TEDxAcademy - Stelios Ramfos

This month's Vanity Fair featured a lengthy article on Greece. Many of you have perhaps seen it. The article was a product of observations and interviews and I can say that it was exceptionally precise, correct. Both incisive and right. And of course well-founded because it started off with the Finance Minister's interview, moved on to discussions with politicians, tax officers and ended with normal citizens. Hence, in that sense, it was both well-founded, and the intuition and knowledge of the author was correct. Very briefly, because the article was 25 pages long, it said that Greece is a kind of third-world country, with the worst Education in Europe, a Health system in disarray, a state, both currupt and at the same time a corrupter, while the people are warm, friendly, smart, interesting, so much so, that they make you believe they are exceptional people, the Greeks. However, that which is a characteristic behavioral attribute, he says is the huge lack of trust in one another. Due to this lack of trust, we retreat into ourselves, or our loyal social clan. The success of friends or acquaintances is invariably deemed suspect. And of course, typical behavioral traits, are lying, deceit, theft, behaviors that negate any sense of a functional public life. Michael Lewis, the author of the article, was interested in highlighting this weakness in constructing a functional public life in Greece. Everyone works for himself, in a practically state-controlled economy, while, with reference to the Vatopedi affair, the monks in Agio Oros monasteries live in the Byzantine times. Intense individualism, coupled with banking growth, led to moral collapse in the recent years, but also a lot earlier, in Greece. In that sense, he notes, fighting the economic crisis is a matter of cultural change and not a matter of accounting. And of course, expanding on this subject, in this closed economy and society resembling a monastery Greeks are passive, as if they don't wish to maintain their autonomy, they constantly blame others, which makes one wonder, that even if reform were technically possible, if this capability existed in practice, do Greeks have the inner strength to make it happen? To bear let' s say, to realize this potential? Or is this impossible, he wonders because they comprise a sum of units motivated by self-interest at the expense of common good? And he concludes by saying that given the recalcitrance towards changing the political system, can the missing public life be reborn? This is, in short, these are the author' s thoughts. He avoids, or may simply not have the desire and ability, to make a diagnosis. We could add however, in a sense, to what he says in order to get a deeper understanding of the problems which he describes so accurately and vividly. From his description, we can wonderfully conclude that our fundamental attribute is Partiality. Partiality in the sense that we always care for part of a whole. Which may certainly be expressed as bias. We are characterized by partiality, that which makes it easy to reconcile cleaning our home thoroughly, while throwing trash in the street. Therefore, the narrow focus on our private well-being leads to the negation of the general public cleanliness. The element at hand is Partiality and a way to explain this Partiality or at least part of the explanation, has to do, I think, with the fact that our psychological, our spiritual world is governed by emotion. Only an extremely emotional person or folk can be living this partiality so intensely in its thoughts and deeds. And it' s very important to emphasize here, that it is our characteristic cultural trait this intensely emotional way of being and because after the 12th, 13th century no Renaissance took place in Greece, such that would have allowed the cultivation of logic, instead, this obsession with religious experience led to cultivating the sentimental actualization of the absolute, which consequently remained in our life and governs in effect our soul, and our choices, it is the dominant characteristic. Certainly, this concept, this emotion, i.e. the neglect of the principles of logic is, ever, also, the neglect of the sense of duty. It narrows the range of a wider-reaching behavior it prioritizes that which is pleasurable as opposed to, let' s say, necessary or moral, and in particular, it leads to a childish temperament. We have something child-like inside us, we have a childishness, childishness as found in all juvenile cultures, but also in all developmental phases of a juvenile person, which certainly leads to our inability to develop personal autonomy. In this sense, the constant dependence on a wider group, be it family or small local community, is a deep dependence and this forces us to find our identity in the same way that children find themselves through others, and not from inside us, as it happens with people of more developed cultures, of more advanced civilizations. This causes many problems in public life, it means the following: That we can have a public life with rather advanced legally vested democratic foundations, but it' s uncertain that we can have a democratic culture. The reason we' re going through this acute crisis is that for the last 35 years we have had a legally vested democracy but no democratic culture. We' ve had a culture of rights, but no obligations. In this sense, it was very easy for this edifice to corrode and decompose while we kept on demonstrating for its support. In other words, as we were sanctioning and affirming it, we were also destroying it, exactly because we were not moving toward that dimension. And it can definitely be asserted, that the existing clientelist system is based on exactly this lack of democratic culture, which was meant to complement the legal framework. That is, I want to say that this element of axiological, value criteria was and remains an Achille's heel, which we are overpaying and will be overpaying for long. It' s interesting to note that while we are living and affirming this partiality we' re a folk that claims universal realities for itself, universal values. And it' s asked what this universality is. I' d like to note here, that we haven' t ceased to be an oriental folk. We are an eastern folk, precisely because we' re a folk of emotion. Only the cultures of the west can interlink mind/intellect with emotion. We, people of the East, live our emotion and eschatologically pursue its validation. Our sweeping Orientalism, with absence of personal responsibility, is always expressed in some typical ways. That is, with images, with grand ideas and myths, of short duration but high intensity. We know our great national myths: One was the Megali Idea (Great Idea) which collapsed in 1922, or the European Idea which was triumphantly expressed at the Olympics with the volunteers and in general, it' s a sense of time rooted in the present and precisely being rooted in the present, loathing any form of longevity. For this reason, the need for pleasure pursues a dimension of eternity inside us in spite of it ever being a momentary pleasure with the known consequences i.e. with absence of thought about the consequences. This is very typical of our spiritual life. Also typical is the recourse to great metaphysical expectations in order to better understand our behavior. The Memorandum (IMF/EU) may frighten us and we may currently be well-disciplined, but if somebody claims that some Saint came into his dreams and told him to gather wheat, or who knows, flour, that could lift all phobias, which are currently operating, and destroy all discipline re: the Memorandum, which the current government painstakingly tries to maintain. I want to say, that it' s important to see where the metaphysical obstruction lies. Therefore, we have a reality of such a character and as this American did, we can also ask if and which could be the exit-strategy that today' s Greece could pursue. What' s interesting and eventually positive in today' s crisis? Because anyway, however black things are there is always light in the horizon. As in, no matter how bright things may be, darkness lurks in the depths. It' s interesting to consider and think about that the phase we' re transiting today is the punchline phase of the great myths. We' re finally reaching an end, 80 years (from 1840 until 1922). 80 years lasted the Great Idea and about 90 the European Idea, which came to fill the vacuum left by the Catastrophy of Asia Minor. Now, we' re at the end of the great myths of Greece. Which means, that we face ourselves directly, for the first time under real circumstances. It' s the first time in our modern history that the big mythical systems can no longer serve as talismans - we 're forced to look at ourselves directly in the mirror. For the first time, the decrepit mythical systems no longer offer escape-routes so the people are called to take matters of their future in their own hands using a different logic. A logic whose prerequisite is of course education and other such important initiatives. But mainly, presupposes at the personal level , the microlevel of attitudes and behaviors, changes and initiatives which could prove useful and truly effective. One must think up alternatives for multifaceted ways of tackling things. By bringing congruent elements together. Choices of openness, not of phobic reactions to realities with which we' re currently dealing. In addition, choices for self-actualization through a true relationship with ourselves and with others in a new accord, the pact that today compels people to a different perception of self-interest. A perception of self-interest in accord and in compliance with the common good. That's it.