A SOCIALIST TRAGEDY: BEAUTY QUEEN DRIVEN TO SUICIDE BY ENVY

By Davis Keeler

Csilla Molnar was a beautiful young woman, 17 years old, who last October won the Miss Hungary pageant, a title which brought down on her a torrent of rumor and harassment that led, a few weeks ago, to her death by a self-inflicted overdose of heart medication.

Csilla Molnar was not a youthful degenerate, for in a socialist state such persons do not become Miss Hungary. Nor was this an accidental overdose of a recreational drug. It was a deliberate suicide, apparently using her father's prescription medicine. Most importantly, it was not in response to the pressures of being a teen-ager or of being a pretty young woman or even of being a beauty queen.

In a radio interview shortly before her death, she said that everyone was harassing her, that they were asking where and from whom she got her pretty clothes, and wasn't it true that her father had special connections with the jury who chose her.

The tragedy is that, in a socialist country, these are perfectly fair questions. In a socialist country you don't get pretty clothes, and especially not stylish foreign clothes, just by going to the store and buying them. Even if you have the money (and Csilla's family was apparently at least comfortable — they had a home in a popular resort area), you may not be able to buy the goods available only in the foreign currency shops or in the stores open only to people with connections or available through friends who have access to the goods that aren't put out on the shelves. Everyone in a socialist country knows that's how things are done.

And whether or not Csilla's father had "special connections" with the jury is really unimportant. The point is that in a socialist country, where merit and money count for less than politics and connections, the natural assumption is that people get special treatment because they know iomeone. Such special favors are costless to the bureaucrat, though they may oe quite valuable. They can be exchanged for other goods or favors that are not available on the market. That's how a socialist economy works.

The seemingly petty backbiting of Csilla's friends was no aberration. It was pure envy, perhaps, but socialism has been called the institutionalization of envy. Under socialism, envy has been rechristened "egalitarianism," and is counted a virtue. In Kurt Vonnegut's story, "The Handicapper General," beautiful people were required to wear masks so as to have no unfair advantage.

Then there was Csilla herself, presumably a good socialist. It is very hard for a 17-year-old girl in America to bear sustained social pressure, but how much harder must it be in a socialist country to bear the scorn and rejection of 'your peers. Rugged individualism is not a socialist virtue.

We have, in the story of Csilla Molnar, a pure tragedy. There were no villains. There were only ordinary humans acting within the context of their society, a society supposedly designed to be caring and compassionate. Karl Marx didn't intend to create a world where a young woman would be driven to suicide by the envy of her neighbors. He wanted everyone to be happy, everyone to have enough, no one to have too much. To dp this he just got rid of a few bourgeois rights. He replaced the cash nexus between people in society with a nexus of care and concern. He replaced the free-market allocation of goods and services with a political allocation. And in doing so created a world where a young woman would be driven to suicide by the envy of her neighbors.

Keeler is a writer living in Mento Park.

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