"It's gone far, far beyond repair."
Alex works as a psychologist in Moscow. He is 45 years old. After February 24, 2022, his list of friends has shrunk drastically. From a professional point of view, Alex is interested in analyzing the clash of personality and morality in connection with the war. He reflects on the "modern psychological manipulations" of people's minds and their consequences in his letter. We publish it with minor editorial corrections:
- In a certain capitalist (of course) society, a father tricks his son into avoiding the result of a fantastic operation. Its purpose is to cut off conscience (probably referring to the story "Operation on Conscience" by D. Bilenkin - Ed.) The tale ends with a painful doubt: will the son thank or curse in the end? More and more often it comes to mind.
A long list of buddies and close friends is a thing of the past. Communication is notoriously impossible. Produce the persistent impression of people whose minds have been professionally rummaged in. Technologies of modern psychological manipulation are used here. As a legitimate "side effect" of aggression in the everyday life, verbal incontinence, other unnatural affects. The personality becomes psychologically unstable, brittle.
Any political regime has a lifespan, especially when it is so obviously agonizing. But we will have to pay a very high price for the events taking place today. We will have to deal with the consequences, perhaps for decades. This is far, irreparably far gone.
Explaining the behavior of Russians by the country's totalitarian past is appropriate. In a moment of bad mood or fatigue I can easily allow myself, by the way, to spout off about "genetic memory" or "slave psychology. Psychologist is also a living person. The only thing I try to do, even in a moment of weakness, is to be aware of it. The affect does not capture me completely. It is not a problem to splash out, even necessary. But it is important to control it.
Is the dictator guilty of building a totalitarian society, or did society get a dictator because it craved one? I would not puzzle over this question. The alternatives proposed are not solutions, but projections onto our human mentality of something from a different plane.
For me, perhaps, it is closer to the psychological analysis of the clash between morality and personality, which inevitably manifests itself in a complex of guilt. When I read Dostoevsky, I don't much care whether Raskolnikov is moral or immoral. I wonder why, at the very beginning of the book, the murderer came to the investigator himself. Let me expand on this theme in the context of today's fashionable discourse about "good and bad Russians.
In my view, responsibility as such for "supporting the war" does not exist a priori. There can be no moral responsibility simply because those "responsible" have not made a moral commitment of this kind. The term presupposes free will, otherwise it becomes meaningless.
But there is certainly guilt. But it makes no sense whatsoever to talk about it on social networks. It must be dealt with professionally. Or it will, alas, work its way out, and the results will not make anyone happy.
I have no clear logical schemes of who to work with and who not to work with. "Supporting war" or "not supporting it" is, as a modern programmer would say, an excessively high level of logical abstraction. I work only with those with whom I can work. This is a completely different set of criteria than this or that declaration of "support/non-support". I recommend to everyone: try, if possible, to read between the lines, not to be fixed on the declared theses. If I understand that I can communicate with a person (not necessarily a client) without using communication for existential gain (without affect, transference/countertransference, and the rest of the bouquet), we communicate. Using someone who trusts you as a psychological picklock is unacceptable. And not just in work.