Egyptians expunge Mubarak's legacy, one metro map at a time

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/20/egyptians-expunge-mubarak-legacy

From Saad Zaghloul station, named after the one-time Egyptian prime minister who led an uprising against the British in 1919, Cairo's metro line trundles north under the weight of successive national liberators. Orabi station honours the general behind a 19th-century revolt against foreign domination; Nasser, Sadat and – finally – Mubarak all lie ahead as well, three generations of army officers turned presidents whose memories are enshrined in bricks and mortar deep below the ground.

"For too long we have put our faith in strong leaders, and as a result the strength of our institutions and our society suffered terribly," said Ahmed Okasha, a leading Egyptian psychiatrist. "The hubris of our presidents made them think they were accountable only to God and history, and they conflated themselves and their country to the extent of thinking, 'There is no Egypt, I am Egypt.' It's time for that to change."

Amid Egypt's ongoing revolution, his words have been heeded by the metro authorities. Signage for Mubarak station has been replaced by hastily printed sheets of metal reading "al-Shuhadaa" (the Martyrs); on the trains, where the maps are yet to be updated, passengers have taken the initiative by scrubbing out every last reference to the 83-year-old autocrat with pens, coins and knives. Some deletions have been carried out with such ferocity that the surface behind is cracked.

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1. The problem is that lacking a strongly centralized government

you essentially need to have a lot of civil society. Not organizations set up to organize people, with a bunch of strong leaders corralling citizenry or haggling over power. A lot of contemporary notions of "civil society" mean social advocacy organizations, not where people voluntarily join cooperative organizations because of shared interests and values.

You need actual civil structures, where you trust another member of the group based on their being a member of the group; where you trust shared values and a kind of group altruism that transcends family. If you don't have that, you wind up with a split economy--lots of mom-and-pop shops and large government-backed companies. If you don't have that kind of society, you distrust strangers and people "not like you" and that chills the economy.

They can be clubs, religious groups, things like Boy Scouts or flower-arranging clubs. But if they don't exist, you're not going to get little businesses becoming medium-sized businesses--you'll mostly just have little businesses and large, government-controlled businesses, with the occasional huge family-run business that has trouble surviving the death of the founder as the family becomes too large to be viewed as a single family.

You can get the semblance of a better-run society without having a large civil society sector, but it depends crucially upon having a benevolent ruler who cedes power voluntarily.

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2. But Egypt has that - had that ALL that for longer than the west. Nt