To many observers—apparently including governments around the world—the uprising in Egypt came as a surprise. Certainly its rapid escalation has been an amazing sight, transfixing the global gaze and correcting analytic hindsight. Where did this massive upswelling come from? Why now? And what does the overnight erosion of stability signal to other peoples and nations?
These are all very big questions, some with answers specific to Egypt. In a structural sense, though, we’ve of course seen change initiated in this way before. A handful of years back we published a book that was a breakthrough in the economic modeling of social and political change: Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies. Kuran is currently Professor of Economics and Political Science and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University, where he is also the Program Director for the Duke Islamic Studies Center. His focus in Private Truths, Public Lies is on the consequences of the phenomenon of “preference falsification,” which is a term for expressing support for an opinion that isn’t one’s actual belief, or making a choice against one’s actual desire. Such falsifications have effects on scales commensurate to their importance: remark favorably on your host’s flavorless roast chicken, you’ll continue to be served bland food; express support for a political regime you don’t actually favor, you’re increasing the likelihood of that regime’s survival.
Kuran’s insight and its relation to explaining social and political change is that the prevalence of preference falsification means that there are always people simmering behind public choices with which they privately disagree. When the conditions regulating public expression shift, there can be a swift and massive recalibration of “public lies.” The following comes from a chapter of Kuran’s book titled “Unforeseen Political Revolutions”:
Where the status quo owes its stability to preference falsification, there are people waiting for an opportunity, and perhaps others who can easily be induced, to stand up for change. Some eye-opening event or an apparent shift in social pressures may cause public opposition to swell. The public preferences of individuals are interdependent, so a jump in public opposition may be self-augmenting. Under the right conditions, every jump will galvanize further jumps.
The potential for change is not fully observable. We can never know exactly how a given event will be interpreted; whether a new technology will alter the balance of political power; or what it would take to turn public opinion against the status quo. Such predictive limitations imply that shifts in public opinion, especially large shifts, may catch everyone by surprise. Yet an unforseen shift in public opinion may subsequently be explained with ease. The shift will bring into the open long-suppressed grievances and draw attention to factors that have made people cease supporting the status quo.
Kuran’s model introduces something called a “threshold sequence,” which can be understood as a statistical model for what are popularly referred to as “tipping points.” The threshold sequence explains why a long-standing regime that appears stable might suddenly collapse, as has happened in Egypt. From the same chapter as above:
Individuals who become increasingly sympathetic to political change do not necessarily publicize their evolving dispositions. If the government enjoys widespread support and is thus very powerful, such individuals remain outwardly loyal to the status quo. In the process, they keep the government, outside observers, opposition leaders, and even one another in the dark as to the regime’s vulnerability. They conceal the developing latent bandwagon that might topple the regime. They disguise the fact that the government’s public support would collapse precipitously if there were even a slight growth in opposition. Sooner or later, an intrinsically minor event brings a few individuals to their boiling points. They take to the streets, unleashing the long-latent bandwagon. The opposition darts to power.
These dynamics are captured beautifully by the old Chinese saying, “A single spark can start a prairie fire.”
In the case of Egypt, that spark was last month’s uprising in Tunisia, itself set off by the self-immolation of one desperate man. Kuran’s book addresses the “domino effect” that these forces can exert, and he traces it convincingly through world history.
Though Kuran’s argument is that preference falsification makes the prediction of specific uprisings very difficult, our awareness of the domino effect certainly helps us to understand how they spread. There were, of course, predictions that the uprising in Tunisia would be echoed in other parts of the Arab world. In an article dated January 19th, Hamid Dabashi, author of the recently published Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest, foresaw the likelihood of the “politics of despair” behind the events in Tunisia leading quickly to parallel uprisings:
A revolt against the politics of despair is sweeping across the Arab and Muslim world—signs of which are on full display from Afghanistan and Iran to Palestine and most spectacularly in Tunisia… Arab leaders from Syria to Egypt to Yemen are already nervous about similar uprisings in their own countries, as many observers are wondering whether "the spring of Arab democracy" is finally upon us. But this axis of liberty is not broken along national, ethnic or even religious identities. The will of a young and fed-up population will bring down these regimes, whether the U.S. considers them friends or foes.
Regimes are clearly falling, and leaders are most certainly nervous. Let us hope that these reconciliations of private truths and public lies proceed as peacefully as is possible.
