The basic law of the myth

We read the Constitution of the Russian Federation along with Roland Bart

The zeroed Constitution of the Russian Federation can and should be criticized from a legal point of view, but it is not the most correct here. The very method of adopting amendments demonstrated that this constitution can (and will) be rejected with the same ease with which the current government has been the same as the “amendments”: it will only be necessary to come up with some other “procedure”.

The constitution has lost the quality of unshakability (so far we note this word) - and without it it is not the basic law of the country. But what? I washed away the act not legal, but mythological, or rather ideological.

The basis of the analysis of modern myths was set by the French philosopher Roland Bart (1915 - 1980). His book “Mythology” saw the light in 1957, but remains relevant - and without it, and not to understand how propaganda acts. Bart stipulates that we are talking about the analysis of non -previous myths that had a narrative form (stories). The modern myth, on the contrary, is fragmented and scattered, appears either in the statement of the TV presenter, then in the poster, then in a conversation with your old friend. This fragmentation makes a modern myth unwivic for criticism: where it was easy to point out inconsistencies in narrative, now only cesura, emptiness - therefore, a typical answer to criticism, for example, this: “And where did we say, where did you get it”?

The same fragmentation is also characteristic of amendments that are scattered throughout the text of the constitution and often in its most unexpected places in order to “type” not to touch its chapters 1 and 2.

During the “procedure”, such a Kunshtuk was also done: through the chambers of the Federal Assembly, approval in the constituent entities of the Federation and in the Constitutional Court, more than 200 changes were carried out as one amendment , and at the stage of approval by “all -Russian voting” it turned into “amendments” ,

And now propaganda could juggle them with the dexterity of a magician who gets from the cylinder a handkerchief, then a fire ball, then a hare, thereby masking the main “amendment” about the reversing of the presidential terms.

If critics pointed out the incoherence of amendments, their initiators could answer that they, on the contrary, are connected by some higher meaning (“Where is it written in our country?”).

Scattered and often inappropriately in themselves, the amendments made, nevertheless, to the “masses” (deprived of the tools of criticism and in many ways access to the opinion of those who have such tools) an integrated mythologizing effect.

In his famous book, Bart uses a intelligible example: in the hairdresser he came across the Pari-Match magazine with a photograph of a dark-skinned young man in an army uniform, salting the French flag, on the cover. According to Bart, this is a “meaning”, behind which a certain “signified” is hidden - a very blurry concept, rather even an emotion to which the cover persistently appeals. The concepts of this kind of transient, they often have no name, so Bart has to compose for this his own rather clumsy (which he himself recognizes) the definition: "French imperial."

We also have a little book in our hands (like a magazine in a hairdresser at Bart), but “meant” were made not graphically, but interspersed with the text: “successor of the USSR”, “millennial history”, “ancestors that bequeathed to us and faith in God”, “the union of a man and a woman”, “Irishability of the borders”, “historical truth”, “children - priority”, etc. All together indicates something, also similar to “Imperiality”, everything is imbued with the cult of power, to which the initiator of the amendments addresses without constraint, but Bart would probably say that this conclusion is too on the surface and therefore inaccurate. The “Imperial Myth” is the current government, maybe I would like to support, but it is already too far from reality.

We will be held with the definition, but for now we will delve into the mechanism of the formation of the myth, as Bart understands it. The myth does not deceive us directly in the forehead, he "does not hide anything and does not demonstrate anything - he deforms, his tactics are not true and not a lies, but a deviation." The myth does not refute and does not cancel reality, it "parasitizes" on it.

And the ancestors, and the USSR, and the children are real concepts, but they are “depleted”, “sucked” by the myth in order to adapt them to their ideological needs. The main principle of the myth is “to take the story from things and turn it“ into nature ”.

Here in the picture is a kind of dark-skinned: probably he was an Algerian, grew up in a family, probably studied somewhere (or did not study), entered the army, thinks something ...-and all this was “stolen” for creating a fleeting, but convincing image. There are also children in Russia, and many of them are living; It is connected with the USSR by a very difficult historical umbilical cord; The Russians really have (and very different) “ancestors”-but all this is discarded with a clever gesture to affirm something else in the same place: to abduct the story and turn it into “nature”, into a certain “always talked”.

Here we, perhaps, approached what “amendments” want to convince us of, in the focus of the complex, cumulative impact of which we all ended up, as if in a sight. And even in this case, we will not have to invent a word, in the Russian language it is: it is “inviolability”. By the way, about the Russian Federation as a “right-willed USSR”: if the Soviet “communist” myth tried to motivate us to change something, then the current one, without setting any goals ahead, on the contrary, tries to immobilize us and paralyze.

A stretched, memorable procedure for approval worked for the same goal: after all, we were raped all of us? - Always soak! (That is: and it will be "unshakable").

Probably, this explains the fact that, unlike last year’s history, when society was deceived in the elections to the Moscow City Duma, almost no one went to protest in an open form. Those who wanted to say “no” could do it, who did not want to vote, he did not go, but who was brought under threat, he will go to demonstrate - what? Your shame? For slurred “amendments” not to see faces, the whole story is “abducted”, and what is the point of exposing yourself to risk if it has always been “like”? It was necessary to be a bart to pay attention to the same cover in the hairdresser - hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen passed by, not noticing how they were exposed to this dose of propaganda, no one protested. The same in our case: the dose is less - the dose is greater, but this is “such nature” ...

The picture on the cover stated, along with “imperiality”, also “inviolability”, as the amendments, primarily claim “inviolability”, but also “imperial” in one bottle. What happened with the inviolability of the colonial system shortly after the release of that Pari-Match number, we know. The same earlier or later will happen to ours “always”, simply because the future is not canceled and not defined. But it is important to understand that this is precisely the myth: although he is able to detain us in the archaic and this is his goal (including the possibility for the current president “to live forever”), but it will not “always have tactically”, but somehow differently (maybe even worse).

The skillfully built myth, ”Bart remarks,“ should not be too simple (then he will clearly come into conflict with reality), nor too complicated. After all, it is designed to assimilate “in the simplicity of the soul”, and for this it should contain a “gesture of innocence”. But this is the fact that the “shares of amendments” were the least: they are too contradictory and bulky, and the procedure “devoid of innocence”.

Therefore, the myth of “amendments to the Constitution” reaches its propaganda goal only to a small extent, and the basic law is destroyed at the same time, and such a precedent is also set for the future.

It should not be unshakable (without quotation marks), not even faith: its fortress is a personal business of everyone, namely institutions. And only then will the state be strong, and this is proved by history many times. The whole clumsy, obviously ugly, substitution epic with the “reversing” of the Constitution makes the idea of ​​institutions more understandable for “elites”.