Translator: Evgenia Syrianou Reviewer: Lucas Kaimaras
I have to say when I was invited to speak here at TEDx,
I got anxious and had a flashback from my childhood
- I have to confess that -
when I had to make the presentation of a project at a theater,
a much smaller one,
I was so anxious that I started to stammer then to utter strange sounds
instead of speaking in my own voice.
Time passed by, I forgot all about the incident,
and at some point, someone suggested I should work at a TV station.
That sent chills down my spine.
I thought to myself, you have to tame whatever stresses you.
This is the most important thing in life after all.
So I decided to work on TV.
My first time, I reported live from the White House.
I did an amazing geopolitical analysis,
in my opinion an outstanding one by those standards,
but I was really nervous, I had no idea what I had said and how.
So I called my mum in Athens and I asked her:
"Mum, how did you like my report?"
"That was an awful cardigan you were wearing," she replied.
(Laughter)
I realized over the years, that many times, what you say
is less important than what people want to hear, see, or absorb.
Seriously now, when I was writing on that subject I really liked,
"The future we share",
something strange happened,
I felt a power while I was thinking what I wanted to talk about,
an invisible hand kept pulling me
to check out the latest gossip about a politician,
to watch someone's very important statement,
to watch people arguing once and again on live TV,
something that is getting more and more ridiculous everyday.
What's wrong with all of us
that we are supposed to deal with the public matters in the country,
journalists, politicians, businessmen?
How much time do we waste on this daily routine, this gossip,
that thing that doesn't go anywhere?
And I assure you, as I live it every day,
there is no one who thinks or plans ahead, neither right nor left-wing, no one,
beyond the next election, the approval of the next tranche by the Troika,
or beyond the next recruitment.
And that is something that personally scares me,
but what scares me even more
is a society that feels it has really lost its grip.
A society that was used to a certain standard of living
which fell into pieces within a few years,
a society that is truly afraid, and is not at all optimistic,
because, in my opinion, the only way to address fear
is with truth and with vision or an even better plan.
As I was pondering all that,
I decided that a big issue is - and history has proven it -
that when a country is going through such a crisis
the biggest gaps open up,
specific traits of a nation that come to the foreground more intensely.
And now they have come to the foreground and sometimes threaten the way we think.
A syndrome we have recently, we keep looking back,
all the time, like we are stuck on the rear view mirror.
And whoever does that is definitely going to crash.
You can have neither visibility nor a vision.
I am not saying there shouldn't be any catharsis for all that's done,
I'm not saying it's everyone's fault,
that we didn't support things that couldn't be supported,
that we felt comfortable when we shouldn't,
or that we didn't speak up when we should.
Don't get me wrong.
But looking back needs to be limited.
Another thing that comes to light is the persecution complex,
that great stereotype that says
we are a unique, blessed nation everybody envies.
I agree that we're a unique nation, we obviously have a great history,
and I don't know who is after us, but they haven't done a good job.
(Laughter)
Look around you and you can see that Greece, even after this crisis,
is still among the 30 richest countries in the world.
Take a look and observe we belong to the most private western clubs,
the level of education the new Greek generation gets,
that the rest of the world would be really jealous
of the position Greece still holds today.
To me the challenge is to keep this level, to stand where we are and move forward.
There's a third syndrome, my favourite one because I've lived it,
and it is conspiracy theories.
I could talk for hours about conspiracy theories,
and I'll share a story because it's really one of those
that sometimes make me laugh even when I'm alone,
when I think how mixed up we got it in our minds.
It was three or four years ago when I got an invitation
from the cursed Bilderberg Group to attend one of its conferences.
It was the second time so I called a friend to ask him what to do.
That friend of mine loves conspiracy theories so much
that you may give him the best present, the best holiday, the best woman,
he doesn't care,
give him a conspiracy theory and he lives and breathes for that.
So I tell him: "What should I do? Should I go?"
He looked at me as if I was a bit crazy, like "What is he doing?"
and asked me why I wanted to go.
I said, "First, to open my mind
because I'll listen to things I cannot listen to here,
second, because every successful newspaper editor
from Europe and America attends,
and third, because maybe Greece will be mentioned, you never know,"
- nothing was said, by the way -
(Laughter)
"and it is a good thing for a Greek to be there and support Greece's views."
"Go then," he told me.
When I returned, he had browsed the Group's site in the meantime,
he'd checked out the agenda, the attendees, everything.
The first day he asked me what happened.
"Please, this is a serious matter," I told him.
The second day passed and the third,
so I tell him: "Look. You are going to take the Bilderberg oath."
He asks me: "What's that oath?"
I tell him: "I'm not sure, but if you break it, you're screwed."
There is no such oath by the way.
After having said that I told him: "Look. There has been a vote"
- there are no votes either, I assure you -
"A vote was taken and it was decided by 149 votes against 14
that the borders of Turkey are going to be redrawn in 2013."
"I knew it," he flashed, "I really knew it."
(Laughter)
You do realise that ever since, I pray for Turkey not to break down,
or else I'm screwed.
(Laughter)
But, let me be serious now.
What I and everyone who attends such forums realise is this.
First of all, what strikes you is how scared the leaders are,
the bankers and everyone else who deals with such things.
They are afraid of that thing called globalization
which is fierce and unpredictable
because they don't know how to handle it, no one knows.
The second thing that impresses you
is how big the challenges are for the West and how small their leaders are.
I don't know why that happens, but it is common in our time.
The last thing I realised, and to me it's very important
and refers to what I mentioned earlier about always being honest,
is that, as much as we want to believe that we are the center of the world,
we are certainly neither the center nor the navel of the world.
We have our history, we have a unique geopolitical position,
we are a nation, a blessed place, from everything around us,
but we are not the center of the world, and not only this.
We need to realise that we are a very small part in a troubled world.
Europe is not the same anymore,
it's not our neighbourhood, Albania, Bulgaria anymore.
There are countries in Europe from the Eastern Block
that have been through hardship, they have starved.
They see our standard of life and really envy it.
There is Turkey in that new, fierce capitalism.
There is Russia, China, there will be Africa,
which is going to form a new middle class,
approximately a billion in the next ten to 20 years.
That is the world we are facing, the one we compete against,
we need to make a decision, it's not easy,
but it's these people we have to deal with.
There are people who state this when they are afraid:
"What do you do when you are threatened? You build wooden walls around you."
Let's look back in history and remember what wooden walls were.
The Barbarians were outside Attica
and many helpless people were taken in by others
and went to hide in the Parthenon behind its wooden walls.
They didn't survive.
The Greeks under Themistocles set out to sea, in itself a bad omen,
but fought creatively,
with bravery, determination, and won the battle there.
And they saved Europe and Greece from the Barbarians.
Do I see Themistocles and the rest anywhere around me?
I do, let me tell you something: after having lived abroad,
I have seen how a Greek can survive in rough seas
when he is extroverted, when he takes risks,
when he works by the rules.
I felt great pride when I went to Los Angeles, to Hollywood,
to Silicon Valley, to the White House, to the media everywhere
and found skilled Greeks in key positions everywhere.
However, I don't want to mention only the Greeks of the Diaspora.
Take this generation which fills me with hope as well as sadness.
Michalis Bachtis is a... he represents this generation.
These people who left their country because they couldn't take it anymore;
the misery, the lack of meritocracy, that we have formed here in Greece.
And there are many such people. We can see them everywhere.
I see a graduate of the Technical University
working as a manager in a hotel in Scotland,
someone else in Munich who has his own store,
some kids from Thessaloniki who run their own store in London.
Young scientists in America.
There are those people and the Erasmus generation,
the generation who seeks opportunity all over the world
- is going to come back home, I know they will come back,
they always do -
and I believe that they're the foundation of something new and prosperous
that is going to rise soon.
I also see signs of hope in Greece too,
and we shouldn't despair.
I see the kids who kept the universities open, against misery,
it wasn't an easy task for them.
I also see civil servants, police officers,
who do their jobs for little money
with a professionalism which does not resemble other eras.
I see broke 50-year-olds who try to build business networks in order to survive.
I see Myron Michailidis who has made an Opera House
just as great as any other around the world.
I see Mrs Stavropoulou who took over a destroyed refugee agency
and completely transformed it in a few months.
It's no big deal, it just takes organization and a plan and we can do it.
Now, why isn't that happening, in my opinion? We lack two things.
The first is Greece which is creative, pays its taxes, pays a lot of money
to provide tuition for its children and send them to university,
isn't represented politically,
and that needs to change soon.
Anger is not going to feed us or change anything.
Nothing can be achieved with abstinence or by looking down on politics.
My opinion is that whoever believes in such values,
whoever believes that this other Greece exists,
should enter the public debate in the new agora of the social media,
to join old or new parties, or even make their own ones,
but there is no excuse for anyone
to stay out of the melting pot of public debate, no excuse.
Whoever goes with the idea, like the Greek elite did for many years,
that they can stay in their beautiful, tidy, and totally organized home,
and everything around be arbitrary and littered, is far from reality,
that doesn't lead us anywhere.
The second thing that has to be changed, is we have to get more practical.
I think that something we suffer from in Greece is overanalysis.
We analyze everything into terms of ideology,
politics, values, and you name it.
It's not like that, I always remember a very successful Greek-American friend
I had met in California, who said that,
one thing that drove him crazy when he was a little boy in his village
was that the well in the village was broken.
For 15 days all the men were arguing.
Whose fault it was, the prefect's, the MP's, the state's, yours, mine.
They couldn't reach a decision.
At the same time,
the women were carrying pitchers and were walking a long way
to get water from another well.
Sometimes I really feel that this society which has suffered so much,
pays the price for the inability of an indefinite political system
to fix the well, to deal with practical issues, hospitals, education, justice.
But it doesn't take much imagination, these are practical management matters.
I want to conclude by telling you that there are a lot of people nowadays
who as I said, want to build wooden walls,
others who think that behind those walls
they're going to protect their possessions or their interests.
They are not going to achieve anything, change is upon us, nothing stays the same.
Greece is in an international environment in which it cannot be rebarricated,
we're never going to be the good old little secluded Greece.
We all share responsibility for what is coming and what is going to happen,
the famous, the anonymous, the settled, those who have suffered.
Everyone.
And I think that what is really important
is to stop looking back
and start discussing seriously and practically
on how we are going to change all that.
And I'll conclude with a phrase that a friend of mine once told me,
and I think that it makes a point.
He said: "Look, the hut we have made doesn't take any more,
it's falling apart, we cannot do much about it."
But he says, "What is more important and I believe that, too,
is that we do not deserve to live in a repaired hut."
Thank you very much.
(Applause)