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At first, let me start with a disclaimer; he is who I once was, I'm not him anymore.
I don't know if you have noticed it too, but lately, there are no exciting ideas
something new which is to say that this is it, this is they way for the country
You are watching the News, for example, and see that
First of all, starts a nagging about taxes, too big taxes, which stifle private initiative
Secondly, a nagging beacuse the income of public officials and Public Utilities are cut
And third, a nagging because civil servants and Public Utilities employees will get fired.
Which means that on one hand we nag because there are too many taxes that finance the government
and on the other hand we nag because there are cuts on the Public Sector, which gets funded by our tax money.
The question is then, what happened? Have we all gone collectively mental?
Can't we understand that we can either have one or the other?
Which means, we will either have big taxes and a big Public Sector or lower taxes and a smaller Public Sector?
To explain this contradiction
I will use the work of a great, and hopefully known,
philosopher of Science named Thomas Kuhn
On 1961 he wrote an important book that has been translated in Greek, called "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
Its central idea was that in every Science there is a dominant theory
Something he called "paradigm" and he named it for the sake of us
with the greek word "paradigm"
You know, when we were building the Parthenon, they were... and so on
So, this "paradigm" is the dominant theory of how we see the world
What glasses we use to see the world, the theory is nothing else but a way of reading the world
And he said that in every Science there is a dominant theory, a "paradigm" which dominates for a period of time
and from it through the "paradigm" all scientists operate and interpret phenomena
I have the impression that the basic dominant theory in Greece has been the big and centralised State
It was and in a degree still is, what we use to view the world with
and I don't mean what we constantly watch in the channels or newspapers, like "Where is the State?"
It was snowing in Athens and the first thing people were asking, no one was using any shovels to clear the street, they were asking "But where is the State?"
"Why is there no State?"
And I mean, even parallel institutions, I don't want to be misunderstood, the State is useful, and serves on various things, but
various parallel stuff that should exist in a society
and could contribute to society's well-being and development, are considered second class
They are not only considered second class, they are considered bad too
For example, the Market which is a democratic way of settling financial transactions is something avoidable
And it's not just the Market.
If we see the Non Govermental Organisation, institutions that are decentralised on one hand from the State but do work for society
Non Govermental Organisations are considered something like Satan's tool
besides being part of the New World Order, but in general, in our understanding, anything that's not part of the centralised State is bad
The Local Government is considered a breeding ground of corruption
I'm not saying that everything is good there, I'm just saying that by definition the only thing we trust,
as the previour speaker said, is the State, nothing else.
So...
So this is our dominant theory. But eventually we see that,
and mainly using experience from abroad where there is less State, we see that this model of viewing the world ceases to exist.
What Kuhn says is that at sometime in Science, the phenomena that scientists observe
don't fit the "paradigm" anymore
The same thing happens with Greece. At some point, I believe in the early 90s
a sensation is created to some, few at first, that the existing "paradigm" is no longer in a position to work satisfactorily
And what happens there then?
Kuhn says that our first reaction to this grande theory we have, to this paradigm
this overview of the world we have is to do
some alterations in our theory so that we can follow the paradigm on one hand but also correcting it at the same time
And he uses and amazing example. He says that the old worldview was the Geocentric Theory
The Earth was in the centre and all the planets were revolving in perfectly circular orbits, since the circle is perfect
God apparently created the world perfect, so they would have to be perfectly circular orbits around the Earth
The thing was that, though, they started observing that some of the planets were not moving so perfectly round
I mean, they were a bit off
They didn't think, they did not enter the logical thinking to reverse the paradigm
that maybe the trojectories, to begin with, are not circular and secondly, Earth may not be the centre of the universe
So, what did they do? They discovered the sub-orbits. They said that while the planets do move circularly around the Earth
but from time to time, they do some small, ehm...sub-orbits which also are circular
because God's vision was circular
I think, our first reaction to that, when we started to see that the State does not function effectively any more
it doesn't work the way we thought it does, is to create our own sub-trojectories
The first sub-orbit we created was the absolutely moral politician, the perfectly ethical public servant
We were saying that it's not the current State's model to be blaimed, it's just that we didn't find thousands of politicians that don't take the political cost into consideration
and a million public servants, that's how many we have despite what was rumored to be seven hundred fifty
that are moral and don't steal
We couldn't imagine that maybe it's the model's fault that some politician think the political cost
and some public servants are willing to be bribed and the like.
We were just trying to adjust it.
And with this way of thinking the governments got elected both 2004 and 2009, that they are more ethical than the others
So, from the moment that the issue of the morality we were expecting from the politicians was dealt with
we dismissed the political system in total
Kuhn, at some point, I will show later too, says that
at some point, scientists, many of the scientists when they find where they can't stay in this
chaos created by the abolishment of the old paradigm, they give up Science and move to other fields
That was the outcome of Ethics
So...
Once the first sub-orbit is dismissed, we are entering a phase that, as Kuhn calls it
"Extraordinary Science". "Extraordinary" is the Science in which nothing seems to be stable
everyone proposes different ideas and those ideas don't seem to work.
And here we see a typical example of what I told you, of the "Extraordinary Science"
In the masthead, the newspaper is nagging about the taxpayers whose incomes will be slaugthered from 500€ to 2.650€
and underneath grumbles about the slaughtering of the salaries in the Public Sector and Public Utilities
This is like, you don't know where to stand, you are neither a liberal nor a statist, you are something in-between or both of them
So here, not shown, on top says "Ether"
Ether was another tricker that scientist do when
a second paradigm changed, from Newtonian Physics to the Theory of Relativity
Becuse they couldn't explain how light could travel in vacuum, they made up an invisible, odorless, tasteless thing called "Ether"
Which was needed only to run the old paradigm, so that the Newtonian Physics would work.
And underneath, in letters you can't see, it says "Development"
Development is like Ether now. Everybody evokes it but no one knows how it will come
But we base...
(Applause)
But we base our whole model on it, that the current model can function, as long as this Development exists
the way Newtonian Physics could work as long as Ether exists
I don't want to be misunderstood again, Development is good and must exist, but Development can come in the old way
where the State makes money, funds the Market, those money make a circle on the Economy
and then leave out in order for us to by cereal, meat and others.
Development can come only through the reconstructing of this model
Releasing Economy from its shackels, that the first speaker told about...
why we don't have new businesses in Greece.
And acquiring new institutions.
and especially, by reducing the State so that there is money for the Economy.
So, now, we are at the point that Kuhn calls "paradigm shift"
See, the old is not dead yet, right? In the back of our heads, and if you watch the News and the newspapers
and the columnists, in the back of their heads, there is the State and there is the need to change that model.
And we are at a point right now that, whatever is suggested, if it's suggested based on the old model
for example, expansion of the State, seems outdated
If something else is proposed based on the the paradigm shift, like reduction of the State, firing public servants
we think it's too bold, we don't like either.
So we are now at what I told you earlier, at the point, like Albert Einstein said, "there is no ground to stand"
at the point where there is no theory, where this whole thing is going, the question
of where we go as a society, in order to see where we are heading as a society we need a theory
about where we want this society to go to
At this point, I simply think we are with two feet on two boats and we don't know where to go
So in this phase, Kuhn writes that, there have been lots of scientists that quit Science
because they couldn't endure the crisis, to live in a world without consistency.
And I think the greek society lives at that moment
It doesn't have the theoretical coherence to understand where to go. Not where the world is headed, we make a mistake here when we say
"where is this thing going?". What's important is where we want this thing to go
And in order for us to know where this thing is going, we must have a theoretical model of where this whole thing is going
And here I want to focus mainly on young kids mainly, who, exactly because they live in this situation,
in an incoherent world, they are getting ready to leave.
They will do very well.
I just want to point out that, in this country, because the old ideology collapses
the old hierarchies are being demolished, new opportunities are created
Now, this country will be rebuilt at all levels from the beginning
Both on a political level, financial and business level.
I hope some of the young people in here will seize the opportunity.
Thank you
(Applause)