RCS – Business Default

We can safely say that today’s crisis in our country is not only financial or political, but that it is based on a distorted and chained view of reality and ourselves. This view has its deep roots. Didn’t we live in the “best system in the world” until 1990 and mostly believed it? And didn’t we all live a “success story” for twenty years or so again? Apparently, from the previous regime, we have inherited both the art of self-deception and deception, as well as the naive belief that we are something special. You still remember from the former country the mass shopping in Trieste, during which we thought how lucky we are because we have the best that the East has to offer, and we can even treat ourselves to a taste of the West. This charm of Yugoslavian socialism and self-management has sometimes also attracted some famous person from the West, who then flew to Brione to enjoy the sunset and listen to the wise thoughts of the enlightened leader. Similar intellectual journeys to distant places where pure socialism was supposed to grow were undertaken by some Western writers and artists as early as the 1920s, when they were attracted by Stalin and the Soviet Union, and then in the 1960s, when they rushed to visit Mao to China. Sometimes a learned head realized her mistake upon arriving in the socialist paradise, but what if no one at home wanted to believe her, that perfidious manipulation and shameless violence hide behind the facade of popular socialism. Very, very rarely have we heard anything from the mouths of these intellectuals about the reasons for this self-deception of theirs. Because if we are precise, these illusions are always a match between the deception planned by the socialist government and the self-deception that only a former believer in socialism could explain. What drives us to occasionally place our hopes in the hands of dictatorial freaks? Disappointment and despair? The left in Europe will not be able to admit this despair for a long time, and that is why it has repeatedly thrown itself into some utopian project or visit.

We all like to be right, and we don’t mind being right all the time in our own eyes. The problem arises because the attitude of always being right has hidden anger, manipulativeness and even hatred in the background. When people are angry, we feel that we are being wronged, and since we are the victims of injustice, we are right to defend ourselves and speak up. The victim is therefore always right, and the more victims we are, the more right we are. In reality, of course, it is not said that we are victims at all, maybe we are just pretending to be victims and being you. self-proclaimed victims, but we still have the right to have our say and be right. For example, many dictators believe in their own genius and then build luxury ski resorts in North Korea or sandy islands in the Persian Gulf. Sometimes he gets lucky with the Olympics or some similar facade, and then the whole world applauds him, saying how visionary he tackled the matter and succeeded. Thus, for example, the leader of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, appeared to himself and to the domestic and foreign public as an exceptional, skillful and genius leader of the country at the dividing line of the two political-military blocs, on the border of two ideological systems and two civilizations, East and West. He must have believed in this idea himself, as seriously as he could, and with him multitudes at home and many others in the world, but the thing persisted only ten years after his death, leaving behind billions of debts and foci of hatred.

Let these narcissistically withdrawn and inwardly frightened people believe what they want in their own genius, the conspiracies of their colleagues, artificial islands and so on, the problem is that we believe them ourselves. Because they are persuasive, because they do not waver, and because we waver next to them and think, well, maybe this time it will turn out differently and the dictator will turn out to be a less evil person than his actions show. Why sometimes even people who were victims of Stalin believed in him and in communism? They thought, maybe he doesn’t know what’s going on behind his back, he would have sorted things out if he knew about all these injustices. And so even today, people in our country make a pilgrimage to Kumrovec, and if you say something to them, they turn into angry victims who the world does not understand and who are always right. Anger and hatred erupt from them, because hatred and self-deception always go together. “We haven’t killed you enough yet” and “Long live democratic socialism” or “Europe will not command us”, hatred and self-deception.

Today, of course, we are ashamed of these illusions, phantoms and self-deception. Which, of course, is a good sign because it shows that we can handle criticism, that we even have the ability to self-criticize, and that we can be in touch with ourselves and our fallibility and humiliation, even when people are pointing fingers at us. In leaden times, few dissidents could bear the shame of criticizing Tito’s socialism and everyone flocking to them saying, what’s wrong with you, it’s the best system in the world, shame on you for judging it so unfairly, you must be corrupt. Well, in order not only to remain ashamed, they were also imprisoned and persecuted. Who was able to insist all these years on the point of view that Tito is disturbed and that everything will collapse when he is gone and when the money runs out?! Just someone who could take being shamed and not immediately respond to recriminations with anger and hatred. That is why those in Kumrovac are never ashamed, their advisors are anger and hatred, which tell them that they are always right and that they do not need to look at others. The answer to the question of why it is so difficult to shake off certain illusions is therefore the following: whoever wants to see clearly into the very essence of hatred and the way in which some people shamelessly incite their hatred to other people, by humiliating, imprisoning, threatening and intimidating, must be prepared at the possibility of everyone mocking him and telling him he’s wrong just because he’s right.