Within Lebanon’s Shiite community, it is not only political positions that have changed; the very standards by which positions are formed have also been transformed. What counts as dignity? What is tolerated as humiliation? How is victory understood? And when, if ever, is it permissible to acknowledge defeat? This transformation did not occur suddenly, nor was it the product of a single speech or moment. Rather, it emerged through a gradual accumulation of practices and narratives that reshaped the relationship between the individual and the collective, and between lived experience and the narratives imposed upon it.

In this process, the place of the individual gradually receded in favor of an abstract collective entity. The individual ceased to be the primary reference point for interpreting reality and instead became a recipient awaiting an authoritative discourse to provide ready-made explanations, complete with their vocabulary, limits, and acceptable modes of expression. The narrative was no longer presented as a perspective open to debate, but as a complete framework into which one was expected to fit. Consequently, the expectation shifted from persuasion to adherence.

What emerged was not the product of discourse alone. It was built incrementally through institutions, rituals, and everyday incentives. Schools helped present loyalty as a condition of belonging. Media transformed every question into a political position. Religious commemorations reproduced the narrative through the body before the mind. At the same time, networks of social and economic rewards made conformity beneficial and dissent costly.

This was not brainwashing in the simplistic sense of the term. Rather, it involved the construction of an entire environment in which independent thinking increasingly became a calculated liability rather than a freely exercised virtue.

The impact became evident in moments when the discourse itself was absent. In the early days of the “Support Front War,” the delay in the official position revealed more than a political vacuum; it exposed a genuine state of paralysis: hesitation, confusion, and an inability to produce an independent position. It was not merely a matter of waiting for guidance, but rather a suspension of the capacity to interpret when the one who monopolizes interpretation falls silent.

Loyalty That Paralyzes Its Bearer Is Not Loyalty but Dependency

The Syrian war was the first and most profound test. When Hezbollah announced its military involvement in Syria in 2013, its support base was confronted with an explicit contradiction that could not easily be overlooked: how could a force that had presented itself as a defender of the oppressed fight alongside a regime killing its own people?

The response was not an acknowledgment of the contradiction, but a redefinition of reality itself. The war was described as a “defensive jihad” to protect holy sites; opponents were redefined from revolutionaries into extremists; and the narrative of historical victimhood was invoked to transform any objection into a challenge to the community itself.

Not everyone accepted this framing. There were voices that rejected it, clerics who expressed reservations, and families who objected. Yet what ultimately determined the outcome was not persuasion, but cost. Those who objected paid a clear price: socially, professionally, and at times even in terms of security.

In this way, silence was no longer evidence of conviction, but the result of calculation.

Here lies the fundamental difference between a community that remains committed because it is convinced, and one that remains committed because the cost of leaving is greater than the cost of staying.

People did not lose the ability to think. Rather, they found that their thinking collided with a wall of consequences that made silence a rational choice, even when it conflicted with what they understood and genuinely believed.

The October 17, 2019 uprising opened a different window. For the first time in years, a number of people from within the Shiite community took to the streets in Beirut, the South, and the Bekaa, raising slogans that had long remained whispers behind closed doors.

What this moment revealed was not only the extent of suppressed dissent, but also the price paid within the community before it is paid outside it. The response came not only from state institutions or the party, but also from neighbors, relatives, and networks of everyday social relations.

The message was not fundamentally political; it was social at its core: dissent carries a cost, and you alone will bear it.

Then came August 4, 2020.

The Beirut Port explosion was not merely a catastrophe; it was a moment of revelation.

In the very city that embraces all Lebanese, entire neighborhoods were devastated by the ammonium nitrate whose origin, storage, and intended use have remained the subject of controversy and unresolved accusations. Yet, regardless of these details, one fact remains beyond dispute: the party did not seek the truth; it fought it, and sought to shut down the investigation by every available means. Every serious judicial effort, and every judge who approached the case, faced systematic obstruction that at times reached the level of threats. This is not the behavior of someone who knows nothing and fears nothing; it is the behavior of someone who sees the investigation itself as a threat.

This time, the cost did not fall only on “others”; it struck the party’s own support base as well, on three levels simultaneously:

• Direct victims in the port, Beirut’s neighborhoods, and its suburbs;
• A city that had long embraced the party and its constituency, parts of which were reduced to rubble;
• A community that once again found itself in the position of the accused before all Lebanese, compelled to defend itself at a moment when it too was among the victims.

What followed was not an internal uprising, but neither was it a comfortable silence. It was a silence weighed down by questions that could find no path into the public sphere. In condolence gatherings and family meetings, questions were raised that had never been asked before.

But no answers came.

Not because the truth was absent, but because those who held the keys to it chose to keep the doors closed.

At that particular moment, the objective was not to persuade people of a specific narrative, but to make the very act of asking questions costly enough that it would remain within its narrowest limits.

Amid all this, the place of victimhood changed. It is true that Lebanese Shiites experienced genuine political and economic marginalization, as did other Lebanese communities, albeit to varying degrees. Yet the Shiite version of this marginalization provided fertile ground for the party’s discourse. This history is not an invention, but it is precisely what was later used to evade accountability rather than to demand it.

There is a fundamental difference between the victimhood of an experience and the victimhood of a discourse. The former invokes injustice in order to produce demands for change and calls for accountability from those responsible, including members of the community itself. The latter invokes injustice in order to produce immunity from accountability, turning every internal question into a stab in the back and every criticism into a service to the enemy. The transition from the first to the second was not inevitable; it was a conscious political choice, one for which the Shiite community has paid a higher price than anyone else.

When victimhood is transformed from an experience that drives demands for change into a mask that prevents self-examination, it ceases to be a tool of liberation and becomes a tool of entrenchment.

At the same time, the concepts of victory and defeat were emptied of their meaning. They were no longer linked to actual outcomes, but to a narrative imposed in advance. Mere survival came to be presented as a “victory,” regardless of the cost, while acknowledging defeat became forbidden, as though naming it constituted a threat in itself.

When the standards of gain and loss are abolished, reality does not disappear; rather, the ability to read it is erased.

The painful irony is that this contradiction is felt. People see the cost with their own eyes and live the losses in their own homes. Yet the system always provides a ready-made explanation that transforms doubt into weakness and questioning into betrayal. The issue is not ignorance that can be remedied with information; it is a structure of power that reproduces itself with the consent of those who pay its price, because the cost of rejection is higher.

Societies do not collapse only under the weight of defeats. They also collapse when they lose the ability to name them. What this model has built over decades is not merely a loyal constituency, but a constituency that fears asking questions more than it fears reality itself, and that finds greater safety in silence than in speaking, even when speaking about a home that has collapsed or children who have died.

When denying reality becomes a virtue, self-examination becomes betrayal, and criticism becomes a threat, the question is no longer whether collapse will occur, but who will remain to acknowledge it.