Populism weaves its own narrative in response to the challenges facing society without thinking about the rationality of that narrative or its political and social consequences.
When it does so, it resorts to the unconscious stock of the group, or let us say the collective mind, which consists of a set of vague feelings rooted somewhere in the collective memory, a place that enjoys protection from examination because it does not appear in its original components in a crystallized form and with specific concepts that can be touched and exposed to the mind.
Let us note that the unconscious stock or the Arab-Islamic collective mind constantly tends towards sectarian-religious standards, while the other standards are modern and fragile, trying to ride on the collective mind from above and not from within it to a large extent.
Because this is the case, we find that populism constantly has the ability to regain its position in society, when culture declines to become confined to elites isolated socially and politically.
This is true in closed societies, as it is true in societies where political tyranny has prevailed for a long time, this tyranny that constitutes a real obstacle to the interaction of elites with society, so that culture and awareness can be transferred to the depths of the collective mind in an effective manner.
What is happening today in Syria is that Syrian society has emerged from a long period of political desertification that produced an intellectual desertification that paved the way for the collective mind to dominate, this mind that produces nothing but populism in the field of politics.
The worst thing that populism does is that it places a barrier in the way of rational trials, and thus in the way of seeing the self with a critical vision and not considering the self as a sacred god and considering the other as a stranger and an entity closed to understanding.
*Ego inflation
Thus, the ego of society, or more frankly, the ego of the group, inflates until it no longer accepts the other except as outside of it, which is a feeling very similar to the tribal feeling, and in fact, the division into sects finds its only historical explanation as being in one way or another a projection of the oldest and most ancient tribal division in the field of religiosity.
Perhaps this explains why sectarian divisions gathered in the Levant, but not in Egypt? Rather, they were sometimes born in Egypt but exported to the Levant, and Egypt remained a single sectarian societal bloc to a large extent?
Simply because tribal influences in the Levant are more deeply rooted, so societies here have a natural tendency to vertical division, unlike Egyptian society.
This is just a digression, and to return to our original topic, we in Syria still deal to some extent as tribes that have adopted sects or as sects that are aware of themselves with tribal awareness.
The result is that we see the collective mind before us today weaving its narrative in each party's view of the other freely and effectively, far from any rational thinking.
The Sunni Arab majority no longer sees minorities as anything but an obstacle to be overcome, and minorities no longer see the majority as anything but a project for comprehensive domination that leaves them with only a narrow window of life.
*A place that does not resemble our hopes and dreams
This mutual vision has become the root of a political crisis that cannot be ignored without examining it and addressing it socially and politically, not in a spirit of victory.
Perhaps the gateway to this lies in penetrating the prevailing populist narrative on the ruins of the political-intellectual desertification that we inherited from the defunct regime.
But that requires a real societal dialogue in which cultural and rational concepts intervene.
A dialogue that is not built from above but from below, from the foundations of society, and does not take place between the authority and society but within society, and such a dialogue requires an atmosphere of freedom and independence.
Without that freedom, it will not be possible to achieve any progress, meaning that populism will ultimately triumph.
As for what its victory means and where we will go, no one knows, but what can be certain is that it will lead us to another place that does not resemble our hopes and dreams that blossomed after we breathed freedom with the fall of the defunct regime.
By Makal Zohour Adi
Zaman Al Wasl
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