Yin and yang of the Tatar mentality

TATPOLIT published an article by Ruslan Aisin, who reasons about the metamorphoses of the Tatar self-consciousness: from the steppe “thinking of harsh conditions, where there is no comfort, hearth and coziness” to the changeable elements that “pull into comfort” and call for soft-bodied compromises. The first path has the masculine face of authority, overcoming difficulties. The magnetic power of one’s assertion, taken as genuine, authentic. The second path is female management, total control, in which the fate of sons is always to be a mother’s son, who is in the care of a stepmother. Read – Russia!

Retelling a philosophical article is a thankless task. For my part, I can only recommend it for study. Of course, the article is not intended for the general public – a truck driver or a rural housewife cannot understand and master it. For whom, then, is it written? I think that for the Tatar intellectuals, whose task is not being, perhaps, in the very furnace of the struggle and not holding weapons in their hands, to analyze the Tatar “status quo” with the power of their knowledge and mind, to understand and determine what is the truth for the Tatars, what are the ways of gaining it. To find ways to remove obstacles in the way of the nation striving to preserve its original identity in time and space. To simply put it, the thinking part of the Tatar society should determine and suggest to the rest where the Tatars should move to. To answer the eternal existential questions of being: “What is happening? Who is guilty? What to do?”

The following is a direct quote from R. Aisin’s article,

“As soon as we built ourselves into the framework of the Moscow world, we collapsed first politically, and then ideologically. No culture saves. This is a postmodern whim, a trick in the form of an unequal exchange: you surrender your political and civilizational values to us, and we allow you to dance and sing in skullcaps, and sometimes groan with regret for the loss of past and epic conquests.

Having repeatedly written about the danger of exchanging freedom for stability, I read these lines of Aisin with an unpleasant and offensive feeling of awareness of their truthfulness.

The Tatars are good at “serving”, exchanging their executive initiative, discipline and reliability for the opportunity to build a cozy life, personal comfort, an orderly flow of material life.

The male desire for breakthroughs and overcoming difficulties is gradually disappearing. Explosions of the energy of overcoming difficulties are alien to the feminine principle in the Tatar mentality.

“This is what they treat us with, offering an imaginary stability of vegetation and withering in the face of the energy of awakening. It is better to sleep silently than to be actively awake. This is what the “grabbers of power, usurpers” are imposing on us,” writes R. Aisin.

Many years ago, in a popular science journal, the eloquent results of an experiment conducted with rats were published. Its essence is this. A rat was placed in a box divided into two unequal parts and provided with comfortable living conditions. Light, heat, food, water – live and enjoy your rat happiness. In the far corner of the living compartment there was a small hole through which it was possible  to crawl with great difficulty into the next compartment. And besides, crawling there, the rat got an electric shock. The female rat placed in the box, having explored a new habitat for itself and having got an electric discharge when trying to crawl into the neighboring compartment, calmed down and made no more attempts to penetrate there. But the male rat was never satisfied with satiety and warmth – it repeated attempts over and over again, until it penetrated into the second compartment of the box. The masculine principle did not allow it to calm down, it drove it forward, forcing it to take risks in order to search for new, even better conditions of existence.

R. Aisin rightfully used the opposition “male-female principle” in describing the metamorphoses of the Tatar mentality and identity. It is hard to disagree with him,

Tatars today noticeably lack masculinity in their thoughts and aspirations, and masculinity they have often ends up at the level of a city hooligan, capable of a young person`s triics at the level of “hitting the face of a stranger”, but not capable of expressing an open protest to the boss, authorities, gradually erasing the former Tatar essence – a persistent nomad warrior who despises comfort and chooses freedom.

The described processes are going on in the heads and hearts of the Tatars. It is difficult to control them, it is even more difficult to fight them, but the years spent by the authorities for the “modification” of the Tatar character are bearing their bitter fruit.

I want to finish with one more quote from Aisin’s article,

“There are nations who have gone into oblivion, forever swallowed up by sands, seas or forgotten by history. And we should keep this in mind! Leaving without a trace is not as unrealistic as it might seem. History is a tricky thing.

At the same time, the Tatars are the northernmost Muslim people. Nordic resistance and endurance in the most extreme conditions – this is what should characterize the Tatars. The North is a special existential path where comfort ends and freedom begins!

Will to power.”