When revolutionaries are asked to forget their dreams

In moments of major historical rupture, a commanding figure often emerges to steer the collective imagination towards a particular course. History offers no shortage of examples: George Washington, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Nelson Mandela, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Charles de Gaulle, and many others.

When Syria’s president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, addressed the revolutionary public with a call to move from a “revolutionary mindset” to a “state mindset”, he was engaging in a form of socio-psychological engineering. The aim was to extract society from an emotionally charged, fluid psychological state and usher it into a phase of rational, institutional construction.

His appeal sought to rescue Syrian consciousness from the condition of the “revolutionary crowd” – a state in which the individual dissolves into the mass, critical thinking fades, and primitive emotions and emotional contagion take over, as analysed by the French thinker Gustave Le Bon. A public that had once coalesced around a clear goal – social justice, before the violence of the fallen regime added “the overthrow of the regime” to its aims – suddenly found itself facing a far more complex task: building a state. That task demands patience, layered thinking, painful compromises and the capacity to coexist with former adversaries.

The revolutionary public, having carried the burden of confrontation with the Assad regime for years, responded to this call with a striking degree of awareness and responsibility. They understood that safeguarding the gains of victory required an exceptional level of self-restraint. The silence they maintained while remnants of the former regime walked freely through the streets was not the silence of fear, but a conscious decision to privilege collective altruism – embodied in the idea of the state, the rule of law and the public interest – over the collective inclination towards immediate revenge and the discharge of years of accumulated anger.

In psychological terms, they practised “deferred gratification”, relinquishing the urge to enact justice with their own hands in exchange for a promise that it would be delivered through the institutions of a new state. It was a rare moment of collective maturity, in which society placed its trust in a new social contract, hoping it would prove more just and equitable than the one it had overthrown.

Yet history repeatedly shows that those who ascend to power often fall prey to the very psychological pathologies their revolutions sought to destroy. The call for a “state mindset” appears to have been directed at the public alone, while “the group” – embodied by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and those orbiting it – operated according to the crude logic of the victor, and viewed matters in terms of spoils and appropriation.

Here we see, in stark terms, how the “will to power” described by Nietzsche – the human readiness to risk life itself in pursuit of growth, freedom and self-realisation, which helped fuel revolt against oppression – is transformed, in the hands of the ruling group, into a tool of domination and privilege. This is the “victor’s syndrome”: the belief, born of military triumph, that a faction now owns the country and its people, forgetting that battlefield victory confers neither political nor moral legitimacy.

What is unfolding in Syria today is not merely administrative corruption but the manifestation of deeper psychological dynamics. Chief among them is “identification with the oppressor”, a defence mechanism in which victims adopt the behaviours of those who once oppressed them in order to ward off feelings of helplessness and anxiety. A group that suffered exclusion and marginalisation under the former regime is now reproducing the same mechanisms against its former “partners” in the revolution.

The distribution of positions on the basis of factional loyalty betrays profound insecurity and a desire to construct a tightly bound “in-group” against an “out-group” comprising the rest of society. Such behaviour does not build a state, but a closed camp, turning the state from a shared framework into the private property of one faction.

This systematic exclusion generates acute “cognitive dissonance” among the revolutionary public: a state of intense psychological tension arising from holding two contradictory beliefs at once. They are confronted with a reality – marginalisation and the erasure of their sacrifices – that collides head-on with their convictions that the revolution was fought for justice for all. To resolve this painful dissonance, their options are limited: either they adjust their beliefs and persuade themselves that this new reality must simply be accepted – effectively declaring the death of the revolutionary dream – or they reject it and seek to change it by whatever means are available.

Cognitive dissonance does not disappear when it is suppressed; it accumulates. To demand silence and a “state mindset” while dreams are being stolen in plain sight is a guaranteed recipe for pushing people towards the latter option: confrontation.

The inevitable outcome of this trajectory will be ditching the “state mindset” called for by Sharaa and a return to a “revolutionary mindset”. Grievance and exclusion are the most powerful catalysts for reviving revolutionary identities and alignments. This time, however, the return will be more bitter and more despairing, because the injustice has come from within: from those who were meant to safeguard the dream.

That may lead not only to confrontation with the new government but to a loss of faith in the very idea of the state, and a slide towards more primitive forms of social organisation – tribalism or narrow factionalism – threatening an irreparable tearing of the social fabric. The result is a vicious circle: injustice breeds revolution, revolution gives rise to a new group that practises new injustice, laying the groundwork for the next revolt.

Escaping this dark tunnel requires the new authorities to transcend the arrogance that comes with the psychology of victory and recognise that true legitimacy flows not from the barrel of a gun but from the ability to build an inclusive identity in which every citizen feels dignity and belonging.

What is needed, then, is a shift from the logic of “the group” to that of equal citizenship; the construction of institutions that distinguish between people only on the basis of the law; and the launch of a genuine process of transitional justice. This is not a luxury but a psychological necessity. It is a means of tending to the wounds of the past before they harden into a collective trauma passed from one generation to the next.

Without such steps, calls to adopt a “state mindset” will remain hollow aspirations, while the lived reality becomes a nightmare of a state that devours its own children, and where the psychology of power consumes the dreams of revolution. Once again, replacing tyrants is far easier than dismantling the mechanisms of tyranny itself.