AMMONNEWS -By Abdulillah- Are you as confounded as I am? I mean with regards to how for the last 100 years or so the Middle-East and many of the surrounding Muslim nations have been treading the road of failure, one after the other.
I am not just confounded, but really very astonished that the region cannot figure a way out of the quagmire of a slow steady decline and one failure after the other. What is to blame, who is to blame?
Many of us have eluded over the years as to the myriad of possible causes, and placed blame on everyone, even ourselves at times. Are we so dysfunctional that we cannot produce even one method or solution of curbing this failure, let alone understand it? Or are we cursed to continue on this road of decline and misery?
Today our region has been roiled in conflict and in reality some of the older conflicts have not subsided or even gone away; they are still with us in one form or another. These conflicts are not only ones of war, but others steeped in religious identity, gender and conflicts akin to those tribal in nature, based on how one speaks , dresses or even acts differently from the other.
How could such a region which once was the center of learning, religion, culture, etc… have fallen so far, and cannot seem to find a way to put its legs back under itself again to right itself?
I have an idea what many of us are going to state, and to be honest, much of it is true; that this region has been the hot bed of outside interference for centuries. However; even during those times, many magnificent empires and cultures with such vast differences were able to flourish for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Yes, they declined as all things come to an end one way of the other, but the region and its people were always able to regroup and flourish once again. What’s so different today; and why in this age and time can we just not seem to put things back in order and move on?
A quick history lessontells us that each and every time an outside entity managed to disrupt the region; it was either defeated, or mostly absorbed, where it soon became part of the regions cultural and religious heritage. The Persians, the Mongolsand the like, were simply absorbed and became part of our cultural fabric and heritage, and in fact the empire grew larger, why is it so different now?
The region has never been more divided than it ever has been in the past. We’ve had internal conflicts from the beginning, but not ones that seem to have made the regions populace lose hope that it will ever come back or that they had some commonality between each other.
So why is it that this feeling of commonality with each other eroded so badly in the last 100 years or so, and why is it today the young want nothing to do with the region except to escape from it?
I am not sure,but I feel it has to do with the way our present governments seem to be working. It seems to be happening more and more the past 100 years or so we have been asking our governments to play more of a central role as to how we conduct our daily lives, from when we wake up, when we work, what we grow to eat, what we subsidize and what we don’t, whom to marry and how may kids we should have, and what our pieces of paper money is worth, and what gets paid and for how much and how little, and who gets what and who doesn’t.
Yes it sounds pretty much like we have willing and wantonly given up our liberty as individuals to think, or act, we must rely on the government to tell us how to act towards anything that may affect our life and those around us as well.
It wouldn’t be so bad if each government was made up of the people who are continuously being changed,, but even then it’s still bad enough because when an entity, no matter how benign or altruistic it maybe, unless held back by some moral code of conduct, will eventually manage to horn its way into everyone’s liberty to live their lives, even under the majorities laws.As the old adage goes, “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” and this is not just for governments that are totalitarian, but even those who call themselves democratic and any in between.
You might say you’re wrong about democracies they have built in ways to right themselves when this happens; it’s called constitutions and rule of law. However; I would argue that even this approach will eventually lead to failure of a system because it typically will mean a constitution that is morphing with its people’s present fancies and tendencies. Laws and definitions or even moral natural laws become so elastic to such a degree that nothing becomes sacrosanct, and that too becomes a jail of too much freedom, and corruption thereby flourishes.
Somewhere certain red lines should not be crossed; those inalienablenaturalGod given rights that are not contingent upon laws, customs, or belief or any particular culture or government, which cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws.
That being said where do we fall in the region today and why can we not dig ourselves out of this quagmire of failure?
I would argue because we have allowed and relied much more heavily on our governments, such that they have over time instituted a behavior of dictating what we do on a daily basis. We have lost our individuality, where we are not able to interact with each other and our societies, without following a code of conduct issued by a government.
We stopped being individuals and have become one cell organisms, only ones that cannot work collectively towards a goal without direction or order from a benevolent or non-benevolent state institution. We have given away our liberties to feel safe and secure, and in the process when corruption enters a government body and it fails, we either wonder aimlessly around bumping and eating each other as cannibals.
Time to right ourselves as individuals;let’s start acting with some individuality, governed by our God given natural rights, without rancor or malleus towards each other, not relaying so much on our governments and not giving them too much to do for us. Once we do we will find our feet and we will rise once again to the highest collective and individual human achievements possible.
God Bless Jordan and its People
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