8 - The Family and Social Mindset

The emigration of both of their sons abroad and their partnering with foreigners were developments our parents had not foreseen, not even conceived. In fact, they were surprised and saddened by these transformations of the family fabric. For both parents, like many others of their class and generation, having rarely ventured outside the borders of our small and of minor importance country and for no more than a few days holidays, for their offspring to embark on a better life and settle away from their birth place was inconceivable. That despite admittedly striking flaws with both the country and its society, that is, the dominant culture and social mentality and mindset. Interestingly, those defects were pointed out and, on occasions, vehemently criticised by our parents themselves, contrary to the strongly held view that ‘all is well’ around us.

The prevailing view made more sense to them, however, despite obvious contradictions with reality. The attitude of ‘priests blessing their own beards’ -as the Greek saying goes, that is, an effort by oneself to justify to conscience one’s existence and way of life is understandable. Otherwise, one would be inclined to admit, introspectively and retrospectively, that one’s life has been unfortunate, which, in turn, would lead to denouements often drowned in resentment, bitterness, and regrets from several unanswered ‘what ifs.’ After all, everyone's philosophy reflects -to an extent- an adopted lifestyle, and everyone, once maturity is reached, leads a way life that that is disposed to advise on and even preach to others. On many occasions, although our parents reacted to our decisions at each of life’s major cross-roads in such a manner that pushed us further away from their small world and alienated us from an inertial national culture and heritage, they maintained the pretences of respecting the autonomy we strived to gain in adulthood, our self-acting and initiative, and they could hesitantly acknowledge that there might have been alternative paths potentially offering in some respects a better ‘quality of life’ than the one they themselves, consciously or, most likely, unconsciously pursued. Eventually, they reluctantly accepted that a different family status quo that was taking shape than they had envisaged, despite initial objections and their deep-rooted, rigid perceptions of life. Besides, there was not much they could do, as they were aging, to hinder their relatively intelligent offspring and divert them from the life journey they decided to embark. Their two sons had spread their wings, and flown away on a way of no return.

Other than some property and social traditions passed down from previous generations, the parents and the family that we left behind on our way to foreign lands walked the well-trodden path of the petty-bourgeoisie and civil servant classes they belonged to –their fate and curse. These particular classes in Greece, with a double steady incomes and state benefits, and possibly the land and property they inherited from previous generations, distinguish themselves by their banal objectives and trivial ambitions in life: the purchase of a second and sometimes third home ‘for the children’ and (who knows?) their expanded families, a holiday home in the Chalkidiki peninsula, the ever so popular summer destination of Thessalonians following the frenzy amongst the aristocracy of the city and parvenus displaying a newly acquired prosperity; the continuous process of furnishing, re-furnishing, and meaningless ‘chop and change’ of expanding property portfolios, savings for a ‘rainy day’, which, however, rarely comes to civil servants, with their jobs for life, who collect a salary and then a generous state pension uninterruptedly until death, or stashing money for the ‘old age’ and its diseases, which seems like a rather self-defeating aim.

Mother became, thus, the housekeeper of two or three different homes, and the guardian of the petty interests and the daily well-being of family life. In tandem, she nurtured a growing suspicion towards the world, outside an innermost circle of relatives and close friends, which was apparently eying, at every opportunity, to take advantage and cause harm -materially and financially. Father was the arrogant ‘czar’ managing the family’s financial micro-affairs: one of many stereotypes he was harbouring was that women were incapable of dealing with money affairs, let alone investments, in as much as their brains are not made to adapt to new technologies. Such tendencies and pursuits, amongst others, describe what I believe is a Greece, generation-specific petty-bourgeoisie mentality. It has been solidified further in the post-dictatorship years by the defects of a country heavily dependent on foreign economic centres, sustaining itself οn the margins of an industrialised Europe, a country which always struggled to adapt to technological innovations, and always with a hysteresis for that matter, with marginal participation in the ‘division of labour’ of the global capitalistic system, a country that produces neither significant material wealth, nor, in the decades of its transition to western type democracy, presented a notable creativity and innovative spirit of a global reach in both the sciences and the arts. That established social mindset I made great efforts to eradicate from my way of thinking and acting, being aware of its essence and the dead ends that it could have led me to.

Sometimes, meanness and malice, and rejoicing at the misfortunes of others, a schadenfreude in a word, characterized Mother's behaviour in many of her interactions with the outside world and, particularly, with people she a priori disliked, despite a feignedly polite demeanour she always publicly exercised. She treated with suspicion and a generally negative predisposition strangers and people who found themselves either permanently or temporarily outside a well delimited circle of close, loved ones. Even those intimately close to her, like her sisters, were occasionally, privately and in absentia, targeted with derogative remarks and even bitterness, usually within the context of arduous gossiping with others from the same group. This behaviour and generally private criticisms of Mother towards individuals and social groups, regardless of any traces of objectivity or prejudices we all harbour, helped me understand some of the contradictions (or latent or side-struggles and conflict) that had been taking root within Greek society since its transition to democracy in the ‘70s, and are still evident today.

Because Greece’s economy lacked sound productive industrial foundations, intra-society and -class conflicts have not directly reflected the fundamental contradiction inherent in capitalistic production since the industrial revolution, namely, between capital and labour, but they are rather by-products of a dependent economy with significant parasitic elements born out of its unorthodox development. On the contrary, from the experience of coming of age and studying, I learned that Greek society and its political superstructure have been shaped by struggles and conflicts amongst various layers of a largely counterproductive middle-class, fragmented into guilds and groups of well-guarded individual interests, acting insularly from the rest of the society and with disregard to broader social concerns. With two large groups roughly within the same income and wealth percentiles, claiming their share in the limited material wealth of the nation: the legions of civil servants, employees of state-sponsored enterprises, and central government bureaucrats and state affiliates, on the one hand, and all kinds of self-employed freelancers, small businessmen, dealers, rentiers, etc. on the other. The former group shifts the blame for the country’s deficits, its own class -barring a privileged elite- relative income poverty, and the poor public services offered by the State on the widespread tax evasion of the latter, while the other group derides the state and its services for over-centralisation and bureaucracy, for parasitism and corruption, as the main hindrance to the latter’s apparently more ‘productive’ and entrepreneurial activities, a hubris to its diligence and work ethos. Both operate relatively tightly within the narrow confines of their guilds and organisations, defending their petty interests, blind to the interests of the wider society and unwilling to compromise a stake of their own share for the sake of the whole. It is left to one or two visionless governing parties of our bourgeois democracy to moderate such conflicts with haphazard and hit-and-miss policies. However, administration of the state affairs and governance by the political class, with the makeshift reforms it introduces now and then are bound to be ineffective and deficient, merely because this class either originates from or is intertwined with the parochial groups of the middle-class whose votes is elected from. The political class that is supposed to monitor social class struggles aiming at temporary respites and reconciliations, instead, it is focused mainly to sustain and perpetuates itself, for the sake of votes and conserving its main attributes, like privilege, nepotism, and cronyism, which in turn warrant its self-preservation in power.

We also learned from our families that "everyone should look after his own interests" or ‘himself’ or his ‘own party’ -as the general Greek public would say. The only notion that unites these diverse and divergent substrata of the ‘people’ or, better, of the populus and fragmented middle-class, is a sterile nationalism against fictitious or manufactured enemies, a skewed and in many cases unsubstantiated and even falsified historical narrative, a pre-election populism that brings individuals with conflicting interests once every few years under the same political party umbrella and on nebulous or unrealistic or simply false premises, that satisfy their passive audience temporarily, until many are changed or forgotten, whilst in the background its main actors provide the necessary reassurances to ‘allies’ and foreign patrons. Above all, a political class, which was able to sustain its populist policies with excessive borrowing until the debt crisis of 2009, and which, when, cornered between policies that kept it in power and the spectre of bankruptcy, barely managed to survive amidst the economic ruins with conditional bailouts -until the next crisis, that is.

At the end, I resented my petty-bourgeoisie roots and the mindset of the class which I was born into. No matter, I am still formally part of this class on a marginally elevated stratum and somehow feel bound by some of its prosaic ‘aspirations’, albeit detached from the mainstream norms. Daily contradictions that are recognized and expressed by some of those unconsciously trapped within the invisible shells of their class, in schools and universities, in the army, at work, in shops and services, in parents’ advices, all these contradictions daily life presents, I could not unravel and reconcile, let alone accept consciously and live a life riding on their waves. The future could not wait. The place that gave birth to me was shrinking before my eyes, the distance from my children years under the family roof was growing. I threw a black stone behind, as the Greek saying goes, despite the emotional threads that connect me with hometown and family and which often drew me back -and still does, like an invisible magnet, thanks to a nostalgia grown on ingrained memories of childhood and youth, some of them unforgettably beautiful. But I struggled to change my culture and the mindset I inherited, to reshape it and move on in life with a somehow different perspective. To a certain extent I succeeded. In the end, I felt I might have been partly vindicated as, for good chunks of my lifetime, conscience has been in accord with praxis – or so I do think.