Алмаз Браев – Digital Ruler. The eternal Colosseum (страница 4)
Such a harsh entrance into adulthood serves as the artistic framing for the system’s own rigidity. If the system is rigid, totalitarian, and ideological, then graduates are bound to sing anthems at the exit and the entrance.
In the school of ideology, the last spark of individuality is erased. Every lesson is a lesson in subordination. You are taught not to think, but to guess the correct answer already prepared in the educational bureaucrat’s methodological guide. You are taught to fear the red ink in the notebook just like an adult fears the tax office or the police. You are accustomed to the fact that your personal opinion is worthless if it does not coincide with the textbook paragraph.
The grade becomes the primary measure of your value. A five — you’re a good slave, you’ve earned your sugar. A one or a two — you’re a defective part, an outcast who can be collectively baited.
And right alongside the teachers, the street pack gets to work. The schoolyard and hallways are a mini-model of that very Colosseum where a child ends up without parental protection. In this spontaneous hierarchy, a brutal micro-vertical is instantly born: there are leaders (deranged or insolent bullies), their close sycophants, and the grey mass of outcasts who are beaten for not being like the rest.
The child quickly understands the jungle law of the asphalt and the blackboard: either you lick the boot of the strong, or you are trampled into the dirt. Horizontal solidarity is killed here at the root. Friendship in school is often an alliance against a third party.
By the time the graduation certificate is handed out, we are no longer looking at a living human being, but a fully finished semi-finished product. He has learned the main rule of the system: the one who survives is the one who yells loudest with the pack, bows before the senior in rank, and obediently rents himself out to the very first master.
A school diploma is the same as a prize ribbon across the shoulder. Only it is handed out not for winning in life, but for successfully completing the young fighter’s course and being ready to voluntarily take your place at the foot of yet another vertical.
Every new vertical matures not all at once; sometimes centuries are required, sometimes decades: recently, the maturation of new supports for the masses has accelerated due to the technological leap. That is why it took several centuries from the spectacles in the Colosseum to the fall of Rome, and only two generations for the collapse of the USSR.
Leon Trotsky wrote about Stalin’s schools in 1936:
In 1991, the USSR collapsed quite naturally.
I remember well how an unfamiliar female teacher walked into the primary grades and said almost sadly:
The vertical is always rigid. Therefore, it needs only provincials.
They are raised in families to obey and respect elders.
This does not at all mean that a vertical made of obedient and unprincipled people is durable. This is merely a market requirement — for people and nations that did not create it and have not survived all the horrors of market maturation.
Chapter 6
Digital Cancer
You know about cancer — that incurable disease.
Modern people are deeply vulnerable to this fatal affliction. Yet physicians try to treat it with external chemistry — a materialistic approach typical of the weak.
Whether cancer existed in the Ancient World or not, it most likely did not. But to prevent people from dying of cancer — meaning dying devoid of support and meaning in life — prophets used to appear.
For all past centuries, the problem of the meaning of life was solved by the vertical. Support was found in service to family, kin, relatives, leader, tsar, state, and God. Remove the most important part of this list, and everything collapses: there is a man, and then there is no man. (By the way, here is a curious detail: after publishing this, I gained 8 subscribers and had 39 users block me. Yet all 340 out of 340 articles were continuously republished by other editors. The irony is telling. I can’t help but worry that those 39 experienced sudden psychosomatic jolts the moment they looked in the mirror).
Every system, every throne, and every tower has its limit, its rigid perimeter, crowded with an endless queue of those eager to grab the coveted handrail. But when they finally claw their way to the top, displacing the old holders, they discover with astonishment that they were holding onto absolute emptiness. How naive they were!
A talisman ceases to work the moment the first serious failure strikes. God loses authority at the first blatant, screaming injustice where an innocent man is crucified while scoundrels triumph. Power is instantly devalued down to sheer disgust at the sight of any petty, bribe-taking bureaucrat trading in official stamps. And at that exact moment, yesterday’s devout acolyte looks at the ruins of their faith with utter contempt: “Was this really what we believed in?!”
After all, every instrument of initial survival had its own cynical function:
A talisman was needed solely to unite the pack and defeat a neighboring tribe.
God was invented to preempt ambitious relatives and restrain the madness of kinsmen.
Ritual served merely to demonstrate the gravity of the hierarchy, leaving no room for questions before the leader’s club.
But the new, awakened intellect no longer plays these old, decrepit games. It feels cramped in foreign myths; it needs to assert itself on its own, prove its point, and smash through the wall.
And out of this arises a universal paralysis of dissatisfaction, permeating every single floor of a collapsed world:
Opposition politicians drown their rage and impotence in alcohol because they were shoved away from the trough, and the upper tiers are too crowded for all the greedy aspirants.
Artists drink vodka by the bucket in their dressing rooms, weeping because someone else is playing the lead role while the spotlights refuse to illuminate their wrinkles.
Scientists write volumes of dissertations while their wives cheat on them at home, discovering the bitter truth that a formula cannot save anyone from loneliness.
The ultimate trauma is standing completely alone face-to-face with oneself, when every support becomes a question mark. What is left to lean on?
Millions of people depart for the next world profoundly, unbearably dissatisfied. This existential discontent is the deep, incurable ache for a lost anchor that nothing can ever muffle.
And as a grim, medical, and metaphysical climax to this dead end — cancer for the millions. When the human body can no longer stomach the falsehood, when the psyche refuses to uphold a borrowed vertical, and the soul is torn apart by lies, the cells begin to explode from within, trying to build their own wild, insane autonomy.
And in past epochs, men would appear…
No, not men. Not quite men.
They arrived with a mission of a new support.
Thus we smoothly transition to faith, and then to religion, as the primary scaffolding of human meaning-making. Weak people need gods — ideally, one God. God needs the desperate to forge a new vertical of supports with them.
It is hard for modern man to believe. He believes far too much in himself. But when the unexpected happens and he loses his life supports — when disillusionment sets in — then arrives…
And the Digital Ruler has arrived so that millions and billions of those who suddenly woke up to their own meaninglessness could be reeled in all at once.
Chapter 7
There Will Be No War Between France and Germany. Forget It.
Traitors always have a multitude of explanations. Every single act of betrayal is dressed up as a “higher choice,” while their spokesmen dismiss any accusations as mere “clichés” and shout that you simply don’t understand. In this sense, the RECON project meets these traitors halfway. Not to whitewash their corruption, but to expose the mechanics behind it: old betrayals always pave the way for new ones. And the newest betrayals have already been cataloged and digitized by the Digital Ruler, who sits at the top of this pyramid, smiling and laughing at the frantic scrambling of weak men. Before we finally dismantle the scaffolding of civilizations, look into the eyes of the French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre. What do you see in his portrait?