The news feed of modern Russia is a wonderful social laboratory.
In the Smolensk region, they intend to completely ban abortions in private clinics, although many medical centers across Russia have already preemptively refused to provide such services. The key word here is preemptively — to avoid problems, to avoid being shut down. Although no one has yet come with a seal and a padlock to close them. Everyone assumes that they will come and close them — sooner or later.
Another news: at a meeting of the media industry commission of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), a Standard for advertising with traditional-value content was presented, developed on the initiative of the media holding "Maer". Before that, there was a "popular" initiative approved by the President of the Russian Federation — to create such a standard. Initiative is the key word here — no one was forced, and if they were, it wasn't much; no one will be fired or imprisoned if such an initiative — exemplary absurd — is not manifested and formalized. But one must run ahead of the train and strive to be noticed: we are for traditional values. In every speech of officials of any level, the words "cultural code", "state-civilization", "traditional values", "victory", "Westerners" (enemies) inevitably flash.
The book fair in the trendy space "GES-2" quickly folded the tents of several publishers and promptly expelled any somewhat liberal, previously announced, book authors. A bad signal was received. Maybe, having received a bad signal, it was worth contacting the police? Or remember the words of Bulat Shalvovich about "conscience, nobility, and dignity"? No, it is easier to yield to the thugs and render the book fair meaningless, depriving it of content. And reputation.
But conformism is more important than reputation — after all, there have been arrests in the book industry, their own "book case", and in large publishing houses, both authors and editors, and AI are already catching prohibited content in books — suicides, same-sex love, the same abortions.
Heroes of Our Time
Heroes of our time are passive conformists, in the old, very old definition of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "as-if-nothing-happenedists". Heroes of our time are active conformists, careerists, informers, and haters: they feel like masters of the situation under the new orders. This is important: they were nothing — they became everything. Meanness and ostentatious loyalty sell and buy well. Moreover, the buyer is the state and its coercive apparatus.
The state has been advancing for a quarter of a century — slowly, and then with acceleration — along the path of authoritarianism. It advanced as deeply and far as society allowed. And society, trapped in some kind of greedy biological consumerism, allowed everything — just to not be touched. The state tested the waters — the limits of intrusion into politics, private life, private property, each time leaving behind more and more red lines. Since 2012, society, having been stirred, began to tire of its own efforts to build a normal country. Voluntarily giving up attempts. Society turned into an almost insignificant quantity for the state — and then the state stopped considering it at all. Thus, the state became semi-totalitarian. It doesn't consider, and so be it, as long as it doesn't touch, thought society. It touched. The bell tolled for everyone. It touched and demanded complicity. One has to run between the streams of leaden rain...
Learned helplessness, learned indifference, learned formulas from television — all this called and calls for submission and boundless adaptability. There are good terms to describe this state — "fetal position" and "endurance". In France, such people, and this is always a significant majority in any society, were called "attentists", from the verb "to wait". They were waiting it out.
There is a good title to describe the state, more precisely, the process occurring with a significant part of society's representatives — "Surrender and Demise". Arkady Belinkov wrote his book "The Surrender and Demise of the Soviet Intellectual. Yuri Olesha" not only about the attempts of an extraordinarily talented writer to march in step with the era, which killed him, but also about the ways of adaptation to reality by the educated class, as well as the conformism of the entire society.
Olesha, Belinkov noted, began his writing career in the 1920s, when the regime was not yet unconditionally cannibalistic. And it was this "not yet" that Arkady Viktorovich described the approaching terrible era:
"...It has not yet happened that deprived people of the possibility of choice: there was not yet complicity (here it is, the main word, from which surrender and demise begin. — A. K.). Complicity by word, deed, reconciliation with what happened. There was not yet benefit and fear. Such a benefit that would be irresistibly attractive, and such a fear that would leave strength only for adoration..."
Today's society has no strength, it is tired. Only the strength remains either for adoration, or for imitation of adoration, or attempts to wait out the dark times, over which there is no possibility to influence. And this only exacerbates the feeling of powerlessness.
"Burrow" Behavior
An authoritarian/totalitarian person turns into a "burrow" animal. Even if shown a glimpse between the clouds, they will not immediately believe in the possibility of another life, and will wait a little longer to remove the banner "Long live!" hanging above the entrance to the burrow. Moreover, who knows, maybe this banner will still be needed to greet those who come to power next.
The absence of choice with forced complicity is a good description of a society plunging into artificial anabiosis. Complicity is not absolute, which is why society is not yet completely totalitarian, but the state is doing everything to turn it into one.
For regimes that turn a person into some kind of biomass, whose main properties are to support everything and give birth to future supporters, nothing is more destructive than diversity, dissent, variability. Including in education — it is very important that knowledge of reality collapses to the size of a single textbook in one or another field. Naturally, they started with school history. Continued with "scientific Putinism" for freshmen. This is the base. Further, according to rumors that have been spreading in academic communities in recent days, it will be the turn of unified textbooks — installation, real "short courses" — on all possible humanities disciplines. All sorts of "Orthodox sociologists" and "Westernerologists"-soilists from the ranks of freaks will move into the category of guiding and directing forces, also well-paid with taxpayer money.
Among other things — and here is a sure sign of Stalinization! — a textbook on political economy is planned, claim malicious liberal tongues. Personally, I had one, published in 1954, with the leading role of Academician Ostrovityanov, circulation — 3 million copies. It was prepared for a very long time, about a decade and a half, if not longer, with Stalin's personal participation, with a change of leaders of the writing teams (in 1950, for example, the generalissimo decided to rely on the subsequently "joined them" Shepilov). And the tyrant did not live to see the final version. Perhaps, if he had not died, the academicians would have rewritten it endlessly. It was a political economy of "everything" — all formations, including socialism and capitalism. How this textbook will be written now — only God knows. But it is quite obvious that the bourgeois, destructive, non-traditional, liberal pseudo-science of economics will be smashed to smithereens, and it will be replaced by the political economy of the "state-civilization" with the leading role of the state and its military-industrial complex.
If society continues to surrender — and where else can it go — we will reach "Orthodox political economy", which Marx could not have dreamed of.
When the October Revolution happened in 1917, in a conversation in a Vienna café with Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, the author of the doctrine of creative destruction, joyfully noted that Russia would represent a remarkable laboratory for social research. Weber was outraged by such cynical pragmatism, as it was about living people. And now, a century later, Russia once again represents a social laboratory. But the point is that "Werther has already been written" — everything has already been explained a hundred times by Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, and other brilliant minds, including the same Arkady Belinkov, all memoirs have already been published and testimonies presented. Why go through all this well-known again?
The very fact of turning us into a laboratory for studying surrender and demise is evidence that there are no lessons of history, and human nature remains the same.
* Andrey Kolesnikov is considered a "foreign agent" by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation.
Photo: queue in Perm, 1990 / pastvu.com.