I now know what is the reason for the deplorable state in which our country and people are .
First of all, what exactly is our situation? Stuck up to our necks in senseless consumption, never in all our glorious centuries-long history as a country that still retains its original name have we been so rich. I'm not saying it's nice, but it's a fact. When all are rich, practically no one is rich by comparison; general enrichment does not make people wiser and calmer, but more spoiled and capricious.
Ivan Stambolov-Sula commented on this for Tribune.bg.
You can't find workers because no one wants to be a father, everyone wants to be a boss or some kind of tariqat.
Everyone wants to be grandiose, to be the most cultured and the most educated, with a scornful mouth to give intelligence to the inferiors (which in his eyes is almost everyone else) and tell them that nothing about them it doesn't make sense because they are so simple that they don't even understand how simple they are. Except that they stand before the world, exalted, because by some perverse accident he was born in this backward and savage territory, which does not deserve him. Can you imagine that you, from the height of your humanitarian culture, know who Sivushka and Belcho are and where they are from, and suddenly it turns out that among the population that splashes at the base of your pedestal, there are such freaks who do not know!
Wait let me ask you something. What do you think TV competitions are for? To test your intelligence? Not at all. They are not done to suppress the self-esteem of the philistine – the one with the bar in front of the TV, – but to make him feel grand. They ask simple questions to various fools, they fail to answer, and the philistine is filled with self-satisfaction and grandeur: “Egati the fools! We are not a people, but a corpse! Look at me! I know who Sivushka and Belcho are!“. And he is happy.
Television is designed to evoke three basic feelings – fear, anger and happiness. Do not doubt, my dear, that even the simplest television script is capable of making you feel like an illiterate molecule. But don't do it, because you're a viewer, you're a consumer, you're a valuable media commodity, and you need to feel good to keep ad prices up.
Tell me, you know who Sivushka and Belcho are and that gives meaning to your life – do you know who Slav Keya and Arap Merjan are, for example, from the iconic revival work of Pop singer Mincho Kanchev “Vidrica“?
You don't know how you would know if you haven't studied this text!
And I, who have studied it due to the specifics of my education, should I now say about you: “Bassy the fool! He doesn't know who Slav Keya and Arap Merjan are! We dig the bottom! We have no country! I am ashamed to be Bulgarian!“? If you haven't read “Alice” and I ask you who the Tweedleddies and Tweedledums are, and you tell me they're medieval Scottish castles or early Bentleys, should I laugh and point a crooked finger at you?
And what is this fetish for unnecessary knowledge? We cannot know everything. We shouldn't want to know everything. The thirst for knowledge is a gluttony like any other. Some kind of gluttony. I, for one, don't want to know everything. I don't want to know too much. It's enough for me to remember where to look when I need a fact. And then to forget it. Intelligence is not a huge stock of information, but the ability to make an adequate and useful decision in an unfamiliar situation. That's it.
The things a man does not know are far more than those he knows. It is a sin to examine and prove everything. Creation is above all a mystery. And what the heretic said – rector of the University of Prague and ideologue of the Czech Reformation, said it neither with irony nor with bitterness, but with respect. Who is this heretic? What did he say? It's good not to know when you know who Sivushka and Belcho are!
„The young participant” in the televised competition, with whom they have been making fun of for more than a week, there is only one fault – when they asked him who Sivushka and Belcho were, he should have simply said “I don’t know”.
No one is required to know, and ignorance of such a matter does not make anyone stupid or ignorant.
If you don't know “On the furrow”, it is equally plausible that Sivushka and Belcho are rabbits, guinea pigs, canaries or fish. What's more: if you don't know what they are, it is much more worthy to try to guess, because this speaks of some thought, and not of a dusty warehouse of unnecessary knowledge a la Dimo Padalski in “A minute is long” (What is the name of the biggest bus stop in Ethiopia?). Bunnies. Why shouldn't they be bunnies when you hear them for the first time! They are more likely to be that than a folk song duet.
And here, perhaps, we should ask the question: is it a terrible tragedy that works like “On the furrow“ drop out of the curriculum? Of course it isn't. This narrative is biased and relevant to another reality that no longer exists. It reflects societal relationships that no longer exist, yet the text requires us to engage emotionally with those relationships. Instead of the lives of peasants plowing with oxen, school literature is better about urbanization in the industrial and post-industrial age. For peasant grandparents, for their immigrant children and for their grandchildren who are now citizens. Then in literature there will be the same clash of cultures that there is in everyday life, and children will more easily build their moral values.
I just ask you not to include in the textbooks the texts of the official breathers, where they also do not know what they want to say. Or stories about homosexuals and transgenders. That then we will take the sops. Besides, I think that Carthage should be destroyed.