Romania, Life in an alternative reality

I know that it is quite hard to talk about “normality”, word that has almost no unitary definition, but we can talk to a certain extent about “things that are normal” if we make the synonymous to “things that are healthy”, “things that are harmless” and “things that are pleasurable”. Romania, an Eastern European nation, my homeland,  has created for itself a new normality, which is a normality put upside down, a normality which isn’t equal with progress and pleasure, but rather a normality appeared in order to fill the normality which gone away. So why are things as they are? There is no single answer to it, I won’t be concentrating on explaining why in this article…what I want to analyze a little how it works.

The first thing that is quite noticeable is the inexistence of any type of coherent plans towards the future, I think this is one of the most characteristic sing of societies that had reached a dead point in their evolution towards a better spiritual and material condition.

Anti-individualism, this can be noticed very easily in villages where people usually don’t call their neighbors by their full name, they rather prefer to say “Maria a lu’ Zidaru”(Maria of Zidaru), this on one hand shows a lack of capacity to see people as individuals and not as members of a certain family or group. This also shows us a tendency to perceive an individual’s worth through the social status of his family, thus one’s image in the community is heavily influenced by his/her family reputation.

Anti-individualism also translates in to life path plagiarism, or people’s tendency to take models of success and copying them without being conscious of the fact that their professional/personal evolution will not look anything like the one of their ‘success source’. People are incapable of building their own model of success based on their own skills and likings.

Destructive exacerbated individualism, and this is the individualism that really sucks, because if that type of individualism that seeks personal gain and comfort at the expense of others. This translates quite well in to corruption and bribery, what many don’t understand with this is the fact that everything comes with a social cost, poverty and economic stagnation are pretty what you get from that.

The glorification of failing, and of alcoholism, this was mentioned in another post that I made. It is all part of a copping mechanism, where there’s not solution to eradicate such things, it’s easier to glorify them and set them as a standard.

The limitation of children and the obsession towards conformism which is seen as the good thing to do, but it usually ends up with a sick obsession of pleasing everybody which leaves people hallow, shallow, and bipolar in many cases.

This are the few elements that combined create a culture of toxicity, frustration, one that thrives of misery and lack of hope for a better future.