The social trends taking place in Greece in the past three years have been stunning.
According to published reports, 20% of the population of Athens has left the city to go to live in the countryside.
Because Greece has a high percentage of homeownership, 80%, higher than most industrialized countries (67% for the United States), there is a home waiting for those exiting the capital city.
Once there, they can raise vegetables and animals on their property and get by.
Fishing, too, has seen a great uptick.
What emerges is a parallel society different from the mainstream one.
Regular society is about consumption, spending, shopping and racking up bills. It’s about fancy vacations in other parts of Europe, including Turkey, and maintaining a certain lifestyle – car, vacation home, expense account, going out to eat, drink and regular plastic surgery visits.
The economic crisis has fundamentally changed all that in Greece.
Greeks are not spending like what they once did. They tied with Italy in the highest per capita consumption of clothing and hours watching television (is this why they got the stereotype of being “lazy?”).
Clothing consumption has fallen dramatically, as increasingly shuttered clothing and shoe stores reveal. Just a simple walk along Ermou Street in downtown Athens highlights this stark reality.
The consumptive world that so dominates industrial nations is taking a beating in Greece.
Instead, the country reverts to old traditional methods of sustaining itself.
Has anything like this happened on such a grand scale?
The contrast between this parallel society and the mainstream one is unprecedented. It’s as if Greeks live in two completely different and contradictory worlds.
I have high hope for Greece because in a strange way the country represents the future.
It is a fact of modern life that we as a global society have reached a kind of end point in the efficacy and utility of our social institutions.
Most of our modern institutions, particularly those of the industrialized west, grew out of the Renaissance after the 1500s.
Today those institutions have become fat and bloated and no longer serve the needs of human beings. They are, in short, completely corrupt.
It is not just the sex assault scandals of the Catholic Church, or the excessive corruption of governments in Europe and the U.S., but it is the reality that as a society we live under tremendous suppression and control that has made life often unbearable and stifling.
Under these circumstances, it is impossible to “breathe.” To be fully human beings. To be something other than shopping robots.
Eventually these corrupt institutions will harden and not be able to face crisis.
And only those societies that developed people-centered, parallel institutions will thrive.
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