Regarding the joyfulness of the Lebanese uprising

For many years I've written, along with many others, about the way racism makes the racialised hate themselves. It just dawned on me that perhaps one can use this more generally to argue that a pertinent way of differentiating between forms of rule and domination has to do precisely with whether, or to what degree and how, they make the dominated/ruled/governed hate themselves. 

I don't think that it is necessarily the case that any form of rule and domination has to involve the production of self-hatred. Also, this is not about democracy versus dictatorship. Some democracies can produce more self-loathing than some dictatorships (I think. but I am open to debate on this issue). Nonetheless it is the case that, for instance, both the Lebanese ‘democratic’ and Syrian ‘authoritarian’ forms of governmentality, have treated their people with such contempt, even if in different ways and with different means. Both have made their people feel powerless and demeaned such that they have ended up not only hating their rulers but also hating themselves in the process. 

This is not always easy to see for, paradoxically, hatred of the self can express itself in a form of narcissism that only a trained eye with an intimate knowledge of its subject is able to recognise it for what it is, and to particularly discern in its resentful ethos the unhealthy pathology of self-hatred and lack of belief in the potency of one’s agency that is behind it. 

It is this background of self-hatred that explains why the moment of uprising is often marked by another kind of narcissism, a joyful and healthy one. After years of self-loathing and internalising one's lack of worthiness, suddenly one re-discovers something about oneself and about one's people and one's community that is worthy of love. Rather than each person mirroring to the other what they think is worse about oneself, they begin mirroring what is best.  A ‘rush’ in one’s sense of efficacy vis vis the world happens. it is that rush that Spinoza called Joy. and this has been nothing but a Joyful uprising so far.