Restlessness of lies

What properties of the Russian soul are betrayal of the heroes of "polite people"

For a year now, since the “Crimea is ours”, but by and large - the entire Putin’s third term, our power with the help of improvised propaganda means creates the image of the enemy: gayropa, Pindostan, dormitory ... What are the propagandists count on the trusting of the people? In fact, one must be very gullible to believe: Russia remained almost the only country that protects high morality and ideals against the background of a finally corrupted West.

But if everything were limited to morality and "scrapers." Our power threatens the whole world with nuclear sagging, takes away the territory from the fraternal people, gloats over foreign troubles, poisoning compatriots-worshipers, brings up anger against all “foreign” and “different” and obviously for everyone-lies, lies, lies. And at the same time he uses the increasing support of the people. What is the bet here - for meanness?

Yes, and how to combine the romantic elevation of propaganda (all the same high ideals of the “Russian world”) and its frantic evilness?

Goodness if you think about, ideal and meanness do not necessarily contradict each other. There are ideals that are especially easily justifying meanness and even pushing it to it - for example, the communist ideals of equality and brotherhood that did not prevent millions of people from destroying their comrades and brothers in the name of high ideas. People believed in high and at the same time did not disdain to perform small meanings, and even more so: they are easier to ideologically justify. To kill one person is a crime, and hundreds and thousands are social justice and historical retribution.

Ideals are created by a value division: good - evil, beauty - disgrace, truth - lies, tall - low ... But there is another division, which, in fact, crosses out everything else: his own - someone else's. Ideals are generic, tribal, national, as well as ethnic-religious abruptly divide the world into their own and strangers; In relation to the latter, any villainy is possible, acting as valor and virtue. Patriotism is an ideological workshop of such ideals that are easily compatible with immoralism in everything that does not concern their own.

Often ideals and meanness are correlated as goals (good) and means (any). If there is a blessing, that is, stupidity with good intentions, then why not be good and goodness? Is it possible to kill, betray, blasphemify with good intentions? Obviously, it is possible, and the range of examples is very wide: from the great inquisitor at Dostoevsky to Pavlik Morozov in Soviet hagiography.

In addition to the goodness, which consciously connects the highest goals with low -grade means, there is a more common type of dual behavior that does not even require such a connection. The "Idiot" of Dostoevsky tells about the two peasants of comrade-in -ity. The silver clock of the other liked one, and he, in order not to upset his friend, decided to simply kill him. But his soul longed for the high, and he prayed to God with all his heart, asked him for forgiveness in advance, and then, fulfilled the truly Christian spirit, he decided his comrade and took the watch with an ax. A classic example of double -food: a person follows two incompatible principles, without even thinking that there may be a problem of choice.

One of the first to have this amazing line of popular divorce was noted by A.S. Pushkin. In the story “Dubrovsky”, the archpes-blacksman set fire to a bar's estate, not sparing the people who die there at all-and at the same time, with a danger to life, climbs on burning beams and saves a cat.

“The glasses were cracking, pouring, flaming logs began to fall, there was a plaintive cry and screams:“ We’ll, help, help, help ”... Archpushka,” Yegorovna told him, “save them, cursed, God will reward you. “Whatever,” the blacksmith answered ...

<...> You are not afraid of God - the creature dies God, and you rejoice with the fool - and putting the stairs on the tanned roof, he climbed behind the cat ... "

It is impossible not to notice the Pushkin irony in relation to the "pious" archpes. He is not two -faced, not twisting with his soul. He is doubled. The median part of the soul, actually human, fell out - or, rather, was not yet born. This is a primitive dualism, when a person is led by two impulses, without realizing their incompatibility. Where there should be a whole in the soul, crevice is formed.

The philosopher Sergei Askoldov, reflecting in 1918 about the causes of the Russian revolution, describes the third, missing principle in the people's soul as a human actually:

“The composition of any soul has the beginning of a holy, specifically human and animal. Perhaps the greatest originality of the Russian soul lies, in our opinion, in the fact that the average, specifically human principle is in it disproportionately weak in comparison with the national psychology of other peoples. In Russian, as a type, the most powerful are holy and animal. ”

This strange moral growingness, the slack of the soul is noticed by Dostoevsky, more precisely, his “underground man”, as a characteristic feature of compatriots - not only from the people, but also educated classes. In the “Notes from the underground” two types of romantics are contrasted: European and Russians. The European romantic is directed into the oversized heights, but the Russian can behave in the present way - and at the height of its ideals this will not affect in any way.

You can call it infantilism, moral immaturity. Sigmund Freud found her in the personality of Dostoevsky himself, in the deepest traditions of the Russian “psyche”: committing crimes - sincerely repent of them - and commit new ones. Moving in a circle, not ascending to the step of conscious mental growth: “Whoever sins alternately, then, repenting, sets himself high moral goals - it is easy to blame that he builds his life too convenient for himself. <...> This resembles the barbarians of the era of the relocation of peoples, the barbarians who killed and then repented in this - so that repentance became a technical technique that cleared the path to new murders. Ivan the Terrible did the same; This deal with conscience is a characteristic Russian line. ”

Barbaric morality does not exclude ideals - tribal, patriotic, religious, but at the same time allowing any villainy and meanness in relation to strangers. This is a sharply bipolar division of the world into “its” and “strangers” and is a sign of barbarism, which does not know the intermediate, civilized zone, the human actually human.

Deception is like daring in Russia the deeper the gap between the ideal and the fact, the more it impresses the mass. A fearful lies can evade the truth a few degrees, the lie is dared to the right angle, and completely brave - 180 degrees, that is, to be directly reverse truth.

“Confidence in their own exclusivity, attempts by any means to achieve dubious geopolitical goals, neglect of elementary norms of law and morality can lead to terrible consequences” (15. 10.2014). “Other states openly declare their geopolitical claims, do not stop before open intervention in the internal affairs of independent states” (01/20/2015).

Who says this, defending the interests of the international law and order against geopolitical claims? UN Secretary General? Roman dad? Liberal European press? No, this is said by the president of the same country that, under his leadership, joined part of another state and wages war on its territory, breaking a security system that was strengthened in Europe for seventy years. He accuses others of what at this moment he himself does before the eyes of the whole world. Such “reverse” without deviation at least one degree cannot be accidental: it is designed with sniper accuracy. And the goal, obviously, is simple: to demonstrate the deepest contempt for the whole world - and thereby position compatriots to yourself. How? Yes, it is the audacity and recklessness of lies - as you put a slap in the face. What is there to cowardly and twist your soul! Let the western lie fuel, half -heartedly, pretending that they still have a conscience. We have nothing to lose, we go straight: in battle - against the enemy, in lies - against the truth.

The authorities flaunts deception as a removal, winking at the masses and meeting them encouraging squint. Say, we understand, such. Power will not be respected if it simply calls for expansion; But if the authorities say that we protect the world from junta and fascists, but at the same time he will win back to us as accomplices, then we are respected, and we respect it in response. If we were trimmed with all the ears, which we are noble and spiritual, and at the same time lead us on robbery and make it clear that there is a gap between morality and being and cannot be otherwise, we live in the real world, then this is for us the greatest pleasure, because we are both morally high and geopolitically, and therefore in a double winning.

So, from time immemorial it has happened in Rus': a split between the ritual and behavior. Morality should be sky -high, verbal rites are observed - and then everything is allowed. Meaning is not so much in low behavior as in the right to its full inconsistency with words and even the reverse of them. That's where the person is truly wide - and try to narrow him if he spreads on the seventh part of the earth, and she is crowded, give him wider.

Under the sign of their own, it should be noted the difference between the double -commissary of the Soviet era and the divine of the current one. Then the double took the form of bifurcation of goals and means. The Soviet man sometimes still arose an internal conflict between ideal and being, now it is smooth, since there is no gap between the future and the present, between goals and means. Aimless war, without ideals, without the future - war as a state of hungry state organism, looking for a drainage of food.

And among the people, everything goes under the sign of usage - when any internal conflicts are not resolved dramatically, not tragically (“step on the throat of their own song”), but by the search for the greatest psychological comfort. You believe in what is most convenient to believe. After all, it was not without reason that the beginning of the current century has spent under the sign of Glamur, and now its lessons are applied to the situation directly opposite, not well -fed, but extremely alarming, fraught with hardships and victims. The latest propaganda is still tuned to glamor - this is a big step forward compared to even with the “optimistic tragedy” of the Soviet era. Then there was still a tragedy, a break with the past, victims in the present-and faith in the future. Now there is no gap of time, there is neither tragedy, nor optimism, there is some suspended state in which everyone wants to relax and enjoy. This is a chosen faith as a desire for maximum mental comfort even when external circumstances do not give reason for this.

For some, the greatest comfort is associated, on the contrary, with complete distrust. But this is also a convenient position, so to speak, glamorous chernukha. Recently, a student from St. Petersburg, who was undergoing an internship at the British University, according to the reviews of my colleagues, quite developed and thinking. He read my article “Crisis is a court. Above himself ”and did not understand why Russia to judge itself. “What did we do bad and what do we need to make excuses to the“ international community ”? I sent him links to a number of publications, with facts and opinions different from official propaganda. To which he answered me with noticeable irritation, which does not trust either the Russian or the Western press, and therefore prefers to stay in the field of philosophy and art.

Here is such a sad story, typical of the time of "crisis glamor." It is more convenient for a person not to believe in anything, but to stay over the fight, plucking his ears. Classic, in fact, is not much different from the right of command - this is still the same position of indifference to truth and historical somnambulism. From double -heartedness - only a step.

* Mikhail Epstein (b. 1950, Moscow)-philosopher, culturalist, philologist, essayist, Honored Professor of the theory of culture and Russian literature of the University of Emory (Atlanta, USA), professor of Russian literature and cultural theory and the head of the Center for Humanitarian Innovation of the Damage University (Great Britain), a member of the Russian Pen-Center and the Academy of Russian Modern District. Photo: Shutterstock