Kiszolgáltatottság
The simmering rage of no agency
A post in which I will try to illustrate an untranslatable concept
Intro #1: dictionary
Every language has particular expressions that are difficult, if not impossible to translate. The Hungarian word kiszolgáltatottság is one of them. I can explain it, I can describe it, but there is no straight translation of its meaning into a single English word or expression.
The dictionary translates it as ‘vulnerability’.
This is the translation of the Hungarian dictionary definition:
“The state, situation, or fact that someone or something is at the mercy of someone or something;
Being completely at his or her mercy, and must helplessly suffer to be treated at his or her pleasure or will.The necessity of enduring some unpleasant thing or situation.”
(I would also add unavoidability next to necessity)
Would you use the above definition for the expression ‘vulnerability’? Of course you wouldn’t.
No need to feel bad, there are far more English expressions that I cannot translate well to Hungarian than the other way around.
The root of the word is servant/servitude; the state of being ‘served’ into the mercy (and control) of someone or something. It could even be the demons of your own nature. The closest I could come (re)generating the meaning in English would be (being in the state of-) ‘inservitudeness’, much like the structure of ‘indebtedness’.
Intro #2: the roots of MY understanding
I had a wonderful, loving childhood ‘till I turned four, when my mother took me from my grandparents and her two teenage siblings into her new family. That’s when the abuse began. The beatings you can get used to, as anyone who went through it can tell you. The things that are difficult to process are the injustices, the randomness and the excess. By the time I was twelve, I hated my stepfather with passion. I wanted to hit back, but I understood that it would only result in a much more serious beating. I started crying out of my frustrated anger at which point he stopped the beating and started mocking me for being a crybaby who cannot even take a beating like a man, which, of course, made me even more angry.
That is the state of kiszolgáltatottság. The sense of being utterly powerless with the indignation over the injustice and the frustration of the suppressed anger over it all, with the complicity of non-rebellion.
I carry the capacity for this frustrated anger with me still to this day. It is the heaviest burden of my personality. I don’t think I can ever be free from it.
Intro #3: the triggers
Why am I telling you all this? Because I got triggered. Over and over and over again, but before I get to the details, let me give you one more example.
When I was living in Paris, I had people around me loosely connected to my friends back in the old country. One of them was a painter from a small village far from the capital. Since he was very talented, he got into the Academy of Fine Arts and he got student accommodation, but when he finished, he had to face the impossible task of finding a place to live in Budapest. He never really managed, and that was, eventually, one of the reasons why he left.
Health-care and housing was (and is) nominally free in communist countries, but they are always (and inevitably) marred by shortages. What triggered this friend was the retarded leftists of the West pointing out that in communist countries these basic services are free.
He was livid asking them “what difference does it make that it is free, if you cannot have it, because there isn’t any available???”
Indeed, we can ask: what is the value of nothing? I was so completely able to relate to his frustrated anger, that just writing about it today makes me angry.
But I have plenty of my own. Triggers, anger and frustration.
What prompted this post was the news of …
…the death of Gonzalo Lira.
My moral outrage was over the responsibility of the US government. He was an American citizen. All that was needed is a call from an administration official. A call from the US ambassador in Kiev could have set him free. The news hardly even made it into Western MSM.
It is a minor issue in the greater problem of the war, but it is still a revolting manifestation of the callous disregard for life by the very people entrusted with protecting it.
We are at the mercy of the system, in a state of – kiszolgáltatottság.
The Canadian Communist health care system #1
As you know from my previous posts, my wife has Multiple Myeloma, a particularly ugly cancer.
I am 75% convinced that her cancer was induced/triggered/exacerbated by the Moderna vaccine.
NOBODY is willing to consider and investigate it. Not even reporting it as a possibility. When she is raising the question, it is either deflected, or ignored. There is NOTHING we can do about it. Just as I was writing this, we got news from a relative, that a perfectly healthy friend of his died of a stroke a week after getting his fourth Covid shot. I think there is a good chance that it was not reported.
We are at the mercy of the system, in a state of – kiszolgáltatottság.
The Canadian Communist health care system #2
On the top of it all, our family doctor is moving. There is nobody to take over her practice, so she is closing it. When we moved out of Toronto 7 years ago, it took us a year and a half to find a family doctor. It will be much harder now. Everything got much worse with Covid. Without a family doctor, the only thing we have ‘access’ to is hospital emergency rooms with their average six to twelve hours of waiting time. We are at the mercy of the system, in a state of – kiszolgáltatottság.
The Canadian Communist health care system #3
Universal Health Care is consistently on the top spot of the reasons for Canadian national pride.
The percentage dipped a little recently, but it is still #1 on the list.
The problem with this love affair is that most Canadians have no idea what they are talking about as they have no interaction with the system. The people who love the Canadian health care system are the healthy ones. What they are in love with, is the communist idea:
Once they get older and get some exposure to the system, they will already be in the minority, having been replaced by new generations of worshipers of the communist idea.
The rest of us will remain captives of the system, in a state of – kiszolgáltatottság, without any agency over our fate.
The Canadian Communist health care system #4
For the past few years there are signs popping up in hospitals, healthcare facilities and other public places warning us that the people working there will not tolerate any ‘abuse’.
Don’t you dare to raise your voice; don’t you dare to express your disapproval; don’t you dare to challenge their absolute authority over your life. They may refuse to ‘serve’ you. In a system with an absolute monopoly, in a system where this refusal may cost you your life. The signs are just reminding us who is in charge. You can submit or die. We are at the mercy of the system, in a state of – kiszolgáltatottság.
Justin Trudeau and the Canadian voters
Justin Trudeau does not anger me; not any more than a pile of pigsh*t would. What I have for him is an exceptionally high degree of disgust. I cannot take watching or listening to him for more than 30 seconds without feeling nauseated. He literally makes me want to puke, and I never use the word ‘literally’ figuratively. What I feel the frustrated, suppressed rage about is the Canadian electorate that voted this incompetent, corrupt, retarded sock puppet into office THREE TIMES!!! For his hair? For his family name? For reverence of his actual communist father? In the end it does not matter.
I am at the mercy of the Canadian electorate, in a state of utter – kiszolgáltatottság.
The Dangers
My friend on TikTok
I don’t like TikTok, but I have a friend with a channel on it so I subscribed just so that I can follow him. This post of his hit 1 million views:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
It would be difficult to miss the frustration and the pent-up anger in his videos. He is more awake than I am, much better informed about the horrible crimes committed against us.
My frustration and anger are nothing compared to his. The problem is that he is getting more and more consumed by it all. I am worried about him. Really. But I don’t know what is the way out.
The essence of my personal experience is the control of the rage. I am controlling it now, even as it is physically stressing me to write about it. I am tense and angry, just as I feel a similar tension and anger growing around me in the world. What worries me is the prospect that it may lead to serious overreactions. Changes are happening around us that leave us with this feeling of desperate powerlessness and lack of agency.
I could easily name another dozen subjects that make me feel angry, frustrated and powerless – just as it makes an ever-growing number of people feeling the same way.
If you can relate to the concept and have an example of your own to illustrate, please share it with us! Because: Politics is personal
Take a good look at the picture above. I can count few different layers in it to illustrate the desperate lack of agency. What do YOU find the most revolting?
References
Sources of personal or collective pride in Canada
What Does From Each According to His Abilities Mean?
An important word! I was reading a new book with plays translated from Hungarian i to English. Difficult Women it was called and teo of the plays described the Kafkaesque reality of thevwomen depicted and the abuse supported by the system. What made an impression is the language of Hungarian and how the translator must interpret situations as some words are not existing in Hungarian. Fascinating. Am sorry to hear about the health challenges you are facing with your wife.
Hi Zork; You say: I (WNT) aim for a discussion community, and you (ZTH) aim for a debate society. Let’s have a debate society right now. The subject is “What is the Purpose of this Post”. (You say it is to illustrate an untranslatable concept, which I question?)
To start, let's do an overview on assumed identity, and whether that is a legacy that controls you, or if there is a chance to modify it, (also through Substack).
We claim that there is a hidden part of life called the subconscious, for the most part inaccessible. That is mystifying. There are two major categories of human life.
✓The earliest is hunter/gatherer, or subsistence farmer with your own little farmstead, kindergarten, pigs, and as long as you don’t run out of vodka and lard, and at least the grass grows, you don't need neighbors, relations, agreements, nor even a language. You might have some "culture" but not that it is needed. You don’t talk much. Maybe you knew some similar people from Hungary?
✓The second is urban living, way more intense, where you are removed from your primal needs and must rely on organizing supply chains, have a job controlled by someone else, need all kinds of agreements and services to regulate things and keep the peace, water, power, gas, and look out for interruptions that would kill swaths of people. This second system is called “society”, and there are dozens of them in operation right now, and more from the past.
THIS SOCIETY IS NOT REALITY. It is a virtual reality which you inherited, and maybe agree with some of it. Now I am going to say that: all of your particular subconscious, resides in your particular virtual reality. At least so much of it, that it is the first place to look.
We are born, and we start building our identity from the building blocks of our virtual reality, filtered through people. Many of our experiences might have been shocking or even devastating, but they were "hard-won", so don't discard any of them. People talk of persisting "childhood trauma", but notice I have de-personalized all of it.
In your case; by the mid 1970's, you testify that 10 million people in Hungary (all of them), truly hated the Soviet Union. Did they hate communism, hate the Soviets or just hate all Russian people? (Frankly, I don't see Hungary as a hateful nation today, but I may be wrong?) I think that Russia's population at that time, within the USSR was 135 million.
It almost sounds like you are extrapolating that 135 million Russians truly hated communism, and all the rest were just a few “communist dupes”, which if so, it wouldn’t have lasted 2 weeks. Both this, and libertarianism, are not going to be a place for us to collaborate. I hope to “bite my tongue” before I say any more on either of them.
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The essence of “remembered occurrences” is that they were a conundrum. They had some pain attached to them. You might remember the good times too, but the bad ones stand out. They’re more important because of your decision; NEVER AGAIN. Hence the necessity for that part of your identification.
Now let’s back up again to consider our standards of making a judgement. Whenever we say something is “true”, that’s it. It can never be changed. We just said that this is a virtual truth, and only one part of our virtual conditioning. Perhaps there are many “mysteries” in our motivations. But let’s assume that we play some (maybe unknown) part in all of them. Therefore, are we complicit in our circumstances? (Either a statement or a question.) Again, there are two angles to it. Either I am a victim; or I have some empowerment over my life. I choose the latter as a broader thesis to move forward on.
So, if you are complicit, ultimately, you want what you now-have. How does it serve me? I am building this identity; how does it serve me? Every chance I have to let that identity go; I grasp at it even tighter. WHY?
Let’s look at what you have done. You have told 10 stories of conundrums in (your) life, that shouldn’t be this way by your standards of judgment. You say that you have dozens more. Conundrums are uncomfortable, and always illicit an emotional response. In this case I suggest it might start as a grievance, but be spun into hate.
I have no basis to say anything: is hate an important part of the Hungarian identity, or is it just you that “needs this”. I say, needs-this because of our comment above, that being complicit in creating something, (creating an identity), must mean that you want it that way. (It is the most powerful way to look at things.)
This is the end of the Debate society format. Another post is just to utilize this format to illustrate how we could make something happen.
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