Sometimes we need to look at the situation from the outside. We are so deeply inside this process that it is very hard for us to grasp, with a cool head, where we are and what is actually happening. In reality, today we are going through a new phase of the formation of Georgian identity and of the Georgian nation.

What the occupier did for centuries, the regime is now doing with the hands of the occupier — citizen against citizen. In essence, this is the shaping of an obedient society, the kind they need. We remember how we went through the 1990s, yet we did not call everything by its proper name. Even today, without going far, we have many false examples and false labels.

There is a pseudo-narrative — one that “Georgian Dream” is particularly fond of — claiming that the West is taking away our identity. This propaganda appeals to exactly the same imposed Soviet and Russian imperial narrative: that Georgians are lazy, adaptable people who will easily adjust to the system and live comfortably within it. They survive through conformity — because what can we do, the system is heavy, the regime doesn’t allow much — but in return, we get certain “privileges.” We supposedly live better than Belarusians, for example.

Through this logic, an entire nation has been turned into a kind of service staff. When the “great master” arrives, we serve and entertain him. This is what our culture and identity have been reduced to.

When the 1990s came and a real rupture happened — a moment when Georgian identity should have fully formed — propaganda and imperial influence were still so strong in our society that fragmentation occurred again. We did not clearly understand who we were and what we were doing. We chronically wait for someone else to do things for us. This narrative — that decisions are not made by you but by a master on your behalf — stripped us of a sense of responsibility.

That is how we arrived at the point where someone waits for the state to clean their apartment building hallway, even though it belongs to them and they could easily do it themselves. No one is asking for anything extraordinary — only what is already within your ability. As a citizen, you can take one step.

When we often say, anxiously, that “there are not enough people” and that “it’s pointless” — who are these people? It’s me. It’s you. It’s all of us. This does not come from some heavenly leader who will appear and whom everyone will follow. At the same time, we demand a fair, democratic, multiparty state — yet we also demand a single leader. There is a contradiction here.

If we want a state where I choose one party and someone else chooses another — with different worldviews and programs — but where they still agree and can bring the country to consensus; where conflict exists as a healthy political process rather than endless hostility — then society itself must be involved.

And if we want that, we must abandon this infantilism and realize that in this process, today, we are all equal participants in shaping our identity.