Nihilism, Platonism, and Christianity — The Roots of Russia’s Terrorism
It’s not the 24th of February 2022 when Russia for the first time opposed itself to humanistic values.
It’s not Putin who tortured Ukrainians to death in Bucha, Izum, Kherson, and other occupied territories.
It’s not lockdowns that caused a warped worldview of our neighbors still wishing to “repeat” the great win from 1945.
It all is Russian holy fool mentality and an urge for not-wordly-being, which crystallized in their philosophy and made one part of citizens sneak out of Mordor and another one — commit despicable war crimes.
Black holes inside
Having been started as the Slavophiles’ movement in the 19th century, Russian self-identity arose as an antithesis to the European paradigm. It’s not bad, it’s not good — they made their own way.
What was hazardous is that the Russian intelligentsia outlined the inexplicable infinity as the cornerstone of their national spirit.
Centuries later, Nicolai Berdyaev perfectly grasped it in the “Russian Idea” (1946):
In the Russian soul, there is a sort of immensity, a vagueness, a predilection for the infinite, such as is suggested by the great plain of Russia. For this reason, the Russian people have found difficulty in achieving mastery over these vast expanses and in reducing them to orderly shape.
If this infinity meant only the best of human nature emanating good outside (for instance, love to thy neighbor even though within the Orthodox Church’s unity), there’d be no questions.
Yet, yet, yet
As Russians have never tried to cast light on their social immaturity and free public use of reason since the Enlightenment, their infinity appeared to have two negative embodiments:
- total callousness-in-themselves
- an unconscious desire to break this gloomy wall by hurting others
The unconscious at its outrage
Have you ever seen any accomplishments of a so-called mysterious Russian soul?
Their discoveries in mathematics or nuclear physics weren’t done for the sake of such an irrational category. Russian literature could be considered as a natural outcome; which initially could have served as a justification for their pursuit of transcendence.
The “great” Russian soul has always been pictured as dazzling with sincerity, commitment to traditionalism, and ascendancy over a capitalistic worldview, but…
Can you conceive this delusion withstanding a severe life on Russian peripheries filled with propaganda coming from TVs? Can you conceive this ghost of inner beauty intending to bring changes for the better? If yes, what notion of “the better” will it make a reality?
Revealing the Russian soul concept in “The downfall of idols” (1924), Semyon Frank acknowledged despair in European “idols” of politics, culture, and Kant’s categorical imperative (a too rational norm that limits our impulses — both virtuous and wicked — to formal outer compulsion only angels could adhere to) as the point of no return to the European project.
Has anything changed over a century? Nope. It seems the sacral idea of civil liberties has never been embraced in their society.
Instead of fighting for the right to life after the announcement of the ‘partial’ mobilization on the 21th of September 2022 and protesting against upcoming new waves in 2023, most of Russians surrendered to Putin and are heading to Ukraine to… attack the West’s postmodernity based on glamorous simulacres — in Ukraine! — where filthy free people endeavor to come back to the European civilization.
Neglecting any necessity of morality and accepting evil as a part of human nature, why not unleash Freud’s ID with sincere intentions to kill, torment with electricity or plunder washing machines?
Being driven by intoxicating permissiveness, today’s Russian ideology turned all hero narratives upside down. Once a former prisoner joins a private military company and takes part in the war, he atones for previous sins, and can obtain a tuition-free university degree or begin a political career in the State Duma.
Should I say that, living with no constants but uncontrolled aggressiveness, invaders don’t consider themselves occupants? Killing just for fun makes orcs feel like transcending above their squalid being, which can never be satiated unless the world is turned into ruins.
When paradise is hell
Having pointed out spiritual emptiness, Frank, like many other Russian Christian philosophers, tried to veil it with an ‘exceptional trait’ of his compatriots — a close connection with Living God, which is mediated by Church:
Through the overcoming of the internal isolation of our soul, through its opening and communion with the All-in-One Living Foundation of Being, we immediately internally join the supratemporal all-unity of people that live, like us, in God and with God — the supra-individual soul of the church… (The Downfall of Idols)
Sounds quite peaceful, doesn’t it? The subtle nuance is that while Frank offers the unity-in-church as a practical way of restarting the Russian social contract, the Kremlin considers its federative glory as paradise, so distant and self-sustainable that it cannot be reached by anyone alive — not only outside — but inside their borders.
Thus, the only political principle embraced and implemented in Russia is:
We know that the kingdom of a true life is out of this world and can never be adequately and fully realized in the conditions of an inevitably sinful and imperfect earthly life. (Ibid.)
Since no social ideal cannot be either built or even imagined (the USSR experience of permanent approaching unattainable communism through socialism is fully taken into account), why is the government supposed to take care of its slaves, whether they are Slavs or have other ethnicities?
Life might suck everywhere, but it’s only Russia where suffering is a life norm. More weird, it’s something you must wish to become a righteous person. Remember Pushkin’s Elegy?
But, oh my friends, I do not wish to die,
I want to live — to think and suffer.
Without dragging themselves through a number of existential crises and strolling along the edge of finiteness, no Russian could regard themselves spiritually wealthy. To them, feeling overwhelming horror and staking existence in the Russian roulette worth serene decades and indeed are God’s mysterious ways.
No doubt, being down to earth reminds the hopeless Human Zoo with five-star cages predicted by Peter Sloterdijk, but isn’t it unnatural to sacrifice fleeting moments of happiness for tragic woes?
Alexandr Dugin, the theoretician of Eurasianism and vindicator of Russian Orthodoxy (the Old Believers branch), doesn’t think so. In August 2022, he posted the article, the most screaming propositions of which are:
While death is somewhere far away from us, hidden by many covers, our life is a calm and sound sleep. Only a direct encounter with death (in ourselves or in the case of loved ones) can awaken us.
Were the two years of Covid with appalling deaths not enough? Does Europe need to be awakened from the everyday–peaceful and ordinary–life so long as Russia exists and waits for the West to decline?
Following Nietzsche's concept of the will to power, Dugin abhors everyone longing for comfort:
…they do not live and do not die, trying to erase the boundaries, arrange for themselves such an existence, where there will be no gaps, hierarchies, falls and rises. Dead life or living death. (Ibid.)
Would you like to replace your routine with a dubious roller coaster of existential “falls and rises” under HIMARS fire?
Excluding short-sighted counting on a miracle that might let you stay alive, another reason why one can agree to come with a gun to a sovereign country is a belief in the sacredness of the war.
Which cannot be lost. Which will continue to the last Russian. And which will post mortem bring an empty “meaning” to their lives.
Self-locked in the cave
Why do Russists stay optimistic about the war despite more than 130 000 occupants killed? How come their survival instinct went switched off?
Apart from mystical religiosity intertwined with Thanatos, the Russian mindset is completely platonic. The first Russian translations of Aristotle appeared in the 19th century, and they have never needed Aristotle’s forms depending on matter or inductive reasoning.
Can you conceive a society fostered with Plato’s idealism, where a concentration camp is a state to dream of? No plurality in judgements, no Opposition, no critical thinking to question the regime, and a god — a monarch — as the one active cause of political “innovations”. Promising values, right?
At the psychological level, no matter if Russians are atheists, hold agnostic views, or avoid any thoughts about the invisible dimension, they, like devoted Neoplatonists, disdain the material realm with countless problems and have no other choice but to merge their identity with the golden times of Kyivan Rus’.
Anatoly Tykholaz accurately stresses the lack of alternative options for their future history:
…what, except for a belief in ideal Russia, where the truth lives, can hinder from a suicide in real Russia? Here, the entire folk faces a platonic choice: either a suicide or a life with a belief in forthcoming “Holy Rus’. (Plato and Platonism in the Russian religious philosophy of the second half of XIXth — the beginning of XXth centuries)
The more abstract (and emptier) the Russian Idea is formulated, the easier it is to divert attention from human dignity discourse and inflame hatred for normies.
A fish rots from the head.
If you ain’t gonna become a part of Russian salvation plan with necrophiliac intentions — better take pink glasses off when admiring ‘naive’ Russian philosophy.
