How to live after

How tired of all this masochistic-narcissistic hand-wringing from the figures of the Russian intelligentsia. "How can you live after Bucha?" - some ask. "After Bucha, Russian culture no longer exists," say others. A whole list of methods of redemptive flagellation has already been invented: from banning Balabanov's films to abandoning the national flag. However, the question "how to live?" can be answered easily. Ask the Americans, the British, the Serbs, the Croats, the Japanese, the Turks, and so on. Some admitted their mistakes and condemned their cannibals. Others to this day take the position of "you are all lying." How can you listen to country music after Songmi? How can you eat Serbian lecho after Srebrenica? How can you eat sushi after Nanjing?

It is no coincidence that the Germans are not on the list above - the atrocities of the Third Reich, with which the Russian Federation no longer compared only the lazy, had an exceptional scale and character, and therefore required exceptional reflection. There, for a second, 6 million people were exterminated, in an organized and methodical manner. That blocked any expected horrors of war. "This couldn't happen." What is happening now is a terribly banal and predictable evil - the level of the same Balkan conflicts. "This could not have happened." Therefore, repenting as if for the Holocaust is not a sign of virtue, but rather a sign of narcissism. Do not feed the Russian intellectual with bread, let him join some "big narrative". If not a great empire with a great culture, then immediately great guilt for great atrocities. If not a great victory, then a great repentance. Anything to maintain a sense of self-exclusivity. But the joke is that it is our passion for the "great", all this gigantomania, that is the reason why we cannot turn into a "normal" i.e. "normal" country.

This whole discourse of collective guilt, public repentance and "working through the trauma" - in theory, this is just an attempt to apply an already inoperative psychoanalysis to society. In practice, fugitive Russian opinion leaders sell us guilt in their columns and revel in their righteousness. So to speak, the last attempt to preserve and increase the symbolic capital, trying on the guise of Jaspers and Hannah Arendt. However, late ancient philosophers, forced to live under tyranny, did not accidentally come up with a well-known formula with a distinction between what you can change and what you cannot. There is nothing more demoralizing than trying to take the blame for the actions of strangers. Real "working through trauma" begins with understanding what you personally could do and still can do here and now.

Mihail Pojarsky 2022-04-05