20/11/11

Panagiotis Kondylis

We have now in Greece a special brand of crisis experts. Books are continuously coming out, with all sorts of crisis theories, explanations, suggestions, predictions.


The same on the TV channels. A brand new breed of experts has set out to make us understand what is going on.

Hardly any of them, however, even remotely predicted anything close to what is now and for the last two years going on.

But can there really be prediction in dramatic changes as those unfolding in Greece? Who predicted the one night collapse of the Soviet Union? Who predicted the real estate bubble of 2008?

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a superb and inspirational book, authored by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Taleb presents numerous examples, of important events, that nobody even closely predicted. He goes one step further. He lays down a complete theory, with a mathematical back up, to explain why disruptive and non evolutionary patterns cannot be predicted by any statistical method.

Is Greece's fate one of there unpredictable patterns that Taleb so meticulously deciphers and analyzes in his reference book? Were it for all our newbie experts really impossible to have spoken about all these before they happened?

A great, philosopher and political thinker of Greece, Panagiotis Kondylis, wrote in year 1991 a book titled “Reasons of Decay of Modern Greece”. Here are a few lines from this (page 64, Greek edition)

Clientelism in Greece is continuously selling off the country (it refers to sharply rising sovereign debt that period) and is now reaching a point where, in order to avoid its total collapse, it will have to somehow self restrain its spending habits (year: 1991)

Greece is not a case study for Taleb's new statistics. Greece is not about the improbable but about the predictable. As Kondylis excellently shows there has been nothing really unpredictable about Greece. Only condition was to stay clear in your mind, alert in your soul and away from the payroll of the Greek ruling political parties and idiocy of their non ruling peers.

Only perhaps the notion that the client state will show self restraint, only this, was not confirmed, as the political rogues will just-not-let-go whatever the cost.

Kondylis left us in year 1998, at the early age of 56, fortunate only not to see his country leaders redefining corruption, greed and power sickness.