"Confluence can cost us life"

How plagiarism and fake scientific works lead to disasters and to the collapse of the army

Last week in Moscow, the co -founder of Dissernet was detained Andrei Zazakin. For almost 10 years, Zayakin and his colleagues have been talking about large -scale falsification in which the Russian authorities participate: judges, employees of law enforcement agencies, university rector and even ministers are consistently engaged in plagiarism and borrow other people's scientific research instead of conducting their own. Simply put, they are engaged in bullshit. About how fake scientific works ultimately lead to disaster, the “cold” spoke with the sociologist Alexander Davydov, one of the authors of the book “Ethnography of the Confusion: who and how writes custom -made educational work in Russia”.

Alexander Davydov is a sociologist and researcher. He graduated from Kemerovo State University and after studying he wrote custom work for several years. In the book “Ethnography of the bullshit”, Alexander and its co -author Pavel Abramov recorded a series of interviews with all participants in the process of producing educational bullshit: students, teachers and scriptors - authors of such works.

How would you briefly define - what is bullshit?

- In his book about the Gulag, Ann Applebaum tells the story of how in one of the camps it was necessary to pass the norm in the fallen forest. Then the bosses ordered to make fresh saws at old firewood and so reported for a larger number of cubic meters.

Extremely simplifying, bullshit is the use of a deliberate untruth to achieve important indicators for the system. And it works due to the fact that the system is really needed.

The book describes such a disposition in your book: both the author of the custom work and its customer-student and, very often, the teacher who checks it, everyone knows that they are bullshit. Why do they all agree with her? Why do they need it at all?

- Those teachers with whom we spoke, as a rule, described two pictures of the world. Some of them look at the whole system skeptical-they do not believe at all that within its framework you can teach someone something: "People at the university do not come to get knowledge." Others are a little more optimistic: they, as a rule, distinguish for themselves a group of students, a certain core with which they are seriously engaged. But again, most of their students are not studying in order to master the competencies that they are described in diplomas.

It is natural that students begin to look for some other, “genuine” content in this. Everyone finds their own interests inside the system: someone needs a crust, someone is gaining themselves some social ties, someone just earns. So people are embedded in the system and begin to participate in bullshit.

It turns out that the real goals of the participants in this chain are not at all the ones that are declared. Only scriptors - people who write other people's work for money - do something that corresponds to the declared tasks.

Why are scripts part of the bullshit? They just really write something.

- In our book there is a question: how does custom work differ from the student? Formally - nothing at all. But in essence, they are completely different from the point of view of methodology. Good custom -made work is the correct design, the desired level of “uniqueness”, compliance with the topic. And good student work is primarily a student’s living thought. Technically, the subject is the same, but in terms of functionality are completely different things.

What then is the "essence" of work? Does she have any value in itself or is it just a tool for academic acceptance?

The scriptor’s self -awareness here plays a key role. He is looking for an internal justification of what he is doing. Subconsciously, a person always seeks to explain his actions for himself.

It is through such people that bullshit becomes a social institution that continues to practice. Everyone in his place wants to work for some kind of result. In the academic environment, this is implemented through scriptors, in a law enforcement system - through operas, who, in conjunction with investigators and judges, are stamping, for example, criminal cases for reposts or with obviously knocked out indications.

The point is not in the very laziness or greed, but rather, in the deep conviction that, for example, ethical principles are a completely abstract and therefore false thing.

“Rules exist in order to violate them” - are you talking about it? It turns out that the bullshit helps to make this mental leap - from impossible requirements for an acceptable result?

- The concept of bullshit, it seems to me, leads us (sorry for theorizing, but here it is important) to the idea of ​​Marx that "ideology is a false consciousness." This or that large worldview picture is a priori is false. We use it as the art of deceiving.

For me, bullshit is one of the key concepts of the society of red theology. Sorry if it sounds a little dreary: like any person who wrote a lot in the table, I have a complex system of views. For simplicity, we can refer to the book of Yuri Slovkin “House of Government”, where he says that the Bolsheviks are a millenary sect ( a group of people whose members believe in the fundamental transformation of society, after which “everything will change”: for example, to the apocalypse. - approx. “Cold”).

Roughly speaking, in this theology there is a certain imperious order that is still acting on a large part of the territory of the former Russian Empire. This order gives rise to a number of patterns of behavior, patterns of thought. And one of these patterns is just a bullshit.

How much does your study correlate with what Dissernet does?

- First of all, we have a little different niches: we have studied higher education, and they work already in science. But there are intersections. Many people with bought dissertations make an academic career, and it is clear that, having become rector, they in universities begin to produce bullshit in one way or another, so to speak, as ontology ( the doctrine of the order of things - approx. “Cold” ).

"Dissernet" literally demonstrates who is who. And accordingly, this all this sexy infrastructure is displayed and comprehended.

Returning to the history of the issue, for example, with logs at Applum - for whom is this bullshit produced? Are not all participants in the process understand that the numbers are blowing: both those who cut down, and those who wrote the numbers, and those who read them later?

- It all starts with those who lowered this plan from top to bottom. I would have suggested that the people who invented him also deceived him, produced bullshit. Suppose, some average Gulag chief considered something like the following: well, we are building a new society-let me put the numbers higher, and on food for prisoners a more sales. The leadership itself deceives itself, formulating a requirement that cannot be fulfilled.

In my opinion, in the first 10-15 years of Soviet power it was more difficult to drive bullshit-no one really knew how this new society would work. By the end of the 1930s, the commanders of the local one figured out this, a party hierarchy developed, and people began to understand how to do this. In the 1960s, the main subjects of social life in the USSR were already structured in rather strong communities-industry and regional. Accordingly, the tools of bullshit have already become quite legitimate.

In 1975, a performance was released in the Moscow Satira Theater on the play “Foam” by Sergey Mikhalkov - about the big boss with the name who needs a dissertation. In 1979, a film with Papanov and Kuravlev was released on it, which also says a lot: for the period of late Brezhnev, the bullshit is at least what is widely known and discussed.

In my opinion, the decision to introduce troops into Afghanistan was made as part of the ontology of bullshit - the Politburo did not even have a quorum that day, that is, the highest party of the party made the most important decision, scoring on its own protocol requirements.

As a rule, several things speak of the relations of war and bullshit. First: war is the easiest way to hide bullshit. Therefore, warehouses with military equipment are burning - so that it was impossible to check that it was not. Therefore, on the front line of five tanks on the go only three, and only one works completely - and so on. "The war will write off everything." Including for many years of bullshit. The second completely contradicts the first: bullshit is impossible in the war, the war reveals this whole world, it does everything visible.

- Let us return to the position and identity of a person. I’ll refer to the telegram channel “Will ”-they wrote a lot about the fact that in the first months of the war the combat-ready units of the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR were practically destroyed. The soldiers were driven into the frontal attacks, they were very poorly provided, they were terribly commanded. Thus, people engaged in military supplies covered their shortages and for many years bullshit. This is the position of people within the system, whose values ​​and tasks with the tasks and values ​​of the system are not associated. And a specific person is a soldier: he has completely different goals, he is part of a fighting subject.

I will turn to my script experience. I once wrote a course for a cadet of a military school. And after that I never took such orders again. I just figured it out: so I killed for several days that I was digging in all these drill charters, and the future lieutenant, for whom I write this, did not dig in this. And when he falls into a bad situation, he will not have this knowledge on the subcortex. He will incorrectly build a supporting point for his platoon and ditch the soldier. And when I write a term paper, I am a little involved in this.

If we are those who fight, then any bullshit will directly affect our fate, it can cost us life. The following question arises from this: how much a person who produces bullshit shares the interests of a large subject - the state for which he fights?

And here Russia and Ukraine are, of course, subjects of different properties. In Ukraine - I say this on personal experience with the volunteers of 2014, we did an interview with them - at least in the right environment people are ideologically charged, burning their common cause. They are seriously related to the organization of defense, to the preparation of soldiers. After 2014, they often opened good career roads - hence the active, active, ideological officers. For them, bullshit, which is also existing in the Ukrainian army, is not the norm. And on the contrary, sometimes there is a Russian officer who, as a rule, is not ideologically charged, he has not passed all this evolution - even if practically is quite professional.

Why is military bullshit it is not opened? Why is there no obvious external public request for this?

-Again, we are dealing with very different groups of interests. Suppose a person can be directly related to a military bullshit associated with supply. But he will not give a move to some kind of business-because he himself is engaged in bullshit in his place (for example, falsifying evidence of guilt as an investigator), and its opening in another will indirectly hit him.

In parallel, there is always the desire to "not take out the SOR." “It is impossible for the enemy to use this in his information struggle” - and everything is like that. Again we rest against the different essence of subjects. Ukrainians - at least Strat, having impressive social positions - try to build their own, another society, much closer to Western principles. After 20 years of Putin’s rule, the “Soviet style” returned, in which the concept of bullshit became fundamental.