In the country of the winning resentment

Resentmenting

One of the amazing the imagination of the metamorphoses of Russian society is associated with the volcanic growth of aggressiveness simultaneously with the refusal to recognize reality, buried overnight under ideological fictions. Explain this phenomenon is not easy. It is often written off for unprecedented processing of mass propaganda. Official propaganda explains a lot, but not all. Not every society can be proven in such a short time and before such excesses. In order for propaganda to be effective, it must meet the unconscious aspirations of the population.

It seems to me that for the analysis of the transformation of mass consciousness, Nietzsche can be useful and his thoughts about the resentimation. Nietzsche considered a resentification a feeling characteristic of the morality of slaves, who, due to his position, could not change anything in the world. This is an uprising of imagination against reality, not alien and some kind of creative beginning: “The uprising of slaves in morality begins with the fact that the resentment itself becomes creative and gives rise to values: the resentment of such creatures that are not capable of a real reaction, reaction, expressed in an act, and which reward themselves to imaginary revenge. While any noble morality grows from the triumphant “yes”, what was said to himself, the moral of the slaves from the very beginning says “no” “no”, “other”, “non-sebe”: this is “no” and turns out to be her creative act. This turn of the evaluating gaze is the necessary appeal instead of an appeal to itself - just an integral of a resentment: the moral of slaves always need its occurrence primarily in the opposing and external world, needs, in the physiological language, in external irritations, in order to act, its action is an initial reaction ”(“ To the genealogy of morality ”, 1:10).

When the world is not exposed, slaves destroy it in the imagination, radically deny its existence. Nietzsche pointed out the connection of resentification with the religion of slaves - Christianity, unlike paganism, who thought in the categories of another world, the apocalyptic transformation of the future, paradise utopia, etc. Communist utopia fits into a resentment strategy, focused on the denial of reality.

It seems to me that the rejection of reality in present -day Russia is directly related to a sense of helplessness of people who are unable to introduce at least a scanty change to the life of their country and even their family. The media only threw “content” into this explosion of “slave” negativity, which helped people overcome the feeling of alienation and humiliation. The peculiarity of the Russian situation, however, lies in the fact that all Russian society, from Putin to the last switchman, is equally the carrier of the resentment. For Putin, his source is the non -recognition of his and Russia equal and respected players in the world stage, for the switch - helplessness in the face of the police, officials, courts and bandits. I believe that the resentment fantasies of the authorities at some point entered a strange resonance with the resentment fantasies of the townsfolk. And the world began to transform. The adventure in Ukraine became a noble war against the imaginary fascists, the isolation of Russia - its statement in the rank of a great power, the decline of the economy and the fall of income - an increase in welfare and happiness. And even people who are far from the fantasies of the resentment, but frightened by the hurricane of the changes that they are not able to prevent, systematically try to deny the reality of what is happening or at least close their eyes on it.

Loss of reality and institutions crisis

The oddity of what is happening largely in the fact that the Russian authorities represented by Putin, guilty of alienating citizens from any form of influence on events and decisions, are not a victim of the ongoing psychological metamorphoses, but their beneficiary. Alienation from exposure to reality unfolds in Russia at two levels, but in both cases it is associated with a deep crisis of institutions. For the ordinary layman, the institutional crisis is expressed in the total perversion of the functions of law enforcement agencies and authorities, the destruction of health and education. But the crisis of institutions is also obvious at a different level, which is associated with the death and meaningless of national sovereignty. And this crisis is characteristic not only for Russia, but for the whole world.

It is associated with the process of globalization of the economy. The English sociologist Sigmund Bauman loves to talk about the “flows space”, which is located above national territories and sovereignty. Capital, goods, ideas, services, etc. move in this space. A significant part of the new Russian well -being 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 and so on. But, as the same Bauman notes, politicians should solve these global problems whose power extends only to limited territories and population. Hence the systemic crisis of institutions associated with national sovereignty. Local institutions in all countries demonstrate their deep helplessness.

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

Disappointment in institutions, a sense of their meaninglessness both at the layman level and at the President’s level lead to refusal to follow institutional standards and procedures at all levels. As a result, resentification becomes, if you use the expression of the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, "anti -policy." The classic manifestation of anti-policy detergents can be considered a war (although Clausewitz once called the war “a continuation of politics”), aversion to any forms of civil activity and law. All this in Russia equally amazes both the masses and the leadership of the country. Balibar believed that the anti -policy is fraught with nationalism and populism, which easily degenerate into the dictatorship and lead to the cult of the charismatic leader, whose charisma, in essence, is fed by a violation of the law, the constitution, and international norms. There is a paradoxical illusion that nationalism can solve supernational problems, that charismatic leader can solve problems in which ineffective bureaucratic democracies have tied. The Italian sociologist of culture Carlo Bordoni rightly remarks that nationalism and populism are today completely operating (like Russian Cossacks) and do not carry any effective decisions. This is still the same form of denial of reality. But Bordoni considers "statehood without a state." The degrading Byzantine bureaucracy rules, but the state as an institution almost does not exist.

I share the views of Balibar, but I believe that anti -Politics is not just the result of a crisis of statehood, but also the product of the Nitsshevsky resentment, rooted in the inability to act positively. Everywhere we have, as Nietzsche believed, only pure negativeness , a reaction to the resistance of the outside world. Putin's recent recognition by moral authority is the result of anti -policy. “Morality”, as often happens, turns out to be a strange product of anti -intentionality. The decisions of the leader in such a context do not follow from laws and establishments, but from his personal “moral” flair in which his absolute sovereignty is manifested. He makes decisions not on the basis of agreements signed by Russia (for example, on the inconsistency of the borders of Ukraine), 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” policy in this context ignores all institutional norms.

The principle of lies

The rejection of the “principle of reality”, if we recall this term Freud, leads to the assertion of lies as a principle of politics. When the state policy begins to be built on a total lies or the denial of obvious facts, we are faced with a very special type of politics that Hitler and Stalin were successfully engaged in. In 1975, a round table was organized in Germany on the theme of "legitimacy of lies in politics." This event is interesting in that Hannah Arendt took part in it. In her speech, Arenidt noted that the lie was never included in the category of mortal sins and began to occupy a certain place in the European consciousness only since the XVI -XVII centuries, that is, from the moment of the emergence of modern science with its claim to absolute knowledge of objective truth. Politics, in the general opinion of the participants in the round table, never did without the lies, which the participants in the discussion called the "occasional".

The situation, however, is changing with the invention of advertising, total propaganda and modern media. From now on, projects for the design of the world in accordance with the imagination of politicians become possible. There is a complete erasure of differences between lies and reality. And it was precisely such a indifference, today is so obvious in Russian society, that Lessee was considered the most dangerous. In the mass consciousness, a strange shift occurs, as a result of which what isydt called “defactualization” ( Defactualization ) arises. The facts themselves lose absolute reality. Even the death of people begins to seem imaginary. Either they were, or they were not, or died, or disappeared in the air without a trace; Everything begins to be presented only by the version of reality, imaginary. Such a metamorphosis of consciousness always leads to a decrease in civil activity, to an increase in inertia and indifference.

Shortly before the round table, Lessee published an essay “False in politics. Reflections on the pentagon papers. " This is an essay - the most complete version of her thoughts about lies in politics. It was about a collection of secret documents released in 1971 regarding the war in Vietnam. From these documents it followed that the war in Vietnam did not persecute any material benefits for America - neither the acquisition of new territories or economic advantages - absolutely nothing. Moreover, this war partly undermined the power of the United States. According to Lessee, the battlefield was exclusively about image, about the approval of the “image of the greatest power on Earth”, an invincible defender of freedoms and democracy. The complete inconsistency of the war with reality led, as you know, to the defeat of the superpower from the army of a backward agrarian country. At the same time, Asselive notes, the desire to inflate a “false image” was not even an attempt to achieve special international significance using a bluff. Unlike present -day Russia, interested in such a bluff, no one was disputed by American power. Behind the Vietnamese bluff, no real national interest was visible.

This total lie gave rise to faith in their own fantasies. The universal illusion arose made a bureaucracy that has lost in touch with reality even less capable of solving genuine problems. In the Ukrainian epic, with all the difference from Vietnamese, there are many similar ones. Bureaucracy consistently undermines the economic and political well -being of the country to create a certain 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 “preserving the face” and creating an image of “indestructible power”.

But it is precisely in this paranoid desire to demonstrate power in any way and the rootedness of Russian politics, or anti -policy, is manifested in resentimal, in weakness and powerlessness. The incredible fear that the authorities experiences before honest elections or any political and civil activity in the country shows the degree of its helplessness and uncertainty in tomorrow. Resentment - the affect of a frightened, helpless, not having influence on reality - always pours into fantasues of strength and indestructibility (all the sanctions and the whole world do not care for us), and the objectionable media do everything to hypnotize those who long for them and produce them.