In order to explain the premise of my title I would need to give you a brief intro. I come from a country that provides a unique opportunity to observe human behavior on a micro-scale. Cyprus is an island with no more than a million inhabitants. The lifestyle is pretty laid back and almost everyone knows everybody. Connections are vital for one's well being.
You are who you know, not what you know. This is how almost 1/3 of the people in Cyprus leach from the government, the other 1/3 from banks and municipalities while the rest work in order to support them.
Why such concentration of power you may ask? Well, Cyprus has been a rather troubled country due to its strategic geographical position. By being on the far east of the Mediterranean Sea, it becomes the literal crossroad of Europe, Middle East and Africa. Historically everybody wanted a piece from the action. Nothing really changed in terms of controlling the island. Elite global patrons always found an easy way to control the population by fattening the pockets of our leaders.
After the most recent invasion by Turkey in 1974, three superpowers jumped into the scene USA, Russia and Britain — all trying to get a piece of the action by rebuilding what was left. As a result, many comforts have been provided for Cypriots in order to ease their way with their economic endeavors.
I remember my dad telling me that after the war, entire container shipments packed with U.S. dollars were arriving in our port. A few politicians were crowned from the big boys to be our shepherds. Propagating political turmoil and propaganda was their primary agenda. The stage was pretty much set. We became the biggest whore of the Mediterranean sea with the most lazy and apathetic human beings one could come across.
I come from a poor family in respect to the average Cypriot demographic. My parents build our house with their bare hands. My dad has been working 12 hours a day as far as I can remember and the food was never thrown away even if it was bad enough to cause stomach upset.
Most people from Cyprus live rather comfortably so if you come from a family that doesn't have it as good as the rest, you get to notice the little things. The devil after all hides in the details. This is an important point since the Cypriot economic crisis, as it turned out, was easy to predict if one paid attention to the common people's behavior and it had to do a lot with the standard of living.
Most Cypriots after the war got pushed into an overblown government sector that pays almost double in overall benefits than the private sector. Along with Greece, we are probably the only countries on the planet you can observe this disturbing phenomenon. The public produces nothing, yet it gets more money than the private sector guys who work to support this system. If you are looking for economic paradoxes, look no further than the Cypriot system.
The reason this happened was to simply keep as many mouths shut as possible about what was really going on. If 1 in 3 is in politics it means that a family cannot turn against its own members. Did the big guys cause this? Absolutely not. We simply whored ourselves into the situation.
Everybody in Cyprus dreams of becoming a government employee since you can work hassle-free, get salary raises independent of your performance and be home by 2:30 p.m. — leaving you the rest of the day to even have your own business. For tax purposes most Cypriots will register the extra business on their wife who usually works at home. As you can understand this trend skews the tax reward massively, since the private owners get more and more squeezed by the government employees that shouldn't drain the public money twice. To cut the long story short, if you are a government employee in Cyprus, you are basically retired.
Another habit of the Cypriot culture is for banks to be pretty much owned by the government. The employees get paid with the same exact high benefits as the average government employee. Most heads of the banks are in bed with the government and this also creates another comfort blanket for political parties that keep the entire "elite employement sector"checked.
This relaxed lifestyle allowed Cypriots to get even more entitled, living beyond their own means. Any person €2000 in the bank could get a €100.000 loan with no down payment. Most Cypriots were driving cars like BMW's and Mercedes that were actually owned by the bank. I had a friend come to Cyprus once and he thought he arrived in a Middle Eastern Caliphate when he witnessed all the luxury in the streets. And of course let us not forget the mountain and beach resort houses. Who paid for all these? But of course the banks. Everybody was living the dream. Free money right?
The situation was getting worse year after year after the 1974 war. Since 2004 that we joined the EU, Cypriots were living a life as if every single person on earth owed them something. The debt was piling up and our bankers were investing carelessly. I did write publicly providing eye-poking evidence about the imminent collapse but I was dismissed as a pessimist. From early 2011 until December of 2012 I was sending warning messages to my community. I even advised people to move their money from the banks and at least diversify their capital in different banks because It was rather evident what was about to happen.
In 2013 everything came down. The entire banking sector of Cyprus crashed. The EU started investigations and as it seemed, we had been eating up money that did not belong to us. The banks were eventually ordered to have a haircut — aka any account with more than €100.000 was to have the excess amount clipped. Poof, just like that. For those living in places like America or Europe be aware that in the next economic crisis this is exactly what will happen. The governments will bail out the banks by any means possible.
People started getting pissed with the banks, the EU and the politicians. After all, how could this happen? Demonstrations erupted in the streets, some people even committed suicide. Everything came down like a house of cards. But who's fault was it anyways?
You see, an economy is primarily based on its people. The people determine how the entire system runs. The average Cypriot had a monthly salary of €1200, yet he was able to afford an expensive car, a resort house at the beach and almost always send two kids to a university abroad. If you thought the American dream was the shit, well, you should have seen how the Cypriot dream rolled out. One could pay just €200/month as premium for a loan that was 200K. Life was good. Thing is, most people didn't even bother to pay that up and started mortgaging everything around them.
When the 'bill' came from the EU we didn't like it. I mean, why the average Cypriot should pay when the bankers were making even more money from all these toxic loans by reinvesting them in high risk stocks and bonds? But, as we all know, when the pyramid comes down, the bottom pays up the most. Democracy might be a fucked up but it gets one thing right. At the end, society, more or less gets what it deserves.
People where blaming "greedy Germany" when in fact we have been living off German people's loaned money for 6 years. Germany of course was not innocent in the grandeur scale of things. Much like with a loan shark, we accepted the deal so we could live luxuriously.
I adhere to libertarian and anarchic ideas. I have been for most of my life. I always detested though how many anarchists and libertarians tend to just blame "society", "the state" or the "the system" as if these words entail a magical abstract entity made up by malicious aliens.
Society is made out of people. Political parties are also made out of people. If you want to blame someone then blame the guy next door. The normal people that vote for the same guys over and over again so that they can ensure them a comfy position.
Nepotism makes the world go round but also can also stir a society into destruction. Governments are nothing more than the cumulative effect of this trend. Banks do much the same by financing people's irresponsibility. Thing is, if most of us didn't like them, they would be gone by now. They are maintained because most people support these institutions and wouldn't mind being higher on the pyramid. Humans have desires and in order to get something done they create the appropriate institutions to make them come true. There is a great dialogue from the movie "Margin Call" that explains how normal people'sdesires basically fuck the whole system up. Bankers are nothing more but the executioners of people's desires.
Cyprus, like I aforementioned, is a micro-culture that represents pretty much what is going on around the world on a larger scale. Same rules apply everywhere else. What happened here will happen everywhere else considering in how much debt the entire banking sector sits on right now. As far as I am concerned the crypto world is far safer than the FIAT one. You see the peculiar FIAT bull market with the high optimism while there is so much debt should raise red flags in everyone's minds. Who the heck is going to pay for all these at the end?
At the end of the day humans are victims of their own dreams and wishes. We build glass safe spaces and then we complain when everything comes down. Bankers and politicians are nothing but the expression of the average democratic voice. Blaming different institutions serves us nothing since the same effect is observed in both the private and public sectors.
Perhaps if we start assuming responsibility for our individual choices we can slowly understand how our actions, dreams and aspirations snowball into economic calamities. Until then we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, blaming everyone else but ourselves.
