There comes a time in everybody’s life when the most uninvited question rends the doors of our souls and suffocates brightness into despair: Is life worth it? Ready to answer no one ever is, but succeed is what we do, nonetheless. Some helped by love, some by their dreams, and some by David Gilmour’s guitar, we all continue to push forward, hoping that beginnings will last forever.
But time passes by and it is despotic. Some lucky ones will experience those inconstant flashes of beauty life has to offer. For some of us though, beginnings never even begin. According to INSTAT, around 1 million people are living with less than 300 Euros per month in Albania, a country in which the food prices are as much as 58% of those in the EU. It takes only 5 minutes to count to 300. For the average Albanian, these 5 minutes must be stretched till the end of the month, or else the stomach won’t find anything to eat. 5 minutes to live for the whole month, makes one wonder not for new beginnings or expectant dreams. Today presents the biggest threat to survival.
The worse gets callous when people living with 60 minutes per year are greeted by cars eating 200 Euros per month in gasoline, driven by men with no other merit than reminding everyone through their cataclysmic lack of fashion sense, that money doesn’t solve everything. As history tells us, the rich people of a poor country, accumulate their greens by either abusing state resources or by dealing with illegal trafficking.
The Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime (SPAK), a new institution established by the US and EU-backed judicial reform, can now show us beyond doubt that Albania has both these types of riches. SPAK has just recently arrested (among other cases) 18 officials for abusing with a 28-million-dollar public tender. Whereas an investigative dossier of the Italian prosecution revealed how the two bodyguards of the former Interior Minister (himself accused of abuse of office and international drug trafficking) were involved in illegal trafficking. They too drove 150 thousand Euros cars.
In their renowned book “Why Nations Fail”, two leading economists Acemoglu and Robinson assert that countries can escape poverty only when they build open, pluralistic, competitive, and all-embracing political institutions. When communism fell, Albanians hoped that the institutions once operating against them, would now begin to work with them, for them. That was what was promised to us: Functioning political institutions regulating the interactions between society so that everyone can have the best possible merited outcome. A different future thus seemed within reach.
But those who should provide, pretend not to see. From the beginning, our institutions crumbled under the arbitrary will of those in power, which in the name of their empowerment, devised a top-down set of rules favoring only those willing to compromise law for the sake of self-interest. Inclusive policies and fair incentives that nurture a meritocracy-centered type of success are missing. In such a vacuum of rectitude, the governing principles of our society have become awry. It is thus now tragically normal that some of the most powerful, and rich persons of Albania are also the most corrupt or the most incompetent.
The rest of us, unwilling to compromise our values, rightfully believing that only honest work and merit should catapult someone to success, are left with a tyranny of injustices that eats away at our human dignity. We were first promised prosperity but sent to hell right after. Because what is hell if not an everlasting 5 minutes of unfulfillment, where laugher comes to the unprincipled.
The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci once brilliantly described the origin of all crises as what occurs when the old is dying and the new cannot be born. “Now”, he added, “is the time of monsters!” But the thing about monsters is that they never have horror as their main occupation. They serve primarily as a symbolic reminder that deleterious acts can happen effortlessly. Goodness is what we have to work hard for! And we begin such an effort by thinking about how to re-magnetize the moral compass of our environment.
It is the greatest postulate of all democracies, including fragile one like ours, that political power is reciprocal in its verticality. Those who exercise their power downwards do so through the upward legitimization we give to them. Think of a stretching rope that remains steady precisely because is pulled with equal force from two sides simultaneously. If that steadiness ceases to exist and starts siding in one direction, all one of the participating parties has to do, is start pulling a little harder. The same goes for political power. If society feels that political power is creating a toxic environment favoring poisonous beings only, it has to exercise more force towards its representatives.
Two astonishing inventions of mechanical engineering can come to our help. The first one is called ‘negative feedback’ and occurs when the outputs of a system are fed back in a manner that reduces the disadvantages of the original output. By refusing to submit to the established norms of the status quo, we can create a negative feedback loop, informing those in power that the electorate is not satisfied with their doings.
To put it in political terms, it would be like every time an injustice occurs, a protest, civil disobedience, low participation in elections, or political structure drop-off follows. Repeated with strong intensity, in a great span of time and space, that would create a certain pressure on political parties to change their behavior for the better. In the rope example, negative feedback would translate into an electrical charge supplied to the rope by the disadvantageous person, compelling the other one to exercise less force, thus steading the rope again.
This mechanism of redemption has been judged effective by the eyes of history: Gandhi’s Salt March, Kyiv’s Orange Revolution, Paris’ Yellow Vests Movement, Chavez’s Delano Grape Boycott, South Africa’s National Day of Protest, Make Poverty History Campaign, The Philippines Protesting for Vote, all are successful examples of how social mobilization can lead to change. In the long term, negative feedback loops applied to political systems work precisely because they undermine the most robust pillar of power: legitimacy. Marx Weber’s famous definition of the state as “the monopoly of violence” is wrong. What he actually said is that the state is “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.”
But the erosion of legitimacy is only the first step. Since no political system can function in vain, the disruption of the old clusters of social and political commitment would assert the need for new engagements to be born, putting thus, as Antonio Gramsci predicts, the crisis to an end. In engineering terms, this is defined as a positive feedback loop, where ‘A’ produces more of ‘B’ which in turn produces more of ‘A’.
Politically, this means that social unrest paves the way for new organizations, which in turn elicit more pressure on the representatives, forcing them to withdraw completely. Or simply put, when one takes a technologically advanced mechanism to stretch its part of the rope, it leaves the other person forever unable to take the winning edge.
The synergy of positive and negative feedbacks would originate a lively dynamic of social mobilization to our body politic, thus contrasting the now sedentary, top-down political system of ours. After 30 long years of political transition, our society should take a hard look in the mirror, and see how the unscrupulous are succeeding in their life, only to pervert ours. This image alone should fuel our endeavor to dignify the life of those 1 million people living in the anxious margins of the 5 minutes.
We can only ease their devastating dispute of ‘Is life worth it’, by fully comprehending the fact that we are all an integral part of the political equation: There is no solution to our problems that does not require our unmediated involvement. Ladies and gentlemen, we have been sent to hell. When will we come back to life?
-Dosti Banushi is a young political activist with considerable experience in Albanian civil society and media outlets. He has completed his Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and is currently studying Political Communication on an EU awarded scholarship at the University of Aarhus and the University of Amsterdam.
/Abcnews.al
