The behavior of many politicians in Bulgaria is obviously dictated by hatred for European civilization, culture and freedom. Why? Prof. Evgeniy Dainov looks for the reasons:
It increasingly seems that the emotional motivation behind the actions of many Bulgarian politicians, including representatives of the current ruling party, is hatred: hatred for the European civilization of the Enlightenment, culture and freedom. This hatred has been roaming the world for a long time, and it seems to me that we should begin to understand it.
This is not a miracle of three days - we are not faced with a fleeting mood, but a lasting attitude that determines thoughts and actions.
How hatred creates militant sects
There are easy-to-identify sources of this hatred. We know about the hatred of the savage, based on envy of civilized people. We know about the hatred of the contented slave for the free, stemming from the slave's inability to imagine what freedom is. We know what the hatred of the simpleton for the educated person is based on: the simpleton's conviction that the educated "pretends to be interesting," but is in fact just as simple.
Here comes the great Adam Smith to the rescue, who in his book "The Wealth of Nations" draws attention to the following: the simpler you are, the more invisible you are, and the more invisible you are, the more unbridled your behavior. According to Smith, when a "lower class man" enters a more developed urban environment, "he falls into invisibility and darkness. No one observes or judges his behavior, and he is very likely... to indulge in all kinds of licentiousness and vice".
However - and here is the subtlety of observation - licentiousness is paid even less attention. Therefore, he takes the next step: he gathers with his own kind in some militant religious or ideological sect. Once he has formed a sect, the simpleton begins to fight the "liberal" freer and frivolous mores of the elite in the name of some "harsh righteousness".
We have seen a stage of "harsh righteousness" in the political class in the past. Today we observe a stage of "harsh righteousness", fighting against the "collective West" and its "dissolute" mores.
Why are free people viewed with hostility?
But why does the hating simpleton consider urban mores to be dissolute? Here we return to the fundamental slave-free division, running through the works of the great philosophers from Plato to Hegel.
The slave does nothing of his own free will. His actions are determined by the orders of the master. The free man, however, determines himself. He does what he wants. This is precisely what the slave cannot understand, and that is why in his eyes freedom is "freedom", and free behavior is debauchery.
However, by speaking of debauchery, the slave betrays his complete inability to understand that where a free man is also civilized, he places his behavior within the framework of rules - not those imposed by a master, but those that he himself has made up, so that he can behave decently with other free people. However, the slave does not see this because he cannot understand it. In the behavior of the free, he sees only noise, fuss, and chaos - all things that infuriate his slave soul, which yearns for uniformity, obedience, submission, and "harsh righteousness".
For the slave, the ideal state of affairs is for everyone to do only what he is allowed to do "from above" - everyone is a slave, equal to everyone else.
The free man looks at this hostility with bewilderment and humor. He sees what Putin's ideologue at the time, Vladislav Surkov, described when he edified the Moscow political elite on how not to behave when they were "in the West":
"We look like boys from the outskirts who suddenly found themselves in the business center of the city. Noise, lights, movement, all around are full of players and smart people, merchants and moneylenders. And we step back and get confused, open-mouthed and wide-eyed. We rush into battle so as not to be thrown. They will certainly throw us if we continue to step back and open our mouths."
They can do that much
Anyone who has seen an official Russian in a Western environment knows what we are talking about. Today, in some of our politicians, we see similar provincial-Russian behavior in their contacts with our European partners, i.e. with our equal friends. They can do so much, apparently, having fallen into the whirlpool of a civilization alien to them.
This text expresses the opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and the State News Agency as a whole.