Stay in view of the free updates

Simply subscribe to policy Myft Digest – it is delivered directly to your inbox.

There is a scene installed in Bruno Montgon Documentary About Sviatoslav Richter in which the world -famous pianist spoke about the performance of Stalin in 1953. Richter was suddenly called, Reichter was transferred from the airport to play by the open coffin of the Soviet leader.

He complained that he had to destroy the result under the piano pedals to make them work and operate the subsequent orchestra of the sixth Chicovsky Satellonia with the military division outside the Shoban funeral. “The whole thing was disgusting.”

The musician, who lived in the entire Stalinist era, can spoil the importance of the dictator’s death showed an amazing indifference to worldly events. But this is consistent with the tradition of “internal migration” that developed in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as a mechanism of confrontation under totalitarianism. Unable to flee from their country, many migrated internally. For Reichter, his inner world was more important than the outside world; Eternal genius from Bach surpassed the temporary college of Stalin.

Richter may have been exceptional in his ability to control the outside world. But internal migration has returned to appearing in Russia today as an antidote to renewed authoritarianism. Also in many other countries, people seem to lose their interest in news, and they are deported from public life and give priority to the inner world. “I intend to migrate from the inside,” a republican for a long time. He wrote to the New York Times After the American presidential elections last year. “I find that this unprecedented decline in politics is necessary, but also sad.”

This desire to stop the operation is understood. There is a lot of bad news in the world: wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan, and the fateful height of nationalism and disaster that waves on the horizon to change climate. There is also the phenomenon of Donald Trump, which dominates air waves, not only in the United States but all over the world.

As the technician that turned into the phosphopher James Williams Books unabated, Trump is similar to “the refusal of the service distributed against the human will.” Just as infiltrators fill armies from robots to bomb websites to overcome them and make them useless, so Trump mastered “strategic distraction”.

In the United States, AP-NORC poll I was conducted in December I found that 65 percent of people felt the need to limit their consumption of political news due to increased pregnancy or fatigue. This trend was higher among Democrats (72 percent), who have just lost the presidential elections, from the victorious Republicans (59 %), which may be understood.

One of the differences today is to increase the size of news, speed and conquest, which makes escape more difficult. Social media is designed to be addictive and we left us. Anyone who is lost in the evening is born via Facebook, X, Tiktok and YouTube will know the feeling. Often, according to Search paper It was published last year in the journal of computers in human behavior, Doomscripling can lead to the feelings of “despair”, “impotence” and “existential anxiety”.

In his last book Superbloom: How communication technologies tear usNicholas Car warns of the dangers of “the time prepared, festival, saturated with information.” Our individual and collective dependence on social media, and the strong grip of giant technology companies, is now impossible to change the system. So our only hope for “salvation”, writes Car, lies in deliberate expulsion and standing on the edge of the flow of information. “If you do not live with your own code, you will live by someone else.”

Car has a point we must reduce distraction. But as someone working in a media organization, I have a clear interest in continuing to follow the news. And yes, the industry bears some responsibility for deterring readers through “if it bleeds, it leads” negative. However, it can be said that attention is the most expensive assets we have. We must pay at least some of them to follow the most important issues of the day.

It is understood that these, such as Reichter, who live under totalitarian regimes retreat to their inner worlds. But democracies depend on the active participation of the participating citizens, not just negative acceptance. Internal migration can turn into a dangerous escape, leaving the field open to extremists to exploit it.

john.thornhill@ft.com