If there is something that people truly fear, then their fears are connected to two fundamental notions: truth and freedom. What the present book tells us is that the truth of our days is that we totally lack freedom. The lack of freedom seems desirable as long as people are too weak to take on responsibilities. But the fact that this is a truth we avoid but which is suddenly presented to us, makes us claim the freedom that we are deprived of, or at least makes us wish to know the ways and the reasons for which it was taken from us. Through a series of honest essays gathered with the hope of creating a third force for the redemption of the Profound Romania, Ovidiu Hurduzeu and Mircea Platon explain widely and for everyone to be able to understand the current situation of the Romanians.

Firstly, what does the Profound Romania actually represent? As Mircea Platon says, “Sometimes, the Profound Romania can be a peasant. Or a street. Or a bishop. Or a nut tree. The Profound Romania is the Romania against which there is still held a war.” (p. 296). Therefore, everything is about the natural state of the man who lives for himself, for his family and for the land that is feeding him. This kind of man, that can be still encountered, especially in the rural space, is replaced by the post-modern man, the fragmented man, the happy slave who is dominated by the mentality of comfort. The desire to situate himself inside the System gets stronger and stronger for the nowadays’ man, because the System ensures quality, convenience and communion under the careful watch of the Corporations for which one offers absolutely mechanical services so one can ensure the money to buy a life without worries and questions that have no answer. Just as the authors explain, the term “System” is a general one, through which are defined all the organizations and people that serve the same purpose. As long as the main purpose is the disruption and the globalization, the name, the methods and everything that these organizations pretend to be don’t matter anymore.

The main method used by the System is the encryption of the true issues of society and their replacement by risible issues in order to keep the man as busy and as far as possible from everything that might be of real interest to him. Parents are abandoning their children in front of the TV, and when the children suffer a breakdown the parents can’t understand why they can’t be happy with everything they were deprived of in the communist period. Whilst the communist regime kept people away from certain material goods, that were often useless, the period after became a deeply consumerism one, determining Romania to fall in the other extreme.

A solution against the evolution of this cancer that not only spreads over Romania, but over the entire world, is very hard to find. As long as not even the religion as an institution fights any longer, the “resistance cell” can only be the actual person. As Ovidiu Hurduzeu says, “Only a fair individual behavior, a heroic personal engagement, authentic inter-human relations, face to face, and the personalization of each and every situation would offer the human being the chance of a free and respectful life.” (p. 14). All that is needed in order to reach this fair behavior is the pure orthodox faith, a solution that was always brought into view but was always regarded with suspicion. The great Russian writer F.M. Dostoievsky tells us with his every novel that the human tragedy is the lack of faith, because when God doesn’t exist, “everything is allowed”. The globalization is based on this very idea, replacing the Christian God with the God of comfort and consumerism. The post-modern man, now living in incertitude, lets the elites think for himself because it is much simpler and without responsibilities, and he doesn’t realize that this way he loses his individuality. But with the help of faith, the happy slave can become an event-person for whom everything has a purpose, nothing lacks sense or essence. We only need a moment and a space transfigured into an event, valued to its true importance, and people who are ready to live their lives outside the race for comfort, to be able to realize what Ovidiu Hurduzeu describes with such beautiful words: “With a single strain, you tear the cathedral out of its roots, you put it on your shoulders, you begin the ascent to the heavens… (p. 178).

Ovidiu Hurduzeu, Mircea Platon – A treia forţă: România profundă; postf. de Gheorghe Fedorovici, Bucureşti, Logos, 2008