To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

 

Century upon century of sadistic domination on the part of Kipchak khans, paranoid Rurikids, autocratic Romanovs, genocidal Soviet commissars, kleptocratic oligarchs, and former KGB goons have left the Russian people marked with commensurate layers of spiritual scar tissue. Any populace subjected to such unrelenting coercion by its own state would understandably resort to the well-known psychological self-defense mechanisms of denial, repression, regression, displacement, reaction formation, and introjection just to make it through the day, let alone the epoch. All these phenomena are very much in evidence in the Russian case, but it was the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, in his perceptive 2005 study of everyday Soviet life, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, who added another related mechanism to the inventory: the state of “being vnye,” or “outside,” existing “within a context while remaining oblivious of it,” “simultaneously a part of the system and yet not following certain of its parameters.” It is this psychosocial out-of-body experience that has enabled ordinary Russians to maintain a modicum of internal moral equipoise in the face of soul-crushing czarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet despotism.

Hello Russian people, escape from your trance and embrace both reality and respectability!

No longer exist in obliviousness.  Rejoin the world of dignity.

Repudiate Putin, Putin’s lies, Putin’s carnage, Putin’s invasion.

Arise as Spiritual Justice Warriors!

Demand peace today.

Glory to Ukraine!