Great goals are never achieved alone. They are realized through cooperation among people. And the foundation of cooperation is trust, mutual respect, inner peace, and the ability to move in a common direction.
But this is exactly where one of the most common obstacles appears: unrestrained opinion.
When disagreement within a team turns into a personal clash, people begin to divide into groups, choose sides, and defend not the cause, but their preferred individuals. At that moment, the common goal is pushed into the background.
After a disagreement of opinions, our mind often continues arguing internally with that person, deepening resentment even further. And this creates an obstacle to working with them freely the next time. We do not need those obstacles; we need cooperation.
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In Armenia, many initiatives, organizations, movements, and even circles of friends have weakened not because of a lack of resources, but because of clashes of opinion. Very often, the problem is not ideological difference itself, but the inability to distinguish a person from their opinion.
Opponents and various centers of influence easily take advantage of this by cultivating provocative opinion-based apples of discord within our national family, deepening divisions and disagreements.
Yet a person is not only their opinion. A person is also experience, skill, connections, creativity, organizational ability, and responsibility. When we reject someone solely because of their opinion, we sometimes lose their useful potential as well.
If a doctor, programmer, teacher, soldier, organizer, or artist can contribute to the common cause, then what matters first is their practical ability — not whether we agree with them on every issue.
For this reason, overvaluing opinion is just as harmful as oversensitivity, which was discussed in the previous part of the article. Both elevate the personal ego above the common goal. When a person cannot remain silent simply because they feel their view must be voiced, they often serve not the mission, but their own self-affirmation.
From this follows an important rule: if disagreement begins to erode unity, one must know how to restrain the expression of opinion — whether online or in real life. Not every thought must be spoken, not every argument must be continued, not every disagreement must become a battle.
Our opinion is not as important as the common goal. Our opinion may exist for a few years or for an entire era, but the goal endures. Dissent is like a heavy stone: it is an illusion to think that if you express it, you will cast it off your shoulders. More often, expressing it only makes the stone heavier.
We achieve goals not through endless talking, but by combining abilities in the right way.
Of course, this applies to cases where people are moving with the same mission and in the same direction. If the goal is hostile or destructive, silence is no longer a virtue. In that case, resistance, rebuttal, and struggle become necessary.
But when the goal is shared, when the direction is one, when the task is great — sometimes the wisest word is the one left unsaid.
In the next part of the article, we will discuss the effectiveness of applying diverse ideas, rather than the search for one single correct thought.
In the first part of The Strategic Armenian, it was discussed that one of the possible forces capable of restoring order and justice in the world is the Armenian people.
In the second part, it was argued that to fulfill that mission, national identity must be elevated to a supranational level — a consciousness of being useful to planet Earth.
From the previous part of the article, we continue discussing what kind of mindset, behavior, and way of life are necessary for that national-supranational mission to reach its goal.
Hovhannes ISHKHANYAN
