Alina Vitukhnovskaya, writer
A little over a year ago, I tried to investigate the nature of the global fear that gripped humanity in my article "What will life be like after the coronavirus", and at the beginning of this one, in my opinion, it is already possible to summarize some intermediate results and build more or less clear predictive scenarios.
It looks like the year 2021 will be the year of a surge in mass frenzy. As a compensatory mechanism of the previous period of prohibitions on natural social, psychological and physiological needs. Quarantine plus the strengthening of authoritarianism gives us a real mental storm. And the following destruction and (or) radical reformatting of social reality.
But first, let's talk about the very nature of insanity. We believe that a madman, a deviant lives in his own psychic world. Sometimes it even seems to us that he should know about his "peculiarity", conceal it, veil it, or, on the contrary, flaunt it, literally, "waving a certificate." However, there are a lot of madmen who seem to have merged with the world around them, especially here, on the ground, the blessing - the landscape has it. Their behavior seems quite natural to them.
The Soviet Union created a homosexual, who is always (!) Psychotic, there are practically no exceptions. Socialism cripples and deforms the individual beyond recognition. In this context, a post-Soviet madman can be called a hyperadapted mutant of a new generation. The current Russian environment is his own environment. The fish is looking for where it is deeper, and where it is worse.
Their amazing feature is to endow others with their deviations. For example, a paranoid person believes that everyone is paranoid. "Everything is bugged and recorded and there will be a final judgment!" He exclaims, convinced that they will believe him.
The madmen here are as predictable as alcoholics and sexually anxious. Every alcoholic thinks the other person wants to drink. A sexually obsessed person believes that the first person he meets wants to make love to him. By the way, deliberate sexual preoccupation, especially public one, is also a sign of mental disorder. But more on that next time.
Why is the mental state of a post-Soviet person so stable, total and static? He seemed to have become entrenched in it, found a cementing soil. The fear of change is the fear of death. Therefore, people prefer the worst conditions to the best. This is especially true for the elderly - in fact, the pro-government electorate. This is one of the obvious "secrets" of current politics. The existence of autochthons is ritualistic. The ritual appears here as the guarantor of immortality. Therefore, the ritual can be anything - from "Krymnash" to "pancakes with a shovel".
Madness is believed to be individual. No, of course, he, like any disease, has common symptoms, beginning, development, end. But it sits inside the individual, like, for example, the mechanism in the schizoid "Tumbler", which makes him rise every time. In the case of socialist, herd communities, we see not even individuals, but a kind of unified social organism, subject to destructive pathology.
When someone speaks out the symptoms of someone else's madness, he seems to be fencing off from him. Draws a magic circle around itself. Says - "mind me", that is, performs some kind of therapeutic ritual action. But it also happens the other way around. Take a closer look at those who laughed at other people's vices and deviations. At some point in their lives, many of them acquire the monstrous and painful properties of those who were recently laughed at. Do you suppose this is a punishment? Leprosy? Oh no. Just madness is sometimes - and a kind of comfort. Madness is a comfort zone. Finding schizoid comfort, running a dumbfounded creature into the last psychic enclosure before jumping into the pit, to the bottom of the already complete (and sweet) disintegration of the “I”.
The audience responded to my Facebook thematic survey as follows:
"A feeling of increasing insanity and increasing fragmentation of life".
"I'm tired. I got tired of official propaganda for a long time. I got tired of the "opposition" at the end of last - the beginning of this year. All these characters resemble a suddenly revived skeleton of a Triceratops, which should stand behind glass in a museum, but it wanders around, rattles bones and tells incomprehensibly what is not clear to anyone in an incomprehensible language about incomprehensible things.
“War-veterans-fascism-Vlasov-collaborators-Stalin-Dzerzhinsky-Maidan-special services-conspiracies” and so on with fanatical hysteria on one, and “repression-37 years-Gulag-arrest-protest” and so on with masochistic aspiration on the other. What is it about? Who is it for? What impact do events a century ago have on what is happening?
So these skeletons of dinosaurs roam the political and cultural field and mutter something under their breath. Living anachronisms have long gone mad, then they have nowhere to go. As for me personally - as one character said, "Let the whole world go to hell in its own way, and I will go mine".
I cannot give you a recipe for insanity. But I believe that each of us should take responsibility for our life and for our mental health, not expecting any more benefits from the completely destructive Leviathan.