08.10.2023, Moscow.
A post-truth society has no authorities, it does not value reputation, and it lacks self-respect, which makes an environment where only political flip-flopper can live, but a national elite cannot, the leader of the Essence of Time movement, philosopher and political scientist Sergey Kurginyan said on September 22 on the program Conversation with a Sage of the Zvezda radio station.
The conversation about a post-truth society resulted from the degradation of the informational space and a total degradation of journalism, in the USA in particular. For example, US ex-president Donald Trump said that as the fake media kept silent about Ukraine it suggested that it was losing.
Kurginyan told that the Russian authorities in 1992 offered him any kind of a promotion if he agreed to say that his book Post-Perestroika was a joke. In other words, they encouraged him to say that the disintegration of the Soviet Union would not result in a catastrophe.
“I thought about what would happen if I did so. First, I would lose my wife’s and my family’s respect. Then I would lose my friends’ respect. Then something else would happen. And first of all I would not respect myself anymore. And when lose any respect to myself, would I be able to make any move when I wake up in the morning?” Kurginyan explained.
He explained that accepting that kind of an offer would have been practically unreasonable as well, because he understood that the current government would fail in two years.
“But there is also a supreme aspect. The supreme aspect is that as long as my idea about my own existence is based on certain respect to myself, my own position about something, if I lose all this why would I need everything else?” the philosopher stressed.
Kurginyan told what Mao Zedong told Khrushchev when the latter demanded that China should follow the contemporary USSR authorities after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in condemning Stalin. Mao Zedong said that China would not do that. When Khrushchev asked why Mao Zedong said “Because then we will lose our face. We glorified him for too long. We will lose our face.” As he saw that Khrushchev did not understand, Mao explained, “And if we lose our face we will lose power.”
“Then he made a pause feeling that he did not put it perfectly clear to himself, and he said, ‘And why do we need power after we have lost our face?’” Kurginyan told.
He reminded that, in contrast to these members of the Chinese elite, who understood how important self-respect and reputation are both in the supreme and the practical points of view, Boris Yeltsin when we was First Secretary of the Moscow Municipal Committee of the CPSU and candidate member of the Politburo blamed his opponents for poor commitment to socialism, but just a few years later he began to condemn socialism. Kurginyan gave some more examples of similar transformations.
“I was at a Pozner’s talk show, where Vasily Aksyonov was condemning communists in every possible way. I said, ‘Excuse me, I remember a book titled Love to Electricity about great heroes like Lenin, Krasin, Krzyżanowski, the great revolution of 1905, the Bolsheviks.‘ He said, ‘So what? I had an order to write it, I needed money, I wrote it for money.’ I said, ‘Perhaps now your position is for money, too? Or not?’” Kurginyan said.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
