The Tragedy of the Masses and the Certainty of the Ascetics

By Abasher Al-Haj. It is said that 'suffering breeds creativity,' but is there any saying dearer to the hearts of the simple than this smooth phrase? The human psyche is characterized by a strange tendency to find spiritual justifications for its misery, casting a halo of sanctity over its pain and transforming helplessness and poverty into heroism. It is as if genius were a lazy genie that only wakes from its divine slumber when its master is struck by the ailment of hunger or thrown into the depths of tragedy. The truth is that when we lift the veil of illusions from human history, we discover that most popular sayings are merely social narcotics invented by the mind to endure the bitterness of reality. Yes, a miracle might occur, and a poet might emerge from the heart of deprivation, or a philosopher might create while starving, but to transform anomalies into a general law is naïve. Not every hungry person will inevitably become Al-Mutanabbi, nor does everyone who sleeps on an empty stomach wake up with a theory that shakes the pillars of the universe. As is our habit of sanctifying survivors, we always remember the few who escaped the claws of tragedy and forget the thousands ground under the wheel of daily striving—those consumed by living crises before they could find enough time to read a book or think about a galaxy. Look, if you will, at the farce of the human mind in the Sudanese reality today, where this saying has found its greatest 'practical laboratory.' The citizen who wakes up every morning to wage a fierce war against prices, collapsing services, medical costs, and the bitterness of war and displacement is not occupied by the question: 'What shall I create today?' but rather by the ultimate existential question: 'How will I manage today's lunch?' They practice a kind of 'living fraud' to survive the day with the least possible losses, and a superficial observer might mistake this for genius and creativity. In reality, adapting to a flaw does not mean the flaw has become a virtue, and excelling in the art of survival does not justify accepting economic enslavement. Here, the glaring contradiction appears when we confuse the 'stations of the elite' with the 'reality of the masses.' Saints and ascetics may see poverty as a trial through which they draw closer to God; their souls elevate because they chose their deprivation spiritually and imbued it with faith-based meaning. But the great catastrophe begins when state-aligned scholars, writers, and journalists demand that the common people behave like saints! The father who stands helpless before a pharmacist, unable to afford medicine for his child, will not see poverty as 'divine wisdom' to console his grief; he will see it as a tragedy crushing his dignity. Continuing this pressure amidst a blocked horizon does not generate creativity or teach patience; it breeds bitterness and doubt, and may drive the common person to the brink of losing faith in the mercy of the world. Poverty is not a virtue in itself, and asceticism is an individual choice that cannot be turned into an economic policy for which the simple must pay the price! To add a flavor of scientific irony to this social circus, we can borrow the famous 'Parkinson’s Law,' formulated by the British historian C. Northcote Parkinson, which states that 'work expands to fill the time available for its completion.' Metaphorically, we can formulate a 'Living Parkinson’s Law': Daily crises expand and inflate to such psychological mass that they devour all space available for time and thought. The time that our youth could have invested in innovation or science is completely drained by managing transportation, searching for a gas cylinder, or securing the price of the next meal! Creativity does not grow in soil poisoned by constant misery; it requires resources, freedom, security, and time. If poverty and misery truly created geniuses, then the poorest and most underdeveloped nations would be steering the civilizational vehicle of planet Earth! The central question is not: 'Why did suffering not make us more creative?' but rather: 'How many brilliant minds and great ideas were assassinated in their cradle because suffering ground their owners down before anyone even heard of them?' True civilization is not measured by humanity’s ability to invent tricks to live in ruin, but by establishing a human society where the individual is not forced to spend their entire life just trying... not to die!