Conversation two

E. Yasin: I do not believe that the society that is maturing today is very similar to the ideal. We need to figure out what's going on. It is important what problems it itself, this society, will face. I would call the structure of such a society network. This term allows me to clearly contrast two pictures: one is a network, the other is a hierarchy. Hierarchy is a symbol of traditional society - pre-capitalist plus Soviet, which, in fact, is also pre-capitalist. But the network society does not have to be called capitalist, that is, to say that its symbol is capital as an economic category of Marx’s research.

The network society will, of course, have its contradictions. For the first time, we were faced with the fact that financial flows on a global scale are not regulated by anyone; they are completely beyond the control of national governments, including the American one. The US has been saying for years that they have no regulation, that they are liberal... And all the problems arose on the periphery. And then the Asian crisis led to colossal capital flowing from emerging markets to the United States. And now the revaluation of NASDAQ companies and a deep correction plus the stupidity of Bush himself can turn into a big disaster.

In the global economy, we have a certain version of the network society, based on modern information technologies and extending mainly to the sphere of capital movement. In other areas, in the flow of people and other flows, it is much more limited by national boundaries, but capital moves quite freely. Therefore, I believe that the direction of development in the book is indicated correctly, and references to, say, insurance companies, pension funds, and so on, are all appropriate. All this, of course, provides a person with greater freedom, greater independence and opportunities for personal development, but at the same time it creates a whole bunch of problems.

For me the biggest problem is freedom. The more troubles there are, like the current crisis, the more freedom will be limited. And 9/11, protectionism, steel tariffs in the US, and so on - all this causes me very great concern.

Now about Russia. Of course, Russia is not ready today. I would really like to say that we are no worse than others. But the fact is that in reality we are in the second echelon.

Before the revolution, we had a traditional society. I was just now studying traditional Russian values, reading literature, and even prepared a list tablet. So, with such a value system, we are not ready to go online. For many reasons. We are not ready, say, to do business. Assets must be converted into capital. From this comes wealth. To do this, it is necessary for every person to sit and think: yes, I have an extra 5 rubles there - I need to invest them somewhere. But we don’t have such a thought. Only for very rich people who have already decided that this will be the source of their existence.

The moral code of building communism and the values ​​that were brought up by the Orthodox Church are surprisingly similar and do not contribute to the development of business and freedom. However, in Russia values ​​change, and quite quickly. Thriving in a networked society requires people to be active.

I agree that disruptors play a central role in development. I would introduce one important factor - uncertainty. It always exists, and people who can be called violators can act within the framework of existing rules, falling into unexplored, unreached niches. They take advantage of this uncertainty, which plays an important role in the realization of freedom. The entire democratic system is truly structured this way. Uncertainty is not aimed at finding optimal solutions, but at generating new approaches and solutions. Nobody wants authoritarianism. Nobody wants to restore the vertical power structure. I even think that Putin doesn’t really want it either. He uses some words that for him do not have the meaning that we later assign: “the rule of law” or “the vertical of power”...

But he showed himself as a person who can do anything. And he is the final authority. And then the lobbying begins. For example, in the alternative civil service. For example, Ivanov comes and says: “How can this be? Let them serve.” Putin gives the order - and everything works out as it should. Then the very liberal Kudrin comes and says: “Listen, on the taxation of small businesses they have raised the bar so high! Let’s lower it, otherwise we won’t collect anything.” And Putin replies: “Okay, go ahead.” He said the last word! So he didn’t ask Kudrin to come to him. He did not ask Ivanov to come. Finally, some Petrov appears: “Why would I go to the president? Whatever happens, it will work out! We have enough strength, we will pass this law.” And he does, but Putin thinks: “Why didn’t Petrov come to me? One came, another came, but he didn’t come...”

Firstly, there must be a king, and secondly, we will educate him ourselves, in our own way, as best we can, don’t worry. These mechanisms worry me, because the further path is again the emergence of hierarchy, and in modern society this is like death. We again find ourselves on the sidelines of development, and, unfortunately, there is still a lot of work to do.

A. Asmolov: Let's try to look at this book as a kind of another genre that was once called philosophical letters and belonged to a man who was, as we all know, a bit of a liberal. I'm talking about Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev. The important thing is that at some stage in history people begin who do not create an anti-culture, but build other worlds, other logics, other cultures. The richness of the proposed ideology is that it is not built on the principle of a gaming society against an information society or one world against another. All these alternative systems into which we have fallen due to the cunning slavery of faith and passion, all these again oppositional or binary logics are traps. And the logic of "order - violation" is one of those things where the proposed idea does not fit, so I do not accept the term "disturber".

This book is an out-of-system book, and what is the value of being out-of-system? So we begin to say: our society is post-industrial, our society is postmodern. And you can screw it up, screw it up. Our society is totalitarian or civil, our society is totalitarian or democratic, totalitarian or liberal. We drive ourselves into the power of stereotypes.

People are born who are better not to be called violators, but by the good old funny term - troublemakers. And the genre of disturbance of calm is an absolutely special genre. The intruder is a special case of this logic. Unsystematicity is broader than violation. People appear who determine the evolutionary paths of development, who one way or another say: here is one narrow-gauge railway, here is another narrow-gauge railway, they exist, we do not argue, but there is also something else.

What is being proposed is a spinal hypnosis disorder. What is back hypnosis? When one person runs after another and tries to either catch up with him or overtake him. He sees the back of a running man in front of him and does not see other roads of history. To catch up and overtake America, to catch up and overtake democratic countries, countries of civil society. Or maybe there are some completely different ones that we don’t even think about today? Hence, thinking about the unthinkable - this is the genre that is incredibly important today.

It is no coincidence that the word “metaphor” is used here. It is no coincidence that the world of the game emerges, generating its own special logics. According to Lotman, the main engine of cultural development is the mechanisms for generating uncertainty. If there are mechanisms for generating uncertainty, the range of which either expands or contracts depending on the existing government, then these mechanisms help determine and understand how ready a culture is for crises, changes, and conflicts. If there is complete leveling in a culture, then it quickly breaks down and, like any totalitarian culture - Egypt, the fascist Reich, the Soviet system - leaves the arena of history. But if the metaphorical nature is sufficient, if the indefinability is sufficient, if there is enough (very precisely here - and it is very joyful that the idea of ​​anarchism emerges in a different way) anarchism as a line of possibility of freedom for man and society, then culture has a chance for further development, which again There is no need to solder into the concept of progress or regression.

Culture has no stops, no progress, no regressions; culture has a set of different logics. The uncertainty gives rise to several figures. These are the figures of a trickster, a jester, a dissident, a violator, one of these figures is the figure of a holy fool, if we take religious traditions. In this regard, indeed, both poets and politicians often act as people exposing this system, perhaps in different ways.

The offender always questioned the existing system, the entire real system. But who doesn't bet? He questions the modern style of thinking, which is much more important. He is building his own culture of thinking, which belongs to him as his sovereign territory, from where he can attack anyone and however he wants. Another thing, much more complex and associated with clownish, funny truths, is an attempt to construct a different reality.

E. Yasin: As a person who worked closely with simulation games, I can say that I left this field with deep disappointment. Of course, you can imagine society as a kind of game model, in such a set-theoretic, mathematical sense, but at the same time I have the feeling that the game itself is a very good model for education. And it’s completely unsuitable for making any decisions. Soros wrote about the principle of reflexivity. This principle confuses everything and it turns out that we are not able to predict anything. The game as an instrument is good only for a purely theoretical description. The network also has a set-theoretic justification; it is a very clear model that distinguishes the market as a network, contracts as certain nodes, mutual links, mutual obligations, etc.

A. Asmolov: A cultural expert will come and say: sorry, this is my territory. A theater expert will come and say - this is my territory. A mathematician will say - only I am a specialist in game theory. But here we are not talking about that game, and not about this one, and not about play as the leading activity of a child’s development. No. This is a game for the sake of playing. Unlike any other motivational activity, playing for the sake of playing is a unique system of construction and the same uncertainty. The school of variability, the school of uncertainty is the school of a gaming society in which we can only move.

How would a person differ from an animal if he needed only what was necessary and nothing superfluous? Therefore, play is akin to redundancy, play is akin to uncertainty. We do not know what the society of the future will be like, but that it will be a society playing with uncertainties is certain. I don’t want to call him civilian, so as not to slide into another stereotype later. I don't want to call it Protestant, Catholic, or information, or cybernetic. I would just add that I would like us to pay more attention to the need to play with the concept of communication, because the gaming society is a communication society.

E. Yasin: In general, I believe that a truly market economy is only now beginning to develop. 19th century capitalism is something completely different. The neoconservative wave, Thatcher, Reagan and so on, is a kind of new quality. Fundamentally new opportunities have emerged for society.

The thesis that poetry determines knowledge and what will happen in life for 100 years is very meaningful. Yes, poets have epiphanies; imaginative thinking in this regard has enormous advantages. But I proceed from the fact that after real relations change, institutions begin to change, then values ​​change and language changes. Language is also an institution, and its vocabulary begins to expand. Every time we are faced with the fact that some words appear in the language that seem to be able to be said in Russian, but more precisely in English. It’s better to take the English version, use it without translating it and understand exactly what you need, and not as approximately as it is in Russian.

What, most importantly, could be the insight of the poets? It is to see a radical turn in relationships, in role settings. After this, the system, its social part, develops according to its own laws. Poets introduce some changes that create a new genotype. In torment, contradictions, clashes. We are witnesses of all this. In this sense, there is a certain logic for me.

We are strongly constrained by conservative values, we are non-acquisitive, we are unattainable, immobile, contemplative.

In fact, everything is changing, changing before our eyes. Firstly, the 20th century: twice in Russia there was a radical breakdown of institutions. They say that formal institutions broke down, while informal ones remained. Yes, this is correct, but informal ones simply change more slowly. However, there are signs of change. For example, the number of appeals to court increased 21 times from 92 to 2001. Everyone keeps saying that the court is no good, the judges are corrupt, but they still go to court. And more and more people prefer to go to court instead of punching people in the face and shooting with a sawn-off shotgun.

Liberalization and the dismantling of the hierarchical planned delivery and distribution system have changed relationships between people. Accordingly, values ​​will change. The criteria for success are already changing.

The liberal formulates a system of values ​​that he believes we must adopt in order to successfully develop, well, in general, close to the Protestant ethic. And his opponent, a conservative, says that the Protestant ethic is bad because it encourages human selfishness, a person begins to worship himself, and so on and so forth. But, in fact, they agree on the main thing! Both agree that the value system cannot be changed. This is a given, this is the character of the people. And the liberal doesn’t say how to introduce these Protestant values, and the conservative doesn’t say, naturally, because he believes that everything should remain as it was, and even need to be turned back. But I don’t agree with either one, I think that slowly but surely, if relationships change, everything else will change. And the language. And the language of management, and the language of business, and the language of poetry.

I can give one example - this is Japan, which is always cited as the immutability of institutions. Yes, they used traditional culture, and now they have just come to the very moment when the old schemes do not work, when the scheme of collective agreement does not work. Young people don’t want to become workaholics, they want freedom. They have a crisis of transition from an industrial society to a new one. So they realized the advantages of industrialization when it was still possible to use old values, because the conveyor belt is a period in the development of capitalism when feudal remnants are highly valued, and then...

E. Penskaya: The question of language seems fundamental to me - both for the author and for our conversations around the book. The important thing is that the Russian government begins the construction of a new image by mastering a new vocabulary, rejecting the old one. This is generally a very Russian trait - to start each time anew, with a clean slate, abandoning previous experience. B.N. Chicherin said that in Russian history there are so many beginnings, no matter how many times the new government embarked on reforms, Russian history with its entire structure is doomed to begin a “zero cycle” at each new turn, which does not at all imply any continuity or motivation. Let me remind you that in the absence of cause-and-effect relationships, logic and sequence of development, V.O. Klyuchevsky also saw one of the grounds for political and cultural absurdity that defies rational explanation. In this regard, V.O. Klyuchevsky analyzes the semantics of the political transformations of the Peter the Great era and notes that it is no coincidence that the “zero cycle” of the new era began with a powerful linguistic breakdown. “Russia was pregnant with a new language,” and Peter accelerated the process of its birth by aggressively implementing his program. The almost forced involvement of an entire army of translators, the massive “throwing in” of translated texts at that time was akin to a military campaign and had an absolutely revolutionary effect on Russian society.

Since then, the Russian social structure has reproduced this situation with a regularity of repeating absurdity, resolving the problem of establishing a regular state.

The end of the 1980s - 2000s showed that the question of whether the Russian literary language is alive or dead was not of academic significance, but quite relevant. The media of that time are living evidence of this complete linguistic bacchanalia, when the thieves' layers of language, which broke the prohibitions, mixed with forms frozen in the post-war Stalinist codification. There was simply no language. The situation turned out to be completely Peter the Great. The then (and in journalism often the current New Russian literary language) was a wild mixture of archaism and foreign jargon. In building from scratch (and the next round of Russian history usually takes nothing but scratch into inheritance - neither mental paradigms, nor corporate spirit), of course, each time there is its own charm, because the poverty of the heritage is happily compensated by the spirit of freedom.

In fact, the spirit of newly discovered freedom stimulated the return of the “Petrine project” in the last decade - hastily filling the gaps, the Russian mental market began to absorb translations, hastily digesting and not having time to digest what in Western culture was the day before yesterday. The gap of more than half a century and the belated - hasty, hasty - assimilation of other people's experiences have again doomed us to a cultural race, chasing after a long-gone train.

The results and consequences of these meetings and clashes, in my opinion, have not yet been seriously comprehended anywhere or by anyone.

In this sense, it seems to me no coincidence that in the book, among the many names, two names - Huizinga and Ortega y Gasset - can be classified as “aporia”. It is no coincidence that some fundamental series is revealed here: “Power is disgusting”, “Homo ludens”, “Revolt of the Masses” - these are books that are, first of all, an action, an act. The mechanisms of this act are social in nature.

The essay “The Revolt of the Masses,” published in 1930, immediately placed Ortega on a par with Spengler and Croce. But the fate of his ideas is completely ambiguous. This is not the place to talk about it. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the cohort of those who did not accept this text believes that the philosopher was primarily a poet and the “Revolt of the Masses” was an extremely unsuccessful gesture, in essence, a failure of the thinker. It is believed that, after all, the main guarantee of Ortega’s success is the plastic, strange, incredibly concentrated language in which he thought about Spain: “On the left hand, far, far away, the Segovian Cathedral floats across the yellow wheat, like a huge mystical dreadnought, which with its massiveness nullifies the rest of the city. Now it seems olive and dissects the wheat waves with its apses. In its arches, as if in a ship's rigging, shreds of blue shine through..." (translated by A. Geleskul).

The fate of almost all of Huizinga’s works is no coincidence. Remember? His subject matter and approach to historical material are so unconventional, there is so much lively story, living thought, interruptions, analogies, escapades, associations in them, so little is said about methodology and evidence - that in the shortest possible time his work, translated into many languages ​​of the world, aroused the sharpest criticism from a variety of sides - from representatives of strict science to specialists, professionals in a variety of fields (“It’s a luxurious thing,” noted one of the colleagues, “just don’t think that it’s about history”).

When Huizinga was being prepared for republication in Italy in 1974, the translator and compiler Ovid Capitani was cautious: would it seem strange to offer it again to the public thirty-six years later? Wouldn't the publication of his actual historiographical concepts today look like a provocation?

Huizinga came out even later, in 1992. Exactly 10 years have passed since then. But no matter how all this is perceived today, no matter what aberrations occur, it is important to note: both “Power” and “Man Playing” and “Revolt of the Masses” have some similar impulses hidden in the text: Huizinga and Ortega is fear, horror of the impending nightmare of fascism. Huizinga was still guessing a lot, Ortega knew, saw, tested with his own skin. Saburov may be one of the last - of the same caliber. He has seen and knows things that are difficult to name; he has been where it is pitch black. And we, readers, sometimes can only guess what is being said. There is its own pain, its own “documentation”, which only language reveals. The author blurts out several times: tired. “Power is disgusting” is a find in the literal sense, it is a tired sentence, an end, a break in speech. What's next? Is a continuation possible?

A. Asmolov: The fact that the idea of ​​language comes to the fore here is very important. And language appears as what really, according to the hypothesis of determinism, determines consciousness. The analysis of language to understand what society does is brilliantly done in the work of Klimperi, which he wrote over the course of 3 years, when, pretending to be a docker, he became a loader for the Nazis. He recorded in detail the language changes that the Third Reich imposed.

Therefore, when someone is “pissed in the toilet”, when we do not understand that by using certain vocabulary we thereby create consciousness, this is symptomatic. And yet, thoughts are generated by the word, but do not fit into it. This is a very difficult transition. I would be much more careful here.

E. Penskaya: Let me remind you that the Latin word “order” has two meanings - “order” and “threat”. Roman Jakobson accurately showed that any language is determined not only by what it allows the speaker to say, but by what it seems to force him to say. Language is converted into real action, the consequences of which the author calculates.

The book Power Is Abominable contains a number of twentieth-century definitions. What he? What will remain? Is it possible to derive the formula?

And here, in these classifications of the “consequences of history,” another very clear dialogue with Mandelstam takes place. Remember how suddenly, sharply and piercingly the portrait of the century suddenly grew in Mandelstam’s speech: “the gigantic wings of the nineteenth century are its cognitive powers... Like a huge Cyclopean eye, the cognitive ability of the nineteenth century is turned to the past and to the future. Nothing but sight, empty and predatory, with equal greed devouring any object, any era... The past century did not like to talk about itself in the first person, but it loved to project itself on the screen of other people's eras... With its sleepless thought, like a huge crazy spotlight, it scattered across the black sky of history; rummaged with giant tentacles of light in the void of time; snatched this or that piece from the darkness, burned it with the dazzling brilliance of historical laws and indifferently allowed it to plunge back into insignificance, as if nothing had happened... And all the sciences rummaged together the starless sky with its methodological tentacles, meeting no resistance in the soft, abstract emptiness..." Or again: "the rusty language of the eighteenth century"... - this is the key of the era. It seems to me that Mandelstam very accurately guessed one of the key and most dramatic properties of the twentieth century. Overcoming the pull of the earth, its power, is the essence of the twentieth century.

In fact, when the memory cools and the wounds stop stinging, when Joyce and Platonov are read as Sophocles and Lucian are today, the twentieth century will be spoken of as an era when, for the first time in the history of mankind, the number of workers on earth decreased sharply. Revolutionary changes in man's relationship with the earth have influenced the millennia-old ratio in the reproduction of Homo sapiens. And never in history has the connection between man and the earth been as important to man as it is today. By inertia, we continue to evaluate economic development by the growth of the gross national product, measure personal well-being in dollars and rubles, and argue whether the “information economy” has taken the place of “heavy industry.” Meanwhile, modern civilization, as a result of changed relations with the earth, has become more fragile, vulnerable and much more dependent on a myriad of subtle political, social, economic connections within each society.

Here, it seems to me, lies one of the fundamental paradoxes of the century.

Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, agricultural productivity and harvests seemed to constantly increase, while the percentage of the population living off the land decreased. For example, in the West, the share of farmers in the political process has changed proportionally. Farmers are now an almost disappearing category. A lot has been written about this. Whether here in Russia or there, the departure of an entire layer meant, not least of all, powerful, irreversible changes in the noosphere.

In this regard, let me remind you of the long-standing “rice war” between Japan and the United States - a long time ago, approximately in the 1980s. At that time, American rice was much cheaper than Japanese rice, but the Japanese government categorically refused to open the domestic market for rice imports. We are an island, they said, and we cannot leave the basis of our existence to the elements of the market, although they agreed that Japanese agriculture was unprofitable. Were the Japanese right to insist that the foundations of civilization lie outside the economic sphere? It seems that the orthodox market approach is just as unproductive and dangerous for society as autarky. It abolishes the hierarchy of values, breaks the life-giving connection between the economy and its cultural basis and - in theory - is fraught with social chaos. And in the then clash between Japan and the United States, a conflict emerged between two different worldviews, two philosophies of life. At the same time, the Japanese side - in an implicit form - put forward another fundamental premise: maybe the whole point of industrial development is to allow society to maintain and strengthen its own security - biological, cultural, political?

And now, when the gaps and ozone holes in the noosphere are really acutely noticeable, perhaps the protective and restoration resources really are located on the territory of the “educational colony”? In this logic, for me it is simply necessary.

E. Yasin: As for the idea that you can tell from the works of poets what the next century will be like, I didn’t understand it, to be honest. I just don’t know poetry well, maybe... Some logical content of Khlebnikov - I agree, yes, it can help. I don't mind, it's an original idea. I have always been inclined to believe that intuition and imagery are a method of cognition that is in no way inferior to the rational. Anticipation of something - it can be more important than logic.

A. Asmolov: Several heroes are fighting in the logic of the development of society. On the role of poets. I completely agree that these are pioneers - not because they are conformists, but because poets come up with things that scientists never dreamed of. Poets are filled with non-systematicity, if they are poets, of course. Mandelstam divides poets into two categories - meaning-makers and meaning-makers. Here is Bryusov - he is a signifier, and I, says Mandelstam, am a semanticist, I generate meanings, and not some kind of formal structures. By the way, why did the author attack structures? And so lovingly, as if we were talking about a beloved woman, forgive the association. There is no point in laughing at psychology, considering that in psychology a structure is a static image. There is no structure-process opposition. A frozen structure is not a structure - it is a parody.

From the point of view of the historical-evolutionary approach, the tendency towards stabilization and the tendency towards change always collide, and this dynamic is three-stage. If we talk about development, then there is always system dynamics in culture. To disturb the system, a trickster, for example, Marat, comes and begins to rock it. This is the first phase in the development of the system. But to help him make changes and make them stronger, Robespierre appears. But Robespierre is not eternal, in the end, because Napoleon continues his work. And it is such phase dynamics - Marat, Robespierre, Napoleon, namely variability, and after it violent introduction and then again a return to stabilization that determines power.

E. Penskaya: In language, slavery and power are intertwined, paradoxically. And if we call freedom not only the ability to escape from under any power, but also, above all, the ability not to put pressure on anyone, not to suppress, then this means that freedom is possible, as it were, outside of language, without language. And this means a dead end, hopelessness, a kind of closed space. I think that the book itself is a very strange, very surprising, interesting case of working with language in the first place. And here, in this junction of forms, sketches, ideas, sketches of ideas, some kind of rough plasticity, I would say, there is some kind of game, cunning, some kind of brilliant deception or something, which allows you to hear the sound of a powerless language. Behind it, as I said at the beginning, is experience. The real experience of a poet and politician.

But in connection with what Evgeniy Grigorievich said, I have a question. What do you think is the structure of corporations and, in general, the role of corporations in the Western, American economy today? And how do you assess the prospects for such a transposition of corporations into our Russian one?

E. Yasin: All these problems with corporations in America now are simply due to their inflated arrogance. We are the smartest because we are the richest. Just like our oligarchs. People are going crazy because everything seems to be working out for them. Then suddenly it turned out that not everything was working out, it turned out that the most inflated guys had not counted the money. It all started to come out, and eventually scandals began. I don't see anything wrong with this. Maybe because I'm old?

It is important from my point of view that the corporation as such, with rare exceptions, does not belong to the network society. They are growing fragments that have the properties of crystals that attract everything around them. And they are, first of all, fragments of a hierarchical structure. Corporations really want to change themselves, and there are such experiences in the USA, Hong Kong, and Japan. Network companies are completely different; they cannot even be called truly corporations, because there are no subordinate structures. There is no leader, no master, who, like Khodorkovsky, for example, would completely control this entire structure.

But still, basically, corporations are hierarchical structures. What is a network? The network is the market. But there were predictions at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries that in the end everything would turn into a giant monopoly. So, this monopoly was realized only in one country, in our great power. Remember, a single national economic complex?

Small firms, if society somehow protects them from the aggressive tendencies of monopolies, if they are sufficiently protected by law, very often turn out to be more effective from an economic point of view than bulky heaps. They are precisely the point where innovation occurs.

All violators, to use the terminology of the book, do not appear in corporations. A corporation is a concentration of capital, it is a concentration of people who are able to carry out certain projects according to certain rules. These are business projects where a certain organization of a large number of people reigns to solve some problem of mass production.

But corporations are resilient because only they can implement the ideas of disruptive inventors. But they cannot invent. The inventor of the personal computer worked at the Macintosh company when this small company was located literally in a barn. But when Macintosh began to turn into the same company, the guy-inventor left. Somewhere else, something else to create.

The most important advantages of America include not only the fact that they sooner or later grab the hand of dishonest auditors, but also the fact that this spirit of “do it yourself,” “invent it yourself,” is alive among them. The spirit of entrepreneurship is very important!

The island corporations strive to expand, to interlock, so that everything ossifies. And the opposite trend is that the currents wash away the shore, and it turns out that corporations are not able to cope with this, so to speak, pot-bellied little thing.

On a national scale, national government institutions act against corporations - the government, parliaments, laws, and so on. But on a global scale this does not work. This is the contradiction. It arises because small businesses also work at the global level and enjoy the benefits, but they cannot create something like this without large corporations. Therefore, so to speak, on the one hand, the idea of ​​anarchy is confirmed, on the other hand, this is an eternal struggle, we only dream of peace.

The big question for me is whether it is necessary to talk about education in this context. Isn’t this in the book a consequence of the author’s personal experience, which is not at all dictated by the logic of the book?

E. Yasin: It seems to me that things related to education are most valuable for the book precisely because education is the design of reality. I would be even more harsh about the system of the respected John Amos Comenius. What is the Comenius system? This is a factory of mass education, this is a factory of the average personality. The emerging production of the post-medieval period provided the model for such a factory, and we are slaves to this formation. And it doesn't matter what happened next. You can argue with Pestalozzi, you can argue with Rousseau and so on, but they all remained in the slavery of Comenius. It is known that the greatness of a scientist is determined by the extent to which he delayed the development of science. This is the greatness of Comenius; it is difficult to overestimate him for education... For all its categoricalness, the book is too careful about Comenius’ system. They say: there is not a rigid alternative, but opportunities

Outside the system. Many things are burning and collapsing today. The first is that the logic of binary oppositions is on fire, our thinking moves away from this. The second is Aristotle, who proposed formal logic, and today it, just like Comenius’ system, seems to us to be something natural, as natural as the color of eyes, hair, etc., but this is not so. Any logic is a cultural invention, any logic is a cultural tool. Here, too, is an attempt to make a cultural tool.

Think about what we are being called to? To very simple things - to reflection, to alienation, and I would even say - to defamiliarization and even detachment. Let's think about the topic of liberalism and anarchism. Our generation sees anarchists in Soviet films: drunkards and bandits with a cigarette in their teeth. But in fact, the best work that could say a lot about economics today was written by an anarchist. This work is called "Mutual assistance in the world of people and animals as a factor of evolution." And this work was written by Kropotkin. He said: what are you talking about? do you build all systems on conflicts?! Conflict is one of the ways of development. Synergy, mutual assistance, interaction, said the anarchist Kropotkin, is another way of development. You see, this means that conflict is not discarded, it’s just that mutual assistance also acts as a driving force.

It’s not just words, but neoideologemes that take possession of us. We are slaves of three great conflict experts. The first name is Charles Darwin. Only on the basis of the death of one species will another species survive. Darwin's entire ideology boils down to the formula - the survivor survives. But essentially the book states that you cannot work with such simple schemes. Darwin is infinitely systematic, he does not see the non-systematic, does not see its role in evolution, does not see what the anarchist Kropotkin sees. However, following Darwin, Kropotkin also says: only conflict and antagonism of classes is effective. On the blood of one class, another will grow as opposition. Again, look how amazingly systematic everything is. Where is the non-systematic nature? Where is the alternative to homeostasis? Where is the violation of the idea of ​​balance? Where is what is called - after Vavilov - pre-adaptation? When non-systemic forms appear, which will then determine development.

It's the same in society. Conflictologist of the Marx Society. Now everyone is a conflictologist, and they are all Marxists. What a horror! That's how they fight. And education is made competitive. This is where I have a very difficult time with competition. And finally, the third conflictologist who prevents us from seeing non-systemic forms is Sigmund Freud. From the conflict between “I” and “It” jealousy is born.

If we look at the world in reflection through alienation, through detachment and defamiliarization, then we see other realities. And the reality of anarchism is in a completely different form. You make yourself.

I would be afraid to call what is described anarchism, I don’t know what it is. It is very difficult to work with the language. Marked with a word - became a slave. You have to be very careful with the topic.

E. Yasin: After all, a game, a myth, a ritual - this is a new area for me. I don’t really know, so to speak, this terminology and, most importantly, the meaning of this drama. I can only say that recently I was interested, somehow it happened by chance, because I was trying to understand why the Orthodox religion is not combined with liberal values, and I came across the fact that, it turns out, Orthodoxy has a world mission, which is that she is the keeper of patristic tradition. I became interested in what it was and discovered that it was very similar to Marxism. I thought that the Russian Marxists were all very Orthodox. Because they carried Marx, as this patristic tradition, “Source”, and this is a pure ritual, nothing more. Since I was quite experienced in Marxism, I simply gasped: how is this? This means there is nothing new under the sun, it’s all already happened. And it turns out that we, Russians, are called upon to do just that throughout the world, to preserve and refer to them. God forbid you think about something on your own!

E. Penskaya: The system of evidence in the book, or rather its absence, seems symptomatic to me.

E. Yasin: I think so, as my old friend said: the evidence is humiliating. What for? Thought abandoned. This book does not suggest that you need to prove anything. The author writes what he thinks. Well, if you want, prove it; if you don’t, don’t. But the idea is original. For example, the author says that Hollywood played a huge role in our economy in the 1990s. In fact, Hollywood films change our consciousness. It would be nice if they formed our legal consciousness. Because the appearance of a businessman in general or a free person is one thing, and “New Centurions” is another thing; I don’t know whether you remember such a film or not. It shows people who are dedicated to a society that fights crime as heroes.

Let's say, you can ask me: how to defeat corruption in Russia? How to create the kind of system that now exists in America or Europe, where the law is the law and you must respect it - and everyone understands that this is in the public interest? Where does it come from? But because there were such centurions. Are they limited? Ugly? Are they in trouble? But they performed this function. And American cinema is the most ideological cinema in the world.

E. Penskaya: Well, this is very interesting...

E. Yasin: Well, just don’t need to prove it. The evidence is humiliating. This is a mystery, absolutely Hollywood. But there is no mysticism in this mystery. I am a rational person, I find it difficult to perceive: myth, mysticism. I read about conciliarity from Berdyaev. He wrote what it is. This is my feeling of guilt and responsibility for everyone. And then there are some words about love. And just at this moment, since I am from a different time, I sag. And after that he says that it’s me, this is me, it’s me who has to save everyone!

A. Asmolov: Why am I offended? The book is called "Power is disgusting." Mandelstam's brilliant, polyphonic lines give meaning to this title. But the book is not only about the idea of ​​power. Power plays an important character here, but the drama is so much broader, so much bigger! The title works like Kashpirovsky from the very beginning. He says: I give you instructions - power is disgusting. And everyone is waiting for another dissident to appear. But what kind of dissident? There is no dissident here, no violator, but there is a constructor of other logics, and here everything does not come down to power.

And I don’t agree with you, Evgeniy Grigorievich, about the alienness of the chapters on education. This is not an excess of education in a book - it is an excess of education for a person. Any economists are so ruthless about education that for them the very mention of it evokes painful associations. They also say: Lord, now we are moving towards the market, and therefore education must respond to the market. This is complete crap, excuse the term. Because education is redundant in relation to any market. Education is universal, education is fundamental, education is cultural, and if we want to have a gaming society and gaming models for the development of education, it means that we want to cultivate cultural, free individuals, and not individuals where the child is a reaper, the child is a gamer, the child is like an ant , and not just an ant, but a queen ant, a worker ant, etc. Today, some economists are imposing adaptive models of education on the world. I say again, I stand on the position of pre-adaptation, anti-homeostasis, and thus all the adaptive models that many economists build and which lead to the fact that education ends up in the dustbin of their thinking raise a serious question for me.

Academician Kolmogorov said that solving a problem is turning the problem around. Here the task revolves, the task of generating different logics of thinking. And this is something for which it is worth talking, talking and at the same time remaining in front of a mystery.

I kept thinking how different the logic of tolerance is from binary logics. Tolerance removes opposition, tolerance creates a space of thinking where compromise becomes productive. We are faced with three types of conflict of sociology, psychology and biology. And the sister of conflict is balance, the sister of conflict is stress. Because today we are driven into a three-membered scheme. The first phase is anxiety, the second phase is mobilization, the third is relaxation. Singers and masters of adaptation sing the praises of balance and stability. Today I am this way, tomorrow I am that way, but I have an excuse - a pragmatic effect.

I am not against stability, I am against considering this reality as what development strives for. Education through play acts as a way to achieve personal and professional success. Filter theory actually shows that education is a game of success and luck and a path to achievement in life. After all, what is the path of life? The brilliantly stated formula - the path of life - is the story of rejected and invented alternatives. And in this sense the game helps. It is initially pre-adaptive and therefore opposes conflictological models.