Mind and freedom

Perhaps one of the most important things that remained stuck in my mind since I was a student studying in the early eighties of the last century with my teacher Fathi Al-Treiki, is that a good idea does not need anyone to defend it, nor do we seek support for it from any party, but it imposes itself, and quickly receives from acceptance and interest what we do not usually find in hasty opinions and confused perceptions. And this precisely applies to the equation of "mind and freedom" or "reason and freedom" as it is proposed to be presented, approached, and addressed in its most prominent manifestations and implications in relation to what is happening today of events and changes in our Arab society and in the world as a whole. In fact, in this book, we present a diagnosis of human reality through a process of dismantling the structure of the mind and establishing the meaning of freedom before examining the manifestations of embarrassment that are evident in the relationship between the mind and freedom: separating them when the mind deviates from its path, causing a functional rupture of the mind, which no longer serves as an indicator of knowledge, thinking, acquaintance, and openness to others, but has become a technological tool serving economic dominance, and a strategic tool used in developing means of destruction and death; and connecting them when the direction of the mind contradicts the demand for freedom due to what "the authoritarian regimes are currently doing to erase freedoms they do not recognize for others and other cultures." Dr. Fathi Al-Treiki's reading relied throughout the treatment on opening a possible path for thinking about the crisis of human reality today, emphasizing that there are available potentials for Western and non-Western nations alike, enabling them to work on shaking the rigidity of the coordinates causing the deadlock of the horizon of peaceful communication among humans, and to explore their deeper political and social effects. From the introduction by Zohair Al-Madani