Zeus falls to Confucius

By Oh Young-jin

Assistant managing editor

It is the land of Odysseus and Penelope that is blessed (cursed) by a pantheon of gods.

Its divine lineage is interrupted by demigods sired by Zeus during his escapades.

Hera's jealous wrath crests and falls, never targeting her husband or "king god."

There exist Cupid's arrow and Narcissus's lake as well as Achilles's tendon or Brad Pitt and Paris, the son of Prium and a pawn in a whimsical game played by three goddesses fighting for the title of the most beautiful in the revengeful plot of Eris.

The list could go on indefinitely, ensnaring one's imagination in an inescapable trap of storytelling that strikes the very essence of the human mind.

That is Greece, a nation that I once visited but am eager to tour again for another moment of inspiration with the gods that so resemble us earthly human beings.

Now, that myth is being peeled away, several layers at once, amid a debt crisis that is consuming the origins of one of the greatest ancient civilizations.

There appears to be no divine intervention that brought Odysseus back home to the bosom of his faithful wife Penelope.

According to reports, in today's Greece, banks tumbled, companies fell, people with jobs are protesting.

Maybe, it is Bacchanalia gone too long or drunken Trojans that fell asleep, leaving a Greek wooden horse unattended.

George Panpandreou, the incumbent Greek prime minister, is putting up a valiant fight to keep his bankrupt country afloat. Alas, his mission is doomed like Icarus' attempt to fly from Crete on the wings of features and wax flying too close to the sun. Panpandreou's Icarus are his country's people who have lived on increasing debt, spending as if they were as affluent as the Germans.

The Germans don't have a god. They declared the death of one, if you recall Nietzsche's straight forward insight.

When the German parliament or Bundestag passed a bailout package for the Greeks, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel looked the part of Ubermensch, the superman the nihilistic German philosopher predicted would appear to substitute the God as we know or "Thus spoke Zarathustra."

So would you say God is dead?

No, I definitely wouldn't.

Although I believe that it is not time to nitpick and detail reasons to explain the Greek demise, studying it now can make us wiser either to prevent or to prepare for the next time a crisis hits. The current crisis is by no means the last facing us human beings. As in the past, we can find a solution.

Besides, the Germans make good knives. But their political track record was not always enviable. They can only be relied upon on a selective basis.

What about China? The god-forsaken Greeks and their European colleagues are going to Chinese leaders with their hats in hand, asking for handouts. After all, China, the fastest-growing among the major economies, sits on $3.2 trillion in foreign reserves.

Perhaps the Greeks may ask, why not a few hundreds of billions more, when they are already heavily indebted. But the Chinese are neither good Samaritans nor in a situation to move their money freely.

Above all, there would be a demand for something big in return for any help _ those are their rules _ free lunches are okay for themselves but not for others. China's myopia is caused by the fact that their historical distrust of outside powers (the Opium Wars) and their compressed growth that may cause the patched-up crazy quilt composed of its capitalistic economy and communist rule burst at the seams.

In any case, global leadership is a foreign concept to China, who is in the modern sense not politically mature enough to exercise it now.

Back to the Greek plight, I think that there is a way that they can restore their gods' love for them or resuscitate their gods, if they are swooning. That is, they first try to help themselves. Remember heaven helps those who help themselves.

That example is set by Korea which pulled out of similar trouble the Greeks are now facing in 1997 during the currency crisis.

Still referred to as "the IMF crisis" by Koreans, it is by all means no less severe than what the Greeks are enduring now. But Koreans didn't demonstrate despite massive layoffs. Koreans didn't press the government to improve their miserable situation.

What they did was to accept their fate and unite behind a new leader.

The world remembers how Koreans took out their gold rings and trinkets in a nationwide collection drive aimed at replenishing its foreign reserves.

The jury is still out regarding how Korea dealt with what was then called "the worst peacetime crisis."

During that time, Koreans were not much different from Greeks, living a life on hefty loans without considering that they would eventually have to pay back their debts.

Reactions were notably different over here.

I am not saying that Koreans are better than Greeks or the other way around. The point is that, however many gods one has to backstop his plight, it will eventually come down to the individuals. In other words, unless one gets his act together, there would be no god or superman to help you. That is the lesson Koreans learned the hard way during the IMF crisis. I want Greeks to take advantage of this precedent and overcome difficulties better and faster.