions are fixed, and changes are never made to them. You deal negatively with any unaccustomed-to position. You never accept discussion about anything you believe; you are envied for this by those who have become weary from their envy, knowing the truth of what you do.
The truly strange thing in your lives is that you not only fail, but fail to learn your lesson. Any effect on you is not taken advantage of as a useful experience, no matter how much you fail you never change. No matter how much your beliefs betray you, this is never accepted by you. You are distinguished by your inability to recognize the truth, no matter how irrefutable. What is certain is that you will reject those results that do not agree with your fixed tendencies. You rely on an order of things and ideas that are not, of course, justifiable.
You make accommodations with all truths and lies as well, according to the prior beliefs that you espouse. For example, you hold the belief that magic, or a group of evil spirits, can steal the moon, and could even do so with the sun; the boldness of these hidden beings is quite dangerous! If experiments are performed in front of you that show that it is the earth's shadow which sometimes falls upon the moon and obscures it, or that the moon's shadow falls upon the sun and causes an eclipse, you do not believe it. Why? Because this is something that you do not desire.
In fact, nothing at all will change for you. Your lives are monotonous and calm; you are submissive until the end. You take the easiest of roads, even if it means total destruction. Impotence of action covers your world, which is dreary and boringly lived. However, despite your incapability, you are capable of accommodating your world with what changes can be made in accordance with your impotence. The hard lessons of the past are forgotten. You take the surface road, the one that requires no effort. You adopt the superstitions of the past, and reject others that do not conform to the pace of your easy, trusting lives, even if there are truths at stake. You never look for the truth; this is not your concern. Rather, you resort to what suits your state of inability to act, and no more.
The sellers of nothingness have encouraged you, plundering markets and setting up cemeteries where they sell you canned air. When you open such cans, the air flies out and mixes with the atmosphere – they explain this by saying that this item is both sold and bought. The sellers of cooked earth also encouraged you, as well as the drawers on the sand, the astrologers, writers of magic spells, and exorcists. You seek help from the dead, while the living among you are unable to help. You who achieved your dreams while asleep, yourconfused dreams[1], while you are unable to achieve anything while awake. When you fail in your lives, you postpone success until the afterlife. If you by chance are defeated through your own action, you explain this by saying that it was not really due to this action, so that you will not burden yourselves with the duty of resisting it. If you fail to defend yourself, you explain this by saying that it is outside your volition, the reason for it is an outside actor, so that the responsibility will fall upon another. If you fail due to a reason that you would not like to be external, or self-caused, then you say that it is luck.
Although the world of the incapable has no meaning and no effectiveness, is null and void and silly, and although they have no positive effect in life and although they are of no consequence, and are parasitic and trusting in their everyday lives, irresponsible, and not serious, in their frail, comic world in their empty, superficial world although they justify things, are apologists, and insignificant, and although they create nothing and change nothing despite all of this, the world of these incapable ones is the richest, most fertile, most teeming, and full of literary meaning. For the world of this people has its culture; it has an ability to accumulate psychologies and narratives of literature, myth, and metaphysics. If it were not for this, the world would be completely material and utterly dry and calculating. It would be multiplyingly multiplied, addedly added, and divisingly divided; in structural terms it would be bottomed out and topped [2], and made convex and concave. Without the world of these impotent actors, the world will be at its wit's end, connected and electrified and joltingly tense. Were it not for them, the human race would be active solely in a material sense, imprisoned between fixedness and mechanical movement, as if its hell were an inescapable prospect. The world's dictionary would be full of lifeless terms and words atomic and modulating, chronological and inclusive, gravitating, equilibrilizing, and non-existence.
But what is truly, truly beautiful for those incapable and impotent ones whose lives are drowned in a sea of myth, who draw invisible pictures when they so desire, who interpret the world of force, material things, and progress in the way that suits them. They are heedless, unembarrassed by the frightening, empirical world. They have filled the world with their amazing dictionary, filled with gelatinous definition and opening up limitless horizons. They have taken their imaginations farther than others, they have used their dictionary to name the world, they have explored the unending COSMOS [3] where logical and involuntary miracles exist. Then they make retreating actions to the unknown, unrecorded, and un-understood past, they revive this past in an attractive way; using it to interpret concrete existence in a mythical way. They find feeble meanings for it in material givens of this existence. From this sensitive point, the impotent ones succeeded in exploding the meaningless dialectical revolution. The theory of superstition is in force; logic flees from the equation. Knowledge becomes foolish and insignificant. Bellow a brilliant, rainbow-like ornamental halo, everything finds its explanation in impotent metaphor. But these metaphors are not serious, and thus thought out in scientific fashion. Thus, this is how the spirit of the incapable takes over the hearts of the masses, who then fall away from the positions of struggle and seriousness, toward positions of easy surrender using the logic of these very incapable ones, who do not recognize the law of the self, who do not believe in themselves.
Here, the defeats find their justification in the culture of the impotence, while setbacks are explained away as bad luck. Failing to perform is justified as a lack of will. The reasons for decline are said to involve necessity; the thing or person responsible disappears and it is understood without being believed (as in Quranic interpretation), and the pre- or post-reasoning becomes a storehouse of inexhaustible excuses used to avoid accountability.
The world of the impotent sits squatting on the straw of the life of illusion. Its law is one of the renunciation and defeat, submission to all forms of plunder and pillage. It is based on deliverance from the burdens of the ready-made and moral searches, to comprehend the humiliation and justify it. It is based on a readiness to undertake hereditary or future costuming in order to flee from the conflict of the present. The incapable are always biased toward the source of the incapability. They are forgiving of being struck and slapped, and they create sick and satisfying explanation for this. They blame opportunities and circumstances, luck and hidden things, their ancestors Meanwhile, their newspapers are daily filled with crossword puzzles, horoscopes, and lottery drawings. The sensing of superstitions becomes quite a sensitive practice, and attempts to justify this and reveal mysteries become deep-rooted. Anxiety is overcome, and a false sense of balance is created by checking omens, and by believing them. Dreams are interpreted, totems, pagan gods, and ancestors are entreated for help.
It is compensated for when those impotent ones oppress those more unfortunate than them, including women and children; this is a way of oppressing a projection of themselves in a search for lost balance. Entertainment then takes on the meaning of wasting time and being absorbed; culture becomes superficial, telling and exchanging jokes takes the place of good literary work and criticism. Entertainment becomes the issue that takes the place of the truth; entertainment and absurdity link up, along with unnecessary needs, sterile dependence, and social conflict and strife. Moral decadence and decay result as well. They are all the sickness of these incapable people, and they find their explanation in the state of impotence that is lived by these people.
Revolution: when feelings of impotence penetrate every part of the life of the incapable, and they lose the feeling of impotence and the decline that it involves. When neglect, ignominy, and baseness fail to provoke, the life of the impotent reaches zero, a static level of silliness and marginality. The countdown to approaching nothingness begins, and one begins to feel the accumulated weight of this condition. The incapable are no longer able to carry out a revolution against themselves, except by having the chance to compare their lot with their opposites, by being incited [4] by someone, or by seeing the situation for themselves. The opportunity must be a good one if incitement involves visual accomplishment. It will be an especially good opportunity if the source of the impotence is befallen by an imbalance which encourages risk-taking. If the disequilibrium continues, is used properly, and is expanded by propaganda or further incitement, then the dead morale of the incapable will become filled with life.
Here, the revolution will first proceed into the self. The impotent person will begin to treat himself violently. he begins to humiliate and insult the self, until it becomes a ready-made sacrifice. He begins to present selves that the impotent have cheapened to the altar of impotence. This is the explanation for suicides, which become more frequent in the world of the impotent, for most trivial of reasons. These people enter a phase of wandering in the desert, with series of lone, aimless, unconnected actions. Usually, this self-destructive state is accompanied by sadistic initiatives against the other, and the sacrifice is of a cow, suicide for a word, murder committed over a mere tree, divorce over the sake of a meal. The false need to place borders among the impotent, from where they live to what they eat and drink, to the area of playpens, traffic and turning, the volume level, and the sound of footsteps. Regarding the source of the impotence, each impotent person imitates other impotent people. He practices all types of superficiality and hostility against them, trying to deceive himself, convince himself that he is not like them. This is the law of life of these incapable people on any level, whether individuals, groups, or countries. The life of the impotent will continue in this manner, as long as the circumstances remain the same.
But if it is the case that the impotent have a factor in their favour, which will help them achieve salvation, then their situation can be moved from the vicious circle toward movement in a path that is not circular. The shamefaced style of the incapable could be transformed into a violent revolution against the source of impotence, and it will be violent, because this source lives also in a state of chronic hatred and is moodily justified against the impotent. It does not exist in a psychological situation that allows him to comprehend the reaction, but makes it provocative and surprising. Therefore, neither party can be held responsible for the confrontation. Thus the revolution breaks out and let death come to the impotent until revolution.
* The more common type of revolutionary slogan in Arabic would be "Revolution until Death"
[1] See Quran, Sura 12, verse 44, and Sura 21, verse 5.
[2] These expressions are alliteratively stronger in Arabic, where they are used for effect, and not literal sense.
[3] Or 'without cosmic boundaries,' if we consider the expression borrowed from Quran, Sura 53, verse 14.
[4] In the sense of being politically instigated, 'incitement' would be the task of the revolutionary committees inLibya.
---------------------
jamahir's note - a great work of philosophy, simple-worded and wide in its understanding of human behaviors in any society and the effects of this on political structures... one of the best philosophic/political texts i have read.
---------------------
Poor incapable ones, how far you are from the bitter truth! You are truly envied, for you take the easiest of paths in life, and take on no hardships. You require no explanation or interpretation of anything that you care about. Everything is clear for you; there is no vagueness. You take on no responsibility for thinking about your lives, nor do you make any change in your customary and limited ways of behaviour. You easily decline anything involving difficulty, sparing your bodies and your consciences any effort. You fool yourselves extremely easily, and make light of any criticism of what you do or believe. Your opinions are fixed, and changes are never made to them. You deal negatively with any unaccustomed-to position. You never accept discussion about anything you believe; you are envied for this by those who have become weary from their envy, knowing the truth of what you do.
The truly strange thing in your lives is that you not only fail, but fail to learn your lesson. Any effect on you is not taken advantage of as a useful experience, no matter how much you fail you never change. No matter how much your beliefs betray you, this is never accepted by you. You are distinguished by your inability to recognize the truth, no matter how irrefutable. What is certain is that you will reject those results that do not agree with your fixed tendencies. You rely on an order of things and ideas that are not, of course, justifiable.
You make accommodations with all truths and lies as well, according to the prior beliefs that you espouse. For example, you hold the belief that magic, or a group of evil spirits, can steal the moon, and could even do so with the sun; the boldness of these hidden beings is quite dangerous! If experiments are performed in front of you that show that it is the earth's shadow which sometimes falls upon the moon and obscures it, or that the moon's shadow falls upon the sun and causes an eclipse, you do not believe it. Why? Because this is something that you do not desire.
In fact, nothing at all will change for you. Your lives are monotonous and calm; you are submissive until the end. You take the easiest of roads, even if it means total destruction. Impotence of action covers your world, which is dreary and boringly lived. However, despite your incapability, you are capable of accommodating your world with what changes can be made in accordance with your impotence. The hard lessons of the past are forgotten. You take the surface road, the one that requires no effort. You adopt the superstitions of the past, and reject others that do not conform to the pace of your easy, trusting lives, even if there are truths at stake. You never look for the truth; this is not your concern. Rather, you resort to what suits your state of inability to act, and no more.
The sellers of nothingness have encouraged you, plundering markets and setting up cemeteries where they sell you canned air. When you open such cans, the air flies out and mixes with the atmosphere – they explain this by saying that this item is both sold and bought. The sellers of cooked earth also encouraged you, as well as the drawers on the sand, the astrologers, writers of magic spells, and exorcists. You seek help from the dead, while the living among you are unable to help. You who achieved your dreams while asleep, yourconfused dreams[1], while you are unable to achieve anything while awake. When you fail in your lives, you postpone success until the afterlife. If you by chance are defeated through your own action, you explain this by saying that it was not really due to this action, so that you will not burden yourselves with the duty of resisting it. If you fail to defend yourself, you explain this by saying that it is outside your volition, the reason for it is an outside actor, so that the responsibility will fall upon another. If you fail due to a reason that you would not like to be external, or self-caused, then you say that it is luck.
Although the world of the incapable has no meaning and no effectiveness, is null and void and silly, and although they have no positive effect in life and although they are of no consequence, and are parasitic and trusting in their everyday lives, irresponsible, and not serious, in their frail, comic world in their empty, superficial world although they justify things, are apologists, and insignificant, and although they create nothing and change nothing despite all of this, the world of these incapable ones is the richest, most fertile, most teeming, and full of literary meaning. For the world of this people has its culture; it has an ability to accumulate psychologies and narratives of literature, myth, and metaphysics. If it were not for this, the world would be completely material and utterly dry and calculating. It would be multiplyingly multiplied, addedly added, and divisingly divided; in structural terms it would be bottomed out and topped [2], and made convex and concave. Without the world of these impotent actors, the world will be at its wit's end, connected and electrified and joltingly tense. Were it not for them, the human race would be active solely in a material sense, imprisoned between fixedness and mechanical movement, as if its hell were an inescapable prospect. The world's dictionary would be full of lifeless terms and words atomic and modulating, chronological and inclusive, gravitating, equilibrilizing, and non-existence.
But what is truly, truly beautiful for those incapable and impotent ones whose lives are drowned in a sea of myth, who draw invisible pictures when they so desire, who interpret the world of force, material things, and progress in the way that suits them. They are heedless, unembarrassed by the frightening, empirical world. They have filled the world with their amazing dictionary, filled with gelatinous definition and opening up limitless horizons. They have taken their imaginations farther than others, they have used their dictionary to name the world, they have explored the unending COSMOS [3] where logical and involuntary miracles exist. Then they make retreating actions to the unknown, unrecorded, and un-understood past, they revive this past in an attractive way; using it to interpret concrete existence in a mythical way. They find feeble meanings for it in material givens of this existence. From this sensitive point, the impotent ones succeeded in exploding the meaningless dialectical revolution. The theory of superstition is in force; logic flees from the equation. Knowledge becomes foolish and insignificant. Bellow a brilliant, rainbow-like ornamental halo, everything finds its explanation in impotent metaphor. But these metaphors are not serious, and thus thought out in scientific fashion. Thus, this is how the spirit of the incapable takes over the hearts of the masses, who then fall away from the positions of struggle and seriousness, toward positions of easy surrender using the logic of these very incapable ones, who do not recognize the law of the self, who do not believe in themselves.
Here, the defeats find their justification in the culture of the impotence, while setbacks are explained away as bad luck. Failing to perform is justified as a lack of will. The reasons for decline are said to involve necessity; the thing or person responsible disappears and it is understood without being believed (as in Quranic interpretation), and the pre- or post-reasoning becomes a storehouse of inexhaustible excuses used to avoid accountability.
The world of the impotent sits squatting on the straw of the life of illusion. Its law is one of the renunciation and defeat, submission to all forms of plunder and pillage. It is based on deliverance from the burdens of the ready-made and moral searches, to comprehend the humiliation and justify it. It is based on a readiness to undertake hereditary or future costuming in order to flee from the conflict of the present. The incapable are always biased toward the source of the incapability. They are forgiving of being struck and slapped, and they create sick and satisfying explanation for this. They blame opportunities and circumstances, luck and hidden things, their ancestors Meanwhile, their newspapers are daily filled with crossword puzzles, horoscopes, and lottery drawings. The sensing of superstitions becomes quite a sensitive practice, and attempts to justify this and reveal mysteries become deep-rooted. Anxiety is overcome, and a false sense of balance is created by checking omens, and by believing them. Dreams are interpreted, totems, pagan gods, and ancestors are entreated for help.
It is compensated for when those impotent ones oppress those more unfortunate than them, including women and children; this is a way of oppressing a projection of themselves in a search for lost balance. Entertainment then takes on the meaning of wasting time and being absorbed; culture becomes superficial, telling and exchanging jokes takes the place of good literary work and criticism. Entertainment becomes the issue that takes the place of the truth; entertainment and absurdity link up, along with unnecessary needs, sterile dependence, and social conflict and strife. Moral decadence and decay result as well. They are all the sickness of these incapable people, and they find their explanation in the state of impotence that is lived by these people.
Revolution: when feelings of impotence penetrate every part of the life of the incapable, and they lose the feeling of impotence and the decline that it involves. When neglect, ignominy, and baseness fail to provoke, the life of the impotent reaches zero, a static level of silliness and marginality. The countdown to approaching nothingness begins, and one begins to feel the accumulated weight of this condition. The incapable are no longer able to carry out a revolution against themselves, except by having the chance to compare their lot with their opposites, by being incited [4] by someone, or by seeing the situation for themselves. The opportunity must be a good one if incitement involves visual accomplishment. It will be an especially good opportunity if the source of the impotence is befallen by an imbalance which encourages risk-taking. If the disequilibrium continues, is used properly, and is expanded by propaganda or further incitement, then the dead morale of the incapable will become filled with life.
Here, the revolution will first proceed into the self. The impotent person will begin to treat himself violently. he begins to humiliate and insult the self, until it becomes a ready-made sacrifice. He begins to present selves that the impotent have cheapened to the altar of impotence. This is the explanation for suicides, which become more frequent in the world of the impotent, for most trivial of reasons. These people enter a phase of wandering in the desert, with series of lone, aimless, unconnected actions. Usually, this self-destructive state is accompanied by sadistic initiatives against the other, and the sacrifice is of a cow, suicide for a word, murder committed over a mere tree, divorce over the sake of a meal. The false need to place borders among the impotent, from where they live to what they eat and drink, to the area of playpens, traffic and turning, the volume level, and the sound of footsteps. Regarding the source of the impotence, each impotent person imitates other impotent people. He practices all types of superficiality and hostility against them, trying to deceive himself, convince himself that he is not like them. This is the law of life of these incapable people on any level, whether individuals, groups, or countries. The life of the impotent will continue in this manner, as long as the circumstances remain the same.
But if it is the case that the impotent have a factor in their favour, which will help them achieve salvation, then their situation can be moved from the vicious circle toward movement in a path that is not circular. The shamefaced style of the incapable could be transformed into a violent revolution against the source of impotence, and it will be violent, because this source lives also in a state of chronic hatred and is moodily justified against the impotent. It does not exist in a psychological situation that allows him to comprehend the reaction, but makes it provocative and surprising. Therefore, neither party can be held responsible for the confrontation. Thus the revolution breaks out and let death come to the impotent until revolution.
* The more common type of revolutionary slogan in Arabic would be "Revolution until Death"
[1] See Quran, Sura 12, verse 44, and Sura 21, verse 5.
[2] These expressions are alliteratively stronger in Arabic, where they are used for effect, and not literal sense.
[3] Or 'without cosmic boundaries,' if we consider the expression borrowed from Quran, Sura 53, verse 14.
[4] In the sense of being politically instigated, 'incitement' would be the task of the revolutionary committees inLibya.
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