There was a hair salon on Shinararner Street when I was a child that my father used to take me to.
The overbearing cigarette smoke and the endless passionate fights about chess and football stayed in my memory. We had a world champion in chess and a football team in the late 1960s and early ‘70s that people supported.
The level of these debates was quite low, but their basis was conspiracy theories coming from wild imaginations. So modern readers can understand what kind of conversations these were, let me give you a similar example from recent times.
A few years ago, someone on the street tried to convince me that “Turks were giving Mourinho money so that Heno wouldn’t play”- in other words, so that our midfielder wouldn’t play in Manchester United’s main group. Without knowing enough information about soccer or about how that team’s coach makes decisions, it is obviously possible to fall into the trap of conspiracies, and our conspiracies are mainly tied to Turks. Similar judgments were being made in the aforementioned hair salon.
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But today’s political discourse is not on a higher level, either, and I can say that the majority of our people have no idea what is taking place in Armenia, the region, and the world. “Nikol is a savior who freed us from the thieves” (and that is why everything he does is forgivable) and “Nikol is a Turkish spy who sold our lands for money” (once again, the Turkish theory) are both conspiracies that prevent us from seeing the reality and understanding why it is so sad.
You may say that people don’t have an adequate understanding of the world because reporters can’t give them the right information. That is partially correct. But the majority of people don’t just have a lack of information- they don’t want to be informed, either. I can come to that conclusion based on the comments I receive on these editorials. No matter what I write about, no matter what laws or sensitivities I include, readers’ responses typically do not differ from the “Nikol savior-Nikol spy” scenarios. But what do we need to do in order for people to start thinking or for people to want to know things? They need to be educated from preschool until the end of their lives. Education must be our country’s main strategic direction. When this domestic instability becomes somewhat stable, we need to seriously start thinking about that.
… When they ask school students who wrote the Gikor story, the students take out their phones, Google it, and answer in a matter of seconds. When they are asked what six times seven is, they look for the answer in their smartphones again. Let’s look at another parallel. In order to become a pianist, one can’t just listen to piano music. They need to have some creations on hand. In order to be a citizen, it is not sufficient to have knowledge, thoughts, and evaluations on “external carriers” such as Google, any authority, or passion.
It is also necessary to have something in your head.
Aram Abrahamyan
