PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY OF HATRED. WHAT MAKES UKRAINIAN "BUBBLES" BOIL

Disclaimer about what will not be here.

We will not be talking about psychotic reactions to hysterical media stimuli, because they last for a maximum of three days.

We also won't talk about things like betrayal and victory here, because everyone already knows that "betrayal" is something we don't like, and "victory" is something we can't achieve (note the quotation marks).

This will also not be about morality, because we are encouraged to such diversity, where everyone has an aggressive right to the blinding projection of their erotic and social fantasies.

We will talk about social dynamics and mass brainwashing here.

The word "bubble" as a marker of a virtual social group with signs of a sect has long entered our everyday life. This is such a new local identity, an augmented reality with a minimum of costs and a maximum of self-expression (not to be confused with self-realization).

The participants of each such sect profess the ideology of a "surrounded fortress", increase their self-esteem through mutual public confessions, unsuccessfully engage in proselytism (conversion to their own faith) and the so-called "burning of witches".

By the way, the vast majority of “witches’ burnings” in the Middle Ages were independent local activities of civil society, and not some decree initiated by the Church Inquisition. After all, democratic local government always knows how to do it better.

Our everyday experience says that the appearance of bubbles is the result of boiling. This is as obvious as the fact that the Sun revolves around the Earth. However, it is worth noting that microscopic bubbles first appear at the bottom of a container, where the liquid is heated. If we extend this metaphor to society, then most of the explanations lie in the realm of demography and sociology.

This is an old story, at least thirty years old. The euphoria of the 1990s, the cultural tendency towards magical thinking, the readiness for beautiful deception and self-deception, as well as a certain approach to things in which people pretend that they know nothing, have not heard of anything and have nothing to do with anything at all. All this, coupled with the desire to plant beets where the hat will fly, that is, to take as many of certain desired things as possible. The other side of this coin is romantic heroism and sacrifice, empathy, and trustworthiness.

The bottom of our social pot is the same as that of any “deep people,” that is, people belonging to the underprivileged strata of society. It is worth emphasizing that it does not have such a negative moral connotation as the pretenders to moral authoritarianism endow it with. The bottom is something that has a greater specific gravity, greater inertia, extremely simple but effective settings for species and individual survival.

The bubble consists of dissolved gases (mostly air), that is, something simply contrived. The centers of vapor formation are microcracks and surface irregularities. It is worth noting that there is an objective state of affairs that is traditionally ignored. There are half a dozen systemic gaps between the authorities and society. This is a kind of tax on democracy.

When the temperature of the liquid reaches the boiling point, the vapor pressure inside the bubbles exceeds the external pressure, they increase and rise to the surface. During the rise, the bubbles can burst, releasing steam. This steam will contain such negative emotions as hatred, envy, fear, and malice.

When I spoke above about emotional manifestations that were simply made up, I meant that all this happens exclusively in our heads. The cognitive sphere does not see reality, our tool of cognition is the brain, but it cannot know and become aware of itself. 

Scientific explanations are not convincing enough arguments for people who really experience, suffer, and hope. But if we are talking about experiences, I always tell my interlocutors that without using any other techniques and approaches, it will end by itself in a year or a year and a half. However, it is important to say that you can shorten this process, in any case, the choice is yours.

Zebras, like many other mammals, do not see a tiger as bright yellow and black as we do. It is worth noting that they have dichromatic vision, the tiger looks striped-green to them, as if in a Tiger Stripe camouflage.

Similarly, Ukrainian “dichromatic” cultural and political vision does not see proportions, proportions and scales. Evolution does not know final solutions, except for species self-elimination, but we still have some time for this. It is worth noting that in our traditional settings of moral and ethical optics, there are obvious generational changes, but our demography indicates that this layer is unlikely to significantly affect the general processes of emotional boiling.

At the moment, our society is living in an era of phase transition, which affects, according to the most optimistic estimates, about a quarter of humanity. This is a Euro-Atlantic contingent, which is gradually destroying the post-Christian system of values, which for several centuries kept the nervous system and mental state of people in a state of relative stability.

The rest of the world is busy with its own very specific worries, which are not even close to our dreams of humanism, progress and the purpose of man. Of course, they are all “wrong”, as progressive media teach us.

In general, man is not such a gentle creature. However, it is worth emphasizing the fact that mass hatred in society arises due to several circumstances.

1. The war reminded us that we are all suddenly mortal, and no healthy lifestyle, money, or worldview can change this fact. The feeling of threat and anxiety in society contributes to the formation of hatred for “others” as a way of protection. In addition, it is important to note that others are not only enemies, they are simply everyone else.
2. The negative experience of previous decades, rooted in the Soviet past and reinforced by Russian propaganda, causes a deficit in the need for security, the so-called basal hostility.
3. Members of sectarian hate groups are motivated by internal attachment to the group and external hatred of others. This is a classic of group dynamics, but our situation shows that the pressure of hatred within the “bubbles” themselves is growing. That is, it is worth emphasizing the fact that each “bubble” also strives to boil over on its own.

Emotional contagion has a long and colorful history. An epidemic of the so-called dancing plague swept through Europe from the 11th to the 17th century. The most famous described outbreaks of such a dancing plague occurred in 1374 in Metz, where 11 thousand people simultaneously began to dance something bizarre until they were completely exhausted. It should be said that such a disease was also observed in 1518 in the city of Strasbourg, when a woman named Troffea began to dance and provoked mass madness.

The main explanations for this phenomenon include, in addition to poisoning with hallucinogens of ergot, psychosis caused by constant fear of hunger, poverty and epidemics, as well as a religious context (“the curse of St. Vitus” as punishment for sins).

At the global media level, we had and still have a cancel culture, which started in the world in 2014, and this coincides in our realities with the beginning of the war, the confusion of various blissful ideas about reality. The meme “you are breaking the rules of the community” is only a small part of the total reflexive control over behavior.

The Covid epidemic, as a psychotraumatic episode, has added to the deformation of consciousness, creating unprecedented pressure and spreading fear of uncertainty. It is worth noting that the large-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine turned on the mobilization resource of consciousness. However, it is worth saying that unfortunately, within a year the battery began to run down, until the spinal cord, which dictated to us what to do and had its own calls to action, namely “fight, run or freeze”, declared its rights to control behavior.

Hatred is the prerogative of middle-aged and older people. While young people have more biological compensatory mechanisms that protect against social turbulence and degradation of value settings.

Like any complicated human experience (that's why we love the sacred simplicity of animals), because hatred is a conflict of patterns with attitudes. Thus, taking into account all the factors, we can say that the basic human firmware on the zoological operating system does not cope with the operating mode of our protein devices. The human spirit may be omnipotent, but the hormonal system is not aware of this idea.

Patterns are, in particular, value settings that all come from the last century or even earlier. It's scary to look at what we are offered now as a replacement, and the spinal cord says that this is pure nonsense from the point of view of survival mechanisms. Such a thing as our attitude to something works on the principle of "guess the melody", they contribute to the flexibility of our behavior. The more solid principles people have, the stronger the foundation of their personality, the more sensitive they are to the earthquake of modern challenges.

It is worth noting that it is almost impossible to perceive and accept such processes as geological, as an incredibly insignificant part of the general anthropogenesis, because the human age is already very short, and now especially.

In people in such conditions, the protective mechanism of transference and projection is turned on. It is worth remembering that Albert Camus once wrote that the greatest fear is not the fear of death, but the fear of life. In addition, Jean-Paul Sartre supported him that hell is other people.

Thus, it can be stated that we cannot do much more than we can. Since the times of Socrates and Plato, this obvious judgment has been supplanted for several hundred years by faith in progress and other utopian things, but nature sooner or later takes its toll, and no smartphone will protect you, and even vice versa.

It is important to note the fact that people have a physiological need to hate someone or something, the more they feel less worth. In addition, it is worth saying that such a feeling as hatred is external aggression without the ability to accurately localize its cause and physically absorb excess adrenaline. And such a feeling as aggression is a simple product of fear, which turns into either self-destruction, including suicide, which a person commits (9 out of 10 attempts are demonstrative), or the need to destroy something externally. And if it technically cannot be immediately destroyed, then people have feelings of hatred.

Hatred is a necessary ballast of the psyche, like balloons or submarines. Such a manifestation keeps us at that balanced level of pressure where life is still possible. This description does not look very much like a good lifestyle, but when everyone around is performing the St. Vitus dance, why not join in?

What to do with all this

You can feel hatred if you really want to. The only really limiting factors are the Criminal Code of Ukraine and the Constitution of our country. It is worth taking into account only the fact that hatred makes it difficult to aim accurately. This applies not only to the Defense Forces of Ukraine. The optics of hatred are a bright, but augmented reality. You may hate a poisonous snake or not, but your brightest emotions 24/7 will not protect you from an accidental bite of this creature. This can be prevented only by correctly selected footwear.

If you are not interested in post-traumatic growth by age or simply by your own choice, then you can stay in the circle of like-minded people.

However, it is worth keeping in mind: the nature of bubbles is such that they will certainly burst at some point. And all that remains of them is foam.