When All the Voices Answer

98.6% of Kazakhstanis agree that hard work should be rewarded. For 92.2% of respondents, it matters that their parents are proud of them. 91.6% evaluate science and technology positively. 89.4% believe that the more equality there is, the fewer problems there are.

A sociologist, looking at data like this, expects something to tip the scales. Expects a core to emerge among the values, something a person would be willing to sacrifice the rest for. There is no core here. There is uniformly high agreement with everything at once.

How is that possible? When the question about freedom is paired with equality, 63.3% choose freedom. When freedom is paired with security, the majority chooses security. This is not a contradiction in the data. This is the data. What takes shape in these numbers is a society for which everything matters. The question is what stands behind that.

The first explanation sociology reaches for sounds reassuring. It is a change. A transition, political scientists would say. Cultural theorists would say that old values are still holding on but new ones have already arrived. Wait a little and it will all settle.

The data do not confirm this. If it were a transition, we would see a generational gap. Young urban graduates would show one profile, older rural generations another. But a young banker in Almaty and his grandmother near Shymkent give similar answers. Not identical ones, of course, they live in different worlds. But the configuration is the same. This is not a transition. A transition implies that one thing displaces another. Here nothing displaces anything.

Ten years ago, I held in my hands a job offer from a foreign university. The kind of thing you dream about in graduate school, in doctoral programs, when you imagine how life might unfold. The first thought was about the dream. The second was, what will my mother say? Not how she would react, or how I could explain leaving. Specifically, what she would say. As if a verdict had already been delivered somewhere and all I had to do was hear it. These two voices did not argue with each other. They simply coexisted, from different worlds, in different languages, and neither one intended to yield to the other. I left. But that does not mean one voice won.

I think we are witnessing not change but coexistence. Inside the person, several voices operate simultaneously. The pre-Soviet one, where family is what you live for. The Soviet one, where work was sacred and everyone was equal on paper. The post-Soviet one, with its instinct for security. The post-independence one, with its language of success and personal initiative. These voices did not replace each other and did not arrange themselves into a hierarchy. They learned to run in parallel, and the person learned to move between them.

This is what is invisible in a questionnaire but stands behind its numbers. When a Kazakhstani answers a question, they do not choose which voice to answer from. All voices answer at once. That is why 98.6% favor rewarding hard work and 92.2% favor parents being proud. The first number comes from the market culture, the second from the pre-Soviet one. And both tell the truth about the same person. Poland, Turkey, and South Korea went through a similar coexistence. But in Kazakhstan there are more voices and the distance between them is greater. The distance from tribal memory to the post-Soviet market, four fundamentally different eras, was covered in just one hundred years. The capacity to hold all of them simultaneously without experiencing contradiction is not confusion and not immaturity. In sociology, this condition has a name, ambivalence. It is something the person has learned. At the level of everyday life.

Then what the answer ‘everything matters to me’ means becomes clear. It is not an evasion of choice. And it is not a contentless “yes” to everything at once. It is a fairly precise description of how a person is put together inside. “Several voices genuinely operate in them at the same time, and none of them is in charge. When a person says that family and success and stability and freedom all matter, they are not confused. They are telling you how their priorities actually work. Not a weakness and not immaturity. A language in which society describes itself while another language does not yet exist.

From this follows not a conclusion but a clarification. The Kazakhstani for whom everything matters is not a person without priorities. This is a person whose priorities are organized differently from what we have come to expect. Not a hierarchy, but several voices operating at the same time. And then a question arises. If this is a stable pattern rather than a moment of transition, how do we speak about it more precisely? Not to explain this person. But to hear them. To really hear not one but all of their voices at once.