To be or not to be

[عبدالله حميدالدين]

To be or not to be
Is that the question?

Most if not all readers would assume a mistake in the title. Hamlet was not questioning, but rather asserting. Well, at that time, Hamlet would have asserted, but if Hamlet were to play now, or probably any time in the past 100 years he himself may have questioned or even refrained his celebrated expression. I can even go further to assume, and with a high degree of confidence that he would have replaced it with an expression more in touch with the mind-frame of today, something like: “To have or not have that is the problem”.
Its either that or he would be talking riddles to an audience composed of those who can’t anymore comprehend or appreciate the value of the concept “to be”.
“To be” has become a very distant memory, a slogan for an idealistic few, who are either alienated from the realities of today’s life, or financially protected from the miseries of the “masses”, people who live in ivory towers built on Socrate’s contemplation or Smith’s secret hand.
What ever the case maybe, today’s consciousness and value systems are shaped by a social setting and economic background which glorifies a new slogan which is: “to have”, and this indeed leads to a devastating state of affairs.
When we lived in a “to be” culture, our course of being didn’t - by design or by nature - cross with that of anyone. Nor were the resources for “being” limited by time, space, or finiteness. They weren’t even shared. All one had to do if he or she wanted “to be” was to be. So each one, with enough sense, was “being”, free of feeling challenged by others also being.
Such a state of affairs left struggles of survival and competition to those things which were not "the problem", things – either trivial or significant - which didn’t have vitality in the philosophy of our lives.
Needless to say, I am not even remotely implying that all people and societies lived in complete tranquillity and blissfulness. They did not, nor will they. For although they had a “to be” mode of thinking, they behaved in a “to have” manner. Their problems – to mention a few- might have been the absence of a bridge between thought and behaviour, culture and civility, inadequacy of the overall philosophical system, ineffectiveness of their socialisation process, and incompetence of leadership.
So we had two sets of people. The majority who chose to enter the survival battle and compete on the “to have” front; and those few who chose not to indulge themselves in such pettiness. And the norm, the ideal, the “what’s right” was always with the few.
But for a multitude of complex and chaotic causes reasons things changed.
Many of the pathologies of that era came from a “to have behaviour”, and in the light of the increasing gap between thought and behaviour, ideal and reality, among other reasons, it seemed reasonable for many to assume that thought should stem out from reality, rather than thought shaping reality, or attempting to in the least.
And so a “to have” culture was instigated, “philosophically” justified, and eventually institutionalised socially and economically.
With it a new mode of social relations was formed.
The “to have” culture by design assumes that one will need to reach out and take. And in this process where taking is naturally going to be from a common pool hands are likely to tangle with each other, and snatching is going to be the norm. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that resources of “to have” are limited by time, space, and finiteness. They cannot be shared. What one will take, others will be deprived of. And if all what one wanted to do was “ to have”, if Hamlet’s problem became “to have or not to have”, then all what one would really doing is deprivation of others. So each member in such a culture, in their senseless thoughts, would be living in a continuous feeling of being challenged by others seeking “to have”.
In that context a culture of survival grew, and soon spread locally and eventually globally.
Lucky for some, before it was well rooted, a political institution called “democracy” was installed which mitigated the effects of such a culture to quite a degree. In our case – us in the Arab corner of this globe - that culture had already rooted itself with neither the existence of a political will to change it or limit its power of destruction, and the institutional setting to alleviate some of its destitution.

[Nader]

Very Sophisticated by a good philosopher !!!
Is this an article you wrote ??
if yes, where was it published?

[معاذ حميدالدين]

An alternate version was published in Arabic at Al-Hayat daily news paper
http://www.daralhayat.com/opinion/06-20 ... story.html

[أحمد الشامي]

Salam

This is a small picture that explains our reality as human beings today.

Nice Article

Thanks for posting it

[Nader]

Dear Mu3adh
The link didn't work!!!
at least with me...

[عبدالله حميدالدين]

thanks for your comments
by the way, i sent the arabic version of it to al-hayat, but they made slight changes, when publishing it.

thanks once more

[الأثير]

http://www.daralhayat.com/opinion/06-20 ... story.html

It worked with me with this link.

[معاذ حميدالدين]

Dear Mu3adh
The link didn't work!!!
at least with me...

The problem was with the file name extention it should have been html and not htm.
Some web sites treat htm and html extensions differently ,any how I corrected it.

[Nader]

and it works fine, thanks dear