I've been abroad and compared to it Bulgaria does feel like a frontier, like a good place for a certain type of nonconformist, especially in terms of career and business. There is no playbook and beaten road for a lot of things.
If you try to have your career go the same way as you would expect in Western Europe/USA - go to the best school, get the best internship in the best company and be rewarded for following the rules you'll be infinitely disappointed in this country. There is no shortage of people who feel unrewarded and unappreciated for their qualifications and credentials.
But if you try to make your own way - getting a skill by practicing yourself and searching out people who need that skill it might work surprisingly well and take you far.
Btw if you enjoy the linked writing you should check out Time Shelter, it won the Booker prize recently.
I think I wrote about it here before, Bulgaria feels like the freest place I've ever been. Having left the country at age of 14, lived in Turkey, Germany, Belgium and UK I still feel the best when in Bulgaria.
This is because, when I step on the motherland soil I don't feel like I have mission or that I'm part of a large community. Instead, it feels like it just exists on its own and its up to me to figure out what what I want to do. I can see that things are happening, people are up to something but I don't feel the flow - if you know what I mean.
Especially in Turkey, being a collectivist society, is very limiting because it makes me feel like I must have an explanation for everything I do. It's like everyone has a well defined persona and everything is done in certain informal way and you don't have even the slightest wiggle room. Things change for you only as much as you can change your persona. For example, if you manage to get into a good school you suddenly enter in a new space with a different wiggle room. You don't feel the world much, all you can operate in is the society and you can't get out of it.
Germany, I find it interesting. It made feel like entering a well oiled machine and there's a strong flow but also opportunities. You are still free, it's not like Turkey but unlike Bulgaria you need to pay close attention on how stuff works and do it that way.
UK, feels closer to Turkey in many ways - it feels like you have a mission and place in the society. The wiggle room is much better than Turkey though, and unlike Germany you are allowed to mess with how stuff works and propose changes. It's more goal oriented than process oriented in that regard but you definitely feel boundaries of your place in the society. Also, in UK I felt like at the edge of the civilisation and I was allowed to reason why things are done the way they are done(in contrast with Turkey, where it's extremely energy consuming to question anything).
Belgium was a bit like Bulgaria: You don't feel like you have a mission but unlike Bulgaria it felt like a lot is going on but the flows are rigid and hard to get into the stream.
as someone who has done similar thing (~10y older than OP) - go to oz to see how it is, then one day, return back, to see how it is .. and stay since .. yeah, Time Shelter is quite a thing. Although at the end it went rather close-to-real and too dark. Which after all, might as well be. And while i'm not that pessimistic.. the Hydra heads can be seen+felt all around.. covered in various puff.. just watch carefully..
It's not hard to find the frontier. Just go to the cold areas, but that's not what this really is about, it's just finding cheap cool hipster enclaves.
I assure the readers that there is ample frontiers in northern canada
Frontier is not just a place which is cold and desperate. Frontier is an opposite of that - a place which is undeveloped yet it is at the beginning of strong growth curve.
A place where it is dangerous and you will have to break your back, but the payout is nice and allows you to climb societal ladder fast.
Vorkuta is an opposite of frontier despite being the reference cold area.
That sounds like a no true Scotsman's frontier to me. There's nothing about "beginning of a strong growth curve" in historical or colloquial definition of frontier, nor did most people coming there settle there for that reason. Most frontiers do not guarantee a nice payout even if you break your back. It's just that the ones that do are the ones we write books and make movies about.
> My mother left her state job (she’d had a leading role in developing Bulgaria’s first information system for traffic control) to run the risk-assessment and anti-fraud management system of a large French bank; my father was promoted, at age 38, to medical director of his hospital. My paternal grandparents transformed their garage in a provincial town into a general store, while my maternal ones started a rabbit farm on the premises of their village property. Almost everybody, regardless of age, wanted to do something bold with their newfound freedom, to risk and experiment.
No, they didn't, maybe some of the newly well-off people wanted to do that, like the parents and grandparents of the author of the article here, and that was mostly happening because they could afford to fail because they had money, but the great, great majority of people in Eastern Europe back in the '90s most certainly didn't "want to do something bold with their newfound freedom", they just wanted to be able to, like, literally live, meaning to be able to pay the bills and to put food on the table. Both of those things (paying the bills and putting food on the table) had become impossible for many of our parents back then, my parents eventually did have to sell their one-bedroom apartment in the early 2000s because of unpaid bills.
But I get it, the children of the well-off people from the 1990s went on to study in the West and now they're back lecturing us about this and that and that other thing. Maybe they could just try and open their eyes a little more and realise how difficult and excruciatingly hard life was for the majority of us back then, people who didn't have our parents join well-paid jobs in Western companies.
I'm not Bulgarian, but I did grew up in a city just 11 kms from the border with Bulgaria, one of my first memories as a kid is going with my mum to a Bulgarian border city in order buy some stuff from there (in the mid-80s the Bulgarian stores had more diverse stuff compared to stores in Romania). I'm also about the same age as the author of the article, I think a year older, thereabouts.
The authors viewpoint seem to be very much influenced by being somewhat well-off and therefor being able to chooses which changes to participate in. Now they increasingly find themselves being like everyone else and conclude that things have changed, while this was what was happening all along.
So it is more a personal frontier than anything else. A frontier is usually where little exists and by building something from the ground up you have more to say about things. While most people may not have had much of a say in the first place what happened in Eastern Europe and also more slowly in the rest of Europe was still mostly the opposite. It has been more of a frontier for others, like the French bank mentioned, than the local population.
> The States felt like an old place, weirdly older than Europe, a place where, for all its breathless movement, time seemed to have stopped. There was too much of everything: rules, work, wealth, poverty, guns, art.
> Perhaps that was why the Communist regimes all across Eastern and Central Europe collapsed in the final run. Not so much because of their beleaguered economies, although that was an important factor, but because no one believed anymore.
Heh, that one about the states resonated with me as well, even more generally instead of specifically the US, but I guess to my own consumerism.. I have 1200+ music albums, 800+ games, 400+ books.. Too much of everything! A blessing and a curse at once.
What's funny is that nobody steals any more. My apartment got burgled in the 90s and they stole a DVD player, some CDs, and a pile of change. Nowadays you have to pay someone to take your junk away.
Crime rates have gone down, but I think it's because there is nothing worth stealing anymore. I even looked at Craig's List and found a bunch of legit used older laptops for $100.
What has happened is that the only thing worth anything anymore is property... and the prices of that have gone through the roof!
The decline of consumer goods theft is actually a strong signal that the project of consumerism has run its course - part of "making it" in the late 20th century was having the toys, but the toys are now prolific, and that's happened in the most literal sense too, when you look at the pricing of children's toys and how many families now feel inundated with them. "Unboxing" is just an influencer ritual now.
The recurring themes now are all nuts-and-bolts concerns: housing, transport, employment, the environment, public spaces. These are things that aren't solved well with our existing coordination structures, since they tend to result in win/lose or lose/lose game-theoretic outcomes.
Western consumerism was actually one of the main reasons why Eastern Europeans stopped believing in communism.
Seeing people in the West spoilt of choice for basic goods and affording them made communism a dead ideology.
Parts of this essay remind me of the 2020 novel Time Shelter [1] by Georgi Gospodinov (another Bulgarian). Especially this part:
My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition. In most cases, these attempts are ridiculous, ersatz, misguided imitations of ideologies borrowed from the past, exposing their own imaginative shortages—they aspire to move the hands of the clock, even if backwards—but it’s hard to deny they represent dissatisfaction and resentment with the way things are. There is, it seems to me, a subconscious craving to be taken out of the boredom of timelessness and be thrown back into the flux of time, even if that means violence or war—anything but the broth!
To me, this excerpt reads more like a person standing politically left not willing to accept that the deal with democracy is that they can not have their way every election. Trumpism, Brexit and the rise of nationalism are simply an expression of the democratic pendulum swinging from side to side. Interestingly, a few years back, I could never have seen that in this light But now it is clear as daylight. If one side would always win, it would be a dictatorship.
For a good long while it seemed like one side was definitely going to use power, if it got power, to stay in power forever -- look at Hungary for a good example -- but lately it seems like the younger generation of the other side wants the same thing, which historically makes sense: totalitarianism has every bit as rich a history on the Left as on the Right.
So yeah, it's dangerous to think you will always win because your ideas are the only correct ones. But it's possible to rig the system so the "good guys" (you) always win, and then say it's because your ideas were correct. At which point you might find you have not a dictatorship per se, but merely an illiberal democracy that guarantees continuity of government.
how democratic is a system where losing the popular vote doesn't imply losing the election?
the Senate being a strange beast is not surprising, it's by design. it's important to prevent tyranny of the majority. (after all usually populism quickly switches gears into that, then slowly but surely throws off the other restraints and it becomes a usual dictatorship.) of course, it bears asking how well the Senate is doing at this prevention.
As someone who's a bit older than the author and from the same corner of the world - this was a really nice piece.
Brought a lot of memories from the early 90s. The blackouts, the queues for bread and fruits, and the empty shelves...
I was a kid back then and I didn't had any perspective. But I wander how my parents dealt with all that. I can't recall they complaining too much.
Same for other countries in eastern block, Soviet union was very keen to erase individualities of given society and create 'uniform communist people'. Life was simple, even trivial - state gave work, you went straight to jail if you refused. No organized crime, nothing to steal since everything was owned by state. No hard drugs, just endless misery of alcohol and heavy smoking. So even sizeable roma population which now has some 98% unemployment rate were all working, even if in completely meaningless jobs.
Government often also gave accommodation in those tolerable-at-the-time concrete flats. I meant allowed people to take a loan for state-built accommodation, you still had to pay it back. Same for cars, my parents waited few years since they were not apparatchiks (just university-educated folks which was already a bad place to be in eyes of regime, they had 1/2 salary of a guy digging ditches and struggled to get by financially), no way to choose color or anything else, take it or bye. Of course if you were known for causing troubles then you were eternally at the end of queue. Same for stupid things like... a couch. I wish I was joking.
People were often dangerously naive, that's why when it fell 90s were so brutal - wolves always making part of population stepped from the shadows and stole everything, killed anybody in their way, often in gruesome ways.
Sounds familiar? Every single post-soviet and eastern block (aka nuclear battlefield as planned by soviets for WWIII that never came) ended up like that. I still firmly blame soviet union for all this, and lets be honest current Russia is trying to bring back those 'good' old times desperately anyway it can. And for some reason those pesky satellites don't want to lose that stupid freedom so easily. No idea why
My family is from Russia, and we were luckier than most due to some factors (which, again, mostly came from luck.) But yeah - it's odd to go through some of those memories when comparing them to the writings and memories of others, realizing that while I lived through a very strange period of time, I didn't get to experience much of that strangeness due to my age.
Here, in case you don't want to read the entire piece, here's the conclusion it's all there to lead up to:
Today, we have become citizens of a global, Brezhnevian capitalist state, which, in its failure to provide an inspiring frontier—gone are the days of Kennedy’s “New Frontiers” or Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In”—has slowly ossified and wrapped back upon itself. My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition.
(And when the author mentions a Brezhnevian state, bear in mind he actually grew up in one: he knows whereof he speaks.)
I think the authors argument is fascinating; the idea that Western capitalism is self-defeating precisely because it is so successful in ensuring political and social stability, thereby stifling the people living under it. However, I wonder if 'Trumpism, Brexit, rising nationalism, etc.' are better explaining within the context of wealth inequality. In other words by capitalism failing to provide benefits to subset of the population while still keeping the status quo.
I'd say Brexit and the "rising nationalism" is because the system is creating social instability by negating, even denying the existence of, people's desire to belong to a nation and to preserve their own distinct culture and social norms.
"People's desire to belong to a nation" is not a given - nations didn't even exist until roughly 300-400 years ago. People's desire to belong to something is a thing, but the definition of that something is very fluid: your town, your religion, your guild, your football club, your political party, your programming language community... The definition of one's "tribe" changes with the years, even in one's own lifetime.
Nation-states came into existence following the increased reach of reliable, everyday movement of people, goods, and ideas. Such limits are now disappearing, and not even slowly. This will continue to generate friction, while people's desire for belonging morphs political structures into something that suits the new conditions.
A reality in which the citizens of New York and London share more values than they do with people from the surrounding townships, is already here; one cannot wish it away out of nostalgia, sooner or later reaction gives way to progress.
It is not nostalgia. In Europe, for instance this is something actively forced on the people.
You put it like this is all inevitable and 'progress', which I think is both not true and dangerous by discarding the opinions of those unhappy with it (which leads to things like Brexit, IMHO)
This is a choice made on behalf of the people and Brexit, the recent election result in the Netherland, and the political situation in many other countries show that the people don't necessarily agree with it.
> this is something actively forced on the people.
Forced by whom? Changes are agreed by people, often very smart people who believe in a future where we won't squabble on silly things because someone drew a line in 1840something as far as they could drag their cannons.
In a world where your goods and services are built and sold all over the world at any given time, where everyone talks across continents at every hour of the day, a lot of the old "national" dimensions simply don't matter - or keep us in a state of vassalage towards folks who have already embraced the future.
There is always someone resisting change; you can still travel by horse if you really want to, but people will zip by you in trains and cars. Most of the Brexit-supporting public, for example, have already realized that they voted themselves on a buggy whip, and are busy trying to retrofit a steam engine on it.
You may remember how the Dutch, French, and Irish rejected the EU Constitution just for the EU to repack the same as the Lisbon Treaty and run with it anyway.
Immigration is a highly sensitive subject, and both in the UK and the EU governments have decided that 'more' is correct and anyone complaining is wrong and an extremist.
So I am not sure that changes are necessarily agreed by the people (not the same as "by people", which is the whole point).
> There is always someone resisting change
Again, you paint "change" as inevitable when most of what we're seeing is conscious decision by some people, not inevitable change (which is only mostly technology as in your examples).
"The EU" didn't repack anything - treaties are agreed or amended by national governments. If the Irish voted one way and then their government agreed something else, they can take it up with their own politicians.
> Immigration is a highly sensitive subject, and both in the UK and the EU governments have decided that 'more' is correct
Again, immigration is a topic managed almost exclusively by democratically-elected national governments. And it has always been - EU rules only apply to "traffic" between member states, and in fact give extra responsibilities to peripheral countries. Even between EU members, the only real EU rule covers right of employment; everything else (who can stay where for how long, which services they can access, etc) is for the local authority to decide.
The UK government, in particular, is currently schizophrenic on this subject. They spent inordinate amounts of time and money on grand public gestures (Rwanda policy, "hostile environment", Windrush fallout, or indeed Brexit) while, at the same time, completely failed to implement serious and sustainable policies on who is allowed to stay where and how - hence numbers skyrocketing.
You won't find a single UK cabinet minister not genuinely convinced that immigration should be curbed; it's just that nobody knows how to do it without looking like a buggy whip maker in a world of car drivers. To compete on the global stage of modern capitalism, a country needs talent and labor to go there, regardless of where they were born; a closed country inevitably declines, as it happened even to mighty Japan in the last 30 years. That doesn't have to mean that you relinquish entire towns to groups fresh off the boat. It's not a binary choice, and painting it as such is disingenuous at best.
> you paint "change" as inevitable
Because it is - change is driven by technological advancements. You can fight for the ancien règime as much as you want, sooner or later someone will show up at your port with a metaphorical warship and force you to join modernity.
> "The EU" didn't repack anything - treaties are agreed or amended by national governments
Yes, but you got the point, I used "EU" as umbrella term to mean the institutions and national governments controlling them. They all came together and 'repacked' the initial Treaty because they had decided to move forward with it even if the people made the "wrong decision" when asked about it.
> everything else (who can stay where for how long, which services they can access, etc) is for the local authority to decide.
That is not correct. EU law extensively governs these aspects as well.
> You won't find a single UK cabinet minister not genuinely convinced that immigration should be curbed; it's just that nobody knows how to do it without looking like a buggy whip maker in a world of car drivers. To compete on the global stage of modern capitalism, a country needs talent and labor to go there, regardless of where they were born; a closed country inevitably declines
And here we have it. The usual blurb that we cannot do anything and that, anyway, this is required, both of which are not true. We could divide immigration by 10 (the government is free to decide how many visa are issued and to whom) and still get the real, actual "talent". That's exactly the point and issue of all my comments in this thread, and this applies across Europe.
Certainly, in case of the UK, it is totally mad to claim that 700k extra immigrants in a single year were "needed talent". They are used to hide the decline of the UK economy that keeps declining per capita while the overall GDP holds on because of the ever increasing population (which is unsustainable so, actually, we need to learn to do without more people sooner or later), and too bad if that is going to create social and cultural issues in the future.
I agree with you that cabinet ministers do not want to curb immigration, that's the point: this is not "schizophrenia", it is a deliberate, deceitful strategy by the government. Again, the same seems to apply in many European countries and when the people show their dissatisfaction in the polls they are suppressed by the usual labels of "far right" and "xenophobia", which is also a deliberate strategy.
> used "EU" as umbrella term to mean the institutions and national governments
I.e. "the people", according to the various national constitutions. Unless you're actually stating that all EU governments have never represented their electorate for over 50 years, which is a bit of an extraordinary claim, your original point is fundamentally baseless.
> EU law extensively governs these aspects as well.
That's basically not true. The Dutch government can and does, for example, tax non-Dutch citizens extra amounts for healthcare, and/or remove them from the country. It can, and does, regulate how the non-Dutch can rent or buy property and where. The only thing it cannot do is stopping people from entering the country from another member country to look for a job, or stop them from getting such job. Everything else is fair game.
> And here we have it. The usual blurb
Please read what I wrote, not whatever strawman you wish I had written.
> We could divide immigration by 10 [...] and still get the real, actual "talent".
Note that I said talent and labor. You need basic labor to grow as much as you need advanced talent. Even Japan imported Iranian laborers during the stagflation years, effectively just to maintain the levels they already had. That's a simple function of increased wealth: the more people get wealthy, the less they want to break their backs doing hard jobs. So you either push up wages around the board, with massive inflationary pressures which will make everything even worse, or you import some basic labor. That doesn't mean 700k, obviously, but realistically it doesn't mean 1k either.
> They are used to hide the decline of the UK economy
I think you overestimate the strategic abilities of UK politicians. They are just incompetent buffoons propped up by propaganda based on obsoleted assumptions and lies, without any real ideological horizon.
> The Dutch government can and does, for example, tax non-Dutch citizens extra amounts for healthcare, and/or remove them from the country. It can, and does, regulate how the non-Dutch can rent or buy property and where. The only thing it cannot do is stopping people from entering the country from another member country to look for a job, or stop them from getting such job. Everything else is fair game.
No. EU/EEA citizens must be treated as local citizens, and there are very strict and limiting rules on deporting an EU citizen (so yes, they can deport you but only if you meet a pretty high threshold of creating problems and abusing the local benefits system). They have obviously more freedom over non-EU citizens but still that is limited since discrimination based on nationality is generally illegal. I don't think that renting or buying property is restricted, at least as long as the person is a legal resident when it comes to renting (same as here in the UK).
As an example, this is why when the UK was an EU member EU citizens from the EU could study in Scottish universities for free (equal treatment with local residents under EU law) while residents of England could not (Scottish law)!
That's what I said, verbatim: "People's desire to belong to something is a thing, but the definition of that something is very fluid."
The instinct is there, but how that instinct manifests is absolutely a cultural construct determined by circumstances. There is no biological imperative that says I should belong to the group of people born less than 10km from me (or 100, or 1.000, or 100.000).
I feel that part of the problem is that we kind of ran out of advancements and reached a plateau. It's not capitalism's fault this happened (other than getting us there); but unfortunately it's possible that capitalism with its focus on growth is not compatible with that kind of regime and it will break. Hopefully something else big will come up and unblock more growth for a while (Starship + space colonization?)
And that freedom carries the weight that now our decisions matter more, and help from our peers is less, and we can make shitty decisions that affect our lives. We can be stuck in dead-end jobs, and it will be our doing. We can be addicted to many things, like gambling, and it is our responsibility to breakout from that.
So, in a sense you are right, but in another, it's up to each person to change eternal repetition.
No, representative democracy does not give us freedom.
All representative democracy give us is the ability, collectively, to sack a government that has outlived its welcome for some reason. (What happens after that is a complete crap shoot.)
When opposition parties start to triangulate -- that is, to define their policies in terms of what the government and perceived extreme opposite are doing -- rather than by espousing a concrete ideology or policy platform, we end up with everything converging on one dominant faction's idea of how to do things: a one party state in all but name.
(Which seems to be where we are here in the UK right now, and to a lesser extent in the USA.)
Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To ‘be modern’ means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underdefined. Each new structure which replaces the previous one as soon as it is declared old-fashioned and past its use-by date is only another momentary settlement – acknowledged as temporary and ‘until further notice’. Being always, at any stage and at all times, ‘post-something’ is also an undetachable feature of modernity. As time flows on, ‘modernity’ changes its forms in the manner of the legendary Proteus . . . What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) 'post-modernity' and what I've chosen to call, more to the point, 'liquid modernity', is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago 'to be modern' meant to chase 'the final state of perfection' -- now it means an infinity of improvement, with no 'final state' in sight and none desired.
This reads to me as a somewhat resentful protest of the need to change, when living in a society. Yes, the world changes - yes, you need to adapt to it.
What immaturity, to assume that there exists anything like a 'final state of perfection'.
It's easy to agree with this quote but I am writing this response because it made me feel like there's a bit too much repetition, or maybe exposition. First two sentences felt like enough to convey the whole thing to me.
I have never in my life felt that countries matter. That a person might be better off in one country than another. As such I cannot understand the feelings in this article even though I am Bulgarian and know the events by heart.
My parents spent 15 years of their life in Spain and hated every second of it. They hated it so much because I wasn't there with them. And they had a horrinle opinion of the culture and daily life there.
While in opposite my 2 uncles that went with them and took their own kids with them, like it there and have never went back.
I with half the life span of my parents believe that personal issues and events completely eclipse any effect the political and cultural environment has. For me political and/or cultural events were just a new conversation topic in my social circles. Something to be part of because well everyone is part of it.
All my life I've been told that there is opportunity abroad, there is opportunity in the capital, in X large city. But opportunity isn't somewhere it just arises sometimes. I know for sure that opportunity doesn't come while sitting in one place you don't like.
But what I am trying to say is that: cities and countries aren't really colored in a specific way. They aren't dull, closed, eventful and such, they just are places. They have as much effect on an individual as does a single individual on them. Even so undoubtedly some places have a personal color to us - my parents will never again try to work in Spain and it would not end well if they did. I myself will never go back to the town of my high school, but others like it there.
I am a Czech with a Bulgarian father and I understood the feelings in this article perfectly. The 90s were pretty similar all across the former Eastern Bloc, excluding Russia proper; a time of massive change and also hope for a better future.
Well, better future is here, but there is nothing more to aspire to anymore. No radical improvement to hope for. All changes are now marginal and usually translate to "more stuff in shops".
Also, I would say that countries and cities are plenty colored. There is a world apart between, say, cosmopolitan St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. If the mentality of the former held sway in Russia, there probably would be no war.
(And yeah, I know that Putin's rise to power happened in Petersburg first, but he didn't really fit into the spirit of the city and now dwells elsewhere.)
Ofc those Russian people who are unhappy with the status quo in Putin's Reich will shut up right now. The propaganda that streams into the world is coordinated and one of the prevailing motifs is "united Holy Russia against all the enemies".
But Putin's mafia is still somewhat afraid to start mobilization in Petersburg and Moscow. Both cities are a potential mutiny threat, full of young people including students, and not easy to subdue if shit hits the fan.
Peterburg is the more global of those two, as contact with Sweden, Finland and Estonia was extensive prior to the war, while the location of the city with respect to the core of Russia is a bit peripheral. The ports of Helsinki and Tallinn used to have a thick schedule of ferries there.
Russia as a whole cannot become part of the EU, not in 30 years at least, possibly ever. But, in the improbable case of St. Petersburg seceding from the empire, we could integrate them a lot better than some Balkan states.
I live in St. Petersburg but my family and friends live in Moscow, in the South and elsewere.
The last thing I desire is having a border with passport control and customs between them and me. No amount of kissing with your Swedish and Baltic friends would compensate for that.
Russians are no longer fools, they now understand how that particular meat grinder works.
> I have never in my life felt that countries matter. That a person might be better off in one country than another.
I think the people walking across central America to escape violence only to risk more of the same at borders, or taking rickety boats across the sea knowing full well that many of them sink killing everyone aboard, would strongly disagree with you.
> I with half the life span of my parents believe that personal issues and events completely eclipse any effect the political and cultural environment has.
I see where this is coming from, but sometimes events beyond our control - whether it's a lahar coming down a mountain, tanks firing rounds through your house, or a revolution that means your family are suddenly pariahs - can eclipse absolutely anything else, because suddenly those people who you have personal issues with are no longer people, but just meat that's no longer breathing or thinking. And some countries tend to have significantly fewer volcanic eruptions, or violent uprisings, or transfers-of-power at the end of a gun.
right at the top of the essay it is the following:
"All illustrations featured in this essay are part of the Bulgarian Visual Archive, a digital project that curates thousands of found and donated photographs. BVA aims to narrate the history of 20th-century Bulgaria through the visual record of both private and public events that have usually been pushed to the margins of official narratives. As part of its mission, BVA offers all of its photographs for download free of charge, for both personal and commercial purposes."
I don't know if this comment will be found in the sea of great comments in this thread, but I think this article is the answer to Adam Curtis' film Hypernormalisation.
The premise is that humans are currently trapped in an endless cycle and we have no concept of how to break out of it, but I think this might at least provide some context as to why.
I highly recommend watching it (along with his other documentaries) if you found this article fascinating. It's like this in video form.
Adam Curtis is honestly one of the greatest documentarians of our time. I first watched Hypernormalization, but then binged everything he ever made a few months ago.
More Adam Curtis recs: the DDT episode and the Kwame Nkrumah episode of Pandora’s Box (the rest are good too), The Way of All Flesh, and The Power of Nightmares. Also, Cant Get You Out Of My Head might be his masterpiece but it’s also not very accessible.
Counterpoint: Adam Curtis is a pretentious bore. His films feature massively overegged theses, based on a flimsy evidence base. His ideas are trivial, but he thinks they are deep.
I used to feel this way, but then I slowly realized that Curtis tends to appear to have more of a thesis than he ever actually does. The movies are less a traditional essay, and more a social history of ideas and their consequences. What the ideas mean isn’t as important to him as how the ideas influence us. By tracing the history of memes (in the Richard Dawkins sense of the word), he’s providing a service that almost no one else is providing.
His latest documentary on the fall of the soviet union was fascinating, although admittedly very dry and difficult to watch since there was no commentary.
I feel that's really only for hardcore Curtis fans, which I'm sure, he knows would be interested in.
> Ukraine has turned into a rallying call for much of Europe, a vicarious way (dangerous, but not too dangerous) to experience once again the forward vector of time.
I wonder if Europeans understand these wars around them are not fought for their amusement...
Bombing Serbia or ISIS affair is "dangerous, but not too dangerous" for you but it means hundreds to hundreds thousands of dead and hundred thousands to millions losing their homes.
The author accurately captures the overall picture during the 1990's, yet he is talking about a frontier. He perfectly realizes that the political power was just consolidated into another form, so we never had a real frontier after the fall of the communist regime.
I am little bit younger than him, and grew up after the fall of communist regime, after 34 years of transition into "democracy", and westernization, nothing really changed now the grandkids of the communist regime,are lecturing us about "democracy" again, because their fathers are getting old.
There is also this common comparison during this time era about the west(western culture and capitalism), and soviet union(communism), with the slight little nuance which is actually the elephant in the room that communism comes from the west... So the cycle continues.
What exactly is this western culture and values that we are constantly talking about, and being sold on, and advertised 24/7?
The Brezhnevian capitalist state global citizen, just wants to offer me a slightly less different totalitarian regime, throw us in a violent war because of his boredom with the flux of time, and call it a day. No thank you.
The closing of the Bulgarian frontier was during the April Uprising of 1876, which was the last time Bulgarians decided that are going to unite as a nation and will stood for something, their freedom, they will live free under their own sovereign country. You cannot exclude 500 years under Ottoman Empire rule, which rewired our survival instincts, if you are painting a picture of what and how happened next.
Like a fellow commenter said I prefer the kaba gaida to continue to echoes in the Rhodope mountains.
Despite growing with predominantly western influence after 1990, it is really hard to explain what happens with my body when I hear Valya Balkanska - Izlel ye Delyo Haydutin, a song that is flying in the space with the Voyager probes.
The next frontier is currently happening, but this time information travels differently.
Well, in a nutshell, what changed is that the right of the people to own and accumulate property and extract rent from it, is enshrined in the law and enforced. Also, which less important but provides an important safety valve against government misbehaviour, people are free to travel abroad, reside, and work everywhere else in the EU - so a government can't take these freedoms away: bailing from EU means quick end of everything, it's just technically impossible no matter how hard they try, and taken capitalist freedom away means people will vote with their feet. That's a pretty huge difference, no matter which particular group of people is now in power.
I come from a completely different background but am about the same age as the author. It sounds like many other commenters are in this same general bracket too. So are the sentiments expressed truly a period (or, maybe, cohort, given the post-communist contrast) effect, as suggested, or just an age effect?
I suspect that the middle aged in every society feel some closing of the frontier as possibilities seem to collapse and family commitments multiply.
I was born in Australia and live in Germany, and I think I see something of the same: in both countries, there is no sense of purpose, no raison d'etre. There is no national project beyond managing a series of externally-imposed and self-inflicted crises, and no obvious direction for the future to guide the decisions taken today.
So our politics (in both countries) becomes reactive and unanchored, solving whatever problem seems most pressing today, and ultimately devoid of meaning. What do individuals do in such an environment? They look after themselves, they partake in consumerism, they try to protect themselves against things the state can no longer be bothered to. It's all very nihilistic, and thus the deep anomie that seems to have infected most Western societies, and the younger generations most of all.
My purpose is to care for the people I can as I learn to love and be loved.
It is not the job of the nation-state to give people a deep sense of purpose. That is a job for a church, temple, or other spiritual community. Governments which try to do that job tend to do badly, sometimes with monstrous results. They ought be separate.
It seems to me that historically, "the church, temple, or other spiritual community" filling that role has come with all the same downsides as the nation-state filling that role. And that's not a comment about religion – any organisation is at risk of abuse of that type because that's just how humans and organisations work.
And fully agree with "care for the people I can as I learn to love and be loved", but at the same time people do need some sense of "community", "togetherness", and "we're all in it together"-ness, especially in times when things are perhaps not going so well, and I do feel that's rather been lost.
Any organization made of humans is indeed fallible and corruptible. I have heard some dark stories of this. They are not mine to tell.
Still, the people who say they are trying to uphold a responsibility are more likely to do so with care than those who are trying to do something else.
If a father needs someone to watch his 4-year-old daughter, is it wiser to drop her off at a daycare or at a post office logistics warehouse?
Every organisation attracts all sorts of people with different motivations, interests, desires, which often conflict within the organisation. I don't think there are big differences there. Daycares and post offices are narrowly defined specialist organisations, not broad wide organisations such as the church or government.
And besides, I don't think churches can be a general solution to sense of purpose or community, because it would exclude the growing majority of secular people who don't really have any religious affiliation, or are explicitly agnostic/atheist. You need ... something else for that, something more secular. I don't really know what that would be.
And let's not view the past with too much rose-coloured glasses either, as religion could be ugly business just as much as nationalism can. A famous example is Tolkien's mother, who converted from Anglicism to Catholicism and was pretty much ostracized and consigned to poverty by her family (her husband died of illness when Tolkien was about two). A Catholic priest took Tolkien in and that's how he got his education so the church/religion isn't all bad in this story, but there was a lot of needless misery, and he was "saved" by a stroke of good fortune.
I remember this type of stuff from my grandfather as well (in the Netherlands). Their house burned down during the war and after the war they relocated to the next village, which was protestant instead of catholic (or the reverse? I forgot) and were ostracized because of that. Especially in the context of post-occupation Netherlands this was double ridiculous because you'd think that these kind of small differences would fade away, but there you have it. One of the reasons they ended up moving to the city.
Let me suggest that the reason you label the church as the body responsible for the deep sense of purpose, is that the Church in all societies used to be, and in some cases still is, the Government. Europe's cathedrals were the middle-ages equivalent of work programs. (All those church tithes had to be spent on something.)
It has also done that job spectacularly badly at times.
The states of Germany and Austria take away a persons purpose because these states are very authoritative and oppressive. Governments shouldn't try to give people a purpose, but they should develop a country via laws that enable or encourage its people to find purpose. Socialism does the opposite, as it's based on the logic of taking away from people who have, and giving to those who don't, which means taking away from those people who found purpose, and giving to those who don't and usually don't seek purpose but instead search for temporarily pleasures like alcohol.
> it's based on the logic of taking away from people who have, and giving to those who don't, which means taking away from those people who found purpose, and giving to those who don't and usually don't seek purpose but instead search for temporarily pleasures like alcohol
I’m with you in your opinion that government shouldn’t try to give people purpose but I think the last part of your argument is an overreach.
You’re conflating purpose with making money. They’re not the same. Counterexample: Vincent van Gogh. His purpose was clearly art but he did not see professional success while alive. If you don’t consider Van Gogh’s purpose to be something like painting or art then I’d suggest you’re not using the word as it is commonly defined.
Also I’d suggest that it’s unfair to paint the poor broadly as not seeking purpose and instead searching for temporary pleasures. I have simultaneously known both an economically struggling person who refrains from drugs and alcohol and a well-to-do person who is a functional alcoholic.
Certainly alcoholism can make people lose money, relationships, etc. But it does not follow that simply abstaining from these things will make one wealthy.
Of course they're not the same, but before people can developer higher spiritual or social purposes they have to develop their material life. For most people, on top of what I just side in the previous sentence, developing their material life itself is a journey that leads them to developing and furthering their social and family life which then leads to a higher spiritual life.
Point being Vincent van Gogh who was "Born into an upper-middle-class family" according to Wiki.
> Also I’d suggest that it’s unfair to paint the poor broadly as not seeking purpose and instead searching for temporary pleasures.
Of course, but I was talking about those poor people who live their lives by becoming dependent on the social states without trying to further their lives. I'm not talking about poor people in general.
I was once told "Australian's don't know how to live, they just die slowly". I've spent a lot of time thinking about that.
(For context, I was born there, but left almost 20 years ago. I recently spent 18 months exploring the whole country, and sadly I now agree with the above quote)
Hundreds of millions of people around the world somehow manage to live perfectly decent lives dedicating themselves to the personal purposes of their choice and to giving their loved ones a bright future. Much of this is what you might deride as "consumerism". It's generally a good thing to aspire to, and without having to have some collectivized state-level notion of "purpose" crammed into one's life.
No thank you. For those who want such wider purpose, by all means, aspire away while leaving others alone to live their peaceful private ends, but it's absurd to think that a country "needs" it, or some crisis to be a good place to live. A country only needs stable, law-abiding, transparent government for decency. Considering how many places lack even that, it should be purpose enough in a basic sense, with a firm onus on the bureaucrats to provide it.
If anything, bullshit about purpose and so-called national projects has been used to justify centuries of horrific repression and destructiveness while a select few leaders impose thier specific idea of what's needed on those they can dictate to.
The article being discussed describes the collective sense of purpose in Bulgaria as being at its peak post-communism, when the populace was excited to be free from repression and able to try new things, start businesses etc. You’re basically agreeing with the author.
It does seem, however, that there are many concerning trends in social measures in western countries these days, particularly among things that have traditionally given people a sense of purpose on an individual level. So it may behoove us to discuss and think about why that may be, and what we can do collectively to inspire the kind of societal outlook that is likely to promote a different trend in those measures.
> Hundreds of millions of people around the world somehow manage to live perfectly decent lives dedicating themselves to the personal purposes of their choice and to giving their loved ones a bright future. Much of this is what you might deride as "consumerism". It's generally a good thing to aspire to, and without having to have some collectivized state-level notion of "purpose" crammed into one's life.
Citation? Haven't we seen a rise in despair and loneliness (and ultimately in people dying of these things), even as people's material condition got better?
>Citation? Haven't we seen a rise in despair and loneliness (and ultimately in people dying of these things), even as people's material condition got better?
Have we really? or are you citing poorly quantified media narratives of this? I'd love to see a solid analysis of human happiness today, overall, across several specific metrics, vs. the same metrics say 100 years ago. Without both, anyone who says people are generally less happy now (because random social media or formal media dramatic clickbait garbage source said so) might just as well be full of shit.
In other words, you're claiming a sort of counterfactual I argue and I'd like to see your citation for it.
I think what you’re getting at is that societies define themselves based on external threats.
Psychologically speaking on a group level it is much easier to say what we are not and define ourselves based on that than it is to develop an internal definition of ourselves.
You can see this in the history of national identities coalescing around external threats such as the American identity being sidelined for state identity until the revolution.
This is a well-studied phenomenon and contributes to the post-colonial failed states with arbitrary borders. Remove the colonial power and you’ve removed the national identity and cause massive fragmentation and dysfunction.
I’m not sure there is a solution to this in a nuclear world as it is in our biology and has served us well up until the point where we developed genocidal tools and processes which justifiable scare the developed world into relenting from defining external groups as major antagonists.
As much as a strong national identity can give great cohesion and confidence it can now also teeter the world or parts of it into apocalypse which it has basically done twice now and loomed over us a third time with the Cold War. I sense we have a new Cold War now and it has been looming for almost decade. To me this is our great filter and I am forcefully optimistic we can figure something out because the alternative is utter destruction.
In Bulgaria, the people are able to agree, that life is shit. Why can't we agree in the west?
I mean - why is there always someone who is eager to prove you wrong? What has western society become? So many people feel the same, yet they can't get together to agree ... why?
A lot of people agree that life is shit in the west as well.
The problem is if you don't align with the politics of the person you're conversing with when you say that, they'll get pissed and claim you hate their country and should leave. But they'll readily turn around and also say the country is shit, just for different reasons and claim the biggest problem is people like you who are standing up for the shitty system that's in place.
I don't believe that. I don't think the number is important, nor does it correspond to my experience. If people were truly happy, they wouldn't be in constant fear and fighting each other publicly.
The division is pretty clear.
And a honest talk with people who even percieve themselves as happy, also reveals their concerns and worries and feelings of discomfort.
But my point was more of this kind: why do western societies struggle so much with unhappyness and discomfort? The compulsive therapeutic approach only came with the advent of psychoanalysis and happiness guide literature at the beginning of the 20th century. Today everything has to be translated into positive psychology. For me, this is one of the greatest deceptions against yourself. Because the political enemy is evidently unbearable to the other party - so facts you can't translate into something positive exist.
Real happyness is above such contradictions. Real decadence is ignoring them. The west has become very decadent and I can't see any real happyness in decadence.
Quoting:
> My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition.
It’s interesting how the various post-communist states in Central/Eastern Europe have played out since the 90s. Having lived here for roughly the last ~8 years, it seems to me that the ones succeeding the most are those which have a nearly universal negative appraisal of the communist era. Poland, for example, is on a pretty great trajectory and will probably be in the top 2-3 EU economies in a decade. The Soviet system was forced upon Poland and very few people look upon that era favorably. The break between eras was also fairly clean and without too much internal conflict.
Compare that to some other states like Bulgaria or Ex-Yugoslavia, which have a more complicated memory of the communist era, and which also had a lot of conflict during the transition period. There is less of a pre-packaged “social imaginary” of what the country could be/used to be prior to the communist era - unlike Poland, which was occupied and spent a couple centuries building an oppositional identity during the Partitions/occupations.
> the ones succeeding the most are those which have a nearly universal negative appraisal of the communist era.
A simpler explanation is that you swapped cause and effect: it's the countries where the economy struggled, where their people regret leaving their previous socialist economy.
Why some economies struggled less than other is something that probably requires a lot more of country-by-country investigation, rather than generalisations... But I think that a common trend might be:
How accessible (and geographically close) is the country to potential investors? Poland is close to Germany (and German investors could already find a German speaking minority, which could help bootstrap), likewise the Baltic republic are close to Finland and Sweden (Sweden is the first country to open an embassy in Estonia for example, which is arguably a prerequisite for a lot of investment in Estonia)
> A simpler explanation is that you swapped cause and effect: it's the countries where the economy struggled, where their people regret leaving their previous socialist economy.
That's a simpler explanation, indeed. It's also wrong.
Take the 2 examples of GP. In Bulgaria, the first elections after the first president after the fall of the dictatorship was Petar Mladenov, a former politburo member. The first parliamentary elections were similarly won by the communist party.
In Yugoslavia, Milosevic remained leader for decades.
In both cases the "nostalgia" had already set in before anyone had the chance to experience any I'll effects caused by democracy.
So much this. Among other causes: Poland has a population of more than 35million people, so they were able to export a lot of workforce - which then generated significant remittance income, a fundamental driver of capital creation in poor economies. Bulgaria is less than 7 million, they obviously could not do it on the same scale; they also suffered from blocks on free circulation of workers, imposed on Romania and Bulgaria on accession precisely on the back of the experience with Poland. These blocks were only lifted about 10 years ago - and significantly increased the lag they already had versus the Baltic states (which were allowed to join much earlier, largely because of strategic German interests that did not apply to Romania and Bulgaria).
Some of ex-Yugoslavia (mostly Croatia) is doing rather well. But the Yugoslavs did have oppositional identity: it's just that their identities were the ones from before WW2 and even WW1. The lifting of Communism wound the clock straight back to the smoking gun of Gavrilo Princep, and the place tore itself apart over nationalism and religion again.
Yes Croatia (along with Slovenia) is a good example of a place that has a strong oppositional attitude toward the previous communist era. My impression is that Croatians want nothing to do with the Yugoslav era and much prefer to be an extension of Catholic Europe / the EU. Compare that to Serbia which is still trying to be unaligned, just as Yugoslavia was.
As a Serb, I wouldn't really describe Serbia as being unaligned/centrist. The corrupt politicians (I wouldn't dare call them people) in the gov't itself eat from the laps of Russia because the West = Evil for some nebulous reason that nobody quite understands anymore (slightly exaggerating, it's mostly to do with Kosovo and NATO involvement in the Yugo wars in the 90s but most of the youth don't give a shit about that anymore), while the youth, at least in the bigger cities, tend to support the EU and want Serbia to join them one day if we're to have any hope of advancement.
At the same time they're also selling the country to the highest bidder, which for now are various Arab states like the UAE and the Saudis (lookup the Belgrade waterfront as an example), though there's also lots of Chinese money flowing into the pockets of the politicians as well.
It's a horrifically corrupt country with legitimate war criminals and their leashed dogs (like current PM Vucic) still holding the reigns, trying to scam and bruteforce their way to as much money as they can muster before the inevitable happens. Meanwhile it experiences insane levels of brain drain as anyone sensible and with the means to (my parents in the 80s and myself and pretty much everyone else in my family now included) gets the fuck out and never looks back twice.
Mind you, myself and most Serb diaspora I know don't want anything to do with the place. I was born and grew up in Indonesia and have visited Serbia a handful of times at most, so it's not a country I'd call home in any sense of the word. Even then, it still depresses me how hopeless the situation seems for anyone living there, as relayed to me by the few friends and family that are still stuck there with no way out.
Maybe relevant, from Conversations with Tyler (Ep. 184, with David Bentley Hart):
COWEN: Let’s say Poland, Slovenia, Czechia, which have a lot of Catholicism in their backgrounds — they seem to be converging on Western norms, living standards much more than, say, the EU members to the East: Bulgaria, Romania.
HART: Well, they had certain advantages to begin with, too, but better relations. Again, I don’t think it has any particular... To be honest, Polish Catholicism is basically culturally very much like Slavic Orthodoxy. There, you’re going to find that culturally, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are closer to one another in many ways than Catholicism in the East is with Catholicism in the West.
Trying to draw causal ties between what are very complex social histories, I just think is a mistake. There’s no way of saying one way or the other. Greek democracy flourished in the modern age for a while after Greek independence in the early 19th century, and Greece remains Orthodox, too. Even more than Poland, it is committed to a set of real democratic norms. In Poland, there are stronger reactionary forces at present than there are in Greece.
and also from Ep. 192, with Jacob Mikanowski:
MIKANOWSKI: [...] I think that idea of an Orthodox disease is maybe a figment of geography more than a deeply cultural matrix that we think. I’m not — I think we could be optimistic about Croatia and Romania simultaneously. Bulgaria maybe too. I’m not sure that I believe in a kind of Orthodox curse. I think it has more to do with how things shook up internally in former Yugoslavia and where those countries are in relationship to that industrial core of Germany, Austria, Switzerland.
Yeah, I also don't think I'd really call Czechia a place with a "lot of Catholicism in its background." It was a hostile top-down imposition from the Austrians, with the consequence that Czechs are largely agnostic/areligious today.
Prior to re-Catholicization of the 17th century, there was a strong presence of homebrewn Hussite/Brethren Protestantism (mostly Czech-speaking people) and somewhat smaller presence of classical Lutheranism/Calvinism (mostly German-speaking people). There wasn't any clear geographic boundary between those two, the communities were mixed, though there were regional "strongholds" - e.g. Silesia was strongly German-Protestant while southern Moravia was strongly Czech-Catholic.
Orthodox communities, with the exception of ambassadors or foreign businesspeople, weren't a thing in Early Modern Kingdom of Bohemia.
I have to say that I met Mikanowski in HS in passing a few times in academic competitions and I never heard anything about him being bigoted in any way whatsoever.
That’s a pretty big claim and I’d be curious to see this research. I think you’d have a hard time untangling the communist effect (and earlier Ottoman effect) on Orthodox states to make any kind of deeper argument here.
> Religion plays a significant role in influencing corruption levels [26,[29], [30], [31], [32], [33]]. While all religions encourage good moral conduct and ethical behavior, studies show that different religions are associated with varying levels of corruption. Notably, countries whose primary religions are hierarchical religions such as Catholic Christianity (Catholicism), Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Islam, tend to have higher corruption levels, particularly in comparison to Protestant Christian countries [21,30,[34], [35], [36], [37]]. Supporting this claim, [30] found that corruption levels are lowest in countries with a Protestant majority and highest in countries with an Orthodox Christian majority.
This claim of hierarchy doesn’t make sense for Islam, which explicitly does not have a fixed religious hierarchy like Christianity (which I will also note it’s interesting that Christianity was split into sects but not Islam for this study).
All studies analyzing countries as a whole are flawed. First of all, it's low sample size, there are 200 something countries. Secondly, countries are complex systems with thousands if not more variables, that are impossible to account for, so any finding is incidental at best.
But how many of these Orthodox countries have been Orthodox countries officially for more than a few decades? I’m struggling to think of any besides Greece.
Lebanon never got communism and the country was founded as largely a Catholic and Orthodox project, but it still has considerable corruption. (Not defending the OP's claim, just offering another data point.)
But the question is concerning studies done recently, not centuries ago. So I think the only way to determine if Orthodoxy leads to "more corrupt" states would be to analyze one that wasn't something un-Orthodox (e.g., socialist Yugoslavia) for the last half-century.
Huh, Orthodoxy is very old and widespread. Ofc during Communism, it tended to be suppressed, but as a bedrock of the society, Orthodoxy definitely prevails in Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Belarus and Russia at least.
Ukraine is more complicated, a nation sewn together from very different regions; Greek Catholics are an important minority, mostly present in the formerly Austro-Hungarian western part of the country, which also seems to be the most nationalist one.
Presumably these studies have been done recently, not two centuries ago, so I'm not sure how useful they are in determining that Orthodox states are "more corrupt."
I am not sure either, but I wouldn't rule it out either. Caesaropapism was probably, on the net, a negative shaping force in societies which indulged in it.
In the world of Islam, the Shi'a system of ayatollahs is structurally fairly close to Christian Orthodox Churches, and the Iranian theocracy which builds on it is corrupt beyond belief.
That said, it probably makes sense to study why some countries are somewhat less corrupt or how they managed to keep corruption in check. Corruption seems to be fairly widespread across space and time, one of the universal blights of mankind.
FWIW I don't know about the statistics, but it is true that Eastern Orthodoxy does have notions like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphonia_(theology) that are especially conductive to authoritarianism and its associated ills (including unchecked corruption by local authorities).
Well, if people start missing the Soviet union, you probably got concerning problems. I think there is very little causality the other way around (missing the Soviet leads to problems).
My point is more that in Poland, communism was always something of a foreign imposition by the Soviet Union, as the history (the Soviet invasion in 1939, plus Russian partitions before that) didn't lend itself to being happy about the situation.
Bulgaria, on the other hand, was a close ally of the Soviet Union and more historically, of Russia (at least, more of an ally than Poland.) Yugoslavia wasn't in the Soviet sphere at all and was more "indigenous" and not as repressive as the Soviet states. So in Bulgaria and Ex-Yugoslavia, the memory of the communist era is not as clearly negative as it is in Poland. (Even if it's not positive, either – it's just more murky.)
> My point is more that in Poland, communism was always something of a foreign imposition by the Soviet Union
I think communism or not is besides the point. Poland has a strong imperial tradition where the state spanned from Baltic almost to the Black Sea. They’ve been occupying and ruling for much longer than they’ve been in a socialist camp, and that had a much bigger impact on their national identity. And, as some others noted, being close to Germany gives Poland a big advantage.
On the point of “communism”, take Romania as an example. I took a tour of the Presidential palace when I was in Bucharest. The guide was extremely negative about the communist era(when the palace itself was built), as many Romanians are. She went on and on how the dictator forced the palace construction and how terrible it was. Ironically, the palace is one of the few attraction in Bucharest. Walk just 200m away and it’s going to be rubble and desolation. In summary, I don’t think being anti-communist helps them all that much.
> Bulgaria, on the other hand, was a close ally of the Soviet Union and more historically, of Russia
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Bulgaria never was an economic powerhouse or major European power, unlike Poland. Between the Ottomans and other empires, they probably don’t have a history of building a strong economy. Being between rock and a hard place, not having resources, etc. probably contributed much more than what you say.
Poland was occupied / colonized almost continuously from the late 1700s to the 1990s. The idea that their imperial history before that had more of an effect on the modern person’s psyche is nonsense.
> Ironically, the palace is one of the few attraction in Bucharest. Walk just 200m away and it’s going to be rubble and desolation. In summary, I don’t think being anti-communist helps them all that much.
You got it wrong here.
1)Bucharest doesn't have many eye-catching tourist attractions like a quaint historical old town because of the 1977 earthquake that destroyed a large part of the old historical buildings, and Ceausescu in his infinite wisdom, decided "fuck it, we'll just build concrete commie blocks instead for the communist party members", a highly unpopular decision even back then in those days, that even the lead architect in charge fled the country for speaking up against this idea because he didn't want to desecrate history to build commie blocks.
The only somewhat silver lining of this today, is that due to the over construction of commie blocks back then, Bucharest housing remains somewhat affordable for the average person today despite gentrification, when you look at housing affordability in other EU capitals.
2) People in Romania are rightfully anti-communist due to the atrocities of the regime, and a giant building as a big tourist attraction doesn't change that. Being anti communist does actually help with the imense progress the country made becoming business friendly and attracting foreign investors.
If you think Bucharest has few attractions besides Casa Poporului, you must have not had a good guidebook and really missed out. The city is full of interesting sites. Yes, the socialist era and the big earthquake damaged the city, but there are still great museums, churches, parks, and sites connected with the artists and men of letters of the 19th century and prewar era.
I think it happens naturally in many places because older people tend to look at their history with rose tinted glasses. You forget the bad parts and treasure the good parts (which is not a bad psychological coping mechanism in itself). Add to that that the current world looks more complex as it becomes harder to keep up with age.
We see that even in Western countries, where a sizable set of boomers want to restore the order of the good old 50 or 60ies and vote conservative or right wing populist parties..
The question is what do the younger generations think and what portion of the population they are.
This period was a time of rebellion against the more authoritarian styles of government/society that existed in Western countries historically. I doubt that it's nostalgia for the 1960s that's driving modern conservativism. Perhaps any nostalgia for that period would be economic, in that it was still possible for a person (man) with one job to support a family and even own a house without much difficulty. Today, it seems like more of a struggle where people are working multiple jobs for decades to buy over-priced real estate. But modern conservatism doesn't seem to have any particular plan to go back to that kind of economy ... actually I'm not clear what it's actually trying to achieve.
I certainly hear from many people on the left that it’s nostalgia for the religious and racial power structure that’s driving it, but I’m not sure I buy it.
For the rank and file it might very well be economic, but the up and coming politicians seem to be more about money and power than any actual plan of governance.
It's hard to imagine that there's a large group who are thinking that their lives will be so much better once abortion is banned and people are no longer allowed to dress as whichever gender they like.
The irony about the economic issues is that tax rates and wealth redistribution were so much higher after WW2, and economic inequality was quite a bit less than today. The domination of right wing politics has been increasing inequality for decades, so why would anyone think that moving further to the right would help?
People miss communism because communist governments provided normal people with stable jobs and guaranteed housing. Present day neo-liberal governments do not provide normal people with stable jobs and guaranteed housing.
As such, you could say that choosing neo-liberal governments over communist governments doesn't make utilitarian sense for normal people, they should choose the governments that provide them with the basic necessities of life (i.e. housing and the guaranteed opportunity to earn one's living).
It's more complicated than that, you are ignoring some significant facts.
First of all, Poland, your example, has major human rights issues.
Even ignoring the LGBT issues (the so-called "lgbt free zones" in Poland), Poland has practically abolished abortion rights. Abortion has been denied to Ukrainian women refugees that were rape victims.
Amnesty International: Access to abortion was further limited. Criminal charges were used to curtail freedom of expression. The authorities continued to erode the independence of the judiciary. Freedom of peaceful assembly was restricted. Violations of LGBTI rights persisted.
Ironically under the Soviet Union Poland was one of the first Countries in the whole Europe (and probably the World) to have legal abortion, because communist countries did not have to please the Catholic Church (or any church).
Under Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union became the first modern state in legalizing abortions on request — the law was first introduced in the Russian SFSR in 1920
So there's that.
The second issue is nationalism, mainly far right nationalism, that spread throughout Europe from the former eastern block, that was once put under control by the Soviets.
AfD in Germany, Sweden Democrats in Sweden (despite the name they have roots in white nationalist and neo-Nazi parties), Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, Giorgia Meloni and FdI in Italy, Vox in Spain etc. etc.
Look at Milošević for an example gone really bad, former leftist, he joined ranks with far-right nationalists extremists and things went south.
A very popular representative right now in Europe is Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who took a more moderate approach but is still a far-right conservative dictator-wannabe who's causing lots of troubles to the EU.
All of the aforementioned far-right parties in Europe are allied to, or close friends with, Orban.
Third: the so called Visegrád Group formed by Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, has strong ties to Germany, which in turn means they sustain German economy by importing their goods (combined, they are the second largest export market for Germany) and vice versa.
Last, but not least, the EU has invested a lot of money in those Countries and sustained their economy to keep them in, even though their politics have raised more than an eyebrow.
So it's like the end of WW2, by looking at the numbers one could think that the war produced the economic growth in Europe, but it actually was the Marshall Plan.
p.s. Poland is far from being one of the 3 major economies in Europe
> Ironically under the Soviet Union Poland was one of the first Countries in the whole Europe (and probably the World) to have legal abortion
>> the law was first introduced in the Russian SFSR in 1920
Poland was never part of the Soviet Union. It became socialist and part of the eastern block only after WW2, so I doubt the legal abortion date.
Also I mean, yeah the eastern block was quite progressive in some ways, but human rights were not one of them. Some of the gain were hugely offset by the millions of people who were tortured and killed by the system. Also much more blood thirsty in the Soviet Union than in Communist Poland.
In 1932 the new Penal Code legalised abortion only when there were medical reasons and, for the first time in Europe, when the pregnancy resulted from a criminal act. This made Poland the first country in Europe outside the Soviet Union to legalize abortion in cases of rape and threat to maternal health.
In 1920 Lenin legalized abortion in the Russian Federation, not in Poland.
> but human rights were not one of them
Poland has major human rights issues right now, in 2023, as a member of the EU.
Stricter laws about the abortion rights have started popping up in 2011 and the latest reform is from 2021. They are quite bad, they basically abolished abortion for 98% of the cases it was performed and for the rest of the cases the waits are so long that it becomes virtually impossible.
I find this extremely true. Hungary has a neutral/good memory of Soviet times.
Despite oppression, people felt more safe, because there were clear guidelines to life in general. If you adhered to them, you had a boring and regulated life. Everyone had a job (it was mandatory to work), and most people could afford to own a holiday home in the countryside.
The "state" provided a life where you played along the rules and with minimum input you reaped maximum rewards. That's difficult to duplicate in a capitalistic scenario.
As someone from the UK with a Hungarian partner - you pretty much nailed it.
The older members of her family look back with fondness on that period in time which sounds strange to someone from a western country but I can sort of understand it - some of it is just the nostalgia of youth but some of it is I think caused because the freedom to make choices comes with the requirement to live with your choices.
When the state keeps the safety rail up in where you live, where you work and how you spend your leisure time you have a clear path towards how to live your life - which is a comfortable if stifled existence.
That said, the younger diaspora have a different way of looking at the world - many left to move to other EU countries because they wanted to avoid that nostalgia.
That said I truly love visiting Hungary, the history, art and food is amazing, the people are warm and friendly and the countryside is staggeringly beautiful (as is the Balaton).
It's certainly on my list of places to suggest people visit.
Hungary was also way more liberal, than east germany for example, which practiced Stalinism till the very end (but still we have people nostalgic for that).
The nostalgia is for the period after 1956. While the USSR and Warsaw Pact helpers succeeded in putting down the Hungarian uprising, they had to manage the discontent in the country so that it wouldn’t happen again. (Moreover, the Hungarian uprising was fed by frustration at specifically the Stalinist regime forced on Hungary, but Stalin’s death was eventually followed by a thaw even in the USSR.)
So, for the remaining thirty years of socialism, Hungarians found it easier to travel abroad, publish literature or present art and music that was previously forbidden, and there was even some limited private enterprise. In rankings of which countries had it best in the Eastern Bloc, Hungary is usually at or near the top.
I can barely understand the logic behind "Hurtling toward a black hole, we seem to be endlessly stuck, horizonless, in the event horizon." and "Ukraine has turned into a rallying call for much of Europe, a vicarious way (dangerous, but not too dangerous) to experience once again the forward vector of time. "
Integrate Ukraine to EU and after that... What? "Hurtling toward a black hole..." again, but this time with Ukraine? ;-)
The hip neighborhoods in western cities are no longer secret and have become expensive and have a lot of tourists. Also, the author is approaching middle age.
I always felt that the States was "tatty", more "run down" than old. Public places were considered to 'belong to nobody', so were often dirty or defaced because nobody took pride in them. Subway trains were covered in graffiti.
In many countries overseas, public places are always well looked-after because they 'belonged to all of us' rather than 'belonged to nobody'.
> public places are always well looked-after because they 'belonged to all of us'
Or mostly the local govs have the will and means to look after them. I don't really think people's attitudes regarding public places is that different in Europe compared to the US
I agree. For way to many people in the US "muh taxes" is their single voting issue and they wonder why infra is crumbling. Obviously you don't want to be overtaxed but people will vote for the guy who wants to reduce school funding so their property taxes go down 0.1%. It's insane.
Europe is not a single entity. There are definitely tired-feeling parts of Europe. What I've seen of the US felt like Ireland or the non-tourist parts of Poland to me.
> Like Communism, capitalism is a teleological system at its root, relying on a narrative of progress, on a forward-moving vector of time, but when that time turns cyclical, repetitive, without a clear direction, the system begins to disintegrate, not under the weight of its own contradictions, as Marx would tell us, but under the weight of its own uniformity.
Capitalism is economic freedom and a government to enforce it. It isn't teleological.
The apparent telos of capitalism comes from people. It turns out that people, in the presence of freedom, have certain goals which they choose to pursue. Prominent among those goals is the accumulation of wealth. When it becomes excessive, that goal may be worth criticizing but people will choose to pursue it whenever they are free.
> Today, we have become citizens of a global, Brezhnevian capitalist state, which, in its failure to provide an inspiring frontier—gone are the days of Kennedy’s “New Frontiers” or Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In”—has slowly ossified and wrapped back upon itself.
Do we need politicians to pick our frontiers? Actually there's plenty of frontiers. Some examples are: eradicating human disease, extending human lifespan, replacing fossil field, exploring the solar system, changing how humans interact on the internet, inventing AGI, etc. It's beyond me that someone can claim with a straight face that there's no inspiring frontier.
The problem here is people who find these frontiers too boring. They secretly want a do-over of the 20th century. No thanks.
Boredom though, is a very valid feeling. A bored species doesn't get very far, and maybe for us humans, feeling like we're getting somewhere is how we operate.
When I think about it, I think that's probably why I've been struggling so much, is that I've just felt bored with life. In-spite of all that society is, I think like a lot of people, I just don't really see what the point is. More money? More goals? More experiences? But then what?
Maybe the type of frontier is important, because everything you give an example of is really just the one frontier: Figuring out how to continually scale human population. Although rational, how is it inspiring? Or rather, how can you be inspired if you are bored?
I am a Bulgarian, born in 1986 and immigrated to Austria in 1997. But it pains and scares me that an exiled Bulgarian now wants to take on the Bulgarian collective with postmodern, cosmopolitan and American ideas.
The cycles he describes exist mostly in the minds of postmodern cosmopolitans. And these arise because cosmopolitans in reality cannot produce anything other than ideology and services. Yet the terrible and boring every day bread still comes from the bakery! And since you can't invent a new ideology or service or produce a new work of art every day (except for journalists of course, who mastered the producing of "nothingness" every single day), at some point you get lost in pondering and start looking for the culprit. Of course, the first scapegoat is politics, society, people - always the others. Just because you can't free yourself from your nihilistic mental wheel, you have to conjure up and condemn the entire collective. Herein lies the birth of all 'structural arguments', I claim, ad hoc. 'My dissatisfaction must have structural reasons, otherwise I wouldn't be dissatisfied.' The eternal lamentation of the upper-urban-class cosmopolitans.
No, I know and admire people for whom such complaints are distant, even annoying. People who don't have time for it. And you can just as freely and willingly decide to lead a calm and regulated life. This life is not a danger to humanity, as the postmodernists and cosmopolitans have always wanted to tell us, and I do not want Bulgaria to be 'Americanized' that way. I would rather listen to a Kaba Gaida in the mountains than have to read through a capitalist-cosmopolitan lament. The former gives me power and strength, a connection to the world, the latter just makes me sick and weak.
I know Bulgaria has its issues, but losing its uniqueness to solve them, is for me the bigger issue.
I don't see what are these postmodern, cosmopolitan and American ideas. Can you explain yourself better?
What I read was something different: The eternal search for a meaningful existence. It applies to everyone, in every continent of the globe, through their entire lives.
So if for example: I am working for an IT company, and my work deals only with improving ad technology, at some point I will feel that meaningless apprehension, because ad technology is ultimately worthless for humanity in general. (This is only an example, I don't work with ads)
Working for example in bioinformatics o biotechnology, helping people heal, would be much better. It would be meaningful. (Another example, I don't work with biotechnology)
Both technologies, both paths, are available in western countries and in other countries. It is our personal choice, and no one is forcing us to choose one over the other.
It's all a series of personal decisions, aggregated in the millions, what makes nations what they are.
It's a US-centric view written by a Bulgarian who is already engulfed in that culture. Bulgarian society is driven by a different set of cultural values and you cannot understand it through the lens of these grand-explanatory mechanisms offered by US think-tanks.
Even during communism, ideology in Bulgaria was something few people cared about or believed in. It was about empty slogans in schools and public places, empty-speech by public officials and nothing much more. Private life was a different affair. It was always centered around the family and providing safety for the kids. It is a deeply-embedded instinct for self-preservation since Ottoman times. New forms of social organisation emerged under the official iron fist of the ruling party. People were doing mutual favours within a close relationship.
Even now, this is the primary form of organisation in Bulgarian society. Knowing the right people, nurturing close relationships with them, calling them for favours in difficult times, expecting to be called by them at any time.
> Bulgarian society is driven by a different set of cultural values and you cannot understand it through the lens of these grand-explanatory mechanisms offered by US think-tanks.
I am trying to understand that set of cultural values through the lens of my own eyes. I don't think the influence of US think-tanks is something that matters to me much.
Family values are something I understand, as we are not too different in South America.
> That's the base of nepotism/corruption and is a big problem.
And this is something I can't understand.
Years ago, a newspaper advocated, essentially shortened, 'dissolving family structures because corruption is higher in countries with strong family relationships.' The journalist concluded his article with more or less the words 'Mom, Dad, I'm sorry, but I have to serve the greater good'.
And I don't believe that neighborly assistance is the basis for corruption. And I also believe that neighborly assistance is much closer to human nature and offers many more human benefits than a transparent state that is free of corruption. I don't think you should balance the two against each other in such a way, or even indulge in the latter at the expense of the former.
wow - this ignore below is my first bad experience on this page. For me it came out of nowhere and I can't even explain it nor take a stance on it. Such a shame :(
It got toned down though since bad times reality became more apparent and the "global utopia can still be reached" if we write it into existence delusion faded. Nothing to project on aurocracies now..
I think you've overlooked a quote from what bluetomcat wrote, so pasting it here:
> Even now, this is the primary form of organisation in Bulgarian society. Knowing the right people, nurturing close relationships with them, calling them for favours in difficult times, expecting to be called by them at any time.
This is more of a general statement than of a "neigbourly assistance". In a sense this applies both to small scale (familes and neighbours), but also it applies to what I call clientelism and a form of corruption. The impact of the latter cannot be overstated as East European countries are drowning in it.
My theory is that this usually happens when you have a large goverment apparatus (be it state or local, or usually both) and that implies a big bureacracy. So if you need a permit to say build a house or even say install PV panels, you may have to wait even a year just for that permit alone. But if you know someone who is a friend/colleague of a guy issuing any permits, you might get it in couple of days. Also, good luck if you need a surgery and don't have money for private clinics. But its all good if you know a doctor, you can get taken care of pretty immediately.
There doesn't have to be any money or goods involved. Just favors for (maybe even potential) favors. I'll give another example. My dad was a director of a local government owned company in charge for traffic/parking etc. I remember one evening his phone rang and he had a nice chat with some person on the other side. I've asked who she was, and was told that she was a director of a hotel and she wanted to arrange 2 reserved spots near it. And my dad was happy to oblige even though no goods were exchanged. I hope you see where I'm going.
I've learned a valuable lesson that day. If you're just a private citizen minding your own business thinking that "the system works", you'll never get in touch with people actually making decisions in these kind of societies. While people nurturing those connections will get what they want and usually you'll be worse for it. So nevermind parking spots or "easy" things like that. What if you need a kidney and you don't really know a doctor? So to put a bit more extremely. How beneficial is for an average Canadian to know a doctor? I would guess not that much. But for a Bulgarian to know a doctor might mean a difference between being alive or dead in some circumstances.
While I observe the neibourly assistance with postivity and nobody is arguing that's bad, especially in the time of need, there should be a clear cut that this doesn't take root in public/government organizations as this is a recipe for a society where the tumor of corruption is bigger than the body itself.
I think its sometimes hard for someone coming from a country with low levels of corruption to put in a perspective how some of those high level corruption societies work in reality.
I know that Bulgaria is unfortunately very corrupt. That hurts me too, because otherwise it would be a very beautiful country. But the neighborhood help I'm talking about is of a different kind. It's not just about burdening each other with favors and debts, but actually helping each other in difficult times and celebrating in good times. I'm not talking about trade, which brings advantages, but rather normal coexistence, which occurs naturally and exists independently of politics.
Yes, having access to a doctor is surely a good thing, and knowing one benefits you in every society.
But is it an absolute good or a relative one? Aren't there also people who forego treatments? Wouldn’t people much rather grow old and die at home than in a hospital?
Should you really sacrifice socializing for medicine when it contributes just as much to your health?
The poster is complaining about the city dwelling intelligentsia being out of touch with the everyday values and ambitions of the 'common' man. This is due to liberal Western ideals apparently. To get the same effect for a US context, you could replace 'postmodern cosmopolitan' with 'urban coastal elite'.
No, not only the "ambitions of the common man", but of man or life itself, no matter if common or exceptional (if there is such a difference at all here). I'm living in Austria, and I feel that I have to leave this country. I want to move back to Bulgaria or somewhere else, where life is wild, natural and rough. The west has become tame and sick, and I got exhausted of it. I don't fit in this society anymore, and I can't be productive under its conditions.
But you can't even say that out loud anymore, because that means "questioning the whole western ideology" and suddenly someone feels threatened, and myself becomes a criminal. I'm tired of a society where the fears of person A makes' person B a criminal, and of people lacking any decisiveness or spontaneity - and being afraid of spontaneous and decisive people. If wester culture is anything, then it is "fake". Probably the reason, why the author, "the rootless cosmopolitan" moved back to Bulgaria, and found again a sense of feeling home. I claim that the West has forgotten what "home" means. Western culture has become empty and fake - and I'm tired to explain the most obvious thing to so many people - and in the end, they don't believe you anyway. They really believe, they are part of something bigger, are very important and are going to be famous or something. Intellectual vanity and luxury and bragging.
And someone knows, very well, how to define himself and where he stands. The question is not how to objectively categorize or define you, but rather how and what you have to say about yourself.
edit: in Bulgaria, there is a common truth: life in Bulgaria is shit. But it is impossible to agree on the same truth in western societies, because that's the strong myth they rely on - that they are better, than the rest of the world. Do you get what I mean?
Anyone who is dissatisfied with the west must be out of their minds.
There are things that have now become impossible in the West.
Simply expressing unsatisfaction has become a danger for the status quo or the state.
Sorry but I can’t stand when someone takes their own dissatisfaction (which is entirely valid, it’s your life after all) and generalizes it to a grand social theory in a way that is simultaneously immensely self-important (everyone who isn’t dissatisfied in the exact same way as me is fooling themselves, no one could have a different experience from me) and deeply self-pitying (oh noo I’m a literal criminal in this society because someone had a surprised reaction to my dissatisfaction).
> But you can't even say that out loud anymore, because that means "questioning the whole western ideology" and suddenly someone feels threatened, and myself becomes a criminal.
What reality are you living in? The consensus in the west, online at least, seems to be that everything sucks and is getting worse. Personally I think that’s overwrought, but it’s certainly a sentiment that’s everywhere. It sounds like you are the one who’s struggling with the fact that some people disagree with you, which sounds like something you should be able to handle if you want to live a “wild, natural, and rough” life.
> Western culture has become empty and fake - and I'm tired to explain the most obvious thing to so many people - and in the end, they don't believe you anyway. They really believe, they are part of something bigger, are very important and are going to be famous or something. Intellectual vanity and luxury and bragging.
This is the embodiment of the meme of the guy in the corner at the party (“they don’t know…”) while everyone else is dancing happily. The fact that you feel that life in Austria is empty and fake actually does not mean that everyone else must be feeling the exact same thing and are just deluding themselves! The ability to understand that other people have different internal experiences than yourself is a really basic emotional skill.
I’m sorry that you haven’t been happy in the west. I’m sure you’re far from the only one. But your unhappiness doesn’t mean that western culture is against “life itself”, whatever that even means.
> The consensus in the west, online at least, seems to be that everything sucks and is getting worse.
It might be so in words, but it's not so in meaning. I understand what the GP means, the west has a mindset of "things are terrible and getting worse, the elite rule us, but this is still the best country in the world". The eastern mindset is more of a "this country is shit, but there are some nice things, and we try to focus on those".
It's hard to communicate a whole culture in a few comments, but the sentiment is very different.
Exactly. One of the reasons why the West feels so empty and artificial is because it has lost this complex understanding of the world and people and acts only according to simple maxims, logical sentences or final conclusions. In principle, all of life has been reduced to the pure logic of political economy and statistics. Language, thinking, arts and freedom become impoverished. Now that life is so simple and can be controlled politically and economically, even the existential problems are being reinterpreted. They suddenly become logical problems themselves, solvable through calculation. Suddenly they are overcome with optimism that they can in principle be solved, and for everyone equally. So we don't have to worry about anything anymore and can just trust that someone will find the algorithm for it.
I think the only reason people can't read between the lines anymore is because they're too quick to get hung up on words that can be used as criticism. This destroys mutual understanding immensely.
> I think the only reason people can't read between the lines anymore is because they're too quick to get hung up on words that can be used as criticism. This destroys mutual understanding immensely.
Unfortunately yes, this has become much more common now. "I'm offended by your words, therefore you have no right to say them" is a thing that is very widespread. Yes, free speech does mean that you allow poisonous ideologies to spread, but a lack of free speech means that you allow them to ossify and persist because nothing can be challenged any more.
It's an ongoing path of over-rationalisation which is developing since early modernity. The current trend of the "appification" of the entire human condition is just a late manifestation of that intellectual lineage starting at least since Descartes and Spinoza. All aspects of life are seen through a rigid, mechanistic structure of institutions, rules and behaviours. "Anecdotal experience" is often discarded for a unique "reputable" source of truth.
Wait a second. You accuse the West of being overly reductionist? Isn't that an incredibly reductionist thing to say? There isn't a monolithic "West". There's billions of people with widely divergent attitudes and beliefs.
I guess I have to take a stand on this.
I don't care about social media, I said goodbye to it a long time ago. It is even a problem to measure or evaluate the world based on social media.
So where does the feeling of people not feeling heard or understood come from?
Well, firstly, because they like to be told first and foremost that this isn't true at all. You could say anything. But you overlook the simple fact that you didn't listen to the other person when you gave your reply. People neither listened to his reasons nor asked about them, nor were interested in them.
Second, people who like to feel entitled or special have learned to simply ignore other people's problems. As Taylor Swift aptly said - 'shake it off'. This 'shacking off' occurs all the more, the deeper and more complex, i.e. more incomprehensible, your problems are to outsiders, so that an enormous effort is necessary to make them understandable. And also very compressed, because the time span of attention is also no more. On the one hand, it is often difficult to communicate, but on the other hand, interest in listening has also decreased.
Thirdly, many people probably have similar problems and therefore intuitively avoid each other. Suddenly the company of others feels exhausting, perhaps demanding an imagined care that you cannot give because your own strength is not enough, or creating a fear of rejection because you need the care of others, but they also have the right to refuse this.
So far all I’ve read are vague claims of oppression. I do sympathise that you don’t feel happy about something. Life can be a struggle and nearly everyone has their share of challenges. But based on what you have written so far I’m very unconvinced it’s anything much to do with western life because a) it’s terribly vague and b) sounds very familiar to stuff I’ve heard before from people just wanting to blame others for their own problems. I’m listening though so be specific and I’ll genuinely consider anything you have to say.
I don't know if this of any interest to you. And it is in German too, so maybe even not understandable to you. But the findings are shocking. The majority of German people are afraid to express their opinion as it strikes them.
So if you are interested in it or just want to look up how the "trend" feels in Germany, here a very actual analysis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOvG35T8NEw
Thanks for your comments I find your writing has some satisfying and interesting components to it. These are important observations— putting in words some of my own feelings of my own western society. I would emphasize also a feeling of decline: that there is a sense of helplessness with the state of society sometimes.
Replying as a 60yo American living in the Western part of the US (ie. I'm about as Westerner as it gets, I suppose)...
> I claim that the West has forgotten what "home" means.
This I mostly agree with. The America I'm familiar with is quite rootless. In fact rootlessness was encouraged even ("you should be willing to move to a new/better job"). It goes all the way back to manifest destiny - always be on the move. There's a temporary feeling about everything. Most of our buildings aren't intended to last centuries - they're intended to be knocked down when something more profitable comes along and that might happen just be in a few years.
> Western culture has become empty and fake
I agree with this as well. Style over substance. Confidence is valued over competence.
> They really believe, they are part of something bigger, are very important and are going to be famous or something.
But this part I don't agree with. I think if anything Americans in 2023 would like to feel like they're part of something bigger but that feeling has been lost for quite a while now. There's no shared vision of what America should be at this point like there mostly was 40 or 50 years ago. That common vision has shattered into a million pieces especially over the last 10 years or so. We're the most isolated people on earth.
> There are things that have now become impossible in the West. Simply expressing unsatisfaction has become a danger for the status quo or the state.
I don't think you've been listening. There's plenty of expressed dissatisfaction - I just did above. Social media is rife with dissatisfaction.
> Just because you can't free yourself from your nihilistic mental wheel, you have to conjure up and condemn the entire collective. Herein lies the birth of all 'structural arguments', I claim, ad hoc. 'My dissatisfaction must have structural reasons, otherwise I wouldn't be dissatisfied.'
> The west has become tame and sick, and I got exhausted of it. I don't fit in this society anymore, and I can't be productive under its conditions.
I can't help but notice the connection here though, your complaints certainly sound like attempts to conjure up and condemn the entire collective to explain your dissatisfaction. It might be worth reflecting on that.
I'm curious about your perspective, but I'm unable to understand these abstractions. Can you give me some examples? What fears of person A makes person B a criminal? What parts of western culture are "fake"? What do you mean by "fake"? Or by "tame and sick"?
You sound a lot like Holden Caulfield - a quintessential part of Western Culture.
> But you can't even say that out loud anymore, because that means "questioning the whole western ideology" and suddenly someone feels threatened, and myself becomes a criminal.
That seems paranoid and irrational. I can say anything and criticize anyone from a Western country without issues (as long as the criticism is valid, not libel). I can't do that in China or Russia, which are the least Westernized countries.
> edit: in Bulgaria, there is a common truth: life in Bulgaria is shit
Life here is awesome. I welcome you to visit some places in Latin America for a real taste of shit life. You are really not aware of how good you have it. There is a whole different world outside of Europe. :)
Yes, social media seems to exist to create outrage. But so much of it seems to be outrage for outrage's sake. Like other things it seems to have no resonant permanence. it seems to be manufactured for a purpose, then abandoned, or worse, endlessly recycled.
On the other hand, raising items of concern about some other things get enormous pushback (and quick down votes.) Things like-
Does the military really need 777 billion dollars? Why are health-care outcomes so disparate? Why is the US so far behind socially (workers rights, maternity leave, et al)? Why is the answer to another school shooting more guns? Why is building housing in my neighbourhood so hard? How is our life and lifestyle contributing to climate change? Why does climate change even matter?
In the US (and Europe etc) the comfortable middle class is so scared of change, any change at all, that they'll do anything to keep the status quo. And where there has been change there's a desire to rewind the political clock, to return to "happier times" (where, incidentally , wages were $10 a week, a detail lost in inflation discussions.)
Change is scary. Suggesting things could change for the better scares a lot of people who are confortable-enough. So yes, Expressing dissatisfaction with certain things which seem to strike at the heart of that comfortableness is thus not OK.
But clearly, since life is not perfect, we should create narratives explaining our current shortcomings. We need to blame -something- so better that we are presented with the issue (immigration! Gay people!) lest we start thinking for ourselves.
So yes, social media is all about dissatisfaction, but it all seems terribly shallow, self-serving, and, dare I say it, manufactured.
Sounds like you're mad that some people online don't agree with your political opinions.
Imagining that your personal politics are something that everyone would agree with if only the veil could be lifted and a mysterious "they" would stop suppressing the truth is the lowest form of political thought.
Hmm, im sorry it came across that way, that wasn't my intention. For the record I'm not personally on social media, so this wasn't meant to reflect a specific case or issue.
Rather I was trying to convey a sense that people are generally more angry about things that don't matter, while not discussing things that do matter
I make no judgements on "what is right" here, rather on the concept of some topics being "off limits".
Yes, I do find it hard to engage with issues as important as to what some actor tweeted (to get attention) when, for example, kids are scared to go to school because of school shootings. I went to school at a time and place where actual bombs were a thing, but I never felt the way kids feel today.
I wouldn't say I feel angry about this. I'm not being shot at etc. And I don't feel like the truth is bring suppressed- it's not like the actual ills of our society are a secret. I guess it's more a sense that we're fighting about the wrong things. And perhaps it suits some that we continue to do so.
Thank you. Feels good to know others think or feel alike.
It's not concrete yet, but I'm thinking about it out loud. The last time I applied for a job, I applied abroad. I don't feel fully ready to move to Bulgaria yet, but maybe later.
Most of my childhood Bulgarian friends were in the UK for many years, and some have returned. Well, I don't know yet... but it sounds nice.
You're dancing around it, and there are plausible alternate meanings for "cosmopolitans" and "postmodern cosmopolitans" and even, perhaps, "cosmopolitan intellectuals". But "rootless cosmopolitan" has an unambiguous antisemitic meaning.
No, it doesn't. It might be unambiguous in some cultures or some circles, but it's not globally unambiguous.
For example, I didn't even think of it until you pointed it out. I disagree with a lot of the sentiment in Vektorceraptor's comments, but I immediately grasped their meaning behind "rootless cosmopolitan".
Maybe it's because I hail from the same region. I was born in what was Yugoslavia back then and is now Serbia, and I left when I was 20. I spent 14 years in South America, and another 10 here in the US, and I guess that makes me one of Vektorceraptor's "rootless cosmopolitans": someone who has been exposed to different cultures and can live in them, but doesn't really feel at home in any of them.
So no, "rootless cosmopolitan" might sound to you like a dog whistle for "Jew", but it doesn't have to mean that on a culturally diverse site like this one.
EDIT: It might be worth reflecting on the fact that English is not a native language for everyone here. When picking words, some of us might make a suboptimal choice. Ask yourself whether you would have had the same reaction if Vektorceraptor had picked "uprooted" instead of "rootless".
Edit: Also, I don't really know whether Kenarov is in any way Jewish but it's not hard for me to imagine someone using the term satirically but not intending to (at least, not strongly) evoke its antisemitic aspect. I don't think that really works in English and aimed at a Western audience but people do irony-recycle the old slogan tropes quite a bit and it's a linguistic theme throughout the piece.
Yeah that's a good page and covers the weirdness of the term well. You read 'rootless cosmopolitan' in English and think 'ah yes, Soviet antisemitism and Stalin's abortive final purge'. And that's not at all wrong! But the term as used by the Soviets is not a simple euphemism like, dunno, 'urban youth' is in the US.
The ideological terms where picked fairly carefully with an eye towards 'ideological soundness' and had multiple purposes. 'Rootless cosmopolitan' was an antisemitic dogwhistle, it was also part of a deliberate effort to shift to a more Russia-centric Soviet ideology. In a way it was also a Russian dogwhistle so tptacek was kind of right after all, completing the pedanticircle.
I'm just kicking back waiting for y'all to resolve this.
I regret (and did even at the time) using the words "dancing around" --- I was just waking up (let's not discuss the unhealthiness of "commenting on HN" being one of the first things I did after regaining consciousness) and even as I wrote it was thinking "this conveys more intentionality than I mean to".
So for that bit, I apologize! People still should aggressively avoid the term. I only saw this thread because I've been on a sort of comment bigotry scavenger hunt with "rootless cosmopolitan" as one of the items.
I don't think there's really anything wrong with your comment, it's a triggery term and jumped out at me in the original piece itself where the author uses it to ironically self-describe. It's a little weird (or maybe he is also Jewish) but I think I get the usage. He's written previously about Bulgaria's Roma community and the discrimination they continue to face so I don't think he's trying to start any shit.
I wouldn't casually use it in English, though, precisely for the reasons you outline.
Thomas was asserting that "rootless cosmopolitan" was an antisemitic slur that Vektorceraptor deliberately applied to Kenarov. I asserted that the knowledge and usage of that expression is not nearly as universal as Thomas claimed. Thomas clarified that it's a Russian dog whistle.
I've just finished reading the essay you linked there. How does it fit in this discussion?
Kiš (who was of Jewish descent) was piled on by people in the Communist intelligentsia who were ostensibly criticizing him and his literature for being exactly that term and stirring up "fake accusations of nationalism", but when the masks came off in 1988-91 turned out to be exactly the sort of nationalists they called him (and ended up praising people like Milorad Pavić who really were what they seemed on the tin). Kiš's essay has to be situated in that context. When he talks about the "national key" he is calling out the Communist party policy of ethnic parity via rotation as being an eyewash because the apparatchiks are closet people "who see themselves only in others"
The connection with your posts is tenuous and based on pedantry. When I objected to @tptacek's assertion that the meaning of the expression you used is globally unambiguous, I did so on the grounds that not everyone comes from the same cultural milieu and I used my own as an example, mentioning that I'm originally from Yugoslavia.
This provided @selimthegrim with the opportunity to use Danilo Kiš as an alleged example of how the expression was also used in Yugoslavia, not that I can find anything to verify that claim.
Suffice it to say that I don't know anyone from my generation who has even heard this expression, much less used it, and it's certainly not part of the cultural milieu in which my generation grew up.
Like I said, it's just pedantry, and not of the good, informative kind we can see in sibling threads, where the interesting background and nuances of the expression are highlighted for purposes of enlightening the readers. Rather, it's terse, opaque kind of pedantry whose purpose I fail to understand, unless it's to stubbornly double down on the claim that the expression you used is universally unambiguous and instantly recognizable to everyone.
Oh no, sorry, I think I got you wrong. It was actually some "Thomas" who accused me of something. You actually understood my first intention very well. So a little bit confused. But be that as it may, this thread has been taken too far anyway. I apologize for not following the whole thread and accusing you of something false.
Nope. I see you're a fan of Kiš. I haven't read his stuff, apart from the essay you linked in another comment.
I'm still trying to figure out what you're trying to say, though.
If your point is that there was plenty of bigotry in old Yugoslavia, then yeah, I know that. It's still alive and well in the remnants of it. The casual bigotry and rampant nationalism are part of the reason why I'm still "rootless", because I wouldn't fit in with my compatriots anymore.
But none of that was really the point here. The point is that a phrase might be very well recognized by some people here and totally unknown to others who might stumble into using it by accident.
I mean, I don't actually know if Vektorceraptor was being deliberately antisemitic or not. Maybe Vektorceraptor did know it and its antisemitic connotations and used it like that on purpose. Or maybe not, maybe it meant what I read from it and described in my reply.
Yeah, it's fascinating to read the history of that expression, and to find out it's not a "Western", but a Soviet expression. But I'd like to offer a gentle reminder that the countries that comprised the Soviet Union are one set, and the countries that used to be in the Soviet sphere of influence is another set, and they're not the same set.
Your post resonated with me and you have a well-structured description of this sentiment. Are there any books/articles that you can recommend about this issue?
Speaking of gajde, one of my favorite ever music recordings is this rendition of Delio Haidutin on Music Idol Bulgaria of all places [1]. That song is also what was sent up on the golden CD on the Voyager. But I like this version better :-)
For me it seems like you interpret a lot into the text as an opposition from you own believes.
It’s seems somewhat unreasonable how you claim for true values of an real working class life while typing text into a keyboard that for certain some of those cosmopolitan has invented back in the days.
You live in a too simplified model for whatever reasons imo
The claim that it is only cosmopolitans or progressives who advance progress and the course of the world, which is made without any evidence and is only an expression of your own bias and preference, cannot be made in this way. You neither really know who worked on it under what conditions and with what personality, nor do you have the right to attribute to them values that you personally like.
It is precisely these unjustified attacks that in reality do not advance the world, but rather destroy it from within, because they pretend to have something, namely objective validity, but in reality they are just very personal evaluations and ideas that are imposed on others in a way that can clearly be described as arrogant and insulting. Anyone who loses people's favor in this way need not be surprised if they turn their backs on them.
Where did I claim that only ? I just have some elderly innovators in my personal life who invented important laser technologies which are not crucial in every day life and they are exactly those cosmopolitans you were talking about.
I just wanted to give you another perspective
Then of course I can understand you very well. In such an environment, happiness and optimism thrive much more easily. I think you're lucky to be surrounded by people like that.
As Tolstoy said: 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'
But could you then maybe try to explain me your post once more cause maybe I missed it. I thought you were saying that the cosmopolitan people don’t produce valuable things compared to normal labour aka white collar vs blue collar. For which I responded that ofc the educated people of the cities produced values but at a more complex often times abstract level. For instance information technologies, chemistry, medicine to name a few.
I think the two groups are separable. Most real scientists and engineers I know are mostly focused on methods and data. They don't waste their time with cosmopolitan ideas and they recognize their own ignorance in areas like politics.
All right, they can go ahead and bury their head in the sand until like Landau, Kapitza, Khalatnikov, Sakharov, Orlov and Shubnikov it catches up with them.
The whole piece reads like superficiality dressed in sophistry to a maddening degree. Like a messy soup of wishful thinking inspired by the style of Georgi Gospodinov
Hey, can you please not post like this to HN? We have to ban accounts that do. Don't get me wrong—I understand and personally enjoy this sort of barbed satire, but we can't allow it on HN because it evokes a cascade of garden-variety internet slop, most of which is flammable. This is the inescapable fate of a large+open internet forum, so we need you to make your substantive points in a different way here.
I feel like this article could be a lot better, but it stopped in its metaphorical tracks, turned its turrets and started shooting darts at US readers. All for the sake of controversy/publicity.
But TFA's points can traverse the cheapness easily, just a small push:
> The States felt like an old place, weirdly older than Europe, a place where, for all its breathless movement, time seemed to have stopped. There was too much of everything: rules, work, wealth, poverty, guns, art.
Many HN readers are probably familiar with how does it feel to start a greenfield project. The magic that happens on a greenfield project is not so much about your beliefs or your open mind, it's more about all the other people mentally unblocking you and not putting spokes in your wheel.
So, yeah, if the whole hierarchy crumbles and entire lifetimes of curated opinions, thoughts, social norms become garbage, people let others be. For a time.
I'm just pointing out that there is a specific recipe offered here for unblocking "the time", and that recipe has a huge cost.
> Perhaps that was why the Communist regimes all across Eastern and Central Europe collapsed in the final run. Not so much because of their beleaguered economies, although that was an important factor, but because no one believed anymore.
Hah, that alone? Roman Empire was falling for hundreds of years (thousand, actually, if you count Byzantium).
Actually two factors were needed for Communist downfall.
1. Lack of belief.
2. A better model how to prosper, proven and readily available just across the border (or two borders).
If you try to have your career go the same way as you would expect in Western Europe/USA - go to the best school, get the best internship in the best company and be rewarded for following the rules you'll be infinitely disappointed in this country. There is no shortage of people who feel unrewarded and unappreciated for their qualifications and credentials.
But if you try to make your own way - getting a skill by practicing yourself and searching out people who need that skill it might work surprisingly well and take you far.
Btw if you enjoy the linked writing you should check out Time Shelter, it won the Booker prize recently.