GO FOR IT, TSIPRAS

The leftist government of Greece, headed by Alexis Tsipras, should use the present situation to mobilize the poor population, involve the sympathizing intelligentsia and activate the lazy bureaucrats in order to tackle the rich.

Instead, this government, just like the former one, waists time and energy to go and ask for money elsewhere, now not only in Brussels, Frankfurt and Washington, but also in Berlin and Moscow, That’s not leftism, that’s clientelism, the same social mechanism of client-patron relationships that parallelizes affairs at home.

And what’s more, when again loans would be given, the Greeks may emit a sigh of relief and continue practices that are creating the present problems, including personalized contacts, such as in client-patron relationships, that breed social skills but also undermine initiative, achievement motivation and efficiency, and therefore hampering economic and technological progress.

Paradoxically, there’s a fair chance that the foreign bankers and politicians may not like it when the leftist government of Greece would really undermine the positions of rich Greek patrons because they may be in the same financial and economic networks as the foreign bankers and politicians, having the same outlook on society. Anyway, I would be delighted to see that surface, provided the Greek leftists will ever go that far.

But what fascinates me even more, as an anthropologist, is again the underestimation of cultural differences, basically perhaps between north and south Europe in this case, when the political and financial leaders decided to start the Eurozone. It’s one more example in a long series of underestimations of the power of cultural difference.

HUMANITY'S SURVIVAL BY PROACTION

If humanity wants to survive, we may have to shift from genetically shaped reactive adaptation to intentionally proactive adaptation. In other words, we have to exchange environmentally dangerous technologies for environmentally friendly technologies, and better be fast in it.

Evolution is the gradual adaptation to conditions in the here-and-now. For humans that meant a reactive, slow, piecemeal and localized adaptation by which they could evolve during millions of years. But while our genetic evolution gave us the capacity to let technological growth accelerate, it did not generate a genetic evolution that created an equally fast acceleration of adaptation capacities.

Technology goes on creating economic growth and population growth which, together, lead to the increasing problems of meat production, climate change, depletion of ocean fish, depletion of groundwater stock and depletion of forests. Some of these processes have even reached points of no return.

In other words, our genetic evolution did not generate a sufficiently large shift from environmentally dangerous technologies to environmentally friendly (green) technologies. As a consequence, we have arrived at a point where this enlarging gap between fast changing physical conditions and our genetically shaped slow adaptation has become the most dangerous growth process for us. This growing gap is in fact more fundamental than the dangers of economic growth and population growth.

Therefore, the core question is whether our genes will make us go on to gaspingly run behind the effects of economic growth, technological growth and population growth, or make us able to modify those growth processes in time.

More precisely, the question is whether we will be able to change our genetic influences so that we become proactive and fast, at a global scale, in order to reduce the gap between the environment degradation and our adaptation practices. Can we timely shift from reactively fighting of symptoms to proactively fighting of causes?