Chaos as a remedy against traditionalism

Alina Vitukhnovskaya, writer

The other day in an interview I was asked if I feel nostalgic for any time. No, I prefer not to remember anything. The past collapses, falls off, dissipates, depreciates. Until the 1990s, it seems to me, there was generally hell. Both outside and inside. Childhood, family, school - a solid gray spot, a swampy pillowcase.

No one offered me a future here. Finish school (11 wasted years!) And dissolve into everyday life? Live like those who are around? I rejected this scenario from the start. It is not surprising that the "future" in my poems was called "oak".

Even before the end of the Soviet Union, it was noticeable that the domestic ideology gives something satanic in the output. Children made on some kind of "metaphysical" conveyor, tortured, happy, shriveled. I immediately distanced myself from "all this." She built an existential, and often a physical barrier.

As a result, the minimum goal was the stupid “be a hero” (and I already understood the profanity of this idea and that you can only become a “comic book hero”) and become famous before the age of 20. The second goal is quite normal. Which, in fact, happened, and two in one, as ordered. “ The fruits of your existential provocation turned out to be excessive ,” they wrote to me. No, normal fruits. Anything is better than "living a philistine life." Here it is so conceived - only extremeness saved from the grave. Of course, pseudo-extremism, because inside I experienced everything that is possible, I was simply invulnerable.

In that reality, there was absolutely nothing to want. From what I've seen around, yes. Well, do not live in fantasy. But now my desires are merciless, tangible and real. And social, of course. All "passions" are social. It is "passion". And goals are mechanical. "Become an orange mechanism." And the goals (all the same, not desires!) Can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Why am I writing about the past? Because the time that has come now is very reminiscent of the Brezhnev stagnation. Not politically, but emotionally. I'm starting to feel the same as then. And this is extremely annoying. At the same time, I see different views on the past and strange interpretations of events by others. For example, it is extremely unexpected for me to hear opinions about the events of 2012 that are interpreted in a completely Soviet style.

Someone Andrei Desnitsky claims that Bolotnaya lost because the protesters did not have a myth that would motivate them. No. Bolotnaya lost because the protest was leaked. And because the protest was tailored to the interests of a narrow group of people and was not, from this point of view, a full-fledged (popular) protest. That is, for purely technical reasons.

The post-Soviet person thinks in slogans and outdated concepts. They again want to impose on us a "myth worth dying for." A disgusting idea. The motive of the political struggle is not a myth, but the desire for political changes and, in fact, power itself. Power, not myth.

One can also understand the birth of a myth in a society of excess and satiety. It became boring, created a myth. A myth in a destructive, impoverished society is nothing more than a massive delirium introduced for the purpose of manipulation. Vulgar, and even vile. Strange is the very desire in the 21st century to close some kind of existential gap, to patch up metaphysical wounds. Civilization and comfort generally remove these issues from the agenda. By the way, understanding of the nature of being also removes them. But this is for the very brave.

The same Desnitsky writes that 1991 happened thanks to the myth about the West “ ...where there are freedoms, jeans, chewing gum and all that. Yes, it was inseparable. Please note that everything that people really and massively wanted, they got: jeans, a hundred varieties of sausage, a hundred TV channels and trips abroad. Nobody really wanted democracy, and they didn’t know what it was, in general.”

In my immodest opinion - enchanting nonsense. 1991 was historically inevitable, like all the processes taking place in the socialist countries after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. And they really wanted democracy. And now you want a myth again? Do you want to live badly? Dying for an idea? Well, no wonder. The fish is looking for where it is deeper, and the owl looks for where it is worse.

Mythological consciousness and spirituality are two parasitic Russian concepts. What is local spirituality? Antirationality. Priority of states over results. Therefore, Russia is not moving anywhere. But it remains a meaningless "eternally drunk" and eternally old substance. It's not just Russian. This is universal anti-civilization. "To have or to be." So "to be" here means "not to have". Killing leftist anti-capitalism. By and large, the advertised feeling is nothing more than a legalized psychosis.

In conditions of time pressure, when there is no time to make decisions, anti-rationality takes possession of everyone. And rolls back the version of reality. This, alas, concerns not only Russia, but also the West. The abyss of traditionalism has opened up and is pulling the world into itself, as if into a supposedly saving harbor, from which one can start again into the "great, but merciless future."

The world arose from a proto-broth, literally from an ocean, an ocean of chaos. Now this chaos, alas, in the form of destruction and imbalance, is becoming obvious even to the most inveterate skeptics. But chaos is always a chance to dismantle the old system of relations and rebuild a better one.

Let me remind you that society is not the observance of traditions, but, above all, a system of relations. And in the event that this system of relations does not satisfy you, it can and should be changed. Understanding the true reality is a great courage and a great art at the same time. It is impossible to anchor forever in the cozy cove of traditionalism, because this is fraught with an absolute fiasco of civilization, the prelude to which we are now seeing online.