❊ Lebanon’s Heartless Capitalism

Lebanon’s capitalism has a lot of beauty, but very little heart.

Yesterday I linked to two stories that are more related than you think. In the first, the minister of public works authorized a fashion show to take place in the middle of an important bridge, shutting it down for three days and causing a traffic hell to the commuters. In the second story, a charming 100 year-old coffee house is to be shut down and replaced by a bank.

I’ve been having this idea growing in me for a while. But yesterday, it finally took shape because of the two stories above. It hit me like an apple falling from the Naccache bridge: Lebanese capitalism has a lot of beauty, but it has no heart.

Before you dismiss me as a communist, I want you to know that in fact I’m as capitalistic as you can get. I’m a businessman when I’m not blogging and the only magazine I can read from cover to cover is The Economist, a vanguard of free market and capitalist thinking. I’m actually one of those people who are regularly caricatured in Lebanon: I make good money abroad, and then visit during the summer to splurge on Items that are more expensive than many people’s salaries. I own an appartment I don’t use and a car that I only use for one month every year. You get the picture.

A look in the mirror

And yet, even I look at our capitalism in Lebanon and see no heart. To understand what I mean, let’s take a good look in the mirror and see if we can recognize the monster we have become:

• We don’t care about the plight of foreign workers if the consumers (the ‘Madames’) are satsified.
• We don’t care about people stuck in traffic if a modelling agency paid enough money for a cat walk
• We don’t care about old historical houses and cafes being destroyed because the replacements will bring quicker money
• We design billboards that say “My Jewelry, My right” and we don’t care about the countless people who pass by everyday and can’t afford jewelry .
• We treat rich-looking people like royalty and not-so-rich people like shit.
• We shut down entire neighborhoods for months to make a political point, and we don’t care about the countless people who will lose their jobs because of this

Get it? The list goes on, but the conclusion remains the same: Lebanese capitalism has a lot of beauty, but it has very little heart. And that is breaking mine.

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Note: Posts with titles starting with an ❊ (asterisk) are my opinion posts. I used this system to separate long posts from quick links and comments.