Obscuration phase

“Conservative mobilization,” as political scientists elegantly call the rollback to the archaic currently taking place in Russian society, is a significant trend, since it is based on a fundamental factor: the country has not been able to overcome the phase barrier of post-industrial society.

This was the global challenge of the 80s, and the current “Putin regime” has a distant relationship with it: it is only a damaged child of historical defeat. In such cases, regressions of ethnic groups into the archaic are common and inevitable. There are orders of magnitude more societies in the world that are frozen in the traditional phase than those that have successfully dealt with phase barriers. Only a few took the post-industrial one.

Moreover, in this case we are obviously talking about a rollback not to the previous (industrial), but to an earlier – pre-industrial phase of development with corresponding forms of social consciousness and political practices
/media/ shamanism, xenophobia and persecution (the archaic mechanism of ethnic self-defense from violence is activated, which, according to Rene Girard, consists of focusing on selected victims - not “one of us” - otherwise they will have to be avenged, but not “strangers” - otherwise the potential for violence will not be discharged, the “culprit of defeat” - aka the “scapegoat”, will not take evil with him to the grave). The persecution of oppositionists in Russia in recent days fits perfectly into the mainstream of this archaic paradigm.

The deindustrialization of Russia has become an everyday fact - in stores you will not find a domestic hammer or even a floor rag, not to mention complex appliances: vacuum cleaners and washing machines. The abundance of signs of post-industrial society in the form of various gadgets and powerful cars should not be misleading - this is just Russian oil, which we can still exchange for goods. Nothing more.

This story is sad precisely because of its fundamental nature: the country does not have a single good development scenario because all types of resources that provide such scenarios have been exhausted. Lev Gumilev in his “Ethnogenesis” long ago (back in the 70s) described this phase of obscuration, when the imperative “Be like us” dominates, i.e. do not strive for anything that you cannot eat or drink. Any growth becomes an odious phenomenon, hard work is ridiculed, intellectual joys cause rage. In art there is a decline in style, in science original works are being replaced by compilations, in public life corruption is being legitimized, in the army soldiers keep officers and generals in submission, threatening them with mutinies. Everything is corrupt, no one can be trusted, no one can be relied upon, and in order to rule, the ruler must use the tactics of a robber chieftain: suspect, track down and kill his comrades.”

And further: “The order established in this phase, which is most correctly called “obscuration,” cannot in any way be considered democratic. Here, as in the previous stages, groups dominate, only the principle of selection is different, negative. It is not abilities that are valued, but their absence, not education, but ignorance, not firmness of opinion, but unprincipledness... But then comes retribution: life-lovers only know how to parasitize on the fat body of a people who have overeaten during “civilization.” They themselves can neither create nor preserve. They corrode the body of the people, like cancer cells in the human body, but, having won, i.e. Having killed their opponent, they die themselves.”

Therefore, the obscuration phase is followed by either the death of the ethnic group, or a transition to the memorial phase, or the phase of homeostasis. “In the latter case, subpassionaries die out and a relic remains of the ethnos, consisting of harmonious individuals who, unlike passionaries, do not strive to change anything, and are carriers of a static state... Even when a passionate individual is accidentally born among them, it does not seek employment for itself homeland, but with their neighbors (for example, Albanians made a career either in Venice or in Constantinople). Here two possibilities arise: either the survivors eke out a miserable existence as a relict ethnos, or they fall into the crucible of melting and, under some favorable conditions, a new ethnos is smelted from several fragments, only vaguely remembering its origin, because for it the date of its rebirth is much more important ..."

You can't say more precisely. Relic or remelting - only this alternative lies in the prospects of the modern Russian Federation. However, another Gumilevian scenario is possible - transformation into an “anti-system”, the signs of which are obvious (the integrity of people with a negative worldview has been formed, which is a specific attitude towards the material world, expressed in the desire to simplify systems, that is, to reduce the density of system connections . At the limit, the density of systemic connections is reduced to zero, which means the destruction of the system, be it a state, a landscape or an ethnic group."

But this does not change the essence of the matter.