LITU T. ATIT

Many peoples are enslaved by violence.

Other people are enslaved by hunger.

But there are also peoples who are enslaved by the pathological need to worship someone.

The latter is the most sophisticated form of captivity because it is made without external handcuffs. Man connects them himself.

I'd love to. With enthusiasm. Even with a moral ecstasy.

Erich Frommmi had understood this horror long before the modern world entered the age of emotional populism.

In the book “Arratia From Freedom”, he wrote that the modern man, once released from one authority, instinctively begins to seek another.

Not because you don't want freedom as an idea, but because freedom is an ontological burden. Freedom requires consciousness and responsibility. Freedom requires titanish courage to live without a spiritual tutor.

Most people cannot cope with this metaphysic anxiety.

So Frommmi said that many individuals flee from freedom as if the thirsty man fled from the wilderness toward the first shade he promises of water. Even if that water is poison.

Kosovo today has become a wild laboratory of this psychological tragedy.

Society dissected by permanent transition.

Society fatigued by historic expectation.

Stirred by cyclical disappointment.

Distorted between the myth of statehood and the reality of collective emptiness.

In this state of civilian fatigue, citizens no longer care about institutions. Institutions require patience, democratic culture and intellectual restraint, and tired people no longer have the energy for such luxuries of civilization.

In these moments, the people start looking for their rescue figure.

To look for a man to whom he can place fear, uncertainty, anger, and fatalistic form of even his own nonexistence.

Emotional authoritarianism thus arises.

Not to the dictator but to collective need for dictators.

Frommim called this “authoritarian character” means that the individual who kneels to power but who also exercises aggression against anyone who does not kneel with him. This is paradoxical psychology, where submission is perceived as force, and free thought as a threat.

Is that what we see every day in Kosovo?

Today such political leader is no longer being treated as temporary state administrator, but as a Messianic figure, as moral authority and as an emotional mediator between the crowd and the meaning of its political existence.

His supporter no longer asks whether his policy is functioning?

This supporter just cares about asking himself if he's feeling saved through this leader?

Once that happens, politics does not continue to remain institutional rationality but turns into collective liturgy.

Look closely at modern militia.

He's not ideological.

He's a psychosexual.

Frommmi has told us about political secularism, that individual's need to submit to a superior force, and at the same time to exert that power over others.

That's why militants are so aggressive.

Not because they're strong.

But just because they feel small.

A man who feels ontological emptiness in himself requires that he fill it with a tribal identification. And the more empty the individual is, the more fanatic his need for belonging becomes.

Not surprisingly today in Kosovo, any criticism of the leader is perceived as blasphemy. Any disagreement with him as political heresy of any autonomous thought as moral treason.

Because the problem is no longer political.

Now the problem is anthropological.

Our society is gradually losing its ability to live without the cult of a figure. And I'm not sure if he ever had that skill.

That's why public debate has turned into emotional hysteria. We no longer have confrontations of ideas, but collective rituals of loyalty. Facts have no weight. We no longer have reasoning citizens, but crowds seeking emotional confirmation of the beliefs they have already absoluteized.

So happens the most elegant disaster of modern authoritarianism, the one when people start to give up freedom, not out of fear, but out of love.

Out of love for the leader.

For the crowd.

For the narcotic sense of belonging.

Frommmi realized that the most dangerous dictatorships are not those that rule the body but those that colonize psychics.

Under these conditions, Kosovo today does not only risk political authoritarianism.

Kosovo today risks emotional slavery.

A situation where the individual no longer thinks of the truth but only about harmony with his ideological beam. This situation where critical thinking is perceived as moral deviation. Where intelligence begins to be considered arrogance, and servileity is sold as patriotism.

We fought heroicly to be freed from a foreign ruler, but we continue to fear freedom.

Because we love submission!