Egypt's Future

I find the articles of Alaa Al-Aswany compelling and yet singularly depressing but not in a way that can make me turn away or stop reading them for they speak the truth. The painful truth.

There is not a single rule in Egypt which really applies to all, from traffic offences to bank loans to the sale of state land and property and public-sector companies. Who you are, who your father is, how wealthy you are and how close you are to the regime in power – all these are decisive factors in determining which rules you will be judged by. Everything in Egypt now depends on the circumstances and every case has its own special rules. Causes no longer necessarily lead to effects. Hard work does not necessarily lead to success and a mistake does not necessarily lead to punishment. 
Those who lived in Egypt in the 1960s no doubt remember a unique phenomenon: hundreds of secondary school and university students used to do their homework in the street under the street lamps … they were too poor to study at home but they worked hard, confident that achieving success was a matter of time because their advancement in life depended on their efforts. That system of equal opportunities in education and promotion has ended completely.
Egypt’s problem is not poverty or shortage of resources or overpopulation. Its problem can be summarized in three words: lack of justice. The injustice has simply become more than we can bear. Egyptians will not regain their sense of belonging or their capacity to work until they recover their sense of justice, and justice cannot come about in the shadow of despotism. Democracy is the solution.

It is this that makes me sad, it is this that makes me lack hope and unfortunately I see no solutions....

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

Okay, this is going to be a rant and a muddle of thoughts but do please hear me out. 

How long have we been wondering about President Mubarak's imminent decline? A few year's ago Egyptian newspapers speculated that he had gone, recently he went to Germany for a 'gall bladder operation' and now the Western media speculate that he may have terminal cancer. 

Surely we're missing the point here? Should Mubarak die tomorrow, the automatic result will be that his son Gamal will take over and the system will continue unchanged.  It is disappointing that government officials in foreign capitals are now concerned over the situation when  they could have been involved in making Egypt a better and more stable place by cracking down on the government and not allowing them to do whatever they want.

It is laughable that foreign officials are now worried about Egypt when the president dies. They weren’t worried when Egypt was beating, torturing and killing activists over the past few years because they got Egypt to support their policies in the region.

Hammam

I love Hammams!!!

HAMMAM: Spreader of Warmth from Mervyn Leong on Vimeo.

Talking about the French

Recently I have been getting back into French culture in a big way: music, movies, literature...the lot!

Perhaps this is because, as a language it is so much more descriptive of the human state. All aspects of the French dialectic is fashioned to answer the 'big questions'. Most of their films seem to address these issues and in my case never seem to fail to leave me a jibbering wreck, having hit too close to home such as in 'Coco before Chanel'.



The music also touches so close....check out anything by Noir Desir.



And literature.....ah, literature has consumed tomes authored by intellectuals and philosophers much more intelligent than I but just think Camus, Baudelaire, De Beauvoir, Sartre......

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.
Albert Camus

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
Albert Camus

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.

Simone de Beauvoir

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir

Please Make Me Blog!

I miss blogging, I really do. I used to be addicted to it at one point and now..... Well even when I have more time on my hands than I know what to do with, I can't.

People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.
Andrew Carnegie

On another note, I watched Audrey Tautou and Gad El-Maleh's film Hors de Prix or Priceless yesterday. It really gave me a new comprehension of relationships- a much more pragmatic and materialistic one, whereby one enters a relationship based on the concept of give and take but in a different sense- not the one I understood, of emotional and moral support but swaping time, effort and manufactured emotions for material gain. Depressing and yet I think more prevalent than I had previously suspected. But still....a delightful film!

A Question of Freedom

I returned. I thought to start with a new blog but I wish to keep this one- it chaos represents me well and I wish to be represented with my faults and my moments of inspiration (though these days they are few and far between).
I have been feeling for a while that I am unable to write, but that is silly- if there is a time to write, then this is surely it. So I will start slowly and just commit a little of what is on my mind to this blog- in no particular order or withy any particular mastery but simply for the fact of it being. Something concrete.

So first up is this article I found in the guardian which highlights one of the aspects of life in Egypt which perhaps most annoys visitors to the country and that is the lack of personal freedom. Though I find that Baher Ibrahim examines the issue from a very Western liberalist perspective and ignores the fact that it is not only Middle Eastern societies which do not allow for this freedom  but many other political systems as well and indeed the concept of personal freedom is extremely subjective.

The essence of personal freedom is choice. The more freedom we have to choose, the freer we are. Having said that, in our "modern" culture, where we have more choices than ever, many of us have our freedom limited because we are not the ones creating the choices before us.

In his great book, "Escape from Freedom," Erich Fromm suggests that we do not really want to be free. Being truly free also means being fully responsible for our lives and our decisions. Many of us would rather have others to blame for our lack of success or fulfillment in life.

Fromm identifies three ways that we escape from freedom. One he called authoritarianism. He saw this in its most viral form in Hitler's Germany. In authoritarianism, we choose safety over freedom. We are taught to be afraid and look to an authoritarian government to protect us. In America today, the Bush administration constantly uses fear of terrorism as an excuse for taking away our freedoms.

The other thing one can do is become the authority. This also makes you less free. Neither the prisoner nor the guard is free. The authoritarian leader must be constantly vigilant in keeping the people afraid. Such vigilance removes freedom from the dictator as well.

The second way to escape from freedom is to lash out at your oppressors. This he called destructiveness. Destructiveness is seldom successful in setting people free. In fact, it is often the case that when one authoritarian regime is destroyed, a second takes its place.

Gandhi and King represent non-destructive methods for obtaining freedom in both the political and personal sense.

Conformity is the third way to escape from freedom. You simply go along with the program and don't make waves. You give up your freedom willingly and allow yourself to be imprisoned as long as the prison is a pleasant one. In the West, conformity has led to the lack of freedom we are now experiencing. We have taken our freedom for granted for so long that we didn't notice when it began to slip away.

I do like the finale very much though "Egyptians need to realise there's a better way to live their lives than following others' dictates" and perhaps this should be applied globally.

True personal freedom requires a lot of personal courage. Freedom means taking risks. Freedom means defining ourselves and not being defined by others. If you affirm that you want to be free, you are affirming that you want to be responsible. It's just possible that freedom really is worth the risk. We haven't much to lose in any case.