What makes people unite

New protest actions are expected across the country this coming weekend. But what makes people rally around this or that idea? And is outside influence capable of creating this ownership?

The wave of protests that swept through Belarus; rallies and marches in Khabarovsk that stirred up the entire region; flash mobs against the environmental catastrophe in Kamchatka… It seems that the social distance has not increased, but, on the contrary, is rapidly decreasing.

Pickets and rallies, large-scale charity events on social networks, the “anti-handicapping project” Izoizolyatsiya, which has 580 members on Facebook (an extremist organization banned in Russia). It seems that after a long lull, we again needed to be together. Is it only the new technologies, which have significantly increased the speed of communication, the reason for this? What did “I” and “we” become in the 20s? Social psychologist Takhir Bazarov reflects on this.

Psychologies: There seems to be a new phenomenon that an action can break out anywhere on the planet at any time. We unite, although the situation seems to be conducive to disunity …

Takhir Bazarov: Writer and photographer Yuri Rost once answered a journalist in an interview who called him a lonely person: “It all depends on which side the key is inserted into the door. If outside, this is loneliness, and if inside, solitude. You can be together, while being in solitude. This is the name — “Seclusion as a Union” — that my students came up with for the conference during self-isolation. Everyone was at home, but at the same time there was a feeling that we were together, we were close. It’s fantastic!

And in this sense, the answer to your question for me sounds like this: we unite, acquiring an individual identity. And today we are moving quite powerfully towards finding our own identity, everyone wants to answer the question: who am I? Why am I here? What are my meanings? Even at such a tender age as my 20 year old students. At the same time, we live in conditions of multiple identities, when we have a lot of roles, cultures, and various attachments.

It turns out that “I” has become different, and “we”, than a few years and even more so decades ago?

Certainly! If we consider the pre-revolutionary Russian mentality, then at the end of the XNUMXth — beginning of the XNUMXth century there was a strong demolition, which ultimately led to a revolution. Throughout the territory of the Russian Empire, except for those regions that were «set free» — Finland, Poland, the Baltic states — the feeling of «we» was of a communal nature. This is what cross-cultural psychologist Harry Triandis of the University of Illinois has defined as horizontal collectivism: when “we” unites everyone around me and next to me: family, village.

But there is also vertical collectivism, when “we” is Peter the Great, Suvorov, when it is considered in the context of historical time, it means involvement in the people, history. Horizontal collectivism is an effective social tool, it sets the rules of group influence, conformity, in which each of us lives. “Do not go to someone else’s monastery with your charter” — this is about him.

Why did this tool stop working?

Because it was necessary to create industrial production, workers were needed, but the village did not let go. And then Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin came up with his own reform — the first blow to the horizontal «we». Stolypin made it possible for peasants from the central provinces to leave with their families, villages for Siberia, the Urals, the Far East, where the yield was no less than in the European part of Russia. And the peasants began to live in farms and be responsible for their own land allotment, moving to the vertical “we”. Others went to the Putilov factory.

It was Stolypin’s reforms that led to the revolution. And then the state farms finally finished off the horizontal. Just imagine what was happening in the minds of Russian residents then. Here they lived in a village where everyone was one for all, the children were friends, and here a family of friends was dispossessed, the neighbor’s children were thrown out into the cold, and it was impossible to take them home. And it was the universal division of «we» into «I».

That is, the division of “we” into “I” did not happen by chance, but purposefully?

Yes, it was politics, it was necessary for the state to achieve its goals. As a result, everyone had to break something in themselves in order for the horizontal “we” to disappear. It was not until World War II that the horizontal turned back on. But they decided to back it up with a vertical: then, from somewhere out of oblivion, historical heroes were pulled out — Alexander Nevsky, Nakhimov, Suvorov, forgotten in previous Soviet years. Films about outstanding personalities were shot. The decisive moment was the return of shoulder straps to the army. This happened in 1943: those who tore off shoulder straps 20 years ago now literally sewed them back on.

Now it would be called a rebranding of «I»: firstly, I understand that I am part of a larger story that includes Dmitry Donskoy and even Kolchak, and in this situation I am changing my identity. Secondly, without shoulder straps, we retreated, having reached the Volga. And since 1943, we stopped retreating. And there were tens of millions of such “I”, sewing themselves to the new history of the country, who thought: “Tomorrow I may die, but I prick my fingers with a needle, why?” It was powerful psychological technology.

And what is happening with self-consciousness now?

We are now facing, I think, a serious rethinking of ourselves. There are several factors that converge at one point. The most important is the acceleration of generational change. If earlier the generation was replaced in 10 years, now with a difference of only two years we do not understand each other. What can we say about the big difference in age!

Modern students perceive information at a speed of 450 words per minute, and I, the professor who lectures them, at 200 words per minute. Where do they put 250 words? They start reading something in parallel, scanning in smartphones. I began to take this into account, gave them a task on the phone, Google documents, a discussion in Zoom. When switching from resource to resource, they are not distracted.

We are living more and more in virtuality. Does it have a horizontal «we»?

There is, but it becomes fast and short-lived. They just felt “we” — and they already fled. Elsewhere they united and scattered again. And there are many such “we”, where I am present. It’s like ganglia, a kind of hubs, nodes around which others unite for a while. But what is interesting: if someone from my or a friendly hub is hurt, then I start to boil. “How did they remove the governor of the Khabarovsk Territory? How come they didn’t consult us?» We already have a sense of justice.

This applies not only to Russia, Belarus or the United States, where there have recently been protests against racism. This is a general trend all over the world. States and any representatives of the authorities need to work very carefully with this new “we”. After all, what happened? If before Stolypin’s stories «I» was dissolved into «we», now «we» is dissolved into «I». Each «I» becomes the carrier of this «we». Hence “I am Furgal”, “I am a fur seal”. And for us it is a password-review.

They often talk about external control: the protesters themselves cannot unite so quickly.

This is impossible to imagine. I am absolutely sure that Belarusians are sincerely active. The Marseillaise cannot be written for money, it can only be born in a moment of inspiration on a drunken night. It was then that she became the anthem of revolutionary France. And there was a touch to heaven. There are no such issues: they sat down, planned, wrote a concept, got a result. It’s not technology, it’s insight. As with Khabarovsk.

There is no need to look for any external solutions at the time of the emergence of social activity. Then — yes, it becomes interesting for some to join this. But the very beginning, the birth is absolutely spontaneous. I would look for the reason in the discrepancy between reality and expectations. No matter how the story ends in Belarus or Khabarovsk, they have already shown that the network “we” will not tolerate outright cynicism and flagrant injustice. We are so sensitive today to such seemingly ephemeral things as justice. Materialism goes aside — the network «we» is idealistic.

How then to manage society?

The world is moving towards building consensus schemes. Consensus is a very complicated thing, it has inverted mathematics and everything is illogical: how can the vote of one person be greater than the sum of the votes of all the others? This means that only a group of people who can be called peers can make such a decision. Who will we consider equal? Those who share common values ​​with us. In horizontal «we» we collect only those who are equal to us and who reflect our common identity. And in this sense, even short-term «we» in their purposefulness, energy become very strong formations.

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