In the Land of Victorious Resentment | Colta.ru

Resentment

One of the mind-boggling metamorphoses of Russian society is connected with the volcanic growth of aggressiveness simultaneously with the refusal to acknowledge the reality buried overnight under ideological fictions. It is not easy to explain this phenomenon. It is often attributed to the unprecedented processing of the masses by television propaganda. Official propaganda explains a lot, but not everything. Not every society can be propagandized in such a short time and to such excesses. For propaganda to be effective, it must respond to the unconscious aspirations of the population.

It seems to me that Nietzsche and his reflections on ressentiment can be useful for analyzing the transformation of mass consciousness. Nietzsche considered ressentiment to be a feeling characteristic of the morality of slaves, who, due to their position, cannot change anything in the world. This is a rebellion of the imagination against reality, not alien to a certain unique creative principle: “The rebellion of slaves in morality begins with the fact that ressentiment itself becomes creative and generates values: the ressentiment of such beings who are incapable of a real reaction, a reaction that would be expressed in an act, and who reward themselves with imaginary revenge. While any noble morality grows out of a triumphant “Yes” said to oneself, the morality of slaves from the very beginning says “No” to the “external”, “other”, “not-oneself”: this “No” turns out to be its creative act. This turn of the evaluative gaze—this necessary turning outward instead of turning inward—is precisely inseparable from resentment: slave morality always needs, for its emergence, first of all, an opposing and external world, needs, speaking in physiological language, external stimuli in order to act at all—its action is initially a reaction” (On the Genealogy of Morals, 1:10).

When the world is not amenable to influence, slaves destroy it in their imagination, radically denying its existence. Nietzsche pointed out the connection between resentment and the religion of slaves - Christianity, unlike paganism, which thought in terms of another world, an apocalyptic transformation of the future, a paradisiacal utopia, etc. The communist utopia fits perfectly into the strategy of resentment, oriented toward denying reality.

It seems to me that the rejection of reality in today's Russia is directly related to the feeling of helplessness of people who are unable to make even the slightest change in the life of their country or even their family. The media only added "content" to this explosion of "slavish" negativity, which helped people overcome the feeling of alienation and humiliation. The peculiarity of the Russian situation, however, is that all of Russian society, from Putin to the last scapegoat, is equally a bearer of resentment. For Putin, its source is the failure to recognize him and Russia as equal and respected players on the world stage, for the scapegoat - helplessness in the face of the police, officials, courts and bandits. I believe that the resentful fantasies of the authorities at some point entered into a strange resonance with the resentful fantasies of ordinary people. And the world began to transform. The adventure in Ukraine became a noble war against imaginary fascists, Russia's isolation became its confirmation as a great power, the decline of the economy and the fall in income became an increase in prosperity and happiness. And even people far removed from the fantasies of resentment, but frightened by the hurricane of changes that they are powerless to prevent, systematically try to deny the reality of what is happening or at least close their eyes to it.

Loss of reality and crisis of institutions

The strangeness of what is happening largely lies in the fact that the Russian government, represented by Putin, guilty of alienating citizens from any form of influence on events and decisions, turns out to be not a victim of the ongoing psychological metamorphoses, but their beneficiary. Alienation from influencing reality is unfolding in Russia on two levels, but in both cases it is associated with a deep crisis of institutions. For the average citizen, the institutional crisis is expressed in the total perversion of the functions of law enforcement agencies and government bodies, the destruction of health care and education. But the crisis of institutions is also obvious on another level, which is associated with the withering away and meaninglessness of national sovereignty. And this crisis is characteristic not only of Russia, but of the entire world.

It is connected with the process of economic globalization. The English sociologist Zygmunt Bauman likes to talk about the "space of flows" that is located above national territories and sovereignties. Capital, goods, ideas, services, etc. move in this space. A significant part of the new Russian prosperity owes its existence to participation in the space of flows. This global space, however, not only brings wealth, but also gives rise to many problems - environmental, migration, financial, etc. But, as the same Bauman notes, these global problems must be solved by politicians whose power extends only to limited territories and populations. Hence the systemic crisis of institutions associated with national sovereignty. Local institutions in all countries demonstrate their profound helplessness.

The Russian authorities, with their exaggerated cult of sovereignty that is now outdated, on the one hand want to benefit from the global space of flows, and on the other hand, they are still trying to solve global problems with the help of local institutions. This is especially evident in the naive attempts to counteract global economic sanctions with ineffective countermeasures based on self-isolation.

Disappointment in institutions, the feeling of their meaninglessness both at the level of the average person and at the level of the president lead to a refusal to follow institutional norms and procedures at all levels. As a result, resentment becomes, to use the expression of the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, "anti-politics". Classic manifestations of anti-politics can be considered war (although Clausewitz once called war "a continuation of politics"), disgust for any forms of civil activity and the law. All this in Russia equally affects both the masses and the country's leadership. Balibar believed that anti-politics is fraught with nationalism and populism, which easily degenerate into dictatorship and lead to the cult of a charismatic leader, whose charisma, in essence, feeds on the violation of the law, the constitution, and international norms. A paradoxical illusion arises that nationalism can solve supranational problems, that a charismatic leader can solve the problems in which ineffective bureaucratic democracies are bogged down. Italian sociologist of culture Carlo Bordoni rightly notes that nationalism and populism today are completely comical (like Russian Cossacks) and do not bring any effective solutions. This is the same form of denying reality that stems from resentment. But Bordoni considers "statehood without a state" to be the most dangerous product of anti-politics. The degraded Byzantine bureaucracy rules, but the state as an institution practically no longer exists.

I share Balibar's views, but I believe that anti-politics is not simply the result of a crisis of statehood, but also a product of Nietzschean resentment, rooted in the inability to act positively. Everywhere we have, as Nietzsche believed, only pure negativity , a reaction to the resistance of the outside world. Putin's recent recognition as a moral authority is the result of anti-politics. "Morality," as often happens, turns out to be a strange product of anti-institutionality. The leader's decisions in such a context follow not from laws and regulations, but from his personal "moral" sense, in which his absolute sovereignty is manifested. He makes decisions not on the basis of agreements signed by Russia (for example, on the inviolability of Ukrainian borders), but on the basis of a sense of justice - to save imaginary Russians from Ukrainian oppression, to correct the injustice committed by Khrushchev in 1954. "Moral" politics in such a context ignores all institutional norms.

The principle of lies

The rejection of the "reality principle", to use Freud's term, leads to the affirmation of lies as a principle of politics. When state policy begins to be built on total lies or the denial of obvious facts, we are faced with a very special type of politics, which Hitler and Stalin successfully practiced. In 1975, a round table was organized in Germany on the topic of "The Legitimacy of Lies in Politics". This event is interesting because Hannah Arendt took part in it. In her speech, Arendt noted that lies have never been among the mortal sins and began to occupy a certain place in the European consciousness only starting in the 16th-17th centuries, that is, from the moment of the emergence of modern science with its claim to absolute knowledge of objective truth. Politics, according to the general opinion of the participants in the round table, has never been without lies, which the participants in the discussion called "occasional".

The situation, however, changes with the invention of advertising, total propaganda and modern media. From now on, projects of constructing the world in accordance with the imagination of politicians become possible. The distinction between lies and reality is completely erased. And it is precisely this lack of distinction, so obvious in Russian society today, that Arendt considered the most dangerous. A strange shift occurs in the mass consciousness, resulting in what Arendt called “ defactualization ” . Facts themselves lose their absolute reality. Even the death of people begins to seem imaginary. Either they were there, or they weren’t there, or they died, or they disappeared into thin air without a trace; everything begins to seem only a version of reality, an illusion. Such a metamorphosis of consciousness always leads to a decrease in civic activity, to an increase in inertia and indifference.

Shortly before the round table, Arendt published an essay, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers.” This essay is the most complete version of her reflections on lying in politics. It was about a collection of secret documents made public in 1971 concerning the Vietnam War. These documents showed that the Vietnam War had no material benefits for America—no acquisition of new territories, no economic advantages—absolutely nothing. Moreover, this war had partly undermined the power of the United States. According to Arendt, the issue on the battlefield was exclusively about images, about affirming the “image of the greatest power on Earth,” the invincible defender of freedom and democracy. The complete discrepancy between the war and reality led, as is well known, to the defeat of the superpower by the army of a backward agrarian country. At the same time, Arendt notes, the desire to inflate the “false image” was not even an attempt to achieve special international significance through bluff. Unlike today's Russia, which is interested in such a bluff, no one was challenging American power. There was no real national interest behind the Vietnamese bluff.

This total lie gave rise to belief in one's own fantasies. The emerging general illusion made the bureaucracy, which had lost touch with reality, even less capable of solving real problems. The Ukrainian epic, despite all its differences from the Vietnamese one, has much in common. The bureaucracy consistently undermines the economic and political well-being of the country for the sake of creating a kind of bluff. Defactualization in Russia has entered the stage of self-destruction of the state and society. And all these sacrifices are made only for the sake of "saving face" and creating an image of "invincible force."

But it is precisely in this paranoid desire to demonstrate strength by any means that the rootedness of Russian politics, or anti-politics, in resentment, weakness and impotence is revealed. The incredible fear that the authorities experience before fair elections or any political and civil activity in the country shows the degree of their helplessness and uncertainty about the future. Resentment - the affect of the frightened, helpless, having no influence on reality - always results in fantasies of strength and invincibility (all sanctions and the whole world are nothing to us), and the servile media do everything to hypnotize with these fantasies those who thirst for them and produce them.