What do I represent physically, spiritually mentally, my social status, material potentials, and personal life, I am the one who is responsible for all of it. I can bring thousands of excuses trying to prove who is guilty that I do not have what I want to have, to allude to my near and distant surrounding, the government’s poor performance, weather conditions, geographic position, ethnic peculiarities and so on. This reasoning, however, is a self-deception and an attempt to avoid responsibility. If I am dissatisfied with my financial situation, then I am the one who is guilty. If I’m satisfied with it, then it is my gift for it. And it is so in all spheres without exceptions.
The majority of people do not think so. Especially in the countries and the societies where the totalitarian or paternalistic traditions are strong. People refuse to accept their own responsibility, preferring the status of “the victim of circumstances” and begin pitying themselves seeking the cause of their own failures in the external world. The allegations addressed to the latter are the basis of any political demagogy: you will live well, my dear people if you are not disturbed by the internal and external enemies. The search for the enemies by individual and national levels is the foundation of many mental illnesses. American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz even believed that there is no such a notion as a mental illness but only varying degrees of irresponsibility.
The highest degree of responsibility is the faith when you agree your behavior with your established principles. You can reach almost the zero degree of responsibility when a pagan priest or a shaman, both secular and religious, are trying to tuck you into any group, in compliance to his limited notions. During my work as a journalist, I have heard the following “intimidations” from such “shamans” hundreds of times: “If you write in this way, I would think that you are as such,” forgetting that his “thinking” is still very little.
And now, a clergyman has decided to “warn” all Armenians: the one who is not a Christian, he is not an Armenian, forgetting that it is the matter of responsibility for each individual person. If a person feels himself to be an Armenian, then no one can deprive him of that feeling. The man is an Armenia, he is happy, rich, and strong or weak to the extent that he considers himself as such. No one can “prompt from aside” the feelings of the person. Even the archbishops.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
