You go to a river, “a place for a carouse,” and you see plastic bottles and other trash piled up in somewhere. What will you most likely do? You would probably think, “It’s all the same, there is littering here, adding my two or three bottles to this pile, nothing will change in particular, let me add my trash here instead of troubling yourself and filling in the trash into a sack.” For like-minded people, after 5-6 carouses the pile of garbage would increase twice as many.
“Everyone does so.” This is the universal formula of irresponsibility. People feel more comfortable when they are not different from the total mass. If you’re sitting at the banquet table, during the digestive process after eating full some ten people begin talking that “this country is not worth living in”, “these poor people perished from hunger,” and then hearing this regular Armenian repertoire and disagreeing with it, you at best would keep silent and at worst, accompany this choir. Otherwise, you would be categorized among the looters, plunderers, in short, to the number of anti-heroes and negative characters.
Numerous experiments made by psychologists confirm, the formula “everyone does so” is much more operative than the arguments confirming the usefulness of this or that product. For example, during the day, you can listen for ten times that the morning running is useful, it helps this or that muscle to develop, it improves the blood circulation and so on. But it is ten times more likely that you would do it if they tell you that all the residents of your building are running around the building every day.
One of the option to solve social problems is to create “resistance centers” and not for the “regime” (for the “regime” is created based on “everyone does so” herd instinct), but “centers” to resist this very instinct. They can be established in the family, at the workplace and social circles (but not in artificial NGOs).
Therefore, it is necessary to elaborate rules and principles different from the herd. I have already thought of several such principles. But, this comes next.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
