Paper short abstract:

This paper ethnographically explores Hungarian liberals' coexistent registers of reality and falsity that converge around the figure of George Soros and expose the gradually accepted frame of conspiracy theories, on one hand, and the simultaneous yearning of "reality" as rationalist, on the other.

Paper long abstract:

In Hungary, a society polarized along numerous axes, declarations of reality and falsity become politically loaded zero-sum manifestations, revealing a distressed longing for rationality which nevertheless unfolds comfortably on par with conspiracy theories. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork among liberal intelligentsia in Budapest, I take the figure of the Hungarian-born investor and philanthropist George Soros and his "shadow empire" as a starting point to show the reality/falsity-dichotomy becomes complicated. Since years, the Fidesz-government of Hungary has engaged in an aggressive propaganda campaign addressing the so-called "Soros Plan", referring to Soros' alleged struggle to destroy European nation-states by bringing millions of muslim refugees to Europe. This campaign reaches Hungarians via large roadside posters, TV advertisements, news, and leaflets distributed to households. While at first the public at large denounced the campaign as a preposterous conspiracy theory insulting to the rational mind, over the years questions relating to Soros and his "plan" have become gradually accepted as the very frame within which questions of right and wrong are negotiated. I show how present-day discussions in Budapest simultaneously unfold on supposedly contradictory registers that expose the flexibility of reality: debates over the identity of the "the real" executors of the Soros plan run comfortably next to desperate cries for the return of "reality". When a falsity is repeated, it first begins to shape reality, and then becomes real. When past and present are negotiated against the backdrop of this "new" reality, the question arises: what was real, or false, in the first place?