Myth as a mean for quasine social identity forming
Abstract
It is stated that pro-Russian authorities in the occupied territories of Ukraine use distorted coverage of current social events, manipulation of historical facts, artificially created political, social, and cultural myths to form in the inhabitants of these regions, especially in the younger generation, such social identity, the content of which would be consistent with political Russia’s goals to destroy the identity of Ukrainian citizens and Ukraine’s demolition as a state. Due to the characteristics of myth as a tool for rapid information dissemination among the mass audience, for uniting people and relieving emotional tension, it is an effective sociopsychological mean of social processes’ managing, including purposeful social identity forming in a certain group of people. The results of content analysis of news texts on the pseudo-state of Luhansk People’s Republic’s Ministry of Education and Science website (2016-2019, 3750 information messages) show that the formation of consciousness of young citizens of the «republic» is mostly based on the former USSR myths, therefore, in essence, their social identity is quasine. Such identity performs the functions of children and youth socialization as loyal citizens of «young states», the older generation adaptation to the social situation changes (basically, to the conditions of war), explanation of the modern events meaning to the citizens themselves, creating of a positive image of the future. The realization of these tasks is impossible without a mythological interpretation of the historical past and present. The part of the news on the so-called LPR’s Ministry of Education and Science website, which contains various ideological guidelines of mythological orientation, makes on average a third of information messages. Conventionally, mythologies were classified into three types according to the focus on the formation in children and youth: 1) pro-Russian identity (25.97%); 2) the identity of the LPR’s citizen (17.12%); 3) militarized consciousness, disguised as their patriotic upbringing (56.91%) and primarily uses the theme of the Great Patriotic War
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