Tongueless zombies in the logocratic ghetto

Alina Vitukhnovskaya, writer

In a recent article, I mentioned a cynical century-long experiment that the Russians were subjected to. Its name is socialism. In addition to the political component, this experiment resulted in disgusting living conditions. Which, however, have not changed for many of them so far.

And in today's Moscow, I notice the gnawing, debilitating discomfort inherent in the socialist landscape, especially the Russian one. It penetrates into the blood, into the pores, into the subconscious, sticks with ice needles up to the distortion of features. Therefore, even the shadows of the models cast something hunched over, and babies are already born with the grimaces of old people. How can we unmistakably recognize by the well-groomed, glamor faces, even those who left long ago, that they are Russians (and especially Russians)? What is the worst thing they do to people here? Monstrous especially in that it is tangible, but inexplicable.

I take things to the dry cleaners. Courier - "To lower the price, add something heavy. Nowadays, wedding dresses are usually added.” Truly, the life of a Russian is one nightmarish necro-ritual, everything from the registry office to the morgue. Only now this process is radically accelerated. People are not only depoliticized. They do not understand the real circumstances of their existence. They, like schizophrenics, live "not here."

Despite the widespread informatization of society, the main direction of the information flow goes from the source to the person, and not vice versa. As people used to write “letters on the radio”, now they broadcast reflections on social networks. This is the notorious "feedback" in the system of unstructured management. In this sense, the intelligentsia and even the intellectuals are not much different from the proletarians. In fact, these are the proletarians, but with fashionable gadgets. Why did this happen? Because they have given up their claims to resources and power. Yes, from claims. They accept life as it is, or rather, as it is "given to them in sensations." That is, like some hastily molded Pelevin cake. Poorly processed illusion, existential cake. And “life as it is”, as I already wrote, this is fascism. And ontological, organic. And therefore, the establishment of a dictatorship is always a direct consequence of not only power, but also this vicious, legitimized as “normal” worldview.

The whole experience here is the experience of humility, accommodation, acceptance. Terpiote practices. They walk, doomed, into their own destruction, weak-willed, lost. All life scenarios and psychological practices here essentially come down to the “acceptance stage” and this is very scary. Psychology here only replaces religion, it teaches to surrender, adapts to hell. First they make you suffer, then they make you endure. Instead of protest, they are taught strong “heroism”. The hero here is always a controlled clown-passionary serving the system. If you can't ignore the pop psychology, at least choose the "bargaining stage". Look for your subjective benefit. Benefit is antisense in the world of fixed "values" and "sacred" killing "senses", the true currency of true life.

Post-Sovietness as a phenomenon, conservative revenge, pathological imperialism and all the political madness that we are seeing now, arose from deep provincial complexes tied to the ideas of anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism, which were stuffed with the Soviet people.

Philologist Ella Raskina writes:

“Two dimensions of the Soviet, both obvious to me and formulated before, but which for some reason it never occurred to me to combine into one clear statement, and yet it’s simple:

First. it was a bubble external to capitalism, a world outside dollar consumption and market relations. it's not about whether it was good or bad, but about the fact that everyone who lived there entered into life and lived without capitalism. This united Marchenko and the KGB colonel and now continues to unite those who represent the USSR as a paradise and those who soberly remember how it was - fierce enemies, ready to bite each other. Regardless of the personal and group narrative, i.e. no matter how they-we described our life and the world before and after, inside and out, everyone, without exception, got an experience of meeting capitalism that they had not had before. Many, of course, will say that this meeting did not traumatize them, but only freed them - a statement that does not inspire confidence in me, although the feeling of freedom after the USSR could certainly be dizzying and overshadow everything ... surely many people think that having earned "good money" impossible to get hurt). To explain why I am so sure that this was a trauma for everyone, it would be possible. write in more detail how I imagine what “capitalism” is.

The second, even more obvious, and, it seems, generally the main generic feature of the (post) Soviet is the discrediting of any ideas, politics in general, and, most importantly, the idea of justice. Much has been said about this. It turns out that the (post) Soviet is the trauma of meeting capitalism in the middle or at the beginning of life, deprived of the opportunity to speak about oneself in the language of political ideas and with the help of an appeal to justice, i.e. in the only language in which it can only be described.

Thus, socialism has made a person not only a semi-disabled man, not only a politically and morally perverted object, but also a totally languageless being. Exactly in the sense in which he describes Ruskin. A paradoxical situation is that in a logocratic world (and Russia is precisely a logocratic country), a person cannot adequately describe anything, and therefore comprehend, because the concepts with which he operates do not belong to him, but to the prevailing system.