Илья Марголин – The First Quarter Of My Century (страница 13)

Within two days, news came of the deaths of three public figures: Diogo Jota, Mark Snow, and Julian McMahon. These events were unrelated biographically, professionally, or culturally. Yet their near-simultaneous departure prompted a reflection: certain human figures continue to participate in personal memory regardless of the formal scale of their achievements.

Each of these individuals entered my field of attention at different times. Contact was one-sided: through a screen, sound, or broadcast. Yet it left a durable imprint on the structure of my experience. Not because they were culturally significant, but because they became linked to moments of my own formation.

At the age of five, I first saw a «Fantastic Four» disc on a store shelf. My parents refused to buy it. A few years later, I watched the film at a friend’s place. Of the entire content, I remembered only one actor – Julian McMahon. His behavior on screen differed from typical acting choices. He did not display inner states or rely on expressive accents. His role was organized around a consistent line of behavior. This became an example of how to act consistently within a given frame without resorting to external markers of expression.

Mark Snow became known to me through the musical theme for The X-Files. I heard it repeatedly over time. I did not analyze it as a musical structure. Yet it formed a stable auditory perception in which the content did not require interpretation. This theme became for me a model of concise musical expression, free from excess.

Diogo Jota entered my observation later. I was not among his supporters, but his model of behavior impressed me. He participated in the game without episodic flourishes. His actions did not seek attention. He did not display initiative unnecessarily. Yet he never fell out of the game’s process. This allowed me to regard him as an example of a disciplined, consistent, and reliable professional.

None of these three figures were models in a direct sense. Yet each became part of my private experience as a point of orientation – not in morality or culture, but in the domain of everyday precision. Their actions registered for me as permissible models of behavior in specific contexts. This is their significance.

For this reason, the news of their deaths did not elicit an emotional reaction but became a matter of deliberate attention. They departed not because they exhausted their potential, but because they found themselves in circumstances that did not allow continuation. Each departure became for me an example of how memory structures itself independently of public significance.

This essay is not an expression of gratitude or a symbolic act of respect. Its purpose is to record that, in a brief span of time, three people left life, each of whom at some point became a source of orientation for me. Their work, within their respective domains, continues to operate within my memory. For this reason, their departure feels untimely – not in terms of their biographies, but in terms of how they continued to participate in the structure of my perception.

Thank you.

Evil as a Benefit

In this essay, I examine the phenomenon of actions that are judged as evil but later produce outcomes recognized as positive. My focus is not on evaluating specific episodes but on the logic by which consequences come to determine the permissibility of the act itself. I distinguish between action and outcome as a foundational principle for ethical reflection and show that collapsing this distinction leads to substituting responsibility with mere efficiency. The essay is an attempt to hold the boundary between what happened and how it happened.

The fact that some actions initially interpreted as destructive eventually result in outcomes deemed positive is not exceptional. History provides ample examples in which cruelty, coercion, or violence were accompanied by consequences considered purposeful or «necessary.» The question is how such retrospective logic affects ethical judgment and the political structures that allow it.

The expression «evil with positive consequences» violates intuitive ethical boundaries. It suggests that an act condemned at the moment of execution may post facto gain the status of justified. This narrowing of distinction between basis and result is not merely a moral concession – it is a methodological undermining of the principle of differentiation on which politics, as a rational practice, rests.

If the consequences of an action can redefine its nature, then in conditions of uncertainty any act – regardless of means – may be deemed justified. This creates a situation where responsibility is replaced by effectiveness, and decision-making is subordinated to outcome.

The political history of the twentieth century demonstrates how this logic operates on the scale of states. Mass violence, repression, suppression of internal opposition – all were later described as necessary measures to strengthen institutions, maintain cohesion, or navigate crises. Such reasoning replaces evaluation of the act itself with evaluation of its consequences. Meanwhile, the subject of responsibility disappears: the agent is judged no longer by what they did, but only by what resulted.

Ethics, grounded in the distinction between good and evil, does not permit substituting the act with its consequences. It insists that certain forms of action remain impermissible even if they produce desired outcomes. In this sense, the tension between political and moral domains is preserved rather than dissolved. Politics operates on results; ethics on grounds. Attempting to equate them opens space for arbitrariness disguised as necessity.

At the individual level, the distinction retains significance. A person whose action yields positive outcomes is not absolved from moral scrutiny. On the contrary, they must acknowledge that a favorable result does not resolve the question of the act’s permissibility. The simplified logic «if it turned out well, it was right» undermines both ethical foundation and political responsibility.

Anthropologically, humans have learned to use the consequences of evil. Through trauma, they construct experience; through rupture, understanding; through loss, structure. Yet none of these processes eliminates judgment: the act that caused harm remains an act demanding assessment. Experience does not annul the basis; it only shapes the practice of overcoming.

Nations, cultures, and states are capable of justifying events that were terrifying in the moment because memory is functional. It transforms suffering into argument, destruction into prehistory, violence into stage. This allows life to proceed, but at the cost of erasing distinction. Therefore, any civilization wishing to remain lawful must insist on separating what is permissible from what merely proves useful.

When justification of evil relies on outcomes, politics loses stability. It becomes a function of interpretation. Whoever controls interpretation controls the moral status of actions. In a system where consequences outweigh principles, power becomes the sole criterion of rightness – a return to a pre-ethical state.

Thus, the possibility of positive outcomes does not negate the status of the act. Accepting that evil can be justified by results is abandoning the idea of moral grounding. Preserving the distinction between action and consequence maintains politics as a domain of will and responsibility, not merely a mechanism of outcomes.

This essay records the tension not to resolve it, but to remind that in any system where action is justified post facto, the capacity for adequate ethical evaluation disappears. And with it, the possibility of a stable political position vanishes.

Hard to Be a God

This essay examines the tension between knowledge and action, necessity and limitation, understanding and the impossibility of translating it into decision. The position of a knowing subject – possessing information but deprived of authority – is simultaneously tragic and disciplinary. Its structure is paradoxical: the one capable of foreseeing destruction cannot prevent it without violating the very fabric of development. One knows, but cannot act; or acts, and thereby forfeits the legitimacy of their position.

Situations in which knowledge outruns events raise questions not of technical intervention, but of ethical and political permissibility. To «be a god,» in this context, means occupying a stance in which human history is observed in slow motion, while the pace of decay itself cannot be interrupted without abandoning the boundaries of another’s freedom.

Such figures recur within social dynamics: a scholar observing the collapse of an educational system; an engineer seeing a project’s failure yet bound by procedure; an intellectual analyzing the terminal degradation of public language but denied access to the point of correction. In all these cases, reality is composed of elements whose inertia exceeds consciousness.