symbolic elements of everyday culture - MTA Szociológiai ...

● KAPITÁNY ÁGNES – KAPITÁNY GÁBOR ● Changing World-Views in Hungary, 1945–1980●
whose energies are exhausted by the long stagnation feel themselves more attacked, more
surrendered, while mechanisms of self-destruction increase: alcoholism, suicide, ways of living
which end up in heart diseases and the public and private destruction of the environment.
With the decentralization of society, the individual who is left alone suffers from a crisis of
identity. Previously, he had been regarded as a faceless piece of the mass, and then as a part of
small communities. Now, as he becomes an individual for himself, he begins to seek the possibilities
of embeddedness. The problem of identity enters among the key categories of the age, both in the
sense of the individual search for identity and of the renaissance of the national-ethnic
consciousness.
Another new development is the category of interest in the market-centered world. We have
seen that in the 1960s there was more emphasis on distribution than on production. The system of
allotments by the state had condemned the individual to a passive role, which could not satisfy his
interest; now opinion crystallized that the individual must take his fate into his own hands. Criticism of
paternalism becomes common, and individual enterprise, flexible, and creative adaptability are
extolled. Competition becomes a key category and a magic word. As the driving force of capitalism, it
is expected to become the dynamizing force of a society which is sunk in stagnation. The concept of
capital itself is also used in an increasingly positive context. In the 1960s there was a move from rigid
materialism towards consciousness, the psyche; now this continues towards instincts. The cult of
spontaneity also means that the instinctive becomes a positive value. The world of the instinct-ego,
the senses, is appreciated. As the conscious, the planned, and the rational are discredited, the mystic,
the irrational, the inconceivable are elevated.
Of course, some of these processes are not the peculiarities of Hungarian society, nor of
socialist societies in general. They are the characteristics of changes in prevailing intellectual
currents throughout the world. But these elements of the Hungarian world-view – from the
conservative wave to mystical fashions, post-modem quotation marks and subjectivity, appreciation
of local societies – were built into the fundamental experience of the crisis of the system and
supplied their stretching energies.
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