The Mechanism of Youth Liberation and Why the World, and the Arabs, Fear It

By Warkaa Nizar Saadi

What distinguishes the human being from all other creatures on Earth is that he seeks meaning. He is not content merely to survive; he wishes to understand why survival matters. Humanity creates its own purpose and pursues it, even to the point of sacrifice, without any practical compulsion to do so.

This quest for meaning is what gave birth to humanity’s distinction in art, thought, and scientific advancement, in its stories and myths, too. History continuously tells of those who tried to slow the wheel of human progress for the sake of personal glory: they burned libraries, silenced thinkers, imprisoned scientists, and cultivated hatred toward others in order to enslave or wage wars against them. Such people were willing to spill rivers of blood in pursuit of material control.

But history also tells of the recurring revolutions that rose to confront those tyrants who reappear in every age. The harsher the tyranny, the stronger it’s opposite grows. History teaches that the injustice of the ancients has always begotten the rebellion of the contemporaries. And the responsibility for change always falls on the shoulders of each new generation, for the young are the ones most bound to the present, and therefore most capable of reshaping reality for the children of the future.

Yet when this process of change is interrupted, our minds become sluggish and lose their ability to humanize the world around us. Ignoring the intellectual and scientific potential within people turns societies numb.

Conscious, united, knowledge-based youth liberation is what creates new nations, ones able to renew the meaning of human life and breathe creativity and optimism into existence. Without it, societies may remain physically alive but spiritually and intellectually hollow.

This raises the question: why have successful, truly transformative revolutions become so rare and difficult to achieve in our age?

In 2015, statistics showed that ten of the world’s most powerful leaders were under seventy years old. Today, nine of them are over seventy. In the Arab world, meanwhile, youth are retreating from politics and movements for change, despite being the demographic majority.

The reasons for this absence are many and perplexing.

While it’s impossible to grasp all their dimensions, attempting to understand them remains a moral and human necessity.

A person grows within three systems that shape his consciousness: the family, the school, and the virtual world. All three are, to varying degrees, under the influence of broader cultural and political authorities that mold the child’s thinking from early childhood to adulthood. Here, we’ll focus on these three factors, starting with the family.

1. The Family

The family is a child’s first encounter with the laws of the world. It is where they learn how to navigate authority and freedom. The home, in essence, is a miniature political system, with its own “leaders,” “laws,” and “punishments.” The child obeys and receives approval and reward; disobeys and faces discipline, the severity of which depends on the parents’ temperaments and beliefs.

Most parents raise their children according to what they themselves experienced in childhood, replicating what they found good and rejecting what they disliked, often without considering the social, cultural, and technological transformations around them. Thus, generations keep repeating old behavioral patterns in entirely new environments.

In countries that have suffered war, insecurity, or poverty, the consequences of this outdated upbringing are particularly severe. Wars drag humans back to zero, no matter how far they had advanced. They implant in people the idea that survival matters more than creativity. Over time, hope erodes, replaced by the belief that the only way to survive is through force, to reclaim what was stolen.

When the deep psychological traumas left by such conditions remain untreated, frustration hardens into a toxic resentment toward the world itself. Nations, like individuals, are easy to wound and difficult to heal.

Thus, the parent who has lived through such a poisoned past unwittingly passes on their fear to their children. They teach them that people are dangerous and that conscience cannot be found in the hearts of strangers. In doing so, sometimes with good intentions, they ensure their child remains cautious, fearful of everything beyond the boundaries of the “honorable home.” That fear stays with them into adulthood.

Parents often teach their children that they are perpetual victims, and that those who harm them are driven by envy or exploitation, while they themselves are pure and blameless. There is no need, then, to build or develop the self; wisdom resides with the parents, experience lives in their memories, and the child’s role is simply to obey and thus survive the world’s chaos.

But when that parent sees their child grown, a young man or woman who resembles them in looks and behavior, they become unsettled. The youth now possesses all the things the parents once dreamed of: clothes, food, comfort, entertainment. Yet they dare to ask for more.

Worse still, they begin to question: they want to know, to try, to separate themselves from the path drawn for them without their consent. When they seek to discover their true purpose in life beyond the barren values of the past, the parents feel their greatest project , the “child” , is slipping from their grasp, just as so much else once did.

The child’s failure to become a replica of their parents’ expectations becomes, symbolically, the failure of parenthood itself, a project that drained them economically and socially, yet was the only domain where they felt control and influence.

Neglecting the concerns of youth is not merely a political or administrative flaw; it is evidence of a collective psychological state of nihilism and hopelessness toward the future. The young person who grows up in such an environment emerges alone, alienated within their own homeland, frustrated, not because they failed, but because they were never given the chance to try.

Such a youth is often betrayed even in their simplest attempts to trust others. They discover that those they loved never valued them, and so they withdraw, losing faith in people and in themselves.

Their potential remains undiscovered because no one ever cared to notice it. Their goals in life remain unclear because a person discovers their purpose only through interaction with the world. Out of pain and naïveté, they eventually pursue “security and stability” as ends in themselves.

Yet security and stability for their own sake are nothing but forms of surrender. A generation raised to fear risk and curiosity cannot lead a cultural or intellectual revolution. It cannot change the world, because it was never allowed to imagine that change was possible.

2. The School and Educational Systems

The 17-year-old activist Sanjana Buddi, founder of a major charitable organization, said in one of her TED Talks that she is deeply angry at educational institutions that failed to provide her with the experience, opportunities, or knowledge necessary to face the world and shape it as she imagines. Despite her desire for change, she felt powerless, because school had not prepared her for real life.

Globally, newly graduated high school students are expected to decide what they want to specialize in for the rest of their lives, even though they have no real professional experience to guide such a life-altering choice. Worse still, the last things they are taught, especially in the Arab world, are leadership skills and creativity. Educational systems are often designed to kill curiosity, deliberately so. The individuality of the student has no value; they are trained to suppress their thoughts and obey the teacher, regardless of the teacher’s competence or ethics.

The late Egyptian writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi described this reality as “fragmented, incomplete education.” It forces students to specialize narrowly without learning how to connect different bodies of knowledge to form a holistic understanding of the world. When young people lack a complete picture of life, creativity and innovation become impossible. A politician must understand the physician’s view of the human being he governs. An engineer must grasp the humanities to know how people benefit from what he builds. And a philosopher must comprehend the material dimension of existence to reach the essence of his philosophy.

This separation between disciplines is not accidental. It is a deliberate form of intellectual containment orchestrated by global power structures that grant us fragments of knowledge , just enough to activate fragments of our potential. We end up with incomplete scientific backgrounds that we mistake for complete understanding.

3. Social Media Platforms

The internet offers many benefits. For countless young people, it provides spaces where they can find communities that resemble them and offer belonging. Through platforms like YouTube, any young person can learn diverse skills for free. These platforms even played a key role during the Arab Spring, amplifying voices and connecting activists with the world.

Yet, once the excitement faded, that digital energy failed to translate into real-world transformation. Social media helped revolutionary ideas spread, but also made them nearly impossible to control, lost in chaos and impulsiveness. The ease of joining digital protests came with an equal ease of withdrawing from them.

The technological transformations we witness today are largely unfolding beyond the will of most people. They are driven by capitalist, profit-oriented agendas concealed behind slogans of “human progress.” In reality, they slow human maturity, fragment societies, and deepen isolation more than ever before. This can be observed through three main phenomena:

1. Learned Helplessness

   
   

   Algorithms that decide what we see are engineered to keep us captive to our screens. We drown in an endless stream of information and entertainment, a state that researcher Hank Crane calls “information saturation.” Data is refreshed at dizzying speed, leaving no room for boredom. Yet boredom is vital, it’s the quiet space where consciousness and the subconscious converse, the source of creativity. When boredom disappears, reflection disappears, and humans turn into consumers without meaning.

   
   

2. Selective Exposure

   
   

   The relentless flood of news and content exhausts the mind and drains energy without any real achievement in return. On an app like Instagram, we might simultaneously see a starving child in Gaza and a girl trying on a new lipstick. This horrifying juxtaposition of tragedy and frivolity creates psychological paralysis that drives us to escape reality altogether. Unable to bear the weight of events, we begin filtering what we see, listening only to those who think like us and ignoring dissenting voices. As a result, intellectual communities within a single generation fragment, and the sense of shared humanity erodes.
   

3. Attachment to Virtuality

   
   

   a deadly stillness has settled over much of today’s youth, mistaken by some for peace, but in truth, it is stagnation. Social media drowns us in waves of entertainment, gifting us an illusion of happiness even as reality grows harsher. We grow emotionally attached to distant strangers who know nothing of our real selves, while becoming detached from those physically near us. Even under conditions of war or oppression, we remain absorbed by our screens. That virtual happiness numbs awareness and makes us forget what we should be resisting in the real world.
   

What Is the Solution?

If you have reached the end of this long essay, you have already taken the first step toward the solution. The greatest prison for the human being is ignorance. In a world that glorifies superficiality and nourishes stupidity, knowledge itself becomes a form of resistance.

When we recognize both the harms and benefits of digital devices, we free ourselves from illusion, we realize that we own the phone, not the other way around.

When we resist deliberate ignorance by defining our identity and daring to ask the difficult questions, no matter how uncomfortable, we begin to discover our true selves. Only then can we reorder our priorities and pursue the ones that carry the deepest meaning, with determination and effort.

And when we finally grasp the priceless value of those who love us as we are and believe in us sincerely, it becomes our responsibility not to abandon them, but to grow, together, improving ourselves and the world around us.

The paths to freedom lie open before us. The question that remains is: will the day come when enough of us choose to walk them?

Warkaa Nizar Saadi, Iraqi writer

The opinions expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not represent the views of Nisaba Media.