Geopolitics Magazine November - December 2014 | Page 73

Geopolitics & Daily News Magazine
discernible, everyday. This response along with other similar, like the wide spread of the feeling of
anger, the sense of hopelessness, the magnitude of fear that makes people overly sensitive should had
been taken for normal attitude, if only a few weeks after the initial impact of the crisis, the majority of
the people would have presented signs of a changing behavior, proving that efforts for overcoming the
difficult situation were on the way.
The reality though had been proven totally different, as the signs of cognitive and emotional
impairment still exist on local population, since the burst of an unexpected situation that fast evolved
into a catastrophe. The explanation to people’s stance can be explained by the work of Professor
Guylene Proulx(1994) who has developed an underlying rationale for four concepts related to how
people react when the feeling of danger that threatens their existence is high.
The Avoidance Concept
According to the avoidance concept people tend to overlook an unexpected event in the hope that it
will magically go away. The initial reaction is often to either look for a reasonable explanation or to
ignore the danger signs. When risk takers fell into this concept, they put themselves into a delay mode
in raising an internal alarm. Prior conditioning will also affect how populations react. Before 2010
normally no one in Greece, could have expected that a whole country could financially collapse like as
it is a private company. Respectively no adult in Greece could beforehand positively have answered,
that they were expecting a horizontal cut in salaries and pensions, as the easiest for implementation
countermeasure by the government, in a country that the dominant motto for years had been “Justice
equals the worker’s right”. Therefore this is the reason that keeps the biggest portion of Greek
population stuck into previous existing axioms which deny the possibility of a Western Country to
collapsing in such a way.
The Commitment Concept
Commitment assumes that people will finish one activity before paying attention to another, even if
that other activity has the potential to put their lives in danger. If citizens for so many years were
selecting certain political parties, they have long ago identified their leaders, or at least they have
created a criteria list to do so, during elections, it is very difficult for them to proceed all of a sudden
with other an opposing method to doing so. If people have stood in a long queue or have paid for a trip
with a ship they expect to reach their destination and they will be reluctant to leave. I assume no one
can forget the Titanic sinking and simultaneously the orchestra keep playing its tunes till the last
moments. It is well perceptible that although the “fire” in Greece had started long ago, in clear view of
a whole nation, citizens are still sitting into their sofas, taking no action, continuing instead to
attempting living a normal life.
The Affiliation Concept
Research has shown that if people identify themselves belonging into a group, into our situation,
serving the rights of the same nation, the Greek, they expect to evacuate out of the trouble and to
finding a solution as a group. So population needs spending time on discussing the existing situation,
like what had happened in Iceland and after that they can only mo