Lebanon: Living Together or Ritualized Fear?

During one of my visits to Canada, I stopped, as I usually do, at Volume bookstore, which carries valuable intellectual works that are no longer in print. There, I came across a small book by a Canadian author, Michel Poulin: Vivre et laisser vivre.

I picked it up immediately because it deals with how people live together, what we in Lebanon call “coexistence.” The book’s central idea appears simple: my freedom ends where another person’s freedom begins. But the real question is: who determines those boundaries?

The book rejects two extreme ideas: absolute freedom, which leads to chaos, and total control, which leads to repression. In place of these two, it proposes another form of freedom: “responsible freedom.”

These ideas come close to John Stuart Mill’s thinking and his “harm principle,” according to which society or the state may legitimately exercise coercion over an individual against their will for one purpose only: to prevent harm to others. They also echo Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatment of the social contract, namely the attempt to reconcile man’s absolute individual freedom in the state of nature with submission to political and legal authority in civil society, without losing that freedom or becoming dependent on others.

What is particularly compelling about this book, however, is that it does not offer a theoretical discourse. Instead, it begins with lived examples drawn from everyday life, from the family to the workplace and then to the public sphere.

It uses concrete situations to show how the principle of freedom turns into a daily struggle for influence and power, and therefore into disagreement over the very definition of “right” itself.

How does this play out in Lebanon?

Let us begin with a question: do we have a single definition of freedom? Or does each group define freedom according to its own interests?

One group believes that only its weapons protect its freedom. Another considers those very weapons a threat not only to its freedom, but to its existence and to Lebanon’s existence itself. A third believes that its influence is what protects its freedom. These conflicting conceptions bring competing freedoms into conflict. Instead of complementing one another and allowing peaceful coexistence, they lead to an imposed coexistence or a forced balance.

Lebanon’s competing sectarian communities do not clash because their religions or cultures differ, but because they are driven by the same “mimetic desire,” to borrow René Girard’s term: the desire for domination, monopoly over power, and recourse to foreign powers in order to strengthen themselves. Every community has, at some point in Lebanon’s history, enjoyed a period of political hegemony: Maronite political hegemony, then Sunni political hegemony, and now Shiite political hegemony. At each stage, the other communities felt the desire to imitate the dominant group, viewing it at once as a “model and a rival.”

Thus, when one community possesses weapons or enjoys regional influence, the others do not necessarily demand its disarmament from a purely civic standpoint. They are also driven by a form of “mimetic envy” and by the desire to acquire a power advantage of their own, both to protect themselves and to reinforce their position by relying on an external power.

Lebanon’s communities are “rival twins” who sacrifice national interests to similar impulses: domination and monopoly over power.

But this mimetic rivalry has now reached its peak. The social order is in crisis as state institutions, the only common denominator among all the adversaries, collapse. This is what drives some to demand autonomous security arrangements and cantons.

The paradox is that the demand for autonomous security arrangements and cantons does not arise from a coherent political vision. It is, rather, one of the clearest expressions of “mimetic rivalry,” a mirror response to an unequal balance of power. For decades, Hezbollah has succeeded in building its own “private canton,” with its military apparatus, financial institutions, social services, and independent security system. When the other communities see this group, entirely autonomous within its own “state,” while at the same time dominating central decision-making, they do not see an equal partnership. Their natural sociological response, driven by fear for their very existence, becomes: if the central state is unable to protect us, then we must build our own cantons in order to survive.

This is precisely what Girard warns against when he speaks of “rival twins.” In trying to resist Hezbollah’s model or protect themselves from it, the other communities end up reproducing its behavior and demanding isolated areas of their own. In doing so, they serve Hezbollah’s objective: to make the establishment of a sovereign, civil, centralized state governed by the rule of law impossible.

The “Mimetic Crisis” and Collapse: The War of All Against All

When mimetic rivalry reaches its peak, the social order collapses and boundaries and distinctions begin to dissolve. This is what Girard calls the “mimetic crisis.”

We seem to be at the heart of such a crisis, because state institutions, our only common denominator, are collapsing. When the state collapses, each community comes to see itself as the absolute victim and the other as the demon that must be eliminated. This is what happened during the civil war we lived through, and whose return continues to haunt us today as sectarian divisions deepen and Lebanese citizens endure one shock after another.

Historically, Lebanon’s pluralistic system has managed, after every crisis we have gone through, to reproduce itself. Each time, the communities, or rather their leaders, manufactured a “scapegoat” to whom they assigned full responsibility, as a way of releasing collective violence and reviving coexistence.

It began with the phrase “the wars of others” on our soil, used to explain the civil war. Then came the Palestinian refugee issue, followed by the Syrian refugee issue, with these “foreigners” blamed for the economic collapse. Judge Bitar then became the system’s scapegoat in the aftermath of the crime at the port. Even the political class itself was targeted in 2019, when the street chanted, “All of them means all of them.” And when the system managed once again to save itself, it sacrificed a few figures. The governor of the Banque du Liban, Riad Salameh, thus became the scapegoat made to carry the sins of the entire banking system, 40% of whose owners are themselves members of the political class, as well as those of the political system as a whole. The rest survived.

Can this truly be called “coexistence”? Or is it a ritual that worships fear?

This coexistence, endlessly recycled and reproduced through political rituals that the system has excelled at marketing, national dialogue sessions, sectarian allocation of posts, and mutual vetoes, is not intended to build a state in any real sense. Its purpose is to prevent “mimetic rivalry” from exploding.

It is a coexistence built on fear of a return to conflict. In other words, what is sacred in Lebanon is a “precarious civil peace,” worshipped like an idol, in whose name justice, the law, accountability, the rights of the port victims and of depositors are sacrificed, to the point of sacrificing the state, the land, and the country itself.

But we are now living through the most dangerous phase Lebanon has ever known, and the gravest of its crises, because the “scapegoat mechanism” is beginning to lose its effectiveness. The system can no longer invent a victim capable of convincing all Lebanese. The fracture has deepened, and there is no longer any “shared victim’s blood” capable of bringing the adversaries together.

The hope is that the new generations, who will assume tomorrow’s responsibilities, will reject this “false coexistence” built on burying the truth. The hope is that the new generation will demand a transition from a society that bargains away its victims to one that holds people accountable, and toward a state governed by law and justice, whether for the port or for the country as a whole.