A talk about Socrates in New York

On occasion of the ONASSIS FESTIVAL 2019: DEMOCRACY IS COMING in New York, Afroditi Panagiotakou, Director of Culture of the Onassis Foundation and writer of “Socrates” Tim Blake Nelson were invited in a discussion about Socrates, democracy and all things in-between, with Hari Sreenivasan for Christiane Amanpour’s TV program, Amanpour & Company at PBS.

“Well, even when it comes to the rest of the themes of our festivals, democracy was always there for us at the Onassis Foundation. It's Health, Education and Culture when it comes to our pillars, but these are just vehicles in order to talk about the major issues like social justice and democracy and human rights. In that sense we try to be corruptors of the citizens of Athens, the same way that Socrates did in a way, and we wanted to pose the questions and we wanted to bring people together and we tried to collaborate with people who share the same adjectives that we do. So, these adjectives or nouns or words are definitely words like democracy and of course, democracy is always coming. It never arrived.”

The Onassis Foundation believes that there is of great importance to talk openly about all major issues of today. During the Onassis Festival 2019: Democracy is coming in New York until 28 of April, the Onassis Foundation collaborates with NYPL New York Public Library and talks about the arts and ideas that celebrates, evaluates, and considers anew the concept of democracy, posing questions and talking about all things that should go without saying.

“First of all, if you are in a country where you can actually say that ‘this is not democracy’, that means there is, and the other countries where they call themselves democracies, but they go on google and if you say something against the president you go to prison. So, I guess that it's good when a foundation like the Onassis Foundation –and yes, it is called a foundation but were never sponsors; we are producers of content and we act as a platform for artists and thinkers and scientists and we provide this content to as many people as possible. I think it's important that we raise these kinds of questions because the problem is actually, when we sleep and we take everything for granted.”

Tim Nelson continues that, “With the line about disguising tyranny as democracy, I think that's happening all over the world, and there's another moment in the play where he says ‘anybody can use the word democracy’, and of course, there's democracy in the title of the country of North Korea and it's a misused, misapplied word and I think ancient Greece was far more of a democracy than what the United States of America is and we are now considered or we consider ourselves the great democracy of the world, but we are really more of a republic […] In a sense, we are less democratic than Athens was and one of the questions the play asks is that necessarily a bad thing?"