Lies are commonplace. Freedom of speech in Russia is replaced by moral relativism

Maria Smirnova, journalist (Tver)

Facebook disputes are the last thing when there is nothing else to drink...

Slightly tangentially got involved in two Facebook disputes regarding a hypothetical war with Ukraine. By the way, I am sure that this war will not happen, but in this whole Ukrainian epic, which has been going on since 2014, I am very worried about the psychological processes taking place in the minds of Russians.

Our collective psyche is already so severely disabled by the nightmarish experience of the 20th century, unresolved traumas that offer not to heal, but to be proud of them - they say, as many people as we have, never died anywhere, therefore, we are selfless heroes. And now this, on an already sore head.

Dispute first. My good friend Dima Sokolov-Mitrich, an excellent journalist, claims that the entire Western press equally assesses the role of Russia in relation to Ukraine, does not express doubts about who shot down the Malaysian Boeing in the summer of 2014. This means that there is also censorship in the Western press, they are also sent manuals from the "Washington regional committee", they dictate what to write.

When asked if he thinks that there are things that are unequivocally assessed by all normal people, people who just consider themselves normal come to the comments - and they have a picture from the domestic TV in their head, where Russia is always and in everything right.

Second dispute. One of my Orthodox intellectual friends writes that it is not bad to withdraw troops from the Ukrainian border, and immediately the tension will decrease. In the comments, another respected intelligent friend writes that, they say, giving up right away is an interesting idea. I intervene with a question, maybe it’s better not to start fighting, then you don’t have to give up, otherwise they say, some kind of dementia and courage come out ... A person takes a common expression at his own expense, takes offense. It turns out that he does not consider the option not to fight at all.

One of the biggest problems of today in Russia (and throughout the world) is moral relativism, confusion of ideas about good and evil, non-acceptance of moral assessments of this or that event, process, and so on. “Everything is not so simple”, - citizens say.

For example, the other day, in the Facebook group “Old Tver”, our colleague Igor Marchenkov posted a post about the history of the building of the Tver Medical University, in the 1930s there was an NKVD prison, executions took place in the basements. And then people ran into the comments who began to claim that there were no executions, and if anyone was shot, then for the cause, and in general, in 1937, the party was cleared of spies and enemies of the people, so everything is correct, and do not "slander our Motherland, and if you don't like it, leave".

Frankly, now we all live in our own "information bubbles", and I have not come across such mossy judgments from a seemingly forgotten era for a long time. But they are, these people live among us and express their strange views on history.

It seems to me, on the one hand, these are the consequences of the same psychotraumas of the 20th century. For 70 years, people have been drummed into thinking that there is the only correct interpretation of everything in the world - from history to economics - the Marxist-Leninist one. And doublethink was practiced in everyday life, everyone knew that there was no truth in the Pravda newspaper, and no news in Izvestia, and in order to find out something about what was happening in the real world, one had to listen to Radio Liberty (recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation). Only there, for example, they said, when a flour mill exploded in the city of Kalinin in the early 1980s, about what actually happened.

On the other hand, now every gopher is an agronomist. And anyone who has an account on social networks has the right to express their clumsy concepts. In the West, there is more trust in the traditional media, which, contrary to the opinion of Sokolov-Mitrich, are not at all unified in their assessments of what is happening - you can read newspapers with different political positions, and make your own assessment of an event, derive the “arithmetic mean”.

In our country, people get even deeper into their “information bubbles”, watch some videos on YouTube confirming their guesses ... And deprived of critical thinking even at lectures on dialectical materialism, they firmly believe in a “world government”, invent conspiracy explanations for everything in the world. By the way, this is most clearly seen in the anti-vaccination campaign, in relation to the pandemic, and the restrictions associated with it. Conspiracy theories fiercely fought against masks, vaccines, and even having been seriously ill, they did not leave this fight, confident in their rightness...

Original is here.