How could pro-Putin Russians be so deluded?
Wait a second...
On Sunday, Russian activist Oleg Orlov (above) was arrested in Moscow’s Red Square for staging a one-man protest with a poster that said, “Our unwillingness to know the truth and our silence make us accomplices to the crimes.”
Why was this a one-man protest? Why aren’t more Russians protesting their country’s inhumane invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine? Multiple stories record family members in Russia denying the reality of on-the-ground loved ones in Ukraine. Blame that, at least in part, on an immensely effective media blackout — as well as the threat of significant consequences for countering the blackout — in Russia. This article, with sociologist Greg Yudin, a professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, also includes a good explanation. From the linked New York Magazine article, Yudin said:
The dominant attitude is to preserve your everyday life. A Russian citizen might say, “What am I supposed to do?” It’s impossible to imagine what would be the response to that. And of course, the government gives them the story line and the talking points to reject it, and they’re willing to believe it, not because they believe the propaganda — Russians don’t believe anything and anyone — but because it reconciles them with the reality that helps you protect your everyday life. I haven’t seen anyone so far saying, “I was kind of supporting this war, but now there’s just too much.”
Does that sound insane? It shouldn’t. We have our own brand of delusion, don’t we?
A new study involved paying regular Fox viewers to switch and watch CNN for a month. The findings were somewhat predictable and included (but were not limited to):
Partisan media hides information from voters.
Partisan media hurts democracies.
Partisan media are committed to presenting a limited amount of topics on which to focus (for instance, racial issues on Fox).
How could Americans be so deluded? Why aren’t we out protesting, well, a host of things? A steady diet of one particular media — any media — does not encourage critical thinking. Instead, such a diet creates an echo chamber in which the news consumer partakes strictly in information that reaffirms what that news consumer already believes to be true. Unlike in Russia, in the United States, people purposefully lock themselves into their own curated information bubbles, and then they act as if they have all the facts. It is what has allowed so many deluded people to continue to insist that TFG won in ‘20, and that vaccinations are bad for you.
How much do we love our bubbles? Sadly, after the month spent watching CNN, Fox viewers went back to Rupert Murdoch’s swill.
Stalin killed millions of Russians so maybe they put ‘surviving’ totalitarianism over protesting it?
In addition:
In the United States we seem to have a set of communities focused on purity, on being kept from possible infection by points of view not held by their insiders and by facts not supportive of community principles. While there are some verbal pigeons of those not deemed sufficiently left, on the left, it doesn't seem to be so much a purity thing as a valve for excess energies that recognize a hard time getting a fingernail under the edge of societal problems.
Purity cultures worry me a lot. I don't like the pastoral epistles, but where's the Titus 1:15?