An intriguing remark by the musician Shostakovich about life under Stalin, and why so many mediocrities rose to cultural prominence under the Soviets:
“Fiction triumphed because a man has no significance in a totalitarian state. The only thing that matters is the inexorable movement of the state mechanism. A mechanism needs only cogs. Stalin used to call all of us cogs. One cog does not differ from another, and cogs can easily replace one another. You can pick one out and say, ‘From this day you will be a genius cog,’ and everyone else will consider it a genius. It doesn’t matter at all whether it is or not. Anyone can become a genius on the orders of the leader.”[1]
Add the me-too mentality of those who want to be in the club — certain journalists, critics, socialites — who will join the chorus in celebrating the new artistic “genius.” Thus a self-reinforcing culture of the middling is born.*
Meanwhile, (1) those with real talent are marginalized, (2) the newly-anointed “geniuses” know to whom they are indebted for their celebrity, (3) the hangers-on obsequiously play along, and (4) the cultural leader consolidates his power. Ruling a herd of mediocrities is much easier than ruling independent individuals.
Sources: [1] Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New York: Harper and Row, 1979, pp. 211-212. The photos, via Wikipedia, show Stalin with a group of followers, one of whom was disappeared, both from life by execution and from the historical record by photographic manipulation. What the leader giveth, the leader can taketh away.
* Reminds me of Ellsworth Toohey’s strategy of promoting non-entities like Peter Keating and Lois Cook, as portrayed in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead.
Related: The original dictatorship-of-the-proletariat theorist, in the Philosophers, Explained series.
I think Rand’s identification of the principle of the “establishing of an establishment” extremely important and valuable.
It is widespread in our society. Having little expertise in the areas they propose to regulate and fund government officials typically turn to the accepted authorities in those fields for guidance: thereby consolidating the status quo and giving bad ideas and products, including artistic, a greatly extended lease on life, echoing the monopoly on the mind once enjoyed by the church. “To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors” said Jefferson, “is sinful and tyrannical.”
Today non-objective art, “experimental” “music”, etc., have become state funded status quos.
Government co-opting credentialing of professionals like doctors is creating new priesthoods immune to the challenges and correctives of competition, producing horrors like modern psychiatry which has appropriated and illegitimately medicalized the field of psychology with devastating consequences.
Reply
Read that Stalin “suggested” Russian composers compose like Tchaikovsky and Glinka. I happen to like both, but…
Reply
I think there are a lot of manipulations with Stalin’s name.If we talk about simple people like my father,he admired him his whole life and always said that modern politics lacks such leaders as Stalin who would organize all the chaos now.I also know that a famous Russian writer Valentin Rasputin supported Stalin as well.
Reply