A private life in a failing state

Lebanon has developed an unusual answer to public failure: find someone else to provide what is missing. When electricity fails, subscribe to a generator. When water stops, arrange a delivery. Choose a private school, find a good hospital, secure an income that can cover the difference. For those who can afford these arrangements, life can be comfortable, even deeply attractive. The country fails in ways that do not always prevent a household from functioning.
That distinction matters after Parliament’s September 15 debate. Nawaf Salam described a war his government had neither chosen nor been consulted about. Different MPs warned of national disintegration and urged him to govern. Their interventions raised a question beyond the government’s immediate performance: how long can the Lebanese organize their lives around institutions whose authority remains contested? 
The answer may be longer than we imagine. A country does not have to work for everyone, or work well, to remain liveable for enough people to postpone fundamental change. This is a possibility worth examining in Lebanon: the arrangements that help people survive public failure may also help that failure endure.
The argument is not that private provision is undesirable. A private hospital can deliver excellent care. A private school can offer an excellent education. State capacity does not require public ownership of every service. It requires enforceable standards, fair access, dependable infrastructure and institutions capable of protecting people when a transaction goes wrong. The relevant distinction is between choosing a private provider and having no reliable alternative to one.
Nor is Lebanon a country without taxes. Income taxes, VAT and property taxes exist. Uneven enforcement does not make them disappear. The meaningful comparison is what households pay altogether, what they receive and what risks they must carry themselves. A smaller tax bill is not necessarily a saving if essential services must be purchased separately and protection disappears when income does. 
For a family, however, the immediate calculation is understandable. Children need schooling this September, not after an eventual reform. Medicine cannot wait for institutional recovery. A household that finds a solution has done something sensible. The political difficulty begins when solutions available to individuals reduce the urgency of building something dependable together.
Albert Hirschman’s distinction between “exit” and “voice” offers a useful starting point. People dissatisfied with an institution can seek an alternative or try to improve it. When alternatives draw away those able to press for improvement, the institution can lose an important source of pressure. Applied to Lebanon, this suggests a kind of partial exit without necessarily leaving the country: continuing to live here while arranging essential parts of life elsewhere, outside public provision. 
This is not an automatic relationship. People using private services can campaign for public reform, and those living abroad can support political change at home. But it identifies a question that denunciations of Lebanese apathy miss: when an individual solution is available now and collective improvement seems remote, where will people invest their limited effort?
Political psychology helps explain the distinction. Personal efficacy concerns what someone believes they can accomplish. Collective efficacy concerns what people believe they can achieve together. A person can be highly capable of securing work, arranging services and protecting their family while having little confidence that organized citizens can influence public decisions.
Research by Martijn van Zomeren, Tom Postmes and Russell Spears brings perceived injustice, shared identity and collective efficacy into a common explanation of collective action. Their meta-analytic findings show that all three matter. Dissatisfaction alone does not explain mobilization; identification with others and belief in the effectiveness of joint action also contribute. This does not establish that private services suppress political action in Lebanon. It gives us a framework for examining why frustration can persist without producing sustained pressure for change. 
That advances the argument for a new national pact. Common rules and mutual protection are necessary, but recognizing a shared interest does not automatically create the capacity to pursue it. People must also believe that acting as Lebanese citizens can achieve something their separate arrangements cannot. 
The same applies to recognizing suffering across political boundaries. If only a communal organization acknowledges someone’s pain, attachment to that organization can become a form of protection. Yet dependence is not always partisan. Money, professional connections and relatives abroad provide other routes through insecurity. Buying electricity from a private supplier is not equivalent to owing a politician a favor. What these arrangements can share is a reduced expectation that common institutions will provide the answer.
The consequences are unequal. Those with resources may purchase distance from a public problem. Those without them may spend so much effort managing its consequences that political participation becomes harder. Where assistance depends on political relationships, challenging a leader can carry additional costs. There is no need to imagine a population satisfied with failure. Dissatisfaction can coexist with practical dependence on the arrangements surrounding it.
This is why celebrating resilience requires caution. Keeping children in school and businesses operating deserves respect. Treating that endurance as evidence that Lebanon is functioning confuses the achievement of its people with the performance of its institutions. The ability to absorb another failure does not make that failure harmless.
There are also limits to what money can separate. A generator can power a home; it cannot determine whether that home lies in the next war zone. School fees can purchase an education; they cannot guarantee a future labor market. Private insurance cannot by itself secure functioning hospitals during national catastrophe. At some point, the conditions of private life depend on decisions that can only be governed collectively.
That is what brings us back to Parliament. The government must answer for relief, spending and implementation. Hezbollah must answer for maintaining military decision-making beyond state control. Responsibility should follow actual power, rather than being transferred wholesale to institutions expected to manage consequences they could not prevent. Equally, constraints cannot excuse every failure to use the authority the government does possess.
The practical task is to make collective action credible through visible results. Municipalities could publish service targets and procurement decisions, with residents able to track delivery and challenge failures. Reconstruction assistance should follow published eligibility criteria and an accessible appeals process. Parliamentary scrutiny should identify who must implement a decision, by when, and what prevented it. These mechanisms cannot resolve the sovereignty crisis, but they can make participation consequential rather than ceremonial.
A national pact needs such experiences alongside its constitutional commitments. People should not have to abandon private schools, hospitals or businesses to acquire a dependable relationship with the state. They need confidence that basic protection survives a loss of income, a disagreement with a leader or the absence of a useful connection.
The Lebanese have learned to manage remarkably difficult lives. The political task is to make acting together as credible as managing alone. Otherwise, the next national crisis will again expose how much of our private security depended on public decisions we never controlled.