The Methodological Structure for Reading the Thoughts of Prince Mohammed bin Salman 2: To Whom Does the Idea Belong 24

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In the previous article, I concluded with an approach to answering the question: Is there an idea behind the achievement? After establishing that there is a conceptual structure behind the achievement, we move to a more difficult and sensitive question: To whom does this idea belong? Here, the transition from proving the idea to attributing it becomes another test of reading.

The first and clearest source is the prince himself: an interview in which he speaks, a speech he delivers, a statement he makes, or an answer he provides to a question. However, even here the problem does not end, as interviews are not all the same; some are recorded with audio and video, some have their full text published, some are edited and summarized by journalists, and some are written in the form of a news story interspersed with direct quotes. Additionally, some may be translated from another language. Thus, the question of the source's validity differs from the question of the validity of attribution. The validity of the source is one thing, while the validity of attributing the idea through it is another. A newspaper may be completely reliable, but the article it published does not provide the full text of the interview. The quote may be accurate, but extracting it from the preceding question or the subsequent speech changes the context upon which we can build our interpretation. Therefore, I learned during this reading not to search for the phrase alone, but also for its context. It is not enough to find the evidence; the surrounding context may be more important than the evidence itself. However, the matter becomes more complicated when we move from the direct words of the prince to documents. For example, Saudi Vision 2030 is not a press interview with the prince, but it is also not a document that can be treated as a report issued by an entity distant from the project owner. The prince presented the vision from the beginning as an ambitious and achievable vision that expresses long-term goals and is based on the strengths and capabilities of the Kingdom. Then, the vision transformed into strategic goals, implementation programs, strategies, indicators, and executive paths. How do we deal with it?

In my opinion, it is not correct to attribute every sentence in the hundreds of pages produced by the vision, its programs, and its strategies to His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman, placing them between quotation marks and saying: The prince said. However, it is also not correct to treat them as if they do not reveal his thought and exceptional genius. These documents originated within a project that he has directly led from its inception to the present day, overseeing its construction and following its implementation, transforming it through the institutions he heads or leads into programs, policies, and strategies. Here, we need to distinguish between the personal text and the project that bears the imprint of its owner.

The interview may directly reveal his language, while the vision document reveals the structure of the project, the program shows how the goal transforms into a plan, the strategy reveals the arrangement of options, the system shows the transition of the idea into the institution, and the report reveals what happened to it during implementation. Therefore, these sources do not equal in the type of ratio, even if they complement each other in building the reading.

Perhaps the clearest example is that the vision did not remain a document hanging in the state apparatus; its goals have transformed into implementation programs, each with a roadmap, execution plans, and performance indicators. After nearly a decade, the vision reports describe an implementation system that has accumulated over time, enhancing institutional capacities, performance management, coordination, and accountability. Here, we are not faced with a phrase said by someone that ended, but rather an idea that entered the institution. This opens up a third type of evidence for us, which is: the decision. The statement reveals what its owner thinks at a moment in time, but transforming the idea into a system, institution, program, or target reveals another degree of its relationship to the project, and this degree may, in some cases, be more significant than the repetition of the same phrase.

All these precautions may initially seem to narrow the scope of research, but in reality, they strengthen it; because the goal of this series is not to attribute as many ideas as possible to His Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman, but rather to know what can be reasonably attributed to him with a degree of assurance, and what should remain within the framework of the institutional project. From here, the sources began to take on different functions for me. Interviews, speeches, and statements directly reveal the language of thought, while Saudi Vision 2030 and transformation documents reveal its general structure. Programs and strategies reveal the mechanism of transforming it into action, while systems and decisions reveal its institutionalization. Reports and indicators reveal its path and results. As for studies, journalism, and analyses, no matter how important they are, they help in verification, understanding, comparison, and discovering sources, but they should not alone be the basis for attributing an idea to its owner when the original source is available. Thus, the reading method changes; instead of saying: I found this idea in an official document, therefore it is from the thought of the prince; I must ask: What is the nature of this document? What is the prince's relationship to it? Did he speak about the idea himself? Does it appear in more than one source? Has it transitioned into a project or decision? Does it personally belong to him, or to the state and its institutions, or to both but to different degrees? And sometimes the answer may be: I do not know, and this, in research, is a better answer than an attribution we cannot prove.

Indeed, the power of reading is not only evident in what you can prove, but also in its ability to refrain from what you cannot prove. From here, the issue for me is not to gather many sources, but to place each source in the position where it can serve as a witness to the thought of His Highness, and not in the place we want it to witness from. A single source can give rise to multiple titles, and a single title may require more than one source.

The interview that reveals a perception of opportunity may simultaneously uncover the meaning of ability, priority, and time. However, a single concept like 'the future' may require interviews, words, documents, strategies, and projects that extend over years for us to understand its true position. At this point, the question: To whom does the idea belong? becomes part of the idea itself, because when we separate the words of His Highness, his project, and the institutions of the state, we do not separate them to sever the connection; rather, we do so to understand the nature and degree of the connection.

Thus, I arrive at a second principle in this reading after the question of the previous article: Is there an idea behind the achievement? It is not enough to prove the idea; you must also prove its attribution.

But even if the existence of the idea is established, and we are assured of its attribution, a third question remains: When does this idea deserve to become an independent concept and the title of an article? Why has 'opportunity' become a title, while 'value' has not? And why has 'ambition' remained independent of 'the future', while 'risks' have entered the concept of 'challenge'? Here, the question is no longer about the source or the attribution, but about the construction of the concept itself, which I will attempt to approach in the next article: when the title is a hypothesis.