Census... 1971, 1981, 1991... And then? Only in 2003. Why? We fought a little and burned each other's houses. So we registered again, now separately. The return to "order" starts in 2011, and next, in 2021, we also expect a population census. With divided emotions, as they say, at least in Montenegro. What is it? Didn't our people always like to register and declare themselves, to simply be on the lists. Umberto Eco wrote the book "Endless Lists", and in our country "lists" have even entered swear words - everything according to the list, let's say...
Enumerating, making lists, is a key methodological procedure of our civilization. Because, when civilization rests on the "warehouse concept", then lists and lists are crucially important. This is the magic of the Catalogue, which excited many writers, from Homer to Kish.
Nevertheless, we do not owe a certain upheaval on the Montenegrin political scene to these civilizational impulses, here, always, "another drama is unfolding". It is obvious that in their desire to confirm their identity, people like to rely on numbers. I never quite understood what that meant. If you are sure of your own (national, religious, any...) identity, why does it matter how many other citizens you share it with? How and to what extent such data can affect your sense of identity.
A friend of mine, a Montenegrin with a Serbian identity, once very sincerely told me - isn't it better for you to belong to a nation of eight million people than to a nation of half a million? I was equally astounded then as I am now by this logic. What does all this have to do with such a personal feeling as the feeling of national identity. If you were to choose by "beauty", I would probably be Irish or Argentinian, but it doesn't work that way... When it comes to a nation, you are what you are, regardless of what you think is prettier or better. Precisely because such a drive for multitude in unfinished nations turns everything into a caricature.
Someone thought of it, so the European practice was invoked, where questions of this type are not mandatory, and a kind of light version of the list was proposed. It was proposed to omit the sections on nation, religion and language.
Our man can hardly understand it: What kind of list is that? What will they do then? A list without declaring a nation would be massively boycotted here, with the belief that Bill Gates is behind it all. And of course Soros...
Perhaps the excessive dramatization of this issue is unnecessary. Namely, it is a kind of belief that the citizens of Montenegro are not mature enough, smart enough and self-aware to know who and what they are. And in any case, it is not only unworthy, but also humiliating. Behind such an attitude is mainly a consciousness that does not believe in maturity as such, that trusts only in directives and obedience. A good part of the past thirty years has been an orgy of obedience - and almost every problem of modern Montenegrin society has its roots from there.
DPS has always preferred to buy people rather than educate them. Now he is paying the price of such an approach. That is why they feel apprehensive - will they be Montenegrins, if they are not "paid" to be Montenegrins. By the way, I consider this attitude to be profoundly anti-civilizational, therefore anti-Montenegrin.
In short - Montenegro is in the middle of a global pandemic that has devastated the economy, in the middle of the constitution of a government that announced bold and necessary reforms, but the story that excites public opinion the most is - the census from the following year. Is it not that something as ordinary, self-evident, benign as a population census is a "hidden" priority of the new government? Is there anything worse than being an eternal prisoner of your own limitations...
Bonus video:
