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.