We statesmen and all behave like small minds in a small country. Which is otherwise not even technically true, writes Ivaylo Noisey Tsvetkov. What is this small Bulgarian world due to?
For more fun, let's try a paraphrase of the unsung geniuses of the inimitable Russian humorous tradition - Ilf and Petrov. Along with the great Bulgarian world, in which great Bulgarians and great things lived and live, there is also a small world with small people and small things. Lactobacillus bulgaricus was invented in the great Bulgarian world, Yovkov's military narratives were written, a round-the-world voyage was made with a two-masted yacht, the legendary record of Stefka Kostadinova was set, and Deacon Levski personally created an entire revolutionary committee network under the nose of the empire.
In the small Bulgarian world, Payner's music was invented, the pepper oven was built and the modern Bulgarian political crime, sorry - system, was organized. In the big world, people were guided by the desire to benefit Bulgaria. The small Bulgarian world is far from such lofty tasks. Its inhabitants have one aspiration - to survive crookedly through petty or larger corruption, so as not to experience the feeling of hunger.
The grand direction is absent
Actually, the latter is not entirely true - the feeling of hunger in recent years has been replaced by the feeling of overeating everything and at any cost, as if tomorrow someone will officially cancel pleasures and the fleeting drive for happiness at any cost. And here justly looms the question of how we have become both a nation of petty urges towards self-hedonism and a nation of our own little world without much direction.
Was it because of the opening of the great floodgates of (self)hatred in forums and social networks? Was it, and is it somehow, the national disdain for the observance of general rules of living that gradually prevailed? Is it the gargantuan appetite for consumption in the self-made middle class? Is it that unearthly and somehow embedded in mental software eternal trickery, the ingrained attempt to cheat the system? A "poor man - living devil" type, which today has turned homo bulgaricus into the irreversible self-centered "tarikat" without a gram of moral compass, regardless of stratification floors?
Probably all of this in total, but also something else - susceptibility to propaganda, be it our own or foreign. With the digital revolution, one would think that the general IQ would rise in direct proportion to the free access to all information, but alas, it did not. The opposite happened - in a geometric progression, the shared Bulgarian narcissistic disorder increased, the feeling that everything is done to you, and systematic efforts are for the losers in the race of life. And this happened for a maximum of two generations - the grandparents longed for more and more frequent meat on the table, and the grandchildren and now great-grandchildren have not seen any poverty since the beginning of the century. Moreover, they don't see the continued deprivation and shameful poverty in certain areas of the country, and how the once traditional urge to build up seems somehow stupid, loser.
Why do we let the environment around us decay?
I also have a personal example - with a Sofia and historically poor village, Popovyane, the one with the storks, to which I am related by blood. On the hill above it was a magnificent school building, late Viennese Secession, built by some man from the village before September 9 who had studied in Vienna. Imagine the Marston House of "Salem" with Lot" of Stephen King - a "mansion" towering over the village, surrounded by a pristine pine forest. Imagine the stylistic paradox of what such a building is doing over a poor village in East Skopje. Today, this building is half-ruined, the windows, according to the theory of James K. Wilson and George Kelling, are broken, and in the whole village there is only one living force and technique - the restaurant in the center, titled clearly with a wink "Bistro Popovyane". And it is 35 kilometers from the center of Sofia. I am not told what I have seen, say, in Northwestern Bulgaria.
Why do I mention it? Because in the small Bulgarian world, which has taken over us culturally and in every way, the systems for support and in general for public welfare at the expense of the personal literally do not function. And when I walk through ruins in Bulgaria, I always ask myself why. Especially because of the depression that doesn't go away and won't go away after seeing part of Poland.
The answer, if we are going to be true anthropologists, does not exist, or at best it is complicated. On the one hand, the question "why don't we maintain the environment" gives us food for research, and on the other - we must ask ourselves about the very way of thinking of today's Bulgarians with certain opportunities. It's easy to sew this generalized image of the potential investor as a mental retard - it's more difficult to understand why the person in question does not, in principle, ennoble the environment in which he lives his newfound quasi-luxury life.
I think it is again the small Bulgarian world that we have surrendered to. And it's as if we've tacitly agreed - because of our tendency to let life and events "carry" us rather than guide them - because someone else will take care. I'm always looking for someone else, I'm still wandering on a path that I don't see the end of.
What could be the new national idea?
My explanation is related to the next, third or fourth accumulation of so-called initial capital, which directly affects the political leaders who project the same model - enter politics to fix your life. And they go in and go in.
Ergo, it is most difficult to create a new elite. You know - there was one before the fledgling communists in the late 1940s shook it up. Then, after the 1970s, the crooked left created another, late communist, after which Overton seemed to open the window. And through it came mainly night butterflies, which do not live long, but repeat the same pattern. This, in turn, led to the feeling, supported by social networks, that it can be done without anyone, that there is no need for a long-established authority, because this same authority "blows" into nowhere, when everyone is already an unshakable authority of the "he'll tell me" type.
It all boils down to something very simple: where is this country going and is there a next national idea. I am right-wing in my gut, and it breaks my heart to say it, but nevertheless, it seems to me that the so-called "welfare state", i.e. a state that tries to at least partially suppress inequalities and places the social well-being of its citizens on a pedestal. Paradoxically, if something like this happens, the right will have a field day, i.e. a big holiday.
The problem is cultural, not political
And why am I even talking about the small Bulgarian world? It's very simple - because we behave like small minds in a small country. Which is otherwise not even technically true. As long as the scope of thinking itself is limited and small, we will never even catch up with Lithuania, let alone Poland.
The problem is cultural, not political. Everyone already longs for everything to be simple, for it to be first level, for no one to strain intellectually. The intellectual labor proletarians in the national media crush everything differently as if they graduated from the same night school. And the general moral compass, so far as there is one, points all the time to the southeast, to the original Oriental.
If even one person thinks about the fact that modern Western culture wants to equate everyone to its former prerogatives, that would be a kind of victory. My feeling is that we are carrying each other culturally through this new and intolerable world where the commandment is that there are absolutely no authorities. Even the swimmer Leon Marchand or the writer Michel Welbeck. Or that the authorities are already of the "for a little while" type. and attention to them lasts seconds before we scroll something else on Instagram or TikTok.
Let's not surrender to the small Bulgarian world!
And that is why I am talking about a small Bulgarian world. It has been crushed to a ball by the big media, which generously cover nothing at all - for example, the ridiculous stupidity about the semi-disintegration of the DPS or the a priori impotent attempts at a government, but they are mostly excited by the crocodile in Botunets.
What else, you ask. For example, people who do not want an oriental version of "development". People who don't bet on the clay a priori, but on a possible potter who knows that the building of our common being is not one-story.
And here to help William James: consciousness, he says, is possible only through the existential, i.e. through the probable possible, which is not much for us.
There is a need for an exit from the small Bulgarian world, and an urgent one. And to show the world that we are not - if you will - the inert material that certain politicians think we are. All our lives, for generations, we seem to live in the smallness of little ones, and that is simply not true. And it is not fair to a really big Bulgarian world in which we can make a quantum leap, as the Romanians did. In short: enough with this "little" Bulgarian, closed life, and more than enough with "whoever hates us, let him be on his stomach".
Enough with the nec plus ultra - the understanding that we are of modest means and can't do more than a moment on. But civil and all courage is required, as well as a general prescription where to go.
This courage is gone, our shaky legs are bequeathed to us by communism - let's be careful with big brother, let's humble ourselves, not to face ourselves and say, well, we were wrong, we'll repent, but we will also follow a new ideal. Who is this new ideal? It's very simple - to beware of the poisonous socialism that sprouted in the soul of Etienne Lantier, and not to leave our sick and slower ones to the whims of fate.
In short, let's not give in to the small Bulgarian world, but make it big - with every action and thought. Is it that hard?
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This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and of DV as a whole.