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By Ausama Anwar:
It’s not easy to choose between what’s true and what’s not these days, since truth takes the form of a mirror shattered into a million pieces: in each, only a little part of truth.
Today, we’re not living in a world where we can do well and protect goodness in the way our primitive nature taught us. We are in an era when everything seems and claims to be true and real and when nothing seems wrong. But, as a matter of fact, our lifestyle, environment, and even our own psyches are getting worse day by day. In this article, I’ll try to highlight how we’ve been caught in the triangle of beauty (illusion) and how things are not working the way we thought. Everything is just wrong, uncomfortable, and quietly straying from how it should be.
There are reasons behind what’s happening: reasons which have always been hidden and somehow invisible. We may have created some of them. In one way or another, we may have protected or even worshipped them but never realized that they lie behind our sufferings and destruction. Therefore they are the ultimate source of Man’s eternal conflicts, concerning which religions have focused on solutions while philosophical theories have just talked about their abstract definitions. People act as though blinded and pretend to have never understood this. For the sake of their own interests and in order to fulfill their goals, they take the risk of destruction and break from the way they and their ancestors have previously lived. Some call this a revolutionary act but I’d rather call it a distortion that relates to beauty. Everything has become perverted: Our emotions, pure feelings and honest nature. They are turned into limitless rage conducting wars and leading to dilemmas.
The modern world is systematically complex and hectic. You can’t find anonymous places or indulge yourself within a community without being caught in its system.
The American computer scientist and naval officer Grace Murray Hopper, whose life spanned two world wars, once said: “Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.” Before then, you could determine what is meant by war from what is really meant by peace. The same with good and evil. But when it comes to the “systematic world”, things get a bit confusing: we have institutes, and signed papers which define someone’s wealth and make him rich or poor. There is no obvious polarity: no king or anybody that holds everything. Various authorities in the power structure hold the biggest share. So these modern conglomerates pave the way to injustice and corruption, making the poor poorer and the rich richer.
The typical image of the city, through its general system that governs our world today, hides underneath its institutions and rules great illusions and delusive dreams aspired to by the modern Man . That’s what I call a poisoned “beauty”. A beauty the majority accepts as a general truth. But, don’t get me wrong, at the same time, this beauty may reflect the radiances of optimism. (Wouldn’t we be happy to enjoy modern services which make our lives better? We have hospitals to cure us, cinemas for entertainment, and police stations to feel safe?).
But when this beauty conceals injustice and corruption it should be shattered for the sake of justice. This calls for a Revolution which is rather a call for freedom. The term “revolution” may be understood in a traditional way but what I mean here is a form of implicit opposition which has great impact. Books or even movies awaken us from this elusive beauty (system). ‘Wreck it Ralph’, for example, simplifies what I mean. This movie – from which I got the main idea for this article – shows a great understanding of our life. Ralph is a bad character in a game. He yearns for change, to become a good person. Through his adventure, he meets a little racer girl who’s been banned from the game (city, town, land) just because of her talent and great skills which make her better than the governor of the land. In the movie we can see a great and outstanding, beautiful town (beauty). We can see everyone happy.
Despite the great atmosphere of joy which has been fostered by the governor, and beyond all this beauty, there’s a great injustice crippling the little girl (an individual). When Ralph gets to understand this, he starts to destroy the game and breach all those embellished principles and rules. He defeats the governor only for the sake of justice and getting back one’s rights. These are new revolutionary issues in our modern era. Yes! There’s beauty and amazing architectural designs everywhere, but that’s not enough. They shouldn’t blindfold us from what’s been done against some people, or even against us. We are lying asleep at a time when very few are benefitting at our expense.
I think that’s the best purpose for starting a revolution in this era. And thus we can talk about the end of civilizations which I discussed in a previous article.
Accordingly, there remains an important question: what sparked the Arab Spring revolutions?
They were absolutely related to justice, which is more valuable than a “beauty” created to hypnotize the majority.
“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!” (Let them eat cake). Back in the 1790s, this sentence encapsulated a revolution. It was attributed to a queen whose people later witnessed her execution. “The queen has cakes while we don’t have anything to eat”! When injustice stings minds, arms take actions. Thus revolutions burst.
Ausama Anwar was born in 1994, in the capital of the Kurdistan region, Hawler. He is a writer and author of two books. ‘A Gate to the Intellectual’ is dedicated to youth generally with an intellectual background. ‘Hidden Idea: Some Samples from Movies’ is a work of creative movie analysis. Ausama is also President of Zamwa Society Development Organization.
Contact: twitter.com/Suaam – suaamo@yahoo.com
