Leadership Quote by Walid Jumblatt

A politician reaches for absolutes when he wants to turn private suffering into public legitimacy. "No one can live under degradation" is short enough to chant, broad enough to recruit, and morally loaded enough to corner opponents: if degradation is the condition, then resistance becomes not merely permissible but necessary.

Walid Jumblatt, a perennial power broker in Lebanon's volatile sectarian landscape, knows how language works when institutions don’t. The line functions as a pressure valve in a country where people routinely do live under indignity: economic collapse, militia-era memories, corruption-as-infrastructure, and the quiet humiliations of dependency. That tension is the point. By saying "no one can", he isn’t describing reality; he’s describing the breaking point he wants to manufacture - or at least recognize as politically actionable.

"Degradation" is doing strategic work here. It’s less specific than "poverty" or "occupation", more visceral than "injustice". It names an injury to status and selfhood, the kind that makes politics feel bodily. It also leaves room to expand the target: a regime, a rival faction, an external patron, even a whole system of patronage that forces citizens to beg for basics. In Lebanon, where dignity is often bartered for services, this word cuts both ways.

The subtext is a warning and an invitation: ignore the humiliation and you court eruption; acknowledge it and you can funnel anger into a cause. Jumblatt’s genius - and risk - lies in how easily that cause can be steered.