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How Victimhood Affects The Economy

Aleksandar Dimishkovski - 8/17/2007

One of the most dangerous byproducts of the transition process is surely the overwhelming feeling of lethargy that like a virus is spreading among the people. It runs trough their veins, infecting every possible cell that used to be a piece of a functional unit. And, what once was a fully functional unit, a productive part of a growing society, especially from the economic point of view, now is more alike to the atoms of gases in their natural Brownian movement.

In many countries during the transition process, various forms of negative mood occur among those countries' populations, from the physically destructive to the overall passive. In post-communist countries, the change as a process was hardly ever viewed as a positive thing. On a contrary, for the majority it only meant something unpredictable, something scary. This kind of a behavior is a perfect illustration of the known saying, old habits die hard.

And it shouldn't be very hard to figure it out, why even new technologies are having troubles to penetrate the market in these countries. People are satisfied with the comfort that they somehow have inherited from the previous political order. The elderly for instance, have kept tightly their 8 am to 16 PM jobs for decades. They maintained the habit to go home to have lunch with the family, and after a whole day spent in front of the TV, going to bed was the next part of the immutable scheme of their lives. The younger generations are somewhat different, but in essence have very similar scheme of living. They are more willing to spend the whole day drinking coffee with friends, thus spending the money earned by their parents.


Facing a defeat

It seems that the lack of will is easily noticeable on the faces of the people in countries that have recently passed trough the transition process. It is easier also because everyone is doing it. And, as usual, in a social meltdown, stereotypes surface.

Facing the upcoming change of the order in their country, for them, was like a battle without a struggle. It looks like the defeat was inescapable, so every effort to fight was massively criticized by the majority as a futile waste of energy. In that constellation, the media lost their efficiency in what now seems to have been their most important obligation: to influence public opinion.

The mass media became purely commercial, making quotidian politics more meaningful than even global warming. What was the most surprising was the will to evade responsibility, especially in the print media which decided to enter the race for vacuous news, along with the electronic and new media, mainly the Internet. Another waste of energy, someone would say. Or is it a pattern?

It seems that this contributed to making the evasion of responsibility a modern trend. The politicians weren't the first ones that implemented this unwritten rule as a way of acting; they were just following the trend. And when the magic circle of the victims of transition was established, it became the state's sole responsibility to resolve every unanswered question, to find jobs for everyone, to ensure political stability, the process of integration with the EU, NATO, and to cure the economy from every disease that was left over by the transition. To beat the defeat!

Is doing nothing something?

It is clear by now that evasion was referred to as the easiest choice. Though, what seemed to be an evasion of responsibility turned out to be only a simulation. A massive one, indeed. Because, in a society, even doing nothing is something. So, by doing nothing, the majority of the people in the countries in transition, left it to inertia to be the leading force, in a political as well as in an economic sense. With that, they contributed to their defeat, as persons, as units, as functional parts of society and the economy.

"We all are economic beings", Marx used to say.

In the ruins of the communist regimes, people turned from economic beings to victims. Their defeat was inescapable, because of the path that they had chosen.

Now, in the ruins of the post-communist regimes, people are only contributing for society to act as a victim that works towards its own defeat. And, this victimhood vaporizes the economy. It's like an ocean with a few islands which represent the functional parts of the economy, and numerous types of fish that swim in different direction, apart from each other.

The dysfunctional function of these people–units, is malfunctioning.