Алмаз Браев – Digital Ruler. The eternal Colosseum (страница 3)

They have no contents.

Or perhaps there was nothing inside them to begin with?

After all, can so many people really sustain tension?

(Is this why there are so many divorces? When there is no support, there is emptiness inside:

“Shall we go to a show tonight?”

“Jennifer Lopez has come to town!”

“Yes, yes, it’s prestigious! Not everyone can afford such an expensive ticket. We’ll tell everyone about it afterward.”)

Reference

Jennifer Lopez’s tour of Central Asia, as part of the worldwide Up All Night: Live in 2025 tour, took place from July 8 to August 12, 2025.

The singer performed in Astana, Tashkent, and Almaty. In Kazakhstan, concerts were held on August 1 in Astana and August 10 in Almaty.

Approximately 10,000 tourists from more than 30 countries, primarily from neighboring countries and from Europe and Asia, attended the performance in Kazakhstan’s capital.

On August 10, Lopez attracted more than 20,000 spectators to Almaty’s Central Stadium, including visitors from more than 35 countries.

In Uzbekistan, Lopez’s concert took place on August 7 in Tashkent at Milliy Stadium. It attracted approximately 31,100 attendees, including staff, of whom 25,000 purchased tickets.

The singer’s performances stimulated tourism, the hotel industry, and the restaurant business, while generating significant tax revenues for the cities.

Chapter 4

Parents

We risk getting bogged down in textbook psychology and domestic dramas if we forget what we are actually writing about. The reader needs these stages — parents, school, yards, teachers — only as steps toward the inevitable finale.

We have no interest in dissecting childhood traumas for the sake of trauma itself, even though nearly everyone has plenty of them. What matters to us is showing how a beaten, frightened domestic animal, raised under parental and school pressure, morphs into that embittered, lonely creature who cannot stand on its own horizontal, cannot endure inner emptiness, and befouls everything it can reach — whether it’s a real avenue littered with plastic waste or a digital screen vomiting comments.

(In modern Kazakh families, obedient — even excessively submissive, sometimes downright dull — children are favored. Such submissive and occasionally under-developed individuals get everything bought for them; families try to provide them with everything. On the other end of the character spectrum, the picture is reversed: the more independent and spirited a son is, the higher the probability of parental dissatisfaction. Indeed, where did the word “kazak” originate? Originally, it meant an outcast — someone without a family, without the backing of a clan. Only later did the word acquire the semantics of a noble, independent, free dzhigit. When such spirited sons, like Modu Chanyu or Genghis Khan, seized power themselves rather than waiting for a handout from the clan, they posed a threat to the clan elite — starting with their own fathers… who refused to age and share their authority).

Family and school are simply the primary processing of the material. It is a meat grinder that breaks the spine of horizontal ties so that the individual grows irrevocably fused into the vertical. And next, this battered, lonely consumer is stamped out by the millions to fill the Colosseum and leave behind heaps of broken plastic. (Here we have, of course, jumped forward in time. No matter, that happens).

The Global Floor and the First Step

A human being needs a foothold — this is an axiom. But the system is engineered to knock any horizontal support out from under their feet.

In an ideal world of human society, an individual could rely on the horizontal: on craft, on habit, on the warmth of another body, on the honest shoulder of someone standing nearby. They could lean on the floor rather than on the chieftain’s neck.

Yet power and the vertical cannot tolerate horizontal ties. Two people supporting each other without sanction from above already constitute a threat to the system. Therefore, the primary objective of any vertical is to destroy the horizontal — to ensure that a person forgets how to stand on their own two feet and look for support among equals.

And the very first vertical a newborn encounters is the family. The parents.

This is the closest, most intimate, and most brutal meat grinder. A child comes into the world as an absolutely defenseless lump of flesh, and the first hands to take them are the hands of their parents. They become the first wardens.

Parents do not teach freedom. Parents teach survival within the system, passing down as an inheritance the fear of elders, the fear of punishment, and the habit of bowing before whoever stands taller and hits harder. A small human doesn’t yet know the word “state,” doesn’t yet understand what “the law” or “the party” means, but they already absorb the core matrix at the level of reflexes: love must be earned through subordination, and protection is guaranteed only when you kiss the hand of the giver.

The family is a miniature Colosseum where father and mother play the roles of emperor and priests. They decide whether to execute or pardon, whether to point the thumb up or down for a cleanly eaten bowl of porridge or a good grade in the gradebook.

It is here that the foundation of future character is laid. Whoever fails to learn how to rely on their own floor within the family will spend the rest of their days searching for a parent in every boss, every bureaucrat, every television screen, and every algorithm.

School merely cements this skill. The teachers add another floor. Street gangs and school authorities test the strength of your pack instinct.

Yet it all begins with a mother’s hands, pressing you to her chest not to liberate you, but to accustom you to the leash. Of course, it is difficult to speak this way about a mother’s hands. But if we are talking about the primary supports children require, we must also address the resulting products known as “mama’s boys” — when a mother’s overbearing love morphs into weakness of character and a complete lack of agency, particularly in single-parent households, which is so crucial in the modern world. Because a teenager is always hunting for a vertical.

“Who is stronger than me?”

“Whose property am I?”

“Whom should I respect?”

“Whom should I fear?”

“To whom must I prove that I am strong myself?”

Chapter 5

School

The family only breaks the spine, forcing one to hover a foot over the leash, but the state machine is what ultimately drives a person into the stall. And its first link is the school.

Although school is neither a stall nor a state machine, but a temple (I have the fondest memories of the Soviet school). School is undeniably a temple of knowledge, as the ancient Greeks called it. But it is also the first factory for standardizing young hearts. Here, teachers identify the depth of soul and speed of thinking in their students. The most capable are promised a great future. (Ha-ha-ha. I always revered the schoolteacher as such. When I was finishing school, the teaching profession was already prestigious no longer, though they tried to instill a sense of beauty in us. We were already quite cynical children. We already understood what was truly “beautiful.” And the subsequent generations confirmed our suspicions, giving birth to completely cynical children of the market. Back in my day, I didn’t do homework at all: I’d come home from school, drop my backpack, and go play hockey, then the next day I’d come and copy from the straight-A girls — they let me copy. At the same time, I must say, I got straight A’s. The children of the children of the market no longer just refuse to let you copy; they even bargain, telling you what the assignments were. You can’t quite hear “Pay for information!” through the phone yet, but the huckster spirit has already filled the air).

It is not for nothing that any child is plucked from the family nest so they don’t grow up wild and can experience life alongside everyone else. Whatever the demands are for adults, they are for children too. That is why schools appeared back in Ancient Greece, and the Greeks spread their gymnasiums across the entire empire of Alexander the Great. Throughout the world, perhaps excepting India and China, teaching was tied to civic organization. The philosopher Socrates was executed for “corrupting the youth,” for instance. Need we say what the Spartans taught children? (And some Jews even rebelled because in the Greek gerousia they were forced to strip naked due to the physical cult of the body).

Therefore, a certain Spartan spirit is always present in schools.

The child is ripped away from the familiar (albeit suffocating) family nest for the first time and thrown into a barracks with desks, bells, and gradebooks. Here, official drilling begins. The state does not hide its goals: it does not need thinking individuals capable of standing on their own floor. It needs cogs that will spin in a strictly prescribed direction, taking their places at precisely eight o’clock in the morning and obediently raising their hands at the command of a taskmaster in a skirt or a strict suit.