If someone 30 years ago would say that the Soviet Union will collapse, and we will be able to liberate Karabakh, or Russia and Ukraine will become almost enemies, very few people would believe him. People would say that it is impossible. Why? Because our imagination, as a rule, is based on the existing reality, and moving within this very narrow limits, it depicts an adequate image. Henry Ford, founder of the American automotive industry, once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses.” It’s simple, people have seen horses, and the imagination for most of them does not come out of the stereotype of moving by horses. Guillermo Marconi’s friends were seriously discussing the plan for sending the physicist to a psychiatric facility when he announced that it is possible to transmit signals in the distance without wires.
“It’s impossible,” “I’ll never be able to,” these are the main enemies of the mankind. Personally I have banned myself to think so, I do not allow any of such negative thought embeds in my mind, and look, it helps. But to make my imaginations become true across our state, my willingness solely is not enough. It requires at least the willingness of one million people.
“We will never become a civilized and democratic country,” “the government always robs the people,” “we will always remain Russia’s colony”, “our people will always live miserable,” “there will never be free and fair elections in Armenia” and so on. Here are the brakes of imagination that immediately throw Armenians into despair and drive to inactivity. If that is the case today, it will always be this way. If people today are moved by horses, then they will always do so, if the signals today are transmitted by wires, then it will always be so.
Of course, the elite should take the first flight of imagination, particularly those in power. If the measurement unit of their happiness is a portion of kebab and/or, let’s say, the gold-plated “Ferrari”, then they or their successors need to understand that it is a very poor and wretched imagination. Economists should understand that the methods, by which the economy was headed for 25 years, were fundamentally wrong, these methods should not be improved, but changed radically. Those responsible for education should understand that neither the schoolchildren, nor the students need today’s “naphthalene” education. And so in all sectors.
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Will there be failures on the way to reforms? Of course, there will be. But let me remind you also a case with one inventor. Once, Thomas Edison’s laboratory was completely burnt, all the drawings and equipment were burnt up. The workers were shocked. Only Edison was happy. “This fire, he said, burnt all our mistakes.”
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
