On the ruins of a familiar world

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

Fig. Alaric's entry into Rome (detail). Artist Wilhelm von Lindenschmitt the Younger

Essays on the history of our time

People love to live in comfort not only materially, but also emotionally and intellectually - in the world of familiar images, concepts, schemes.

Especially this love intensifies in crisis, critical epochs, performing the function of psychological protection against the inevitability of a strange, and sometimes terrible world.

However, laziness, naivety of a special kind (the one described by N. Korzhavin in his famous poem), simply an inability to keep up with the changes, make their contribution.

I am not even talking about class limitations of understanding and even adequate perception of reality, and this applies primarily and mainly not to the lower classes, but to the upper ones: there are problems, phenomena and processes that class-specific (and definite) consciousness is not able to perceive or adequately, or at all.

This inability of the ruling stratum as a whole (but not of individuals, who in a similar situation turn out to be something like Kassandra) is rapidly increasing when the system enters a phase of decline. As noted by O. Markeev, “the ability of a system to anticipate reflection is correlated with the phase of development.

With degeneration of the system, the ability to "hear" is drastically reduced. " There are three additions to be made here:

1) not only hear, but see and understand;

2) we are talking about the conscious ability (or positive inability) of the top, and not about some kind of deviation;

3) as for the lower strata and even the middle strata, they just demonstrate the anticipatory reflection of the catastrophe, but at the unconscious and mass-behavioral level, primarily in the form of various forms of deviance. This is both a fashion for the occult, and an increase in crime, and - especially - an increase in the number of suicides, in particular, among the youth (there are intriguing parallels between the spread of suicide "clubs" in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century and the network of suicide communities in the modern Russian Federation).

At the same time, the leaders always strive to impose their own picture of the world on the population, or even to replace it with the products of a zombie box. And it turns out: blind guides of the blind, the vicious circle of deception and self-deception is closed.

But it is precisely the times of crisis that present unprecedented opportunities for an adequate - as-it-is-in-fact - understanding of reality, the discovery of the secrets of systems and the secrets of the "koshchey death" of their owners. N. Mandelstam remarkably said about this: “During the period of fermentation and disintegration, the meaning of the recent past suddenly becomes clear, because there is still no indifference of the future, but the argumentation of yesterday has already collapsed and the lie differs sharply from the truth.

Those very well-fed European brothers, about whom S. Helemendik wrote. For those who are inclined to perceive all this as excessive alarmism, I will answer: it is better to worry for five minutes than to be a dead man, an exile or a slave to strangers all his life.

At the very beginning of the 5th century. AD the noble Roman Sidonius Apollinarius wrote to his friend about how good and calm it was for him to sit in his villa by the pool, watching a dragonfly froze over the water. “We live in a wonderful time,” he concluded. A few years later (in 410) Alaric plundered Rome, and the "internal proletarians" opened the gates for him.

The best remedy for the "Sidonius Apollinarius syndrome" is the principle of "he who is forewarned is forearmed," and the best way to be forewarned is information converted into knowledge and understanding. In this regard, it makes sense to take a closer look at the area from which trouble may come, and find out what kind of thunderstorms are gathering behind the Black Mountains, what kind of smoke rises from behind the blue river, so as not to say later: “Trouble has come from whence they did not expect ".

That is why it is so important to talk about the real picture of the modern world, especially about its shadow side, because the shadow has ceased to know its place. A little more - and it will be just right to quote Tolkien: "The Veil of Darkness rises over the world."

The shadow side of the modern world is a dying, and therefore increasingly criminalized "capitalism-financialism"; these are closed structures - from the top (clubs, lodges, commissions, special services) to the bottom (mafia, Camorra, Ndrangheta, Triad, Yakuza, etc.); these structures are actually very similar, said Trismegistus: what is above, so below.

And the connections between them are very, very close, uniting them in the Shadow World, covering an ever larger part of the planet. Global Economy - Criminal Economy; in the face of a lack of liquidity, almost half of the world's banks exist, lending to drug trafficking.

Finally, there is a huge world of underdeveloped countries - the world of social hell, grief, death, social hell (literally and figuratively - a hellish world), the world of global slums, from which, for a number of reasons, some regions of several countries, primarily China and India, managed to escape. …

However, the greater their economic achievements, the more acute the social problems, which most likely cannot be solved not only economically, but, perhaps, even socially and therapeutically - only surgically.

From this world on the sidelines of the picnic of developed countries, which inertly, although less and less enjoy life (how can you not remember the Surah of the Koran: “now let them enjoy, then they will know”), we will start our conversation - from Africa, India and China. More precisely: from China, India and Africa.