By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
There is no word for it in Russian. Platon Karatayev, the
typical "Russian soul" in Tolstoy's "War and Peace", extols, for
pages at a time, the virtues of communality and disparages the
individual - this otherwise useless part of the greater whole. In
Macedonia the words "private" or "privacy" pertain to matters
economic. The word "intimacy" is used instead to designate the state
of being free of prying, intrusive eyes and acts of meddling.
Throughout Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the rise
of "individualism" did not give birth to its corollary: "privacy".
After decades (and, in most cases, centuries) of cramped, multi- generational shared accommodation, it is no wonder.
To the alienated and schizoid ears of Westerners, the survival of
family and community in CEE sounds like an attractive proposition. A
dual purpose safety net, both emotional and economic, the family in
countries in transition provides its members with unemployment
benefits, accommodation, food and psychological advice to boot.
Divorced daughters, saddled with little (and not so little) ones,
the prodigal sons incapable of finding a job befitting their
qualifications, the sick, the unhappy - all are absorbed by the
compassionate bosom of the family and, by extension the community.
The family, the neighbourhood, the community, the village, the
tribe - are units of subversion as well as useful safety valves,
releasing and regulating the pressures of contemporary life in the
modern, materialistic, crime ridden state. The ancient blood feud
laws of the kanoon were handed over through familial lineages in
northern Albania, in defiance of the paranoiac Enver Hoxha regime.
Criminals hide among their kin in the Balkans, thus effectively
evading the long arm of the law (state). Jobs are granted, contracts
signed and tenders won on an open and strict nepotistic basis and no
one finds it odd or wrong. There is something atavistically heart- warming in all this.
Historically, the rural units of socialization and social
organization were the family and the village. As villagers migrated
to the cities, these structural and functional patterns were
imported by them, en masse. The shortage of urban apartments and the
communist invention of the communal apartment (its tiny rooms
allocated one per family with kitchen and bathroom common to all)
only served to perpetuate these ancient modes of multi-generational
huddling. At best, the few available apartments were shared by three
generations: parents, married off-spring and their children. In many
cases, the living space was also shared by sickly or no-good
relatives and even by unrelated families.
These living arrangements - more adapted to rustic open spaces than
to high rises - led to severe social and psychological dysfunctions.
To this very day, Balkan males are spoiled by the subservience and
servitude of their in-house parents and incessantly and compulsively
catered to by their submissive wives. Occupying someone else's home,
they are not well acquainted with adult responsibilities. Stunted
growth and stagnant immaturity are the hallmarks of an entire
generation, stifled by the ominous proximity of suffocating,
invasive love. Unable to lead a healthy sex life behind paper thin
walls, unable to raise their children and as many children as they
see fit, unable to develop emotionally under the anxiously watchful
eye of their parents - this greenhouse generation is doomed to a
zombie-like existence in the twilight nether land of their parents'
caves. Many ever more eagerly await the demise of their caring
captors and the promised land of their inherited apartments, free of
their parents' presence.
The daily pressures and exigencies of co-existence are enormous. The
prying, the gossip, the criticism, the chastising, the small
agitating mannerisms, the smells, the incompatible personal habits
and preferences, the pusillanimous bookkeeping - all serve to erode
the individual and to reduce him or her to the most primitive mode
of survival. This is further exacerbated by the need to share
expenses, to allocate labour and tasks, to plan ahead for
contingencies, to see off threats, to hide information, to pretend
and to fend off emotionally injurious behaviour. It is a sweltering
tropic of affective cancer.
Newly found materialism brought these territories a malignant form
of capitalism coupled with a sub-culture of drugs and crime. The
eventuating disintegration of all polities in the ensuing moral
vacuum was complete. From the more complex federations or states and
their governments, through intermediate municipalities and down to
the most primitive of political cells - the family - they all
crumbled in a storm of discontent and blood. The mutant frontier- "independence" or pioneer-"individualism" imported from Western B
movies led to a functional upheaval unmatched by a structural one.
People want privacy and intimacy more than ever - but they still
inhabit the same shoddily constructed, congested accommodation and
they still earn poorly or are unemployed. This tension between
aspiration and perspiration is potentially revolutionary. It is this
unaccomplished, uneasy metamorphosis that tore the social fabric of
CEE apart, rendering it poisoned and dysfunctional. This is nothing
new - it is what brought socialism and its more vicious variants
down.
But what is new is inequality. Ever the pathologically envious, the
citizens of CEE bathed in common misery. The equal distribution of
poverty and hardship guaranteed their peace of mind. A Jewish
proverb says: "the trouble of the many is half a consolation". It is
this breakdown of symmetry of wretchedness that really shook the
social order. The privacy and intimacy and freedom gained by the few
are bound to incite the many into acts of desperation. After all,
what can be more individualistic, more private, more mind requiting,
more tranquillizing than being part of a riotous mob intent of
implementing a platform of hate and devastation?
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AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)
Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review,
PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International
(UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health
and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and
Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com