A Chinese Perspective on Lebanon's Collapse

When conditions in a country descend beyond the bounds of madness, one begins to wonder: what can be done to strengthen our ability to endure such chaos and successive collapses? Chinese wisdom often offers a different approach, one that can help us find balance.

The Chinese thinker Zhuangzi was one of the philosophers of Taoism. He is considered the second most important Chinese figure in this tradition, after Laozi, its founder.

My first encounter with Laozi came through a sentence in Edward Hall’s book The Hidden Dimension. I dwelt on it for a long time: “Emptiness gives things their meaning”! Laozi believed that “being gives things their qualities, but nonbeing (emptiness) is what makes them useful.”

Edward Hall believed that every living being needs a certain amount of physical space to maintain its equilibrium. But there is another, hidden dimension: the cultural dimension. To explain this, he compared American and Japanese cultures in their relationship to space. Westerners perceive only objects, bodies, and physical masses, regarding the spaces between them as empty areas to be crossed or filled. Japanese and Chinese people, by contrast, recognize that emptiness itself is a “thing,” one that has a name and a value and deserves respect. In Japan, it is called ma, an interval in movement or time that gives identity to what surrounds it.

What Hall wanted to tell Western architects was this: you build walls, but human beings live in the space left between them.

Laozi’s concept of “emptiness” is deeply connected to Zhuangzi’s famous story of the “butterfly dream.” According to the story, Zhuangzi once dreamed that he was a butterfly. When he awoke, he asked himself: “Am I a man who dreamed he was a butterfly? Or a butterfly dreaming that he is a man?” His question creates a “perceptual void,” an empty space in which the rigid boundaries between identities dissolve. This is what he calls the “transformation of things,” the passage from one state to another. It requires abandoning rigidity and entering the logic of “emptiness,” where everything becomes possible.

Transformation, then, requires letting go of rigidity and entering a space of emptiness where everything becomes possible.

What Zhuangzi did was to develop Laozi’s concept of physical emptiness and extend it to the mind, calling it the “fasting of the heart.”

For him, a mind crowded with preconceived ideas, judgments, and fixed identities, such as “I am a man, I am Western, I am Eastern, I am a nationalist, or I am the resistance, for example,” is like a vessel already full. Nothing else can be placed or added inside it. It is rigid, which means that it is closed.

The “butterfly dream” is a practical application of emptying the mind. By freeing his mind from a rigid or fixed conception of the “self,” Zhuangzi was able to experience existence as a butterfly, unconstrained. Emptiness here becomes a psychological space that allows a person to remain flexible. It serves the same purpose for the mind as windows do for a room.

Laozi teaches us that it is the empty space between the walls that makes a room habitable. Zhuangzi teaches us that freedom from fixed identities and ideas, much like opening windows in a room, enables the mind to exercise its freedom and live in harmony with the universe.

In Lebanon, as we search for a psychological means of surviving or enduring, and an existential means of confronting the successive, accumulating crises imposed upon us, we might try putting the philosophy of the two Chinese sages, Laozi and Zhuangzi, into practice.

Zhuangzi teaches us that rigid identities can break when they collide with reality. Storms uproot large, dried-out trees, while the flexibility of bamboo stalks allows them to bend with the wind and straighten again once the storm has passed.

How can we translate this into the Lebanese situation so that we can endure reality and preserve the energy and vitality needed to sustain both body and mind, without exhausting ourselves in fierce daily battles over details beyond our control!?

The practice of “fasting and emptying the mind,” away from media noise and constant threats, can help us here. If the external collapse imposed upon us is inevitable, internal collapse remains a choice we can avoid. In our situation, creating emptiness means establishing “a measure of psychological distance” between ourselves and the outside world, between what happens around us and our individual identities, so that we can breathe in this suffocating atmosphere.

If we return to Laozi’s philosophy, the commotion surrounding us becomes like the wheel he used as an example: it turns around its axle, but it is the empty space between the spokes, where the axle passes through, that allows the wheel to turn.

Let us find such emptiness within ourselves so that we can continue to move and live.

When we listen to a song, isn’t it the silence between the words that gives them meaning? Can you enjoy a song when the noise and clamor of the music drown out the lyrics, preventing you from hearing them clearly and understanding their meaning?

Edward Hall taught us that every system of thought or culture creates spaces to protect itself. Our culture therefore determines how we occupy physical space and interact with others. It shapes a way of seeing the world, interpreting it, and looking at it, a way of arranging the things of the world and defining their boundaries.

In Lebanon, public spaces and territorial security have collapsed, forcing Lebanese people to recreate “small spaces” in which to seek shelter: family, close friends, the walls of their homes, and even virtual space. ChatGPT has become a refuge for Lebanese people and, at the very least, their medical adviser. This means that Lebanese people have created spaces of their own, building small networks of human solidarity and carving out intervals of time within the crisis itself. Hence the crowded cafés and restaurants, but also the return to oneself, the search for moments of silence, and the retreat into emptiness.

Inner resilience here lies in emptying the mind of illusions, including the endless anticipation of promised turning points that never arrive, and in developing the ability to rise above events.

At one point, I came to believe that learning to adapt to a bad situation could itself become a form of maladaptation. I therefore viewed the Lebanese people’s excessive ability to adapt to everything they endure in a negative light. They display remarkable ingenuity in finding alternatives and solutions for everything the system fails to provide: solar power, water tanks, electricity generators, solidarity networks, and civil associations to welcome displaced people… All to avoid going down with the state.

I wondered how Lebanese people could remain silent today after having risen up over six cents in 2019.

But beyond my disillusioned and pessimistic outlook, I began noticing “signs of inner change” taking place alongside major external transformations. I tried to reconsider what had happened since 2019.

After 2019, many Lebanese people attempted what Taoism calls “directing the river with your own hands,” that is, trying to force change. But the expected change never came, and frustration followed.

Applying the Taoist idea means ceasing to resist towering waves recklessly and beginning to flow with them intelligently. It means bringing about inner change, no longer waiting for salvation from the state or from abroad, emptying minds of the illusions of the past, and beginning to build alternatives and pursue self-sufficiency.

Before the collapse, Lebanese people lived amid false prosperity: excessive consumption, lives built on debt, and an attachment to sectarian structures that had rotted from within.

The current collapse is a process of “forcibly and violently emptying the vessel.” It is painful to the point of tragedy, yet the emptiness it leaves behind will be the only space in which something new can emerge. The signs of growing awareness we now observe among Lebanese people could never have appeared had we maintained our former way of life. Lebanese people are now compelled to choose what is essential and genuine for survival, leaving superficial things behind in order to preserve a dignified life.

I thus found myself softening my view of excessive adaptation as a harmful anesthetic. I began to see in both this adaptation and the emptiness created by the collapse an opportunity to rebuild the self and allow awareness to emerge anew.

This is why we can observe a transformation in Lebanese people’s relationship with land and energy: a return to growing food at home, the use of solar power, and a more negative attitude toward ostentation and outward displays of wealth. It marks the beginning of a kind of reconciliation with nature. An old saying from our heritage goes: “A self-sufficient farmer is a hidden sultan.”

A large segment of Lebanese society has redefined what it means to have enough, giving up unnecessary luxury consumption and rediscovering the concept of “subsistence,” away from excessive consumption of nonessential goods and luxuries. Perhaps this is a consequence of most luxury retailers having left the Lebanese market, prompting individuals to reassess the value of things. It is as though we were returning to our ancestors’ saying that “contentment is an inexhaustible treasure.”

People also no longer have the psychological energy required for social niceties and superficial relationships. Their social circles have contracted and narrowed, but have gained greater depth.

The void left by the state and the absence of its institutions has been filled by spontaneous local initiatives. A movement of solidarity has emerged, encompassing family networks, support funds, neighborhood committees, and services offered without financial compensation…

The collapse of hopes placed in outside powers, the expectation of a savior from abroad, or the miraculous transformation of the political class has “emptied the minds” of Lebanese people of false expectations. Pragmatic thinking and self-reliance have taken their place.

This silent change is a kind of uprising at the level of consciousness, a shift from waiting for the system to change to “changing the way we approach life.”