How do we change Romania dominated by mistrust? “We started doing digital politics, but we don't know how to listen to the other”

There is no such idyllic Romanian village where relations between the community were based on trust and help, says anthropologist Radu Umbreș. Distrust towards the other also has effects in today's Romanian society, which discovered politics on TikTok, but does not have a democratic tradition of debate.

National Day is an occasion for celebration and reflection. PHOTO: St. Both

Radu Umbreș, the anthropologist who wrote the book “Distrust. How Deep Romania Works”, speaks in a podcast about the distrust that defines Romanian society. Why don't we trust each other? How did we get so radical and enmity today? Why do we live in our own bubbles? How can we heal and rebuild trust?

University lecturer Radu Umbreș wrote the book after spending two years of fieldwork among the inhabitants of a village in Romania.

The anthropologist sees today's Romania “as going through a moment of transformation. In a way, any moment in history can be a moment of transformation, but right now you're feeling certain tensions that have built up over the last few years, and you're also at a kind of crossroads, a kind of crossroads with some pretty big choices about the future and a society that, like it or not, it became very politicalvery concerned with politics in quite polarized and sometimes radical terms. And yes, it should be mentioned, the important role played by mistrust or trust in various people.”

15 years ago, Umbreș lived for two years in a village in Romania and analyzed the interactions between people. “Then there was a certain reality that I describe and adapt in the book, things have changed since then. To understand the morality of these rural communities we need to look at what morality looks like in traditional societies based primarily on kinship and other personal relationships“, explains Umbreș in journalist Emanuel Bălan's podcast “From man to man”, on Radio M Plus.

There is an ethical code in which people have a “contract of morality” with certain people (family, relatives, kindred, certain neighbors, certain friends) towards which there are mutual obligations, there is care, respect. “And the face of the rest of the world is an individualist or, more precisely, a familyist ethic, in the sense that everyone pursues their own interests, it assumes that everyone else pursues their own and family interests, and people should not have very high expectations of others. In fact, on the contrary, and this interested me, there is an element of suspicion towards the intentions, motivations, behaviors of others, a certain fear of the one next to you“, he explains.

The researcher tried to find out where this division of the world comes from between a moral sphere and an amoral sphere, not necessarily immoral, but a sphere where these moral expectations do not exist: “It's kind of around this thing that I built my research and the book. There is very little concern in these communities for what is moral for the whole society. Even what would be moral or good at the village level was not as intense a concern as what is good, important for me, for my family, for the people in my sphere. I did not sense this idea of ​​something that is bigger than us, society, humanity, except on a discursive level, maybe, but not necessarily put into practice.”

Why don't we trust each other?

Asked why Romanians do not trust each other, Umbreș said: “From an anthropological and evolutionary-cognitive perspective, mistrust is easier to explain than trust. And it's certainly easier for social relations to be dominated by mistrust than trust. We keep talking about how it's good to have social trust, societies work better, economies work better, but trust is hard to come by, it needs certain conditions to prevail, to be stable, and it's very easy to destroy. I could ask the question on the contrary, why in that community and even, even in general, in Romania, although I am afraid to do this rapid expansion, why is it reasonable and expected that there is so much mistrust?”

One of the arguments that Umbreș analyzed was the historical one. “It does not exist in that romantic, beautiful, moral past, that Romanian village where everyone trusted everyone else and helped each other. On the contrary, one can see some deep roots of people's mistrust in each other. And these roots, at least from the oral and social history that we could document, stretch back to the 19th century, and we're talking about the relationship with the big landowners, the boyars or former boyars, which looked like a kind of neo-serfdom. Then we have a period of appropriation, but also we see quite a lot of conflict between people over land, over inheritances which creates mistrust and lack of cooperation. After that comes the period of war and communism, the period of authoritarian systems, which further maintain this division between individuals“, he elaborates.

His conclusion: mistrust is not a pathological or aberrant element. “It's a constant state in which these small communities live.” he explained.

During the communist period, the level of suspicion between individuals was even higher because of the way the authoritarian system worked. “All the people had to hide from the state, all of them were doing illegal things to survive, everyone was stealing from the CAP or all kinds of other illegal practices. The constant fear that you will be reported, that you don't know who is your friend, who is not your friend“, he points out. Trust begins at home, in those blood relations, in the family. Then, it extends to relations with relatives, on the two lines of descent, the relatives of the spouses and then other collateral relatives.

Anthropologist Radu Umbreș. PHOTO: Personal archive

“The authorities, considered predatory, exploitative”

“People have a sphere of trusting relationships, often, and of course this trust is very, very deep. But that it does not axiomatically extend to other people. It seems that you have so much trust in family and in people you know privately precisely because you cannot trust others. That is the social sphere that you feed on, because all people need cooperation, they need help, support emotional, economic and so on. And under all this, one can see a red thread, namely, the weak or absent care of the state or institutions towards the people, but on the contrary, they considered them predatory, often irrational in the decisions they made. So people managed as they could, through this negotiation of the spheres of moral relations. explained the anthropologist.

Related to the division of Romania into two camps, similar to the situation in 1990, Umbreș claims that “we are a society that started doing politics digitally, but we don't have that tradition of grass-roots politics, of discussions, of meetings, like Iocan's glade, which was idealized anyway. I think people are starting to be interested and even take opposing positions, the problem being that we don't have that experience, that history behind popular democracy, where people know and listen to each other and respect certain rules of conduct. But there are growing pains.”

Now, since social media has exploded and especially TikTok, there is a desire for people to be involved: “And if they've found this tool, they're going to use it, unfortunately, and to the detriment of other tools that might be a bit more productive.”

How can we heal from distrust?

Asked how we can rebuild trust, Umbreș claimed: “The way we can rebuild trust in others, especially others who are very different from us, socially, economically and especially politically and ideologically, is now to get in touch with them, directly.”

There is a tendency to oversimplify others and present them as one-sided characters: “The moment you come into contact with people, even if you see that there are differences on certain things, there are also a lot of things in common. And on the basis of things in common you can build dialogue between things that are different. As long as we stay only among those who are the same as us in our bubble, we do nothing but feed ourselves in one direction. So yes, that step of vulnerability, courage, resilience, to expose yourself to the ideas of others.”

As far as the state and the other institutions are concerned, the situation is reciprocal. “We see that the state does not really trust the citizens. In many elements, we see that the perspective is that you cannot trust the citizen, that he is not careful, that he could deceive the state and so on. I think that the state, if it asks for trust, must offer trust in its turn”explains the anthropologist.

There are also elements that we cannot control: “Certainly, as society becomes more stable, more prosperous, people come out of the struggle for survival, and then they start to trust each other a little more. And we see this throughout history. Again, not all things are in our power.”