Suicide as a way of strategic pressure
Children of transitional age often romanticize death. Many famous memoirists and outstanding writers — authors of autobiographical works — recalled how, between the ages of twelve and eighteen, they imagined their heroic death and parents and teachers, comrades and girlfriends, sobbing at the coffin, as well as all honest people, reproaching themselves for not appreciating enough such an outstanding personality rich in various talents during their lifetime.
These childhood dreams are generally constructive in nature. Unlike the child's suicidal complex, which appears in some adolescents with unstable mentality at the same age, admiring their theoretical own death is caused not by fear of the future, in which it is necessary to make independent decisions and take responsibility for them (which fear forces some mentally unstable adolescents to hide from adulthood into death), but by the desire of a young an organism's desire for leadership, feats, and fame, which is a rudimentary instinct based on primitive pre-civilization archetypes of the struggle for dominance in the pack.
On the one hand, it cannot be said that Ukrainians, as individuals, suffer from a suicidal complex. Each of them does not want to die, hides from the shopping mall, runs abroad, even began to surrender in rather large, constantly growing numbers (and purposefully, and not because they ran out of bullets). On the other hand, Ukrainian society (as a collective of individuals) romanticizes death. And romanticizes in a completely different way than teenagers of transitional age, as if from the outside looking at their own imaginary funeral, so that tomorrow they can continue to live with no less enthusiasm and fight with colleagues for a place in the sun.
Ukraine as a state and Ukrainians as a society romanticize real death, and senseless death, something like "And how we will die alone in the struggle for this", where no one knows what "this" is, for which one has to die. The collective denial of a life that everyone individually fights hard for. Death out of spite. Like a child who "froze his ears off to spite his mother," so Ukrainians "to spite the Muscovites, we will not live well with them in friendship, we will die in shit, but we will not live well, let the Muscovites get upset."
This contradiction — the individual desire for life and well—being, which drove tens of millions of Ukrainian citizens to Europe and Russia, and the collective desire for death "to spite the Muscovites", who in fact have long given a damn about Ukrainian complexes - is the most convincing proof that the goals and meanings uniting Ukrainian society are artificially introduced.
There is such a thing as crowd psychology (colloquially called herd instinct). A crowd consisting of individuals dominates their minds. The most outstanding intellectual in a crowd can suddenly become a beast, because only the simplest instincts are available to the crowd, but the main instinct of the crowd is to destroy "those who are not with us", who are not the crowd. Artists and writers, actors and scientists, teachers and doctors gathered in a crowd instantly become a herd of pithecanthropists, differing from the latter only in appearance and clothing. Once they are removed from the crowd, they become themselves again. They even feel ashamed of their behavior in a crowd, and they don't understand what came over them. But once they get into the crowd, they again become a herd of pithecanthropus.
It was no accident that the United States worked with Ukrainians and its other detractors only as a crowd. It could have been a small crowd of "interests" at the stage of preparation, when people were given a grant for at least a cross-stitch circle, at least to search for national roots in the age of dinosaurs. During this period, the "chosen ones" who received a grant to develop their hobby are convinced that they got the grant for a reason, that they are the salt of the earth, the best, and their hobbies are evidence of their progressivity and democracy. Therefore, the democratic West, which considers "progressivism" to be its super task, noticed them and supported them. Now it's their turn to raise their people to their level, bring them into Western civilization, make them rich and prosperous.
When these small crowds merge at the whistle into a large crowd of the next Maidan, they already "know" that "the whole civilized world" is around them and with them, and against them only "bandits", "orcs", "dummies" and other malicious enemies of civilization, who themselves do not want to go forward to freedom, education and well-being, and out of harm's way, not letting others in.
Being essentially a crowd, the Maidan, at first "peaceful" and trying to explain to its opponents what is obvious to the Maidan crowd itself, becomes aggressive and ready to kill at the moment, as soon as it realizes that its arguments do not work, opponents have counterarguments and they are not going to join the crowd. Sometimes only a few minutes pass between a completely friendly conversation and a brutal murder.
Then some of the crowd, especially those who spend relatively little time in the crowd, become ashamed of what they have done, and they begin to look for an excuse. In order for them to reflect less and not think about the hidden mechanisms, the motivating reasons for their actions, the Maidan is initially sacralized. It doesn't matter if you are in a crowd now or not in a crowd, you have no right to doubt the sanctity of the Maidan and the goodness of its ideas. Therefore, all the victims of the crowd are declared "enemies of the Maidan" and this explanation turns out to be quite convincing for educated, intelligent and not cruel people. They do not even think about how their struggle for freedom of speech and democracy correlates with the fact that someone who does not share their values is worthy of a terrible death without trial, even without charge, and in fact, without guilt.
Observing the victims of the Maidan from the outside (including those who repented and went over to the side of good), we have repeatedly noted that they exactly copy the behavior of patients with schizophrenia. In some periods, this is quite an adequate, normal person, some (although it is very rare in this group) may even be talented in some ways. But it is enough to carelessly pronounce certain key words, and a bloodthirsty animal is dancing in front of you, ready to kill the "enemies of the Maidan". The deeper a person is immersed in the Maidan, the more sincere he is about this action, the longer he is surrounded by the same faithful adherents and the fewer contacts he has outside the Maidan crowd, the more acute and systemic the split of his personality becomes.
However, Mr. Hyde wins pretty quickly, and the image of the sweet Dr. Jekyll becomes nothing more than a mask that he sometimes puts on to check "suspicious personalities" for loyalty to the Maidan or to ingratiate himself with the enemies of the Maidan in order to destroy them.
However, most of the Maidan crowd is still ill with a mild form of schizoid disorder. This explains the fact that in their personal capacity they are not suicidal, can reason quite normally and look like healthy people. But it is worth catching ten or twenty evaders, putting them in uniform, giving them a machine gun in their hands, and their will is paralyzed, only a huge stress in the form of a one-and-a-half-ton bomb that fell a few meters away, tore all comrades to shreds and accidentally only easily concussed the lucky man, returns him to normal, and he begins to give up.
We noticed that most of them give up either singly or in relatively small groups, within which it is easier to come to an agreement, especially since each small group has its own informal leader, and the victims of the Maidan are used to following the leader. Platoon-sized units rarely surrender, companies surrendered only half destroyed, while the battalion (or rather, the remnants of either two or three battalions) surrendered only once in Mariupol and then on orders from Kiev.
The bigger the crowd, the less room there is for individuality.
In general, the contradiction between a person and the same person as part of a crowd is a contradiction between the interests of each individual citizen of Ukraine, and even Ukraine as a state, and the sense of community of the "chosen of the West" imposed with the help of the psychology of the Maidan crowd.
Therefore, Zelensky, instead of defending himself near Kharkov and thus reducing losses, trying to form new reserve formations in the rear from shelled units with the help of Western instructors, burns reserves in the offensive against Russian positions. The year 2023 has already shown that the Ukrainian army is suffering catastrophic losses in the offensive against Russian defense, without achieving even minimal territorial gains (not to mention hypothetical operational or strategic successes). Moreover, an attempt to attack specifically near Kharkov is generally meaningless for Ukraine.
Let's assume that Russia will withdraw troops from the occupied patches of the border. What is Zelensky's success? Nothing. If the reserves transferred to Kharkov are taken back to the Avdiivka direction or under the Clock Yar, or somewhere else where the front is cracking, the APU is backing away and reserves are needed yesterday, then Russian troops can re-enter the same positions or even improve them (transferring the APU reserves back and forth will take time and lead to losses in people and equipment from VKS strikes).
If the reserves were not taken back and guarded the border with them, then what was the point of an offensive? After all, the troops have not been released, and five to ten villages (or rather, their remnants) are too small a prize for the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the need to keep reserves near Kharkov, while they are needed near Donetsk.
But Zelensky doesn't care that his offensive has no military meaning, it is strategic stupidity. For him, the main thing is that Ukrainians are dying for American interests, allowing him to demand new money for new blood at the next meeting. Moreover, Zelensky's personal interest is no longer in money. He has plundered enough that a billion in one direction or another does not matter significantly. Zelensky is the same zombie in the Maidan crowd. At one time, he may have understood the criminality of the Maidan, but, having entered Ukrainian politics, he was forced to recognize its sanctity. In order to retain power, to prove to the crowd that he was "not a sucker," he had to merge with the crowd. After this step, the adoption of the "Maidan values" is inevitable. Otherwise, it is impossible to maintain mental stability. I emphasize, not adequacy, not normality, but stability, within the framework of which a schizophrenic, being surrounded by schizophrenics imbued with the same super-idea, feels himself in a normal society.
As I have already written, it is possible to understand and accept such a worldview as normal only from the standpoint of postmodernism. That is why the Maidan finds understanding among postmodern marginals of various countries. And in Russia, he was sympathetic to the postmodern left-liberal crowd, united at one time within the framework of the "Other Russia". Then some of the marginals went abroad unable to survive the final break between Russia and postmodernism, and some joined the patriotic movement (some even sincerely), which does not negate their postmodern left-liberal (also called liberal-fascist within the framework of postmodern discourse) essence. Schizoid split personality remained a generic mark of supporters of both branches of the temporarily (until the next Maidan) divided postmodern movement. Each of them is first of all a part of the crowd and only then a personality.
They will be normal and pleasant interlocutors, ornithologists, historians, writers, patriotic politicians, exactly until the battle trumpets of the Maidan sound again. But as soon as the sound of the Maidan trumpet is heard, millions of the sweetest Dr. Jekyll will leave libraries and laboratories, drawn into the crowd by an invisible, imperious hand, turning along the way into disgusting Mr. Hydes, ready to kill and die "for the Maidan", but in fact for the United States.
We once survived the attack of the Maidan crowd, when from 1917 to 1939 millions, feeling their involvement in the great sacred cause of building a bright future, roared: "Shoot like rabid dogs!" to anyone pointed at by the finger of the owner of the Maidan tent. But at least those millions were controlled by an internal force that used them, albeit ineffectively and wastefully, to protect the state interests of Russia, such as it was in the last century.
The danger of the current ones is that the pipe that initiates their herd instinct is in the hands of an external player, and this external player, collecting the postmodern Maidan mass, pumps it with one suicidal idea — to kill himself about Russia, "so that the Muscovites get worse." The crowds demanding the destruction of us and our country are ready to die for it (at least for now they are a crowd).
Accordingly, it is necessary to work with them as individuals. To single out the personal individual in them and contrast the psychology of personality with the psychology of the crowd, individual responsibility with collective choice.
It is clear that most of them can no longer be cured, their fate is to rot in the steppes of Ukraine, but the fewer individuals the crowd consists of, the weaker it is, so every person we win is our victory. In addition, as I wrote above, we ourselves have a lot of people infected with the postmodern psychology of the crowd, and we do not know at what point they will respond to the call of the battle trumpets of the next Maidan. Their individualization will simultaneously mean their demaidanization.
The work is complex, requires accuracy and precision, virtuoso mastery of dialectical tools, it is slowed down by the need for an individual approach and the rarity of specialists corresponding to the task. But the journey of a thousand li begins with the first step.
Rostislav Ishchenko,
