Today, Macedonia Nord is, unfortunately, a petty bourgeois society. But that was not always the case. First, under the centuries-old Turkish, we were a feudal society. In the first Yugoslavia we became a peasant society with a petty bourgeois elite, and in the second, a socialist Yugoslavia, we became a truly modern society. Our society reached its modernity by revolutionary means, with the same collective enthusiasm for modernity, and in a short time, characteristic of the pace of revolutionary change.

The most important role in the modernization of society was played by ideology, so our modernity was felt equally in the technical-technological areas of industrialization and electrification of the country, but also in the areas of urbanization and social and humanistic disciplines. Our modern institutions were created there, our modern self-knowledge, there - in the social and humanistic thought - the Macedonian society self-shapes all aspects of its cultural uniqueness.

And the most important feature of that uniqueness was precisely its modernity that embraced the ideas of the Enlightenment, the universal human rights, the scientific and technical basis of progress, with the ideas of freedom, equality and brotherhood and, of course, internationalism. In a word, we felt - and we were objectively - real citizens of the world.

Deleting creative thought

When we became an independent state, we returned to the pre-modern era again in a flashy time - as in a morbid medieval fable. Several catastrophic historical mistakes we made, it is said, from the very first day of the euphoria of newly gained independence - while the Frushko Gog pearl was foaming at the hands of the first prime minister - were key to the successful self-degradation of society.

The first - and most frightening - was the rejection of modernism and the embrace of VMRO revivalist ultra-nationalism. The VMRO-DPMNE, which marked practically the entire three-decade transition to nowhere and nothing, was based on fierce anti-communism, which, unfortunately, is still not recognized in its true form - as fascism. This retrograde ideology cruelly, thoroughly and indiscriminately rejected the communist cultural heritage, social institutions, and with them the educational, humanistic and scientific-rational achievements of the time of Macedonian socialism.

The erasure of the collective memory from socialism also erased our ability to think critically and creatively, as a result of which our culture, our language, and our self-knowledge - our collective identity - suffered badly.

The second catastrophic mistake is that in rejecting the Marxist ideology and the experiences of the socialist society, we have given up all the acquired systemic and organizational qualities, knowledge and skills from our previous state-building and civilization existence. At the very gate of the "free democratic world", we disguised ourselves as newborn children; we performed a somersault in complete self-infantilism and voluntarily became "entertainers": we entered the preparatory class of the elementary school of liberal capitalism.

Moreover, we were fortunate enough that the transition from socialism to capitalism took place at the zenith of the cruel age of neoliberalism, which sent its missionaries, instructors and political commissars, with precise directives from our modern society, to make it mafia-like, cleric-fascist, provincial petty bourgeois society. But, let's understand, if it was only the negative foreign influence, the process of cretinization of the Macedonian society would not have been so successful. He might not have succeeded at all. A key factor in this collective civilization suicide was the internalization of Macedonian society, which was a thorough and nationwide process of self-cretinization from which few emerged unscathed. If anyone at all.

An essential feature of our petty bourgeois state of consciousness is its resistance to information. Hence the re-immersion into magical and mythological thought, general mental laziness, forgetting the meaning of words and, in general, forgetting language, mastering kitsch and shallow fashions and clichés. Let me explain this in the words of cybernetics and information.

Messages themselves, as Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, explained long ago, are a form of structure and organization. Because in every set of messages there is entropy - as in every set of states in the real world - and it can be considered a measure of disorganization, the information carried by each message becomes a measure of the organization. In fact, the information carried by the message can be interpreted as a negation of its own entropy, ie as a negative logarithm of its probability. Everything has become clear to you since I mentioned the negative logarithm, right?

But in simple terms, this means that the more likely a message is, the less information it contains. Because of this entropic law - physically the truest and most applicable in the whole universe - clichés, kitsch, VMRO baroque and turbo political-folk are infinitely poorer in content than great poems or other works of art. But they are also more likely and easier to proliferate, and especially popular with lazy-minded consumers who have already gone through the process of vmrorization and self-cretinization.

Salvation from self-forgetfulness and hopelessness

One will ask, under the burden of this oppressive entropic realism, is there any salvation from the low slope we have carved with our own mental desolation, laziness and conformism? There are, dear readers, and he is in the same area of ​​messages and information whose bad "management" we have reached our petty bourgeois paradise. In the successful management of the state - as well as in the management of all social processes - the most important thing is for each individual operating in a real and changing environment to receive information about the results of its work together with the information that is crucial for its further operation. It's so simple, but we persistently do not apply it.

When driving an elevator - to borrow another example from the basics of cybernetics - the front door can not be opened only on the basis of the order according to which the cab should be located opposite the door at the moment we open it. The permission to open the door must be conditioned by the fact that the cab is really opposite it, because without this insurance if something holds the cab, one could step into an empty shaft.

So, this way of managing every action and every process in the society, based on the real, not the expected situation, is called feedback or feedback. This simple mechanism of managing our activities and actions is the only way to control the general tendencies towards the disorganization of the society. Obtaining feedback is the only way to reverse the usual direction of entropy, to save oneself from self-forgetfulness, pettiness and quiet hopelessness.

But will we be smarter than an elevator?

(The language in which they are written as well as the views expressed in the column "Columns" are not views and reflections of the editorial policy of "Free Press")