Leaderless Revolution?

The March of Millions occurred today in Egypt. Impressive. President Mubarak spoke and vowed not to run again, yet claimed that he would not leave office until the election in September.  “Not soon enough,” chanted the people, as well as President Obama in his brief message. The entire Middle East is nervous. King Abdullah of Jordan dismissed him cabinet.

How to understand a “leaderless revolution”? Yesterday I discussed the idea of “self-organization” out of chaos and the Egyptian revolution. This process is related to the quantum concept “emergence,” or, as Jeff Goldstein defines it “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems.” Ah. What does that mean? In a popular, leaderless revolution means that similar aspirations, yearnings, and needs arise among people in a coherent fashion to form novel processes. Energy flows in reciprocal and confluent ways.  Leadership is spontaneously dispersed into tasks that support the effort: security, mutual care, water and food, behaviors, expressions of shared values and demands.

Yet, this does not forego the need for a mindful person who can hear and speak with authority in the negotiations. Mohammed Elbaradei and Ayman Nour are such men. However, the Muslim Brotherhood is clever, highly organized, and well-funded. If a vacuum arises, they could move in. That is the fear here and abroad.

What will happen tomorrow? We’ll see.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 1st, 2011 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Education, Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.