Do you know this phrase? It can shut down any discussion, any dispute about freedom, rights, and common sense. As soon as an official says “we are protecting the children” — that’s it, the opponent already looks like a monster.
American scientists from the University of Texas at El Paso decided to test how this actually works. Not on the level of “well, everyone understands,” but in laboratory conditions, with control groups, numbers, and statistics. The results were frightening.
Take a bill limiting solitary confinement for teenagers. Give people the dry text. 75% support it. Now add the story of a girl named Rosemary, who committed suicide after six weeks in solitary. Support — 100%. Not 90%, not 95%, but 100%. Or take a law on alcohol monitoring for parolees. Without the story — 60% “for.” With the story of a deceased teenager — 80%.
And then comes the most interesting part. The scientists separated the variables: here is just the victim’s name in the title of the law, here is a story without a name, and here is both. Guess what worked? Of course, not the name, but the story. “The Vasily Pupkin Law” by itself achieves almost nothing. But a three-paragraph tear-jerker triggers the “I’ll sign anything, just do something” mode.
The mechanism is very primitive: take a tragedy, link it to any law you need, and voilà — the population’s critical thinking is completely switched off. Now let’s look at how this works in our case.
2012: Dima Yakovlev dies — a little boy adopted by Americans who died of heatstroke after being left in a car by his adoptive father. A terrible tragedy. At the same time, US authorities pass the “Magnitsky Act,” hitting the wallets of Russian security forces and officials. And to retaliate, the State Duma passes a law completely blocking Americans from adopting Russian orphans (including those who had already met their future adoptive parents). And they named this act of political revenge the “Dima Yakovlev Law.” It doesn’t increase oversight of adopters, it doesn’t reform the system; it simply closes the border to all American parents and thousands of children who could have actually found a family.
Why? “To protect children from violence.” Although anyone who has ever looked at statistics knows: the probability of violence in a Russian orphanage is orders of magnitude higher than in a European or American adoptive family. But who needs statistics when there is a dead boy and a beautiful name for a law?
Same year, 2012. A registry of banned websites appears. The formal goal is to protect children from suicidal content, drugs, and pornography. Who would argue? “What, you’re for child pornography?” — and that’s it, conversation over.
Then begins what we have all observed. Teenage problems didn’t go anywhere, but the Roskomnadzor registry, created “for children,” gradually, like a boa constrictor, swallows everything in sight: opposition websites, independent media, pages criticizing the government, Social Network X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, VPN services, and generally any thought that does not align with the party line. The mechanism is already tuned, the censorship infrastructure is built; all that’s left is to expand the list.
What is this all leading to? Bureaucracy does not know how to empathize. When the state weeps for victims from a podium, it is simply lubricating with tears the very bolt it intends to screw into your civil rights. Creating laws based on isolated, most emotional, and horrific cases (lawyers call these “hard cases”) is a direct road to totalitarianism. Empathy is a wonderful human quality, and that is exactly why we must protect it from the sweaty hands of politicians.
Next time you are asked to give up a piece of freedom, the privacy of correspondence, or the right to choose in the name of “safety” and the memory of another victim — turn your internal skeptic to the maximum. Because these laws will not help the dead in any way. But you and I will have to somehow live with this repressive creativity.
