Marina Davydova

MARINA DAVYDOVA is not afraid of Orthodox activists and the Cossacks who have joined them. There are worse things. For example, running in place

Talk about general decline - especially about the decline of education, culture and the entire humanitarian sphere - has now become such a common place that there is literally nowhere to step. You will definitely end up in a common place. When I come across another cry about this very decline, my imagination involuntarily begins to paint a terrible picture. There was a closed (according to Karl Popper) Soviet society, an evil empire, so to speak, but in this empire people loved culture. At every corner they recited “Eugene Onegin” by heart, easily inserted quotes from Gogol and Griboedov into conversation, read Baudelaire and Flaubert, and watched the ballet “Swan Lake.” And now “Onegin” is not recited, quotes from Griboyedov are not included, the existence of Flaubert has been completely forgotten. Everyone listens to Stas Mikhailov and watches “Dom-2”.

However, memory and imagination enter into a fierce debate. I, too, found a “beautiful past.” I remember literature lessons in a comprehensive school in Baku, where our class had to make a comparative analysis of “War and Peace” and “Little Land” in an essay, and a parallel class (attention!) - compare the image of Kutuzov (from “War and Peace” ) with the image of Brezhnev (from “Malaya Zemlya”). I remember English lessons. I’m not even sure now that it was English and not some other language. In any case, it definitely had nothing in common with the English that I later learned on my own. I remember how many hours at the institute were spent on historical mathematics, diamats and other NVP, how many idiots with party cards gave us lectures on specialized disciplines, how much unimaginable rubbish I read in order to pass exams for graduate school...

During the years of late stagnation, people read books, it’s true (what else could they do if the Internet had not yet been installed in their homes by that time). But the overwhelming majority of them read the novels of Maurice Druon with ornate titles (“It is no good for lilies to spin”) and Anatoly Ivanov’s epic “The Eternal Call” (it was he, and not the novels of Yulian Semyonov, as some had long believed, that was the main bestseller of the pre-perestroika years) . Modern Russian television is horror. But the television of my youth was horror, horror, horror. Even if we subtract from it the ideological “Rural Hour” and “I Serve the Soviet Union,” the bottom line is that we got concerts for Police Day, “Blue Lights” with jokes from the presenters, next to which any of the frontmen of “ProjectorParisHilton” would seem like Oscar Wilde, and dessert "Kinopanorama".

In general, no matter how you look at it, there is absolutely no reason to talk about the degradation of our culture (that is, about a progressive movement from better to worse). The youth spoke in foreign languages. NVP and historical mathematics have sunk into oblivion. There has been a proliferation of festivals, apparently and invisible. If you wish, you can find film classics here and there and even see them on terrible TV. In it - what is there - they even sometimes show arthouse films. As for “Eugene Onegin,” about the same handful of people can now recite it by heart as before. Not much has changed here. But life has become better, more fun, more interesting. But the general feeling of degradation still remains. Where the hell does it come from?

In the most boring textbook on the political economy of socialism, which, as you know, was remarkable in that it was usually not possible to understand and present in any coherent way what was written in it, before the next exam I came across one very interesting paragraph. It was called "The Absolute and Relative Impoverishment of the Working Class." With absolute impoverishment everything was simple. Well, a worker received a salary of 100 conventional units, but when he began to receive 85, he became impoverished. But the oppressed worker, according to the political economy of socialism, became poor even as his wages rose. And this paradox was explained as follows: the profit of the capitalist is growing much more rapidly than the salary of the proletarian. The gap between them is growing, this leads to an intensification of the class struggle... and so on.

Now, in 2012, all this already seems like a monstrous plusquaperfect.

When I think about what causes my persistent feeling of today's degradation, this delightful example of sparkling Soviet demagoguery involuntarily comes to mind. There are many things in which we have not budged or even taken any important steps forward since my student youth, but the civilized world, in which not only science and technology, but also the value system itself is changing at a fantastic speed , since then he has completely gone far, far away. And the gap between us is growing larger and larger - like between a person walking or even running after a train along the platform, and the train itself, rapidly rushing into the distance.

This cultural gap (if by culture we understand a certain set of our ideas about art and life in general) in the 70s and 80s, paradoxically, was not so huge. It certainly was, but it seemed surmountable. It was still possible to jump over it with a good run. The civilized West, too, did not become civilized right away, to put it mildly. If we look back not to the distant, but to the very recent past, we will remember that censorship restrictions in America even in the 70s, not to mention the 50s and 60s, were still very strong. People from the Reagan administration called AIDS a divine punishment, and this did not seem unthinkably savage. In the 70s and 80s, homophobic statements could still be heard from the mouths of quite respectable Western politicians. Come on, homophobia... I was told recently that in West Germany in the 70s, in order to get a job, a woman had to get written permission from her husband. Until relatively recently, Western society was much more repressive and conservative than it might seem. But now, in 2012, all this already seems like a monstrous plusquaperfect.

Literally before our eyes, in countries that are commonly called civilized, the level of tolerance and the degree of independence of the human personality, on the one hand, have fantastically increased, and the very structure of humanitarian knowledge has become fantastically complicated, on the other. And just as the outlines of life changed there, so did the outlines of art - it, too, increasingly became a zone of freedom and began to speak to the viewer in an increasingly complex language. In the field of theater, these processes (at least to me) are especially noticeable. The changes that the theatrical landscape has undergone over the past 20 years can truly be described as tectonic. And if in the late 80s, when, thanks to the Chekhov Festival, the first truly serious meeting of the Russian public with the masters of the European stage took place, the gap between us seemed insignificant, but now, paradoxically, despite the aforementioned abundance of festivals, it is becoming insurmountable. Not because we are going backwards, but because we are simply not going anywhere.

Conversations on the evergreen topic “Is it possible to use profanity on screen and on stage” were still amusing and even seemed fruitful some time ago. But when at VGIK, at a seminar on modern dramaturgy in 2012, you again hear these arguments from the lips of professors, this is already evidence of degradation. When not only among network marginals, but in the works of venerable doctors of science, observers of quite progressive media and some public intellectuals you read the same monstrous rubbish as many years ago about contemporary artists and playwrights corrupting our morality and about the “curators of contemporary feces” who have bought up everything around – this is degradation. When the artists of one capital theater at the beginning of the 21st century are not ashamed of their homophobia, and of another they declare that they have never read greater nonsense than the texts of Alexander Vvedensky, this is degradation. Both in public life and in the sphere of discussions about the fine arts, the brains of a huge part of my fellow citizens more or less froze in the late 80s. Only in the late 80s this state of the brain did not yet seem like a catastrophe, but now it already does. Because at that time the vector of our movement was not yet fully understood, but now it is clear that in fact there is no movement at all.

To be honest, it’s not even the Cossacks or Orthodox activists that scare me; after all, there aren’t that many of them, and a healthy society can easily resist all these madmen. It frightens me that a huge part of the educated class of Russia has voluntarily doomed itself to provincialism. She revels in it, carries it around like a handbag, calls it “love for classical art” and “loyalty to the traditions of Russian culture.” Together with a huge part of the country, she recalls the recent past with nostalgia, nurtures national complexes, looks at the complex and changing modern world like a poor student at an integral equation, and, like the hero of “The Tin Drum,” resolutely does not want to grow up. But in order to hopelessly lag behind the civilized world, it is not at all necessary to go backwards; it is enough simply - as my homeland is doing now - to demonstrate to the entire planet a non-stop run in place.

This is music flowing from popular radio stations; these are books by modern authors; These are the clothes of fashion designers. The list, of course, is far from complete.

If we give definitions, then mass culture is a culture generated by technological progress at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, oriented towards the so-called mass society - a society whose individual elements have almost lost their individuality, including in the choice of consumer products (cultural, social, economic). This concept is characterized by averageness, which applies both to objects and phenomena of a given and to the people for whom they are intended.

Mass culture: pros and cons

So let's start with the positives.

One of the advantages of mass culture is its accessibility. There are many sources of information: from magazines to the Internet - just choose.

Active development of technology and introduction of new technologies.

And, of course, mass culture is a significant reduction or complete absence of censorship in the media, and therefore problems occurring in the world and society can be accessible to a wide audience.

Unfortunately, there are more disadvantages.

Availability has become the reason for the so-called “sexual dominance”. Children under 10 already know sex. Among middle school students, interest often turns into active actions, which contributes to the spread of cases of early pregnancy, as well as pedophilia.

The cultural degradation of society is obvious. For example, young people absolutely do not recognize classical works - musical, literary, artistic. The formation of their worldview is influenced by conveyor belt Hollywood films, rap, glossy magazines and low-grade romance novels and detective stories. It is clear that such products of mass culture determine the consumer’s attitude to life. A social group called “majors” has gained popularity among young people. As a rule, these are pupils and students who spend their parents’ money on various types of entertainment (like expensive cars or nightclubs).

In addition to widespread consumerism, people are becoming incapable of simple analytical activities. They turn into a gray and faceless mass that believes what they are told by TV presenters, politicians, salesmen, etc.

The dominance of the Internet reduces the importance of live communication. And if the mass network still presupposed direct human interaction, then today, in the 21st century, various social networks have become the main habitat of a large number of people. Yes, only the number of “likes” and positive comments under photos has become important. At the same time, the level of literacy in these very comments leaves much to be desired.

In general, of course, it is obvious that popular culture carries more negativity than positivity. On the other hand, I would like to remember those pearls of Soviet and European cinema that Chaplin, Hitchcock, Ryazanov gave us), many talented writers (Grossman, Bulgakov, Platonov), magnificent composers (Tariverdiev, Pakhmutova, Gliere). Therefore, mass culture is not always bad, you just need to be able to find truly good and worthy things in a sea of ​​husk.

Yuri Loza, who ended his own musical career quite a long time ago and is content with the recording business and infrequent quiet tours, has become a rare, but very resonant critic of public events. Thus, the current New Year's programs came under the devastating fire of his criticism, although the low quality of New Year's shows has been causing public discontent for several years now.

The most unpleasant thing is that Loza’s criticism is quite deep, objective and smacks of hopelessness. Domestic show business did not begin to rot yesterday, and one can only note the fact that its decomposition has reached a certain perfection.

General decomposition has been manifesting itself in Russian culture for quite a long time. It marches victoriously under the motto of the triumph of primitivism. Why create your own if you can buy it at a global flea market? At the same time, it is much easier and easier to “cut” what has been allocated. Why eliminate problems if ministries or new control bodies can be organized around them. Why, in general, eradicate problems if they can be declared the machinations of enemies?

When there is nothing to buy, then you have to exploit ideas that were 60 years old.

The crisis has reached such proportions that it has suddenly become nauseatingly obvious to everyone. Domestic talents are pushed aside by “cultural monopolists” who have nothing but endless repetitions. No authors, no ideas. There are no scriptwriters, cameramen or lighting technicians, no singers or just good voices. But there is an abundance of the fed-up “Brezhnev from culture” crowd. It would be funny if it weren’t scary: music universities and competitions for young performers regularly churn out original, disposable types that are not talents at all. This benefits everyone: mediocrities who fall into the rays of fame, cultural “authorities” who have no one to replace them. And, even for politicians, since it benefits them that the people are dissatisfied not with their theft and mediocrity, but with the low quality of cultural content. Few people care that this is disadvantageous to society.
The forecast is also negative. Instead of faith, people are given superstitions and obscurantism. Instead of culture - cultural ersats. Instead of music - rhythmic vomiting or a puzzling “duck-dick”, for variety. It goes without saying that serial killers and perverts of the original variety have become the heroes of the present time. Then there will be surprised eyes at the next crisis, when everything collapses, suddenly and at once. And the search for those to blame. And recipes for unrealized salvation, one more primitive than the other.
Saving the world is possible, even if it's not worth it. Only, this requires work. Big and ungrateful. Are there people interested in it?

Much has been written about sociocultural degradation in the post-Soviet period; it has been studied in sufficient detail; the main drawback of the works is the excessive complexity of the, as they say, “abstruse” presentation. There is a lack of a clear and precise, literally in one phrase, diagnosis of the sociocultural degradation of man and society, obvious to everyone in practice, but not yet clearly explained by theorists. This small article is a feasible contribution to the formulation of the causes of sociocultural degradation.

The main initial reason for the socio-cultural degradation of man and society is the following:

Due to a number of objective and subjective reasons, life begins to be perceived by a person as a given, and not as the current result of a complex process.

As soon as a person begins to perceive his life in this way, the connection between culture, sociality, knowledge and direct, immediate survival disappears.

To the man of the Brezhnev era, and especially the Gorbachev era, it began to seem that no one and nothing OBJECTED to his earthly existence, and if he himself did not offend anyone, then no one would offend him either. This is such a naive Brezhnev principle of “smile symmetry”, which even ended up in children's cartoons.

In fact, of course, the entire material world has taken up arms against man due to the fact of his existence, starting with the simplest, viruses and bacteria, and ending with similarities. There is no “smile symmetry” in the world, but there exists, starting with the simplest, continuing with mammalian predators and ending with governments - the principle “it’s your fault that I want to eat!”

A person does not live simply because he lives. He lives only because someone, even before his birth, prevented Hitler’s invasion, and before that, stood on the Kulikovo Field. Someone created conditions for survival for his parents, someone persuaded or forbade his mother to have an abortion, etc. That is, life is the current (changeable) result of a complex and ambiguous, let’s say, multidirectional process. The main problem for children who grew up, like me, under Brezhnev, was that the CPSU instilled in them the idea of ​​life as a given, life as a constant.

As a result, the type of social degenerate grew up, placing his survival on external forces, wanting to enjoy what he himself, personally, did not conquer and defend. When this type appeared, the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century became inevitable...

What does cultural degradation have to do with it? I explain through the law of universal interconnection...

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Human thought and memory are designed in such a way that they get rid of what is not in demand. What is unnecessary is cleared out.

Otherwise, having cluttered the “attic” with unnecessary things, we will not find a place for what we need. Few people in the humanities remember school lessons in chemistry or trigonometry, although at one time they may have had excellent grades in them. But as the years go by, unclaimed knowledge is pushed aside due to the law of economical thinking.

It cannot be otherwise. Indeed, is it really good to get bogged down in mind, divorced from life, in some inanimate abstractions, in long discussions about nothing that have nothing to do with you? That’s why we forget phone numbers that we haven’t called for a long time, we forget languages ​​that we don’t speak, etc.

Thinkers have long noticed this feature and the necessity of human thinking. The basis of medieval OKCAMISM is the so-called. Occam's Razor, a methodological principle that states:

“You should not attract new entities unless absolutely necessary.”

Ockham himself wrote: “What can be done from a smaller number should not be done from a larger one” and “Variety should not be unnecessarily assumed.” Well, really, think about it: why drive ten tractors to a place where one is enough? Why put an entire division near the warehouse - if one sentry is enough? After all, you can’t supply enough divisions for every warehouse!

Ockhamism played a fatal role in the history of Europe and the world. He split the European consciousness between himself and Catholicism-Thomism. It formed the basis for the “de-Christianization” of European civilization, which is especially noticeable today. That is, he gave birth (probably without wanting it) to an internal killer for European civilization.

But Occamism could not do this if it were not based on highly convincing inferences.

It is impossible to argue with the basic principle of Occamism - the multiplication of entities in the head will lead to both a technical and a qualitative catastrophe: after all, if a person is constantly immersed in thoughts about the unnecessary and superfluous, then, to put it simply, he is crazy...

Therefore, Occamism further formed the basis of new European post-Christian methodological reductionism, also called the principle of frugality, or the law of economy (Latin lex parsimoniae). In economics, this is the liberal market principle of universal self-sufficiency and profitability. Everything is very simple: what is not needed, we delete. Occam himself wrote that it is wasteful to hire 10 workers for a job that can be easily done by one worker...

But understand the dialectic inherent in Occam's razor: don't multiply unnecessarily! And if necessary, where to go? That is, the non-multiplying of entities is only true if there is no need multiplication.

Now let’s combine the principle of economical thinking, the principle of getting rid of unnecessary gibberish, with the idea of ​​life as a given, which ignores the complexity of survival processes. What will we get?

You look at the modern liberal degenerate and you will see! Since he takes life for granted, he doesn’t need ANYTHING!

A person wants “EVERYTHING TO BE SIMPLE”, therefore, in his rush to maximum simplicity, he does not want to study, think, or listen. Vegetative existence with a bottle of beer on the sofa does not require even animal mental abilities, not to mention human ones: the reflexes inherent in plants are enough...

But in this comfort of deadly simplicity lies the great deception of “consumerism”: who and why would brew beer for a “vegetable”, pour it into bottles and put it in the hand? Why won’t he be thrown out of the sofa, and thrown out from where the sofa is located - this is, at a minimum, a room, and the cheapest room in Russian cities costs at least a million rubles!

You see, a room, a sofa, and a bottle of beer are all facets of LIVING SPACE, which is essentially a very expensive thing. Think about how many people, starting with the village hop growers, had to work to make your beer?

Therefore, in a normal sociocultural environment, both a sofa and beer are This is not the start of a career, but the end of it. This is the final victorious result of very, very complex processes of self-affirmation of an individual in life, defending one’s rights in the world.

And among degenerates, it’s as if it’s taken for granted, as if no one and nothing wants to take it away...

Well, we get privatization following the results of Brezhnev’s “feast times” and millions of corpses in hastily abandoned graves...

A person surviving in the struggle feels the need for both culture and social knowledge - like a weapon. He needs them in war, and therefore cannot be discarded according to the law of economy of thinking. What is really superfluous, crazy, delusional, absurd, extravagant is separated from them and thrown away.

The process of separating nonsense and nonsense from the necessary knowledge is a complex analytical process, it requires a well-developed and trained consciousness.

The mind of a fighting man is in constant spasm, he is in constant search, As for “relaxation”, it is used rarely, therapeutically, mainly in the evenings before bedtime: lie on the couch, drink alcohol, have a tasty snack, allow yourself the LUXURY of not thinking about anything for an hour or two...

For what? To get up in the morning with new strength and start thinking hard again and absorb useful knowledge!

A person quite justifiably does not want to engage in pretentious, abstruse nonsense, divorced from life - but for an adequate person, culture and social knowledge are not empty speculations divorced from life.

They are the art of confronting a world that kills people, accumulated by generations of ancestors, requiring flexibility and a huge amount of intelligence.

The fact is that every large community of people, be it a state, a nation, a collective or a party, is insidious.

On the one hand, they are necessary for a person (without them, one cannot survive alone) - on the other hand, they do not want to serve you personally. They always strive to USE you as a consumable, to PRIVATIZE the energy of society for someone’s personal selfish purposes, robbing its naive members.

The same can be said about a person. Entering into an insidious community, he himself is insidious: he, too, would like to use the opportunities of society, and not serve it as a consumable.

To prevent a person from being deceived, you need to know everything. For this purpose, humanity created all the humanitarian (and technical too) knowledge - so that a KNOWING person could intercept in time a forgery, manipulation of consciousness, a setup, a trap, a trap...

There is nothing given in life, these are fairy tales of grandfather Brezhnev and the decrepit, weak-minded CPSU in old age. No one will snatch life from the world for you; everyone who leaves brings relief to those who remain: there are fewer contenders for the benefits!

The dead are forgotten the next day, and history stores barely a million percent of the names of people who once lived, existed, and for the most part - not the best representatives of the human race (those who committed some kind of unimaginable atrocity, even by earthly standards).

We are doomed to fight as part of one super-large community against another super-large community, and at the same time remember that our community is by no means a reliable rear for us, that there are fermenting Masonic processes of local conspiracies going on inside (like the enemy), etc.

In order to keep in mind the entire dialectic of human relations, you need to keep in mind the entire world culture, understand and accept all its lessons and observations, take into account all its memorizations.

The sociocultural degros for whom “EVERYTHING IS SIMPLE” does not understand any of this. Of course, if you don’t intend to live and continue the family line, everything is really simple, who would argue?

It’s easy to die and everyone around you will help, because they need your space of benefits and resources... To the dying person, all are friends: they forget the grievances, since “that’s it,” and they hope for a share in the will, and take a warm place when they are free...

But as soon as a dying person recovers (Russia after the 90s), protuberances of rage, hatred, greedy predation, showdowns and litigation, struggle and setups immediately swirl around...

A bid for life is a serious bid. The sociocultural degenerates that our youth are made of will not be accepted...

Khoruzhaya S.V. diagnoses this in a serious scientific work: “The concept of “sociocultural degradation” covers two sides of a single process, when the destruction, entropy of the “social” is accompanied by primitivization, the destruction of the “cultural.” A decrease in the level of complexity, development, system-hierarchical structuring, multifunctionality of any socio-cultural system as a whole, its individual elements or subsystems can be complete or partial. Thus, there is hidden degradation when a stably (in the economic and political spheres) developing society contains a culturally integrative “core” (a strictly structured, hierarchized system of value orientations, forms and norms of sociocultural organization and regulation, recognized by the overwhelming majority of the population), which, however , in its qualitative parameters does not correspond to the true nature of man, the fundamental principles of humanism.

2. Degradation occurs both at the level of lowering the objective status of a person, his place in the system of social connections, and at the level of his spirit, culture, loss of moral foundations and norms learned in the process of primary socialization of values, meanings, meanings of his own existence. These processes are inextricably linked with each other and actually constitute two sides of a single process, mutually conditioning and reinforcing each other.

At the level of society, degradation manifests itself as stagnation of economic, political, spiritual life, stagnation, moral decay, societal crisis, etc.

Degradation is associated primarily with the growing processes of marginalization of the population, the erosion of dominant cultural attitudes, the decline in the authority of leading sociocultural institutions, the narrowing of the scope of historically established and socially acceptable patterns of behavior enshrined in the cultural tradition and institutional standards, and the expansion of the influence of marginal forms of culture.

If a certain phenomenon can be solved in two ways: for example, the first - through the involvement of A, B and C, or the second - through A, B, C and D, and both methods give an identical result, then the first solution should be considered correct. Entity D in this example is superfluous: and its involvement is redundant.

Today, watching TV is deadly - through it, we are imposed such stereotypes of behavior that are symptoms of mental illness.

Child psychologist Irina Medvedeva, who is the director of the Institute of Demographic Security, in one of her interviews:

You said earlier that the environment in which we now live is unfavorable for the psyche, and because of this, many children and adults are in a borderline state, that is, they are not mentally ill, but at the same time they have some slight deviations. Why is our environment unfavorable?

Because in our country, after the so-called Perestroika, attempts began to bring about a cultural breakdown. They still don't stop, although now they are no longer as aggressive as in the beginning. In my practice, the discovery of the greatest Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung about the presence of the so-called collective unconscious in people is confirmed. Jung so called the deep memory of a person, in which in some mysterious way the basic patterns of behavior, worldview, and worldview characteristic of a particular culture in which a person lives and in which his ancestors lived were encoded. If the fundamental norms of Russian culture are violated in a family, then the child’s psyche suffers from this. And on the contrary, when we ask parents to return to our cultural tradition in raising a child, this return to the roots alone can harmonize his psyche.

What is our mentality and how is it broken?

This cannot be said briefly. One of the basic principles that they are trying to break is the attitude towards poverty and wealth.

Has Russia ever considered wealth as the main goal in life? Wealth has never been a priority. Wealth has never been a criterion for a person's positivity.

Then Russian culture is communal. Our people have always loved to work together, to rejoice together, to grieve together. In the Church this is called conciliarity. In Soviet times this was called collectivism. In recent decades, they have been trying to tear a person away from other people, trying to convince him that he should be on his own.

I remember how at first, when the expression “it’s your problem” came into fashion, it injured my hearing. Everything has been done to ensure that the communal spirit leaves our lives, but it cannot leave, because it is still in the genetic memory. He's just depressed. Any pressure causes some kind of reverse reaction. That is, from somewhere hidden, this communal spirit, unable to come to the surface, gives unconscious signals to a person. Both children and adults suffer due to attempts at cultural destruction. The first step towards mental health is the translation of unconscious dissatisfaction, unconscious anxiety, an unconscious feeling of the foreignness of what one has recently had to obey and the feeling of the foreignness of pseudo-standards into consciousness. And then we must consciously reject everything alien.

What else goes against our collective unconscious?

Traditional Russian culture is very patriotic. People here were always ready to give their lives for their land. And when Perestroika happened, they began to convince them that they had a shameful slave history, that they had a terrible present, that they had no future, and many people believed this at the level of consciousness, because people were accustomed to treating the media with reverence .

What else is in our genetic memory?

A huge role is played by the fact that Russian culture is very sublime. She is all turned into the sphere of the ideal. In Russian culture, it was not customary to attach great importance to what is today called the quality of life - what is on your table, what you are wearing, what kind of furniture you have, and so on. In Russian culture, it was customary to turn children to the sphere of the ideal as early as possible, to teach them to love the immaterial, and if material, then not what could be bought with money, but the beauty of God’s world. Love for nature and joy from it are available to any person, regardless of their income. To love one’s homeland, to love friends, to love one’s neighbors in general, to love real art—everything was given great importance. Russian traditional education has always been aimed at suppressing the base in a person and at awakening and developing the upper levels of the psyche.

What do we see now?

In recent decades, everything has been done the other way around. The sphere of attraction is disinhibited.

Man is provoked to crave base pleasures. All the time they advertise some new varieties of yogurt, chocolate, sausages, cheeses, furniture, cars, clothes. In addition, the sexual sphere is disinhibited, the destruction of shame is not just a mistake, it is a terrible crime against both children and adults.

I think that there is nothing worse than the destruction of shame, because the feeling of intimate shame is one of the main indicators of mental normality. And when people are called to shameless behavior as a standard, and they are told that they need to discard false shame, because what is natural is not shameful, in fact they are called to artificial disability of the psyche.

In what mental illnesses do people have no intimate shame?

These are the most severe psychiatric diseases. For example, some types of schizophrenia are in the defective stage. The defect stage is the last stage of any disease. Schizophrenia in the defect stage is a complete collapse of the personality. This is a severe mental disability. And in fact, a lot of normal people are encouraged to imitate the behavior of seriously ill patients.

If a normal person lives with the absence of intimate shame, can this somehow affect the psyche?

I'm just sure that this can't help but have an effect. This does not mean that healthy people will develop schizophrenia, but some deviations - one or another - sooner or later, obviously or hidden, of course, will appear.

What is the psychological state of people now?

Of course, for some people it is not in the best shape, because many try to keep up with the times, try to obey new stereotypes, and, being normal, imitate the behavior of the mentally ill. After all, the stereotypes being imposed now are very reminiscent of psychiatric symptoms. Nowadays there are a lot of misdiagnoses because normal people can behave like mentally ill people.

Can you give examples of behavior that mimics that of mentally ill people?

One can give an example of aggressive behavior that is demonstrated in thrillers, when the main character destroys and breaks everything in his path, knocks out doors, windows, jumps from the twentieth floor, and along the way with a completely cold heart, not in a state of passion, but because some people interfere with him, kills them. Here the behavior of a heboid schizophrenic is imitated. With heboid schizophrenia, a person combines teenage aggression and teenage irresponsibility with an absolutely stony heart. That is, such a patient does not attack people out of his ardor and knock down doors and windows, but out of complete indifference to his surroundings.

What other imposed behavior patterns are there that are symptoms of mental illness?

For example, when adults advertise some new types of products, licking their lips and rolling their eyes voluptuously, they imitate the behavior of the mentally ill. Adults who treat food with such voluptuousness that they are ready to forget about everything in the world if they want to get something tasty, and for whom food becomes a super idea, so that they can no longer think or talk about anything, are called schizoid infantiles. And shamelessness, which many people, especially young people, consider to be a manifestation of healthy looseness, is characteristic not only of patients with schizophrenia, but also of patients who suffer from hysterical diseases, for example, hysterical psychosis.

Is the fact that many women walk around half naked in the summer a symptom of some disease?

Nudity in public is called exhibitionism in psychiatry. For the time being, the psyche of such women can be preserved - as long as they force themselves, by virtue of fashion, to wear such clothes, while they commit some violence against themselves. And then, when you start to like it, you have to ask the question: is everything okay in their head? People who watch obscenities such as reality television behave like psychiatric patients suffering from a disease called voyeurism. Such patients usually peep through the keyhole, into other people's bedrooms, and into the toilet. In fact, normal people today are disposed to behave this way.

Can you say something about humorous TV shows?

Here secondary dementia is induced. When people laugh every day at things that even monkeys would not laugh at, they are, as it were, infected with dementia. Actually, questions also arise about the modern names of catering outlets: “Kartoshechka”, “Yum-Yum”. Yum-yum - this is babbling speech. This is what children under one year old say. Why is there such a sign on the stall? To make adults degenerate.

Can we say that those people who laugh while watching comedy programs have dementia?

No, you can’t say that, but, of course, we have to talk about some kind of degradation or involution. And I don’t know whether it will be so easy to return these people to normal if they stop making idiots out of people.