New Year's Hypocrisy (essay)

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Ololosh lived outside the city in a beautiful log house. Thick larch logs reliably protected him from the cold. Smoke was pouring out of the chimney, and a bathhouse was being heated there, in the stove of which good birch firewood was burning. Having sent a bunch of toilet paper with the inscription "no waste paper" down the drain, Ololosh washed his hands, left the toilet and went to the kitchen. I took a wooden cutting board and cut up pieces of meat. He knew perfectly well how much harm the pastures do for cows and pigs and that huge forests were cut down to create them, but he preferred not to think about it.

Leaving the meat deliciously crusty in the pan, Ololosh went into the room and printed the fifth version of a hundred-page report on his work on a printer. The boss did not want to accept the report and still demanded corrections, and since he himself was an ossified dinosaur, he could not get used to reading the text from the monitor, he still demanded to print drafts on pure white paper, so that later they would be flipped diagonally. Then Ololosh threw new firewood into the fireplace, ran to the bathhouse to check how it was heated there. Returning home, he made sure that the meat was not yet ready and sat down to leaf through the contact. Then he saw a post in which the author condemns all those who cut themselves a Christmas tree for the New Year. The colorful description and condemning motives of the post made Ololosh think. Indeed, how awful, how much harm people do to nature! Ololosh became more and more emotionally heated, and then could not stand it and wrote his own post, in which he poured mud on those who celebrate the New Year with a real tree even more powerful, even harder and dirtier. Having published it, he calmed down and realized that he had done a good, useful deed. Then he went to the kitchen, where the meat was already fried, poured himself some champagne, peeled some fruit, throwing the peel from them into the same bucket in which the other rubbish was lying. He knew very well that by mixing organic and inorganic waste in one bag, of which he gets 2-3 per day, he damages nature many times more than if he chopped trees every day. He also knew that buying alcohol causes indirect harm to the state in the five-tap size of the cost of a bottle … he knew all this, but preferred not to think about it.

But how can you celebrate the New Year without a tree? This is such an important tradition, and children will be glad to see a gift under the tree, because this is how they see this holiday in cartoons and children's programs. Ololosh solved this problem too: he will buy them a plastic Christmas tree, the production of which does much more harm than if a real tree is cut down, and especially if this real tree was specially grown for the holiday or turned out to be a side effect of thinning the clearing for the power line, because these are the trees are sold at legal points of sale for New Year's merchandise. However, Ololosh did not know this, he did not have time to read to this place, when angry emotions overcame him completely and he rushed to write his derogatory post. He preferred not to think about how his artificial Christmas tree was made and what would happen to it after the expiration of its natural service life. He generally did not like to think about such things, this prevented him from maintaining a positive emotional background.

For the same reason, Ololosh never went to subbotniks or tree-planting events, where the same ordinary people could in some way atone for their guilt for the damage to the ecosystem. Participation in such an event awakened in his mind some glimpses of something unpleasant, reminiscent of something important … like something that is associated with a change in his logic of social behavior, but his consciousness immediately closed, or even rapidly slammed from these thoughts, shouting to him: "Run away, do not pay attention, let these losers bother themselves, you don’t shit so that you can clean up after yourself!"And Ololosh quickly forgot about the announcement he had seen, and on his face a blissful smile of a pleasant consumer nothingness appeared on his face … then a sweet sigh … a light sip of warm Baltic balm with a healing effect … his eyes dart across the entertaining pictures of a humorous site, and the index finger of his right hand lazily snaps more »with a soporific monotony.

Ololosh sat at a wooden table made of pure solid oak and washed down his hypocrisy with swill for the same hypocrites, blotting his lips with clean paper napkins, the colorful polypropylene packaging of which was lying in the trash bin with all the other waste.

Happy New Year or something …?

Author's explanation

I have no right to judge people for their managerial mistakes made in organizing their lives and in choosing their logic of social behavior. Yes, many people live wrong, and I am among them. However, the essay is not about that: its task is NOT to expose these mistakes, but to point out the hypocrisy in making them. I am not against the mistakes themselves, if a person gradually understands them and tries to correct them, but I am against hypocrisy when stupidity is done with one hand, and with the other SHE is condemned when it is found in another person. And with this essay, I ask you not to be hypocritical in at least two of the indicated ways. The first method is indicated explicitly: there is no need to condemn others for those stupid things that you yourself deliberately commit.

The second way is less obvious. The point is that a similar essay was already published elsewhere last year. I received several reviews of conceptually the same content: "Well, after all, you have to start somewhere, you can't eliminate all your shortcomings at once, you can just start with the Christmas tree, and then we'll get to the garbage, why are you so strict with us?" … Answer: you will not get there, because you do not have such a goal. Let me explain this point for everyone.

There are two fundamentally different development strategies: active development in spite of inconvenient circumstances and passive expectation of favorable circumstances for development. So, these people cover up the second strategy by the fact that they are supposedly "little by little" moving in their development, although in reality they are just waiting for an opportunity to take the next step so as not to lose their comfort. For example, a person may wait for several months when they will give him food bags so that they can take food in bulk in them, and not in disposable bags. He will wait for decades when a recycling center will appear in the city to start sorting garbage, because he does not even want to start looking for other solutions, because it is inconvenient. This is NOT a development, it is flexing under the circumstances, and passive acceptance of some good tendencies, but without contributing to the development of these tendencies. Therefore, to be honest, the second strategy is not a development strategy at all, it is just a beautiful version of degradation. Therefore, in reality, there are not two development strategies, but one.

Such people who move "on the sly", in fact, cover up their degradation, and internal contradictions, which somehow still creep out, pour out in the form of anger at those who cut down the Christmas tree or did something else insignificant. the background of the whole volume of nonsense of these critics is simply imperceptible and inconsequential.

So, I repeat: it doesn't matter to me that you are mistaken, or even deliberately mistaken. We all parasitize and spoil in one way or another. This is our common problem. I only urge you to stop being hypocritical in the above two senses.

And as for development, yes, it MAY be slow due to a number of reasons (for example, when there are VERY many problems and they are VERY difficult), but I repeat ONCE AGAIN: there is ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT UNDER the circumstances when a person is trying his best, but there is PASSIVE EXPECTATION for convenient circumstances, when a person does not try at all, but simply waits for a convenient excuse, that is, when someone else does everything and he can get a recipe ready to use or a ready circumstance. At first, both of these options may seem the same, since with active development you can bury yourself so hard that you seem to be standing still. But gradually the ice will break, the speed will begin to increase, it will become so great that no passive “activist” will ever catch up with the active one, unless he himself takes the path of active development.