The Idiots

The author of the first article in Romanian forgot to bring to Romanians' attention one of the most important paragraphs in the original article, "None of Romania's universities are ranked among the top 500."

I wish The Economist the best of luck in deciphering the complexity of this issue. I'm sure with the today's advancements in psychology, sociology and other disciplines many of the scholars of their own major universities could explain for us many of the aspects of the phenomenon, given time and motivation. And maybe they are already doing it for private or privileged entities, for the right compensation.

But the author just tackle the issue and brings to us only the short term with possible economic effects implications leaving place for many interpretations and of course, as many other press articles do, with no suggested solutions.

We are also noticing here the irony of the question in the title quoting a president that he uses himself a very old and advanced type of twisted psychology pointing sarcastically a problem that himself helped create.

Nobody is an idiot. But people, many times do exploitable, idiotic things. Sometimes on subconscious demand.

However, there are enough people in Romania who may understand well this problem but choose not to talk or whose silence have been bought or whose voice have been covered by well targeted noise or corrupted by political forces  that make confusion, corruption, mass ignorance, some of their tools in taking over that country.

Interestingly enough, i think they also have some kind of philosophy that covers their own conscience, thinking slowly eliminating "the garbage" or those who give in to the pressure of corruption they create, or "bury themselves" in sweet ignorance, for the future good of the country, (but not necessarily the people of the current generation) ("Uneori ca să îţi salvezi poporul trebuie mai întâi să salvezi ţara") (We all so well heard that for generations... "Generaţii de sacrificiu").  And when they do not fully succeed, they threat, frame and blackmail, trying especially to show to their own that is doable.

But if somebody would ask me i would say the problem has even deeper roots. It starts simply with the interdiction of talking of certain things, during the harshest period of the communist era. People were fearing their own family members as being possible informants. Once the habit formed, in a generation or two they relaxed the repression and started using softer methods and made the country look in many aspects similar to western countries and the habit was handed down throughout generations and changed form and became part of the culture. I don't know if it's not too obvious what i will try now to say, but by not talking about certain things in time generations stopped thinking at those things and those things were so related to the exercising of the most basic of human activities or rights that it lead to an atrophy of some area of personality for entire generations.

For reasons that may be known to the authors of the original article, Romania, thanks in part to its above quoted president is more visible internationally than other ex-communist countries but i think is safe to assume the phenomenon is similar.

It is also possible that Romania was somewhat treated specially and prepared for the future within the eastern block due to its potential as being a closer resemblance with western European countries and civilizations.