Silence and shame

A couple of hours ago we barely avoided a headlong dash for the cliff -for the time being. But the lemmings are known to be stubborn little devils, and this society contains a sizable portion of them, a group moreover that is fired up by extraordinary destructive energy, so much so that they do provide whatever vitality is left in the dead limbs of its body politic. This is of course a negative vivaciousness, an urge for death, a brutal impatience for disintegration. To that extent it is a typical expression of the spirit of theological mysticism, which scorns the concreteness of the present, disdains the task of knowing it and reforming it, and instead delivers itself to a dark fantasy of otherworldly salvation presupposing the conflagration of the real, a colossal auto da fe.

This inflamed delusional state of consciousness is the bitter fruit of the cultural, political and economic regime imposed (in the name of radical democracy) by a small coterie of charlatans, dupes and demagogues, all of them in thrall to a mafia of brutal exploiters who proceeded to suck the very marrow out of the commoweal. It is these groups that are out in the streets protesting against the harsh measures needed in order to save the country from the consequences of their lying, looting and plundering.

There is no doubt that these measures are going to hit the hardest precisely those that had the least participation in the blood-sucking orgy of the privileged minorities. And the reason for this is that the representatives of the old order, inside and outside the government, fought tooth and nail in the past year in order precisely to frustrate the implementation of any structural reform.

Still, the masses of the people (crushed indeed by the one-sided attempt to rein in financial debauchery without touching the outrageous privileges of the mafias nurtured by statist collectivism) are silently watching the spectacle of self-immolation unfolding on the world's screens with the heartfelt wish for the defeat of these vipers currently parading under the pretense of "direct democracy". This is a sociopolitical fact that I trust will assert itself in the medium run given a modicum of sanity by all those in positions of power (however undeserved these positions). But of course there is also the possibility that precisely this modicum is lacking.

There are three distinct methods of approach to "truth" in physical and sociohistorical matters (each with a number of internal differentiations to be sure). The first is empiricism: one attempts to garner as inclusive a body of empirical facts and observations, concerning the matter at hand, as humanly possible. One then extrapolates from these evidences to the most likely generalization that can be erected on their basis. The second one is rationalism: one begins with certain rationally self-evident assumptions and then proceeds to deduce by means of correct logical procedure whatever other propositions follow from the initial posits. Both of these methods are ignored, violated, scorned and rejected by the vast majority of public players in the current Greek situation (not to speak of the populace subjected to their nefarious influence).

With respect to factual evidence, all opinion leaders here are complete ignoramuses in the fields that they are arrogantly pontificating about. They know nothing about cultural and political history, including the history of Greece itself, and they do not give a damn about it either. Engels said back in 1890 that historical materialism was simply an excuse for the "Marxists" of the time not to study history. This is absolutely true of this country today: the various ideologies that are passionately broadcast by the roaming bands of political vandals are simply covers for the most apalling ignorance of reality, an ignorance moreover that has been exalted to a positive virtue. The Marxists of all hues are devoid of knowledge of history, social structure and development, political ideas and methods -not to speak of economics. And the nationalists are equally heedless concerning nations, the Greek nation and their historical conditions and itineraries.

Rational argumentationa and logical coherence is also egregiously lacking on all sides. Let us assume that the prime concern at this juncture is to protect the people from utter impoverishment (as the representatives of the public sector mafias and their tools in the press claim). Then, how does this aim square with their demand that we should simply defy our creditors (who have been paying for their bloated bellies for so long), refuse to pay them back in any way, or adopt any measures of restructuring, with the result of being ejected from Europe and the euro? In what way would the people's welfare be secured with Greece tumbling to the level of, say, Zimbabwe? With a return to the drachma (touted by many, including Marxist "economists" as a patriotic goal) we would not be able to heat our homes come December.

Their "ideal" is, thus, a reversion to a subsistence economy of exchange in kind, a primitive communism of general destitution (one of Marx's worst nightmares). That real, living individuals would be thus forced to endure an actual hell with no foreseeable escape is, to these enthusiasts, neither here or there. For their real committment is not to people, but to their ridiculous "visions", the flights of their diseased imaginations.

And this brings us to the third way to "truth" alluded to above, which is the preferred one by these raving maenads of "revolution". And this is simply the "method" of mystical intuition, the revelation of higher, absolute truth by the supreme being that controls the unfolding of history, a divine authority that somehow speaks through their stunted and crude minds. What they believe is true a priori, even though it violates both the principles of logic and experience, simply by virtue of their claim that it derives from a secret source unavailable to common mortals.

This is the good old mentality of religious fanaticism, which (as I have explained before) has thoroughly corrupted the modern Greek collective consciousness since late medieval times (since the triumph of the Hesychastic heresy in the Orthodox church). This mental abomination continues to poison it, even though the content nowdays of religious belief is party politics rather than bona fide theism. And the cause for this iron grip of irrationalism is of course the fact that this society never went through the cathartic experience of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.

In base Byzantinism all social and political questions were reduced to theological ones and the uneducated masses were brought out into the streets spurred by the eschatological ravings of uncouth monks: ζῆλος λήψεται λαὸν ἀπαίδευτον καὶ νῦν πῦρ τοὺς ὑπεναντίους ἕδεται as the church still boasts even today. Not a single day has passed, it seems, since those calamitous times, in which even the destruction of the Greek Byzantine state was preferrable for these lunatics to an alliance with the "heretical" west.

We are living through the same public dementia today. Europe will eventually eject this fake "Greece", not least because she yearns to be so ejected. The public mind here has drastically veered off any European, or even civilized, consensus as to basic values. The great crime of the regime that has so pitifully collapsed is precisely that it managed to excise any awareness of public duty from the mind of the average person. And all this, oh shame of shames, in the name of a hard core leftism!

"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity": Yeats' immortal lines are constantly on my mind these days. With an amendment: it is not so much that the best lack convictions, but rather that they are totally demoralized as to the possibility of these convictions making the slightest dent in this torrent of mystical lunacy that seems to impell a whole society towards its own doom. The only thing left is to look on in silence and shame.