Yuri Loza, who quite a long time ago ended his own musical career and was content with the recording business and infrequent quiet tours, became a rare, but very resonant critic of social events. So the current New Year's programs have come under the devastating fire of his criticism, although the low quality of the New Year's shows has been causing public discontent for several years now.

The most unpleasant thing is that Loza's criticism is quite deep, objective and smacks of hopelessness. Domestic show business began to rot not yesterday, and we can only note the fact that its decomposition has reached a certain perfection.

In the domestic culture, a general decay has been manifesting for a long time. It triumphantly marches under the motto of the triumph of primitivism. Why create your own, if you can buy it at the world flea market? At the same time, the allocated is much easier and easier to "cut". Why eliminate problems if ministries or new control bodies can be organized under them. Why, in general, eradicate problems if they can be declared the intrigues of enemies?

When there is nothing to buy, then you have to exploit the ideas of 60 years ago.

The crisis has reached such magnitude that it suddenly became obvious to everyone to the point of nausea. Domestic talents are pushed aside by "cultural monopolists", who, apart from endless repetitions, have nothing. No authors, no ideas. There are no screenwriters, cameramen and lighting, no singers or just good voices. But in abundance there is a tired party of "Brezhnevs from culture". It would be funny if it weren't scary: music universities, competitions for young performers regularly churn out original disposable types, not talents at all. This is beneficial for everyone: mediocrity falling into the rays of glory, cultural "authorities" who have no one to replace. And even politicians, since it is beneficial for them that the people are dissatisfied not with their theft and mediocrity, but with the low quality of cultural content. The fact that this is not beneficial to society is of little concern to anyone.
The outlook is also negative. Instead of faith, people are given superstition and obscurantism. Instead of culture - cultural ersatz. Instead of music - rhythmic puke or puzzling "dyts-dyts", for a change. That the heroes of the present time are serial killers and perverts of the original sourdough is not worth mentioning. Then there will be surprised eyes at the next crisis, when everything collapses, suddenly and immediately. And looking for someone to blame. And recipes for unrealized salvation, one more primitive than the other.
Saving the world is possible, even if it's not worth it. Only, it takes work. Big and ungrateful. Is there anyone interested in it?

Mass culture is scolded by everyone who is not lazy, but it seems to feed on criticism - it only swells, threatening to bury cultural values ​​traditional for Russia. Or maybe you should not cling to the old, give way to new trends, and just leave a small reserve in the form of the Kultura TV channel for boring intellectuals? And is it possible to influence these processes?

After the collapse of the USSR, the scrapping of everything old took place not only in the economic life of Russia, cardinal changes overtook the cultural sphere as well. Those manifestations of the mass culture of Western countries, which 20 years ago were the object of ridicule by Soviet propaganda, came to us and became a new cultural paradigm of Russian reality.

Television air was filled with degrading reality shows, primitive serials, programs devoted to speculation on the basest instincts, or operating with absolutely anti-scientific nonsense - endless stories about aliens, psychics, dwarfs and giants ...

Under the pressure of primitive, simple mass culture, academic culture was forced out into the reservation of the stiff TV channel "Culture" or into the night airs of the central channels. In prime time, they prefer to show plastic stampings of serials about Carmelita or Andrey Malakhov's market shows.

Russian cinema is divided into two trends: auteur cinema "not for everyone", good, of course, but inclined to hide the meaning so deeply, use such sophisticated ways of expression that sometimes only the highbrow jury of the Kansk film festival is able to detect them.

And mass cinema, the cinema of Fyodor Bondarchuk and Nikita Mikhalkov. Yes, in recent years, Russian mass cinema has been trying to squeeze "blockbusters" out of itself. However, the expensive epics that come out one after another are still not able to compare in their psychological depth with many Soviet films. And although they are filmed on important topics of historical patriotism, like, for example, Bondarchuk's last film Stalingrad, for some reason they turn out to be very superficial, celluloid.

It can be assumed that this is due to the fact that the directors are trying to mechanically transfer the standards of Hollywood, "Oscar" cinema to the domestic cultural and historical basis. “I don’t believe it,” Stanislavsky would say. “I don’t believe it,” says every second spectator, leaving the cinema.

Not only directors, musicians are also prone to banal adoption of foreign stylistics. What is good for America or England is that the musical styles that were formed directly in these countries, transferred to our soil, look stunted. In principle, we can say that the total spread of the musical styles of the Anglo-Saxon and American cultures is part of the general expansion that these nations have been successfully implementing for a long time, or a side effect of it.

Russian pop music, created according to Western tracing paper, must obviously lose and lose. However, there are no alternatives to this style, because Russian culture simply failed to develop its own, authentic analogues. Russian folk melodies did not form the basis of any popular musical style, remaining the lot of small school choirs. So the Russian stage has to adapt to the cultural codes of the Negro subculture, for example. It turns out badly, and this is understandable.

If we talk about popular music, then we can say that it is almost non-existent in Russia. What Russian radio stations broadcast, for the most part, has nothing to do with the art of music. If in the 90s there were still small inclusions of pop performers who could be called singers and musicians with at least minimal vocal abilities, then at the moment we can state the final degradation of mass music. Just noise, meaningless fluctuations in the air: "Don't let me go, I'm about to close the doors, you share your bed, fly into my arms" - the most popular performer Stas Mikhailov sings. Poetry, depth, plot….

Pop music is also divided into two main currents: the so-called "chanson" and the standard "pop" of teen discos. They share popular tastes approximately equally, but they are similar in one thing: the absolute absence of musical taste. Why the “thieves” theme has so firmly won the hearts of the Russian listener is a topic for a separate discussion. But what is impossible not to notice, even if you feel hostility to such "aesthetics", is that in this direction there is also a monstrous degradation. Dina Verny and Vladimir Vysotsky were replaced by eternally whining guys, boringly lamenting on the air of the Chanson radio station.

Marina Davydova

MARINA DAVYDOVA is not afraid of Orthodox activists and the Cossacks who joined them. There are worse things. For example, running in place

Talk about the general decline - especially about the decline of education, culture and the entire humanitarian sphere - has now become such a commonplace that there is literally nowhere to set foot. Be sure to get into a common place. When I stumble upon yet another cry about this very decline, my imagination involuntarily begins to paint a terrible picture. Here was a closed (according to Karl Popper) Soviet society, an empire, so to speak, of evil, but in this empire people loved culture. At every corner they recited "Eugene Onegin" by heart, easily twisted quotes from Gogol and Griboedov into the conversation, read Baudelaire and Flaubert, watched the ballet "Swan Lake". And now "Onegin" is not recited, quotes from Griboyedov are not screwed up, the existence of Flaubert is generally forgotten. Everyone listens to Stas Mikhailov and watches Dom-2.

However, memory enters into a fierce argument with imagination. I, too, found a "beautiful past." I remember literature lessons in a secondary school in Baku, where our class had to make a comparative analysis of "War and Peace" and "Little Land" in an essay, and a parallel class (attention!) - compare the image of Kutuzov (from "War and Peace" ) with the image of Brezhnev (from Malaya Zemlya). I remember English lessons. I'm not even sure now that it was exactly English, and not some other. In any case, he definitely had nothing to do with the English that I later learned on my own. I remember how many hours at the institute it took me to study history, diamats and other scientific and educational programs, how many idiots with party cards gave us lectures on specialized disciplines, how much unthinkable rubbish I read in order to pass the exams for graduate school ...

People in the years of late stagnation read books, this is true (and what else could they do if the Internet had not yet been installed at home by that time). But they overwhelmingly read Maurice Druon's novels with ornate titles ("It's not good to spin lilies") and Anatoly Ivanov's epic "The Eternal Call" (it was he, and not Yulian Semenov's novels at all, as some believed for a long time, that was the main bestseller of the pre-perestroika years) . Modern Russian television is horror. But the television of my youth was horror-horror-horror. Even if we subtract from it the ideological “Village Hour” and “I Serve the Soviet Union”, the bottom line was that we received concerts for Police Day, “Blue Lights” with host jokes, next to which any of the ProjectorParisHilton frontmen would seem like Oscar Wilde, and on Dessert "Kinopanorama"

In general, no matter how you look at it, there are absolutely no reasons to talk about the degradation of our culture (that is, about the progressive movement from better to worse). The youth spoke in foreign languages. NVP and istmat have sunk into oblivion. Festivals divorced apparently-invisibly. You can find film classics here and there if you wish, and even see them on a terrible TV. In it - what is already there - even art-house movies are sometimes shown. As for "Eugene Onegin", it can now be recited by heart by about the same handful of people as before. Little has changed here. But life has become better, more fun, more interesting. But the general feeling of degradation still remains. Where the hell does it come from?

In the most boring textbook on the political economy of socialism, which, as you know, was remarkable in that it was usually not possible to understand and coherently state what was written in it, I came across one most interesting paragraph before the next exam. It was called "The absolute and relative impoverishment of the working class." With absolute impoverishment, everything was simple. Well, here a worker received a salary of 100 conventional units, and began to receive 85 - he became impoverished. But the oppressed worker, according to the political economy of socialism, became impoverished even when his wages grew. And this paradox was explained as follows: the profit of the capitalist is growing much more rapidly than the salary of the proletarian. The gap between them is widening, which leads to an aggravation of the class struggle... and so on.

Now, in 2012, all this already seems like a monstrous pluperfect.

When I think about what my persistent feeling of today's degradation is connected with, this delightful example of sparkling Soviet demagoguery involuntarily comes to mind. There are many things in which we have not moved forward since my student days or even made some important steps forward, but the civilized world, in which not only science and technology, but also the value system itself, are changing at some fantastic speed , since then it has gone far, far away. And the gap between us is getting bigger and bigger - like between a person walking or even running after a train along the platform, and the train itself, rapidly drifting away.

This cultural gap (if we understand by culture a certain totality of our ideas about art and life in general) in the 70s and 80s, paradoxically, was not so huge. She certainly was, but she seemed surmountable. It was still possible to jump over it, having a good run up. The civilized West, after all, was also civilized, to put it mildly, not immediately. If we look not into the distant, but into the most recent past, we will remember that censorship restrictions in America, even in the 70s, not to mention the 50s and 60s, were still very strong. People in the Reagan administration called AIDS God's punishment, and it didn't seem unthinkable savagery. Homophobic statements in the 70s and 80s could still be heard from the lips of quite respectable Western politicians. Come on, homophobia… I was recently told that in West Germany in the 70s, a woman had to get written permission from her husband in order to get a job. Western society until relatively recently was much more repressive and conservative than it might seem. But now, in 2012, all this already seems like a monstrous pluperfect.

Literally before our eyes, in countries that are commonly called civilized, the level of tolerance and the degree of self-reliance of the human person, on the one hand, have fantastically increased, and the very structure of humanitarian knowledge has become fantastically complicated, on the other. And just as the outlines of life changed there, the outlines of art also changed - it also increasingly became a zone of freedom and began to speak with the viewer in an increasingly complex language. In the field of theater, these processes (at least for me) are especially noticeable. The changes that the theatrical landscape has undergone over the past 20 years can truly be called tectonic. And if at the end of the 80s, when the first truly serious meeting of the Russian public with the masters of the European stage took place thanks to the Chekhov Festival, the gap between us seemed insignificant, now, paradoxically - despite the abundance of festivals mentioned - it becomes insurmountable. Not because we are going backwards, but because we are simply not going anywhere.

Conversations on the evergreen topic “Is it possible to use profanity on the screen and on stage” some time ago was still amused and even seemed fruitful. But when at VGIK at a seminar on modern dramaturgy in 2012 you again hear these arguments from the lips of professors, this is already evidence of degradation. When not only online marginals, but in the works of venerable doctors of sciences, observers of quite progressive media and some public intellectuals you read the same monstrous rubbish that you read many years ago about actual artists and playwrights corrupting our morality and about “curators of actual feces” who bought everything around - this is degradation. When the artists of one metropolitan theater at the beginning of the 21st century are not embarrassed by their homophobia, and another declare that they have never read more nonsense than the texts of Alexander Vvedensky, this is degradation. Both in public life and in the realm of fine arts discourse, the brains of a large proportion of my fellow citizens more or less froze in the late 80s. Only in the late 80s did this state of the brain not yet seem like a catastrophe, but now it already does. Because then the vector of our movement was still not fully understood, but now it is clear that there is actually no movement.

To be honest, it’s not even the Cossacks and non-Orthodox activists that scare me, after all, there are not so many of them, and a healthy society can easily resist all these madmen. It frightens me that a huge part of the educated class in Russia has voluntarily doomed itself to provincialism. She revels in it, rushes with it like with a hand-written sack, calls it "love for classical art" and "fidelity to the traditions of Russian culture." Together with a huge part of the country, she recalls the recent past with nostalgia, nurtures national complexes, looks at the complex and changing modern world, like a loser on an integral equation, and, like the hero of The Tin Drum, resolutely does not want to grow up. But in order to hopelessly lag behind the civilized world, it is not at all necessary to go backwards, it is quite simple - as my homeland is doing now - to demonstrate to the entire planet a non-stop run in place.

It's music streaming from popular radio stations; these are books by contemporary authors; These are fashion designer clothes. The list, of course, is far from complete.

If we give definitions, then mass culture is a culture generated by technological progress at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, focused on the so-called mass society - a society whose individual elements have almost lost their individuality, including in the choice of consumer products (cultural, social, economic). This concept is characterized by averaging, which refers both to the objects and phenomena of the given and to the people for whom they are intended.

Mass culture: pros and cons

So let's start with the positives.

One of the advantages of mass culture is its general accessibility. There are many sources of information: from magazines to the Internet - just choose.

Active development of technology and the introduction of new technologies.

And, of course, mass culture is a significant reduction or complete absence of censorship in the media, and therefore problems occurring in the world and society can be accessible to a wide audience.

There are more cons, unfortunately.

Accessibility has become the cause of the so-called "sexual dominance." Children under 10 already know sex. In middle school students, interest often turns into active actions, which contributes to the spread of cases of early pregnancy, as well as pedophilia.

The cultural degradation of society is obvious. For example, classical works - musical, literary, artistic - are absolutely not recognized by young people. The assembly line of Hollywood films, rap, glossy magazines and low-grade romance novels and detective stories influence the formation of their worldview. It is clear that such products of mass culture determine the consumer's attitude to life. Among young people, a social group called "majors" has gained popularity. As a rule, these are pupils and students who spend their parents' money on various kinds of entertainment (like expensive cars or nightclubs).

In addition to widespread consumerism, people become incapable of simple analytical activities. They turn into a gray and faceless mass that believes what they are told by TV presenters, politicians, salesmen, etc.

The dominance of the Internet reduces the importance of live communication. And if the mass network still assumed direct human interaction, then today, in the 21st century, various social networks have become the main habitat for a large number of people. Yes, only the number of “likes” and positive comments under the photos became important. At the same time, the level of literacy in these very comments leaves much to be desired.

In general, of course, it is obvious that mass culture carries more negative than positive. On the other hand, I would like to recall those pearls of Soviet and European cinema that Chaplin, Hitchcock, Ryazanov gave us, many talented writers (Grossman, Bulgakov, Platonov), great composers (Tariverdiev, Pakhmutova, Gliere). Therefore, mass culture is not always bad, you just need to be able to find really good and worthy things in a sea of ​​husks.

Today, watching TV is mortally dangerous - through it we are imposed such stereotypes of behavior that are symptoms of mental illness.

Child psychologist Irina Medvedeva, who is the director of the Institute for Demographic Security, in an interview:

You said earlier that the environment in which we now live is unfavorable for the psyche, and because of this, many children and adults are in a borderline state, that is, they are not mentally ill, and at the same time they have some slight deviations. Why is our environment unfavorable?

Because in our country, after the so-called Perestroika, attempts began to demolish the culture. They still do not stop, although now they are not as aggressive as at the beginning. In my practice, the discovery of the greatest Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung about the presence of the so-called collective unconscious in people is confirmed. Jung called the deep memory of a person in this way, in which the main models of behavior, worldview, worldview, characteristic of a particular culture in which a person lives and in which his ancestors lived, are encoded in some mysterious way. If the fundamental norms of Russian culture are violated in the family, then the child's psyche suffers from this. And on the contrary, when we ask parents to return to our cultural tradition in raising a child, already from this return to the roots, his psyche can be harmonized.

What is our mentality and how is it broken?

You can't talk about it briefly. One of the basic principles that they are trying to break is the attitude towards poverty and wealth.

Was it ever supposed in Russia to treat wealth as the main goal in life? Wealth has never been prioritized. Wealth has never been a criterion for the positivity of a person.

Then Russian culture is communal. Our people have always loved to work together, to rejoice together, to grieve together. In the Church, this is called catholicity. In Soviet times, this was called collectivism. In recent decades, they have been trying to tear a person away from other people, trying to convince him that he should be on his own.

I remember how in the early days, when the expression "it's your problem" came into fashion, it hurt the ear. Everything has been done so that the communal spirit leaves our lives, but it cannot leave, because it is still in the genetic memory. He's just depressed. From any pressure there is some kind of reverse reaction. That is, from somewhere under the bushel, this communal spirit, not being able to come to the surface, gives unconscious signals to a person. Both children and adults suffer from attempts at cultural breakdown. The first step towards the improvement of the psyche is the transfer of unconscious discontent, unconscious anxiety, an unconscious feeling of the alienity of what has recently had to be obeyed, and feelings of the alienity of pseudo-standards, into consciousness. And then it is necessary to consciously reject everything alien.

What else goes against our collective unconscious?

Traditional Russian culture is very patriotic. People here were always ready to give their lives for their land. And when Perestroika took place, they began to be told that they had a shameful slave history, that they had a terrible present, that they had no future, and many people at the level of consciousness believed in this, because people were used to treating the media with reverence .

What else is in our genetic memory?

A huge role is played by the fact that Russian culture is very sublime. It is all turned into the realm of the ideal. In Russian culture, it was not customary to attach great importance to what today is called the quality of life - what is on your table, what are you wearing, what kind of furniture do you have, and so on. In Russian culture, it was customary to turn children as early as possible to the sphere of the ideal, to teach them to love the intangible, and if material, then not what could be bought for money, but the beauty of God's world. Love for nature, joy from it are available to any person, regardless of his wealth. To love one's homeland, to love one's friends, to love one's neighbors in general, to love real art - all of this was given great importance. Russian traditional education has always been aimed at suppressing the base in a person and at awakening and developing the upper floors of the psyche.

And what do we see now?

In recent decades, everything has been done the other way around. The sphere of attraction is disinhibited.

Man is provoked to crave base pleasures. All the time advertise some new varieties of yogurt, chocolate, sausages, cheeses, furniture, cars, clothes. In addition, there is a disinhibition of the sexual sphere, the destruction of shame is not just a mistake, it is a terrible crime against both children and adults.

I think that there is nothing worse than the destruction of shame, because the feeling of intimate shame is one of the main indicators of the mental norm. And when people are called to shameless behavior as a standard, and they say that it is necessary to discard false shame, because what is natural is not shameful, in fact they are called to artificially disable the psyche.

In what mental illness do people have no intimate shame?

These are the most severe psychiatric diseases. For example, some types of schizophrenia are in the defect stage. The defect stage is the last stage of any disease. Schizophrenia in the defective stage is a complete disintegration of the personality. This is a severe mental disability. And in fact, a lot of normal people are called to imitate the behavior of seriously ill people.

If a normal person lives with the absence of intimate shame, can this somehow affect the psyche?

I'm just sure that it can not affect. This does not mean that healthy people will get schizophrenia, but some deviations - one way or another - sooner or later, obviously or covertly, of course, will appear.

What is the psychological state of people now?

Of course, for some people it is not in the best shape, because many try to keep up with the times, try to obey new stereotypes, and, being normal, imitate the behavior of the mentally ill. After all, the stereotypes now being imposed are very reminiscent of psychiatric symptoms. There are a lot of misdiagnosis right now because normal people can act like they're mentally ill.

Could you give examples of behavior that mimics the behavior of mentally ill people?

An example is the aggressive behavior that is demonstrated in thrillers, when the main character destroys and breaks everything in his path, knocks out doors, windows, jumps from the twentieth floor, and along the way with an absolutely cold heart, not in a state of passion, but because some people interfere with him, kill them. Here the behavior of a heboid schizophrenic is imitated. With heboid schizophrenia, a person combines teenage aggression and teenage irresponsibility with an absolutely stone heart. That is, such a patient, not from his vehemence, attacks people and knocks out doors and windows, but from complete indifference to the environment.

What other imposed behaviors are there that are symptoms of mental illness?

For example, when adults advertise some new varieties of products, licking their lips and rolling their eyes voluptuously, they imitate the behavior of the mentally ill. Adult people who treat food with such voluptuousness that they are ready to forget about everything in the world if they want to get something tasty, and for whom food becomes a super idea, so that they can no longer think or talk about anything, are called schizoid infantiles. And shamelessness, which many people, especially young people, consider a manifestation of healthy looseness, is characteristic not only of patients with schizophrenia, but also of patients who suffer from hysterical illnesses, for example, hysterical psychosis.

And the fact that many women go half-naked in the summer is a symptom of some kind of illness?

Exposure in public is called exhibitionism in psychiatry. For the time being, the psyche of such women can be preserved - as long as they force themselves to wear such clothes due to fashion, while they commit some violence against themselves. And then, when you already start to like it, you need to raise the question - are they all right in the head? People who watch obscene things, such as reality shows, behave like mental patients suffering from a disease called voyeurism. Such patients usually peep through the keyhole, into other people's bedrooms, into the toilet. In fact, normal people are disposed to such behavior today.

Can you say something about humorous TV shows?

Here secondary dementia is induced. When people laugh every day at things that even monkeys would not laugh at, they seem to be infected with dementia. Actually, there are questions about the modern names of catering points: “Potato”, “Yum-yum”. Yum-yum is a babble speech. That's what kids say. Why such a sign on the stall? For adults to degenerate.

About those people who laugh while watching humorous programs, can we say that they have dementia?

No, you can't say that, but, of course, you have to talk about some kind of degradation or involution. And I don't know if it will be so easy to bring these people back to normal if they stop making idiots out of people.