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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

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Ever since late 19th c. thanks to the French sociologist Emile Durkheim we've known that what makes our modern societies stick together is neither the brute force imposed from above, nor our consent as citizens, but our individual contributions to some specialized functions, hence the functionalist approach for understanding of where we live in and what we actually can do. Long time ago our ancestors lived in traditional societies, where everyone was more or less mutually interchangeable. In societies where 90% were peasants growing wheat and rye, the social know-how was reduced to performing and passing to children of several primitive tasks. There was no "progress" as we know it today and thus there wasn't danger to lose any valuable knowledge because of sudden natural or human-made tragedy. Plagues could decimate whole regions and within a generation or two the population would reappear performing the same tasks as if there wasn't any gap in between.

Our societies are different. We have different expertise within different fields as distant from one another as building spaceships and providing psychological comfort to victims of family violence. Theoretically speaking we can switch our specialty and try doing something else, but we may need some time to reach the desired level of performance. During the last decades these periods have become longer. There are no more people like Leonardo that can claim to be on the top in any science and art. There are no more people that can be on the top even within one particular field like physics. In order to grasp just part of our reality and be useful parts of our societies we need to go through whole educational system as far as college, sometimes as far as PhD.

By becoming more specialized we become richer, everything being equal. That argument goes into history as deep as Plato and in our modern times as early as Adam Smith. By doing just one thing where we are best, we produce more from the same, we make it cheaper and we reach higher quality. Precisely because of this we are richer than those who lived 200 years ago. Even in the most developed countries as late as mid-20 century people often changed their manual jobs that seemed identical in their simplicity. That isn't the case now. We must study longer and by growing older the pool we can swim in becomes shorter and shallower. We build the golden cage of our own specialization with our own hands. The price of shifting it for another cage becomes higher and higher. This process doesn't seem to have ended.

We become richer but at the same time we become more vulnerable. Our vulnerability, if we may represent it as a formula, is the ratio between the risks the life may surprise us and our abilities to cope with their consequences. These unpleasant surprises can come from the nature or from our own activity. The risks today are more numerous than ever before. First, their number grows because our societies become more specialized. Power outage is unthinkable in societies without electricity. Industrially polluted water supply can't happen in societies, which don't know what polluting industry is. Second, these risks seem more numerous because we have lost our universal expertise to cope with them. In traditional societies people had to learn how to cope with their problems; we rely on specialists. Just 30 years ago everyone seemed understanding how to fix most of the problems with their cars. Nowadays without a degree of computer engineering many of the problems seem out of reach. And the cars are the visible tip of the iceberg.

My daughter, age 17, asked me how we have lived without PCs when I was her age? My son, age 9, asked me how we have lived without Internet when I was his age? I quote these questions not because I like to suggest the heroism of my childhood of living without these two necessities. In fact I'm sure that my grandchildren will ask my children similar questions about things we have no idea about. My point quoting these interesting questions is to show how quick these two modern attributes became part of our daily life. I really have survived without them when I was younger. I'm sure my children can't survive without them. When they find some day their PC dead and the Internet disconnected, I can't imagine how they may cope with these problems, unless they call for specialists to fix the problems. They don't even have the expertise I had when I was their age how to look for information. I had many friends, I had libraries, and I had my books too. My books look similar to by schoolbooks, so I could pretend preparing for school while I was reading something else.

I don't say that my childhood was more important than theirs. My point is that similar effects occur with every new technological gizmo we introduce in our life. On the one hand, it makes our life easier and happier. When I need some information I don't have to cut my work and run for the library find most recent periodical that was published 3 months ago; I just go to Internet and read the article that isn't published on hard copy yet. On the other hand, I become much more vulnerable. My old library was something I considered stable. The whole ocean of information I have on the Net is fuzzy. How I can be sure that it will be there tomorrow? How I can be sure that the Net will be here tomorrow?

The problem with our progress is that we become more and more vulnerable every time we think we have become happier and richer. The new and more sophisticated infrastructures overlap with our old habits and make us become even more and more specialized in order to keep this whole mechanism in motion. Our freedom is limited to our abilities to move within this progress. We are free as far as we can choose which way to move ahead. But we can't decide just to stop.

When I was looking at the tragedy in New Orleans, I thought about the fate of millions of peasants in poor enough countries around the Indian Ocean that were stricken by the tsunami last December. The difference was striking. Here, people from a highly specialized society couldn't cope quick enough with the problems because there were so many collapsing infrastructures, electricity, oil, water, sewage, police, to mention just few. Almost all have survived the flood but the life was paralyzed. There, people from still predominantly traditional societies needed just minor help, some food and medicine, some seeds to plant, in order to begin putting in order their lives. Human cost was enormous, but many social tasks weren't specialized to the point we see in the most advanced countries. Those who survived weren't completely paralyzed.

I'm not calling for going back to the traditional primitivism. Even if this had been possible, our lives would have been miserable, with the traditional expertise to cope with the natural hazards forever lost. Our tasks rather should aim to make our present infrastructures less vulnerable by establishing ways of alternative exits. It's a good idea to have two stairways to exit a tall building that has caught fire. It's a bad idea to make these two stairways meet at certain point. All our infrastructures meet at certain points. Infrastructures that depend on each other's reliability are prescription for nowhere. Today we were hit in one region; tomorrow we may suffer on global scale. Our progress has no back exists. We can't go to less complex and less sophisticated levels in order to increase our security. Either we move further and at the same time make our lives more secure, or we produce our own coffins.