Or: what the Hungarian societal unconscious learned over four hundred years, and why it chose the predictable bad for sixteen years — the promised sequel to the quantum essay.
The question is not why he stayed for sixteen years. The question is why we let him — and the answer lies not in politics but in a curriculum four hundred years in the gathering, from which the Hungarian societal unconscious learned one theorem to perfection: the predictable bad is safer than the uncertain good.
Ha ezt a bekezdést gond nélkül elolvassa, Önnek nem ez a kiadás kell: az eredeti a tanul.io/teher címen várja, és a nagymamáját sem kell Önnek bemutatni. Ha viszont egy szót sem ért belőle, kérjük, ne aggódjon: éppen egy négyszáz éves tananyagba lapoz bele, és a tananyag türelmes.
P.S. The Hungarian for burden is teher. The Hungarian for load-bearing is teherbíró. The entire thesis of this essay is hiding inside that dictionary entry.
In my grandmother's kitchen there was an oilcloth on the table, checkered, curling up at one corner, and if you leaned your elbow on it in summer, it stuck to your skin. It was in this kitchen that the sentence was spoken which I have carried ever since. It was not about politics. I believe it was about the price of gas, or a bad year, or something a child cannot understand anyway. My grandmother wiped her hands on her apron and said:
„Kibírjuk, kisfiam. Mi mindig kibírjuk."
— We shall endure it, son. We always endure it.
The checkered oilcloth. Upholstery of every Hungarian grandmother's kitchen table and, by extension, of the national memory. Curls at the corners; adheres to elbows in July; survives regimes. Had Proust been Hungarian, the madeleine would have been an oilcloth, and the novel shorter, because the oilcloth does not encourage lingering.
Decades later, at the very end of an earlier essay, I left a sentence behind, half in jest: if one person can overtrain a single prior class in thirty-five years, what happens when an entire society overtrains one — not over thirty-five years, but over four hundred? I wrote that it would be another discussion-starter.
This is that essay. And my grandmother's sentence is its key. Because that sentence was not an opinion. That sentence was a prior — a very old, very well-rehearsed standing assumption about what can be done with the world when the world is bad. And the answer it carried: endure it. Not change it. Endure it.
Jung called the layer that belongs not to the individual but to the community the collective unconscious — the archetypes, the shared patterns we are born into. The term sounds mystical, but it need not be understood mystically. This site keeps a more prosaic translation on hand: the collective unconscious is shared training data.
According to predictive coding, the brain does not process the input; it predicts, and the basis of prediction is the prior: the standing assumption about what to expect. The individual prior learns from individual experience. But man is a social creature, and a good part of his priors come not from his own experience but from inheritance: from tales, proverbs, family silences, from the things grandfather never talked about. A society's priors distil out of its history — in slow learning that runs across generations.
Now let us see what training data the Hungarian societal unconscious learned from. Mohács: the great battle is lost, the country falls apart. The Bach era: after open resistance, passive resistance becomes the national virtue — Deák does not fight, Deák waits. Trianon: the world is strong and unjust, and does not ask. Fifty-six: whoever rises up is crushed, and the West does not come. Kádár: whoever keeps quiet gets a refrigerator. (Travelers needing dates and details: the Guide's brief catalogue of Hungarian catastrophes covers the full syllabus.)
Four hundred years of gradient descent toward a single theorem. The test questions of Hungarian history were never set on heroism, but on load-bearing. And the lesson the system extracted is brutally rational:
This is not national characterology. This is statistics. A learning system learned exactly what its training set rewarded.
In Martin Seligman's experiments of the 1960s, the dogs that had learned that no behaviour of theirs could prevent the electric shock later failed to jump the low barrier even when jumping it had become possible. Not because they were stupid. Because they had learned. Learned helplessness is not the absence of learning — learned helplessness is learning itself, only from a world that has since changed.
The second half of the twentieth century deepened this curriculum in a dedicated seminar. The structure of the Kádár deal was clean: give up your voice, and in exchange receive predictability. Do not ask who decides and why, and in exchange there will be a Trabant, a summer at Lake Balaton, a "merriest barrack". In this subject — learning the deal and keeping it — Hungarian society took the palm even within the Eastern Bloc.
Western journalists' nickname for Kádár's Hungary: "the merriest barrack in the socialist camp." The merriment was real — goulash, small private plots, a two-stroke car after a six-year waiting list — and so was the barrack. The Guide notes that the phrase was meant as a compliment, was received as one, and that this fact is the entire third chapter in miniature.
John Jost's system-justification theory explains why this was not mere coercion. The mind justifies the system it cannot change — because permanent outrage is unliveable. If the world is bad and unchangeable, the psychologically cheapest solution is to learn that the world is not so bad after all. "Everybody steals." "At least there is order." "Politics is just like that." These are not arguments. These are painkillers.
A people that learned this for four hundred years does not ask of a leader whether he is good. It asks whether he is predictable.
Then, in 1989, freedom arrived, and it turned out to be what Erich Fromm had already described in 1941: freedom is not only a gift but an anxiety. Fromm distinguished freedom from something and freedom for something. The regime change delivered the first: the party vanished, the censor vanished, the wall vanished. For the second — for a person to be able to do something with himself — a trained sense of control would have been needed. And that, as we saw, was not in the curriculum.
What came instead: market, competition, unemployment, foreign-currency mortgages. Freedom as a permanent examination — for a people trained to survive exams, not to pass them. Fromm described precisely what happens then: from anxious freedom, man flees back into structure. The authoritarian character is not a sick mind — it is a solution. A strong father, a clear hierarchy, a named enemy, and the redeeming transfer of responsibility: tell me what to think, and in exchange I need not be alone with my decisions.
And in 2010 came a man who read this demand perfectly. Not from opinion polls — from the gut. He knew it from the inside, because he came from the same kitchen, from the same oilcloth. He offered a strong father (the Jungian Father archetype, flawless casting), offered enemies (Brussels, Soros, the migrant — the cast rotates, the dramaturgy does not), and offered an identity that is home ground to the Hungarian unconscious: that of the besieged, enduring, nevertheless-surviving nation.
That sentence is not an absolution. The key is responsible for wanting to be a key. But whoever analyses only the key and never the lock will not understand why it turned sixteen times.
But why sixteen years, exactly? Why not eight, why not four? Because endurance is not a static condition but a self-reinforcing loop — and the loop has two branches.
The first branch runs on the inside. Every endured year deepens the prior. The logic of sunk cost slides imperceptibly into identity: whoever has endured four years can still decide he was wrong. Whoever has endured sixteen no longer holds endurance as a situation but as a self-image — and surrendering a self-image costs many times more than surrendering a bad decision. The quantum essay described this at the individual level: a prior that runs long enough is no longer a prior, but an identity. At the societal level the same mechanism runs, only slower and with greater inertia.
The second branch runs on the outside, and it is the darker one. A system that knows its people are calibrated for endurance has no interest in the burdens running out. A people that recognises itself in endurance would, without something to endure, lose half its identity — and this deficit the system supplies as a service. There is always a siege on: utility-bill wars, freedom fights, threat of war, assassination by Brussels. The dramaturgy sees to it that the muscle of endurance is never left unemployed.
Meanwhile the official language's favourite verb is grow. The economy grows. Employment grows. Wages grow, families grow, the country grows — the rhetoric of growth and the rhetoric of siege broadcast from the same studio, simultaneously, and together they spell out the system's actual message: the burden is not a bug; the burden is the plan. Not the system's by-product — its fuel.
My grandmother's kitchen no longer exists. I sometimes see the oilcloth's checks in restaurants, as a retro design element, and I always think: how quickly survival becomes nostalgia, and nostalgia becomes decoration.
But the sentence remains. "We shall endure it, son. We always endure it." And by now I can also see what I could not as a child: that this sentence was at once our greatest strength and our greatest vulnerability. Strength, because we truly did endure — Mohács, Trianon, the barrack, all of it. Vulnerability, because to those who endure everything, everything can be handed over for enduring. A capacity for burden is an advertisement to the manufacturers of burdens.
I do not know what the years after the sixteen will rewrite of all this. Priors — we have seen — are not swapped out by an election; they are learned on a generational scale and forgotten on a generational scale. But one thing I do know. The next time someone tells us that hardship ennobles, that the sacrifice is necessary, that the squeeze is temporary — let us remember where we know that melody from. For we know, as our grandmothers knew:
under burden grows the power palm.
Apologies. Palm. Naturally, palm.
Hungarian has a proverb: teher alatt nő a pálma — "under burden grows the palm", the local variant of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger", botanically dubious and pedagogically tireless. In Hungarian, the word for power is hatalom; the tongue slips from pálma to hatalom with suspicious ease, and in the original edition of this essay that is exactly the slip the narrator commits. The strike-through above is not a typo. It is the thesis, getting itself said before the correction could arrive.
My grandmother, for the record, never said this proverb. She only said: we shall endure it. Perhaps she knew the two are not the same.
This is a discussion-starter. The comments await your verdicts — especially from those who think the endurance was not learned helplessness but rational adaptation. Because that case, too, can be argued. The chapters below are open.