Fiasco of Humanism: Hybrid Political Schizophrenia Takes Over the World

Alina Vitukhnovskaya, writer

In Russia, clouds are rapidly gathering, the screws are tightening, the windows of opportunity are closing with a bang - we are now seeing all this online. But there are no completely isolated and at the same time functioning systems in the world.

The nomenclature serving the regime only acquired a taste for life in the obese 2000s. Although even with a deep scoop, they lived much better than ordinary citizens, but not as luxurious as they are now. With only one small, but overshadowing difference - a middle-class official will no longer be able to just go to Europe, and even more so to the States. Thus, one way or another, the “fifth column” will begin to form within the system itself. And against the background of general ineffectiveness of management, poverty will also arise as a factor of internal discontent.

The work of agitprop looks like a kind of tortured postmodernism. Margarita Simonyan allegedly reads Trotsky in the evenings. Trotsky should have been read at the age of 14. The red design can be imitated, but not repeated. History is irreversible. Although it is repeated. At first as a tragedy. Then like a farce. First you come for us. Then we follow you. You already look like a show of mummers - from the puffy old man Zakhar Prilepin to the drunken Komsomol member Alexander Pelevin. It will only get worse.

Meanwhile, authoritarianism is taking on new, ever more bizarre forms. I would call this situation adaptive totalitarianism. Moreover, global.

Against this background, it should be noted that the same false, Fromm's humanism, which was originally a simulacrum and intended to patch up the black existential holes that arose in the consciousness of mankind after the Second World War, suffered a crushing fiasco. However, while some were thinking about existence and higher matters in the proposed pop format, others continued to strive for power (resource) without changing the essence of their positions, but only changing their form.

Consider, for example, the situation with the detention in the Republic of Belarus of Roman Protasevich and Sophia Sapega. Interestingly, a beautiful young couple was chosen for the role of the victims. At first glance, it is a fatal mistake to attack those who a priori will arouse the public's liking. But only at first glance. These are the new laws of the authoritarian gerontocratic theater, where an anti-aesthetic, aging, non-ideological (in contrast to the leaders of the early 20th century) “hero”, the owner of the resource, comes to the fore. This is a kind of declaration, challenge, ritual.

At the same time, it is worth noting that the world has not changed at all since the Second World War, it is only for a short while stuck in the optical trap of pseudo-humanism, its epiphany will be nightmarish.

Hybrid political schizophrenia, rapidly taking over the world, also captures the everyday sphere. A symptomatic story. One well-known writer was offended that a friend posted her extremely unfortunate photos to the public and called her a person with a "bad character." And on her own birthday as part of the congratulations. The friend is perplexed - after all, everything was written "sincerely and with great love." There are also a crowd of perplexed in the comments. That is, people really do not understand that bad photos are disrespectful, an insult in fact.

One of my old acquaintances (a rare, I confess, bastard) sang praises to me, and intrigued me behind my back. And yes, I put bad photos. And so with yourself. And here and there he climbed into the frame, trying to capture himself next to him. So, he said that I "do not appreciate the true attitude", but approach the relationship formally. Well, yes, friendship is friendship, and send a photo for approval or go out.

Every day it is more difficult to fix the current situation due to the lack of a common contextual and value field. The world is entering a phase of misalignment of both context and values. Previously, the context was created by a common cultural field formed by the interpretations of the texts of various authors. At the same time, the system was in a relative balance, despite the monstrous sacrifices made on the altar of the conventional division into “good” and “evil”, “ours” and “foes”, as well as other predictable binary oppositions.

The context was created by creators and personalities directly introduced into the mainstream (!) - writers, philosophers, directors, politicians, etc. Basically, text producers and content consumers were in the same self-sustaining environment. Static, but then taking on different shades due to a change in the viewing angle from the inside.

Now the situation has changed radically. The space of interpretations (context) is so overloaded and inert that it no longer needs to be disseminated or even self-sustained. On the contrary, he, in a way, wants to exhaust himself. Of course, he desires not as a subject. But as a distributed system, reduced in the focus of an internal observer into a pseudo-subject (this, in particular, explains the residual religiosity in the 21st century). By the way, religion was the source of the first texts that inevitably reduce their authorship to "God".

Nowadays, context is not required. In principle, it can be stated that the context as a field of interpretations is dead. Accordingly, there is no dependence on previously produced meanings. The subject as an author striving to leave the context inevitably faces the last ideological problem, the last binary choice of a truly Hamlet-like scope - between being and non-being.

It should be noted separately that when we talk about non-being, we are in no way talking about destruction, we are talking about a radically different form of existence - the Victorious Civilization, such as artificial intelligence and overcoming physiological limitations in the form of matrix imprints.

In this new world, the primary role will belong to his Majesty - the Subject. From now on, he and only he creates and dictates new meanings.