Geopolitics Magazine November - December 2014 | Page 74

Geopolitics & Daily News Magazine
The Role Concept
Role concept is used to help explain the response of people according to their normal every day duties.
Citizens may be expected to respond quite differently in an emergency situation like the financial
catastrophe that has stricken Greece. Perhaps they remain in apathy because they feel that it is not
their duty to take charge or assist. Instead so far they generally have taken a passive role and they
still look to the government for advice and assistance.
It seems that Greek population behaves in line with the findings of Harbst &
Madsen (1993) who addressed emergency behaviour models and had found that in massive
unexpected events:
•
•
•

Only 10% of people will accept that there is danger
30% of people will look for further evidence of danger
The remaining 60% of the population will initially ignore the signs of danger.

The two authors have proceeded further to illustrate the likely actions of people once they have
accepted that a dangerous situation exists:
10% will attempt to evacuate
5% will attempt corrective action; eg, start finding alternatives,
10% will attempt to warn others,
60% will wait for instructions or look to others initiatives,
12-14% will become paralysed and take no action; eg, wait just for the next elections,
1-3% will panic.
Given the fact that Greek government is aware of all the previous, it is worth examining the possibility
that on purpose it decided to delay “raising the alarm” or releasing the real facts. These and other
similar responses are very common when signs of an emergency are present. Due to misguided sense
of wanting to avoid panic and not creating inconvenience to the society, those in charge consistently
delay “raising the alarm”. Besides the problems caused by a delay in raising the alarm one must
question whether it is morally correct. Morally, can one justify not notifying the citizens for a
catastrophe or an imminent catastrophe simply because of concern about how they may react?
The author favours the idea that it would be better to notify the nation and give them the facts. If they
are given sufficient, timely information, citizens should be able to take reasoned actions.
Proulx& Simes(1991) backed up this notion and he did that when noticed into their research that
contrary to a theoretical concern that crowds are too easily led to panic, exactly the opposite occurred,
and whilst an announcement released information explaining the existing emergency situation, it did
not encourage panic, but instead it provoked sufficient stress to initiate a proper reaction to the
danger.
The Nowadays Greek Society Status
Unfortunately Alexander Tytler(1801) is no longer in life, only his thoughts had survived time, but he
quite easily could say that, the Greek society as it is today is soon ending its presence, in the 7th stage
of its Democracy Cycle, the one that apathy is transformed into dependence. A little longer it is needed
for dependence to roll back into bondage and another new cycle of Democracy to begin for Greece.
After all, democracies are following a 200 years cycle rule, from nadir to zenith, which for Greece the
200 years milestone is close, with the starting moment back in the liberation day after the war of
Greeks against Turks. Today that the Greek society is racked by internal struggles of a social
character, weakened by loss of faith in its older ideologies and by the challenge of newer ideas
incompatible with its past nature, the Greek civilisation has two options: Either to continuing of a
steadily weakening route until it is submerged by outside enemies who might have managed to
manipulating even internal resources, in line with the ideas of Professor Carroll Quigley (1965) or its
people to start delving into their own “tragedy”, on a catch up race for pinpointing their
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