In one of Plato’s dialogues, Protagoras, in response to Socrates, says. “How do you want me to answer your question, should I tell myths like the elderly are doing when communicating with young people or analyze the problem through judgments?” So, 26 centuries ago, as now, there were two ways to approach the question: emotional and discursive, with some reservations we can say: easy and hard.
For decades, our intellectuals, government officials, the political elite representatives are telling myths to the people without trying to analyze the realities of the present or the past through judgments. That makes it easier; mythology approves the final, irrefutable, immutable truths, and the judgments increasingly deepen our knowledge, however, life is becoming more complex and ambiguous.
I have had the opportunity to write about central and “founder” myth that our people more than other nations have suffered a lot, oppressed by strangers, was always fair, but always suffered due to its naivety and credulity (I do not know what it actually means “fair”, “naive” or “gullible” people, they are individual characteristics). People who are bred with those truly ungrounded myth are guided by such pejorative stereotypes as “Armenian luck”, “Armenian background wit” and “pilgrim nation”.
It directly follows from this myth that the villains, traitors and plunderers are met and meet among Armenian princes, who, unlike princes of other nations, are more ununited, dig under each other and ‘deserter’ each other. Accordingly, our princes were (are) oppressing own people more than it was (is) done by princes of other nations, because our people are more greedy, cruel and ruthless. And here, by the way, comes the following mentality: either to escape and become nationals of another power, which is less severe, or to appoint this good and strong foreign authorities to our head.
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Generally, smaller nations want to differ from the rest, to be specific, even with invented bad features and remarkably bitter fate. In reality there is no such peculiarity, the rest are no better, no worse. “Two times two is four” is true for both apples and pears and mega-galaxy. The state is established and prosperous to a sense that the citizens want to and fight for it, and the authorities are merely temporary technical workers, whom we hire, more they are “invisible” to us, better for us. But, we have to make them become ‘invisible’, no one voluntarily becomes honest, kind and generous.
Otherwise, the opposition, on the one hand, says “systemic changes” and, on the other hand, continues telling our traditional myths.
Aram ABRAHAMAYAN
