On the Unhappiness of Being Greek (2 page)

49
Any race believing itself to be descended from the ancient Greeks would be automatically unhappy. Unless it could either forget them or surpass them.

50
On the question of their heritage, I would separate the Greeks into three categories – the aware, the semi-aware and the unaware.

51
Those (very few) in the first category have first-hand knowledge. They have felt the awful burden of their heritage. They are aware of their ancestors’ inhuman level of perfection in both word and form. And this crushes them.

52
(‘I bore these stones for as long as I could endure.’
¹⁰
)

53
The second category (the majority) do not have direct knowledge. But they’ve ‘heard say’. They are like the sons of the famous philosopher, who are unable to understand his works, but see that those who do know them respect them and prize them. It bothers them, yet the fame flatters them. They always swell with pride – when talking to others.

54
It’s terrible not only not to be able to surpass your father’s work, but not to understand it either.

55
The more we pride ourselves on our ancestors (without knowing them), the more anxious we are about us.

56
The third category – the unaware – are chaste and pure (meaning uneducated: Makriyannis,
¹¹
Theophilos,
¹²
simple folk). They’ve heard about the ancient Greeks in myths and legends that they have absorbed like popular folktales. It is these pure types who created the folk tradition and folk art. These alone lived without the anxiety of their heritage.

57
Nevertheless, it is the overwhelming majority of semi-aware, with their permanent hidden inferiority complex vis-à-vis the ancient Greeks, that determines the behavior and the attitude of the whole.

58
Victims not only of their heritage, but also of the most backward educational system in the world which views the ancient Greeks with such scholastic awe that it keeps them as glorious and as distant as possible.

59
(Or maybe there are other reasons for this so very wise system of ignorance concerning antiquity? A subconscious reaction, perhaps?)

60
Our relationship with the ancient Greeks is one of the sources of our national inferiority complex (N.I.C.). The other is the comparison in space rather than in time. With contemporary ‘developed’ peoples. With ‘Europe’.

61
Whenever a Greek talks of ‘Europe’, he automatically excludes Greece. Whenever a foreigner talks of Europe, it’s unthinkable for us that he should not include Greece.

62
So – just how European are we? There are many things separating us from Europe, perhaps more than there are uniting us. The major cultural movements which created modern European civilization had very little impact on us (with the exception of certain ‘enlightened’ minorities). Neither the Scholastic Middle Ages, nor the Renaissance, nor the Reformation, nor the Enlightenment, nor the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps, culturally speaking, we are closer to the Orthodox Russia of the Slavophiles than to the Europe of the Rationalists. And the Oriental influences?

63
It is a fact – whatever we may say – that we do not
feel
European. We feel ‘outsiders’. And worst of all is that it bothers and rankles us so when we’re told this …

64
We are envious of other peoples – though we proclaim our superiority. With a mania and an aversion for everything foreign, subservient and not only hospitable to (holidaying) foreigners.

65
At the root of Greek unhappiness are the two National Inferiority Complexes. The one in time -with the ancient Greeks. The other in space – with the ‘Europeans’. Unjustified complexes perhaps – but no less real for that.

66
We
are
different. Yet we desperately try to fit in somewhere. Why is it that we feel our uniqueness to be a failing? Why are we ashamed of it? Is it because we are not big enough or powerful enough to make a banner of our singularity? Or perhaps because we are not sure enough of ourselves?

67
(This lack of self-assurance – and not our size – always led us to seek ‘guardians’. There are other small nations – but they don’t allow themselves to become dependent on bigger ones …)

68
We never had any wish to clarify or understand our singularity. We were always doing our best to belong somewhere and not to be who
we are.
We tried to become the ancient Greeks again. We strove to prove the purity of our race, fanatically declaring war on every ‘Fallmerayer’
¹³
to come along, but we never calmly investigated its actual characteristics. We disliked and destroyed our language because it didn’t happen to be exactly the same as that of our ancient ancestors. We disliked ourselves because we weren’t tall or fair and didn’t have a ‘Greek nose’ like the Hermes of Praxiteles. We disliked our neighbors … because we resemble them. (The rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass?
¹⁴
)

69
So who are we? The Europeans of the Orient or the Orientals of Europe? The developed people of the south or the underdeveloped people of the north? The (direct) descendants of the Achaeans or a Babel of motley races?

70
‘… we renounced our country’s traditions, yet we still do not share in the intellectual life of the nations of the west’.
¹⁵
Somewhere between the Zenith and the Nadir. Suspended. Like the tomb of Mohammed.

71
We are a people without a face. Without identity. Not because we don’t have a face. But because we don’t dare look at ourselves in the mirror. Because we’ve been made to feel ashamed of our real face. So much so that we are afraid to know ourselves. And so we learned to play different roles: that of the ‘ancient Greek’, that of the ‘European’ …

72
If the course of the Nation had been a little smoother, perhaps we wouldn’t have had an identity problem today. Yet immediately after the end of centuries of subjugation, so many fell upon us – fighting to give us a new face – that we lost the face we had. Capodistrias,
¹⁶
the Bavarians,
¹⁷
the Philhellenes, the Erudite brought complete confusion to a people who had only just begun to absorb and strike a balance between the new cultural elements brought by the Europeans, Slavs,
Turks and Arvanites.
¹⁸

73
Suddenly it seemed self-evident that the ‘descendants of the ancient Greeks’ couldn’t
possibly
be Balkan peasants. And so everyone set about re-educating us. Against our will. And we had (it seems) an honest and warm face, like the writings of Makriyannis.

74
And so what for every people is self-evident, for us became a problem. (When you start thinking about your breathing, you lose its rhythm.)

75
How can a people without identity not have an inferiority complex. A people not allowed to be who they are, but who are always measured against other, foreign standards …

76
Somewhere deep down, the national complex (which was created for us) coincides with the Greek hyperbole. Hyperbole is a sign of someone who doesn’t feel sure of himself. Someone who feels inferior. Hyperbole is an attempt to overcome this. Overcompensation.

77
Greeks will overcome the national complexes only when they find themselves. When they acquire identity and a face. When they stop hating themselves for what they are
not
and accept themselves for what they are.

78
If we don’t find our own face soon, one day we are going to wake up with a ‘general’ face – a product of the roles we play, of fashion, of the media. Then we’ll be left with a mask instead of a face. And the essence of Greekness will have been lost.

79
I don’t know if what we need is national group therapy. What is needed, however, is self-knowledge, self-analysis and self-awareness. What’s required is demythologization and, together with this, a new delineation. And above all, what’s needed is a new form of education based on truth, which, amid all the make-up, will allow the real face of the race to emerge.

80
We often talk – more so lately – of freedom and independence. And what we mean is that the domestic oppression and external dependence on foreign powers has to stop. But we forget that oppression and dependence are rooted in our very selves. If the seeds weren’t there inside us, no one would be able either to subjugate us or lead us on.

81
It’s not the person who ‘does what he wants’ who is free, but the person who
knows
what he wants. As long as we don’t know who we are, as long as we don’t have a clear mind and a clear sense of responsibility, we will go from one form of dependence to the next.

82
Freedom does not only require ‘virtue and boldness’.
¹⁹
Above all, it requires knowledge. And judgment.

83
But until we arrive at knowledge and maturity, the ailments of the Greek soul will provide the foundations for the unhappiness – and the glory – of the modern Greek.

84
For we mustn’t forget: behind every creation is a wound of some sort. Inside every pearl is an irritating grain of sand.

85
A major symptom of the modern Greek soul: mythopoeia.

86
We fashion myths about ourselves. And then we are unhappy because we appear inferior to the myths (that we ourselves fashioned …).

87
One myth: ‘A Greek’s neck subjects itself to no yoke …’
²⁰

88
Try as I may, I’m unable to find any other people whose neck has been subjected to as many yokes as ours.

89
Except that here too we’re saved by our mythopoeia. As soon as (for whatever reason) the tyrants fall or the foreigners leave – we leap up (like Karaghiozis with the Dragon
²¹
) and say: ‘It was we who got rid of them!’

90
More myths: The Greeks as a ‘chosen’ people. The myth of Greek shrewdness. And the counter-myth of the gullible foreigner.

91
(Someday someone should write the strange romance between the xenophile and xenophobe in every Greek …)

92
Another myth: ‘foreign intervention’. The modern Greeks have never been able to accept responsibility. Someone else was always to blame: those ‘pulling the strings’, the Intelligence Service, NATO, the CIA …

93
And this same myth also operates in our personal affairs: which candidate ever believes that he deserved to fail his exams? Which employee ever accepts that his colleague deserved promotion? The others always have ‘the right connections’.

94
The myth of ‘the right connections’ is the opium that benumbs the sense of responsibility in the soul of the Greek.

95
Of course this is not to say that ‘the right connections’ and ‘foreign interventions’ are purely imaginary. All myths are based on reality. Yet the importance that all this intervening acquires in the ordinary Greek’s imagination is truly metaphysical.

96
Another symptom: the constant demythologization of others and mythologization of ourselves. The total inability of the modern Greek to talk of any notable fellow Greek without qualifying: ‘Yes, but …’

97
The comparison of everyone else with ourselves is compulsory. Necessary. The simple presence of
the other personally offends us. It threatens us. It has to be ‘annulled’. The anxiety of constant competitiveness.

98
We are sometimes a small people with great ideas -and sometimes a great people with small ideas …

99
Is there any modern Greek, I wonder, whose manliness has never been questioned?

100
(At this point, we might recall the two most common Greek invectives …
²²
)

101
Another symptom in the absence of self-assurance: the modern Greek suspiciousness. The immediate reaction to whatever you say: ‘Are you … kidding me?’

102
The Greek doesn’t feel
comfortable
in the world. Like a relative from the provinces, he sits on the edge of his seat and conceals his lack of self-assurance behind his air of seriousness. He rarely laughs.

103
And yet laughter is perhaps the only proof of human freedom.

104
It is between myth and fear that the Greeks live and create.

105
Other peoples have institutions. We have mirror images.

106
The Greek ‘establishment’! A pale, miserable imitation of an establishment. A paper tiger. The only thing saving it is that the Greek antiestablishment is in an even worse mess.

107
The only dangerous institutions in Greece are gerontocracy, bureaucracy and matriarchy.

108
‘Bureaucracy is the illness for which it believes it is the cure.’
²³

109
Greeks continue to view their State as if it were a Turkish
vilayet.
They have every right to.

110
We shouldn’t shout about Big Capital in Greece – because there is none. Fortunately, Big Capital still sees our country as a very small footnote.

111
Greek business basically consists of thirty or so large companies all dependent on one bank, which is controlled by the State.
²⁴
(So you see, we also have socialism in Greece …)

112
It’s not so much our capitalists who are exploiters of the Greeks’ labor as the exponents of the glorious Greek tradition of spivs. Middle-men, agents, wheelers and dealers (Greek-American or not).

113
The classic Greek capitalist is still at the ‘head of the family household’ level.

114
The only major Greek capitalists are our shipowners – but they live outside Greece.

115
The worst form of capitalism is not personal (paternalistic, domestic), but rather impersonal.

116
Greek businesses are basically family enterprises. They retain all the warmth but also all the cruelty of the family atmosphere.

117
Modern Greek ‘management’. Instead of motivation, a clout round the head from Karaghiozis.

118
The recent idyll between the Greeks and the consumer society – a long and bitter betrothal, with no marriage at the end.