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Is The Arab Brain Incompatible with Democracy?
In this thought-provoking episode, hosts Malcolm and Simone dive into the complexities behind the absence of stable democracies in Arab majority countries. Exploring historical, cultural, and geopolitical factors, they debunk common explanations like colonialism, war, and religion. Instead, they highlight the role of tribalism, the influence of Saudi Arabia, and unique social structures that differentiate Arab societies from other global cultures. Tune in for an enlightening analysis on why democracy fits some contexts better than others, illustrated through comparisons with Northern European countries and even touching upon differences in animal social behaviors.
[00:00:00]
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today we are gonna be talking about one of those controversial topics that I just walked into by accident. Oh no. We were on another episode and I was like, well, you know, no Arab country has a stable democracy or ever has.
And I just threw this out there 'cause I was like, just in my head when I thought about it, I was like, yeah, I can't think of any Arab majority country that has a stable democracy. And then I was, I, I rewatched myself saying that and I was like, wait. That cannot conceivably be true. There are 22 Arab majority countries.
The, the, the, the region is one of the oldest, you know, in terms of civilization, in human history. Yeah. Has there literally never been a single democracy in this region that lasted more than one human lifetime? And the answer is no. There really hasn't been. No. The longest democracy ever within this region was Lebanon, and it lasted for a [00:01:00] period of 32 years.
30. Oh my God. Not even. And that was the longest. The next longest was 11 years for Tunisia. Other than that, not a single country has had a democracy last more than 10 years. And give mind, this isn't like a, a, there are 22 countries in this region now to understand how Absolutely effing and insane this is.
Let's contrast this with Northern European countries, right? Okay. You can say, okay, okay. How weird is it really for countries that are Arab majority to never have had democracy. If you look at the 14 Northern European countries in the world today, all over the world, not a single one of them is in a democracy.
Oh
Simone Collins: God.
Malcolm Collins: Like this is one of these things where you gotta be like, this is not like [00:02:00] random odds or something like that. You know, this is not like, oh, we, we, we rolled the dice and we just, you know, weren't sure or something like that. So, so you could now say, okay, Malcolm. Okay, Malcolm, I know what you're getting at.
This is some sort of a Muslim thing. And I'm gonna say, actually no, the majority of non-Arab, majority Muslim countries. 35 out of the 40 total non-Arab majority Muslim countries
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Are democracies.
Simone Collins: No way. Whoa. Okay. Yeah. 'cause I mean like 90% of Arabs are Muslims, but then not all Mus, like actually maybe not even a majority of Muslims.
No, most Muslims are not Arab, so Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That makes, no, no, they
Malcolm Collins: might be semi democratic systems, but like if you're talking even full democracies Wow. It's still the majority of them that are democracies. Wow. Which makes it even crazier that the [00:03:00] Arab majority countries haven't had a single period of democracy in their entire history.
And, and, and then you can say, you know, you go to AI about this and, and, and, because I tried to like, talk this through with ai. Okay. And it, it gives me like. Terrible answers to start, right? Like at first it was okay. Like what? Of course, of course. Colonialism caused this. And I'm like, whoa.
First of all, the majority of Latin America now, which w
Published on 4 months, 2 weeks ago