Being the English edition of A bizonytalan jó (The Uncertain Good): a homecoming essay about the first catastrophe in living memory to arrive without a face, and about the noise that finally stopped. With cultural footnotes for travelers — after István Örkény and Douglas Adams.
A month after arguing, in Hungarian, that four hundred years taught this country that the predictable bad feels safer than the uncertain good, I flew home into an extraordinary situation — and, for the first time in years, the collective psychosis did not land with me. What follows is that discovery, with footnotes: why a merciful geography meant every Hungarian catastrophe had a face, why faced catastrophes teach endurance and faceless ones teach cooperation, and why a country can be calmer inside a real emergency than it ever was inside a manufactured peace. Don't panic: it's good news.
Ha ezt a bekezdést gond nélkül elolvassa, Önnek nem ez a kiadás kell: az eredeti, lábjegyzetek nélküli változat a tanul.io/medence címen várja, és rövidebb is, mert Önnek nem kell elmagyarázni Trianont. Ha viszont ebből a bekezdésből egy szót sem ért, kérjük, ne aggódjon: pontosan Önnek írtuk mindazt, ami ezután következik. Ezt a megnyugtatást, sajnálatos módon, Ön sosem fogja elolvasni.
P.S. If the paragraph above is all Greek to you, relax: you are holding the right edition. A Hungarian would tell you it looks Chinese. It is neither. Linguists agree it is worse.
There is a moment that every homecoming used to repeat with such precision you could have calibrated instruments against it. Not the landing. Not passport control. The first ten minutes in the crowd — when the thing we call air back home seeps in under your skin. The set of people's shoulders. The volume at which two strangers conduct phone calls side by side. The news dripping from the screens, in which there is always a siege on; only the cast rotates. For years this is how I came home: the plane touched down, and inside me the collective psychosis touched down with it. It always landed in my shoulders, two centimetres below the ear.
This time it didn't happen.
At the baggage carousel an old man's suitcase slid back onto the belt. Three strangers reached for it at once, without exchanging a glance. The fastest one caught it, set it down by the man's feet, and before he could be thanked, said over his shoulder: „Adja csak a másikat is, úgyis itt állok."
— Give me the other one too. I'm standing here anyway.
My first suspect was myself. Jet lag. Gone soft abroad. Maybe I had simply got used to quiet and carried it home, like duty-free perfume. But I don't know the collective psychosis from books — I know it from my shoulders. And my shoulders reported nothing. Something had changed here, not in me.
A month ago, in Hungarian, I closed an essay called A türelem szerkezete — The Structure of Patience — by admitting I didn't know what the years after the sixteen years would rewrite in a four-hundred-year-old survival reflex. I did not expect the sequel to write itself this fast. And I did not expect it to be written not by politics, but by something with no face.
Pronounced roughly kee-BEE-ryook. A single Hungarian verb meaning "we will endure it," except the translation loses four hundred years of field testing. It is what a grandmother says about the gas bill, the government, and the twentieth century, in the same tone. Note that the we is not a separate word: Hungarian bakes the pronoun into the verb, the way it bakes paprika into everything. The nearest English equivalent, "keep calm and carry on," is a marketing slogan. Kibírjuk is load-bearing.
Let me defuse the term before it explodes: I am not claiming a country went mad. Psychosis, clinically, means that the mind's predictions detach from its input — the model stops working from reality and starts eating its own output. And that is precisely what can happen to a society. Not as an illness. As an operating mode.
In the language of predictive coding (in Hungarian, but the maths is neutral): the brain is a prediction machine, and a society runs a shared one — shared priors, shared expectations of what comes next. Feed that machine a siege every day for sixteen years and it learns that attack will come. After that, you can stop feeding it. It predicts the siege all by itself.
That is what you feel on your skin at the airport: millions of nervous systems, each tensed by a single millimetre. Individually undetectable. Together: a hum.
I heard it on the arrivals side. Or rather, I didn't — which is the same thing, from the inside.
Between 2010 and 2026, Hungary was governed by Viktor Orbán — a man who, as the Hungarian original of this essay's prequel put it, did not hijack the national subconscious but read it and catered to it, the way a locksmith understands a lock. The era's signature product was the manufactured siege: a rotating cast of enemies — Brussels, migrants, George Soros, occasionally all three on one billboard — kept the nation's endurance musculature in daily training. A government programme reducing household utility bills was officially named a war (rezsiharc, "overhead-bill combat"). The Guide wishes to stress that it did not invent this.
Now look at the map the way Hungarians rarely do: gratefully. The Carpathian Basin is one of Europe's most sheltered embraces. No ocean at the doorstep. Hurricanes exhaust themselves long before they arrive; the mountain rim stands against the winds like a wall built to purpose. The great fault lines keep a polite distance. The one volcano is extinct and currently produces dessert wine. Around here, an earthquake is a rare guest, and the flood was always a slow, legible opponent — you could watch it coming on a map, days ahead.
This geological luck quietly rewrote the curriculum. Because if nature does not deliver catastrophes, people will. And every catastrophe people deliver arrives with a face.
1526, Mohács. The national army is destroyed by the Ottoman Empire in roughly two hours; the country spends the next century and a half partitioned between three powers. 1849. The revolution against Habsburg Austria is crushed, with fraternal Russian assistance; the national strategy of choice becomes passive resistance — waiting, performed with dignity. 1920, Trianon. The post-war peace treaty removes two-thirds of the country's territory overnight; a hundred years later it remains the conversation that cannot be finished. 1956. An uprising against Soviet rule is put down in under two weeks, while the West sends encouraging radio programming. 1957–1989, the Kádár deal. The standing offer: surrender your political voice, receive in exchange predictability, a small car, and the title of "happiest barrack" in the socialist camp. Hungarians proved excellent at this subject.
The attentive traveler will notice what every item on this list has in common: a face. Sultan, emperor, general secretary.
And a faced catastrophe can be survived by enduring: you wait it out, you appease it, you outlast it until it gets bored. This is not cowardice — against a perpetrator, it is rational. But the storm does not get bored. The flood does not offer a refrigerator in exchange for silence. The faceless catastrophe does not sign a Kádár deal. Against it, exactly one strategy works, and it happens to be the one that was lethal against the faced kind: standing together, visibly, in large numbers.
For centuries, the Guide's entry read, in full: "Harmless." Following a recent revision, it now reads: "Mostly harmless." The Dutch, meanwhile, like to trace their famous consensus culture to the sea itself — whoever builds a dyke must agree with his neighbour, because water does not check land registries. Historians dispute how much of that is legend; the Guide finds it telling which legend they chose. The faceless catastrophe is a recurring, compulsory seminar in horizontal cooperation. Some nations have attended for centuries. Hungary enrolled this year.
And then it arrived. I will not name it — if you are reading this in 2026, you know; if you are reading it in 2036, the mechanism is all you need. What matters is this: for the first time in generations, something very bad happened to this country that had no face. No one to outwait. No one to appease. No one to blame — or rather, blaming was attempted, out of ancient habit, and for once it visibly fixed nothing, and everyone could see it fixing nothing.
The four-hundred-year-old toolkit went bankrupt in about three days. And then the thing happened that no curriculum had prepared anyone for: a reserve tool turned up that nobody knew was in the cellar. Human chains no one organised. Neighbours who had nodded at each other in the stairwell for twenty years and are now on first-name terms. The building's group chat, which had spent three years litigating who failed to take the rubbish out, now posts shift schedules. Hungarian has a proverb, sok kéz hamar kész — many hands, soon done. It rhymes, which is suspicious: for four hundred years there was remarkably little occasion to use it. It turns out it was not a proverb. It was a blueprint, waiting.
"Typically Hungarian." A national verbal reflex, applied to everything that malfunctions: queue-jumping, paperwork, weather, football. Declaring things tipikusan magyar is so widespread that it is, of course, itself typically Hungarian — a recursion Hungarians are fully aware of and perform anyway, with visible pleasure. One field datum matters for this essay: in living memory, the phrase has never been applied to something going well.
In my second week home I heard a man watch a human chain pass sandless bags of everything down a street, and say, with the exact intonation his father must have reserved for delayed trains: tipikusan magyar. Typically Hungarian. It was the first time in my life I heard the phrase spoken as praise — and nobody around him found it strange. Semantics had quietly switched sides.
And the grandmothers' verb did not disappear. Only the we hiding inside kibírjuk shifted its meaning, silently and radically: for four hundred years it meant each of us, separately, outlasting. It has begun to mean all of us, holding on to each other. Same verb. Different grammar. Different country.
But why calm, of all things? This is the paradox this essay exists for. There is an extraordinary situation on — and the country's nervous system is quieter than in any so-called peacetime of the preceding years. On first hearing this makes no sense. On second hearing it is the most precise thing I have ever felt at home.
The key was already sitting in a parenthesis of the Hungarian prequel: when Martin Seligman and Steven Maier revisited their famous learned-helplessness experiments, they concluded they had had it backwards — helplessness is not learned. Helplessness is the default state. What has to be learned is control. A society that rarely got a chance to practise control for four hundred years was not cowardly. It was untrained. And now — strange to write it down — the extraordinary situation is running a mass course in the feeling of control. Every burden picked up is a data point: my movement changes the outcome. No campaign on Earth can teach that sentence. It can only be done. And it is learned fast, because the feedback is immediate.
And this is the strength I felt on arrival — the thing that is putting society back in order despite everything. I had to name it, because it resembled nothing I knew from home: it does not order itself from above, but from the side. It is not the state's strength, and it does not work against the state either — it simply runs on a different axis. Horizontal force. Hungarian promptly coined a word for it, because Hungarian coins words the way other economies print money: szomszédnyomaték. Neighbour torque. The Guide is reasonably confident this word did not exist before this summer.
A hitchhiker, famously, always knows where his towel is. What I came home to was a country that suddenly, collectively, knew where the towels were kept.
My kitchen has no viaszosvászon — the checkered oilcloth that upholsters every Hungarian grandmother's kitchen table and, apparently, the national memory. Mine is an IKEA one, which is almost the same thing, except it curls up at the corners in Swedish. It was at this table, on the evening after I landed, that my son asked about the extraordinary situation I am not naming: „Apa, és ha megint ilyen lesz?" — Dad, what if it happens again?
And the sentence started up in me. The one that has stood ready for four hundred years, that belonged to my grandmother and to her grandmother, the one I wrote an entire essay about. It set off down the track it was laid on —
„Kibírjuk Megcsináljuk, kisfiam."
Translation: "We'll endure it" → "We'll get it done, son."
I did not correct myself. The sentence corrected itself.
I won't lie this prettier than it is. Priors do not retrain in a single summer; the noise will switch back on, the manufactured siege will get another season, and the four hundred years will pull us back toward well-practised endurance many times yet. One counterexample does not rewrite four centuries. But the four centuries had, until now, learned without a single counterexample. Now there is one. It is done, it happened, it is in the training set — and nothing can be un-happened from a training set.
I did, out of thoroughness, check the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. Locally, at least, it is not 42. It is the neighbours.
This is a discussion-starter, like everything on this site. The comments are open under every chapter — I am especially curious about readers convinced that what I felt on the arrivals side was not social learning but jet lag. They may be right. But jet lag wears off in three days. This has lasted two weeks — and it isn't wearing off. It's spreading.