Social trust in Romania I: an introduction

If ever a poast on Romania demanded the full rogering, it's this one

Let’s get straight into it.

Take a look at this chart from HBD Chick. Romania is circled in pink; four of the five Nordic countries, along with the Germanic-speaking NW European nations (and North American offshoots), are circled in blue.

As you can see, Romania suffers from the lowest social trust of countries surveyed (composite data from two separate studies, 1997 and 2000). No European country rates lower. Worldwide, only Turkey and Brazil come out worse.

It’s beholden on me to point out that the parent studies are old now, so things could have changed drastically in the meantime (they haven’t). Even granting that (?(?(?for obvious reasons?)?)?) Western European social trust is in decay, Romania was—and by European standards still is—practically a no-trust society. Why?

According to this chart, the country is only moderately collectivist. Even in Europe, all the Baltic states and Belarus are rated as more collectivist than Romania, while Bulgaria, Poland and Northern Ireland are equally so. Therefore, the correlation postulated by some HBD geeks between low trust and high collectivism is not a satisfactory explanation. The effects of communism are similarly insufficient on their own to make sense of things: as measured here, Romania’s social trust is a good deal lower than that of any other ex-communist nation, except formerly ‘non-aligned socialist’ Slovenia. Neither does immigration represent a plausible accounting. Romania has not yet become a favoured destination for the turd world, although...

BACONSCHI (pron: Bakonski; former foreign minister; no I don’t think he is): “There will be a million Asiatics in Romania in 10 years, AND THAT’S A GOOD THING”

But never fear: if only in the interests of generating ‘content’ for muh stack, I think I can with difficulty identify and partially disaggregate four causes of low social trust in Romania.

Cause 1: the missing middle

The first cause is the historical absence from Romania of a middle class in the Western European mould, whose behavioural trait package, developed under at least 600 years of gene-culture coevolution, engendered a high-trust but individualistic social environment in which cohesion was once reliably maintained by what I will call ‘The Seven Cs’: Conscientiousness -> Civility -> Credibility -> Compromise -> Covenant -> Constancy -> Comity.

I dunno…you reckon ‘Seven-Cs’ is a catchy mnemonic I could use to get a book-publishing deal with Simon & Schuster????

Groan…Can you not stop saying the same thing over and over again My Lord and One True Master? I WILL HAVE YOU KNOW I HAVE MANY MID-TO-ATTRACTIVE YOUNG FEMALE READERTH OF VARIOUS ETHNIC BACKGROUNDTH! THUTH I THEND HALE GREETINGTH TO EMILY, GEMMA, AURELIA, RALUCA, TAYEESHA, JUANA-INEZ, TAE-EUN, JINGXIAO AND KANAKO!!!!

Cause 2: the rise of the parvenu

A second and related cause is the composition of the post-communist Romanian middle class: its parvenus, its New Men. The parents of these people were generally members of the rural commons or urban working class, in most cases themselves fresh from countryside to factory. They are socioeconomically middle class, tending to occupy jobs in the services sector, but usually retain to varying but noticeable degrees the taciturn suspiciousness, the delight in deception and the grasping zero-sum mentality of the peasant. They are not by nature people of the ‘Seven-Cs’.

Cause 3: communism

A third cause is to be located in the 50-odd years of communism (1947-1989) endured by the Romanians. In its first couple of decades the country’s inchoate native commercial middle class was destroyed and a heavy outer-party bureaucratic apparatus constructed. Its apparatchiks did as their equivalents across the Eastern Bloc, where commodity scarcity was almost constant. They used their position as intermediaries between state and populace to supplement their incomes via petty larceny, at the expense of the common purse.

At a reduced scale this parasitic state-dependent middle class endures, as do habits of subterfuge, graft and outright theft among other social classes. To some extent the low-trust behaviours typical of people living under communism have unavoidably infected later generations, including members of the new middle class. Though the dictatorship of the proletariat is 35 years in the past, the race to the bottom has not ended. The imperative remains among a great many people of all classes: grab resources and position rapidly and opportunistically, rather than assiduously accumulate and curate them by honest means.

As I will demonstrate in due course, however, this pattern of habitual mendacity, and the high-time preference accumulation strategy associated with it, was more reinforced by than rooted in Romania’s communist phase. It has a number of well-attested historical precedents that go back much further in time.

Cause 4: the home-ground diversity ‘advantage’

The fourth cause of low social trust in Romania is the free market’s rapid emancipation of its Gypsy population—which followed decades’ worth of partially successful communist attempts at sedentarisation/relocation—and the uneasy assimilation, culturally and genetically, of Rom and Romanian.

The Gypsy ‘community’ is—almost, sort of, sorry to say—‘indigenous’ to Romania. Its presence dates to the 14th century, shortly after the traditional date of the Romanian ‘Dismounting’. This is around the same time as the English middle class began its ascent from the manor (a strange historical coincidence indeed!)

The Gypsy population of Romania is very large, though nobody really knows exactly how many of them there are. This numerical vagueness can be attributed to four factors:

First, the premodern non-conformity of semi-nomadic Gypsy lifeways, and thus the Gypsies’ non-responsiveness to census-taking, so that the TRVE TRAD members of the race are not included in official statistics;

Second, the Gypsy predilection, where it is both to their purpose and practicable, for crypsis; many will not declare their ethnicity because for one reason or another it suits them to pretend that they are Romanian;

Third, their latterly intermittent presence in the country, interspersed with residency in other nations, most commonly Spain, Germany, Italy and the yookay;

Fourth, their increasing…interpenetration with ethnic Romanians.

What can be stated confidently of their numbers is that Gypsies make up at least four per cent of the resident Romanian population—a figure in uncommon flux for the last 20 years or so, owing to emigration to W Europe, but at most times around 20 million.

MENACE: Romanian emigration to Western Europe is higher than even that of Poles (dunno whether absolute or per capita). A disproportionate number of these ‘Romanian’ emigrants would be Gypsies. From the stack of Seb Jensen

For what little it’s probably worth, the Council of Europe estimates, no doubt with the expansion of EU bureaucratic meliorism in mind, that Gypsies constitute nearly nine per cent(!) of the total population of Romania. For the present, let us say that the real figure is around five per cent.

Conservatively, it can be further reckoned that there are 500,000 to a million more ‘Romanian’ Gypsies infesting other EU and non-EU countries. For example, in 2018 Canada imposed stricter-than-previous entry requirements for Romanian citizens in response to the number of Gypsies arriving, under cover of bogus asylum claims, to establish organised crime rings and take ruthless advantage of its terminally high-trust sucker Anglo population—though the ethnic dimension was of course never officially admitted.

In addition, there are many Romanian citizens who are of either full or, more frequently, half Gypsy background but who do not identify as Gypsies. I am friends or acquainted with five to ten such people. Shame or plain genealogical ignorance precludes some of them from confirming what I know to be their piebald ancestry (how very Roman Romania can sometimes be!). For these reasons and others, accurately judging the number of half-breeds is difficult; but it is substantial.

Though it is hard to tell just by looking at these obviously mixed people whether their allegiance is to Gypsy or Romanian interests, it is sometimes possible to judge by the way they speak—and I do mean sometimes. This margin of uncertainty is far from socially trivial, as I aim to show later on.

For now, though, a final note: it’s hardly worth mentioning that Gypsies, whether full or part, are not by breeding or acculturation ‘Seven-Cs’ people either.

HAVEN’T I SAID IT ALL NOW? WHAT FURTHER SLANDERS CAN I POSSIBLY HAVE IN STORE TO JUSTIFY SPINNING THIS SPECULATIVE RUBBISH OUT INTO SEVERAL PARTS?

I have dealt with cause 1 in several pieces prior, so I will not belabour it further—at least not too much. Cause 2, like cause 1, has deep roots and I have discussed it briefly elsewhere; yet it deserves and will receive more detailed treatment in the next post or the one after something like that. About cause 3, however, I have nothing more to say, except where it bears on cause 4—this being the matter on which I intend to entertain (i.e. bore/outrage) you at greatest length in the series of poasts to follow.