Colonization Of Emotions Or Taming Of Emotions In Business, Politics, Entertainment Culture

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

We live in a world of emotion-mediated facts. Having the right emotions allows you to take the “right” facts and discard the “wrong” ones.

Identity, including Soviet and post-Soviet, is created by the control of emotions, and only then the facts stand in importance. Only those facts that are accepted by our emotions have the right to life and, accordingly, to influence us.

The Soviet Union worked a lot with future facts, when all the time it sounded: "there will be a garden city", "this stone symbolizes the place of the future university" and so on. In part, such a management of the future can explain a certain optimism of the Soviet person: in his picture of the world there have always been present and the future, which are often not shared by each other. By the way, the past was still alive, but more frozen. During certain periods he was constantly "revived" with the help of literature and art. The Soviet man knew everyone by sight, including Kerensky, who had allegedly fled in a woman's dress, who was entered into a similar role in order to finally humiliate him. This is an emotional transformation of history, where enemies cannot have a decent place.

Under the colonization of emotions, we mean their conditional "domestication", when for applied purposes they are converted from natural to artificial in order to stimulate one or another behavior. This is done by everyone, from advertisements and public relations to television series. And, of course, propaganda - remember the poetry about V. Mayakovsky's Soviet passport. Propaganda creates an image of a person who is overwhelmed with happiness from any action of the state.

Emotions turned out to be "tamed", on the one hand, by the creation in the history of mankind of a narrative format that creates a causal story based on systemic rather than random characteristics. Only in the case of a detective can the reader / viewer be led down the wrong path, presenting random characteristics as systemic. Spectator emotions will always be on the side of the hero who fights against the anti-hero.

School of political serials teaches the correct understanding of someone else's politics. No wonder V. Putin taught S. Shoigu to watch House of Cards in order to understand how American politics works. Prigozhin's trolls also trained on the show ahead of the 2016 US presidential election.

China has entered the struggle to achieve new positions in the entertainment industry. I. Alksnis states: “TikTok is about something else. This is a direct conquest of a wide audience through the entertainment industry. Moreover, what is especially important, we are talking about the young and very young generation: seventy percent of the users of the application are between 16 and 24 years old. ByteDance, a Beijing-based company, has hit exactly the request of a very specific audience, whose interests, needs and preferences are largely terra incognita for business and politics. But after a few years, its representatives will become the most active and very significant part of society - both as citizens and as consumers. Chinese developers have coped with an extremely difficult task, into the solution of which huge sums of money are poured into the Western business. In a sense, China's success with TikTok is even more of a threat to the US than any technological breakthrough. The reason is that in the field of mass culture - moreover, universal, attractive to people around the world - Americans really had no equal for more than a century”[1].

Moreover, China's tasks are now clear, they are ready to "throw" a different ideology and a different democracy into the world: “in the world, at the suggestion of China, a request for a new interpretation of the understanding of democratic values and democracy in the Chinese sense is being actively formed. Democracy in the Chinese interpretation implies the priority of the economic well-being of the population in exchange for adherence to the rules set by the party, such as non-interference in state interests, for example. What is the main advantage of the strategy itself and why it will be successful - the offer of "increased rations" meets the interests of the majority of the population of any country in the world. Most citizens are inherently prone to rule-abiding and law-abiding lifestyles. It is safe to say that the new social system proposed by China will exist longer than any other in the history of mankind”[2].

Moreover, China has given a positive example of the fight against the pandemic, which is explained by its past history: “China is a country with a collectivist culture. And if we talk about a long tradition of state administration through a centralized enlightened bureaucracy, then in China it is already two thousand years old - there is no older tradition in the world. And this tradition has shaped the Chinese culture, in which the younger must certainly obey the elders. In China, the word "old" also means "respected." The government is the “senior” and the subjects are the “junior”. And if the government decides in the general interest that the strictest quarantine measures are needed, then this is how it should be. Patriarchal Chinese culture has not changed that much over the past millennia. The elders take care of the younger ones, and the younger ones must unconditionally obey them. If the younger ones leave their subordination, then they undermine the social foundations and deserve the most severe punishment”[3].

However, this is only the point of view of the Chinese side and its sympathizers. The United States, on the other hand, is tightening its relations with China. US Secretary of State M. Pompeo devoted several of his speeches in a row to this, as if emotionally transferring the image of China from positive to negative. And this is understandable, since China is undoubtedly not only an economic, but also a political rival of the United States. Pompeo said in the Czech Republic: “China is not using tanks and guns, but economic pressure to coerce countries. He states: “What is happening today is not Cold War 2.0. The challenge of the CCP threat is much more complex. This is because it has already been woven into our economy, into our politics, into our society in ways that the Soviet Union did not have. And Beijing is not going to change its course in the near future”([4], see also [5]).

In another speech, entirely dedicated to China, Pompeo stated the complete failure of the past US policy towards China: “We opened our arms to Chinese citizens to see how the Chinese Communist Party is using our open and free society. China sends propagandists to our press conferences, our research centers, our high school, our colleges … "[6], see the reaction to this speech, where it is called" surreal "[7]). Here he also mentions the emotional component: “Marriott, American Airlines, Delta, United - all have removed references to Taiwan from their corporate websites so as not to annoy Beijing. In Hollywood - the epicenter of American creative freedom and self-appointed arbiters of social justice - even the mildest, hard-hitting references to China are censored.”

True, China happily cites an article from the Financial Times revealing the dependence of the US tech industry on China: “Apple is already approaching the world's first company with a market value of US $ 2 trillion, and it relies on China as its manufacturing base. A fifth of the company's $ 270 billion in annual sales come from China. Apple products are widely used in many Western countries, and China is also an important market with an ever-growing number of new consumers. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said that in China, three-quarters of consumers who bought Apple computers and two-thirds who bought iPads were their first time purchases. The article also noted that other companies are dependent on China. For example, five American chip companies - Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Intel and Broadcom - each have a market value of more than $ 100 billion, and from 25% to 50% of their sales come from China”[8].

But there is ideological competition here, which gives rise to incompatible types of policies, although the economies - Western and Chinese - have turned out to be very compatible. Moreover, they seem to be weakly separable from each other. And it is precisely because of this interdependence that China requires the correction of information and virtual spaces.

In reality, everywhere and everywhere the world sees what has passed the censoring, official and unofficial. And this is not only a fight against facts. States cultivate the necessary emotions and prohibit the wrong and dangerous for them. They program the right behavioral responses based on the right emotions.

The transformation of history is also about rewriting emotions. Soviet collectivization, industrialization, war - everything today is subject to the erosion of emotions, when the positive is replaced by the negative. The Soviet state kept one level of emotional approval, now it is completely different.

Today we are also surrounded by emotions carried over decades, which can be defined as the inertia of emotions that really go away only with the change of generations: “Soviet society was again privatized (or colonized?) By ideology. However, this society continues to emit radiation. Utesov and Kozin are singing on the radio. A beggar in the metro plays a song on the button accordion about how a young miner went out to the Donetsk steppe … Young people sing "Let's join hands, friends …" The expensive furniture store is called Two Captains. New "Union" cigarettes were released with the image of the USSR coat of arms on the pack. The Union of Right Forces seduces the electorate with footage of Soviet chronicles. The Moscow mayor explains to citizens that the city's development plan has three sources and three components, implicitly quoting the title of Lenin's article”([9], see also [10]).

These are certain mental boxes that were introduced sometime ago, and the world is viewed through them to this day. That is, the head of a post-Soviet person, relatively speaking, is half filled with Soviet knowledge and Soviet emotions.

N. Kozlova looks at the role of texts in Soviet times in this way: “The core of Soviet culture is based on the pronunciation of texts. Not only the production of ideological texts and literature, but also music, painting, architecture were only in the second place oriented towards the creation of special artistic worlds, the main thing was the “retelling” of what was to be perceived with the help of feelings. In the creation of the "large mass" of the era of Stalinism, a huge role was played by other means of communication - cinema, radio, spectacles, the cumulative effect of which was in many respects stronger than the influence of the printed word. However, it was the printed word that was explicitly placed in this society above all else, perhaps due to the clearly enlightening orientation of the authorities. The educational policy of the Bolsheviks aimed at transforming society on the basis of involving the masses in writing, reading, and printing. However, the technology of writing and printing is, in principle, elitist; it cannot involve everyone”(ibid.)

And one more explanation of the “power of the word” in Soviet times, however, is already the use of the instrumentation of physical space: “The power of the word was guaranteed not only and not so much by the ideology and authority of the leaders, but by a set of non-speech practices, which modern researchers denote by the metaphor of the“machine of terror”. As you know, successful word players also got into these machines. However, such is the history of mankind”(ibid.).

We would argue that just as important was the visual side, which gives very accurate emotion. Everyone who lived then has a clear visual picture, for example, of a holiday in the form of posters, banners, flowers, a mass of people, although there are no specific words in their memory.

We, in fact, are considered visual creatures, because speech arose much later. Looking is our dominant way of obtaining information [11]. Two-thirds of neural activity is related to vision. 40% of nerve fibers lead to the retina. It takes an adult 100 milliseconds to recognize an object. Hence, in our heads, there is a clear visual picture of a holiday that has been gone for a long time.

Or such a fact: “Even the text today becomes, in essence, just a picture. Recently, the American company Nielsen Norman Group, which specializes in the analysis of user interfaces, published the results of an interesting study: how people read text on the Internet and what has changed in this occupation over the past 15 years. A short summary of analysts from the NielsenNorman Group: “We've been talking about this since 1997: people rarely read on the Internet - they scan more often than they read word for word. This is one of the fundamental truths about searching for information on the Web, which has not changed for 23 years, which significantly affects the way we create digital content”[12].

Kozlova's book concludes with interesting words: “Soviet society is a by-product. We cannot say that those and those invented this society. It's really about an unintentional social invention."

Soviet society was very systemic, since it was built and held through offices, not life. The offices drove life into a fairly rigid framework, punishing deviations. You can come up with anything in the offices. Only life is difficult to do all this.

N. Kozlova considers one text as basic for a Soviet person of Stalin's time: “A short course in the history of the CPSU (b)” was mentioned as a precedent text of the era, a key point on the cognitive map of a fairly large number of people. The Short Course was the gospel of the so-called generation of 1938, the generation of winners, winners of the word game. In Russia, they almost never read the Bible as they did in Protestant countries. Perhaps the "Short Course" is the first book that was read in large numbers: in the army, in civilian life, in circles of the political education system, and often for oneself. It was read individually. One can express the idea that reading the "Short Course" was a kind of teaching a new rationality "[9].

This is also a way to create a unified understanding of the surrounding reality, a generator of a single type of emotions, deviations from which were not allowed. In such a text, both basic facts, the knowledge of which is obligatory for everyone, and basic emotions in relation to them are encoded.

The Soviet Union ruled the human mental world all the time. It contained the basic concepts and their current interpretations. It is like the difference between information in a book and in a newspaper. Newspaper information will not be reliable tomorrow, but it is important and valuable for a person as an understanding of the current situation. As the rate of change increases, current information comes to the fore.

T. Glushchenko says: “There is such a point of view that the Soviet state generally treated adults as children, Andrei Sinyavsky wrote about this in his time. In this sense, the attitude towards children was a system-wide, cultural and ideological matrix. Not only did the school raise children, but the Soviet state also raised its citizens all the time. Here it is necessary to clarify: at first, the Soviet government raised a city dweller, and not just a city dweller, but a Soviet type of city dweller, and this education included ideological requirements and cultural norms, including the norms of communication and hygiene, and a paradoxical combination of loyal obedience and exactingness to the authorities. The modern state, apparently, does not set itself the task of creating a certain type of personality. Therefore, people find that society is crumbling. But the school in its current form cannot fulfill the unifying tasks. Moreover, children more and more often do not understand why a school is needed at all”[13].

And about children: “In the Soviet Union, all serious issues were approached comprehensively. Large funds were allocated for children's culture, since it was an important part of an educational project. Another feature is the professionalism of those who created this culture. Music for cartoons was written by the best composers, characters were drawn by the best artists, and voiced by the best actors. We all know these masterpiece roles, these cartoons, I will not list them. The downside was over-organization and the pushing of ideology as an indispensable element of any cultural activity. But while ideology was obligatory, the scale of its obsession and all-pervading pressure is often exaggerated. Moreover, in the case of children's culture. In children's culture, one could afford more, “push through” some completely marginal themes, examples of Western music, someone notices even psychedelic images in Soviet cartoons”(ibid.).

The growing up of a Soviet person passed faster. It was, as it were, included in the country's adult life in advance. There were political information in the school, students collected waste paper and scrap metal. Children's literature was often based on ideology, that is, an adult rather than a child's component. Adult emotions were generated for children as well.

This is not the case today. It is not the process of growing up of children that takes place, but the process of infantilization of adults. V. Marakhovsky writes: “Due to the fact that real childhood is becoming rather rare, and the status of childhood is at the same time high as never before in human history, we have numerous“imitators of childhood”. That is, they are completely adult, educated and mature people who play angular teenagers and give social signals to schoolchildren. We see people who “diligently avoid initiation into full adulthood. They carefully preserve the elements of appearance and behavior, throwing associative bridges to schoolchildren. They are diligently angular wherever possible. They wear everything oversized, from glasses to sneakers to appear smaller in those glasses and sneakers. They express themselves emphatically awkwardly (“the worse is getting closer”, “I want panties / beads and (political demand)”), consciously or not, imitating children's speech.

What is called "infantilism" and is condemned as a kind of underdevelopment (and for which reasons are sought in lack of upbringing and insufficient attention to the educated), in fact, perhaps, is "demonstrative juvenility" and was the result, on the contrary, of extreme attention to children and childhood, as a result, maintaining adolescent patterns of behavior for as long as possible is simply a profitable tactic, because it provides the longest access to "adult indulgence" with a minimum social burden. In this context, perhaps, one should perceive the strangest phenomenon of "juvenile child-adolescent moviegoers", in which an increasingly solid part of the fan audience of movie comics is made up of more than sexually mature people. In this context, the increasingly fashionable, reckless and rather aggressive "denial of authority" by thirty or more years old people of both sexes should be perceived, from the spread of openly anti-scientific delusions to emotional, non-judgmental and refusing to reason opposition (as a form of opposition to the Most Important Paternalistic Figure). Obviously, that such imitative childhood can be neither normal for the "adult children" themselves, nor useful for society as a whole”[14].

Adults in Soviet times had to behave like children, since the system forbade them to deviate from the permitted type of behavior.

If there is a colonization of emotions, then there are also colonizers. These are the ones who receive their winnings by manipulating other people's emotions. Natural emotions become controllable in business, politics, government. Wherever there is a need for a clear result in the head leading to programmable behavior.

D. Westen has published a whole book on the role of emotions in politics [15]. The main idea in it is that one should speak with the voter not in the language of problems, but in the language of his emotions. Westen still believes that electoral victories and losses reflect the feelings of voters towards parties, candidates, and the economy …

In his last article, he writes: “We only talk about things that we care about. Our feelings are a guide to action. The mind gives a map of exactly where we want to go, but first we have to want to go there. In politics, as in the rest of life, we think because we feel. Thus, politics is not so much a market for ideas as a market for emotions. To be successful, a candidate needs to attract the attention of voters in a way that captures his heart, at least as well as his head”[16].

Westen gives an example of the word "unemployed", which can be understood in several different ways, for example, that he is lazy. The translation into the language of emotions will be as follows: People who lost their jobs or People who lost their jobs through no fault of their own. That is, abstractions don't work. Another approach is to refer to values and emotions, because they are not random, there are reasons behind them. Positive emotions guide us to things, people, and ideas that we think are good for us and for those we love. Negatives are about what to avoid. A memorable story should be heard, that is, what is called a narrative. All societies have their own myths and legends, they have formed them. Problems themselves are not narratives. The narrative has a structure where there is an initial situation, a problem, a struggle and a solution to the problem. Values are contained in the moral of the story.

Emotions are the key to the heart of both the voter, the viewer of the television series, and the reader of the novel. They help to gain attention. And the one in whose hands the attention turned out to be the winner, since he controls other people's thoughts through the control of emotions.

Business, politics, entertainment modus are professionals in creating tools for the emotional management of mass consciousness. It was there that the "colonizers" of our emotions settled. As, by the way, are the priests of all religions, who only in our time have partially lost their status. True, there is a very interesting proposal for using them for purely applied purposes - memory storage. T. Sholomova, for example, talks about the creation of religion and priests to transmit information to the future: Mountain (USA), the task is to figure out how to preserve the memory of the exceptional danger of this place for 10,000 years, if no human language lives for so long, and the symbols of the radiation hazard will not be understood any more. There were proposals to create a special religion and a caste of priests, who will have the task of transmitting information about the danger of this place from generation to generation; to bring out special "ray cats", whose fur will change color when the radiation level changes, etc. But this linguistic and cultural experiment came to naught, since the storage facility in Yucca Mountain was never built "([17], see also [18]).

A very serious transmission of emotions occurs today through the entertainment mode (see, for example, research by the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California [19-24]). This center grew out of a pool of financiers, filmmakers, and medical professionals who put the information they needed into films. At the same time, the natural limitation was not to violate the outline of the script. And there are more than a thousand such films and TV series today.

Movies and television series can even talk about what is not - about the future. Moreover, most often this type of future is not very good, it is rejected, because in it the surveillance of a person reaches heights unthinkable even today. And, for example, by reinforcing this trend of negativity, we can try to prevent such a future of ours.

Russia is actively creating and transforming its past with the help of cinema, introducing its necessary interpretations. This can be easily seen on the subject of the films. These are the Decembrists, this is Chernobyl, this is the Crimea, these are 28 Panfilovites … All this is intended to keep the state's point of view on these events as the only correct one with the help of not rational, but emotional tools. And this is largely reminiscent of the Soviet approach, when the cinema reality, for example, of "Kuban Cossacks" was perceived as more real than the one outside the window. Film was the rule, reality was the exception.

Netflix has revealed some of its viewership figures for this year's leaders. [25] This is the data for the first four weeks of viewing, which highlighted the top ten films: they were seen from 99 million (the first film) to 48 million (the tenth film). And from them, you can probably study the grammar of the emotions of a modern person: what is he more afraid of and what he loves more.

Rationally, a person changes, new sciences appear, new ideas about the world, but emotionally we remain the same as we were many thousands of years ago. And it is precisely still that allows us to remain human …

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