Compare that to some other states like Bulgaria or Ex-Yugoslavia, which have a more complicated memory of the communist era, and which also had a lot of conflict during the transition period. There is less of a pre-packaged “social imaginary” of what the country could be/used to be prior to the communist era - unlike Poland, which was occupied and spent a couple centuries building an oppositional identity during the Partitions/occupations.
A simpler explanation is that you swapped cause and effect: it's the countries where the economy struggled, where their people regret leaving their previous socialist economy.
Why some economies struggled less than other is something that probably requires a lot more of country-by-country investigation, rather than generalisations... But I think that a common trend might be:
How accessible (and geographically close) is the country to potential investors? Poland is close to Germany (and German investors could already find a German speaking minority, which could help bootstrap), likewise the Baltic republic are close to Finland and Sweden (Sweden is the first country to open an embassy in Estonia for example, which is arguably a prerequisite for a lot of investment in Estonia)
That's a simpler explanation, indeed. It's also wrong.
Take the 2 examples of GP. In Bulgaria, the first elections after the first president after the fall of the dictatorship was Petar Mladenov, a former politburo member. The first parliamentary elections were similarly won by the communist party.
In Yugoslavia, Milosevic remained leader for decades.
In both cases the "nostalgia" had already set in before anyone had the chance to experience any I'll effects caused by democracy.
Orthodox countries are statistically more corrupt due to relation to God and it's translation to relation to authority. This is well researched.
COWEN: Let’s say Poland, Slovenia, Czechia, which have a lot of Catholicism in their backgrounds — they seem to be converging on Western norms, living standards much more than, say, the EU members to the East: Bulgaria, Romania.
HART: Well, they had certain advantages to begin with, too, but better relations. Again, I don’t think it has any particular... To be honest, Polish Catholicism is basically culturally very much like Slavic Orthodoxy. There, you’re going to find that culturally, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are closer to one another in many ways than Catholicism in the East is with Catholicism in the West.
Trying to draw causal ties between what are very complex social histories, I just think is a mistake. There’s no way of saying one way or the other. Greek democracy flourished in the modern age for a while after Greek independence in the early 19th century, and Greece remains Orthodox, too. Even more than Poland, it is committed to a set of real democratic norms. In Poland, there are stronger reactionary forces at present than there are in Greece.
MIKANOWSKI: [...] I think that idea of an Orthodox disease is maybe a figment of geography more than a deeply cultural matrix that we think. I’m not — I think we could be optimistic about Croatia and Romania simultaneously. Bulgaria maybe too. I’m not sure that I believe in a kind of Orthodox curse. I think it has more to do with how things shook up internally in former Yugoslavia and where those countries are in relationship to that industrial core of Germany, Austria, Switzerland.Bulgaria, on the other hand, was a close ally of the Soviet Union and more historically, of Russia (at least, more of an ally than Poland.) Yugoslavia wasn't in the Soviet sphere at all and was more "indigenous" and not as repressive as the Soviet states. So in Bulgaria and Ex-Yugoslavia, the memory of the communist era is not as clearly negative as it is in Poland. (Even if it's not positive, either – it's just more murky.)
We see that even in Western countries, where a sizable set of boomers want to restore the order of the good old 50 or 60ies and vote conservative or right wing populist parties..
The question is what do the younger generations think and what portion of the population they are.
As such, you could say that choosing neo-liberal governments over communist governments doesn't make utilitarian sense for normal people, they should choose the governments that provide them with the basic necessities of life (i.e. housing and the guaranteed opportunity to earn one's living).
First of all, Poland, your example, has major human rights issues.
Even ignoring the LGBT issues (the so-called "lgbt free zones" in Poland), Poland has practically abolished abortion rights. Abortion has been denied to Ukrainian women refugees that were rape victims.
Amnesty International: Access to abortion was further limited. Criminal charges were used to curtail freedom of expression. The authorities continued to erode the independence of the judiciary. Freedom of peaceful assembly was restricted. Violations of LGBTI rights persisted.
Ironically under the Soviet Union Poland was one of the first Countries in the whole Europe (and probably the World) to have legal abortion, because communist countries did not have to please the Catholic Church (or any church).
Under Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union became the first modern state in legalizing abortions on request — the law was first introduced in the Russian SFSR in 1920
So there's that.
The second issue is nationalism, mainly far right nationalism, that spread throughout Europe from the former eastern block, that was once put under control by the Soviets.
AfD in Germany, Sweden Democrats in Sweden (despite the name they have roots in white nationalist and neo-Nazi parties), Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, Giorgia Meloni and FdI in Italy, Vox in Spain etc. etc.
Look at Milošević for an example gone really bad, former leftist, he joined ranks with far-right nationalists extremists and things went south.
A very popular representative right now in Europe is Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who took a more moderate approach but is still a far-right conservative dictator-wannabe who's causing lots of troubles to the EU.
All of the aforementioned far-right parties in Europe are allied to, or close friends with, Orban.
Third: the so called Visegrád Group formed by Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, has strong ties to Germany, which in turn means they sustain German economy by importing their goods (combined, they are the second largest export market for Germany) and vice versa.
Last, but not least, the EU has invested a lot of money in those Countries and sustained their economy to keep them in, even though their politics have raised more than an eyebrow.
So it's like the end of WW2, by looking at the numbers one could think that the war produced the economic growth in Europe, but it actually was the Marshall Plan.
p.s. Poland is far from being one of the 3 major economies in Europe
>> the law was first introduced in the Russian SFSR in 1920
Poland was never part of the Soviet Union. It became socialist and part of the eastern block only after WW2, so I doubt the legal abortion date.
Also I mean, yeah the eastern block was quite progressive in some ways, but human rights were not one of them. Some of the gain were hugely offset by the millions of people who were tortured and killed by the system. Also much more blood thirsty in the Soviet Union than in Communist Poland.
Despite oppression, people felt more safe, because there were clear guidelines to life in general. If you adhered to them, you had a boring and regulated life. Everyone had a job (it was mandatory to work), and most people could afford to own a holiday home in the countryside.
The "state" provided a life where you played along the rules and with minimum input you reaped maximum rewards. That's difficult to duplicate in a capitalistic scenario.
The older members of her family look back with fondness on that period in time which sounds strange to someone from a western country but I can sort of understand it - some of it is just the nostalgia of youth but some of it is I think caused because the freedom to make choices comes with the requirement to live with your choices.
When the state keeps the safety rail up in where you live, where you work and how you spend your leisure time you have a clear path towards how to live your life - which is a comfortable if stifled existence.
That said, the younger diaspora have a different way of looking at the world - many left to move to other EU countries because they wanted to avoid that nostalgia.
That said I truly love visiting Hungary, the history, art and food is amazing, the people are warm and friendly and the countryside is staggeringly beautiful (as is the Balaton).
It's certainly on my list of places to suggest people visit.
So our politics (in both countries) becomes reactive and unanchored, solving whatever problem seems most pressing today, and ultimately devoid of meaning. What do individuals do in such an environment? They look after themselves, they partake in consumerism, they try to protect themselves against things the state can no longer be bothered to. It's all very nihilistic, and thus the deep anomie that seems to have infected most Western societies, and the younger generations most of all.
It is not the job of the nation-state to give people a deep sense of purpose. That is a job for a church, temple, or other spiritual community. Governments which try to do that job tend to do badly, sometimes with monstrous results. They ought be separate.
And fully agree with "care for the people I can as I learn to love and be loved", but at the same time people do need some sense of "community", "togetherness", and "we're all in it together"-ness, especially in times when things are perhaps not going so well, and I do feel that's rather been lost.
It has also done that job spectacularly badly at times.
(For context, I was born there, but left almost 20 years ago. I recently spent 18 months exploring the whole country, and sadly I now agree with the above quote)
No thank you. For those who want such wider purpose, by all means, aspire away while leaving others alone to live their peaceful private ends, but it's absurd to think that a country "needs" it, or some crisis to be a good place to live. A country only needs stable, law-abiding, transparent government for decency. Considering how many places lack even that, it should be purpose enough in a basic sense, with a firm onus on the bureaucrats to provide it.
If anything, bullshit about purpose and so-called national projects has been used to justify centuries of horrific repression and destructiveness while a select few leaders impose thier specific idea of what's needed on those they can dictate to.
It does seem, however, that there are many concerning trends in social measures in western countries these days, particularly among things that have traditionally given people a sense of purpose on an individual level. So it may behoove us to discuss and think about why that may be, and what we can do collectively to inspire the kind of societal outlook that is likely to promote a different trend in those measures.
Citation? Haven't we seen a rise in despair and loneliness (and ultimately in people dying of these things), even as people's material condition got better?
Psychologically speaking on a group level it is much easier to say what we are not and define ourselves based on that than it is to develop an internal definition of ourselves.
You can see this in the history of national identities coalescing around external threats such as the American identity being sidelined for state identity until the revolution.
This is a well-studied phenomenon and contributes to the post-colonial failed states with arbitrary borders. Remove the colonial power and you’ve removed the national identity and cause massive fragmentation and dysfunction.
I’m not sure there is a solution to this in a nuclear world as it is in our biology and has served us well up until the point where we developed genocidal tools and processes which justifiable scare the developed world into relenting from defining external groups as major antagonists.
As much as a strong national identity can give great cohesion and confidence it can now also teeter the world or parts of it into apocalypse which it has basically done twice now and loomed over us a third time with the Cold War. I sense we have a new Cold War now and it has been looming for almost decade. To me this is our great filter and I am forcefully optimistic we can figure something out because the alternative is utter destruction.
I mean - why is there always someone who is eager to prove you wrong? What has western society become? So many people feel the same, yet they can't get together to agree ... why?
The problem is if you don't align with the politics of the person you're conversing with when you say that, they'll get pissed and claim you hate their country and should leave. But they'll readily turn around and also say the country is shit, just for different reasons and claim the biggest problem is people like you who are standing up for the shitty system that's in place.
No, I know and admire people for whom such complaints are distant, even annoying. People who don't have time for it. And you can just as freely and willingly decide to lead a calm and regulated life. This life is not a danger to humanity, as the postmodernists and cosmopolitans have always wanted to tell us, and I do not want Bulgaria to be 'Americanized' that way. I would rather listen to a Kaba Gaida in the mountains than have to read through a capitalist-cosmopolitan lament. The former gives me power and strength, a connection to the world, the latter just makes me sick and weak.
I know Bulgaria has its issues, but losing its uniqueness to solve them, is for me the bigger issue.
I don't see what are these postmodern, cosmopolitan and American ideas. Can you explain yourself better?
What I read was something different: The eternal search for a meaningful existence. It applies to everyone, in every continent of the globe, through their entire lives.
So if for example: I am working for an IT company, and my work deals only with improving ad technology, at some point I will feel that meaningless apprehension, because ad technology is ultimately worthless for humanity in general. (This is only an example, I don't work with ads)
Working for example in bioinformatics o biotechnology, helping people heal, would be much better. It would be meaningful. (Another example, I don't work with biotechnology)
Both technologies, both paths, are available in western countries and in other countries. It is our personal choice, and no one is forcing us to choose one over the other.
It's all a series of personal decisions, aggregated in the millions, what makes nations what they are.
Even during communism, ideology in Bulgaria was something few people cared about or believed in. It was about empty slogans in schools and public places, empty-speech by public officials and nothing much more. Private life was a different affair. It was always centered around the family and providing safety for the kids. It is a deeply-embedded instinct for self-preservation since Ottoman times. New forms of social organisation emerged under the official iron fist of the ruling party. People were doing mutual favours within a close relationship.
Even now, this is the primary form of organisation in Bulgarian society. Knowing the right people, nurturing close relationships with them, calling them for favours in difficult times, expecting to be called by them at any time.
For example, how do I know if I'm postmodern or not?
This organised performance probably goes against the sprit of your post but it’s really beautiful.
You live in a too simplified model for whatever reasons imo
But why are the two things mutually exclusive? America is not manhattan either, I'd reckon non-cosmopolitan america is larger than all of europe.
In the end, shouldn't the quality of life for the people who live there be a priority?
I always felt that the States was "tatty", more "run down" than old. Public places were considered to 'belong to nobody', so were often dirty or defaced because nobody took pride in them. Subway trains were covered in graffiti.
In many countries overseas, public places are always well looked-after because they 'belonged to all of us' rather than 'belonged to nobody'.
It's just a difference in national cultures.
Or mostly the local govs have the will and means to look after them. I don't really think people's attitudes regarding public places is that different in Europe compared to the US
Driving in and around the freeways in New York a foreign friend exclaimed "It's like everything is half finished".
I've never been able to get that out of my head.
Today, we have become citizens of a global, Brezhnevian capitalist state, which, in its failure to provide an inspiring frontier—gone are the days of Kennedy’s “New Frontiers” or Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In”—has slowly ossified and wrapped back upon itself. My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition.
(And when the author mentions a Brezhnevian state, bear in mind he actually grew up in one: he knows whereof he speaks.)
And that freedom carries the weight that now our decisions matter more, and help from our peers is less, and we can make shitty decisions that affect our lives. We can be stuck in dead-end jobs, and it will be our doing. We can be addicted to many things, like gambling, and it is our responsibility to breakout from that.
So, in a sense you are right, but in another, it's up to each person to change eternal repetition.
We are free, but only if we act on that freedom.
All representative democracy give us is the ability, collectively, to sack a government that has outlived its welcome for some reason. (What happens after that is a complete crap shoot.)
When opposition parties start to triangulate -- that is, to define their policies in terms of what the government and perceived extreme opposite are doing -- rather than by espousing a concrete ideology or policy platform, we end up with everything converging on one dominant faction's idea of how to do things: a one party state in all but name.
(Which seems to be where we are here in the UK right now, and to a lesser extent in the USA.)
If you try to have your career go the same way as you would expect in Western Europe/USA - go to the best school, get the best internship in the best company and be rewarded for following the rules you'll be infinitely disappointed in this country. There is no shortage of people who feel unrewarded and unappreciated for their qualifications and credentials.
But if you try to make your own way - getting a skill by practicing yourself and searching out people who need that skill it might work surprisingly well and take you far.
Btw if you enjoy the linked writing you should check out Time Shelter, it won the Booker prize recently.
This is because, when I step on the motherland soil I don't feel like I have mission or that I'm part of a large community. Instead, it feels like it just exists on its own and its up to me to figure out what what I want to do. I can see that things are happening, people are up to something but I don't feel the flow - if you know what I mean.
Especially in Turkey, being a collectivist society, is very limiting because it makes me feel like I must have an explanation for everything I do. It's like everyone has a well defined persona and everything is done in certain informal way and you don't have even the slightest wiggle room. Things change for you only as much as you can change your persona. For example, if you manage to get into a good school you suddenly enter in a new space with a different wiggle room. You don't feel the world much, all you can operate in is the society and you can't get out of it.
Germany, I find it interesting. It made feel like entering a well oiled machine and there's a strong flow but also opportunities. You are still free, it's not like Turkey but unlike Bulgaria you need to pay close attention on how stuff works and do it that way.
UK, feels closer to Turkey in many ways - it feels like you have a mission and place in the society. The wiggle room is much better than Turkey though, and unlike Germany you are allowed to mess with how stuff works and propose changes. It's more goal oriented than process oriented in that regard but you definitely feel boundaries of your place in the society. Also, in UK I felt like at the edge of the civilisation and I was allowed to reason why things are done the way they are done(in contrast with Turkey, where it's extremely energy consuming to question anything).
Belgium was a bit like Bulgaria: You don't feel like you have a mission but unlike Bulgaria it felt like a lot is going on but the flows are rigid and hard to get into the stream.
I assure the readers that there is ample frontiers in northern canada
A place where it is dangerous and you will have to break your back, but the payout is nice and allows you to climb societal ladder fast.
Vorkuta is an opposite of frontier despite being the reference cold area.
The premise is that humans are currently trapped in an endless cycle and we have no concept of how to break out of it, but I think this might at least provide some context as to why.
I highly recommend watching it (along with his other documentaries) if you found this article fascinating. It's like this in video form.
More Adam Curtis recs: the DDT episode and the Kwame Nkrumah episode of Pandora’s Box (the rest are good too), The Way of All Flesh, and The Power of Nightmares. Also, Cant Get You Out Of My Head might be his masterpiece but it’s also not very accessible.
I feel that's really only for hardcore Curtis fans, which I'm sure, he knows would be interested in.
> The States felt like an old place, weirdly older than Europe, a place where, for all its breathless movement, time seemed to have stopped. There was too much of everything: rules, work, wealth, poverty, guns, art.
> Perhaps that was why the Communist regimes all across Eastern and Central Europe collapsed in the final run. Not so much because of their beleaguered economies, although that was an important factor, but because no one believed anymore.
My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition. In most cases, these attempts are ridiculous, ersatz, misguided imitations of ideologies borrowed from the past, exposing their own imaginative shortages—they aspire to move the hands of the clock, even if backwards—but it’s hard to deny they represent dissatisfaction and resentment with the way things are. There is, it seems to me, a subconscious craving to be taken out of the boredom of timelessness and be thrown back into the flux of time, even if that means violence or war—anything but the broth!
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58999261-time-shelter
So yeah, it's dangerous to think you will always win because your ideas are the only correct ones. But it's possible to rig the system so the "good guys" (you) always win, and then say it's because your ideas were correct. At which point you might find you have not a dictatorship per se, but merely an illiberal democracy that guarantees continuity of government.
the Senate being a strange beast is not surprising, it's by design. it's important to prevent tyranny of the majority. (after all usually populism quickly switches gears into that, then slowly but surely throws off the other restraints and it becomes a usual dictatorship.) of course, it bears asking how well the Senate is doing at this prevention.
My parents spent 15 years of their life in Spain and hated every second of it. They hated it so much because I wasn't there with them. And they had a horrinle opinion of the culture and daily life there. While in opposite my 2 uncles that went with them and took their own kids with them, like it there and have never went back.
I with half the life span of my parents believe that personal issues and events completely eclipse any effect the political and cultural environment has. For me political and/or cultural events were just a new conversation topic in my social circles. Something to be part of because well everyone is part of it.
All my life I've been told that there is opportunity abroad, there is opportunity in the capital, in X large city. But opportunity isn't somewhere it just arises sometimes. I know for sure that opportunity doesn't come while sitting in one place you don't like.
But what I am trying to say is that: cities and countries aren't really colored in a specific way. They aren't dull, closed, eventful and such, they just are places. They have as much effect on an individual as does a single individual on them. Even so undoubtedly some places have a personal color to us - my parents will never again try to work in Spain and it would not end well if they did. I myself will never go back to the town of my high school, but others like it there.
Well, better future is here, but there is nothing more to aspire to anymore. No radical improvement to hope for. All changes are now marginal and usually translate to "more stuff in shops".
Also, I would say that countries and cities are plenty colored. There is a world apart between, say, cosmopolitan St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. If the mentality of the former held sway in Russia, there probably would be no war.
(And yeah, I know that Putin's rise to power happened in Petersburg first, but he didn't really fit into the spirit of the city and now dwells elsewhere.)
Please tell more? If there were/are any drastic differences, I wasn't seeing them emanating here onto Poland.
I think the people walking across central America to escape violence only to risk more of the same at borders, or taking rickety boats across the sea knowing full well that many of them sink killing everyone aboard, would strongly disagree with you.
> I with half the life span of my parents believe that personal issues and events completely eclipse any effect the political and cultural environment has.
I see where this is coming from, but sometimes events beyond our control - whether it's a lahar coming down a mountain, tanks firing rounds through your house, or a revolution that means your family are suddenly pariahs - can eclipse absolutely anything else, because suddenly those people who you have personal issues with are no longer people, but just meat that's no longer breathing or thinking. And some countries tend to have significantly fewer volcanic eruptions, or violent uprisings, or transfers-of-power at the end of a gun.
(circa 2002-2005)
No, they didn't, maybe some of the newly well-off people wanted to do that, like the parents and grandparents of the author of the article here, and that was mostly happening because they could afford to fail because they had money, but the great, great majority of people in Eastern Europe back in the '90s most certainly didn't "want to do something bold with their newfound freedom", they just wanted to be able to, like, literally live, meaning to be able to pay the bills and to put food on the table. Both of those things (paying the bills and putting food on the table) had become impossible for many of our parents back then, my parents eventually did have to sell their one-bedroom apartment in the early 2000s because of unpaid bills.
But I get it, the children of the well-off people from the 1990s went on to study in the West and now they're back lecturing us about this and that and that other thing. Maybe they could just try and open their eyes a little more and realise how difficult and excruciatingly hard life was for the majority of us back then, people who didn't have our parents join well-paid jobs in Western companies.
I'm not Bulgarian, but I did grew up in a city just 11 kms from the border with Bulgaria, one of my first memories as a kid is going with my mum to a Bulgarian border city in order buy some stuff from there (in the mid-80s the Bulgarian stores had more diverse stuff compared to stores in Romania). I'm also about the same age as the author of the article, I think a year older, thereabouts.
For me as a young West Berliner, it was a fun time with lots of opportunities.
For many people in the former GDR it was a trauma, their lives collapsed.
And Bulgaria has not received high transfer payments.
So it is more a personal frontier than anything else. A frontier is usually where little exists and by building something from the ground up you have more to say about things. While most people may not have had much of a say in the first place what happened in Eastern Europe and also more slowly in the rest of Europe was still mostly the opposite. It has been more of a frontier for others, like the French bank mentioned, than the local population.
Brought a lot of memories from the early 90s. The blackouts, the queues for bread and fruits, and the empty shelves... I was a kid back then and I didn't had any perspective. But I wander how my parents dealt with all that. I can't recall they complaining too much.
Government often also gave accommodation in those tolerable-at-the-time concrete flats. I meant allowed people to take a loan for state-built accommodation, you still had to pay it back. Same for cars, my parents waited few years since they were not apparatchiks (just university-educated folks which was already a bad place to be in eyes of regime, they had 1/2 salary of a guy digging ditches and struggled to get by financially), no way to choose color or anything else, take it or bye. Of course if you were known for causing troubles then you were eternally at the end of queue. Same for stupid things like... a couch. I wish I was joking.
People were often dangerously naive, that's why when it fell 90s were so brutal - wolves always making part of population stepped from the shadows and stole everything, killed anybody in their way, often in gruesome ways.
Sounds familiar? Every single post-soviet and eastern block (aka nuclear battlefield as planned by soviets for WWIII that never came) ended up like that. I still firmly blame soviet union for all this, and lets be honest current Russia is trying to bring back those 'good' old times desperately anyway it can. And for some reason those pesky satellites don't want to lose that stupid freedom so easily. No idea why
Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To ‘be modern’ means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underdefined. Each new structure which replaces the previous one as soon as it is declared old-fashioned and past its use-by date is only another momentary settlement – acknowledged as temporary and ‘until further notice’. Being always, at any stage and at all times, ‘post-something’ is also an undetachable feature of modernity. As time flows on, ‘modernity’ changes its forms in the manner of the legendary Proteus . . . What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) 'post-modernity' and what I've chosen to call, more to the point, 'liquid modernity', is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago 'to be modern' meant to chase 'the final state of perfection' -- now it means an infinity of improvement, with no 'final state' in sight and none desired.
What immaturity, to assume that there exists anything like a 'final state of perfection'.
Be like water.
The author accurately captures the overall picture during the 1990's, yet he is talking about a frontier. He perfectly realizes that the political power was just consolidated into another form, so we never had a real frontier after the fall of the communist regime.
I am little bit younger than him, and grew up after the fall of communist regime, after 34 years of transition into "democracy", and westernization, nothing really changed now the grandkids of the communist regime,are lecturing us about "democracy" again, because their fathers are getting old.
There is also this common comparison during this time era about the west(western culture and capitalism), and soviet union(communism), with the slight little nuance which is actually the elephant in the room that communism comes from the west... So the cycle continues.
What exactly is this western culture and values that we are constantly talking about, and being sold on, and advertised 24/7?
The Brezhnevian capitalist state global citizen, just wants to offer me a slightly less different totalitarian regime, throw us in a violent war because of his boredom with the flux of time, and call it a day. No thank you.
The closing of the Bulgarian frontier was during the April Uprising of 1876, which was the last time Bulgarians decided that are going to unite as a nation and will stood for something, their freedom, they will live free under their own sovereign country. You cannot exclude 500 years under Ottoman Empire rule, which rewired our survival instincts, if you are painting a picture of what and how happened next.
Like a fellow commenter said I prefer the kaba gaida to continue to echoes in the Rhodope mountains.
Despite growing with predominantly western influence after 1990, it is really hard to explain what happens with my body when I hear Valya Balkanska - Izlel ye Delyo Haydutin
, a song that is flying in the space with the Voyager probes.The next frontier is currently happening, but this time information travels differently.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Uprising_of_1876 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnxUYsf6GuU
Integrate Ukraine to EU and after that... What? "Hurtling toward a black hole..." again, but this time with Ukraine? ;-)
Capitalism is economic freedom and a government to enforce it. It isn't teleological.
The apparent telos of capitalism comes from people. It turns out that people, in the presence of freedom, have certain goals which they choose to pursue. Prominent among those goals is the accumulation of wealth. When it becomes excessive, that goal may be worth criticizing but people will choose to pursue it whenever they are free.
> Today, we have become citizens of a global, Brezhnevian capitalist state, which, in its failure to provide an inspiring frontier—gone are the days of Kennedy’s “New Frontiers” or Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In”—has slowly ossified and wrapped back upon itself.
Do we need politicians to pick our frontiers? Actually there's plenty of frontiers. Some examples are: eradicating human disease, extending human lifespan, replacing fossil field, exploring the solar system, changing how humans interact on the internet, inventing AGI, etc. It's beyond me that someone can claim with a straight face that there's no inspiring frontier.
The problem here is people who find these frontiers too boring. They secretly want a do-over of the 20th century. No thanks.
When I think about it, I think that's probably why I've been struggling so much, is that I've just felt bored with life. In-spite of all that society is, I think like a lot of people, I just don't really see what the point is. More money? More goals? More experiences? But then what?
Maybe the type of frontier is important, because everything you give an example of is really just the one frontier: Figuring out how to continually scale human population. Although rational, how is it inspiring? Or rather, how can you be inspired if you are bored?
I wonder if Europeans understand these wars around them are not fought for their amusement...
Bombing Serbia or ISIS affair is "dangerous, but not too dangerous" for you but it means hundreds to hundreds thousands of dead and hundred thousands to millions losing their homes.
I suspect that the middle aged in every society feel some closing of the frontier as possibilities seem to collapse and family commitments multiply.
Quoting: > My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition.
But TFA's points can traverse the cheapness easily, just a small push:
> The States felt like an old place, weirdly older than Europe, a place where, for all its breathless movement, time seemed to have stopped. There was too much of everything: rules, work, wealth, poverty, guns, art.
Many HN readers are probably familiar with how does it feel to start a greenfield project. The magic that happens on a greenfield project is not so much about your beliefs or your open mind, it's more about all the other people mentally unblocking you and not putting spokes in your wheel.
So, yeah, if the whole hierarchy crumbles and entire lifetimes of curated opinions, thoughts, social norms become garbage, people let others be. For a time.
I'm just pointing out that there is a specific recipe offered here for unblocking "the time", and that recipe has a huge cost.
> Perhaps that was why the Communist regimes all across Eastern and Central Europe collapsed in the final run. Not so much because of their beleaguered economies, although that was an important factor, but because no one believed anymore.
Hah, that alone? Roman Empire was falling for hundreds of years (thousand, actually, if you count Byzantium).
Actually two factors were needed for Communist downfall.
1. Lack of belief.
2. A better model how to prosper, proven and readily available just across the border (or two borders).