Empression instead of ideology

Philologist, historian of culture, researcher of Soviet and post -Soviet literature, cinema and social thought, researcher at the Russian Culture Center for the Russian Culture, Ilya Kukulin on the YouTube channel “On the Country and World” says :

“Modern Russian propaganda does not broadcast ideology as a consistent narrative, but a psychological state. Another reason this happens is due to the fact that ideology is associated with the idea of ​​truth. The ideologist comes and says: "That's how everything really works, I will explain everything to you now." And for many years, the modern Russian state and its propaganda said that no one knows the truths, and promoted (in order to hide their actions) the maximum number of explanations contradictory. <...> In order to maintain such an information regime, that is, the stuffing of the maximum number of versions that contradict each other, in order to distract from the truth - here, of course, no ideology is needed. But in order to draw people into their actions, you need to promote a complex of psychological and emotional states. ”

The historian of education and culture, researcher of Soviet literature and education, researcher at the Center for Research of Russian Culture Amhert-College Maria Mayofis adds:

“This neologism - empress - is a combination of the words“ empathy ”and“ aggression ”. Exactly this occurs at the level of broadcast of some normative emotions, at the level of provocation and at the level of reaction from consumers of propaganda. <...>

Empathy is a rather complicated emotion and is associated with two important factors. It involves the inclusion of imagination. Without imagination, it does not work. It can be excluding, or it can be included. Excluding certain social, ethnic cultural groups or vice versa.

Imagination must be involved if we want to encourage the audience not only to think, but to imagine something in the key to us. <...> We can direct this imagination along a certain rut, setting a certain series of perceptions, when people begin to identify themselves with some victims that can be represented as their own, and can be represented as strangers.

And here a very important border passes between empathy to his own and empathy to strangers. Because empathy to its own is half -hearted, it does not imply recognition of the otherness and understanding of this otherness, recognition and understanding of the difficulties in which people are located. <...>

Empathy theorists, intellectual historians and historians of emotions call this Feeling - For . We are not just starting to feel with these people, but we begin to feel so that something to do for them. <...> But in order to really do something for them, and not for ourselves, we must recognize them as others.

If we are told that someone suffers as Russian as we, and suffers from strangers who are not Russians, is half -hearted empathy, in which there is no recognition of this otherness. So, there is no ethical effort to switch to the position of another. ”