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Lebanese brilliance burns bright, but Lebanon’s national psyche is traumatized: a Formula One engine misdirected by a broken steering wheel.
There was an unmistakable irony on Monday as Lebanon’s “Sunni street” marked the first anniversary of the fall of the Bashar al Assad regime. The same community that has condemned its Shia counterparts for venerating Iran’s rulers now engages in the same political canonization, this time for Syria’s new leaders.
The motorbike convoys celebrating Ahmed al-Sharaa in the streets of Beirut, Tripoli, and Saida were a revealing moment, a national mirror held up to a country that no longer recognizes its own reflection, and an example of how its sects so often mimic each other’s worst habits while insisting they are fundamentally different.
Hezbollah’s supporters reacted that night with their usual misplaced confidence, taking to the streets to stir chaos with hateful slogans, all while staying in denial that their party’s regional misadventures and parallel-state project helped collapse Lebanon. The arrogance that once powered Hezbollah’s rise is now the root of its decline.
Instead of reflection, Hezbollah has turned to agitation, stirring street tensions and reviving old civil-war threats as if fear alone can restore its dominance. The irony is that Hezbollah is now the faction least capable of surviving the very conflict its supporters hint at.
All of this points to the painful truth that Lebanon behaves like a country determined to self-destruct, even as viable paths forward are well within reach. Forty years of Lebanon’s collective trauma have turned brilliance into self-sabotage, making peace the country’s last remaining therapy.
Lebanese exceptionalism, no mere romanticized mythology, is a tangible reality. Few nations produce, within such a small geography, a concentration of talent comparable to Lebanon’s. The tiny Mediterranean republic sends surgeons to lead global medical teams, architects to reshape skylines, academics to teach in top universities, and entrepreneurs to build industries abroad.
Its children inherit multilingualism as naturally as they do hair color. A taxi driver can switch seamlessly between Arabic, French, and English in a single sentence. A hairdresser can dissect political dynamics with an accuracy that would embarrass a think tank analyst. Even students from modest backgrounds can debate philosophy and global affairs with an ease rarely found in much larger, more stable countries. Lebanon is a place where brilliance is the baseline.
And yet the same nation that exports intellect at an industrial scale manages, almost magnetically, to implode from within. Its people, capable of thriving in every foreign land, seem committed to engineering their own decline at home. The contradiction is a psychological one, as Lebanon’s modern history forms a continuum of trauma.
Lebanon’s civil war was a grinding psychological assault repeated day after day from 1975 through 1990. What followed was merely the replacement of street battles with political assassinations, economic embezzlement, proxy conflicts, foreign occupations, institutional collapse, and identity-based fragmentation. By the time the Beirut port exploded in August 2020—one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history—the population was already trapped in a state of chronic psychological exhaustion. No society can absorb this volume of unprocessed trauma without profound consequences.
Political psychology teaches us that prolonged instability rewires the collective mind. People begin to make decisions driven by survival instincts instead of rational assessment. They gravitate toward leaders who resemble old patterns of “protection,” even when those very leaders are causing their suffering. Compromise becomes frightening because it resembles surrender. Mistrust becomes instinctive because trust once led to death. Abnormality becomes normal because it has persisted for generations.
Four decades into this nightmare, the Lebanese citizen—regardless of education, wealth, or cosmopolitan lifestyle—exhibits behaviors familiar to anyone studying complex PTSD: perpetual hypervigilance, fragmented trust, tribal loyalty, zero-sum thinking, emotional impulsivity, and a deep inability to tolerate uncertainty.
A society suffering collectively begins to act like a traumatized individual: perceptive, intelligent, but fundamentally reactive and unable to sustain long-term stability. It is not surprising, then, that Lebanon’s political arena often resembles a psychiatric ward disguised as a republic.
Within this wounded psychological landscape, the country has fractured into two political camps that hate each other with a visceral, inherited ferocity. The hostility between them is no longer an intellectual one over policy but the outward manifestation of repressed internal wounds. Each camp accuses the other of treason, ignorance, manipulation, corruption, or foreign allegiance. Each camp is partly right and partly delusional, trapped in a dynamic where identity takes precedence over survival.
Sociology explains this phenomenon clearly: when institutions collapse, people return to tribes; when security evaporates, affiliation feels safer than logic; and when the state is weak, narratives replace facts. Lebanon is the perfect laboratory for this. Almost every national decision since the end of the civil war—from economic policies to foreign alignments—has been driven by fear.
Fear kept the warlords in power, allowed corruption to be tolerated, recycled incompetent leaders, and protected criminals who disguised themselves as sectarian guardians. The country collapsed because every decision was shaped by a traumatized collective consciousness, incapable of imagining a stable future.
This is how a population fluent in multiple languages cannot articulate a unified national interest. How a society overflowing with economists created one of the worst financial catastrophes in modern history. How a person capable of debating geopolitics on café tables could not secure electricity for thirty years.
The country today is caught in a crisis-feedback loop. Crises produce anxiety, anxiety produces emotional decisions, emotional decisions produce new crises, and the cycle tightens endlessly. Lebanese brilliance burns bright, but Lebanon’s national psyche is traumatized: a Formula One engine misdirected by a broken steering wheel.
Lebanon’s greatest enemy has never been Israel, Syria, Iran, or the West, but its own unhealed psychological wounds. A clinical intervention is required to address the dysfunction caused by the absence of a genuine reconciliation process after the civil war. Peace can serve as a national therapy to guide Lebanese society from trauma to growth, from survival to citizenship.
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