Recently, an act of hooliganism took place at one of Yerevan’s intersections after a driver refused to give way. Many have probably already seen the video: one of the drivers gets out of his car and kicks the vehicle that failed to give way to him. The police later released footage of the “offending” citizen being taken to a police station. And, using the already “traditional” method of public humiliation, he is made to bow his head as though he were being taken in for a serial murder.
In practice, many people would probably consider it — and quite justifiably so — appropriate to deal in this manner with those who publicly distinguish themselves through such behavior. I will not argue with that, partly because what happened at the intersection is merely one episode reflecting an entire “culture” in which we live. And the demand for a tough response to those who embody that “culture” is entirely justified and well-founded.
At the same time, if we pay even a little attention, it is difficult not to agree that our everyday urban life has essentially become a kind of “pre-hooligan” environment, in which an act of hooliganism may erupt at any moment. There are many deeper causes, ranging from the widespread reach of the criminal subculture to the various channels through which aggression is fed into society.
Here I will say something that many will regard as an unnecessary politicization of the issue, whereas in fact it is precisely a question of political responsibility. Yet the issue runs aground on one simple reality: the very political force that bears political responsibility is itself a source of direct or indirect aggression in society. The force, the political entity, that should be neutralizing aggressive coexistence and drying up its sources — not through propaganda videos, but through policy — has essentially become a vast reservoir feeding, or irrigating, public aggression.
Of course, however, it would be unfair to say that everything comes from there. The rise of aggressive, combative behavior in society has a variety of causes, both internal and external. But when the political force that bears the responsibility and obligation to pursue a systemic policy against those causes itself becomes one of them, the situation becomes many times more serious. And aggression is now reaching children as young as kindergarten age and the early years of primary school, to say nothing of middle and high school. Children are the most vulnerable group because they are, almost exclusively, imitators of their environment. In that sense, they are both victims of an aggressive environment and, at least unwittingly, its perpetuators and heirs.
The remarkable Hungarian writer and essayist Béla Hamvas had an observation to the effect that, for peoples, even colonization is not as dangerous as brutalization. I do not want to sound apocalyptic in the least, but neither do I want to conceal my view: we are on the road to that most dangerous destination — hopefully still far from the end, but sadly already quite far from the beginning.
Hakob BADALYAN
The illustration was created using AI technology and is not documentary.
