Struggle with the memory. origins of amnesia

Abstract

The article is devoted to the place and role of the memory in traditional and mass culture. An ordinary person is, as a rule, a being deprived of memory. or, it’s better to say, an individual with a poorly developed individual memory and a highly developed ancestral memory. The predominant contents of such memory are myths. Anti-individual nature of people’s memory is expressed in its inability to retain historical events and persons in the collective memory. It can be done only by turning them into archetypes, that is, canceling all their “historical” and “personal” features. Authoritarian government is committed to the creation of a man not burdened with the past, having a “memory” which is created by the efforts of ideologues and is being systematically embedded in the consciousness of the masses through books and mass media. This cultivated memory is designed to suppress the memory of an individual, to make it a pale shadow against the background of great deeds and heroes. In fact, it is the cultivation of national amnesia.