Gambling addiction and capitalism in Russia. What common?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Why make reality better when young people can be forced to love them?

In everyday life, it often happens that a person is afraid or lazy to go to the doctor and is engaged in "self-medication" - the fight against symptoms without understanding the cause of the disease. Unfortunately, we see this approach just as often in domestic politics. Against the background of the tragedy in Kerch, the human rights ombudsman in the Russian Federation, Tatyana Moskalkova, declares that the main problem of today (more than drug addiction) is “gambling addiction” and “the departure of young people to the virtual world”.

It is enough to recall last year's statement by Vladimir Putin that the number of underage drug addicts has grown by 60% in the past five years to assess the scale of the challenge. More than 600 thousand drug addicts are registered; 7, 5 million "users" by opinion polls; and the situation, according to Putin himself, is not changing for the better.

And now our state will have to deal with an even more terrible disaster. With using what? Bans, school psychologists and specialized hospitals. Checkmate, juvenile gamers!

It is difficult to compete with the chief ombudsman for human rights in Russia in terms of understanding the situation and, especially, in the sphere of the application of punitive psychiatry. Moreover, if addressing the harm of computer games / television / rock music, and so on, and so on is used as always - for a catchphrase. But let's take this argument seriously and think about what lies behind "gambling addiction" (and other manias) and whether it is possible to defeat these diseases by fighting the symptoms.

Even the most ancient people guessed that the main reason for escape from reality is reality itself. It was not for nothing that even such humanists as the ancient Greek poet Homer were credited with the wisdom of Selene: the best for a person is not to be born at all, and if he was born, to die. And such an authority in psychology as Sigmund Freud assumed that a person needs sleep in order to temporarily escape from the real world, “into which we so reluctantly came” and which “could not endure continuously”. Many classics are imbued with this same pessimism. It was not by chance that Baudelaire chose from two voices the one that called: "Swim in bottomless fairy tales."

Even the “fantasy” genre - as it were the highest embodiment of “escape from reality” - began with the defeat of King Arthur and the escape from the lives of the heroes Galahad and Lancelot (in The Death of Arthur by Malory), and continued in the work of the Inklings (Tolkien, Lewis and others) who tried to preserve kindness, justice and spiritual freedom for people, at least in a fictional, fantasy world. After all, a person usually "escapes" from prison, noted Lewis. It is no secret that many come to religion not after the visions of Joan of Arc, but in search of peace and salvation in something outside the visible world. Buddhists directly declare as their goal salvation from worldly suffering … And so on, and so on.

In general, escape from reality is a phenomenon so rooted in human culture that it is not up to the Russian ombudsmen to eradicate it. This is both impossible and immoral.

Within the framework of capitalism, this is doubly impossible. And because this system works for anything - for profit, for power, for violence, for selfishness - just not for the happiness and self-realization of most people. On the contrary, it basically functions only with the help of the misfortune of this majority - the robbed, suppressed, exploited. As proof - at least statistics on working poverty.

And also because under capitalism everything becomes a commodity, a business, a way of extracting money - including the need to "run away", to be saved. The Internet and computer games are a huge business, not inferior to cinema or music: for example, the Call of Duty series of games brought in more money than the currently actively promoted Marvel films or Star Wars. Although the Russian market for computer games is not the largest, and therefore not the most important for both “domestic producers” and foreign corporations, it is unlikely that it will even be surrendered without a fight.

The Russian state is not just tightly connected with business, it is itself a big capitalist, even if its main profits come not from production, but from the sale of resources and "nibbling" on the Soviet social system. And it knows how to reckon with the economic interests of business (as opposed to the vital interests of citizens). Perhaps the desire to "respond to sanctions", blackmail "Western partners", play on the conservative part of the population and will play its role - but, most likely, all loud statements will again remain just words.

All this is immoral because, depriving people of some kind of "outlet", we "throw" them not into the light world of built communism, but into the "prison" from which they fled. On the one hand, there are a lot of other ways of escape (the same drug addiction or alcoholism), and "gambling" in comparison with them seems rather harmless and not so much dangerous for others. A drunk driver is not the same as a gambling driver.

On the other hand, a person chooses flight when the struggle to change the hated reality seems impossible. If you forcefully "return" him to the real world, then he will not become dramatically superproductive - rather, he will go crazy. The very psychology on which Moskalkova is pinning so many hopes has been claiming for a century that it cannot “cure” many mental disorders - only change their “symptoms” from destructive to more acceptable for life in society. Adler, Horney, Frankl and other "classics" associated neuroses with flaws in the socio-economic system.

Not to mention the fact that Russian school psychology, proposed as a panacea, is at an unusually low level. The role of the school psychologist is usually limited to the rare moralizing speeches that drugs and smoking are bad. Personally, I still remember the case when, at the Nth such lecture in our class, the psychologist could not cope with the students so much that she switched to shouting and threatening to complain about them to the school principal. The fact that school psychologists are still treated in this way is evidenced by the recent words of the Minister of Education Olga Vasilyeva about the practice of allocating only a quarter (!) Of the rate for the school psychologist.

Worse, the potential strengthening of the role of the psychologist is alarming for many parents. Indeed, in Russia there are de facto "juvenile" norms associated with "whistle-blowing" about any child's problems. A child's appeal to a psychologist can cause pressure on parents by officials, taking the family "on a pencil", blackmail and, at most, deprivation of parental rights. Because children are now also a business with a bunch of interested parties: from foster families receiving a salary for caring for a child - to orphanages living on a budget.

In a word, instead of increasing the “attractiveness” of real life in Russia, in order to open the youth paths of self-realization, communication, love, the officials again propose to build an ugly system, ineffective at best, and at worst, directly repressive, crippling people and driving them into a dead end in life. To our horror, they (officials) cannot do anything else: there will be no ombudsman, or even the entire current political elite, because of one incident in Kerch, to remake the entire existing socio-economic system that ensures their (elite's) domination and well-being ! They will not build socialism in a single country after a stubborn struggle against the Soviet Union and its legacy!

The creation of a new social reality, "revolutionizing" it, is the task not of the prosperous upper classes, but of the suffering lower classes. Escape from reality is not possible for everyone and not always: games and books still need to be afforded, alcohol is also not free. It was by no means poor Baudelaire who could "keep dreams", and even then not without difficulty - most ordinary people are forced to reckon with the reality at hand. And there are two ways. Or accumulating anger, bursting out in the form of some kind of riot or rebellion. Or - building their own, grassroots, civil structures in which people support each other and rebuild their way of life according to their own rules. The experience of various protest communities and diasporas is also quite extensive. However, it still ended either with their death … Or with a successful revolution.

In any case, today's proposals by officials are more likely to increase political instability and encourage citizens to act independently, rather than solve any public problems, even if only superficially. Prohibitions and psychiatry are the last measures of the authorities, which cannot cope with the establishment of the life and economy of the country.