- Fear mongering. First and foremost, Russian propaganda engages in fear-mongering to create an image of Russia surrounded by enemies who are eager to see its complete destruction. The strongest image here is of a future catastrophe – chaos and looting in the streets, destitution, bombs falling from above, dead children, and destroyed houses. Television plunges viewers into an illusory hell, and the only way out of it is unification around the national leader. It cannot be said in this case that the lowest human instincts are exploited – rather, people's reactions to these images are natural defense mechanisms. With all the folly of the artificially created illusory reality, people who buy into this kind of propaganda are more rational and humane than the followers of its other forms.
- Group instinct. Appeal to the group instinct or, on the contrary, individual “elitism.” Even though they seem to be opposites, they are based on the same psychological need – the desire to feel a part of something that is undeniably good. In the first case, it’s a part of a large, cohesive community (“normal people who do not accept fascism,” “the patriotic majority,” “society”); in the second case, it’s a part of “elite groups” (true patriots who have withstood the onslaught of liberal attacks and are prepared to undergo hardships for their homeland; genuine strategists, who understand the subtleties of geopolitics, etc.). The main feeling here is a sense of community and involvement. This social instinct is not inherently something negative, but it is always skillfully used in negative ways by totalitarian regimes.
- Cynicism and cruelty. This kind of feeling, aroused by propaganda, already has a clearly expressed moral dimension, because it plays on the worst instincts of human nature, and is a manifestation of deliberate cruelty. This includes not only “artificial selection,” which allows you to build a career based on denunciations and persecution, but also the phenomenon that some years ago I described as “ideological cynicism” – a creature of the Putin regime. Its adherents believe in propaganda only partially, knowing full well how dishonest it is in other aspects. However, they firmly believe in the postulate: “the end justifies the means,” which in turn becomes the basis of their “ideology.”
- Ends justify means. The story of the exploitation of Ilya Yashin's elderly grandmother is an example of the principle “the end justifies the means." The media attack on his grandmother scraped the very “bottom of the barrel." Here, the most primitive and base human instincts are exploited – the desire to take part in collective bullying, to rummage through someone’s dirty laundry, to pry out a secret, to turn someone else’s life into a show. Viewers of “Dom-2” joyfully wait for these kinds of stories, they yearn for more scandals and gossip, and crave ever new “sensational revelations,” a coveted escape from the monotony of their daily lives. Such propaganda gives them a much-anticipated respite – a “five minute hate break,” as it were, a time of relaxation between the stories of impending apocalypse, a rare opportunity to relax against the background of general moral mobilization and militaristic hysteria.