Nelidov "Ideocratic Consciousness and Personality"

Nelidov, Dmitiri.  "Ideocratic Consciousness and Personality." In The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian 'Samizdat'- An Anthology.  Edited by Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shagrin. Translated by Nicolas Lupinin. 19-46. Massachusetts: Nordland Publishing Company, 1977.


1973


"The culture of social adaptation or the negative ideology of which we speak and which firs into a sepcial, semi-displaced, semi-conscious part of the soul, is at the same time a system of internal filters or censorship.  Censorship forms as the results of the hardening of settled reactions to ideological energy impulses which are regularly sent and organized in a special way. It pre-determines the mastering of information being received, enlivening and coloring some, sterilizing and ousting others." (M-A, 274)


"Today we see the consequences of this process in the culture of social adaptation (i.e. in the meaning which this idea acquires), in the attempt to raise a new type of people whose ctions and views are already predetermined prior to birth. People are born condemned to atheism, doublethink, and ideological instincts. The oppresion of the truth imposed on them is far more serious than the oppression of sultan or dictator. Truth not only demands that you sacrifice be brought to it. Truth breaks into the consciousness and creeps into the heart. It wishes to rule you from the outside." (M-A, 278)


healing the double speak


"A government, after al, which endlessly speaks about freedom and the thorough development of the personality, cannot simply write in its constitution: there is no freedom of conscience, there is no freedom of the press, there is no freedom of speech nd of demonstration. It acs much more cunningly. It concludes something like a secret agreement with its citizens. I will speak to you of your freedom but you act as if there was no freedom. And, in general, that was how the citizens behaved. Otherwise they would not have had to pay so deatly. These are the elementary ethics of doublethink, understandable to a child." (M-A, 281)


"An elementary reflection, i.e. a certain rejection of these contradictions, speaks of erosion of such consciousness. Reflection makes the accommodation purely external. It makes its realization possible and, in individual cases its repudiation. It is precisely from this simple realization (accepted spiritually, not cynically) and the rejection of doublethink which followed that the 'Democratic Movement' began." (M-A, 282)


"Special mention must be made about the publication of the Chronicle of Current events which, it is possible, was not the direct labor of the 'movement,' but which was contiguous to it. The Chronicle elicited the greatest fear in the State's subconscious. This was not slow in appearing in those repressions which it drew upon itself. In its form, the Chronicle is most inoffensive. It has only information regarding the persecution of ideologically inconvenient people: the arrests, searches, protocols of trials, starvation in camps, the closing of churches, or simply the addresses of the incarcerated. Only information, almost no commentary, and no emotion. Here is just on example..." (M-A, 282)


"These names are not a secret and nothing will happen if they will be known. These, after all, are criminal offenders condemned by Soviet laws and for the most part, probably in juridically normal trials. Nothing will hapen even if the facts about them are openly published and anyone who wishes will be able to find them out, to know the length of their sentences, their guilt, their age. Everyone knows that the State is is not the kind fairy, that is has long hands and cold nerves. And no one will be particularly surprised at such publicity. Nevertheless, some instictive, not fully realized wisdom forces it conceal this as much as military secrets. If one speaks of this publicly, some rules of the game are violated. Toorrow there may be other rules but today in our country, as well as in the "international arena," as few people as possible should know about the composition of the women's labor camp, ZhKh 385/3, or about political prisoners in the Soviet Union in general. All of these not even longs lists somehow out of rhythm with the great stride of the magnanimous patron of of the poorly developed nations and the implacable champion of democracy And it is quite indecent to recall this after so many words regarding the 'thorough development' or 'dirty slanderers,' know all the properties very well and know perfectly well how to exclude all that people should not know about." (M-A, 284)


"The Chronicle witnesses to coercion and, in so doing, draws coercion upon itself. IT cites facts of government cruelty which are so systematically and shamelessly concealed. It thus forces one to look at that which is forbidden by some unaccountable law. All of this is done with blindfolded eyes so as not to know, not to see, so as to forget. Even those at whose hands this is done are afraid to take full account of themselves." (M-A, 284)


"The perversion of consciousness becomes a principle which attempts to impose itself on vision, hearing, and speech. The Chronicle, in calling things by their real names, opposed this perversion. It is percisely to the perverted consciousness that it  appears to be deliberatley criminal. If this is analyzed, the whole system of the coercions of a totalitarian state proves to have grown out of the ancient sub-conscious fear of the magical significance of certain works." (M-A, 285)


"The essential point is not that a person is put in jail for expressing his convictions (even though they be in the form of objectionable information). It is in the fact that even prior to any jailing he is deprived of the right to the fundamental, universal choice of his spiritual orientation. Then, by the very means of punishment, the attempt is to physically destroy the possibility of this choice. It has already left the sphere of ideological hypnosis and ceremony is not stood upon in relation to it. What is particularly astounding is a certain petty calculatedness of this overwhelming cruelty: the instructions to organize starvation, cold, searches, denunciations, eavesdropping and the sadism of political indoctrination. THe idea of the punishments is to have the political prisoner lose his personality, to have him accept the imposed scenario or vanish completely. But the pressure of the jail is not enough and someone's fantasy events imprisonment in psychiatric hospitals." (M-A, 285) 


"This is no simply a 'change in the means of repression.' It is a revolutionary leap. The quantity of the punishment transforms into quality. The political prisoner remains a personality. He can announce a hunger-strike write a letter to the prosecutor on a scrap of paper, and no matter how much was added on to his sentence, it would still end one day and he would be released. The mental patient is deprived of being a personality. His protests can be ignored, his hunger-strike may only be a symptom of his illness, he can be legally beaten, poisoned with medicine for the sake of his well being, and subjected to insulin shock. He is not given a pen, is kept with the truly ill, and can only leave when he is considered by the doctors to have recovered. Healthiness means the acceptance of stipulated rules,of the laws of doublethink, of the 'culture of social adaptation.' What is demanded are not prescribed thoughts but accepted gestures, and conditioned instincts. The norm of doublethink put forth its human norm and man's full value was gauged by it. THe whole idea of the political protest of the 'democratic movement; consisted in the fact that it showed a different norm of human health which turned out to be intolerable to a society infected by a spiritual epidemic." (M-A, 286)