They inquire about defensive boundaries, regional alliances, growth indicators, and trade agreements, as if the state is a complex machine in which they are searching for the optimal start button. However, the state is not a machine, but a historical entity pulsing in its veins with the memory of the past and the tensions of the future.
The questions often raised are merely superficial, boiling over under pressure, while the real essence of the issue is cooked in a silent heat beneath the surface!
Stability is not so much a security issue as it is a deep matter of legitimacy, and legitimacy is not a fleeting feeling, but the cohesive fabric between the will of the ruler and the will of the ruled; it is the unwritten ethical contract that transforms power into authority, and authority into responsibility, and responsibility into a legacy.
The real disease begins when the state transitions from an ethical system carrying a historical project to a service institution negotiating survival day by day! Then, political decisions become reactions rather than actions, and attention is focused on alleviating pain rather than eradicating the disease!
The loud voice of opposition is not the disease, but the cough that alerts you to inflammation in the lungs! A decline in the economic index is not the problem, but the fever that reveals an exhausting infection in the production system! The biggest strategic mistake is to treat the cough with suppressants and quiet the fever with painkillers; while the mold spreads in the lungs and the infection penetrates the blood!
What is not said in decision rooms is much more important than what is announced!
It is not said that some external alliances, while providing a momentary security margin, consume domestic political capital and weaken national immunity!
It is not said that some public functions created to ease tension are in reality cancerous cells in the body of the economy, consuming resources and paralyzing movement!
It is not said that official silence on fundamental issues is not understood as tolerance, but is understood as; either ignorance of the danger or incapacity to confront it, and both are diseases that destroy prestige!
The prestige of the state lies not in the strictness of its laws but in its justice, not in the strength of its army but in the cohesion of its people, and not in the height of its edifices but in the depth of its children’s belief in its project!
Ibn Khaldun taught us that states have lifespans like humans, but senility is not a temporal inevitability but a buildup of corruption habits, congestion in communication channels, and the spread of guardianship instead of partnership, and rentierism instead of production!
The silent erosion begins when terms become loose, goals unclear, and responsibilities scattered. It starts when the decision loses its firmness and becomes like pliable dough shaped by the pressures of the moment rather than the will of the future!
And the collapse from within is not a dramatic event, but the whiteness creeping into the hair! It is that hidden fatigue in the muscles before the illness! It is the silence that settles between the words that does not come like an earthquake, but as a crack that silently begins in the foundation wall, and only those who look beneath the surface can see it! And that is the great calamity: that those in charge think that superficial calm is a sign of health, while in reality, it is the dormancy of the organs before the coma!
The silent erosion of legitimacy is like salt dissolving in the water of time; you cannot see it, but you suddenly taste its bitterness when you want to drink from the spring of loyalty and find it not fresh!
The corruption they talk about is not cash in envelopes, but that hidden shift in value; when personal interest becomes the measure and national duty a form without spirit. And the sovereignty that is believed to be protected by iron and fire is in reality downsized every day by small decisions that seem practical but sell the future for a weakened present!
The state worthy of survival is one that hears its heartbeat in the tumult of noon, and is alert to the faint pulse before it becomes a scream. Because history does not record the fall of walls, but it records the moment the builders stopped repairing the cracks, believing that the rain would not come!
