It is certainly surprising, and at times even astonishing, to see how society gives itself over to celebration while the wound left by the loss of Artsakh and other tragic events remains wide open, and hundreds of thousands of our compatriots continue to live with that pain.
But, on the other hand, if we take a deeper look at the 35-year trajectory of our independence, we must admit, with bitterness and pain, that, broadly speaking, no state policy was pursued during those years aimed at creating a different kind of society.
What is more, over the past decades, Armenia’s political, economic and even cultural elites have themselves offered society, through the way they lived their own lives, no example other than a celebration of consumerism.
For decades, we have faced enormous and increasingly profound challenges, including an issue of exceptional sensitivity and central importance to our national and state identity — the Artsakh conflict. Yet no state policy was pursued to build a society commensurate with those challenges, or to raise a younger generation guided by a mindset and principles suited to them.
Read also
What was necessary to create an environment of social solidarity was not done. Nor was there an effort to create an environment in which property rights and social justice could coexist in balance, where, deep in the heart of an ordinary citizen, big capital would not be viewed as more objectionable than an external enemy or adversary.
In the opposite direction, however — whether consciously or simply as a result of negligence and indifference — much was done, fully and ruthlessly, turning society’s social and psychological reality into a crooked mirror of the Artsakh challenge.
I am categorically opposed to the relentless exploitation of the primitive “former authorities” and “looting” narrative as a way of blurring and concealing the direct responsibility of those in power today.
But I am also opposed to failing to examine society’s problems at their roots, because if we do not go beneath the surface, we will always try to find superficial solutions. And in that case, the essence of the problem will only become more deeply entrenched, eventually making even the possibility of treating it at its roots impossible.
Hakob BADALYAN
