Returning to the ideologies that are currently crowding on the market of minds and hearts, and from there on political power, their situation can be described as follows:
Abundance of supply (liberalism, democracy, human rights, nationalism, political Islam).
The exacerbated bleeding of credibility, and reality sundries every day many of its promises.
The growing intellectual chaos, and the ever expanding societal fissures resulting from its conflict.
It is an ancient phenomenon that Ibn al-Muqaffa described more than 1,200 years ago in his book Kalila wa Dimna (Bab Barzwayh al-Tabib):
All of them claim that he is right and guided, and that whoever disagrees with him is wrong and misguided, and there is a great deal of disagreement between them in the matter of the Creator and creation, the principle and the end of the matter, and so on, and each is for every visitor, and he has an enemy, and he is reprimanded, so I saw that I look into the knowledge of every sect. And I look at them and look at what they describe so that I might know that truth from falsehood, so I chose it, and obliged it with confidence and certainty, not believing in what I do not know, and to follow what my mind does not reach. So, it was made clear to me that they would respond, willingly, and did not speak of justice, and I did not find in any of them an attribute that would be fair, and the person of reason knew it and was satisfied with it.
I have cited this text for more than 30 years in my book “In the Prison of the Mind” (on the website), and I have used it in more than one article;
But I come back to him today without the great admiration, which I dealt with at the beginning, and I discover that Ibn Al-Muqaffa viewed religions with an eye of exasperation, which only showed disadvantages, and that he passed unnoticed in front of the real problems raised by the phenomenon.
Is not the most important characteristic of history its continuous experimentation with religions beyond religions, of scientific, philosophical and literary schools one after the other, of all that human genius produces in terms of technology, of various political systems?
He did not notice that the "road maps" conflict and struggle is not evidence of everyone's fault, but rather of the plurality of society and the possible ways to reach the same goals, especially on the vitality of thought that never stops exploring the new, the interesting and the most effective.
Let us remind that society, this intelligent, trans-generational organism, driven by a mighty collective mind, never lays all its eggs in the same basket;
That is why you see him imposing the presence of atheism next to the believers, creating innovators where conservatives prevail and creating conservatives where innovators prevail.
See how this vitality works even within a single faith. It gives you Shiite and Sunni Islam in Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism in Christianity, with secondary ramifications within each original branch.
Is not the most important characteristic of history its continuous experimentation with religions beyond religions, of scientific, philosophical and literary schools one after the other, of all that human genius produces in terms of technology, of various political systems?
In this case, are there lessons to be learned from his ideological experiments that can help us - or at least future generations - to produce better and more effective?
(2)
Each ideology is based on 3 foundations: strong feelings (the yearning for equality and freedom, driven by anger due to the absence of the desired), clear and simple ideas that set goals to amend the unacceptable situation, and actions in the service of these ideas that make them a lived reality.
Ideas, then, are the link between interaction with a situation and the act of changing it.
It is obvious that if there is something wrong with it, then everything that will be built on it will be useless fragile or may lead to the opposite of what is desired.
Some examples by way of enumerating the most important types of intellectual deficiencies in contemporary ideologies.
Ignorance of complexity and interconnectedness
According to an Indian legend, 5 blind people gathered around an elephant, exchanging opinions about the nature of the thing they touched.
The first said a proboscis, and the second said, "It is a long canine."
The same applies to ideologies, and each one sees only part of a complex society in front of its huge problems.
This is how he sees someone who reduces all our difficulties to the doctrinal issue, the absence of democracy, the economic model, the abuse of human rights, or the responsibility of Zionism and imperialism.
When you open your eyes to the maximum, you see that all these problems are closely interrelated, and it is absurd to separate them and even arrange them or present each other to each other, in addition to this that you suddenly see that the theoretical "elephant", which was disassembled by the ideological view, is threatened by the most dangerous of the seven lurking in it, which is an accelerating change To the ocean, which turns everything said about it into Goa, to lose all connection with reality.
Utopia and ignoring the duality of human nature
The experience of 3 centuries showed the original flaw in the basic idea from which the liberal roadmap was launched.
It is true that a person freed from all the restrictions of the tyrannical state in the eras of absolute monarchy in Europe is capable of producing wealth a thousand times better than a person shackled with all visible and invisible restrictions.
Yes, the idea of "Let the people initiate in all fields, especially in production and trade", the largest economic revolution in history, has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty;
But it also led to the sabotage of the planet through the obscene and irrational exploitation of its natural resources, and today it poses the greatest danger to humanity unchecked.
It happened and did not neglect the role of corrupt banks in impoverishing millions, and causing banking disasters such as those that occurred in 1929 and 2008, or the responsibility of large companies freed from all restrictions, which profit from death by trade in arms, and from disease in food industries and soft drinks, which kill more than all germs And viruses and parasites combined.
What the theory overlooks is that the market does not automatically succeed in adjusting trade exchange in favor of the producer and the consumer.
Because every market in the physical space is full of thieves and cheaters.
It was based in all its theoretical construction on an imaginary conception of man, that he is a good being by nature, and that if you give him his complete freedom, he will act as a free and responsible person, and will only strive to achieve good for himself and others, and the bitter experience comes to confirm that this ideal human being on which liberalism is based may be A long-range target;
But it is definitely not the starting point, but the starting point is a being in which intelligence and greedy stupidity and excitement are juxtaposed, chaos and discipline, good and evil.
You can expand the scope of this reading of democracy, which also wrongly assumes that freedom of opinion and expression will be the release of suppressed ideas, and that freedom of association will lead to the gathering of good people in political and societal organizations that aim only to achieve the public good, and that elections will come to decision-making centers with the best in society.
Today we all know how far the bet was and is still losing;
Because he also did not take into account the dual nature of man.
Projecting the past on the present and the future
List the huge challenges our nation faces and the mounting threats to the next generation.
Imagine a poor person who consults a doctor for severe stomach cramps, which may be the beginning of angina, so the doctor tells him more than to eat lettuce, drink the strongest Russian vodka, and he practiced skiing constantly in the mountains of Switzerland.
The necessity of broad headings will be written such as: Unemployment of 100 million Arab youth (which means the explosion of crime, immigration, celibacy, divorce and terrorism), the cost of revolutions, civil wars and counter-revolutions, the consequences of climate change from hunger, thirst and desertification, the control of communication technology companies over millions of minds and hearts, and we have all become Prisoners and addicts to our phones and computers, the beginning of the era of artificial intelligence that may refer backward peoples like ours to the status of animals in natural reserves.
Now see what the political Islam roadmap proposes: returning to the "correct" Islam, establishing the religious state, implementing Sharia, resisting Westernization and Western cultural invasion.
Imagine a poor person who consults a doctor for severe stomach cramps, which may be the beginning of angina, so the doctor tells him more than to eat lettuce, drink the strongest Russian vodka, and he practiced skiing constantly in the mountains of Switzerland.
You say what is this surrealism?
Any relationship of drinking vodka to treat angina?
It is the same relationship between building the "correct" Islam state, a proposed remedy, and the required treatment for the imminent danger that will leave us no place to build the state of "correct" Islam
In other words, the transformation of the Middle East and North Africa to an uninhabitable land in light of the continuing global warming, within a period not exceeding 50 years.
Some say that the Islamists can roll up their minds to search for scientific and practical solutions to all problems, which have become an obsession with you.
Of course, but they will not find these solutions in their reference texts, but rather in working with their secular colleagues to devise new concepts and unprecedented technical solutions, and the doctrinal differences have become as important as the differences in the color of ties (for those who insist on continuing to suffocate their necks with it).
Planting seeds of ruin and death
Radovan Karadzic is a man who stood in 2019 before the International Criminal Court to sentence him to life imprisonment for committing crimes against humanity in general and against Muslims in particular, as he who led a war of extermination against Bosnian Muslims after the Serb nationalists installed him in 1992 as President of the Bosnian Serb Republic, and he was called the Butcher of the Balkans for the atrocity of the crimes that were Committed.
The interesting thing about this man, whose biography I read with much interest and surprise, is that he resembles me in more than one place. He is also a neurologist, lectured at major universities in the world, and he is an intellectual and writer, and has a poetry collection.
How could you be a doctor, poet and butcher?
I don’t know whether Bashar al-Assad is an intellectual and a poet.
But we all know that he is without a doubt a doctor and a butcher.
Now see the biography of a man named Nelson Mandela.
He also triumphed for his fellow countrymen and resisted what he considered a violation of the rights of his people.
But he did not base his political identity on antagonism and denying the existence of the other, and he never succumbed to hatred and rancor.
The lesson then: National, national, religious or communist ideas can - as happened in Cambodia in the 1970s - if they crossed a red line, denying the humanity of the enemy, opponent, or even the opposite of opinion, they would be on the fastest path to the abyss.
(3)
Since we always need a road map;
In other words, ideas with which we explain the reality and grope our way, so what road map for the future exploits all these experiences?
Imagine that we have the largest computer in which artificial intelligence technologies have put all their intelligence, and that we have made the following request:
O robots robot, based on the tons of data that we have packed with you, transformed all the road maps that we have tried since we left the jungles of Africa 200 thousand years ago, we ask you to provide us with a road map that takes into account the interconnectedness of the thousands of factors that control the course of our societies and the continuous change of these factors .
You must be aware of the good, evil nature of man, and that he is by nature fraudulent with all the laws that he enacts.
We also insist that ideas be without unfortunate consequences, such as justifying murder, and firmly immune to malice, and our ability to seize all mechanisms to delegate them to serve special interests.
Of course, we want the road map to save us costly conflicts, and from there it must satisfy the believers and atheists, the progressives and conservatives, the rich and the poor, the revolutionaries and the Emiratis.
Two possibilities in front of the robot: The
first:
to go to work for hours and hours, then days and days, and finally for the sirens to ring, and smoke has begun to rise and sparks flying from its sides herald the beginning of a fire in all its electronic chips.
The second
: if the programmers put a sense of humor in it - to write on the screen in bold and accurate letters after the start of the work: The recipe is ready, I will publish it provided you show me how to insert a camel into a needle's hole.
(4)
Have hundreds of thousands of road map producers imagined, and everyone crying out for their merchandise without the possibility of quick verification of the quality of the merchandise since we sometimes need decades of experimenting with many societies in order to clear the falsehood of the right?
It is said that our last hope is a scientific road map, is it not science that brings us closer to the truth, and gives us all this tremendous power over nature and ourselves?
Yeah;
But science is in particles, and we need an overview.
In addition to this, science is developing without accountability or censorship, and in all directions and in complete chaos resulting from the enormous number of brains, which search in countless laboratories, and throw their discoveries to the "scientific market" to verify their quality and declare their validity or corruption.
Have hundreds of thousands of road map producers imagined, and everyone crying out for their merchandise without the possibility of quick verification of the quality of the merchandise since we sometimes need decades of experimenting with many societies in order to clear the falsehood of the right?
Then which society can bear the continuous experimentation of a thousand tried and tested?
The rule is that societies bear earthquakes, wars and epidemics, and do not bear permanent chaos.
Does this mean that our destiny is incomplete, superficial, fictional, easy-to-delegate roadmaps for private interest, in its "staples", the permanent civil war?
Have we been condemned to revolve in the vicious circles of ideologies of the rest of bygone eras, when we are in dire need of a revised and updated roadmap to deal with unprecedented problems and dangers in an unprecedented era?
of course not;
Because we have a compass that never disappoints, and it is the alternative.
And to talk the rest