In the unusual song describing Matejko’s painting “Rejtan”, Jacek Kaczmarski uses – in the mouth of the Russian ambassador to the court of the Polish king – a term that I remember for the rest of my life, “Authority is not a penny here.”
Everything, or a lot of what has happened in Poland since the pandemic, is a derivative of this very state of affairs, which, with minor fluctuations, has been present here for several hundred years. Every politician who takes over even a part of power in Poland should first of all answer the question: how can this state change, even by a millimeter. Answer – also in an analytical and scientific way.
The authority we have now surely did not ask itself this question. An anti-intellectual, populist course, in which it is only about the votes of its own people, may work on the date of the election, but it will certainly not work when something really needs to be done and when it really concerns the entire society. So, for example, to vaccinate Poles against covid. It is at this point that all moral poverty and the dysfunctionality of populism are revealed.
Unfortunately, that moment has come.
