Social cataract

The fifth year of the hot phase of self-assertion of the former empire has begun

(18+) THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) IS PRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED AND (OR) SENT BY FOREIGN AGENT ANDREY VLADIMIROVICH KOLESNIKOV OR CONCERNES THE ACTIVITIES OF FOREIGN AGENT ANDREY VLADIMIROVICH KOLESNIKOV.

According to Viktor Frankl's formula, a person either wants the same thing as others (conformism) or does what others want from him (totalitarianism). This is how the state of public sentiment was divided before and after February 2022.

A person is placed in a position where, in order not to fall out of his social niche, he must do what the state wants from him. Not always - there are ways to dodge, deceive the state, hide in a hole: this is not yet full-fledged classical totalitarianism. To a person in a difficult situation, even if he has a choice of how to survive further, the state offers a profitable option - to go to the front.

Society has not yet understood what trap it has fallen into, and believes that going to the trenches is the same as getting a job somewhere in the “north” on a rotational basis, but such work is “easier” and “more romantic” than a shift.

Society never understood anything. Because she didn’t want to understand, she deliberately refused to understand. Rutinization and normalization of what is happening partly saves from depression - including social and political. This is not about the whole society - any generalizations have many nuances. But a significant part of society is saving itself from the psychological, political, economic, military four-year state imposed on it by indifference and abdication of responsibility. Preferring a trench and “easy” money to peaceful work is also an abdication of responsibility.

Bonded deal

The poet Oleg Khlebnikov came up with a name for the “homeland” (that is, the state, its upper layer and the sprawling bureaucracy), which requires the citizen to constantly participate in its affairs under quasi-patristic light shows and fanfare: mortgage. This was the root element of the social contract: I have a mortgage, so I support the government. This is how the social contract became: I have a mortgage, so I also go to the front.

The father state uses its children who are ready to make a deal with the father. Despite the fact that the father himself takes money from the family - he raises taxes and fees and gets into secret boxes, calling it the solemn word “whitewashing”.

If I didn’t interfere, there would be no need to “whitewash” anything. The state is sucking the last juice out of society, paying with “ensuring security and sovereignty.” This is what causes depression and a feeling of permanent anxiety. And we also need to tighten our belts to make it easier for a very narrow circle up there to fulfill their “patriotic” duty and spend money on the battle with those who are preventing them from developing within the country.

Such a society cannot develop, it can only survive. This is not only stagnation of the economy, it is stagnation of souls and inflation of conscience. This is no longer a social contract, but an enslaving deal with the state. This is not a social contract, but a social cataract, a clouding of the lens through which a man of the era of mature semi-totalitarianism a la Ruesse looks at the world. And he sees what is not there, and refuses to see what is there.

It is very important for this person to limit communication. First, block the flow of information. Then replace it with the returning TV and hysterical Z-Telegram channels. Then prohibit free speech and correspondence via a convenient, but probably not always controlled connection. The result is to take complete control of a person’s communication environment. Achieve a mixture of China and Orwell.

There is nothing impossible about this. The man of Putin's era has convinced himself that he is free, and tomorrow will be better than yesterday. This, too, is a psychological survival tool—a social cataract in action. You can adapt to anything, but expressing dissatisfaction means getting out of the hole and thereby putting yourself under attack from the state.

The lessons of four years that passed like one day were not in vain.

Land of imitations and cargo cults

There was nothing left of the state except the muscle memory of the empire on the outer contour and violence on the inner. And the bureaucracy, its numb tentacles, works mechanically insensitively. The bureaucracy doesn’t care which order from which government it carries out - it is equally indifferent and bad.

Survival turns into infertility. This era does not create anything of its own - only endless remakes, from cinema to public policy. Everything is from the past.

And the present becomes a worse version of the past - from the same movies to the same government policies. Only cargo cults remain: from remakes of Pinocchio, Cheburashka, and Sailor's cats to the reconstruction of the 1980 Olympics.

The motive of returning to former greatness pervaded this imitative era. And not only here in Russia. In the United States, for example, Lyndon Johnson's program was simply called the “Great Society.” It did not involve returning, but moving forward. Just like, indeed, the program of the CPSU of 1961 (we are not talking about content, but about motive, tonality). Trump, like Putin, looks to the past - “let's make it great again.”

The result is an angry caricature. Collective irresponsibility instead of collective responsibility. The last function, as has always happened in history, was assumed by the intelligentsia. That layer that seemed to have disappeared, but in fact exists - those who still have conscience and shame, are the intelligentsia, regardless of social and income status and very often - regardless of education.

Mythologized and fictitious “reality”, lies, deception, demonstrative omissions, euphemisms instead of directly indicating the meaning of events, Orwellian inversion of the meaning of words and legal concepts to the point of absurdity, mimicry, adjustment to official discourse, getting used to everything that happens around, normalizing abnormality, blaming the opposite side for exactly what you do yourself, appealing to the experience of others to justify your actions. Imposing full identification of the regime and the Motherland. Confusion in concepts: is the Kremlin restoring the Soviet Union or has the Russian Federation actually entered into conflict with the Soviet Union, whose heritage - cultural, infrastructural, human - is being destroyed or profaned? Life in quotes - “cotton”, “negative growth”, “discredit”, “elections”, “economic restructuring”, “controlled cooling / soft landing”, “Anglo-Saxons”. All are imitations, described in a special heavy dialect of power. The experts' bird language (something like "seamless digital sky") describing "development" replaces development.

The drone has become a symbol of greatness and progress. We flew high, but we started with the Siberian Cranes...

Bradbury butterfly

Having established a cult of territories, they forgot about people. Hence the massive failure in the main thing - demography. The cult of heroic death and the quantitative and qualitative increase in human capital directly contradict each other. A person cannot be productive in captivity and in autarky, being fenced off by barbed wire, borders, cultural blockades from the rest of the world. The world cannot be limited to Asia - thereby the country turns into that very Asiape. A man cannot find his best in a trench. But, having returned from it, he claims a high status, benefits and privileges. Power must be shared with him, he will claim his place in the “trenchocracy”. What is the degree of normality and the ability to develop such a society that has developed over four years?

The end of certainty and the uncertainty of the end. Conversation about nuclear war has become unusually easy, like talking about the weather - do we want to become a nation of stalkers in the zone? In the “zone of influence”, which is a scorched earth? Such a Russia cannot have soft power. Central Asia is bustling and visiting Washington, Armenia and Azerbaijan are lost, Moldova is leaving the CIS, the Russian Federation is trading weapons with Sao Tome and Principe, Venezuela is no longer “ours”, only North Korea remains. NATO, which was at the gate only in imagination, is now actually at the gate. Multipolarity has turned into a duopoly between the United States and China.

Catch-up modernization has given way to self-catching demodernization. In the process of restoring greatness, they lost their future and fell through a time machine into the worst episodes of their own past, killing there, according to Bradbury, a butterfly (that is, falsifying their own history) and thereby further aggravating the problems with their own future.

Once again they fell into the state of “Genghis Khan with a telegraph”, only now it’s more of a “Stalin with MAX and facial recognition system” model.

Approval of what was happening gave way to forced justification - with a heavy sigh and rolling of the eyes.

Learned helplessness transformed into learned dishonor, a learned refusal of responsibility for anything. All that remains is to take antidepressants and wait for the endless end. With strange illusions that “after this” for “us” something will change fundamentally. Western investments will return, direct flights to Europe and America will fly. So “we” didn’t understand anything: the West is not restaurants and beaches, but universal values ​​(oh, a discredited word!) and rules (oh, a reviled concept!).

Elites? More precisely, the “elites”... They are held together by a special operation stronger than Moment glue. They are all on the same submarine, and there is no way out. This is a one-window system - in the sense that for many, the solution turned out to be a window, in the literal sense.

One can behave this way only on the basis that the system will be eternal, and the technologies for extending the lives of top officials will be effective. But why do I have eternal life?

The fifth year of the hot phase of self-assertion of the former empire has begun. The answer to the question “What are we aiming for?” no one ever received it. However, few people now risk asking them.

* Included by the Russian authorities in the register of “foreign agents”

This material was published in the sixteenth issue of Novaya Gazeta. Magazine". You can buy it in the online store of our partners.