This paper draws its inspiration, political rational and analytic armory from this tradition of discourse-based work in social psychology. By focusing, though, on an instance of crowd events that took place in Athens and other Greek cities in December 2008 and on the ways in which these were covered in major national papers, it sheds light on a hitherto rather neglected aspect of such discursive practices: the evaluatively loaded and rhetorical potent cultural assumptions that get to be mobilized in accounts that pathologize the social actors involved, actively or by default, in crowd events. As it will be shown, the authorial voices articulating and inhabiting the relevant texts under consideration draw upon a specific ‘tradition of argumentation’ (e.g. Shotter, 1993) of what counts as Greek state and Greek mentality in order to construct morally accountable versions of the events, crowds, the state and Greek society as a whole. We argue that this tradition of argumentation pertains to politically and ideologically constitutive discourses of Greek national identity that prescribe a certain, fundamental, cultural ambivalence: modern Greece, while commonly thought to be endowed with a classic ancestry and its ensuing occidental cultural capital, it is also commonly constructed, within and outside Greece, as a ‘backward’ polity ever seeking after an ever-eluding modernization or state of contemporary occidental cultural perfection (e.g. Bozatzis, 2014; Tsoucalas, 1992; Herzfeld, 1987).