The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

contradicted.
    “That’s the way, but it ain’t. Remember Marx? Ideas only become a material force when they’ve gripped the masses—remember that?”
    “Let’s say I do, so then what?”
    “So, no one ever said what came next. And that was the most interesting part, and the Bolsheviks were the first to catch on to it—Lenin really was a genius....
How
do you get an idea to grip the masses? The masses never did, and never will, give a flying fuck about ideas, pardon my language—the masses don’t want ideas, they want bread and circuses. Like in ancient Rome, and that’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it will always be. It’s just that, until now, no society has ever been able to give the masses a steady supply of what they want, the economics weren’t there. Developed Western nations today are the first to have come within reach of the ideal: a well-fed citizen sitting down in front of his TV after work with a beer. The running of the country is conducted entirely behind his back; he is only shown talking heads on TV, the floor of the parliament—where people are making speeches, debating, working hard to sway his opinion—and he develops a sense of his own significance, a sense that he matters, that he has a say. So every now and then he goes to vote, casts his ballot, persisting in the illusion that he was the one who elected all those people into office, hired them, that he rules the country. And he is quite pleased with himself—and a person who is pleased with himself will never rebel. That he only cast his ballot for those he saw on TV most often, and at the best angles, never occurs to him. And if it ever does, he’ll dismiss the idea on the spot, because it threatens to topple his comfortably ordered world. Do you follow? You don’t seem to be eating anything...”
    “I had dinner already, thank you. So what about those ideas that grip the masses?”
    “What I’m telling you is there aren’t any left in big politics. That’s the thing, Daryna. Have some cheese. They’re all illusions of the pre-information age—all those socialisms, liberalisms, communisms, and other what-have-you.... The nineteenth century still believed all that—in the last twitches of Enlightenment. But, you can write four-letter words on a wall all you want—it’s still a wall, and everything’s still behind it. Take the Second World War—it was a clash of two socialisms, the Russian against the German, and who now remembers that? What ideas? Who gives a damn? The masses are not ruled by ideas—they are ruled by certain complex emotions, but even those are not so complex that you couldn’t predict and model them. Self-satisfaction, envy, resentment, fear—you’ve studied psychology, you know this yourself. And ideas in politics—whenever politicians really needed the support of the masses—always had the same function as slogans in advertising: they’re triggers.”
    “Meaning—they affect the subconscious?”
    “You got it. They mobilized certain complex emotions and locked them into a short circuit. Like with Pavlov’s dogs. You said it right, just then: Communism was a mobilization of envy. Thus, your core constituency is the socially disenfranchised; that’s the base you can count on. Everyone knows the best pogrom squads are made of those who’d grown up being pogrommed themselves. Bolsheviks made good use of the Russian Jewry before they secured their power. You mobilize the base with envy, with the desire for revenge—and intimidate the rest, the passive majority, terrorize them to nip resistance in the bud. And that’s it; you don’t need no ideologies after that.”
    “Are you trying to tell me that was the Bolsheviks’ original plan?”
    “That, or something else—what does it matter? The main thing was that Lenin made the brilliant discovery: it’s not an ideology that constitutes a material force—it’s political technology!” Vadym enunciates the last word with such gusto you’d think it were edible. “You can feed the masses whatever hogwash you want—today onething, tomorrow another, and the day after something different yet, without any connection to what came before. Today we’re dismantling the army, tomorrow we’re shooting the deserters; today we’re recognizing Ukraine’s independence, tomorrow we’re installing a puppet government with our bayonets; today we’re giving land to the peasants, tomorrow we’re taking it away. Any maneuver can be