Egypt In Turmoil

The Huffington Post has a nice update on the state of the crisis in Egypt along with some telling video.   This is a wholesale revolt now.  The government is trying to ban the bastion of modern day freedom - access to the internet - to quell organized resistance. 

I see where people organizing in the streets are chanting that the people and the army have become one.   In other words, that the people are encouraging the army to join them.  It is no coincidence that authoritarian states seek to outlaw religious freedoms.  We see that as a common thread in all completely successful authoritarian regimes.   Even in those that aren’t as successful, the attempt at banning religious freedoms is always present.   

In a police state, successful intimidation and control requires that the police, army or enforcing authority must be a valueless and immoral or at least amoral entity who is able to be brainwashed into a belief system that embraces the primacy of the state.  In other words, that the state serves primarily as the enforcing authority’s religion or the basis of its moral belief system. 

In other words, Hosni Mubarak and his thugs will never be successful using the army to smash civil disobedience because the masses in Egypt, including the army, derive their moral values through their belief in authority beyond the control of the state.  That is, their religion.  The Egyptian army is not going to start wholesale butchering their brothers and sisters in the street because it conflicts with their belief system.   Their primary belief system is not the state but their religion which forbids them from becoming killing agents against their neighbors, friends and family who are part of the revolt.   In a completely statist environment, the belief system of saving the state would allow the enforcing agents to do whatever is possible to save the primacy of the state, the foundation of the belief system for those serving it. 

The illegitimacy of the state can only be enforced through control as long as the people let it.  In other words some matters of thousands of authority cannot enforce obedience upon tens of millions of people unless the people allow it. ……  Without the enforcing agent of the state, Hosni Mubarak will not last.  But the dichotomy exists that the enforcing agent of the state is not aligned with a belief system that would allow it to kill its own people.  

Egypt may have reached a tipping point in just a few days.  And calling out the army may have been just what was needed to seal the fate of the fall of Hosni Mubarak.