Hosni Mubarak is mad.

That is my diagnosis following his speech to the Egyptian people on Thursday 10 February 2011.  It's simple really.  He lives an inside out world.  He has a model of the world as he believes it is and has to fit the information coming in from the outside to the "reality", as he sees it, in his head.  He probably feels that the $70 billion fortune he has amassed is a modest gift in thanks for his humble service to Egypt.  He interprets the protestors as a subset of the population who are expressing anger at the difficulties in their culture.  He is patronizing them and trying to suggest that their anger will subside when Daddy gives them some token recognition whilst fundamentally not doing what they want.  It is a Freudian complex.  It is narcissistic.  It is a compulsion.  It is the behaviour of a pathological control freak.

The scientific equation is between the reality in his head and the reality in the world out there.  Given that he is such a powerful and influential figure the tussle between the two will manifest itself in the outside world.  There is no way the reality in his head can win.  It is the archetypal apocalypse.  Reality will prevail because that is how it works.  For the folk that like to believe in a God the analogy is that God IS the world and we are a subset of that reality observing a small part of it.  When we start to think our interpretation is God then there is trouble.  The world will reveal its own reality and we are part of it.  But Hosni Mubarak is not God.  He does think he is in a way.  In his mind he is humble and modest but oh so favoured by God.  He might genuinely believe that he is the only person who can save Egypt from falling into the abyss.  But the abyss is actually his own annihilation.  He doesn't see that because he is kind of immortal in his mind.  But because he mistakes his internal map of the world for the actual reality out there he cannot leave because the consequence would be a collapse of his world (the world he thinks is reality) and so he possibly genuinely believes that Egypt would collapse if he leaves.  So in his mind he is the one person who can save Egypt.  It reminds me of the famous comment by the American Major who said, after the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, "In order to save the village we had to destroy it."  Mubarak, unfortunately, plans to burn Egypt in order to "save" it.  He might not think of it like that but from the outside it is his intention.

To add insult to injury he designated power to his horrible henchman Omar Suleiman who made a short speech which was amazingly disgusting.

There are two possible futures here.  Either the army will take over on account of the President being insane and they might then pursue the desired path of the Egyptian people.  Failing the army taking control I suspect there will be a lot of bloodshed.