Firstly, she would like to thank you for such a big work and mind and effort that you put into the past 25 years that we are finally able to identify and call it on their names.
So, we have voices now, not just us, like psychologists and, as you mentioned, the victims as well.
So, finally, we are able to process the whole progress.
So, let's talk about a little bit of Hungary and how Hungarian people live and think.
There is a kind of phrase that we like to use about ourself that describes an authentic Aboriginal-Hungarian.
The way how we live and enjoy life, we are at the same time crying as well.
What do you think? Does it makes us to feel a little more as a victim and gives us more power to be a victim in the meaning of we are very highly on the top of suicidal accidents, or breaking up, or divorcing, or also alcohol consumption.
So unfortunately, Hungarian people are really on the top of that.
So it's kind of Hungarian people likes to suffer in a funny way.
What do you think that are we kind of victims because of this?
I don't know.
Hungary and Hungarians sufficiently to express an opinion. It would not be serious of me.
And I understand the natural tendency to assume, natural tendency of each group to assume that it is special.
But I'm afraid it's not special.
This is a modern existential crisis. It's a crisis of loss of meaning.
Life has no meaning anymore. It's not I who made this observation.
It is Viktor Frankl, who was a Holocaust survivor, a psychologist. And he survived the Holocaust for three and a half years in Auschwitz, which is unbelievable, by inventing a meaning for his life, a mission, a direction, a goal.
That's what kept him alive. And then he exited Auschwitz and he invented logotherapy.
Logotherapy is therapy administered by providing a meaning to one's life.
And he said, the crisis of the modern world is that there's no meaning to life.
We try to create meaning by generating or engendering artificial goals.
I want to make money. I want to succeed in my career. Even I want to have a family.
It is artificial goals. They are artificial because we can never, ever derive meaning from the outside.
Meaning can come only from the inside, never from the outside.
Nothing in the outside can give you your life, any significance or meaning.
You must generate it from the inside.
And we have lost this capacity to generate meaning from the inside because of several developments.
First of all, there are too many of us, simply. There are eight billion people.
It is very difficult for any single individual to stand out.
Why is it important to stand out?
It's important to stand out because every individual needs to be seen.
When I say stand out, I don't mean in the narcissistic sense to be a celebrity or to be.
That's what I mean.
What I mean is to be surrounded by an intimate group of people to whom you matter.
A group of people which see you, not only see you, but see you, notice you, are interested in changes and things that happen to you, are concerned, care about you.
We don't have this anymore. We used to live in villages where 8,000 people were seeing each other. They took care of each other, sometimes to intrusively.
Then, okay, we gave up on villages and we had extended families. Then we gave up on extended families and we had nuclear families. Then we gave up on the nuclear family.
And now we have nothing except smartphones. No one sees us anymore. We are isolated like atoms.
This process is called atomization. We're isolated like atoms floating in the air, begging for someone to see us and no one sees us.
We try to be seen by escalating and radicalizing our behavior.
We have social media.
Social media, we try to be seen by posting, I don't know, naked photos, or doing egregiously crazy things, or we try to stand out somehow, desperately.
Fashion, the whole fashion industry developed precisely because of this.
Each one of us needs an individual voice and we use clothing to create an individual voice.
We use hairstyle.
We are very concerned with appearance in the last 100 years, precisely because of this.
We are not seen anymore.
Now, to be seen is an issue of survival and it's the most ancient instinct in the human being.
So when you're born, if you are not seen, a baby that is not seen is a dead baby.
A baby has to be seen by his mother to get food, to get shelter, too.
And the first thing that a baby does, and for many, many months, is attract the mother's attention. Crying, smiling, laughing, it's all to secure the mother's attention.
We need this and we are not getting it anymore because there's way too many of us.
That's the first problem.
The second problem is that we have moved from libidinal societies to fanatic societies.
I will explain.
Freud came up with two forces of life.
One force is called libido. It's a force of life, force of sex, force of recreation, having children, force of writing poetry. Creating anything is libidinal, it's an expression of libido.
And then there is a fanatic force, thanatos, thanatos. It's the force of death.
Our modern societies are societies of death. We live in graveyards where we put emphasis on material objects rather than people. Where we prefer to deal with symbols, digits, money, they're all symbols, money is a symbol. Electronic digits are symbols. We prefer to deal with symbols than to deal with other human beings. These are dead societies. These are death counts. Our modern societies are gigantic death counts. We worship dead things. We worship luxury cars. We worship lots of money in the bank. We worship electronic digits on the internet. We worship dead things.
In a society of death, the only rebellion of life, the only way to prove to oneself that one is alive is pain. Pain. You can prove to yourself that you're alive in such a society only by experiencing pain.
And you can experience pain in two ways.
You can use other people to cause you pain, which is the normal state of relationships in today's world.
Vast majority of relationships are focused, centered aroundand revolve around pain. These are pain- focused relationships.
Or you experience pain by assuming risks or by pursuing thrills.
And so we become an adrenaline junkie.
It's another way of experiencing pain.
But pain had become our currency. Pain had become our language.
Suicide is a manifestation, the ultimate manifestation of pain and colonialism.