If you already tuned out during the last entry, please feel free to skip this one, and check out my ISP experience report instead... To the rest: wow, you'd never have expected so much educational value from my effete website, would you?
So anyway, with the background provided, perhaps some things happening in Hungary today can be more readily explained:
The point is, Gyurcsany, our prime minister now known and ridiculed all over Europe for his infamous lie speech (which was by the way not really a confession, as often claimed, because it was held in a small circle and secretly taped): "We lied in the morning, we lied in the evening, we lied at night" or: "we really fucked up" etc... is member of the socialist party, which is a successor of the communist party (which lied a lot), so the revelations actually do not come as a suprise to most people.
What pisses them off is that Gyurcsany promised everything to the people during elections the last time around, fulfilled his promises - thus bankrupting the country - promised everything to the people during reelections again, but can no longer fulfill the promises, cause apparently, there is hardly anything left.
So the point of the story is, with a cynical leadership rather bent on reelection than on helping the country, Hungary is now on the edge of ruin and the people are starting to get pissed off, and Budapest is being bathed in a light wholly different than the majestic colors of the Chain Bridge.
4 comments:
don't want to debate about communism and democracy but isn't this a build in "bug" in democracy? some politicians occasionally lie so that they can be reelected. Striving for power is a characteristic that politicians should have by default (as Weber puts it. a bit more eloquently then me, i admit)
and if people are not surprised (why should they) why are these riots? does one fight when one is not really angry? is it possible that those are political riots executed by the opponents of the "confessing liar", seeing their chance for power?
i'm not making any statements. i'm just asking myself.
Hi Yavor. Good inputs. You are absolutely right about this being, in effect, a rather common phenomenon: we economists often refer to it as the political business cycle (PBC).
Apart from the magnitude of Gyurcsany´s admission, which goes beyond the PBC (he says for instance that the party did nothing for 4 years),
this misses the point: a type of metaphysical "honesty" is demanded from politicians, which would mean paradoxically, that they have to lie and pretend to be honest or "walk the walk"... a form of playing the game, so to say. You laugh? Consider the vast variety of "simple" people on the street not familiar with the PBC: often for them, it's the first time they hear openly that they are being lied to, and no one likes that.
Furthermore, also consider what I wrote about the government having spent all the money bribing the people for reelection - isn't OUR OWN stupidity or moral failings what we tend to get most pissed off about?
An interesting post. thank you for sharing.
thanks David. And just to sort of round things off, ultimately I think it´s important not to fall into the trap of a total moral relativism.
Just as most of us would not agree with the agenda of a racist or fascist party, but would agree that such parties do unfortunately exist, it is hard to argue that some parties breed structures or cultures where dishonesty is more common or accepted than in other ones.
Put in yet other words, not the fact that politicians strive for power, but how, they strive for it should be the measure that they are ultimately judged by.
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