Have you ever wondered why the Middle East is so messed up?

Two weeks ago, 58 people died in the attack on a church in Iraq. Two days later, 114 people died after 14 explosions targeting Shiite neighborhoods rocked Baghdad.

When I read this news I couldn’t help but think how miserable and unfortunate we, the Middle Easterners, are. The Middle East seems to be a miserable part of the world where people are destined to eternal suffering.

Middle Eastern people are generally judged by Western measures: they are so poor and ignorant because they let the tyrants take control of their lives. They are slaves to their rulers and, until they fight against them, they will remain so.

Part of this is true. We are slaves to our rulers. There is no more proof for that than the way Egyptians reacted when they lost one-sixth of the Egyptian territory to Israel in the Six Day War in 1967. When President Nasser resigned after this defeat — the worst defeat in Egyptian history since the Asiatic people, the Hyksos, invaded the northern part of Egypt in 1720 BC — Egyptians begged him not to step down.

When Nasser took back his resignation, people were cheering in the streets. They were cheering for the very same Nasser who turned Egypt into a police state, turned prisons into torture exhibitions and lost a war against a significantly smaller army in only six days. So why are we worshipping our enslavers? Why don’t we rise and fight them?

This behavior of submission is a result of centuries — or let’s say millennia — of oppression. We’ve lost all ability and all capabilities to strike back against our enslavers. Deprived from every right to decide for ourselves, we became so reliant on our tyrants that we now cannot live without them; we’ve been slaves for so many years that freedom is dreadful to us, and we prefer to be lead.

As American philosopher Eric Hoffer said, “To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint”.

The situation in the Middle East is best described by the short story “The Darkness” written by Naguib Mahfouz, 1998 Egyptian Nobel prize laureate in literature.

In the story, several drug-addicts are gathered to smoke pot in a remote and secluded room, a haven provided by a master drug-pusher — the tyrant — where the clients are completely under his control — metaphor for a police state. The master provides the necessary protection and darkness for the drug-addicts to remain stoned.

One evening, the master, who monopolized the right for speech, falls silent. The drug-addicts grope in the dark to find out that the master’s place is vacant, that they are trapped in a dark room without windows, with a securely locked door. They try to dispel the darkness with matches only to find that their match-boxes have been stolen — metaphor for people having no access to information in a police state. They also discover that their IDs have been stolen as well — the identity of the people is melded into the personality cult of the leader.

The moral of the story is that, under a police state, people are completely reliant on their oppressor who degraded them from all their rights and they are helpless without him. They cannot get out of darkness because they don’t have the means to, and they will not have the means to make such step until they are out of the darkness.

It is a dilemma described by George Orwell in his masterpiece “1984”:

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious”.

After the fall of Roman Empire in 410 AD, Europe lived for more than a thousand years in the same dilemma until they miraculously got out of it only thanks to the Enlightenment philosophy. However, the Middle East doesn’t seem to be ready yet to follow the same steps. Look at what happened in Iraq when they were forced out of darkness while they were not ready.

I don’t believe that the Middle Eastern people have any chance, at least in our lifetime, to get out of the darkness and decide their own fate and, until then, bad news will not stop coming from that area.