Kashpirovsky and gullible Europeans

tldr: Old Soviets trusted the TV charlatan and never learned to flinch – then watched free media die and welcomed Putin’s. Old Europeans are the same audience, same couch, same ending coming.

Recently Anatoly Kashpirovsky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Kashpirovsky) died and I remembered that he was a great example of how trust in your government can backfire, even if that state no longer exists, and still open the gates for future oppression.

Because, for the record, what he was doing was mass hypnosis and paranormal shit on television. And like, what he was doing is, he would ask you to bring a bottle, a chug of water before television so he would charge it. And millions of people were coming together before the televisions to do that stupid shit and all that.

In 1989, he became famous after several of his sessions with patients were shown on Soviet television. Among other things, he was shown to allegedly remove the pain of two patients who remained conscious during abdominal surgery by addressing them by teleconferencing. The first session was shown on 9 October 1989 on the Central Channel of the USSR.

A lot more about it here: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-soviet-unions-desperate-efforts-at-mind-control/

You can find more info on the wiki, or find his sessions on YouTube, but don’t bother with that. It is enough to know he was a charlatan who was using the gullibility of older Soviet people to get them to participate in this madness.

People were coming to the television to listen, people who were promised to be freed from diseases, from upsets, from fears, from uncertainty. They came to cinema theaters, they listened to his instructions, they participated in this mass ritual.

Yes, completely laughable. And yet, that shows a pattern.

The pattern outlives the state

Those older people, the Kashpirovsky audience, lived in a place where for decades they were controlled, they were told what to believe, what not to believe, who to believe and how. They had no other choice – one channel, one paper, no alternative to compare against. You get the idea. And then that country stopped existing, but its echo, rather, the reins of mass influence were picked up by somebody else.

Partially, yes, he was. Kashpirovsky was partly a propagandist. But not entirely – he also used that as a quasi-religious pretext to bring people into believing that he can actually solve anything.

And then the country stopped existing, but these older people could not change overnight. They continued to believe that whatever the state was doing was true. They continued to believe that whatever was coming from TVs and papers was to be believed without any questioning at all.

Kashpirovsky was not some kind of special leader or something. He was not the source of gullibility. He just capitalized on that. He just used the same methods that the state was using all along and just adapted it into paranormal shit. He just stepped into the gap where people had hopes and dreams that things would get better, and just promised them everything while delivering nothing.

He was just one of many but the most remembered, and he quickly got copycats all over. Call it 80% opportunist filling a demand, 20% state supporter by function.
We don’t know for sure what he believed in, whether he was a believer, whether he was recruited, whether he was truly a fanatic in a sense. But we can clearly extrapolate that one who does such bullshit, deliberately reducing his fellow citizens’ critical thinking while riding the establishment’s own channel, ends up working for the establishment whether he signed up or not.
Keeping people stupid kept the status quo he profited from, so whether he believed in the Soviets or not is irrelevant. The act itself made him a supporter of previous conditions.

The younger Soviets, the ones from the 70s onward, many learned to see through the bullshit, who had lived through hypocrisy and bothered to listen to other media from time to time – they learned enough to see the rot.
But ones who learned to chant commie party slogans before – continued to bring water to a TV without a second thought.

Europeans are the same audience

Previously I was saying that Europeans should learn from Russians (mine://europeans-should-learn-from-russians) in the instinct to distrust their government. That article was for the young half, the ones who can still learn. But that lesson was drawn from only the younger Soviet population from the 70s onward who were already seeing the system’s hypocrisy and understanding how it was. They lived in it and they saw it first-hand. Here I show how ones who grew up watching TV – will continue to watch blindly any new format too.

I would be wrong to claim only one dominant vibe in the population existed. Alongside it existed another one who were people who were not as smart, who were older and grew in different times, who were taught to trust the government and actually were listening to them, who were actually accepting it as the core truth. You should listen to and trust everything that comes from television or newspaper personnel.

Well, I guess every state has such split in population. But here in this case you had almost a generational cutoff in this matter. Yes, if you look at the audience who were listening to him in the post-USSR, it was predominantly older people, who had never been able to develop distrust toward Soviet practices.

The point itself stands. I was talking about how Europeans grew up in calm times and trust the government so much, and the claim would be more accurate that they are behaving exactly as the people who lived in the USSR and later were used by charlatans like that, and the guy led them into thinking about some crazy paranormal shit just because it was coming from television, just because they suddenly trusted some guy appearing on it.

Now you could really draw the analogy that the older Europeans, the TV-raised generation, are very gullible to whatever shit the government is doing. They were growing up in a time where there was looser federation, where they had more independence from each other, and the economies grew and the outlook was good enough that trusting the screen felt earned.
But it was a smaller world of smaller communities, and you could not fully attribute trust or distrust there – once power started to get centralized, once you had Brussels dictating to everyone, people were still under the impression that it is still okay to just follow all that.

And when the government turned hostile to their freedom, their rights, their autonomy and well-being, these older Europeans just accepted it as a core truth. Because that’s what they were always led to believe throughout their previous history.

I just can’t unsee the parallel of the same people who never developed the native distrust of anyone who holds power. Now they fall when this power stops being benevolent.

Now when that turned hostile, when they forwent all the notions of your liberties, of your rights, what you had before and started rapidly accelerating, overregulating every aspect of your life, these older Europeans were still in the same fog that post-USSR old people were in, listening to Kashpirovsky.

Television died, the reflex stayed

The so-called elites previously had the capacity to keep the narratives dominant through television. Exactly the same as in the Soviet Union.

Then later the internet came and they started to panic, and they started to think about what would replace that. They found none, because people would not listen to the new style of propagandists, nor did they have any skills to actually create a propaganda machine that could rival the competing voices of small people.

And then they started to crack down on everyone, because they found no other way and were afraid of losing power.

Kashpirovsky was also a last-ditch attempt to keep the spirit of the Soviet Union in place, and he was moderately successful in captivating people, maybe not purely for political goals, but for strengthening the pattern again: that you should listen to whatever television crap and trust it.

"It’s for your own good"
"we will fix this economy (sure sure promise this time)"
"yes, high taxes will solve it all"
"oh we are definitely doing that to protect you and trust us with that"

Recently, they even forgo all those explanations, and just do whatever they want – as they learned the pattern – the public will eat anything and can do nothing.
All the while their "state-affiliated" media just repeats the same narratives.

Trust calibrated in the good years never recalibrated when power turned. The screen that told truth-ish then gets the same blind faith now that it lies and twists.

I just cannot unsee them listening to the same mantras that the pseudo-science idiot was chanting, hypnotizing his listeners and seeing how they respond to it by just accepting, withdrawing and believing they are part of something that is normal.

The old Soviets died trusting. The old Europeans will too. Stop waiting for consensus from people who will die watching TV.
That Kashpirovsky craze was short-lived but significant enough that people did not grow critical thinking quick and fast enough.
That led to further apathy and eventual capture of media by Putin and co. They have not recovered since.

They did not care when the media was actually free – never bothered to know the difference. And when it got attacked, they did not care enough to defend free against unfree, because they trusted whatever was on the screen anyway, whatever its nature.

You may think what I suggest is that such idiots should not be allowed to broadcast and there should be censorship and all that. But that is not the point. If the media stayed free, then such charlatans would have died off and been replaced by somebody else. People would still have access to different kinds of information and the idiot trend would have died off. But they did not care to keep the free media. And that is why Russia turned into another dictatorship again. Same thing is happening with your eurocrats currently, because you gave them license to do with media whatever the fuck they want – same story.

The same thing that allowed them to continue the authoritarian cycle – now the same gonna happen in your countries.
Think of it again when you see your grandpa watching yet-another-eurocrat bleating from Brussels about how right they are.