The American Dream Delusion

Here’s a statistic that I still can’t wrap my mind around: 70-80% of the American population isn’t remotely engaged in matters of American foreign affairs.

Ironic right?

A few weeks back I blatantly stated that the American society is plagued with a dry consumerist internationally absent mentality. I’m kind of hesitant calling it a mentality since it’s more like a complete absence of one. Unfortunately, I got responded to with sentiments such as “you obviously hate America”. Plain and simple. I’m an Arab Muslim so it really doesn’t take me by surprise that that is the default reaction.

This concept of political ambivalence was visited innumerable times by my college professors. Given materialistic incentives to mobilize and enliven capitalistic enterprises, individuals have no psychological vacuum (let alone need) to fabric politics into their interests. Living in this country, it’s not very difficult to identify this theory as a reality; I like to call it United States of Entrepreneurship. In a nation where you can gain a substantial sum of money as a result of the death of your spouse, it’s not really a challenge to identify its priorities.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not venting here. Not at all.

What baffles me is this: despite American apathy to its, and not to mention our, political alignments, we still hold “American Democracy” as the holy grail of modern day liberalism. The “American Dream” as that of modern day living. Knowledgeable figures, such as Francis Fukuyama, went so far as to conjure up a discourse on American Exceptionalism. As a result, we, the peoples of peripheral societies, became enamored with the concept of “libertarianism”. Unfortunately this concept has mutated into something of a social disease. Liberalism has been translated into the belief system of loose morality and abandonment of restraint.

I’m sure you would all agree that in the Middle East when an individual outright states that he/she is “very liberal” it often connotes morally/religiously indifferent. My question is: why did we neglect the American judiciary system and Supreme Court structures, civil and criminal laws, admirable judicial temperament and professionalism, hard work and self-discipline and merely focused on the very much coveted lack of moral restraint? For some mysterious reason, we took “liberalism” and tailored it to cater to our deprivation of social freedom.

Post January 25, I heard people left and right commending American democracy and “liberalism” holding it capable of molding our currently-fragile Egyptian society around. There’s an essential difference between liberalism and libertarianism. The former is political and the latter social. Politically, Egypt is desperate for progressivism and change. Socially, we have a responsibility to NOT be internally imperialized by Western lifestyle.

Call me crazy but I’d much rather not have homosexuals, PDA, teenage moms, failed marriages, and alcoholism taking the country over. We're a conservative society for a reason.

What we’ve seen so far in 2011 only accentuates the incredible democratic drive that Arabs possess. The Arab revolution has become emblematic of change and shackle-breaking. We inhabit the holiest region on the planet having hosted the nascence of monotheism and tradition. Let’s think twice before proposing to adopt a hollow indifferent ideology mindlessly negating all that we have stood for.