Monday
Hungarians turning out to defeat Viktor Orbán yesterday is hugely consequential, not only for Hungary but for Europe and the world. As commentator Ron Filipowski of MeidasTouch puts it, “Orban has done everything possible to prevent the EU from assisting Ukraine in their struggle against Russian barbarians. The big winners are Magyar, the Hungarian people, Zelensky/Ukraine and all of freedom-loving Europe.” Given how American fascists have been attempting to use the Orbán playbook, it’s good news for us as well.
To celebrate, I share a set of poems by the extraordinary Octavia Butler. In her depiction of a dystopian America in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, she has a religion of hope. Its sacred text is Earthseed: The Books of the Living, in which we learn (among other things) why countries choose authoritarian rulers. Earthseed also instructs us in how to push back.
While I’ve read Butler’s novels, I owe to Maria Popova’s Marginalian blog the particular poems that I cite here.
As Butler sees it, change is both inevitable (“God is change,” Earthseed observes) and unsettling. When one looks at the momentous changes that have occurred in the United States over the past 50 years—starting with the Civil Rights movement and including all the other “woke” movements (feminism, LGBTQ+, Native American, Latino, AAPI, immigrant, and neurodiversity rights)—perhaps it was inevitable that we should experience reactionary blowback. Octavia’s formulation helps explain why Hungary kept electing Orbán and why America elected Donald Trump twice:
When apparent stability disintegrates,
As it must —
God is Change —
People tend to give in
To fear and depression,
To need and greed.
When no influence is strong enough
To unify people
They divide.
They struggle,
One against one,
Group against group,
For survival, position, power.
They remember old hates and generate new ones,
They create chaos and nurture it.
They kill and kill and kill,
Until they are exhausted and destroyed,
Until they are conquered by outside forces,
Or until one of them becomes
A leader
Most will follow,
Or a tyrant
Most fear.
Hungary temporarily lost the vision that prompted it to break free from the Soviet Union, and America has lost sight of its founding ideals. When vision fails, Earthseed declares, emotion takes over:
When vision fails
Direction is lost.When direction is lost
Purpose may be forgotten.When purpose is forgotten
Emotion rules alone.When emotion rules alone,
Destruction… destruction.
The decent Joe Biden tried to appeal to our better angels but a number of factors—including post-pandemic inflation (which impacted all the world) and his own declining health—did him in. Although he had gotten the economy back on track by the end of his four years, Earthseed has an explanation as to why a plurality of American voters would hasten America’s decline by turning to Trump:
Drowning people
Sometimes die
Fighting their rescuers.
Earthseed then provides, with blinding clarity, what Hungarians and Americans have been experiencing:
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
So how to respond? Earthseed tells us what the moment demands of us. Hungarians rose to the occasion and, increasingly, Americans are doing so as well:
Are you Earthseed?
Do you believe?
Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action —
Or it does nothing.
Hungary has shown us that authoritarians can be stopped. That should inject a shot of adrenaline into the No Kings and other anti-Trumpism movements.
