How free is public discourse in our country? Not very. It is tyrannized by the safety of clichés, calculated outrage, and fear of the cost. Better to pretend you are fighting without saying anything than to expose yourself by diving into the territory of reason, which may drag you down into the depths of madness.
Thus, entirely rationally and in private, a former prime minister once said that “we are not irrational enough to believe that anyone in the international community would accept the extension of our territorial waters to 12 miles.” Yes, what is publicly presented as an “inalienable sovereign right” is privately described as “absurd.” But how can you say that openly without immediately being branded guilty of national betrayal?
This divergence between public positions and private conversations can be observed across the entire spectrum of the country’s political direction — from national issues to the economy. In private discussions, policymakers with a pro-investment profile bluntly describe the dead ends of the productive model. The view of Athens from Lycabettus resembles a “European Kabul.” “Construction activity is destroying economic value,” they say. Yet the capital, like the rest of the cities, continues to be built as if it had just emerged from the ruins of war. Mud and cement everywhere. Even across the islands.
The islands are the last Eldorado — not of a nation of sailors, but of contractors. In a private conversation, prompted both by the draft Presidential Decree for the Marine Park of the Southern Cyclades presented by To Vima, and by the Spatial Planning Framework for Tourism presented a few days ago, someone well acquainted with both politics and the market pointed out that there are two Greece’s.
“Look at the fishermen in Amorgos,” he said. “They understood that with overfishing there would be nothing left for future generations. For their children. On the other side, investors keep pushing. A provision for hotel units with 350 beds is not enough for them — they want 500. The future does not concern them; profit today is the only criterion.”
On national issues, Evangelos Venizelos has publicly pointed to the problem of the “absence of internal conditions that would allow us to discuss and shape both national consensus and national strategy.” It only takes one nationalist defender climbing onto the barricades for public discourse to become trapped within the safety of its clichés. In the economy, the productive ministries — always privately — fear a return to stagnation from which a new cycle of crisis could emerge.
This combination leads to an essential question: what has truly changed in the country’s political and business culture over the past years? Many things are understood privately, but almost none of them are said publicly. Public discourse is consumed by questions of day-to-day politics.
When will the elections happen, who will be next, who will come first, second, and third, and who is waiting on the bench for their turn. Fine material for public analysis and private gossip, but analysis and gossip do not build the future.
All right, those things are needed too. But no more than cinnamon is needed on rice pudding. That is the extent of their flavor and nutritional value.
So then? Let us “gossip” as well about the Aegean and the Southeastern Mediterranean, about the productive model and the predatory economy nourished by grand corruption. Let us speak freely and listen without shouting. Perhaps then we may finally manage to do something both about the things that “happen without being spoken of” and those that “are spoken of without ever happening.”
