Promoting ‘banality’
Intellect challenged
By Ahmad Al-Sarraf “OUR world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.” — Carlos Zafon in his book ‘The Shadow of the Wind.’
The Islamic and Arab world reached the peak of civilized progress in art, industry, medicine and modern era discoveries. It seems such a rapid progress could not be stopped through conventional means.
Therefore, it was necessary to bring together the Western imperialist and Zionist global powers, the regional Israeli and universal Jewish powers to lay down a plan to stop the rapid progress by promoting banality and making a joke of everything to destroy such progress.
In this regard, Canadian Professor Alain Deneault , author of ‘La Médiocratie’ (banality) from the University of Montreal, monitored the world’s mediocracy (banality) and described political and social conditions that create médiocratie which, he says, is supported by global forces, especially the brutal capitalist forces. Mediocracy controls their markets and conflicts as popular goods. Thus, we see how the values of banality are perpetuated through social media which, over time, became facts and lifestyles in our societies.
According to Deneault ‘s theory, many banal figures in political regimes are like wild locusts, spread everywhere, dancing in all theaters, sticking to their seats, penetrating education, culture, politics, art and media so that the reality is covered with a huge amount of words of flattery to get the satisfaction of their superiors.
He says that plundering global wealth, control of people, market
Al-Sarraf
centrality and consumption can only take place if man makes himself a cheap commodity. It is one of the conditions for dumping the human being in a quagmire of triviality to make him seek it with all diligence and without awareness, and the real market in politics is the market of banality.
A colleague, Ahmad al-Sharqawi, said the spread of banality ensures the exclusion of people who are competent and have experience from areas of public influence. The greatest danger encountered by banality is when people realize the true values of action, production, management and organization. It is a hidden battle which ends only by ending one side or the other.
One manifestation of the spread of banality in our society is what occurred in a television interview with a former Kuwaiti lawmaker, saying that someone has sworn falsely in front of an imam and challenged him if he would order two photographs of lions on a curtain at the back to get out and eat him, so the imam ordered the two lions to attack the man, and they turned out to be real and devoured him.
On the other hand, a local newspaper interviewed a group of religious scholars and took a full page of their opinion on the possibility of WhatsApp users utilizing emoticons of smiling, laughing or sad faces in their text messages rather than words. Their opinions were conflicting as some approved and others not.
When Deneault was asked if there is a magic formula for stopping this relentless pursuit to promote banality, he said the war on terror served the corrupt regime and made people surrender to the will of groups or even people as if they had supernatural care instead of giving a chance for people to regain their decision.
He added there is a need for resistance of experience and temptation and not leave the language of empty management to lead us. We resist banality through culture and we return the words to their right concepts.