“Institute of honesty” NGO in “Noravank”
On January 26 “Noravank” Foundation hosted “Institute of honesty” NGO to get acquainted with the results of the public opinion pall carried out by the letter on “weather the Armenian society trusts the authorities”.
The opinion pall consisted of the introduction, percentage description of the survey and the conclusion that the Armenian society doesn’t trust in the authorities, policy makers, police, state motor vehicle inspectorate, businessmen. It should be noted that here the word “trust” is used as a generalized term as the subject of the opinion pall was “an honest person is a failure in business”.
The seminar participants appreciated the undertaken activates and made some considerations on the matter. We will represent the main ideas streaming from them.
Gagik Harutyunyan, “Noravank” Foundation’s director: “I think it will be more interesting to get acquainted with opposite views how the authorities treat their people, as it is natural that people usually don’t trust them. The matter is whether the elite, authorities trust in the people they rule. It is essential as the elite must generate ideas and undertake the responsibility of them to get true. On the contrary, I consider it immorality to force the people into streets and put the burden of responsibilities on them.
“Noravank” Foundation’s deputy director Sevak Sarukhanyan noticed that the results of the opinion pall has come to prove that our society isn’t ranked among any acceptable political culture. “During the past 10-15 years the Armenian society has carried out quite different political cultures: Activistic policy in the face of Karabakh movement, submissive policy, which is typical to rural communities and traditional policy, for example when Karen Demrchyan returned to the big policy arena. This means that our society is still in the stage of shaping a political culture”.
The professor and expert of “Noravank” foundation Ruben Safrastyan said: “I have an impression that we don’t know the society we live in well enough, so we try to adjust some information acquired from the works of the prominent western researchers to our society”. Hence mistrust to such researches. Why our society needs to be recognized? As my observations have shown one of the characteristic traits of our society is a dynamic way of forming new elite. Consequently it is still too early to consider elite in our society to be realized as a whole. And the main conclusion drown from the above mentioned is that our people have their ideal of “honesty”, but they are certain that as long as they live in Armenia they can’t realize it. However it can’t be called a crisis situation”.
“Noravank” Foundation’s deputy director Sevak Sarukhanyan: “All these remind me the wave of “comparative political science” in 1940s as means of studying fascism, as well as the appearance of the term “comparative research ” in 1980s while the Soviet society was collapsing. According to the American researches none of these mechanisms work in post-soviet countries. Probably we should steak to the idea that these kinds of researches, opinion palls serve for solving inner conjuncture problems or are carried out under the influence of foreign incentives”.
