# Ceaușescu was shit, but at least we all agreed.

- Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/2023/11/25/ceausescu-was-shit-but-at-least-we-all-agreed/
- Published: 2023-11-25T23:50:06+03:00
- Author: Andrei Draganescu

Open societies are not functional in a globalised, hegemonic, unipolar, technological
world. They’re dysfunctional oligarchies where each of these groups is subservient
to some other group.

Surprisingly, dysfunctional oligarchic open societies can appear quite working. 
The extractive power of geopolitics is the main fuel for these societies. The technological
advance smoothens out the dissonances for average people. The globalised hegemonic
unipolar situation makes everyone share the same basic issues. The cross border 
sharing of problems (not of benefits) makes the group of these sharing societies
appear to be even more open.

But they are not open.

Local authority and the public will have literally zero effect. Trans national organisations
with sweeping powers put people in jail for trans national offence. The political
representation of a society’s inner workings is effectively gone, across the liberal
map, and it’s replaced with an over the top soap opera that can only last based 
on perpetual polarisation..

For Popper, the author of the cornerstone work on open societies, an open society
is shaped by a structure flexible enough that individual liberty and critical thinking
have the needed degrees of freedom to thrive. Rule of law and real impactful democracy
are also foundational for an open society. Our fake open societies have a rigid 
structure, because of self preserving castes making the rules for themselves, democratic
process with zero impact, because of constant lobby overreach, and the rule of law
is to laugh at when individuals own fortunes valued more than entire countries do.

I mean, what is this better than? In my country’s Ceausescu dictatorship, we had
castes making rules for themselves, individuals with influence above the rule of
law and a fake democracy that always resulted magically in exactly what the centralised
system planned anyway. Same, same.

The so called “freedom of speech” is the last remnant of an actual difference, but
that too through the efforts to de-platform inconvenient people appears to be erased.

But wait, the horrors of communism! While the atrocities of attempting to make people
accept communism and repent for having their own thoughts seem surreal to a liberal
society citizen – they need to be contextualised, in the sense that the reeducated
were, a lot of the times, actively trying to recruit anti-system revolutionary support.
The same thing is going on today. Some of the reeducated (through gruesome methods)
were innocent of any charge but removed from society because they were in the way
of a big shot. The same thing is going on today. But today we have the means, mostly
technological, to avoid the grotesque, to the very last moment, to that last moment
when Guantanamo becomes necessary.

So it’s hard to discern what are the humane ideals that those in the other side 
of the iron curtain risked their lives and their family trying to evade. There were
obvious economic reasons, particularly towards the end of the communist charade,
but the “freedom” and liberalism seem today like the proverbial images on a cave’s
wall. For us, the ones in the communist cave, the images on the wall were akin to
literal heaven on Earth, where people were paid fairly for work, goods where plenty,
anyone could say what the wanted and become a politician, and the “American dream”
existed.

Once we’re out of the cave, we see people are not paid fairly for work, goods are
abundant but kill you ruthlessly in various ways, you don’t really own anything,
it’s all credit, which your children inherit, saying what you want has “consequences”
and becoming a politician is as futile as those virtuoso playing instruments in 
metro stations.

The system doesn’t even work. Out of the cave we learn that, wait a minute, the 
abundance comes from theft, slavery, environmental catastrophe. Hold on, the “democracy”
is accompanied by a level of inequality that twenty revolutions and ten rebellions
can’t dismantle anymore. Wow, actually, by comparison the cave people had lower 
levels of technological prowess but no ecocides, scarcity but based on their own
resources, and most of the inequality was social, not material, an inequality which
could be engineered away, personally or as a group.

How exactly does unleashed markets, the relentless cultural revolution, sponsored
by proponents of open societies, and corporatocracy actually opens a society? For
now, they seem more closed than ever, biologically visible in the loneliness pandemic
plaguing the “developed” world. To top it all we can’t even agree on the colour 
of the sky anymore.

Maybe the ideals of Popperian inspiration should go to a bottom drawer for now. 
We’re in a very different world, a very different situation, a very different future
than what he envisioned, or hoped, when coining the open society idea. Today, societies
should start closing, maybe like a wound that has to close to heal, because the 
realities we have to live with now are not symbiotic, they’re venomously parasitic:
a global extractive empire, aimless and backward empire enemies, calcified international
networks of wealth and a capture of societal political life in a web of deception,
uninvited secret service activity and overarching corporate influence.

Can we come up with a better metaphor for what we want? In his final power Ceaușescu
offered the unhappy crowd lower prices and bigger salaries. Everyone laughed. In
our minutes before doom the powerful of now offer us a one way trip to Mars and 
nobody laughs.