“We need a proper leader to lead these people.” This conclusion often follows the “standard package” of complaints referring to the luxurious life of the rulers and the rich and their own misery. By saying a “leader”, people imagine a man who will stand in the Liberty square and will articulate final and irrefutable truths from his height, and hundreds of thousands of people gathered will listen to him overfilled with his brilliant ideas, will take this hero in the arms and go to Baghramyan-26, will put him on the throne, after which a happy and prosperous life will begin.
A “small” thing is left to make this dream come true: to find this “leader”, the hero or the savior coming out from the heart of an Armenians or maybe non-Armenians who must carry out all these things. With this myth in mind, people begin to enumerate the names of the current political figures and draw a conclusion, no, there is no such a person. After this search, some people begin thinking of an unknown, outsider and unselfish hero as they are unable to find an appropriate candidate for the “position” of a savior inside the country.
But the problem is not that these figures are not endowed with the “charisma” of saviors. The mistake is methodological. The model of a “leader” as visualized by people is outdated, it does not comply with the challenges of the 21st century. The times for Stalin, Churchill, Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung are gone. In the era of information technologies, idolatry is a remnant of the past, people have become much more informed, and accordingly, much more skeptical. When you can get any information about any phenomenon in 5 minutes, it is difficult to tempt anyone with the stories about false wonders. We, Armenians, are sufficiently informed to understand that no figure around us (like any human being made of flesh and blood) is not capable of political or economic miracles. On the other hand, having no state traditions, we, nevertheless, think that somebody should come and “fix this country”, we ourselves are unable to do it.
The problem complicates also by the fact that most of the politicians cater to the fallacy and behaves himself as a “leader” and the one who potentially fix the country. It is difficult, of course, to give up the importance of your own self. It is double difficult to say, I am not a “leader”, a savior, a hero, a “fixer”, I cannot do anything for you. At the most that I can do is to give you some ideas. And you think whether you can do something good for yourself based on it.
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Aram ABRAHAMYAN
