Social Trust in Orbán’s Hungary
Economist Philip Pilkington moved to Hungary recently, and discovered that everything he’d heard about the country was propaganda created by liberals who know that liberal societies are unraveling.
Four weeks to the day I arrived in Budapest. I knew a little bit about the country. I had dropped in for a few days here and there—even getting to know some of the political circles. Naturally, I did not believe a lot of the nonsense that you read about Hungary. Even a modicum of experience will tell you that the vast majority of what you read is rot. The first time I visited a few years ago, on the way back from the airport ago the taxi driver—a very outspoken critic of the government—subjected me to an unsolicited twenty-minute rundown of every corruption scandal in the country since the present prime minister took office. “If this is what a society without limited freedom of speech looks like,” I thought to myself, “then what on earth is the contemporary Anglosphere—where working people walk on eggshells for fear of offending the latest fad—supposed to be?”
That said, I did not really know what to expect at a deeper level. After all, you would have to be a bear of little brain to believe all the hyperbole about dictatorship, the suppression of dissidents, and all the rest of it. But perhaps there was some truth to the idea that it is effectively an oligarchy, run by the few for the few at the expense of the many. Perhaps it was true that Hungary was moving to become a central European hermit kingdom, isolated from the rest of the world. Maybe, just maybe, despite the occasional vocal taxi driver, most dissidents sulked in the shadows, unable to speak out—and this created the sort of social distrust that many reported as being a hallmark of the Soviet societies of yesteryear.
Alas, I have found that none of this is true. Indeed, on every point it is the opposite of the truth. There is propaganda, andthen there is propaganda. Simple propaganda bends the truth—the spin doctor applies his spin, as we are so fond of sanitizing the corruption of our political processes in the West. Dark propaganda—the type that blackens the soul—tells us the opposite of the truth. In Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother is not content until poor Winston Smith admits that 2 + 2 does indeed equal 5. Hungary, I am afraid to say, has not simply been spun—rather it has been blackened, and we in the West are far worse off for it.