Comment by Ivaylo Noizi Tsvetkov:
Come on, for starters, a few school questions, I'm improvising. Who is Grandpa Evtim? Who is Enyo? Who is Levent Nikola? Who are the Zhekov brothers? Who is Gergana from the village of Bisercha? Who is Rachko Prdleto? Who is Guncho? Who is Sarandovitsa? And who the hell is Bone Kraynenetsa?
And maybe like this: who is Eugene de Rastignac? Who is Rodolphe Boulanger? Who is Tatyana Larina? And Blefuscu?
General literary culture, but nothing more
You've all heard of that young girl in “Get Rich“, to whom Elin Pelin's Belcho and Sivushka sounded like rabbits, hence this quick “test“: all of the above are characters from literary works that are part of the MANDATORY curriculum for upper grades in Bulgarian schools at the moment. How many were you able to answer, honestly, without Google? (Don't count me, it took me 4-5 minutes, I work “to know“, this is a different kind of tragedy.)
Okay, here they are in turn: the abbot from your grandmother Iliytsa (“A Bulgarian“); the cafe owner from “Seraphim“; the handsome man from “At the Harvest“; the champion brothers from “Epic of the Forgotten“; “the White-legged“ from “The Spring of the White-legged“; the little soul-traitor from “Under the Yoke“; the peasant crushed by fate in “On the Wire“; the sexy innkeeper from “Evenings at the Antimov Inn“; the plowman-owner of the aforementioned Belcho and Sivushka from “In the Furrow“; the village levent/Parisian parvenu from “Grandfather Goriot“; Madame Bovary's lover; the tragic beloved of Eugene Onegin. And Blefuscu is a light joke, because they are the enemies of Lilliputia, and represent a satirized France from the beginning of the 18th century in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's novels. I repeat: all this is currently taught in literature from the 7th to the 12th grade.
If you scored more than 5 without help, congratulations - you are educated. In the sense that you have a very good general literary culture. And that's it. (It is no coincidence that I am sparing elementary speculations like “who are Beba, Veselka and Mario“.)
Where is the profiled knowledge?
And why “so much“? Very simple – the value of encyclopedic knowledge (otherwise worthy of admiration) has long given way to the neo-value of the profiled - spurred by the digital revolution, especially for younger generations. I.e. I have one good news and one bad news - Generation Z eventually learns and knows only what interests them along the path of dreams of influencership and choosing a discipline in a Western college; this is actually the same news, you choose whether it is good or bad.
And, contrary to the Turkish outrages “but how come“, I don't consider this to be much of a problem, because it is not much different from the situation with young people in a bunch of other First World countries (I don't even want to get started on general culture in the US; my wife's son is currently studying in Orlando and feels both defeated and amazed how it is possible that almost none of his American classmates know anything about anything outside of their very narrow interests).
Our leaders today are amateurs in politics
Specifically, our problem is not with “but they don't read, they don't know, they're failures“ and other nonsense: our problem is with the power “elite“, because we are not actually producing a politically educated elite. I still wonder if anyone in parliament (besides Lyuben Dilov-sin) knows who Rastignac or Guncho is; I am far more hurt by the fact that we do not have and do not seem to have professionally educated political leaders, without exception. For no other reason than because part of the "impasse" we have reached is due to a very simple fact - all of today's leaders, from Borisov to Petkov and Peevski (I will deal with Radev separately), were and are amateurs, but by force of circumstances and completely different qualities they have simply been pushed to the surface. But, my God, not like cream, but like oily floating spots in that borscht of Ilf and Petrov, in which there was something non-commissioned officer.
And there is no way that these supposedly "proletarian" by origin leaders from all countries (come together, but another time) can convince with an educational biography that they are something really more than the masses. Accordingly, the masses use social media to maliciously nullify them.
And it shouldn't be like that. In every generation, there is a minority of well-educated people and a relatively large mass of poorly educated people (you don't even suspect the monstrous hidden illiteracy in our country, especially after the Soviet era, and even then), and the once-vaunted tendency to know a little about everything (including the capitals) has long been put away in the box with the black-and-white paper photos with jagged edges. However, it seems to me that we have aped our common idea of a political leader: he is usually either a village sly, or someone who has been pushed to the top by the will of the old-new services, or both at the same time. Alas, this also applies to certain supposedly “democratic“ leaders, both in history and now.
How do we choose our leaders
I am far from dreaming of having Sanna Marin, Ana Brnabić, Keir Starmer; in older times Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher or Vaclav Havel. However, all of the above are really well educated in some of the best universities in the world and, mind you, have turned this good education into a constructive political career. I hear you, I hear you: but some from Harvard. First, a person may have graduated from Harvard or even the Martian University, but that does not make him a great political leader per se; if that were the case, Heisenberg or some famous philosopher like my colleague Heidegger would have been wonderful state leaders. No, it does not work like that, but it works on another basis - is a good education mandatory for a politician (especially a reformist) or should we let him learn on the go, often captivated by his otherwise inexplicable charisma.
We are victims of the second approach. If at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century we voted for personalities like (say) Konstantin Stoilov, Alexander Malinov and even Dimitar Petkov, today we are the electoral heirs of the village cunning "of the people", you know who he is, and this is largely the reason for the current neo-historical zug-zwang in which we have fallen.
Why young people in our country don't vote
And perhaps a far more accurate word is indeed "impasse", as I mentioned. This is a term from card games, but also the moment when there is no progressive solution, that is, it is blocked by disputes. Of course, Bulgarian political leaders actually enjoy this "impasse"; they both provoke it and benefit from it, especially when it happens to be self-created by the results themselves; and if you are annoyed by the fact that there is no way forward (except for the eighth and ninth elections), and especially if you want to plan your business at least in the short term, you have no chance. Because culturally you are different from political leaders.
Okay, we do not have educated politicians, especially in special faculties. But WHAT we choose is of great importance, not WHO. That is why all the 18-30 year olds I know do not vote, because they channel themselves into something that excludes the various untraceable and “senile“ arguments about politics in Bulgaria.
And until the army of young non-voters sees something like a relatively young “influencer“, and not the sloppy suits in parliament, they will not know that they will increasingly depend on them. Note: the Bulgarian political game is lagging behind generational, not to say “gerontocratic“ (despite the new beginnings). It is primarily television (even in the new era of “I don't have a TV“) and it smells stale. Accordingly, the cognitive connection between “I decide with my vote“ and “some old and fat people actually decide“ is currently broken. Or it is well-aware. In the way that modern philosophers everywhere try to explain the world through the bad karma of the feeling of political non-representation.
What leaders does Bulgaria need
All this is seemingly easily solved, you want some kind of biblical way out, exodus - relatively young and energetic people should take over political leadership, as happened in countries like Finland. They will not know who Bone Krainenetsa is (not that the current fat or thin ones do), just as the young people in Finland do not know who the greatest national hero Mannerheim is or do not necessarily read Jussi Valtonen. But the young Finns elected the incredible quasi-liberal Sanna Marin. She did not win them over with some stupid woke theory, but with something simple - let's modernize this country, bring it into the 21st century.
Alas, this is not the case here. Everyone here would impose a completely new order of exercising power. They may be from Harvard, they may be from Sofia, but in our country too they must wave liberal democracy like a tattered flag - in a world in which the gerontocratic (but also uneducated) is trying to push its power "conservative" dreams and thefts as a return to traditional values.
Politicians are a kind of profession. Not every skilled or local thief, from Varna or not, carries a political baton in his backpack; just as not every talent from Banka is a politician.
That is why we are now “come and see us“, the Patriarch calls out. Then you would think about the people, and you would feel shame and remorse.