Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

We learned that the population of Constantinople, the City, has reached 17,000,000 people, Turks, Kurds and other ethnic groups. Other megacities, both in the East and in the West, also have corresponding population sizes, such as Moscow, Paris, London and New York. Compared with these numerically enormous populations, the total number of residents of Greece, together with the persecuted and starving foreigners who have entered in large numbers, does not exceed 11,000,000 souls. In other words, the population of Greece is numerically smaller than the population of a modern megacity. Yet despite this numerical lag of the Greeks and the observed contraction caused by the lack of births, which makes them a literally tiny and rather insignificant people, we continue to behave as if we were strong, capable, clever and almost omnipotent, or, as has been observed in another column, the center and navel of the universe. Thus, we maintain a multitude of ministries and ministers, diplomatic representation to the ends of the earth, armies of civil servants, a state apparatus corresponding to that of a powerful social state and welfare state that exercises international policy and influence toward every point of the horizon, numerous courts exceeding population needs, three permanently constituted supreme courts and a fourth constituted on occasion, the Council of State, the Areios Pagos, the Court of Audit, the Supreme Special Court, hospitals, lawyers twice as numerous as Japan’s with its population of 130,000,000, divisions of doctors and engineers, universities, institutions, schools, faculties, institutions, a president of the republic, a prime minister, vice-presidents, ministers, deputy ministers, general secretaries from among relatives, heirs, close associates and friends, rectors, vice-rectors, regular, extraordinary, assistant, emeritus and other professors, academics, an academy and other establishments as well as prytaneia in the ancient Greek sense, spending enormous sums of money that do not come from national revenues but from loans, along with a multitude of parties, political movements, citizens’ movements, initiatives and party fragments, all permanently oriented toward the state treasury. Despite this situation, which everyone now knows and experiences, the tiny people of Greece does not perceive its insignificance, nor the many difficult or practically insoluble problems that it itself created through its incapacity and incorrigible defects. Instead, it continues to delude itself and to behave in the same arrogant way in which it was brought up to behave, as a chosen people to whom everyone owes something and which owes nothing to anyone, choosing as its representatives people who resemble it and possess, to the highest degree, all of its defects without exception. A tiny people such as the Greek one corresponds to a tiny state apparatus and state, tiny demands, and the cultivation of virtues and skills that can push aside the people’s insignificance and raise it only through the virtues and abilities that each person must demonstrate. Otherwise, we must limit ourselves to tiny revenues, tiny salaries and an elementary existence, as happens to all the tiny and insignificant things of this world, which pass unnoticed, without disturbing anyone and without taking part in humanity’s historical becoming.

Emmanouil Papadakis