At the heart of human existence is a passion to explore the unknown, to permanent search for truth. At every stage of life, we are on different levels of searching for the truth.
Halyna Kunashuk, Poltava:
People are free creatures. They can be restricted physically but not mentally. People are free in their thoughts, beliefs, emotions and desires. And it is important when we talk about deception and propaganda.
On whom can deception and propaganda work? Maybe it is right to say that those things can easily influence people who allow it to happen. A person who doesn’t want to be manipulated will do everything to be able to resist every manipulation. Such people try to develop their critical and analytic thinking, to understand the logical functioning of things.
Another point is a person`s awareness in all the key areas of life. If somebody doesn’t know some simple facts about governments, geography, physics, nature, relationships with different countries, it`s much easier to impose that person some false information.
However, the most important reason hides into our mentality and strong beliefs. If we speak about russians, they are brought up from birth in imperial values. And even small child starts thinking that Russia is a large and majestic country which has extremely influence on the whole world. They are just convinced that only one person knows a lot and he is always right – their “king”. And as “elder brother” they must control Ukrainians and other neighbor countries, and not only, as it’s their mission. We always believe in things that correspond to our beliefs. So all that propaganda is automatically taken as indisputable truth by russians.
People really are deceived, because they want it. They want to take lies as a truth, as they like it. Only self-control and analytic thinking can help a person to overcome this problem.
Mariia Ponomaryova, Germany:
“Cogito ergo sum” said a prominent phrase by René Descartes. Descartes called for the recognition of universal doubt. One can doubt everything—the existence of the external world, God, matter, etc., but the subject of reasoning cannot doubt his own existence, because if he does not exist, then who thinks?
At the heart of human existence is a passion to explore the unknown, to permanent search for truth. At every stage of life, we are on different levels of searching for the truth. In childhood, we try to understand why the sky is blue, in adolescence, why you cannot just take and print money from the poor, young people try to understand whether God is with us or not, and so on. However, there are external and internal factors that dull our intentions. The lack of critical thinking reduces all our aspirations to zero. It often happens that instead of checking the information, finding out the circumstances, a person chooses the easiest option—to believe in high-profile headlines, stories, full of distorted facts and manipulation. The content of these messages is always sound like manifestations, they are extremely sweet and easy to digest, they always divide the world only into black and white.
Of course, in this context, we must mention the people of the country, which has been at war with us for a month. Recent statistics say that 71 percent of Russians support the actions of their government, and more than 80 percent learn information from television. After such opinion polls, no one will hope for a mythical minority called the “good Russian”. They chose the path of the least resistance. Each of them acts both as a consumer of propaganda and its creator, a faceless cog in the service of the totalitarian machine.
I can say that the so-called “people” who live in the country we border on in the east, have been accustomed for generations to crawling in front of those who lie to them and exploit them, not daring to doubt its rhetoric. They legitimized a policy based on blood and deception, destroying all manifestations of human.
