Everyone wants to change the world, but not the toilet paper

Something in that line seen on the bathroom wall of a bar in a remote village in south Lebanon feels uncomfortably familiar. Especially here, especially now, especially in circles where talk of Lebanon’s future is constant, fluent in the language of reform, quick to dissect systems and laws structures. Where we can debate decentralization, electoral law, neutrality and institutional design at length, and with conviction, and rarely touch on how any of it lands with someone who doesn’t think twice about skipping a red light, or throwing their trash on the sidewalk.

There is a general discomfort, almost a recoil, when change is reframed not as something systemic, but something social. Cultural. Something that has to start small and mundane. Something so tedious that you can’t livestream.

Because changing institutions is ambitious. Dignified. Noble.

Changing behavior, though, sounds too domestic. Too messy, it’s too much work.

The kind of work no one gets credit for. The kind that feels beneath the intellectual stature of national salvation.

Yet you can’t impose reform on a population that doesn’t believe it matters. You can’t legislate civic life into people. You can’t draft a constitution sturdy enough to override a daily culture of entitlement, impunity or indifference.

Reform that isn’t rooted in behavior — how we speak to each other, how we share a public space — is ornamental.

And the more ornamental it gets, the more disconnected it becomes from the people it claims to serve. Because when institutions are not anchored in a culture that wants and sustains them, they become facades, or worse, excuses for inaction.

And culture doesn’t shift by decree. It changes slowly, unevenly, sometimes invisibly. Nothing about it is glamorous, and no one gets a byline.

This is not an argument against structural reform. It’s an argument for taking seriously the cultural conditions that make structural reform possible. For not dismissing the mundane as irrelevant. There is something quietly violent about skipping over that part. About building grand narratives of rescue and modernity on top of rotting (a word not reserved for corruption alone) everyday dynamics. About imagining a better Lebanon without working through the Lebanon we already are.

The gap between those two is where the fantasy of change dies, or becomes theatre.

And that responsibility doesn’t lie with any single government or institution alone. It’s on all of us. Media outlets have to tell stories that reflect everyday realities and foster civic awareness. Schools must teach not only history and civics but also foster the habits of respect, patience and community that make society function. Public institutions, private companies and civil society groups all play a role in modeling and reinforcing behaviors that sustain reform.

But above it all, it’s on each individual citizen. Change happens when we take responsibility for the small, daily acts that shape our collective culture. Because reform that doesn’t start there, grounded in the realities of everyday life, will remain a distant ideal, no matter who’s in power.

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