Sometimes catalyst thinking happens as a seemingly spontaneous eruption of desire for change amongst a populous. A potent mixture of hope, inspiration, confidence and anger over current repression reaches a tipping point. The population mobilizes and a regime is toppled.
It seems that this is what is has happened in Egypt with the end of Hosni Mubarak’s 30 year tyranny on February 11 2011. The spark of change is spreading across the Middle East, having been initiated in Tunisia with the overthrow of Ben Ali. Now protesters in Algeria and Yemen are shaking the regimes in their countries and other repressive governments in the Middle East are on alert.
This spontaneous tipping point harkens back to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Shortly after, the rest of the Soviet Union began to crumble, with Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania following suit. Within two years the Soviet Union no longer existed.
What is it that causes this society-wide impetus for change to manifest?
Deepak Chopra describes this phenomenon as a mysterious decision made by the collective unconscious. We cannot know ahead of time that an event like this will happen and it is only in hindsight that we can retract the events that lead to a shift in history. Further, we cannot know from this vantage point the outcome, how the Middle East will fare with its collection of dictators, royal families and fundamentalist clerics. Will the people and democracy prevail or will oppression?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/02/14/deepak_chopra_egypt_uprising.DTL
Some credit social media for the fall of Hosni Mubarak. The story line is that activist and Google manager Wael Ghonim reached out to Egyptian youth on Facebook, mobilizing the protest. However, social media did not exist in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. Furthermore, social media did not save the Iranians from repression in 2009 no matter how many tweets tweeted and posts posted.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/11/egypt-facebook-revolution-wael-ghonim_n_822078.html
Then there is the weakening of the existing regime, the slow growing cancer of corruption, repression and aggression eating out its host, the political entity. It caves in on itself and at a certain point cannot withstand the force of change.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2009/0701/p09s01-coop.html
I say it is a mix of many mysterious events, the aspirations manifested by a collective conscious and a weakening of the opposing force. Certainly social media plays a catalyst role, hastening the end of tyranny allowing people to mobilize more effectively.
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