Against Stupidity · 9:17pm Mar 10th, 2022
I figure I’ll do some popular sociology. I’ve reached the limit of what I can do at the present time, and I need to take a break from all the doomscrolling, because there’s only so much war crime bingo I can read before I go do something emotionally motivated and ultimately useless.
That is, I shall now write one more lecture on Russians, while my English-speaking audience is still accessible and still thinks my word is worth a damn.
A word of warning: While I will be using the word “most” throughout this text on occasion, hard numbers are not available, and my “most” is the result of eyeball estimates. However, there are degrees of “most” that affect the behavior of complex systems, like societies, strongly. Take this with a grain of salt.
Here.
From the way some journalists speak of it, you might conclude that Russian propaganda is something extra special. It actually isn’t. Well, it’s brain-melting if you’re not suitably desensitized, but so is most outright propaganda everywhere. While it has a well-defined methodology, the individual samples can be readily recognized as such. As a rule, they don’t hold water. They work on Russians for one reason, and on foreigners for another, mostly unrelated reason, which I shall now attempt to detail.
Reverse Cargo Cult
Most of you have heard the story. On a remote Pacific island, a place that the US used in the WWII island-hopping campaign, the natives, who saw a short rise of prosperity and wealth as military supplies were moved through their territory, sought to repeat it. Being unable to even imagine the complex technological chains of an industrial society due to their lack of modern education, let alone reproduce those chains, they concluded all of this wealth was acquired through magical means. So they sought to reproduce the magic themselves, by creating straw airfields, with straw aircraft, and expecting those rituals to magically deliver cargo.
The actual story is a lot more complicated, of course, but it’s far outside the scope of this lecture.
The man responsible for the idea of cargo cult entering popular consciousness is, as far as I could dig up, Richard Feynman, who used it to describe the practices he saw in science, and especially in education, where, instead of understanding scientific concepts, rote learning was used, resulting in students who technically knew the curriculum, but did not actually understand it – and thus, were entirely unable to apply it.
1. Let me cite a classic joke from CS and AI research from the 1980s. A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Tom Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.” Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.
Many people recognized the pattern and applied it to other things, so it became a general term. Since then, in popular usage, the term “cargo cult <X>” is used to describe doing the “X” in question without truly understanding how X works, or even why is it needed, which results in emphasizing formal and easily reproducible parts of X, while dismissing the ones that actually make X function as unimportant, which results in the whole thing not working as intended.1 Any discipline can offer numerous examples, occurrences are common throughout the world.
2. In a large part, because that political discourse suffered every chilling effect possible since then.
The notion of “reverse cargo cult” was, as far as I know, introduced by Elena Shulman, a Russian politologist, around 2010, and seems to have yet to drift far enough out of Russian political discourse2 to be noticed elsewhere. It is usually described kinda like so:
“Reverse Cargo Cult X” is engaging in X with the belief that X is entirely a lie, usually committed to either keep the masses under control or to make the eyes of superiors glaze over, while the actual reason things “work” is something much simpler.
Basically, the belief that the planes the white men fly are made out of straw too, and they just pretend better.
Like the straight cargo cult, it occurs in all disciplines, but its application to politics is especially notable.
In there, it results in the beliefs that all elections are a fraud meant to keep the masses complacent, all courts are manually controlled by the government, all democratic governments are actually thinly disguised oligarchies, all of your taxes ultimately end up in someone’s pocket, etc. There is no denying that some of it is true, in some places, but degree matters very much in practical terms, when this view ignores that entirely.
This line of thinking culminates in a World Government conspiracy theory when taken to the extremes. This is where it becomes immediately obvious to non-adherents, but lesser forms are nowhere as obvious and do not prevent people from functioning in the polite society, so they tend to go unnoticed – and large groups of adherents are difficult to distinguish from groups of non-adherents in the first place.
In Russia in particular, this sort of belief is most common among government officials of all levels and law enforcement, but they are far from the only adherents. The origins of the view are in the repeated cycles of botched Westernization that started all the way back with Peter the Great, and the cause of its prominence today should be fairly obvious: Russians have always known that the government is lying to them, this has been going on for at least a hundred years by now, and they generally consider this normal, simply because it has never been otherwise. Likewise, they assume that every government behaves the same, and that the same level of corruption that exists in Russian government is actually present in all of them.
You can’t even call this belief irrational, because in the past decade, Western governments, and particularly the US government, made a strong – if unintentional – effort to confirm it.
Russian government, as a result, is entirely such a pretense, a Potemkin Village the size of a very large country, because most people actually running it believe they must keep up the appearances while doing things their own way, and encounter very little internal opposition when doing so, because they’re among people who primarily think the same.
Incidentally, this should explain Putin’s behavior on the diplomatic arena pretty well. He, just like many Russians, believes that the entire Western political system is so much of a sham, that political processes are driven by personal preferences, beliefs, decisions and strategies – just like his own – and masses have no influence whatsoever on these, because they don’t have any influence on his decisions. Likewise, the proverbial Russian whataboutism has roots in the same view: if I point out that they aren’t pretending any better than I am, maybe they’ll shut up.
My American readers should recognize the smell of QAnon here, and those that do will be correct, because the basis is very similar.
Firehose of Bullshit
Someone already explained the basic mechanics of Russian propaganda, so I’ll just expand a bit on that.
As far as I can tell, the firehose of bullshit was adopted specifically because in situations where large swathes of the population are adherents of reverse cargo cult politics, nobody believes anything anyway, and someone finally recognized that. If your readers assume apriori that any public communication is performed with some agenda, adhering to anything resembling truth becomes entirely unnecessary, what matters is not keeping quiet and giving them more rope to hang themselves with.
Among the non-adherents, multiple competing versions of truth serve to quell civil public discourse, because with so many of them, people distance themselves from it to save energy on arguing with their fellows, and adopt an “I am not interested in politics” mindset. Which is the entire point. Similarly, foreigners who try to make sense of the whole mess give up and become uninterested in what’s going on inside Russia, which is what the propagandists wanted all along. For them, it is not actually important what the Russians believe – it is important that they sit tight, accept that affecting the situation is impossible, and don’t rebel.
This is mostly what happens.
I used to tell people that I come from a country in Eastern Europe that you have never heard about, precisely because this isn’t even a lie.
The only available data that I believe was collected with a shred of scientific integrity indicates that the share of hardcore Putinists that support the war does not exceed 30% and strongly correlates with age – and thus, exposure to TV. This is not really good data, just the best we actually have. Russians are actually protesting the war a lot, despite harsher and harsher penalties, while law enforcement completely disregards even the draconian laws Russia has, but nothing happened to change things yet.
The reasons protests have failed to achieve a critical mass are many, varied and historical. Let’s go back in time a bit.
One thing you might not recognize – it’s far from immediately obvious even to the Russians themselves – is that one of the driving motivations of “most” Russians is being cared about. Probably a more important driving motivation than any other, certainly more important than monetary for most people. I could cite some interesting research on the subject, but most of it will be in Russian. Suffice it is to say that this has its roots among the development of Russian people, who were effectively enslaved up until very, very recently in historical terms, have adapted to living in such conditions, and when the upper crust and educated elite were blown away by the winds of revolution, had to rapidly transition to living in urban centers over the course of merely two decades, where they had to adapt again. That kinda left a mark.
3. In fact, there are a lot of people seriously convinced that the Western world, particularly the US, does things with specific intent to do this or that to Russia, when so many Americans don’t even remember where Russia is on the map.
The end of the Cold War and the breakup of USSR left a lot of resentment at the humiliation this constituted, not unlike the humiliation imposed onto the Germans by the disastrous resolution of WWI. The reactions of Americans that drifted in afterwards didn’t help. When prior to that, a Russian was the bogeyman of the continent, they were suddenly relegated to irrelevance.3 Nothing hurt them quite as much as that irrelevance, not even having to accept foreign humanitarian aid. Putin’s government earned most of its early support by presenting the economic growth resulting from the rising oil prices as “Russia getting off her knees,” and restoring that relevance by adopting the guise of energy superpower. The phrase about the knees is frequently repeated to this day. This was exacerbated by yet another exodus of educated elites for pastures greener.
And this brings us to…
2012
4. Which later turned out to be yet another excuse to steal epic amounts of money from the budget.
The crisis of 2012 marked the first case of truly significant Russian protests. When Putin retreated from the post of the President after his first two terms and installed Medvedev, the latter earned a lot of public support by showing interest in the high-tech sector4 and embracing the trappings of modernity – the man doesn’t just have an iPhone, he has a twitter, while Putin can’t use a computer at all – and the situation, buoyed by high oil and gas, was not bad enough to warrant actually fighting this government to the death. Russia was actually declining… but slowly.
For a while it looked like we might even get a new president after he’s done, for a change. Then, after the 2011 State Duma elections in December, already widely exposed as fraudlent, Medvedev announced that he’s passing the chair back to Putin – using a bogus interpretation of the Constitution, which actually forbids a president from serving more than two terms. They said it means more than two consecutive terms.
This was seen as a betrayal and was the trigger for many people to reexamine the life they have been living. The resulting level of public outcry was not seen for decades and has yet to be observed since, and every old grudge at the corruption and hypocrisy of Russian government came to the surface. If you want an understanding of the emotional state of Russia at the time, this song neatly summarizes it. Fortunately, someone already translated the lyrics.
These protests had some important long-term effects.
- A lot of Russians dissatisfied with the situation suddenly realized they aren’t alone here, that the undercurrent of dissatisfied people is actually fairly large, even if the dissatisfaction is far from universal.
- Many of them also realized that peaceful protest is insufficient for long term change, when nothing of the sort materialized, further restrictions on public protest were installed, and opposition leaders were imprisoned on trumped-up charges. Since more active forms of protest seemed insufficiently supported, they went to ground.
5. Unfortunately, I have a tendency to correctly estimate long-term effects, while underestimating how long will it take for them to materialize.
I would say that this was the moment when the eventual collapse became irreversible, though I never expected it would take that long.5 Alexei Navalny, who was just a middling activist at the time, rose to serious prominence in those days, but that’s not about him.
It’s more about what happened in…
2014
The annexation of Crimea was a hugely divisive issue for all the Russians who still engaged in civil discourse. Is Crimea Ukraine? Certainly. And yet, it is a region overwhelmingly populated by Russians, who build their national identity around Russia, rather than Ukraine, simply due to the way it was settled back in the day and the fact that substantial portions of Crimea are employed in supporting Russian Black Sea Fleet – that’s the entire reason the annexation went so smoothly. Should it have been Ukrainian? Culturally, probably not, it is an accident of history that it is, but economically, it is entirely dependent on Ukraine for something as basic as drinking water, due to another accident of history. Did the prior governments of Ukraine handle the issues of Crimean population properly? Probably not, though I couldn’t tell you, haven’t visited the place for thirty years. Is that even our problem? Probably not, to be honest. Was it a good idea to take it? Definitely not, but try fucking telling that to some people. Should it be given back? It’s a bit too late to just give it back, because now it needs to be untangled from the mess of Russian government system, and they knew it when they tangled it in as fast as possible. And let’s not forget how much money they wasted doing that.
6. See the above cited research.
Overnight, the population split on this entire bouquet of issues, lines going across families, everyone had an opinion, everyone had to have an opinion, and even the opposition movements were at each other’s throats over it. Statistically, the older a Russian is, the more likely they are to be a Putin hardliner6 and this event massively increased the number of such hardliners and brought the ones that were previously inoffensive madmen onto the surface. The noise in public discourse over the course of 2014 was deafening.
Propaganda did absolutely everything to convince everyone that the supporters of anschluss are the majority. It was difficult to argue when they really were observable in large numbers, and of course, the released numbers were doctored left and right. But they didn’t just have to convince the Russians, they needed to do something about the international outcry too. True to form, Putin upped the ante to distract from the problem, which is how he always did that. There’s a long and interesting story about what actually happened in Donbas – mostly, manufacturing a separatist movement whole cloth, and then importing it. There are people who literally admitted to doing it if you care to read their story – but I think another song would be more apt, because this post is not about Donbas either, it’s about the Russian reaction to it. Ukrainians can write about themselves if they like.
Translated lyrics might sound a bit tame. This isn’t the original version, either, the original version was explicit, and all the more impactful for it… It was a watered down preview version of the shock we have now, and it already felt like an end of the world.
We’re kinda overstocked on those.
In the end, sanctions amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist, and Donbas became the site of a long-running secret war and out-of-the-way atrocity, where Russians would go to kill imaginary “Ukrainian nationalists” and vanish off the map, while the slow strangling of every civil liberty Russians still had started – to the excited howling of every manner of ultra-conservative idiot, who received more and more prominence and official support. That was the point when some people seriously started calling Russia an “orthodox christian khalifate.”
If this also reminds you of QAnon, it should. At some point, the combination of bullshit and consoling the hurt pride results in the same purely religious fervor, and once this war is over, we – you, too – will have to deal with millions of these people. The recipe for making one seems to be to convince them that everything is a lie. You do have to trust something to live, so you latch onto something that confirms your suspicions and explains everything, and then, no matter how blindingly stupid it actually is, you hold on to it, and this belief is subject to a massive sunk costs fallacy.
7. They got better at blocking things since, but I still suspect Telegram will hold out the longest.
It’s been getting progressively worse since, slowly, little by little. State Duma, entirely under Putin’s control by that point, got popularly nicknamed a “rabid printer” for producing increasingly insane legislation with no sign of stopping. Opposition leaders were shot, poisoned, imprisoned, exiled, and otherwise squeezed out of the public eye. Armies of state-sponsored trolls were created to destroy even the semblance of civil discourse about politics. News of people getting punitive fines and prison sentences for anti-government posts on social media, some of them made many years before the laws forbidding them were even a thing, became a constant low rumble. Then there was the Telegram War, when they broke half the internet, but failed to actually prevent Telegram from working, reported victory and eventually retreated.7 That one was fun, at least. And let’s not forget about that boy who got sentenced for blowing up a mockup of FSB building in Minecraft just recently…
I wish I was kidding, but by this point the actual activities – rather than words – of putinism are indistinguishable from a dark, violent parody, even with the outward appearance of a perfectly normal country. Well, at least that is gone now… IA Panorama, the local equivalent to The Onion, lost count of the number of times it got cited as real news, because they struggled to think up something more insane than what the actual news were.
It would be easier if the divide was between the common people and the government, but unfortunately, that’s not where it really is. Thanks to Crimea, we simply don’t trust each other anymore. And just about everyone remembers Sergei Dovlatov’s famous quote: “We continuously curse Comrade Stalin, and, naturally, with good reason. And yet I want to ask: who wrote four million anonymous tips?”
So it starts like this…
And then ends like this.
This really happened too, but I’m not about to post a photo.
Which is why I envy the Ukrainians, despite everything – they are being shot at, they’re dying, but at least friendship is a magic they actually have.
Those of my friends who could, left the country years ago – some simply because they saw no future for themselves here, others to escape actual persecution. A bunch of people with their minds entirely clouded, who actually believe that Putin is serving in their national interest, remained. They believe Russia is more than an annoying footnote in history because of his efforts, that it’s relevant again, that they matter. Fortunately, I stopped calling most of these people friends a good long while ago.
Everyone else? They’re still here, somewhere, only I can’t see them, because there are few things Russians do better than mimicry, when the entire country is a Potemkin village. For the past eight years, the only local people I still talked to in any depth are those I can’t avoid and those sitting quietly waiting for their time just like I am. The rest? You never know when you’re going to step on a landmine, so the answer is, “I’m not interested in politics.”
Even when actually, you very much are.
All of that means that to be something more than just a way to ease a hurting conscience, publicly state your position and damn the consequences, or acquire proof of defiance through arrest, no matter how much you might want either, a protest has to go beyond just a group of intellectuals with banners.
At least the zwastika will make target identification easy.
P.S. To anyone else who’s going to tell me to stay safe – please don’t. Instead, prove the reverse cargo cult politics wrong, that the planes of the white man are not made of straw, that they actually fly. If they really don’t… Eventually, even if we do get through this crisis unscathed, the same will happen to you, so you might want to look into a ticket to Equestria right now.
P.P.S. If you meet a sincere Russian troll, tell them that Putin is an American shill, who started the war to lose it, so that Soros could buy up what remains of Russia for peanuts. I’m told that’s super effective.
Thank you for posting this, explaining quite a bit, and helping show a different side I was not aware of for a few matters.
I so sorely wish I had enough respect for my southern neighbors to dispute this... is what I say any time I hear anything about them being uneducated, but in this specific case I recall a friend of my mother talking about her time spent working for a call center and the idiots you interact with in a job like that. Most relevantly, the one who didn't realize that there were countries physically larger than the US. So not only is this not out of line with what I'd be willing to believe, I actually have corroborating anecdata. (Which my spellcheck says is a word now? Sure, why not.)
Enlightening and horrifying. I wish I knew how to make the truth matter to the local gaggles of cultists, but I fear it'll take the death of the ringleaders to make it stick, whether by natural causes or natural collapse. And then there's always the next bit of pus that oozes to the tip of the boil...
(Well, I say local. I've never knowingly met one in the wild.)
Thank you for sharing your views on this...situation, I guess. It's hard to read, in some ways, seeing the engine behind so much messed up stuff. I feel powerless to help and I'm a continent away in the US. Other than being sympathetic, I don't know how I can even begin to help with so much happening at once.
Well. This was informative, and entirely unsettling. I wish there was anything that could be done about this, but realistically the best we can settle on right now is to keep other countries from going down this same path.
Yes. We can show that our planes actually fly.
If nothing else, I do love this one.
A fascinating read, thank you for sharing.
Everything is right and good - but You forgot to mention some things.
1. No nation was more pro-west than Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was like Eldorado, Eden and Shangri-La for the most of us - but after the fall of the Iron Curtain we got chaos, persecution of Russians in former Soviet Union countries, war with islamic fundamentalists on Caucasia, rob and pillage. And not without the support of the West.
2. We started to doubt and think after the invasion and bombings of Yugoslavia and Serbia. It was the time when the view of the West as power-hungry agressive colonialist who lost all control after the fall of Soviet Union as counterbalance began to form - with the idea that Soviet propagandists in satiric journal Crocodile were not totally wrong. The inprisonment and death of Slobodan Miloshevich did not help either.
And still Putin was reaaly pro-western at the beginning of his rule. He even wanted to join NATO one time.
3. You forgot to mention the Munich speech of Putin in 2007 and the August war with Georgia in 2008. What reaction did we get after the statement that Russia has her own interests and incidences?
4. Crimea. How did it happen that Kosovo is good and Crimea is bad?
5. To the point of imaginary “Ukrainian nationalists”. Please, could You explain me who are here?
camo.fimfiction.net/I8MsC8MbKdHODYpnL5rowt-fnMikt2EwItc0Z1f2-pk?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FdtVNpgMOVrF0mljmb4fWjEy47RszKrqwrUwgGSmsIgk.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D898c6094341b870b7766fdc44edfb23536cbb5f0
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/neo-nazis-far-right-ukraine/
And yes there are nazis. Try to search the information about batallions "Azov", "Aidar", "Tornado" and "Right Sector" organization. Then - about torchlight processions of Ukrainean neonazi. Maybe You will know that OUN-UPA, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych who served to SS and Abver during WWII as death squads and their leaders are declared heroes and freedom fighters in modern Ukraine.
Try to search about military operation of Ukraine forces on Donbass where thousand of non-combatants were killed by Ukrainian artillery - including more than 150 children.
camo.fimfiction.net/B67e5dWd36DWYoMOnuP_FPNQzAe8tkMNByGcxbyJJ3s?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdnn1.ukraina.ru%2Fimages%2F102625%2F95%2F1026259539.jpg
And just look here. That is canned meat - there are written "Seasoned separatist from Lugansk"and "Separatist in sour cream". It is the "joke" from Ukraine - and there were more of such canned meat with other names. There also was the fruit compote named "Blood of russian infants". Can You imagine the British canned meat named "IRA Au Jus"? Or "Deep-fried Afro-american by the KKK recipe"? Or something like that?
6. What Putin wants - explained here.
And about he boogeymen of the continent. We never stopped being ones! Or please explain me why NATO was taking new countries and closing to our borders? NATO was created to fight against the Soviet Union and Warsaw pact countries. The USSR is no more, Warsaw pact is no more - but NATO still exists and last expanded in 1997. Why? Who was the enemy that time?
Thanks for writing this, it’s very in-depth, and I hadn’t made the connections between QAnon BS and Putin’s BS to this extent. Also hadn’t realized that being seen as less relevant was viewed as that big of a deal in Russia, but it makes sense. We have similar stuff internally in the US, when it comes to race especially.
Can you clarify what you mean about proving the reverse cargo cult politics wrong, having the planes actually fly, means? Like, just show that the politics in Western countries aren’t as corrupt?
5643022
For one, show that they actually listen to you. If you want something done about Ukraine – get them to do it.
My comments are pretty full of people who say they can’t affect the situation. In a properly democratic state, this assumption should be false.
5643042
You are correct in this. People regrettably imagine themselves super-heroically changing the course of events, know they cannot, and so fall to bland passivity.
Action people in the West can take include:
-Writing politicians to pressure for stronger economic and political measures against the fascist invasion of Ukraine and for greater aid and acceptance for refugees. (if in a democratic nation)
-Donating (if financially stable)
-Using platforms (including fimfic itself) to advocate for awareness and aid.
Aside from donations, these require nothing but time. In Russia, regrettably, measures also require courage.
Thank you. :-)
Here in the US, many of the highly-politicized COVID-related masking mandates are ending (with or without scientific justification). I have heard of a man who continued to wear a mask after the requirement was lifted. He entered a shop, and the owner asked if he hadn't heard--that he didn't have to wear that mask anymore. The man scoffed, and asked "What, do you let the government tell you what to do?"
5642964
5643446
See, that's the great part of terrible arguments. You can turn them inside out and they'll be exactly as valid, and the people who actually believe them will have their heads explode.
(As an aside, "sincere troll" is an oxymoron for exactly this reason)
Thank you for the further information.
Quite interesting, but now I'm curious about your more fresh take on the matter, now that initial drama somewhat died down—if such words are applicable to encroaching conflict, of course. Did you adapt and expand your views somehow?