Je me révolte, donc nous sommes

Who am I? What is the kernel of myself? The answer that has enjoyed the most widespread acceptance is Rene Descartes' founding myth of modernity: "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). He came to this conclusion after considering that everything out there must be brought under heavy questioning and cast under layer after layers of doubts. Once such heavy exercise into hard core doubting was exhausted, only one truth should remain unabated: that Doubting Thomas thinks. Thinking, that is, certain extremely complicated operation that takes place in my brain, stands as the ultimate and irrefutable evidence of the reality of poor little old me as a being. Ladies and gentlemen, plese meet Homo Sapiens.

But, hold on. Mr. & Mrs. Sapiens's brainly prowess is affected, for better or worse, by not so lofty intellectual tsunamis. The Sapiens and their kids experience suffering, battle with the pangs of unrequited love, long for impossible goals, want to reach to the stars and at the end see that their brains sometimes are invaded by the forces of Col. Alzheimer as they reach certain age (plus other additional situations).



















There must be something beyond the mere act of thinking, sexy as it surely is. Therefore, Miguel de Unamuno suggested that Descartes's dictum should be rebranded and sold under the motto: "I struggle, therefore I am" (Well, he didn't exactly use those words. His were Lucho, luego existo).


Arresting battle cry. No doubt about it. Unamuno could rally all the forces needed to topple all the dictators that still remain standing in the Arab world and beyond. However, there is a problem. Like Descartes, Unamuno remained stucked in the individual, an isolated person without a past and without a context. The truth is that such a fellow doesn't exist.

We just mentioned the dictators, didn't we? All across the Arab world, satrapies and dictatorships are seeing the end of the world as they knew it, and so are we. Rebellion and revolution, this time atop the cyber-waves (is that technologically correct?) of Facebook and Twitter are taking me back to Albert Camus. He observed that as soon as the oppressed says "enough!" to his or her misery, there takes place a dual birth: the oppressed becomes a rebel that recovers his or her individual self and his or her ensuing mobilization begets a new collective humanity. Defying syntactic correcteness, Camus went back to the old who-am-I problem to say: "I rebel, therefore we are."

What the current Arab generation is doing can be described as the dawn of a new day in the history of humankind. Right when the thriumphant capitalist mentality was installing, once and for all, selfish greed and individualism up on top of the highest pedestal, there came the Arabs of today to create a renewed sense of solidarity around a single and collective cause: freedom.

They rebel, therefore we are. Hopefully we'll become more human.