The Greek psyche is notable for some persistent, clashing and often self-cancelling features. We are lone achievers, bad teamers, prone to flight from reality, but always ready to put up a fierce and hopeless fight, often won against hope. This explains how we have survived for thousands of years, but also sheds light on the complexity and risks of our attempt at European integration. If this applies in general to the Greek psyche, it is valid par excellence for the Greek left, who feel as aliens even within Greek society.
The current review of “progress” in the implementation of the third Greek programme can only make sense in psychopathic terms. The “Quartet” mission are at a complete loss to understand the mechanics or the targets of the Greek “negotiation”, simply because in normal terms, there are not any. The SYRIZA apparatchiks on the other side, cannot possibly get out of their chaos mentality, as they have no grasp and even less experience of such bourgeois notions, as commitment, planning, implementation or duty. They live in a continuous emergency of their own creation, incapable of attaching any time dimension to it.
Both the “Institutions” and the rest of Greeks should realise these inherent handicaps of people reared up as protesters, agitators, against any law, order and reason. Can they be “educated” to the urgent expediency and benefits of structural reform, through the strict enforcement of the programme? Not if they do not grasp it. If they cannot understand the tragedy and hopelessness of the situation they have pulled us into. In the end the situation can be treated as a classic example of a Gordian knot. Either SYRIZA will cut itself free from its upbringing, or we shall cut ourselves free of SYRIZA, or Greece will slash its ties with Europe.
From Maximos