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He has been tagged for many years: leader of an extreme right-wing party, the founder of the Hungarian Guard turned liberal, video blogger, amateur philosopher. Why do you consider yourself? Who is Gábor Vona now?
I have a hard time getting into a box, even for me. I am a historian by training and have been studying psychology for three years and am currently pursuing a doctorate in sociology in Turkey. If I look at these disciplines, I would say that I am trying to be a social researcher. Since I was a child, I have had a hard-to-express desire to delve into the depths of human existence. I think that if someone is going to embark on a political career, they have to deal with these problems before they can locate themselves in the world, in society. If you don’t, your policy will also remain superficial. If I look at my career so far in this regard, I have something to make up for in this area.
There is a subject that has occupied him for decades. This is also at the heart of his book, and it is death anxiety. Are you afraid of dying?
Everyone is afraid of death. The one who says that he is not suffocating or finding for himself some kind of comfort to calm this anxiety. The hypothesis of my book is that death awareness is an evolutionary by-product associated with self awareness, and it is precisely the resulting death anxiety that takes us out of the animal kingdom and makes us human.
For a long time I have been searching for the answer to what makes a person paint a cave, pray to ghosts or include the world in mathematical formulas. We are the only troubled living being in the world, ourselves, who is out of place to search for himself.
There are two things in our head at the same time, the awareness that we are going to die and a vague feeling that there is something immortal in us. Homo sapiens should have perished in this existential paradox, but we invented culture. Culture is an evolutionary innovation that we use to try to reduce death anxiety to a tolerable degree.
When did you first encounter death anxiety?
I was a small child when the absurdity and paradox of the whole thing touched me. Sometime in the eighties, video recorders came to Hungary at that time. One of our families on our street had one and they all joined them for a movie. The adults were talking, they weren’t looking at us, so I had a zombie horror movie in hand, maybe the title was Ghost of the Woods. The other children were playing around me and I was watching the movie. It was quite surreal, everyone else was happy around me and I was traumatized by the sight. The thought of death has left me and will not leave me alone ever since. It inspires me to think endlessly and forces me not to try to search for superficial answers.
In recent years, it has undergone a major shift in political focus. Did you think about the legacy you left?
When I was president of the radical Jobbik, I was still worried about what kind of legacy I was leaving behind, only at the time I thought it was the good legacy that I represented at the time. It was not my research on death anxiety that prompted the popularization of Jobbik.
In the preface, write that this book has matured in you for fifteen years, but due to his political activity, he did not have time to collect his thoughts. If you don’t choose that path, what would you do now?
Academic and teaching careers have always floated there before my eyes as an opportunity. Throughout my political career, I also felt able to influence people, make them think. What else could a teacher do?
If public life hadn’t smelled, I’d probably be a social scientist and teach at one of the universities, which I wouldn’t even rule out in the future.
Did you regret how your life turned out that way?
No way. There is something that I am already ashamed of what I have done or said in politics, but I do not care about anything. Nor that I spent so much time with him because I learned a lot about myself and people through him. It also added a lot to the birth of the book. He may not have written the same book if he hadn’t spent nearly 20 years in politics.
What was the purpose of the book?
This book is my strategy for immortality, my tool against death anxiety. Put something on the table that is really durable.
Which one are you most proud of, your political career or this job?
If I were now a person who thinks about closing his life, which I am not yet, I would say that
this book is my main work rather than my political career.
Was the publication date of the book influenced by the fact that every day we feel this anxiety, the fear of death, due to the coronavirus epidemic? Didn’t we run away with consumption and our lifestyle in the past? Now it’s over, the whole world is closed.
In 2018, after the election, I decided it was time to turn my notes into a book. Politics at the end of my career allowed me to write with due thoroughness. I didn’t know at the time that one would be so current, so hot when done. The quarantine gave me a chance to put the finishing touches on it.
If we look at the consumer society and we look a little at ourselves, we see that in vain we eat, drink and have sex, we will not be happy yet. This is what animals that do not suffer from death anxiety do.
But we are getting better and better, and not primarily because of migration, climate change or Covid, but precisely because we have lost our culture.
The consumer society is a panic reaction to the loss of culture.
That is why we need to value religion, art, science and areas in which culture permeates, such as politics, gastronomy or sports. In the nodes of the cultural network we can only find tranquility.
In the preface, he also writes that men are at war and politicized because they have not been given the opportunity to give life, to give birth. This is how they try to earn some kind of immortality. Is this book your child?
Besides my son, to whom I recommended this book, this is perhaps my other son, yes. I try to stand on more legs.
Isn’t Jobbik your son?
Perhaps the question should be asked more about whether Jobbik still feels like my son. I’m not sure about that and I don’t feel Jobbik for my son either. I see it as a stage in my life, but our son is the one we are responsible for for the rest of our lives. Jobbik is not like that for me. I am grateful to you, I also feel some pride in the results we have achieved together, I wish you much success, but our paths have parted, and
I do not feel that the current Jobbik is associated with my duty, my responsibility.
Are you still watching public life? Are you tired of party politics?
Politics is also part of our culture. In addition, it is an important node in the network. Take, for example, the question of how the renewal of the MSZP will unfold. This can also be seen as completely uninteresting, but for me, every political event like this is a cultural experience that I appreciate.
In the postmodern era in which we live, when religion is repressed, art is marginalized and science is enclosed in an incomprehensible ivory tower, politics becomes a religious, artistic and scientific experience for the masses. You may be bitter about this, I used to, but that’s it.
As pathetic as politics sometimes is, it must be taken seriously because for millions, that just means culture, it gives a kind of pain reliever to their death anxiety.
In his personal concluding remarks to the book, he testifies that he is anxious, depressed, and introverted. Rarely does a public figure speak so honestly of himself. Aren’t you afraid that they might use this against you?
I dared to describe him because he was not afraid of attacks, he had already passed through the purgatory of politics. If I took a public role in 5 or 10 years and in a press conference these few lines of the final word of my book were quoted, I would reach out that it is me and, if I don’t like it, there is nothing wrong. It doesn’t have to suit everyone. I had already taken this stone out of my backpack.
And will it continue to assume a public role? Do you see the point?
In 2018, I said in some interviews: I did not know enough about my own nation and the over-idealized Hungarian society.
If we want to achieve real change in the country, it cannot be achieved at the level of political parties. From this point of view, I don’t believe in a change of government per se, if there will be so much change that the NER tribe will be replaced by the O1G tribe, but the tribal war will continue.
Viktor Orbán can and should be replaced, but we are not yet on the road to civilization.
How do you see the result of the next elections?
I see that O1G and NER will collide with each other in 2022, from the point of view that I look at, I don’t see many opportunities for positive change from there. Perhaps our relations will be a little more democratic, our public procurement will be fairer from time to time.
However, as the social mentality does not change and is based on the tribal civil war, sooner and later a new Viktor Orbán will arrive, who will draw the consequences, recognize the needs of Hungarian society and do the same as Miklós Horthy, János Kádár or Viktor Orbán.
This is the spiral that I don’t want to settle for because I don’t want to live in a country where victimized hatred is a social essence. In our country, political communities are not aligned around different views, but vengeful tribes rally around different past grievances. It may be impossible to change this, but because of my self-esteem, or to refer to my book, because of my own immortality, I want to fight for it to change anyway.
If at the beginning of the conversation it was raised what I would like to leave behind: some political success or the fact that I fought for the civilization of Hungarian society to be a critical thinking people, then clearly I would choose the latter. That is why I created the Second Reform Foundation, with which I would like to target mainly those young and thinking students who could be the leaders of this country in 10-20 years.
Who comes to this foundation? Frustrated servants? Gábor Vona fans?
Young people and not young people who, like me, are politically stateless, who do not support the policies of this government, but who do not have a vision of the opposition, but want to deal with public life.
If one of the parties called you to run for prime minister, would you not agree?
I don’t want to sound arrogant, but if I wanted to, I could go back to party politics. If you participated in the preselection, for example, you would certainly not be in the category of runners yet. But I do not want to. I took a step back two, three because I believe that I can create more value in the civil world both for my own life and for the country.
The volume will be published on September 18. What would you say to those who would not take it in hand because they saw that you wrote it?
If they hadn’t even given them to me, but give this book a try. If I find value in a book, then Viktor Orbán or Ferenc Gyurcsány may be the author. I like to learn from anyone if there is something. I have no problem with them, but with what they represent. So I recommend it to everyone, although it will not be an easy read. I hope it will be of use to many, even those who have rejected it before. I am not speaking here now as a politician, but as a primate as anxious as the dear reader.
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