Sign up for a free recipe e-book →

Clarissa's Blog

A Big Difference

Published by

Clarissa

on

This is what I find funny. In Russia there’s wall to wall propaganda. People turn on the TV, and it’s lies, lies, lies, except for a single show on a single channel. Facebook closes dissident accounts that say anything against the government in minutes. People get hounded for disagreeing with the official line. In short, we all know how it looks.

But the result is quite different. In Russia, the people who disagree with the propaganda and preserve their sanity are all writers, poets, journalists, intellectuals. Not all of them, of course, but if you are to find a dissident, it’s going to be a person in an intellectual profession. Regular people are all completely gone, their brains eaten by propaganda.

And in the US it’s the opposite. You can much more easily find people with intact brains and independent thinking outside of artistic and fancy-schmancy ultra-intellectual circles. I come to work, and the janitor is the only person I can talk to who has fresh, interesting thoughts and zero interest in listing his pronouns. I go on social media, and the only people who aren’t zombies are regular folks, many with no college at all.

4 responses to “A Big Difference”

  1. Izgad Avatar
    Izgad

    I think it has to do with who the lies support. Forget about claims of equality. Any political argument is going to boil down to who has the right to do bad things and who deserves to have bad things done to them. American propaganda serves corporate and academic interests hence such people believe their own nonsense. If you are a non-elite white person, then American propaganda means that you deserve to have bad things done to you. People are naturally skeptical of that.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
    1. ABC Avatar
      ABC

      That too. But please don’t forget Clarissa many of your blog readers and commenters are academics as well. They just lead a double life as they can’t freely discuss these ideas except under the guise of anonymity.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply
  2. Mendelevium34 Avatar
    Mendelevium34

    With Covid, I discovered the hard way that academics and generally intellectuals are more anxious to fit in, more terrified of being uncool than the working classes or “normal folk”.
    Academics will often sneer at the middle-class but not particulaly intellectual mother-and-wife who is willing to pay a fortune for whatever is the handbag brand of choice this season (“Karens”, “white women”, etc.), or at the working class young man who spends half his monthly salary tuning his car (“toxic masculinity” and all that).
    The great irony is that many academics will go to greater lengths (emotionally, intellectually, but also financially sometimes) than said mother-and-wife or said young man in order to develop, cultivate and exhibit whatever luxury belief is in fashion this year (BLM, TWAW, “stay at home to save lives”, etc.).
    Why this happens in the West but not in Russia, I have no idea. I am told the “intelligentsia” is a uniquely Eastern European phenomenon that cannot easily replicate itself (for cultural and historical reasons) in the West but I don’t know if this could be it.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      There is no conscience among the US intelligentsia that it’s s separate class with a special obligation to society. That conscience exists in Russian-speaking countries and in Latin America. This might be part of the reason.

      Like

      Reply

Leave a comment

A conservative literary critic and college professor

Recent posts