The rise of the black pill will test the limitations of education as a solution for addressing those issues. Having studied the phenomenon in a US university, often times we traced everything back to the need of putting more resources into education. What happens when that fails? I am not sure if we are ready for a coincise and harsh answer.
Sorry, Cristian, but I have to react to this: "Felt my worst fears confirmed: why would Norwegians come to listen to a Romanian when they have superstar Americans and Brits in the line-up? I’d go to see them, too."
I'm just fed up, as a Romanian, that we have to accept and be complicit in these narratives of not enoughness if you come from certain parts of the world. Sure, this is the mainstream narrative conveyed to us by the dominant worldview, but why do we have to internalize it and propagate it, and exert that kind of violence on ourselves and on our peers?
I know that in our country far right (and formerly communist) nationalist ideologies have had a monopoly over national pride so messages advocating for self-respect as Eastern Europeans bear the risk of being captured by shady politicians, but that's a perverse distortion of the genuine and basic feeling self worth we deserve as a collective (and need in order to find our way in this difficult world).
The causes of the "Eastern European backwardness" are immensely complex, ranging from deep historical patterns, to geography, to the configuration of the world system nowadays, to, yeah, our human flaws. But they also relate to what we view as backward and who gets to define backwardness, and one thing I've learned from social movements on the other side of the Atlantic is that there is an inner liberation to be done, and part of that is realizing that Western superiority is not a fact but a way of viewing the world, that there are many ways to view the world and it's frankly violent to consider prosperity built on oppression (the case of the US, for example) or ecocide (Norway built its economic prosperity on fossil fuels) as fully legitimate and feel as "not enough" in reaction to that. We need to recognize this in constructing our messy Eastern European identities, and I'm not advocating for playing the victim role here.
I don't know the reasons why there were so few participants at your talk, maybe it didn't have an appealing title :-), but it may also be that yeah, as you said, people didn't come to see a Romanian speaking when there were the American and Brit superstars. But is that fair? Is that something that we should just take as is? Should we just accept as a given the assumption that our messages are less relevant, less universal because we come from a relatively peripheral place? It saddens me and it angers me that one of our top journalists thinks this way. Because it's a trap, it's this underlying basic assumption that permeates almost everything I read in the media and which sometimes prevents even its most progressive messages to be fully empowering.
The rise of the black pill will test the limitations of education as a solution for addressing those issues. Having studied the phenomenon in a US university, often times we traced everything back to the need of putting more resources into education. What happens when that fails? I am not sure if we are ready for a coincise and harsh answer.
Sorry, Cristian, but I have to react to this: "Felt my worst fears confirmed: why would Norwegians come to listen to a Romanian when they have superstar Americans and Brits in the line-up? I’d go to see them, too."
I'm just fed up, as a Romanian, that we have to accept and be complicit in these narratives of not enoughness if you come from certain parts of the world. Sure, this is the mainstream narrative conveyed to us by the dominant worldview, but why do we have to internalize it and propagate it, and exert that kind of violence on ourselves and on our peers?
I know that in our country far right (and formerly communist) nationalist ideologies have had a monopoly over national pride so messages advocating for self-respect as Eastern Europeans bear the risk of being captured by shady politicians, but that's a perverse distortion of the genuine and basic feeling self worth we deserve as a collective (and need in order to find our way in this difficult world).
The causes of the "Eastern European backwardness" are immensely complex, ranging from deep historical patterns, to geography, to the configuration of the world system nowadays, to, yeah, our human flaws. But they also relate to what we view as backward and who gets to define backwardness, and one thing I've learned from social movements on the other side of the Atlantic is that there is an inner liberation to be done, and part of that is realizing that Western superiority is not a fact but a way of viewing the world, that there are many ways to view the world and it's frankly violent to consider prosperity built on oppression (the case of the US, for example) or ecocide (Norway built its economic prosperity on fossil fuels) as fully legitimate and feel as "not enough" in reaction to that. We need to recognize this in constructing our messy Eastern European identities, and I'm not advocating for playing the victim role here.
I don't know the reasons why there were so few participants at your talk, maybe it didn't have an appealing title :-), but it may also be that yeah, as you said, people didn't come to see a Romanian speaking when there were the American and Brit superstars. But is that fair? Is that something that we should just take as is? Should we just accept as a given the assumption that our messages are less relevant, less universal because we come from a relatively peripheral place? It saddens me and it angers me that one of our top journalists thinks this way. Because it's a trap, it's this underlying basic assumption that permeates almost everything I read in the media and which sometimes prevents even its most progressive messages to be fully empowering.