EGYPT AND MR. MASLOW

6/28/13

As Egypt prepares for the huge demonstrations planned for Sunday against the Islamist government of President Mohammed Morsi, we are being reminded of the difficult conditions in Egypt, most notably high food prices and a lack of jobs.  

Back in the days when the Egyptian revolt was brewing, I wrote extensively on that revolution in Rant Political and the Insightful Pontificator.   My only post on this topic for Mighty Quinn on Politics and Money was 1/29/13’s EGYPT:  MEET THE NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS?   My thoughts on the situation in Egypt have changed not at all since the outbreak of the revolution, to wit, such sentiments as democracy, self-rule, etc., etc., may sound fine in the newsrooms and faculty lounges of the West.   But when people are struggling to eke out what we would consider a pathetically meager existence, people simply don’t care what CNN and the faculty at Columbia think is good for them.   They want to work and they want to eat.   Indeed, most of the frustration with Hosni Mubarak resulted from skyrocketing commodity prices in Egypt; increases in the price of wheat were most acutely felt in what was and is the world’s largest importer of wheat.   Simply recall Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which you learned in your psychology, sociology, management, or marketing classes and you will understand what is going on in Egypt and throughout much of the Middle East as the “revolutions” so adoringly covered by the western media leave the populations of the afflicted countries indifferent, disillusioned, or far worse. 

In Egypt, things are even worse.  Not only is the hardscrabble working population left worse off than when the revolution began, but even the starry-eyed, overeducated, underworked scions of the better off who, to the cheers of the West, sparked much of the revolutionary activity, are left out in the cold as their revolution has been highjacked by Islamists.   The people are poorer.  The naïve idle are frustrated.  The nation sinks into dysotpia.   And who is being blamed for the misery?   You guessed it…the United States.  And deservedly so; until we can learn to keep our proboscis out of places where it doesn’t belong (See, for example, only my latest post on Syria, SYRIA AND THE WAR PARTY:  “AFTER YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT YOU DON’T WANT IT…”, 6/17/13), we deserve the derision we get throughout the Middle East and much of the entire developing world.

But western popinjays and poltroons in the media, academia, and “public life” can strut, preen, and declare their allegiance to high minded ideals like “democracy,” a term that not even they fully comprehend.