Posted 4 октября 2022,, 06:31

Published 4 октября 2022,, 06:31

Modified 25 декабря 2022,, 20:54

Updated 25 декабря 2022,, 20:54

Anti-reality on the march: where can we expect a spiritual explosion?

4 октября 2022, 06:31
Алина Витухновская
In a recent interview, I was asked "What role do cultural values play at this historical moment?" To which I honestly answered “None”. The words of the respected Dmitry Bykov now look like a monstrous and strange naivete:

Alina Vitukhnovskaya, writer

“... We are present on the eve of a great spiritual explosion, when all the silenced, tortured, forgotten pages of Russian history will be comprehended and rethought. This will be a much more powerful spiritual explosion, larger than the “thaw” explosion, because a much more powerful block is rising from the chest of Russia. But here we still need the great role of the Christian Church in this understanding. And the Church will have to purify herself now - I read a lot of texts about this, including Orthodox texts - to people who consider themselves churchmen, not just call themselves churchmen, but who live in the Church - they have a lot of work to do in rethinking, including including Russian history of the last century, the last two centuries".

The cultural community believes that it will survive on its values. Completely neglecting material resources, being outside the legal field, having lost their social statuses and not even trying to win them back. How do part of the local educated class combine a demonstrative contempt for money and a refrain-sounding thought that “the smartest ones are leaving”? Given that a specific education, real estate, and so on, they often got only by belonging to privileged families. And money is, to a large extent, a gift from the blessed 1990s. But if you are smart, why did you give away your rights and freedoms for 20 years, and now you left the world alone with those who threaten its security and very existence? What is your mind? Ideas about the mind have been replaced in Russia by the idea of the ability to "get settled", the ideal of life for the Soviet fartsy and the current rulers. So what is your mind?

Disregard for material values, alas, is in the traditions of Russian culture and literature, even that part of it that was absolutely European. So, Nabokov repeatedly uses the term "bourgeois" and, as if feeling some unreliability, insincerity of this "spiritual" accusation, as if justified, explaining - "not in the Marxist, but in Flaubert's understanding." He talks about advertising and buying things that seem to make you happy, which in his opinion (and a common place) is not. However, this popular opinion is itself a fair amount of vulgarity, given how every intellectual loves to neglect the thing, and even more so, an intellectual. Here I disagree with the genius of Nabokov, not to mention other adepts of "spirituality" and anti-materiality, whose name is legion, because I see a thing as something superior even to the notorious superman. Indeed, it would be more appropriate for civilization and ontologically honest to create a cult of the Superthing, and not the Superman.

As for happiness, unattainable by consumption and bourgeoisie, a certain irony lies in the fact that neither the seller nor the buyer is deceived or deceived. That is, they do not sell happiness and do not buy happiness. When I buy a thing, I buy a thing - no more, function, quality, everything. That is, I do not think about happiness. Here the intellectual is rather cunning. And the intellectual - he is lying at all. For happiness is now not only not believed in, but they do not really need it (just as they do not need abstraction). If anyone dreams of happiness, it is just a child, a girl or a fool. But you and I are not fools, right?

The problem is that the modern humanist, made by pop psychology and pop philosophy, has no idea about how the world works and how a person works. He lives in an idealistic illusory reality. It is on this discrepancy between illusion and true being that Khokhloma-like tyrannies like Russia are born. So predictable, so simple, and just as preventable as the average person was afraid to look inward. Don't judge others by yourself? Is not a fact. They judge for themselves. When they have the courage to realize their true self. Therefore, venerable political scientists do not predict anything, but only beat their heads against the walls of the Kantian club created by them.

It's sad that my peers broadcast the same thing that previous generations - "Survive and be afraid." Not only is it completely meaningless, repressive consciousness is the basis of dictatorships, its "sacred" bond.

Having reviewed a huge number of videos about those who are sent to death and about those who send them, I saw in all their psychophysiological horror, in all their ugly detail, these “forced people”. Not a day, not a second of life, a person does not depend here on himself, does not own either the body, or time, or the mind. And this slavish readiness gives them organicity with the local being, presses them into the landscape, even bestows vitality (which, it seems to me, I never had). Life here - this is the interior harmony with the dictatorship - from natural to social, crucified on this "so wound up".

For me, the very thought of the power of a certain force or person over me has always been unbearable, especially here, in the world of an inverted hierarchy. Even the idea of working under someone's subordination has always been unacceptable to me. This hierarchical neurosis (I think I was born with it) is one of the foundations of subjectivity. It also became obvious that we live among pathologically outdated people. Modernity was emasculated from Russia in the late nineties of the last century. These are people of the 17th, 18th, 19th, at best, the beginning of the 20th century. Like the mentally ill, they are “not here”, and the whole of Russia now is the embodiment of anti-reality.

Somewhere the 21st century is passing by, with all its comfort, speed, technology, and prospects. Life in Russia can be called life with a very big stretch. It was still possible to make a biography here, at least not so long ago, but life here is ontologically impossible. Russia has become the embodiment of anti-reality. Not even dystopia, because dystopia is understandable and there is a way out of it. There is no way out of anti-reality. Except its termination.

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