STARTING WITH NOVEMBER 2017
UNIFYING PHYSIOGNOMIES
“ALL IN ONE” – THE STORY OF A COUNTRY’S MAKING
“The future will belong to the mind if we want to survive. We need our minds to be free, critical and independent.” (Călin Georgescu)
Great accomplishments are first and foremost spiritual. This is the starting point. When a desire is found in the unanimous choice of a nation, it manifests with such force that the political is eclipsed and always overcome by the events unravelling. Because the time of the soul is valued differently by history, and in the Balkans “no one can overrun the angels”, as Serbian writer Milorad Pavič once said. Designs for the future are born from such unconfessed ideals. And, behind them, extraordinary forces of social cohesion and national solidarity unfurl. December 1918 had, beyond the political mask that endured in history, another story to tell, rarely evoked in our history.
Today, Romania needs a “map of the future”. And this mapping of the future depends only on the human factor, namely the continuous investment in the human element. As Spiru Haret said during his time, “The way schools are today is the way the country will be tomorrow”. During the last 20 years of freedom of opinion and attitude, there have been few positive endeavours supported by constructive arguments, with clear guide marks and steps that must be followed.
The project for a country can only be produced through a healthy, educated and well-informed population, as “only thus can it control its own fate and become immune to any attempts at intoxication or manipulation” (Călin Georgescu). Education also bestows cohesion upon a long term vision, built on anticipation, and not through ordonnances or Party directives. However, we currently do not have a country project because we are missing a map for the future.
And this map of the future is nowadays called “Professionalization”. The constant investment in the human factor. First of all the “intelligence of the hands” must be recovered – the know-how, the aptitudes, today called “skills”. Then the focus turns to education and vocational training. But “the most important reform that must be implemented is that of the mentality, in order to strengthen the capacity of turning good ideas into real deeds”. What could constitute the first step of this country project? With a change in individual attitude, which would prefigure the change in mentality, and eventually impose the professionalization of the political class.
It is necessary for the reconstructive operation to begin with a new tool, a surprise for any adversaries and optimised for partisans. A superior means of creating something new, with the quality of being an invincible surprise. And this new tool is re-professionalization. For plants and animals, life continues through the repetition of the valid, but for humans and peoples, life can only carry on through continuous creation. Those who do not grow, in fact decrease. Those who do not move forward are actually regressing. And those who do not defeat are defeated.
Thanks to memory, imagination and reason, intelligence is able to find all solutions and solve all problems. And so we must cultivate character beyond intellect and develop our team spirit as a plus to the power of personality.
For those five-six generations that lived between 1800 and 1920, the map of the future was the project of a Romanian unitary national State, and its work instrument was called All in One! The beginning of this journey was also professionalization, with an enormous investment in the human factor. From the Wallachian naught of 1800 a new country emerges, formed in 50 years, with modern institutions, fully established another 50 years later. This was made possible thanks to the education, schooling and continuous professionalization of the urban population.
The Unifying physiognomies. “All in one” – the story of a country’s making exhibition project aims to present the extraordinary human and historic story of Romania’s making as a country. The extent to which a distant historical event and its protagonist become an incentive and an example, a symbol and a representation for tens of generations, since 1600 up to 1920, from all Romanian lands, is perhaps the most interesting unifying historical event. Of course, a nucleus had to develop in order to invest in this project and collect the forces of the entire nations, and this strength was concentrated in the southern part of Romanian-inhabited territory – Muntenia and Oltenia – part of Wallachia, the starting point of the first unifying project in 1600.