Geopolitics Magazine November - December 2015 | Page 80

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Greek, a Failing National Culture?
“Some people and organisations see surprise as an opportunity to learn”, as Sydney Dekker (2006)
argues about occasions, that failure is seen, as a chance for whole societies to alter views, to modify
their beliefs, on the basis of how severe had been the consequences, of an unexpected and also
unpleasant event.
Greece has included its name, for more than half a dozen years already, among the dominant
nominations for the most odious media headlines globally, during the last decade. Financial crisis is not
only said, but truly exceeds the catastrophic results of WWII, as Greek population lately goes by with
grave a difficulty and the country lives a brain drain of hundreds of thousands of its youth members,
permanently abandoning its economy.
Today nearly seven years after the visible
beginning of the crisis, the problem lays
into the fact that Greek society still seems
to be incapable of realizing real causes of
it and therefore unable of discerning
potential escape routes. A closer look
could reveal that Greek people do insist
on “seeing things” under a linear sight
lens which deprives them from
understanding the complexity of their
current status. It seems that Greek
society lacks specialized and esoteric
skills allowing more awareness of
interdependencies when they appear. The
truth is that education and family
environment produce citizens who always
tend to prefer subtle solutions even for
complex situations.
Real world today is full of complexity, so complex instead of linear interactions are the norm,
suggesting that there are branching paths, feedback loops, jumps from one linear sequence to another
because of proximity that construct the structure of real life problems. Those connections are not only
adjacent, serial ones, but can multiply as other parts or units or subsystems are reached. On the other
hand linear interactions are those in expected and familiar production lines of normal daily sequence,
no longer existed in isolation and those that are quite visible even if unplanned. Unfortunately the
financial crisis in Greece still produces sequences and series of troubles either not visible or not
immediately comprehensible, all evidence of a complexity that stays inconceivable that can only be
attributed to a suffering national culture?
The Concept of National Culture
Is it the culture that creates and breeds the leader or the other way round? Questions as such come
unequivocally into the surface of our minds when the topic of research is vague and inefficiently
defined. Culture is a pretty much disputed term by itself that still scares Academics to delve into with
confidence, but a rather fascinating challenge.
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