5 April, 22:03
There is a concept in social philosophy called deindividuation. An academic term — cold and precise, like a scalpel. But there is a more honest word: entomology. The science of insects. Because that is exactly what the state has been doing throughout its entire history — turning people into insects. Not metaphorically. Systematically. Methodically. With a clear understanding of biology and without sentiment.
The goal is simple: erase the boundary between the personal and the collective so thoroughly that a person stops noticing it ever existed. So that he performs his function — strictly assigned, indispensable, like a termite in a colony — without the right to reflection, and without any need for it. Not because he was forced. But because he stopped wanting anything else.
That is the real trick. Not violence — that is a blunt and expensive instrument. The point is to kill the desire to be oneself before it can even form into a thought.
The regime methodically severs horizontal bonds: friendship, trust, solidarity — everything that connects one person to another directly, bypassing the state. An atomised individual, alone before the system, is far more convenient than a person with neighbours, friends, a small private history of his own. But the paradox is that this same atomised individual is required to dissolve into the mass: dress like everyone, think like everyone, march in step. Loneliness and depersonalisation do not contradict each other here — they work in tandem.
And one should not assume that the masses suffer under this arrangement. The readiness to merge into a faceless whole — to shed the burden of choice, to escape the weight of existential solitude — lives at the level of physiology. This is not weakness, and it is not stupidity. It is an ancient instinct millions of years old. The swarm protects. The herd feeds. The colony survives. The state has simply learned to exploit what nature already wired into the human animal.
Where instinct falters, ritual steps in. Mass processions, collective oaths, unified holidays — these are not merely propaganda. They are a dense, physically tangible schedule that leaves no room for private thought. A mind occupied with the rhythm of a march asks no inconvenient questions. A body exhausted by ritual does not reach for a book.
The state instills a creed: the life of an individual is worthless before the greatness of the whole. This ceases to be ideology and becomes religion — with its own saints, martyrs, heresies, and inquisitors. The patriot here is not a citizen reflecting on the fate of his country; the patriot is a function — predictable and governable. A person capable of critical thought is a system error, an anomaly the regime does not immediately destroy but first tries to "correct" through the primitivisation of meaning, social pressure, and the public ridicule of complexity.
Nuanced moral reasoning is displaced by group instinct. Personal responsibility is diluted to the point of invisibility — who is accountable when everyone is accountable? The other person ceases to be an individual with a history and pain; he becomes a label: one of us or one of them, patriot or traitor, useful or expendable. Entertainment appeals to instincts rather than intellect. The search for meaning — that agonising, distinctly human search — is replaced by participation in ritual. Simpler. Safer. Warmer.
A mind living under constant background fear stops thinking at full capacity. The amygdala takes command from the prefrontal cortex, and a person capable of creativity and reflection shifts into fight-or-flight mode. This is not a metaphor. It is neuroscience. Chronic anxiety is a cheap and remarkably effective instrument of cognitive control.
Poverty works the same way. When all available time is spent finding bread or standing in queues, there is neither time nor energy left for thought. But the regime does not need to keep people hungry. The same effect can be achieved through senseless bureaucracy, grinding daily routine, an accumulation of small humiliations that are negligible in isolation but collectively consume a life. Contemplation is branded as idleness. Reading serious books is dismissed as being "out of touch with reality." Reality, in this system, is a queue, a form, a rubber stamp.
Binary thinking crowns the whole construction. Either a great victory or enemy scheming. Us or them. No middle ground — not because none exists, but because a person capable of seeing nuance is dangerous to a system that holds itself together through contrast.
The result is a society that outwardly resembles a human one — it walks, speaks, watches the news, votes. But inwardly it operates according to entomological law: each specimen knows its function, can smell friend from foe, protects the queen, and asks no unnecessary questions. This is not a caricature of a human being. It is a very old, very stable, and very successful model.
The only thing that destroys it is time to think. Not freedom of speech, not elections, not a constitution. Simply time. Quiet, personal, unfilled. That is precisely what the regime takes away first.