From simple to complex

Some time ago, talking both of many years back and about the last few months that have defined, since the beginning of 2009, "the economic crises", there are two expressions that seem to have anaesthetized me.

TV stars and important publishers of the written media are fully using expressions as "simple men" and "common citizens".

Again, using them so often, in a large context, managed to put me in a trance, to drug me, some way. When hearing one of these expressions, there was some click going to my brain and I became to pay attention, "because they are talking about me", Mr./Mrs. X, that enjoys the authority of a large audience.

Once I met my math highschool teacher in a store from the corner of may street; the man that use to fascinate us by endlessly talking about the infinite as a number, when he use to try teaching us to solve "string limits", who use to talk about cognitive limitations of the human mind, while he put on disks on his pick-up brought from home with Bach's Brandenburgic Concerts. The difference between inspiration and equation. Now, with a dirty ragbag in his hand, wearing old, worn-out clothes, in a pitiful decency, he is the type of "simple man", of "simple citizen". Just his hands betrayed a past condition, but who has the time to notice such details? After the meeting, that resumed to several enthusiastic remarks, cordial embrace and perfunctory questions, I thought that in a binary scale, the one that makes computers operate, with all that might this imply, if there are "simple men" and "simple citizens", that means there are "complex men" and "complex citizens". Who are those? What is defining their living? A car, a villa? It would be too easy to resume them all to that. As those are just the product of a certain way of being. A complex man can be that to who all the others are abstract entities, without depth, just as figures on a leader's wall. Or as decimals in a rating, in an election score. Complex citizen are those who believe that the law is an expensive shirt which, if it does not fit, either you throw it away, or you give it to a pour relative. If it "perfectly" fits, of course you'll wear it to the most spectacular public events.

"Common men", "common citizen". When you hear those expressions from a high audience tribune, you immediately realize that the speaker is not from the above mentioned categories. Is a subconscious reflex. If a talk-show moderator would say for instance:"I, as a simple citizen, am asking you Mr. Minister...", you are instantly thinking "come on, don't be so modest, you are not a simple citizen, since you are having your coffee with a great statesman".

There is a great perversity in these two expressions! When you hear them, you are thinking that  "simple men" are as, those that are watching the speaker without being able to attend. "Complex citizens" are those for whom the Romanian state is just an option, from so many other. Unlike the "simple citizen" for whom Romania is the last and definite option.

Dragoş Moldovan