Human memory is afflicted today with other things

Human memory, collective memory, is really a very interesting thing. It is not at all a remote possibility that people remember things en masse, and, again en masse, remember things and build upon them an excessive love or an excessive hatred and rage.

I did not say easy or difficult, you will notice, because it presumably is not so easy to pull off such an operation of forgetting, making forget, or remembering and reminding out of the blue, over something that does not exist at all. But seeing that absurd rememberings or forgettings can very often be shared collectively shows that it is a possibility that can always occur.

Sometimes, indeed often, there is nothing that is remembered; there can be something that is fabricated in consciousness on the assumption that it is remembered. The postmodern philosophers of history who first discovered that history is a body of knowledge reconstructed at every moment presumably meant exactly this. Thus history can turn into a field in which day-to-day operations of projection played upon consciousness take place.

What we should remember and what we should forget can thus be rendered meaningless by the games played on our day-to-day memory. The videos to which we are exposed every day through today's social media tools erode our memories to the point where no record takes hold, and the duration of what we remember from them has been reduced to the duration of writing on water.

According to one study, each of the short videos that flow past in a social media environment has brought the transitions in us between very different and opposed emotions down to under a minute. That is, within a minute we can make the transition from being on the verge of tears over a drama taking place at one end of the world to bursting into laughter, all at once, under the effect of the most absurd comedy clip.

This situation has the effect of thoroughly complicating and distorting our emotions. A terrible state of emotional disorder can gradually become our widespread character. In this way it ensures that we cannot settle on any emotion, and makes each of our emotions shallow, superficial and artificial. Under its influence, a mass forms that on the one hand acts on momentary feelings and on the other gradually sets reason aside.

Superficiality and shallowness are the defining character of this media environment. The medium is the message itself. Messages given with short-lived affects and reactions as their target have thus found their most ideal medium.

On the other hand, there are politicians who try to build politics on this situation. Those who want to form a mass out of this media environment and make that mass a part of their operations. Anyway, it hardly matters who actually says what or what they mean. No one is looking for consistency in anyone. No one is looking for meaning either. Show the reaction-worthy word from the reaction-worthy place, and let the troll armies go on the attack. What matters is to be able to create an energy from the reactions that arise. To produce a perception from this energy and a message from this perception. A reaction cannot be set in motion through thought, through meaningful words. It is these reactions, this lynching energy, that some people need.

In this environment, the intricate history of the single-party period would tax memory a bit too much; one has to go too far back, of course. Yet we are still living today in a condition in which what happened in that period has built our minds. Our complexes, our envy of others, our forgetting ourselves, our deepest loss of memory, our wronging ourselves all took place there. That is also where everyone knows but no one can voice, where those who try to speak fall silent or are silenced, where the skill of hiding great secrets is displayed. That is the time when our great traumas took place. Without confronting that time, without confronting that history in all its requirements, without settling accounts, we cannot grow up, we cannot overcome any of our complexes.

Today, some posts on social media bring up those experiences, those traumas, as flashes of memory. They come and go, flare and vanish, constantly disturbing.

On this occasion we understand once more that, in order to grow, in order to be able to rid ourselves of some of our discomforts, we need to go there, to turn to that, to confront what we lived through.

In the early days, hanging over those who opened the subject were laws and an authority as crude and as concrete as possible. Today the same crude authority is being set up and run through social media, with precisely the maximum capacity to produce pressure that this medium offers.

This pressure sometimes works positively to silence, but while silencing some, it also forces everyone else to confirm, to approve the authority, to speak. Just like the famous rule of fascism, most of the time fascism does not function as a force that silences; it forces everyone to speak in favor of the authority, to voice its ideology. Woe to the one who does not speak, does not applaud, does not pledge allegiance, does not agree to be the parrot of a nonsensical ideology.