Some Issues of the Economic Aspect of the Georgian National Mentality
Authors: Vladimer Basaria Vladimer Basaria 
Published: January 2025

The national economic mentality, which was formed over the centuries under the influence of various factors, determines the nature of the nation's socio-economic rules and their enforcement mechanisms, which, in turn, determine the formation of the historical trajectory of the nation's economic development.
The formation of our national economic thinking is primarily due to a combination of historical-political and natural-geographical factors, under the influence of which our people had to live practically in survival mode for centuries. Households robbed as a result of constant enemy invasions or frequent internal conflicts, lack of land suitable for plowing and sowing, low and unstable yield - it is the long-term effect of these circumstances that is the echo of the established need in our society for a powerful mechanism of equal distribution in the country; To a large extent, the result of the influence of these events is that the level of paternalistic attitude towards the government is still quite high in our country; Due to the historically weak relationship between individual work and well-being, belief in the inevitability of fate was established in Georgian society and the idea of the possibility of living without work was established.
The above-mentioned national-mental peculiarities are absolutely incompatible with the effective functioning of market mechanisms dependent on the individual initiative of people, therefore these peculiarities of Georgian economic thinking should be considered as important circumstances hindering the development of the country's economic processes.
Orthodox ethics is another important factor influencing the formation of Georgian economic culture. Due to the fact that Christian doctrine does not consider material well-being as a source of human happiness, a kind of negative attitude towards the possession of property has firmly taken hold in Georgian society (we can connect the deepening of this attitude to another important factor determining modern Georgian economic behavior - the result of the influence of the ultra-socialist ideology characteristic of the Soviet era).
It should also be noted here that the result of the centuries-old Christian preaching is the heightened sense of collective (family, group) responsibility and care for the poor and needy in our society. It is possible that such "non-market" nature of Georgian economic thinking will slow down the process of improving the nation's material well-being to some extent, but from the point of view of farming, it would probably be wrong to refer to this mental peculiarity only in a negative context - there is no doubt that collectivism also carries a positive charge for economic development; It is not controversial that the stable growth of the economy is determined by the reasonable distribution of national income.
Another factor that did not go unnoticed in the process of forming our economic mentality is that at the beginning of the 20th century, as a result of the socialist revolution, the country was practically deprived of the means of natural evolution: capitalism did not manage to establish strong habits of work (and entrepreneurship) in Georgia, to work (and entrepreneurship) to establish the necessary positive attitudes in the psyche of the members of the society. The distribution equalization principle introduced as a result of the October Revolution has completely distorted people's economic thinking and instilled in a significant part of society such a mood that the volume-quality of work (activity) has no direct, determining importance for the level of satisfaction of human (personal) needs.
The above-described brief historical retrospective of the formation of the Georgian economic mentality allows us to highlight the main values that our modern economic outlook is based on: state paternalism, traditionalism and collectivism.
The evaluation of the influence of the above-mentioned triad on the development of our country and people is mixed: the value system based on the principles of mutual aid, solidarity, responsibility to society, loyalty to traditions and ideals, on the one hand, contributed to the strengthening of collective security in the country, alleviating the condition of the socially disadvantaged, maintaining a low level of crime, educating the masses distribution, development of science and culture or socially important (public purpose) creation of material and (especially) spiritual goods, while, on the other hand, limited private initiative, labor (entrepreneurial) motivation and competition, individual democratic rights, etc., which undoubtedly had a negative impact on the well-being of our population.
The above-described moods, which are of decisive importance for economic behavior, are so firmly established (implemented) in the consciousness of our society that it is practically impossible to abstract from these moods to objectively study the vector development problems of the modern Georgian economy. Unfortunately, it should be noted that even the scientific studies of the most important issue of the differentiation of Georgian and European socio-economic institutions are often conducted in complete ignorance of the specific thinking of the Georgian ethnos at a time when the source of the mentioned differences should be sought in the mental value system.
It should be said here that the Georgian economic outlook is more suitable to the Eastern one, but this circumstance should not be perceived as if the Western institutional matrix is fundamentally unacceptable to our society. The Georgian ethnos has a unique historical experience of equal openness to different socio-cultural spaces and receiving the benefits from these relations, which we must successfully use even today.