Comment by Ivaylo Noyzi Tsvetkov:
What is Bulgarian individualism? Something remarkable – it both produces daily self-generation and lack of empathy, and it seems that there is a quiet and dangerous national consensus that this is how life is done.
How is it done in life? Well, first, secondly and completely you look only at your own interest, and only then, if there is anything human left in you, do you eventually think that your personal interest cannot be solely personal, because it probably screws up the interest of others. This is Bulgarian individualism – he ridicules and curses others, is even often aggressive. And it could have been constructive like Protestant, but alas.
Why Protestant individualism is completely different
But let's talk a little about Protestant individualism, so that we can allow ourselves a more informed mental distinction. Today's “collective West“, especially in North America and Northern Europe (as a kind of its leaders), are “illegitimate child“ of the Protestant worldview. The modern individualism that unites these societies in a sociocultural sense can be traced back to Martin Luther himself. A simple example: the peculiar rules of philosophical and political debate inherited from ancient Greece are the mother and father of the later and still familiar polemics, on whose foundations today's democratic edifice rests.
That is, even the popular banality that truth was born in the dispute is the fruit of initial religious polemics (and placing everything under Cartesian doubt) between Protestants and Catholics; of course, in more recent and post-Enlightenment times the sport of arguing itself reached completely different heights - to get to the “technological bastard“ of all this, namely a Facebook argument for the sake of the argument itself in the style of “you'll tell me”. In the latter, rational arguments, quasi-Cartesian or not, have long since given way to personal deviations.
Of course, this is the result of the general simplification and of what I call “the audience getting on stage and thinking of themselves as equals to the actors“. Ironically, however, the current climate of dispute – a successor to the theological disputes of a bygone era – finds super fertile ground precisely in the most atheistic (not even agnostic) society possible, like ours. This directly reflects the Bulgarian acquired and mistaken individualism, which in the majority can be shamelessly called “animal egocentrism”. If in Protestant ethics during and after the Enlightenment period, individualism was a meaningful result of the “permission“ not to ask God how to live, in our country it has degenerated – thanks, of course, to communism – to the classic nihil sanctum, i.e. there is nothing sacred, with the wonderful addition „except for my personal well-being and benefit/fraud“.
None of the Protestant values has sprouted in Bulgaria
Here is a clarification: in Protestantism there is also Calvinism, according to which there is complete sovereignty of God in matters of the salvation of the soul, and that only a few are saved by God's choice. Fortunately for the future democracy, Calvinism did not take special roots in the way of Western thinking over the centuries. Evangelicalism also intervenes here later, but I don't have the time or the nerve for it.
What I have for: the thesis that many of the great thinkers in the classical liberal tradition were Protestants (John Locke, Frederick Douglass, even Immanuel Kant, who de facto defends a resolutely liberal political philosophy with a certain Protestant influence). That is, the rise of liberalism itself and its legitimate child - democracy, plus its cousin "pluralism", plus "freedom of the soul" (in the sense that believers are individually responsible for their choices before God) - leads to the tolerance that is the basis of liberal democracy. The fact that tolerance has recently degenerated into unnatural excess and woke-police has actually rolled out a red carpet for Trumpism, but that's a separate story.
The trick in Bulgaria is that none of these Protestant values have and could not have sprouted in our country when it was time, which is where Bulgarian non-constructive individualism comes from. Why non-constructive? Because constructive means agreement on the most important thing - that yes, everyone is the blacksmith of their own life, but without community thinking, there is no society and, accordingly, agreement on where we are going and what to do.
Bulgarian individualism is "I want to be well"
We most often unite in self-hatred, especially in the ubiquitous Facebook for the older generations. Or against a separate person, event or cause, while we remain locked in the shell of the Bulgarian individual, type “I'm fine, the rest don't say anything“. At the same time, we are not able to get out of the inner group and the corresponding, with apologies, generic mindset until a late age.
And this, of course, is reflected and observed in Bulgarian politics as a whole. From the tradition of stealing from the common (saplings along the Constantinople, the plan for reconstruction and development) and this being completely acceptable regarding “entering politics“, through “let's sort out our own“, and even the unconscious lack of any community goal. And if you tell me that this is not “cultural“ legacy of the thieving convulsions of communism, I will tell you that you are wrong. And also that your mother is wrong.
I hope that we at least think about this bug, ingrained in Bulgarian thinking, which for now seems insurmountable. It is observed both among the multimillionaires in power and among the small neighborhood predators - this is the Bulgarian version of individualism, which has nothing to do with the careful construction of the Protestant “building”, in which life has always been better. Partly thanks to their thinking.
What the Bulgarian environment teaches its generations
It is no coincidence that in Lutheran Sweden there is “lagom”, i.e. a kind of balanced idea of life, according to which you do not overdo anything, but also with the idea that you do not live alone, but in a community. You know about the Danish “hygge“.
The most crushing problem is that our environment itself teaches the new generations the same thing. Children grow up mainly in groups where they are told en masse that not only first, but also second and third is that you are good, mom, that only if you are ruthless in pursuing your own, you will succeed.
And they are probably right, because no one ever teaches civitas, something like citizenship, or empathy. There will be no Bulgarian “hygge“ - we have let the strong - nepotistic and political - decide everything in the jungle of life; ergo, this is Bulgarian individualism.
And we are paying for it now, and we will pay dearly in the future. Stupidity always leads to even more stupidity, the lack of planning too. And we are the kings in these sports, if we don't count Russia.