Thoughts for the night looking

How to live, what to hope for and what to believe if the world is about to explode

Friends say that in South Korea in recent days the platforms of commuter trains have been empty, the carriages are half empty, and people have been seized by some strange absent-mindedness - they forget and lose everything in a row. South Korea is a small country, over which a real threat now hangs from two sides: either your brothers-enemies will strike, or your friends-allies. On the one hand, it is rather difficult for me to imagine the feelings of Koreans - I have never had such experiences in my life, well, maybe a couple of times in a dream. On the other hand, after Chernobyl, which was back in 1986, it became clear to everyone, including me, what kind of world we actually live in.

Today there is a feeling that this world is collapsing again - at the behest of a few people. What to do? Rely on the will of Putin, Trump and Kim Jong-un? Or those who control suicide bombers? No! Koreans in the South go out to mass rallies and demonstrations for any reason. And they do it right. Because in today's situation it is important not to be afraid to put forward your demands to presumptuous or simply insufficiently competent authorities. Protest and solidarity increase self-esteem and self-organization.

RUSSIA AND MIND

Another question is whether this recommendation applies to Russia? Hardly. In Russia, everyone dies alone (even if it is obvious: there are only 200 km from Pyongyang to the Russian border, and if something happens, you won’t be able to die alone).

In the Russian state (and even in the USSR at all) there is such a long tradition - not to feel sorry for your own population. From mass deportations (by the way, before the war, tens of thousands of Koreans were resettled from the Korean-Soviet border to Kazakhstan) to the readiness to drive people to a demonstration under radiation, as was the case after Chernobyl, when everyone already knew that a mortal invisible danger was hanging over them - we have this practice is common and only confirmed from year to year. Do you need to kill ten terrorists? Well, then you don't feel sorry for two, three, five hundred children and women - in the theater, at school, on the bus. Therefore, the majority of the Russian population - in the spirit of traditional Soviet pragmatics - would rather spit on the truthful information from the Korean Peninsula than demand publicity. The human mind still exists, of course, it just goes around the borders of our state for some reason: it knows that it is not in demand, apparently.

OLD AND NEW

Speaking about the collapsing world, I would not bury the old rules of human society. On the contrary, they just work, but in the new circumstances it is not so easy for them to work. No one in the West and in the East expected that the esoteric ideology of the revival of a great empire would force the seemingly sane leaders of the Russian Federation to seize Crimea and launch an offensive against the Donbass by the forces of some gangs. When this happened, as a sign of immense respect for the sacrifices made by the former USSR, all the countries of the developed world - from Australia to Japan - declared that such an annexationist policy was out of the rules, that the Russian Federation was faced with the task of returning to a reasonable agenda. And since our leadership and the misled population did not understand this the first time, sanctions began, then anti-sanctions. But if the international community took action within the framework of reasonable pragmatics, then the leadership of the still young post-Soviet state took action within the framework of teenage resentment.

It is clear that the return of Russian policy to a reasonable course will require a complete change of the executive, legislative and judicial authorities, and this is unlikely to happen quickly. But the main problem is that the population itself has not yet matured before such changes, living in captivity of conspiracy theories, their own phobias and formulas of life, which, as homo soveticus ruled, still rule people.

GENERATION OF WHINERS

For those living in our part of the world, the books of Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid have become more relevant than ever: there are too many - from Lugansk to the Hindu Kush - young men who passionately indulge in war, murder and show absolutely no interest in peaceful life . Partly this type of fighter is fashioned artificially, partly it arises at the request of the moment. I often see young people nearby (fortunately not students) for whom their own life can acquire meaning only if they give it up for a great cause. When these young people are 18–20 years old, no exhortations or educational trajectories can help them anymore: they feel the aesthetics of modern weapons, believe in their star, and stuffed themselves with overvalued ideas that are worth dying for (“in the world and death is red”, as said once, scaring half the world, Vladimir Putin). With such an attitude - personal dignity at any cost, including at the cost of life - everyone usually loses, and this is perhaps the strongest chagrin that I often experience when talking with the “lost generation”. True, people of my generation were inciting these young people. I mean those who planted in the heads of the Russian leadership a completely crazy idea about the inheritance by the Russian Federation of the entire former Soviet Union, about the primacy of Russia in the community of countries that left the USSR. Instead of giving people a sense of freedom from the most disgusting thing that happened in our colonial past, we got a generation of whiners from whom someone stole something.

The human mind still exists, it just goes around the borders of our state for some reason: it knows that it is not in demand in it, apparently

POSITIVE FOR THE POST

The famous poem by Nikolai Nekrasov "Contemporaries" begins with a quote from the story of the writer Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, who was published under the pseudonym "V. Krestovsky. This is perhaps the most frequently quoted stanza:

I took the book, having risen from sleep,

And I read in it:

"There were worse times

But there was no meanness!”

I threw the book away.

Are we with you

Such a century sons

O my reader friend?

Of course not! Of course not!

Our Zoil is slandering.

The footman brought a bunch of newspapers;

I greedily opened them...

And so on... The poet begins to look for "positive" and, of course, does not find it.

So: now the positive, in my opinion, is that in most of the developed world there is no expectation of a hero and a leader, whom you have to run after with your pants up, and all the power is in a reasonably organized, sane democratic society with functioning institutions. There are failures and fears, but I remain optimistic about the union of Europe, North America, Japan and the countries that hold an alliance with them. The cult archaism, nationalism and populism are excesses of growth and institutions lagging behind people's needs. But the developed countries will overcome these difficulties, as it was already in the middle of the last century. Of course, it is very disappointing that Russia in this situation turned out to be part of the world's problems, and not a force, an instrument for solving them. It is comforting that changes are possible here, including the most unexpected ones.