Civil Society and Corruption
American journalist Michael Lewis has pointed out that modern Greek culture lacks any tradition of volunteerism and altruism and is afflicted by extraordinarily high levels of selfishness and corruption, which culminated in the present Greek government-debt crisis. Commentators both within and without Greece have attributed this critical flaw in Greek culture to the Ottoman Empire's brutal mismanagement of Ottoman Greece, in which individual survival became more important than societal stability, tax resistance became a form of patriotism, and property and commercial tax systems were left in shambles, thereby making it impossible for Greece to create an functional civil society or an efficient modern state.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Greece
Famous quotes containing the words civil, society and/or corruption:
“Come, come, my boy, say “Good morning” to your creator. Speak! You’ve got a civil tongue in your head, I know you have because I sewed it back myself.”
—Kenneth Langtry, and Herbert L. Strock. Prof. Frankenstein (Whit Bissell)
“All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysands to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defence. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“Every clique is a refuge for incompetence. It fosters corruption and disloyalty, it begets cowardice, and consequently is a burden upon and a drawback to the progress of the country. Its instincts and actions are those of the pack.”
—Madame Chiang Kai-Shek (b. 1898)