When taxi driver or an ordinary passerby starts to complain of life using well-known expressions and by showing off personal “poorness”, what should be your response? For pleasing the person you should sing the same song – “oh, they destroyed this poor people” and etc., and in that case you will say “jan (dear)” to each other and hear “jan” back, plus you will seem a “person suffering from the pain of your people” to your interlocutor. To oppose to those complaints, to try to awake dignity in people means to get out of the comfort zone, not to be similarly sweet and acceptable, lose the reputation of “people’s man”.
Do we always find strength inside us enough to step against the stream, not to please, not to comply with? Usually, when speaking about adaptation, they imply not opposing to the system created by the authority. Such thing exists as well. But it is essentially more difficult to oppose to the public mainstream during non-totalitarian regimes. For that, sometimes greater courage is required, than it was needed for “engaging in dissidence” in Soviet times.
Let me bring another example on a widely-discussed topic today. Suppose, a friend or an acquaintance of yours tells about the problems emerged in his family and represents the solution of that issue: “the other day I beat my wife.” If you do not have any psychological pathology, you should say that you dislike that way of solving problems. But will you tell that to your friend or will you remain silent? Or even worse – will you pretend and say: “Yes man, you have made a right choice, one should restrain these women sometimes, not to let sit on your shoulders. Or they will think you are a coward.” In that case your friend will understand that you are also a “man” as a representative of “Armenian genes” and “traditional Armenian family”. Perhaps your interlocutor will appreciate you so much for “understanding” that will invite you to “have dinner”. It is your choice – to be a “good friend” to a “good man” or a “coward”.
The last example. The Member of the Council of Elders, Levon Igityan swears on another member of the Council, moreover, a woman. But other members of the Council of Elders sit beside him from Igityan’s faction. Did none of them want to restrain their friend? Women were sitting beside him similarly – did suchlike attitude towards a woman not induce wrath inside them? Perhaps it did, but they did not have courage to go against their colleague. Perhaps, for some of them peace inside the party is more important than human values.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
