Maktoub

If equality is to be sought after then it can only be a fictitious notion: an impossibility. For to “achieve” equality, is to render it unnatural, and rather historical. Consequently, to institutionalize the pursuit for equality is, by induction, the institutionalization of inequality. So, the law of conservation of inequality paradoxically lies within the pursuit for equality.

What if we Instead presume equality? The act of pursuing equality is now transformed to one correcting for “perceived” inequality: for it only belongs within the sensible manifesting, linguistically, for instance, in “more or less,” “have or have not,” etc.  While the journey from inequality to equality is a mere acknowledgment, the pursuit of what is an acknowledgment away is not a resolution to inequality but a divergence through a redundancy.

If we choose to model society as a classroom, one window for such redundancy to manifest is through, a separation, a dichotomy: What is the purpose of learning? What is the purpose of teaching? While the notion of learning can stand alone, the converse about teaching is not true: would intelligence be able to conceive “teaching” if there is nothing to learn?  The redundancy in separating the two does not necessarily lie in the absence of a distinction between them. While humans can learn individually, the “collective” is implicit in teaching: teaching is first and foremost a social activity that involves at least two individuals. The redundancy however lies in the fact that you cannot address teaching without addressing learning: teaching is a collective behavior involving two or more individuals in pursuit of learning.

So teaching is a social activity involving a collective: a teacher and a student. Material inequality here is loud and unavoidable: a superior-inferior dynamic between the teacher and the student. But if equality is presumed then the sole purpose of the social activity of teaching is to resolve material inequality. Not because it is the right thing to do from an ethical point of view but because it is the logical selfish thing to do from an individual point of view in the pursuit of learning.

To elaborate more on this, one must start by saying that consent is implicit in any social activity, otherwise the “collective” is an impossibility. The superior-inferior dynamics involved in teaching comes from the privileged position of the teacher: teaching is itself a privilege. This privilege on its part can be represented using the notion of ‘time.’ The distinction between the teacher and the student is not in terms of the time spent teaching, but the time spent learning. With the privilege of having spent much more time learning, the teacher corrects for now the surplus of time: the time spent otherwise, outside of learning. The correction comes through a sacrifice of the surplus of time for the sake of teaching. But humans sacrifice for a reason, a selfish reason. What would be the incentivizing factor for the teacher to adopt such a sacrifice? Where does the consent of the teacher stem to partake in this social activity stem from? Here is where, for me, the purpose of learning comes into play.

Learning, as I think of it, is the struggle for representations. And the pursuit of learning is particularly the pursuit of representations.  One then teaches to learn through different representations and ideas offered by the students on the content that is being taught. But it is not enough to teach to receive genuine representations and ideas. The efficacy of learning here lies in its core within the consent of the student to learn. But, being the superior agent, it is up for the teacher to decide to pursue genuine representations (learning) or otherwise. Learning has a clear purpose to me: the production of thinking beings. But it is not that Descartes was wrong when he said “I think therefor I am.” But he simply fell victim of incompletion.

See the collective is a multiplicative element. It does not involve simply the number of people within the collective, but double that number. Each individual within the collective is now a duality: an individual and a social being. If the interaction between the individual and their social double is antagonistic, then the collective is impossible without an enforcer. In the context of the classroom that antagonism lies in the “necessity of learning” rather than the “will to learn.” The teacher is now left with a choice. The teacher can choose to act as an enforcer, leveraging tools such as deadlines, exams, and school policy. But while it might get the students to think, “I think there I am” cannot apply here. For the students are now not thinking in pursuit of their own humanity, in pursuit of their will through their intelligence, but rather In pursuit of something external, material: the will of the teacher. The only hope for a genuine representation and idea now is a “stroke of genius.” More importantly, a perversion becomes at play: the mean, teaching, became the end.

Instead then, it is the up to the teacher to fulfill their own greed for learning by making sure the consent of the student stems solely from their shared pursuit and greed. The aim of the music teacher in pursuit of the knowledge of music is not to produce a classroom full of people capable of playing the teacher’s symphony. It is Instead the pursuit of a classroom full of individuals each capable of composing their own symphony. With a choice now given to the student the superior-inferior interaction perished. There is no genius here, simply because under equality, everyone is a genius. An outcome impossible to arrive at under the methodology adopted by the enforcer-teacher.

A play by a single character: John Kirby. Centered on the stage is a monitor, with running footage of scenes from Gaza. A podium to the left of the monitor facing the audience. The screen and the podium under two independent spotlights. John Kirby walks all the way till he reaches the podium, 90 seconds after the footage on the monitor started playing. Now he is facing the audience. From behind the curtain a voice emerges: three, two, one. Kirby gives the following monologue consisting of 5 statements only:

• The state of Israel has the right to defend itself.
• No indication of Israel committing genocide.
• Hamas is an ideology, and you cannot destroy an ideology.
• Hamas is an organized entity, like an army.
• The day after.

End of the play.

The “state” of Israel has the right to defend itself. And despite tens of thousands in casualties, millions in forced displacement, and mass destruction, ‘no indication of genocide.’ Questioning what Kirby can or cannot say, and what he can, cannot, or refuses to see, will only lead to a speculative chain of thought. The only thing certain here are the words that came out of his mouth, on which I, just like anyone else, can only give my opinion, and comment. 

First of all, I agree with Kirby here: Israel is a state defending itself. And clearly, the word ‘genocide’ is more abstract than one may think, at least from Kirby’s point of view. So let us not call it a genocide and simply call it for what it is: tens of thousands in casualties, millions in forced displacement, and mass destruction. But for it to happen, it needs to first be possible. ‘Tens of thousands in casualties, millions in forced displacement, and mass destruction’ is possible when a state (let alone an occupying one) is defending itself. 

• Israel is a state defending itself. 
• ‘Tens of thousands in casualties, millions in forced displacement, and mass destruction’ is possible when a state is defending itself.

Notably, to think that ‘tens of thousands in casualties, millions in forced displacement, and mass destruction’ is a bad thing is to either question the state of concern in this context, or question the notion of the state from the speaker’s point of view, Mr. Kirby. 

He goes on to demonize Hamas. While the direction he chose is not original or authentic in any way, he did go the extra mile with it. He says, ‘Hamas is an ideology, and you cannot destroy an ideology.’ But ideologies can be destroyed, at least in my opinion. An ideology is a formal definition of an idea, a reduction of an idea to the finite, with a form, shape, and boundary. But who cares about my opinion. Kirby’s own school supposedly ‘sacrificed’ to ‘destroy’ an ideology less than a hundred years ago: Nazism. 

It is not ‘contradiction’ that makes Kirby call Hamas a non-perishable ideology, contrary to the case with Nazi ideology. Actually, if Mr. Kirby is anything, he is ‘consistency.’ In Kirby’s (western) rhetoric on both Hamas, and the Nazis, the word ‘ideology’ would serve the same purpose: hiding an idea and its origin. 

But Kirby’s extra mile is not covered yet. He continues demonizing Hamas by saying Hamas is ‘an organized entity, like an army.’ So if Hamas is an ideology, a formalized idea, an institutionalized idea, a doctrine, as per his claim, and has an organized army, then Mr. Kirby could have demonized Hamas by saying: Hamas is a state. Great! Mr. Kirby is now giving everyone a lecture on the ‘state,’ not as we know it but as a notion: it is as abstract as you want it to be. 

So let us otherwise imagine a play where Kirby decides to change his monologue thus far (the first four statements) to say:

• ‘Tens of thousands in casualties, millions in forced displacement, and mass destruction’ happens when a state is defending itself.
• ‘State’ is a notion that can be exploited as a means of demonization.

Where would he converge or arrive? In my opinion, in the same place he did anyway: the day after. As long as the ‘Palestinians’ are fighting for a state and demonized for that action, and Israel, being a state, can do anything possible, thinkable, to defend itself, ‘the day after’ will remain a Palestinian question. Until the question withers away with its subject.

What is a ‘tankie’? If we follow the origin and root of the word we can think of it as a reference to a person who has the tendency towards the use of tanks, the rule of the tank, and hence a tankie. But ‘tankie’, just like any other word, is a material representation that points at a concept or an idea (beyond the material). That is why if we stick to the definition we just provided for the word ‘tankie,’ we need to acknowledge that it is only a definition, open to interpretations as is, but also can be reshaped and reformulated. Consequently, the word ‘tankie’, by being a word, is a transcendental object connecting the material to what is beyond it: an innovation.

While the word can live in a script on its own within the material, once liberated to what is beyond the material, the word, any word, cannot live in isolation. Neither its definition, regardless of its definition. Other elements start to come into play in the struggle to approach what is beyond it. The context in which it was written, the context of the writer, of when it was written, and where it was written. Even the script itself starts overdetermining itself, where a given word is now also affected by the word before it and the word after it, the sentence before and the sentence after, and so on. Drama. Yet another innovation. 

So if we consider the word ‘tankie’ again, hearing it from an anarchist, a communist, a religious fundamentalist, a democratic socialist, and a liberal, it is the variations in the definition of the word across different performers that is now in action: politics is theatre. But it is particularly within the ‘democratic’ sphere that is focused on here. And ‘democratic’ here is a reference to the western notion of democracy today. Within such sphere, ‘tankie’ is a word assembled to a person who is opposed to the western notion of democracy.

But the record of the western bloc, the ‘democratic’ bloc, is not scarce on the use of tanks, even when the opposition to such democracy are themselves short of tanks (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Palestine, and so on). The use of tanks by the western bloc is often justified through the potential ‘tankification’ of a certain region or state or country, and now the tank battalion from the west arrives as the liberator from the (what could be) tank battalion from within. So it is not the ‘tank’ per se that is in question, but the rule of power, what the tank manifests: order and inequality.

It must be then that the tank battalion coming from the west is sourced from a position of equality, labeled in the west as democracy. So perhaps it is particularly from this notion of democracy the monologue should start. I will refer to western democracy and, simply, democracy interchangeably.

Democracy motivates itself as a correction to the inequality in superior-inferior social dynamic within the notion of the state: a democratic state. But the impossibility of this correction lies in the definition, for equality is the abolishment of inequality, and to correct rather than abolish the state as perceived in the order of privilege (inequality) is to aim for equality while presuming inequality. We are already able then to say that democracy constitutes a perversion. For if democracy is to live up to its objective, that it claims, then it is for democracy, as a notion, to kill the state and then commit suicide.

Otherwise for it to exist, and persist as a notion within the state, it must then serve a purpose from without its proclaimed objective. If democracy finds itself within inequality, then it constitutes, in its essence, an acceptance of inequality. By extending its definition to a redundancy, it serves as a distraction from the realization of such acceptance. From within the redundant then, it acts as a force of divergence. Instead of the convergence of the struggle over several mediums against privilege, each medium is now an independent struggle, striving for its own notion of equality within inequality. Too theoretical? Maybe. We can instead examine democracy from a practical point of view.

It is natural to start examining western democracy from its origin: capitalism. Specialization of the means of production was a maturing step for such means, and capitalism generally. As one demonstration of such maturity it contributed to increase in efficiency, elevating the means of production to means of mass production. As another demonstration of such maturity, more important in social context, it contributed to an uninterrupted production cycle where the labor organization in a factory has now deteriorated into fragments: from unionism to trade-unionism. So instead of a union organizing the struggle between the whole of the labor body and the factory owner, each trade now has their own struggle and their own union: exactly identical yet separable(?).

The result is a rat race: transforming the binary dynamics between the laborers (those who don’t have) and the factory owner (those who have) into dynamics within a spectrum, ranging from least exploited to most exploited. This race, however, is not about identifying the winner and loser, but merely aims to reorganize the losers. For regardless of the result of the race one thing will remain unchanged: the factory ownership. In other words the winner of the race is now the first to concede and accept the notion of exploitation.

With the penetration of the means of production into society, this methodology of deterioration through specialization crystallized under the notion of democracy. The social struggle deteriorated in a similar way still for an uninterrupted “production”: racial struggle, gender struggle, economic struggle, southern struggle, sectarian/religious struggle, and so on. Equality is now ‘constructed’ in a deceiving form: opportunity for all.

But the consequence of this construct is consistent with privilege and its order, merely presenting a new perspective on the fractal aesthetic of privilege: perpetuation. For under this construct, the struggle of the exploited to return to their humanity (equality) is perverted: oriented towards winning the race rather than abolishing it all together. Under this form of ‘opportunity for all’, while not everyone is a ‘factory owner’, whoever is not aspires to be one. So it is not that democracy breeds authoritarianism, rather that democracy is itself authoritarian. Albeit glorified.

So now when a democrat is pointing at a ‘tankie,’ they are actually pointing at themselves: everyone is a tankie, authoritarian tendency is now an identity. With this redundancy, there is nothing beyond the word to approach anymore. It is sealed as a label, chained within the material, and the residual is a perpetual identity crisis, a perpetual tankie tantrum.

I saw a post on X by a Palestinian reporter. A video on a massacre in Nuseirat Refugee Camp, south of Wadi Gaza: supposedly a safe zone as claimed by the Israeli Occupation. A random user, from a Western country, in response to calling it a massacre, said: ‘It is not a massacre. Just move south.’ It is one thing for a statement like this to come from (an elite) a politician, or even a corporation or a CEO, for opportunism in their class definition is enough to induce a state of denial or manipulation. But in my opinion it requires a deeper dig to understand the tendency that makes some people (non-elite) to make a statement that defies logic on many levels. More importantly, to dive into the strategy of naming (ignorant, racist, etc) in this case would preach more about the subject of the question of understanding than the object. In one word: lazy. For naming serves mystification, and to mystify is to abolish thought.

In this context an enclave is of concern. 2.2M in population, over 365 square kilometers (6027 residents per square kilometer). Of which 77% are refugees. Surrounded by an ‘occupying’ army consisting of 465,000 soldiers (25% of the size of the population of Gaza). Without addressing the historic, economic, scientific, moral, and human elements of the situation, one thing is for certain, ‘move south’ is a manifestation of a tendency that defies humanity and the thought within. But regardless of the context, or even this user particularly, what is it that makes a person develop such a tendency ? The short answer is ‘identity crisis’. 

History can be conceptualized as the art of story-telling, so long as the following is imposed on the reception of such art. A story, any story, is not a reflection of a truth. Conversely, every story holds an abstraction of the truth, albeit with variability in the degree of abstraction. The truth, to me at-least, lies within a perpetual struggle: the struggle to resolve the contradiction between the sensible, and the whole beyond it. But that is yet to be a definition of the truth. 

One can take a perverted attempt at the definition, and base it solely on the sensible: the truth is causality. Then if we consider that any given locality in time is a midpoint between two opposing extremes of the infinite, the beginning and end of time, then causation becomes itself an abstraction of multiple causation: where the first event in time now branched out to an infinite network of events leading up to the time-locality of concern. In other words, the causes leading up to the event within this locality itself now lie within the infinite. 

A problem then arises. The struggle between the individual’s finitude and the comprehension of the infinite: a contradiction. Causality then took us a full circle back to where we started. For causality itself is the language of the sensible. The individual then must liberate thought from causality, must counteract against the conflation of intelligence with the sensible, in order to transcend with it to the whole. This is done by complimenting thought from without the sensible through the acknowledgment of the limitations within.

Consequently, treating the truth as that to be attained through thought, thereby abstracting it to the comprehensible, ceases to be the methodology, and instead thought is now a machinery of correction for the shortcomings of the individual, thereby transcending to the infinite, where the truth lies. For without such acknowledgement the individual is dead, prisoner of the past, forever in the moment just before, forever falling short from now: prisoner of causality.

Here is a story then. In a society driven and governed by privilege, and strives for order to perpetuate privilege, the state is merely a crystallization of the will of the privileged. Consequently, if society consists of an infinite network of processes, and itself an abstraction of the whole of humanity beyond it, the state, imposing and enforcing order within society, then is the penetration of the will of the privileged into the various processes within society. The state machinery being itself from within the sensible, society, now dictated by it, becomes itself a representation of an infested, rotten individual. By this token, if imperialism is then defined from within such penetration, then it is too within the definition of the state.

Under capitalism for instance, the metropolis manifests the penetration of the economic state machinery in the cultural process, where the geographic locality, in terms of accessibility (ports, railways, etc), history, demography, etc from an economic outlook dominate the evolution of the cultural process itself. And similarly, as the penetration spreads across all processes, the economic construct spreads with it. Now the state machinery penetrates to the individual in the society through said individual’s struggle to conform to this construct induced by the state’s struggle to enforce order. Now the state becomes the individual, and the individual becomes the state: the intelligence of the underprivileged conflated with the state (the will of the privileged). 

But, in this view, capitalism and imperialism should not be conflated. For capitalism is merely a developed stage of the society of privilege. And the imperialism addressed here so far is a capitalistic one. Consider a different example. In the context of Arab society for instance, the state machinery was engendered from where the cultural process had left off. Particularly, in the Umaweyyeen’s era, who’s dynasty (Umayyad state) could be hypothesized as the first ‘Arab’ state (under our current definition of state), the state machinery was engendered from the cultural struggle between thought and revelation (prophecy). Specifically through neutralizing the struggle all together: compromising thought, and centralizing around revelation, thereby engendering religious privilege in the build-up to the dynasty. 

That’s why when Western colonialism saturated in the Arab colonies, from a capitalistic outlook, and capitalistic parasitism imposed the extension of Western (capitalistic) imperialism in these colonies, the first item on Sir Sykes’ and Monsieur Picot’s agenda was to find a descendant of the Prophet to lead the Great Arab Revolt. By doing so hijacking the state machinery, and the entire society with it, and marking a fusion between capitalistic and religious state machineries. 

Nonetheless, we arrive at a construct manifesting the struggle between doubles, the privileged and underprivileged: king-citizen, civilized-barbaric, bourgeois-proletaire, and so on. But here’s the thing about this world of doubles. The privileged is the state by induction, but so is the underprivileged (under imperialism innate in the state). And now, the struggle within this order of privilege became a struggle of turning tables, and switching roles, for both sides of this double now have the tendency to not acknowledge the state machinery at all. For to do so is, now under this construct, an identity crisis! 

Perhaps now the need for a proletaire with a magic wand is more necessary than ever. Not because liberation lies within their magic, but simply because the magic wand now allows the proletaire to escape the construct all together by finding an identity from without the construct itself: a magician.