Warning: If we do not de-ideologize our life in Sakartvelo soon, we will cease to be a productive society, and will instead become one more oriented on the production of words than on creating the kind of useful goods that are indispensable for our physical survival, saying nothing of the ominously crystallized exigency to save the nation’s sinking demography.
It is truly difficult to comprehend why we enjoy using so much time and energy on talk rather than on productive work, education, childbirth and development. Outdoor politics has become a sickness here, and nobody is making any attempt to introduce a remedy to cure it, as society plunges into an ocean of words, mostly of futile substance, not altering from generation to generation. Words, words, words . . . no bottom-line, no consequence, no outcome, no inference, no suggestion, no innovation, no nothing! Isn’t this bizarre?
We never tire of discourse, no matter how nonsensical it might be. One of the most educated presumptions is that this way of life is an extension of the graph, curve and range of values that are characteristic to the part of the world we want to emulate, where people use lots of words without committing to clearly useful deeds. But why should we take the pernicious example of others? Couldn’t we be a little different from those ‘others’ and a little independent from them in making choices when it comes to the lifestyle we most prefer?
Independence and freedom should first be embedded in our own minds and souls, and only after that must they be used as instruments with which to improve life, seeing us asking ourselves to be more self-made than we actually are. This might be achievable if we turn away from our habitual pointless verbosity and, taking the bull by the horns, seek to create tangible prerequisites for procreating progress. To do this, we need to use our homogeneous collective mind and all-out effort, plus translatable-into-wellbeing education that too often is sacrificed in this country for the doubtful reason of taking to the street.
The best conclusion from this epistolary effort seems to be the following formula: Let’s give more chances to work than to word. Too much of ourselves is being spent on the pursuit of truth, the finding of which is becoming increasingly unachievable. It is said that truth is singular and versions of lies enumerable. It is hilarious that we are now faced with as many truths as there are men and women in this land of good but confused people.
Historically speaking, our people have lived through various ideologies, among them Marxism, Trotskyism, Leninism, Stalinism, Fascism, Despotism, Liberalism, Populism and many other understandable or incomprehensible isms that were used at various times to wash our poor brains. It is high time for us to realize that no isms can help us out of the woods, only tireless labor and education to finally conceive our capability to discern between the right and wrong of ongoing social processes, be they natural or deliberately instigated, which create insurmountable contradictions in our everyday lives.
It is unfortunate that the individual subjectivity inherent to us and social behavior are never in unison in our political reality. We have to rid ourselves of the expectation that there are optimal teachers out there who will write infallible precepts for us, explaining how to behave and where to go. We need to wake up and do as Jesus once prompted us: Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.
Op-Ed by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
