Bulgarian society jumps from one political savior to another, impatiently expecting him to lie to it. Why is the savior syndrome still alive? Ivaylo Noizi Tsvetkov explains:
We wait and wait for someone to save us. This someone is usually lowered as a deus ex machina ("god from the machine") in Bulgarian politics with the huge expectation of restarting the system - by the way, always lowered, and does not descend on its own. And now, in the context of Radev, it is time to realize something important - in this expectation of ours of a "savior" It is both childish and a product of the sense of repeated national and political failure cultivated during the transition, generously encouraged by the political class itself.
Through this feeling, Bulgarian society itself likes to get into a kind of cognitive trap, in which there is also a serious element of self-victimization and self-deception like "lie to me, I love you".
The society that wants to be lied to
You probably remember the previous "saviors" - Simeon "Two", who self-produced himself on the wings of the fragile understanding of freedom and democracy. After which he overthrew the only meaningful government of the transition, dabbled a bit in politics, enriching certain "yuppies", and then ended up as an exceptional Scottish fighter for a few properties. You also remember the savior with the leather jacket, Borisov, who elegantly left the Lower Land to be elevated to something like "father of the nation", at the head of the largest possible clientelist party in history.
But here the question is whether you really remember, because the savior syndrome is still alive. Through the same elementary fishing hooks - when it gets really difficult, what else but a "savior" who can somehow restart the feeling of a new beginning in the social software.
And what could be easier than for society to peck at an empty hook? Not for nothing, but because this collective mental breakdown has long been described in psychology and far from only political. The well-known danger is actually that this society will become the victim of yet another lie, simply because, contrary to logic, it wants to be lied to.
Here's how simple it is: the "convenient lie" syndrome is something that the susceptible mind wants to hear, and which reaffirms its anxiety about a world and reality that it cannot or refuses to deal with. This is a state in which our average voter prioritizes its emotional comfort at the expense of understanding reality. "Don't tell me, I don't want to know and I don't care" - a classic attempt to avoid anxiety, internal conflict or depression. This is where the cognitive electoral trap I am talking about originates - a person is able to accept at face value the so-called psеudologia fantastica or the pathological lies and promises of the "savior". Without knowing that the person in question is probably telling himself through positive pseudo-narratives like "I will clean up the oligarchy".
What does this psychological weakness stem from?
And why are we so susceptible to this? My explanation: a general psychological weakness inherited from the collectivist culture and closed groupness in the family. The need to be lied to - even when you suspect it - is a strong quasi-emotion, described by Jung as part of the "collective unconscious" and related to the inability to assess reality as non-traumatic.
It is a kind of cognitive-emotional and self-imposed comfort, in which you take no responsibility for anything and are never guilty - "and this one lied to us in the end, we won't vote for him". Accordingly, you overthrow and deny yourself the very civil right, because you were lied to or you lied to yourself. Hence a large part of the 60 percent who have not voted recently. Let's really see, right in the midst of the digital era, what part of Bulgarian society is willing to cast its trust in yet another "savior".
And how "tribal" we are, plus our learned tendency towards conformism, because the image of the "savior" is also semiotic - he is a strong hand, he looks strictly, promises everything and knows that there is no public corrective system to hold him accountable. Whenever it was.
Is there a way out?
The way out of this collective stupidity of ours? It will be slow, while we waste time in feigned anger, especially on social media, while somehow it is written into your "software" for generations that you must quickly listen and go after the supposed strong.
Hence the eternal frustration, when you burden the next "savior" with fantastic expectations without a realistic view of the future, like a new nationwide project or at least a narrative. Good news is not emerging here.
Because the result is usually another Bulgarian political bangaranga.
This text expresses the opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and the State Gazette as a whole.