Pathological Consequences of Abused Socialism

These reflections are inspired by the dialogue between Branka Pecotic and Andrew Cooper ‘Healthy and Pathological Consequences of Two Cultures’. Our response is written from the perspective of the Bulgarian experience with totalitarian and post-totalitarian society. In order to sustain binocular vision on social phenomena, trying to keep in mind and understand what is going on both at the level of the individual and the level of the group, as famously suggested by Bion, we need suitable explanatory constructs, grasping different levels of complexity. One set of constructs, used by many social theorists, is individualism versus collectivism. It is widely accepted that different societies have varying propensity for individualism and collectivism, and it is often assumed that collectivism is characteristic of eastern paternalistic cultures, whereas individualism is inherent to Western societies, espousing the ideals of liberal democracy and market capitalism. Culture may encourage and even enforce predominantly individualistic or collectivist values and the ensuing behavioural strategies, and maintaining the balance between individualism and collectivism is certainly a central dilemma, faced by all human societies. However, the explanation of individual and group modes of functioning solely in terms of culture would be deterministic and reductionist. Cultures are not static entities, but fluid and protean phenomena. Furthermore, the continuity of culture may be disrupted by abrupt changes, such as outbreaks of revolutionary violence, which may establish overnight new and quite discontinuous modes of social organization.