History is always written by the victors and the powerful who have every reason to silence, conceal or, worse, distort and alter the truth as they please, lulling the people and depriving them of the knowledge of their true history. We are thus taught a fabricated “virtual history”, not only for recent but also for events of the distant past, which always serves the respective ruling class, the “System”, the “Regime”. Which, through expressions of the type: we are born of history, we are the inevitable evolution of history, we have reached the end of history, and other such “objective” and “inevitable” statements, likes to cultivate a teleological and messianic perception of itself, embellishing events to its advantage and demonizing the defeated, from whom it “fortunately saved” the people and the nation.
All of this suggests that the worldview of the “System” considers that it has incorporated all the good that the civilizations of the past have been able to offer, a fact which implies that no one is now legitimate to question it. Because having supposedly achieved the highest level of civilization to date, it considers its proposal as the absolute only way, both for achieving social well-being (meeting physical – biotic needs), and for realizing the existential destiny of man (fulfilling metaphysical quests).
Thus, its institutional representatives, moral legislators of themselves, who present the general good as something identical to their personal interest, consider it not only a self-evident right but also their obligation to suppress by all means (the end justifies the means) any opposing view that raises issues and doubts about values of “unquestionable objectivity”. For this purpose, with the authoritative authority of “infallibility” that they have bestowed upon themselves, they oversee the observance or non-observance of the correctness of the doctrines of the system’s operation, “imposing the necessary” on the disobedient. Historically, we have seen such “infallible chairs” from the Pope, the C.P.C.S.E., international communism, etc.
Today, the “system’s” “laboratories for producing infallibility” include: “constitutional arcs”, “scientific authorities”, “experts for every disease”, “academic research with predetermined results”, “artistic productions – events”, “sports activities – events”, “human rights observatories”, “chambers”, “independent judicial authorities but with officers appointed by the executive branch”, NGO networks, media networks, “collective” networks, repressive mechanisms of the “Securitate” type (Ceausescu), etc.
There are, however, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who have preserved their national sensibility and it is unfair to attribute to them a kind of collective responsibility for the current state of affairs. Unfortunately, however, a multitude of factors divide these people and do not allow them to see themselves as a single whole that could act historically. Ideological, social and psychological differences prevent them from fulfilling the historical role that could provide the solution to the crisis of our time.
This often happens in History, until the “unforeseen” appears, the “tragedy” with the sacrifice of human lives. And then we see that the intelligent choice of foreigners, instead of placing a foreign guard commander to govern the enslaved state, to place political parties instead to do exactly the same job and with much greater ferocity, is a walk in the park.
However, the persistence in the pathogenicity and its commentary strengthens the forces of decline, often even becoming the first step or the “allothi” for joining it, with the invocation of the futility of any individual resistance. “Activist pessimism” is perhaps the worst “advisor”.
In times when the crisis takes on the characteristics of historical decomposition, as is the case in our time, both naive optimism and habitual complacency are equally harmful and dangerous.
All people must remain steadfastly committed to the Spartan hymn to their ancestors: “we are what you were, we will be what you are.”
Greeks must not allow the sacrifice of what was precious to them that their ancestors saved for so many centuries through untold disasters. But neither should the effort to save their nation simply end up as the Greek-speaking version of a European far-right, which will rest by consuming the opium of either moralism or the worship of antiquity.
Greek nationalism is something else, it is at the antipodes of the West, it is not linked to a specific form of political organization and can be right-wing, centrist, left-wing, without being imperialist and colonialist, always respecting the rights of all nations.
In contrast to the West where the use of nationalism is instrumentalized by the dominant bourgeoisie for its expansion (imperialism). The West where the displacement of Hellenism from the historical foreground allowed the emergence of new waves of barbarism which, with the objectification of the spirit, contaminated the spiritual landscape of the national event.
The roots of Greek nationalism grow in the soil of Homeric poetry, philosophy and the full development of Greek individuality, a conquest that Greece reached since the classical era. The roots of Western nationalism grow in the soil of enlightenment and Western individualism.
Perhaps no one could have better articulated the difference between the slave who gives birth to the collectivist man of the Asian despotism and the free individual of the Greek world than Saint Maximus the Confessor. But of a free individual whose particular characteristics, as Saint Maximus clarifies, contrast sharply between the Greek and Western worlds, as they were shaped after the schism, the Western Enlightenment that followed, and the anthropological type of Western man that he gave birth to.
He writes characteristically:
- Slaves are the faithful, who, out of fear of threats, carry out the Lord’s commands and are disciplined in good faith in what the Lord has entrusted to them.
- Hired (the exponents of Western individuality in this case), those who, out of the desire for promised goods, patiently bear the burden and the heat of the day and its temptations for the sake of virtue. There are also those who, in their own wise opinion, change life for life, the present for the future.
- And there are Sons (the exponents of Greek individuality), those who, neither out of fear of threats, nor out of the desire for promised things, but in the way and habit of the self-governing mental inclination and disposition towards good, are never separated from God. (Saint Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogia, p. 240, Apostolic Ministry Publications of the Church of Greece, Athens 1989).
At the first level are those who do good out of fear (slaves). In the second level, those who do good to receive a wage (employees) and in the third level, those who do good not out of fear or selfishness but because they love God – friend (friends). Jesus says to his disciples: you are my friends because everything I have is yours and whatever good you do to your neighbor, you do to me.
Ancient Greeks believed in the individual, but it understood it differently from modernity (Western individualism). Medieval Hellenism, despite having a collectivist-imperial structure (Byzantium), was a person-centered culture, because it believed in the triadic model. The king has the power to dismiss Tiresias from the stage with dignity, but he has no power to read omens (as the authors of Who Killed Homer very aptly observe).
The regulation of passions is absolutely necessary, according to the Greek understanding, in order to have a free political life. Freedom is not a “natural” state for the Greeks. Nature is governed by necessity, so freedom is a requirement that arises when people settle in a “city”. Then political life allows “natural” needs to be put in second place and the way of relationships to be prioritized, with which freedom is connected. The prioritization of the way of relationships requires the self-regulation of passions.
The term person-centered therefore means that “I want what I want” and “I desire what I want” are not identical. The natural will is one thing and the gnomic will is another. The mind has authority and power that it wants to either fall or resist, writes Saint Maximus. That is, the concept of “natural” will does not only cover our biological, but also our cultural sameness (essence – nature). That is, it refers to what is common – general – impersonal between us.
In contrast to the gnomic will, which refers to absolute personal otherness. However, in order for the mind to be able to “exercise power”, “autonomous power” (control of desire) must precede not only any social regulation, but also the very “natural pre-regulation” of the personality. The cognitive will must “precede” the natural will “ontologically”. The Person (Greek individuality) must “precede” Nature, in order to be able to “transcend” it, if we want to have a real community of Persons.
NOTES
- Greek individuality crystallizes through the search for “true living”. True for the Greek Man is “the common phenomenon”. That is, that whose existential identity everyone empirically knows and recognizes. The Greeks were the only people who understood the fact of relationship, not as a demarcation of egoistic arbitrariness with predetermined and coordinated barriers, but as the “way of governing everything” (Heraclitus). The same way of universal harmony and order that does not change, does not deteriorate and does not die – that is, “is true”, constitutes for them the model of “true” existence. Civilization for the Greek is considered as liberation from instinct, liberation from blind submission to the instincts of selfishness and individualism. It is for the first time in human history that the laws and rules of organized coexistence aimed at serving the public interest (in Europe this was born 19 centuries later), at serving not the ego but the we. “Seeking the useful everywhere is fitting for the magnanimous and free,” Aristotle would characteristically say.
- Western individuality, in contrast to Greek, is a product of utilitarianism aimed at private enjoyment. It was born on the basis of the logic that says that because each individual will wishes to operate autonomously and without restrictions, for the satisfaction of drives, desires and appetites, the coexistence of people is impossible, without mutual restrictions of conflicting desires. Therefore, in order for people to coexist, we need arbitration, contracts and demarcations of behavior. Thus were born the conventions, the laws, the institutions of Law, the penalties, the “penalties” and the codification of the Ethics of the Western world.
