Documentary Reflection: ‘The Square’

The most sinful behavior -if ever there was anything we could truly consider a “sin” about human nature- is that which grows outward like a weed from the belief of entitlement. Sometimes I think that the purpose of society for the last century or so has been to blanket communities under the belief that every individual is entitled to certain things it has to offer. The blanket I’ll call Entitlement covers the sky, the horizon, and nothing but human creatures can crawl under it. When something bad happens, when the blanket gets heavier, somehow, when it feels cold and damp and dreary under it (almost like repression?), we start looking for the sun again- we’ll even take the moon, if only to breath in our own strength again. Because being under entitlement, we grow weak. With all that reminds us of our connectedness to the world, we suffer. Wondering why, when we were supposedly born to have and have and have things (never mind the quality), we still suffer, it becomes clear, to the lucky ones, that the materials that mark is as subjects of a humane society actually mean next to nothing when it comes to our existence. They blind the points we must reach to feel whole. We do what we must to get housing, to clothe and feed ourselves and our loved ones. Recently (in history, that is), governing forces started stating that education was something we humans are entitled to. And so we go to school, some of us. By the time the damp and cold -the illness, the sadness, the hamster-on-a-wheel feeling sets in, we might need something extraordinary to remind us why we feel like puzzle pieces. In a society that has been abused with rules that don’t suit them by outside forces since before anyone can remember, entitlement theory consists of a thread-bare blanket. The people, exhausted, sun scorched, with limbs barely usable…they are at the end. Not death, but the end of the cycle of abuse, and the ones who can still move stand- superhuman. And the ones who think they can’t stand hold their fellows up, and that is what revolution is about. That is what The Square was about. And the majority of this entry is about how western thinkers might most sensibly relate to such an uprising. Perhaps if we saw our nature more readily, we would not just see the revolutionaries as brave, but as very human, as we are.