[lbo-talk] The Economist on Egypt

[Wojtek S]

[WS:] My hunch is that this may be the case of "muddling through" - which
in organizational behavior refers to a situation in which nobody has a
clear idea what to do, so everyone falls back on "safe" conventional
solutions.  That is, the Egyptian military did not like the direction in
which things were going with Morsi government, but the only "solution" they
could think of was staging a coup.  Western observers act in a similar way
- they do not like what they see but they do not know what to make of it,
so the only thing they can think of are their "canned" solutions - military
dictatorship for the Wall street types, popular movement for the leftie
types, restoring democracy for the centrist types, and so on.

More generally, we are quick to see some sinister conspiracies or plots
where none exist, because forming narratives is a natural propensity of
human mind.  We are uncomfortable with situations that are random,
unexpected, or defy our sense of order and logic in any way - we need to
find a narrative that "makes sense" out of events or find a "closure" to a
narrative that does not seem to have one.  An "expert" is a story teller
who can provide a convincing narrative "making sense" of such troubling
developments.

-- 
Wojtek

"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."