Ante faciam frigorem quis sustenibit?
My thoughts are tending to Romania today, a country I came to know rather well (in the library knowledge sense), and which I like very much -- Cluj, Bucharest. But I think the focus on Bosnia and Serbia is correct. The Powers that Be in my country and the Powers that Be in the eastern (which is to say Western) Balkans are a bit simpatico. And I seem to be having a mite of difficulty with the former. The watchword is: basic sufficiency, and the freedom to read, think and write.
Let me try to explain (or perhaps just sum up) how it is that I think things are going wrong in my country. It is a prosperous country, so a materialistic critique would say nothing is wrong. And yet.
First, consider that there is a commonly held notion of fairness, democratic process, and the law of the land, and that this becomes the default understanding when one of the hundreds of millions on these shores thinks about what might be going on in areas of the country that they know nothing about. Second, I would claim, based on several experiences with institutions of national scale, that this is not in fact the sensibility that governs in the event. Third, there is a prevailing sense that this is not the exception, but the higher pragmatic truth. That to be governed by ideas is a mistake, and it is better to reach pragmatic agreement with the habits and processes of those currently controlling the institutions. The claim of right, I think, is the essence of the growing threat to the Republic (in evidence of which I would point to the current Executive). Which is part of the reason that I think my secular work (literally, of the age -- when I break my own rules and read and think about the thoughts currently percolating, as opposed to the old texts) is worth doing, even at the cost of extraordinary difficulty every day.
Next. Consider the balance of realism and idealism within the current political matrix. In more pragmatic terms, consider which things are mind-independent and should be judged by us as to their real nature, and which things are more idealistic, in that we take them on faith to be a certain thing, and our intuition of them allows us to calibrate our general understanding of things -- they teach us how to think about the things that are. In the context of the general imitation that constitutes the present politics, only certain things are thought to be grounds for private opinions. The leaders, whomever they might be, are thought to be guides, not probationers subject to constant scrutiny. Herein is the mistake. Everything on earth is on earth to be judged. That is the Adamic task. And in this general reversal, the things of heaven are claimed to have mind-independent existence as existence is generally understood, and this proposition is promptly collectively negatived, leading the people away from both God and higher thoughts. We look at the stars to expand the reach of our sight, not to judge whether they exist. Perhaps in the context of expanding our sight, we might wonder, with Huck, whether they were made or just happened, but this is the beginning of knowledge, not a threshold criterion of legitimacy.
This is what I think is going on far, far upstream. As for my personal experiences downstream in the muddy flatlands, I know that I've attempted three careers and encountered fatal (and occasionally almost deadly) corruption in each, resulting in the present rather spectacular difficulties. At the same time, there is a general prosperity from the industrial structures set up after the second world war, making the proposition that things are going badly in the world a bit counterintuitive to the materialist mind.
Which is why I think the question of intuition, after the last clarification in Koenigsberg some 250 years ago, is perhaps ripe for another explicitation and calibration.
But first, one must survive the cold, the calumny, and the general confusion.