Universal parochialism is a generic disease of Western civilization. Universal parochialism - a generic disease of Western civilization After the partitions of Poland

Where from the 15-16th centuries. representatives of the local nobility invited Jews to settle in their villages and towns on relatively favorable conditions. Most of these towns were in the developing eastern territories - in present-day Ukraine and Belarus.

Many of these settlements gradually turned into a kind of Jewish towns, the majority of whose inhabitants were by the nature of their activities (renting landowners’ estates and subletting individual objects in them - taverns, mills, workshops, buying agricultural products, peddling, various crafts), as well as way of life were closely connected with the village.

The peak of development of the town was after the 1650s, after the end of the Khmelnytskyi region and the Swedish invasion. The nobility made a concerted effort to restore their economic position by creating new market towns. The development of these shtetls coincided with the enormous demographic growth of Polish Jewry. In 1500 the Polish-Lithuanian Jewish population was probably 30,000, and by 1765 it had grown to 750,000.

A distinctive feature of this Jewish population was its strong dispersion. In the 1770s, more than half of Polish Jews lived in hundreds of private towns owned by the nobility; approximately one third lived in villages. In many Polish cities, Christian guilds and the Catholic Church fought to reduce Jewish residency rights.

After the partitions of Poland

This unity was disrupted with the partitions of Poland (after 1772) under the influence of the socio-economic and cultural characteristics of the states to which Polish lands were transferred. In Prussia, the way of life characteristic of the shtetl gradually disappeared, and in Austria, later Austria-Hungary (Galicia, Transcarpathia, Bukovina, Slovakia, and to a lesser extent Hungary proper and Bohemia), acquired features peculiar to each of the regions.

The construction of railroads and the growth of large urban centers helped create new regional and national markets that competed with the economic base of many towns. New peasant movements questioned the Jewish role in agriculture; cooperatives emerged that competed with the shtetls. In addition, the increasing urbanization of peasants and the movement of Jews to large cities, which began in the second half of the 19th century, led to Jews becoming a minority in many cities where they had previously predominated.

On the territory of the Russian Empire, the distinctive way of life of the shtetl developed within the Pale of Settlement, including the Kingdom of Poland (from 1815), as well as Bessarabia (annexed to Russia in 1812), while in the rest of the Principality of Moldova (Moldova) shtetls developed from 1862 city ​​as part of Romania. Gradually, not only the former private towns of the Polish gentry, but also all small settlements of this type in Eastern Europe began to be called shtetls.

In Russia itself, small towns were primarily administrative centers rather than the market towns that many Russian officials considered sinister springboards for Jewish corruption in the countryside. Russian policy towards the Jews often revolved between the desire to change the Jews through assimilation and the determination to limit their contacts with the indigenous population of Russia.

In 1791, Catherine II established the Pale of Settlement (formalized in 1835 by decree), limiting Russia's Jewish population mainly to the former Polish provinces. The Polish Congress had a separate legal status. While some categories of Jews eventually received permission to leave the Pale of Settlement, the boundaries of which were somewhat expanded in Ukraine, these stay restrictions remained in place until 1917. On the eve of World War I, about 94% of Russian Jewry (about 5 million people) still lived within the Pale of Settlement.

In Tsarist Russia at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century

The Polish uprisings of 1830-1831 and 1863 seriously weakened the Polish gentry, and thus their Jewish partners. The nobles also suffered from the abolition of serfdom. The economic basis of the towns received a serious blow.

Legally and politically, there was no such thing as a shtetl. What the Jews called a shtetl could be a city, town, village, village according to Polish, Russian or Austrian law. In 1875, the Russian Senate established the legal category "Mestechko" (small town), which, unlike a village, had a legal organization of townspeople known as bourgeois society. The status of the shtetl was determined by the Russian authorities at the provincial level. In a number of towns there was city self-government, others were subordinate to the administration of the nearest city.

The issue of recognizing a settlement as a shtetl became of great importance for the Jews of Russia after the publication of the “Temporary Rules” (May 1882; did not apply to the Kingdom of Poland), which prohibited Jews from settling, as well as from purchasing and renting real estate in rural areas, that is, outside urban settlements, which included the towns.

The local administration (mainly provincial boards), trying to further limit the places of residence of Jews, began to arbitrarily rename the shtetls into rural settlements. There was a stream of complaints to the Senate. The Senate, in a number of resolutions, opposed the arbitrariness of local authorities and established criteria for distinguishing towns from villages. The Senate also recognized that the natural growth of shtetl settlements also expands the territory available for settlement by Jews (Decree of June 14, 1896 in the Livshits case).

But these regulations did not cover many settlements (officially considered even villages), which sometimes existed for centuries and were known as shtetls among the local population, as well as new ones that arose in the Pale of Settlement in places of busy trade. These villages, populated almost exclusively by Jews, found themselves outside the law, and their fate depended entirely on the arbitrariness of the lower police authorities.

To legitimize these villages, the government decided to remove them from the “Temporary Rules” and allow Jews to live in them freely. According to the Russian census of 1897, 33.5% of the Jewish population lived in “small towns,” but the population of shtetls was probably much higher, since many formal cities were actually shtetls.

Opening of the Jewish hospital in Balta in 1899.

On May 10, 1903, the government allowed Jews to live in 101 villages, which actually became shtetls. The list of such settlements was supplemented several times, and in 1911 their number reached 299. But many settlements that acquired the character of commercial and industrial towns remained outside the list.

In the 19th century, the center of gravity of Jewish life began to shift to the cities. But legal barriers to free movement in Russia, along with the rapid demographic growth of Eastern European Jewry, meant that the population of the shtetls continued to grow at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, despite mass migrations to new urban centers (Odessa, Warsaw, Lodz, Vienna) and emigration to the USA and other countries. Many towns adapted to changing circumstances, becoming centers of specialized production. In the towns, social and property inequality sharply increased, one of the reasons for which was heavy competition caused by the crowding of a sharply increased population.

At the end of the 19th century. - early 20th century The emancipation of Jews, as well as the processes of industrialization and urbanization, shook the socio-economic foundations of life in the shtetls. In Russia, where restrictive laws against Jews continued to be in effect, the disintegration of the shtetl was accelerated by anti-Jewish repression, economic restraint, and pogroms.

A. Subbotin, in a study of the economic state of the western and southwestern parts of the Russian Empire for 1887 (“In the Pale of Settlement,” in 2 parts, St. Petersburg, 1888-90) showed the disastrous economic situation of Jewish artisans and traders in small towns. Economic and socio-political difficulties, the conservatism and rigidity of life in the shtetl made it less and less attractive to the younger generation, among whom there was a growing passion for revolutionary ideologies and movements.

It was in the shtetls that the self-awareness of the broad Jewish masses was strengthened and the national and socialist Jewish movements were born. Young people from small towns flocked to the big cities of the Pale of Settlement, and often emigrated (most often to the United States of America). Many leaders of Zionism came from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, including D. Ben-Gurion, B. Katznelson, I. Tabenkin, H. Weizmann, M. Dizengoff and others.

After the start of the Five-Year Plans in 1928, the Soviet regime began to offer Jews more social mobility and educational opportunities. New legislation has changed many of the restrictions on “disenfranchised”. Many Jews, especially young ones, began to leave the shtetl to work and study in big cities, including Moscow and Leningrad.

Despite persecution, many shtetls retained much of their Jewish character. In Ukraine and Belarus, local communist authorities supported the Yevsektsiya's policy of promoting Yiddish in schools for Jewish children, and until the mid-1930s, Jewish children in these small towns could not only speak Yiddish at home, but also receive primary education in it. Regardless of the shortcomings of the communist Yiddish schools, they provided some reinforcement against assimilation, but parents realized that the path to higher education and advancement lay through Russian schools.

By the mid-1930s, many former shtetls began to adapt to the new socio-economic reality created by collectivization and the Five-Year Plans. They became centers for local handicraft production or served neighboring collective farms. Despite the momentous changes that these shtetls underwent, the Jews who lived in them mostly spoke Yiddish and were much less likely to intermarry than their contemporaries in large cities.

In interwar Eastern Europe

The town of Lakhva, Brest region, 1926.

The collapse of the Austrian and Russian empires after World War I divided much of the shtetl's Jewish population between the Soviet Union and several new states, the largest of which was the revived Polish Republic.

Holocaust

The Jewish inhabitants of most shtetls were exterminated during the Holocaust of European Jewry. It was more difficult for residents of small towns to evacuate than for residents of large cities. Their destruction changed the entire character of Soviet Jewry by eliminating its most nationally conscious elements and those less absorbed by the surrounding culture.

Only minor remnants of Jewish shtetls after World War II survived for several decades in Romania, Moldova, Transcarpathia, Lithuania and some other areas of Eastern Europe.

Life in the shtetls

For all their diversity, the shtetls in Eastern Europe differ markedly from previous types of Jewish settlement of the Diaspora in all countries - from Babylonia to France, Spain or Italy.

Concentration of Jews in one locality

In other countries, Jews lived scattered among the entire population or, conversely, inhabited a certain part of the city or a Jewish street. Rarely did they form a majority. This was not true in shtetls where Jews sometimes made up 80% of the population or more. In many towns, Jews occupied large parts of the city, especially along the streets, grouped around the central market. Poor Jews had to live further from the center, and often non-Jewish farmers were concentrated on the peripheral streets in order to be closer to the land they cultivated.

Jewish life in compact settlements had a huge psychological impact on the development of Eastern European Jewry, as did the language of the shtetl, Yiddish. Despite the inclusion of numerous Slavic words, the Yiddish of the shtetl differs markedly from the languages ​​used by the Jews' largely Slavic neighbors. Although it would be a great mistake to see the shtetl as a completely Jewish world, without gentiles, it is nevertheless true that Yiddish reinforced a deep sense of psychological and religious difference from non-Jews. Infused with allusions to Jewish traditions and religious texts, Yiddish developed a rich reservoir of idioms and sayings reflecting a vibrant folk culture inseparable from the Jewish religion.

Jews had their own classification of settlements. In Yiddish, there is a distinction between shtetl (שטעטל) - a town, shtetele (שטעטעלע) - a very small town, shtot (שטאָט) - a city, dorf (דאָרף) - a village and yishev (ישעוו) - a tiny settlement in the countryside. A shtetl was a locality large enough to support the core network of institutions necessary for Jewish communal life: at least one synagogue, mikvah, cemetery, school, and a set of public associations that performed basic religious and communal functions. This was the key difference between a shtetl and a village, and shtetl Jews joked a lot about their village brethren.

The place was also noted for its professional diversity. While other Diaspora Jews often focused on a small set of occupations, often determined by political restrictions, in the shtetls Jewish occupations ran the gamut from wealthy contractors and entrepreneurs to shopkeepers, carpenters, shoemakers, tailors, carters, and water carriers. In some regions, Jewish farmers and villagers lived nearby. This amazing diversity of professions contributed to the vitality of the shtetl society and its cultural development. It also led to class conflicts and often painful social divisions.

The experience of living as the dominant culture at the local level, with a large population, its own language and professional diversity, emphasized the special place of the shtetl as a Jewish Diaspora settlement. The centuries-old alienation from the surrounding non-Jewish environment, the economic and everyday life of the shtetl with its limited opportunities for trade and craft activities, with its stable adherence to traditions and local community authorities largely shaped the unique appearance of Eastern European Jewry, its characteristic psychological make-up and the peculiarities of its spiritual self-expression. The life of a Jew in a shtetl was limited to the house, synagogue and market.

The city differed from the shtetl in that in the shtetl everyone knew each other, but in the city people were somewhat more anonymous. In Yisroel Askenfeld's satirical story "Dos sterntihl" (the headband), a city was distinguished from a town in that "everyone can boast that he greeted someone from the next street because he mistook him for a stranger." The new railway could quickly turn the shtetl into a city, and the large city of Berdichev could become a “backwater place”, since it was bypassed by the railway.

Problems of everyday life

Sanitary conditions were often poor. Spring and fall turned the dirt streets into a sea of ​​mud, and in the summer there was a terrible stench from raw sewage, outbuildings, and the hundreds of horses arriving on market day.

Often the presence of family farms on the outskirts of a township limited the available space for expansion and resulted in an impossible density of buildings. Building codes and regulations did not exist. Shtetl buildings were, as a rule, wooden, although the local " gvir"(rich man) could borrow and " Moyer» (brick building) on ​​the market square. Fires were common and were a major theme in shtetl folklore and Yiddish literature about shtetls.

Educational facilities, especially for poor children, could be shockingly poor.

"Partialism"

The place was small enough that everyone there got a nickname. Society seemed to establish for everyone his place within itself. According to the recollections of one woman about the 1930s, in her town there were people with the nicknames Red, Icon, Lousy, Belly, Hernia, Hunchback, Stutterer, Copper Beard, Crutch (one-legged), Toilet (a person with an unpleasant odor). There was Libicke the Old Maid - a married woman with children, who could not be forgotten that she married late.

The house (that is, the family with its patriarchal and traditional foundations) was the main social unit of the town. In him, Jewish love for children and pride in their successes, family cohesion, and pleasure in the performance of religious rituals were most fully manifested. Family events (birth, circumcision, bar mitzvah, wedding, death) became the property of the entire community, which expressed approval or censure of any action of its members.

This communal control became one of the main regulating factors of self-government, which for centuries maintained compliance with the requirements of Halachah and monitored public order, without its own enforcement agencies and without resorting to police intervention. But this same control began to be perceived as oppression and suppression of the individual with changing social conditions, with the penetration of trends from the outside world in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The common stereotype of the shtetl as a harmonious community is misleading. Those with little education and little money were constantly reminded of their lack of status. In this regard, women from poor families were at a particular disadvantage. However, it would also be wrong to accept uncritically the accusations and wide range of criticism from maskilim, Zionists, and Soviet Jewish scholars that the shtetl was a dying society, riven by hypocrisy, stultifying tradition, and bitter class conflicts. The reality is much more complex and historical context and regional differences must be taken into account.

The social differences that divided shtetl Jews were felt everywhere, from the synagogue to the market. At the top of the social ladder were the “Sheine Idn” - wealthy elites who maintained the institutions of the town and controlled their policies. In the synagogue they usually sat near the eastern wall. Just below the "sheine idn" were the "balabatim" - the "middle class", whose shops and businesses did not make them rich, but gave them a certain measure of respect from society. Further up the social ladder were skilled artisans, such as watchmakers and especially skilled tailors. At the bottom there were the usual tailors and shoemakers, and then water carriers and cab drivers. Even lower were the beggars and marginal types who were in every town.

Gender roles in the town were, at first glance, quite simple. Men held positions of power. They controlled the community and, of course, the synagogue, where women sat separately. Girls from poor families faced bleak prospects, especially if they could not find a husband. Behind the scenes, women, especially from wealthy families, often played key roles in the social and economic life of the shtetl.

Women actually had some opportunities to learn to read and write. Religious and secular literature in Yiddish for them (and for poor, less educated men) included such traditions as Tsene-Rene (figurative translations and legends based on the Pentateuch), private individual prayers called tkhines, and romances. The most popular Jewish writer of the 19th century in Eastern Europe was the maskil Aizik Meyer Dick, who wrote didactic stories in Yiddish, which were largely read by women.

Social and political situation in the towns

The numerical superiority of Jews in the shtetls rarely translated into their local political power. They never controlled local government, although there were many ways in which they could bargain for their interests. In the Russian Empire, laws prohibited Jews from holding leadership positions in local councils.

Towns and the world around them

Market in Lyubcha (Grodno region) at the beginning of the 20th century.

The presence of a market was a defining characteristic of the shtetl, and on market day, peasants began to flock to the shtetl early in the morning. Hundreds of carts arrived and Jews surrounded them to buy food that the peasants had to sell. With money in their pockets, the peasants then went to Jewish shops and taverns.

Market day was full of a noisy cacophony of shouting and negotiations and bustle. Often after selling a horse or cow, peasants and Jews would shake hands and drink together. Sometimes a fight would break out and everyone would come running to see it. The presence of hundreds of horses standing around, especially on a hot summer day, gave the place an unforgettable smell. But market day was the lifeblood of the town.

The market (market square) in the shtetls was not only a source of income for traders, artisans and middlemen, but also a place where a meeting with the non-Jewish peasant took place - a world alien and often hostile to the shtetl. The Jews, with their cult of learning, all literate, were faced with a dark, illiterate mass. The village and the town had different, sometimes difficult to reconcile, ethnographic features.

In the hundreds of small Jewish communities surrounded by the Slavic countryside, many customs—cooking, clothing, sayings, and the eastern dialect of Yiddish itself—reflected influences from the non-Jewish world. This is especially noticeable in the Jewish folklore of Ukraine, Moldova and Poland (sayings and songs are full of Ukrainianisms, Polonisms and melodies of these areas).

Jews and non-Jews, coming from different religious and cultural backgrounds, also had personal connections that were often lacking in big cities. While each side held many negative stereotypes about the other, these stereotypes were disrupted by the reality of specific neighborly ties. It was almost common for non-Jews to speak Hebrew, and even less unusual for Jews to speak a mixed language (Yiddish plus local).

The Jews of the shtetl with inner dignity endured the insults and contempt of their non-Jewish surroundings, paying them back with the same contempt. Even when relations with neighbors were friendly, the Jews of the town constantly feared (reinforced by the memory of past disasters) an unexpected pogrom. Usually the pogrom began in the market square and then spread to houses and synagogues.

Shtetl in Jewish culture

In Jewish literature and art, the theme of the shtetl occupies a central place. Since the mid-19th century, shtetl has become a cultural and literary term. This “image of the shtetl,” as opposed to the “real shtetl,” is often exclusively Jewish, a face-to-face community that lived in Jewish space and time and that preserved traditional Jewish life. In literature and in political and cultural speech, the "shtetl image" has evoked many different reactions, ranging from parody and contempt to praise as a supposed bastion of pure "Yiddishkeit" (Jewishness).

As a short symbol, the attitude towards the "shtetl image" was an indicator of the Jewish encounter with the dilemmas and traumas of modernity, revolution and the Holocaust. After the destruction of Eastern European Jewry, shtetl became a frequent, if not the only, designation for the entire lost world of Eastern European Jewry.

A purely negative image of the shtetl in new literature in Yiddish and Hebrew developed during the Haskalah period. Isaac Meyer Dick, Yisroel Axenfeld, and Yitzchok Yoel Linetsky became extremely popular for their parodies and criticism of shtetl life. I. L. Gordon, Mendele Moher Sfarim and other writers of the older generation in their (mainly satirical) works depicted the ugliness and squalor of small-town life, lawlessness, poverty and obscurantism; ridiculed the rich who strive to be known as “good Jews.”

The unambiguous adjectives in Yiddish “kleinshtetldik” (literally “small-town”) and in Russian “shtetl” acquired a negative connotation as symbols of provincialism and narrow-mindedness.

Many people, including officials of the highest rank, are guilty of parochial thinking. Education, science, politics, and economics suffer from it. Parochialism takes care of its own, selfish interests, hiding behind concern for public interests. All the time, some companies are being organized, without understanding the essence of the problem. They begin to fight smoking - the number of alcoholics increases, the fight against alcoholism leads to an increase in drug addicts, the fight against drug addiction leads to an increase in Internet addicts, gambling addicts, and selfie lovers. We are fighting the effect, not the cause. And the reason is fear, which a person cannot cope with and from which he tries to escape. It is necessary to make society normal so that a person feels protected in it and his future is predictable, then there will be no reason to run away from the “terrible” reality. There are very few people who think holistically, strategically, and no one teaches this because there is no knowledge of the topic. Internet addiction is becoming a problem of the century all over the world. People, immersed in the virtual world, stop developing and become dumber. This also applies to politicians who spend a long time on social networks. There is a disconnection from reality and a misunderstanding of it. This is even worse than parochial thinking, because it doesn’t exist at all. Parochial thinking is useful when it solves problems at the everyday level, but when it comes to solving global problems, it causes irreparable damage to their solution. Development occurs, but very slowly and with swings from one extreme to another. With the help of parochial thinking, it is easy to lead the country away from the right path of development, directing it along the wrong path, by giving some parochial idea increased significance. And it is difficult to resist this, because most people do not think in holistic categories. They prefer others to think for them... Chaos reigns in the economy, because every “small-town” leader drags the blanket over himself, trying to snatch his own interest and caring little about the interests of the state. Even if he wanted to take care of the interests of the state, due to his parochial thinking, he would not be able to do this. Each economist has his own truth, which he strives not to prove by persuasion, but to overwhelm his opponent with his “iron” arguments. The same goes for medicine and education. Everyone seems to be trying to introduce some innovations, but they are of little use, which is why development is stalled... Politicians, entrepreneurs, managers, scientists, diplomats, ministers from the field of health and education need to learn to master balanced thinking, which allows them not only to think holistically, but also to be highly spiritual in order to work for the good of the country. The most balanced thinking initially contains spirituality, which is really beneficial to a person, so there is no need to agitate for it... Vision stabilizes balance, including concentration and dispersal of attention (two in one). Vision forces you to see and recognize the truth and follow it. Not because “it’s necessary,” but because the truth allows you to perceive reality directly, without distortion, and avoid mistakes. Recognizing the truth allows you to correct the mistakes of the past and, when comprehending reality, not to do the enormous unproductive work that is done when self-deception is used. Equilibrium thinking allows you to think in essence and it makes time unified, which greatly increases the brain’s ability to comprehend reality (the mechanism for increasing the efficiency of the brain is described in many articles). Holistic thinking allows you to embrace everything at once, feel the interconnection of everything with everything and at the same time be at any specific point, penetrating with consciousness to its essence and at the same time, without losing touch with reality. This is a completely different way of thinking, the potential of which is inherent in man by nature. With holistic thinking, the interests of EGO and altruism are not separated, but intertwined and complement each other…. A person who has balanced thinking will see a holistic picture of the economy, politics, healthcare, science, the army, sports, education and arrange everything in such a way that everything brings maximum benefit to both the whole and the particular. Sustained attention (vision) allows you to stop the emotional movement in the head and then the phenomenon of “super conductivity” occurs, in which a thought can instantly move in space - memory. Information becomes neutral and it can fit in the head in any quantity and be shuffled in any combination, and instantly. Completely liberated emotions, adapting to the situation, with a pure consciousness, not clouded by emotional chaos. Let the world spin, spin, explode, for consciousness it will remain motionless all the time and be perceived without distortion. This perception excludes shyness from one extreme to another. Vision allows you to constantly disperse emotional fixations (fall apart emotional puzzles) so that emotions are always in a state of “emotional broth”, from which they will be extracted according to the situation. This can be clearly illustrated by the example of a lion, a tiger, and predators that do not have a dominant fear. They are completely relaxed and at the same time clearly control the situation and act where necessary and exactly as much as necessary. Not a single extra movement. They act on meaningful intuition, which reads information directly, without preliminary calculations. People, for the most part, have forgotten how to think like that... Schoolchildren are accused of not reading enough and that the level of education is falling. One of the reasons is uncertainty about the future, fear of the future and the present, and running away from fear into social networks, where you can realize your desires and increase self-esteem. As a result, the connection with reality decreases, attention becomes unstable, and therefore school material is poorly absorbed. A persistently disturbed balance weakens the immune system, resulting in poor health and reduced resistance to stress. Pay attention to teenagers, how addicted many of them are to selfies, gadgets, and phones. You constantly need to call someone to say something “about nothing” and all the time take pictures of your loved one in order to stroke your vanity. And if you take a good photo, post it on the Internet and get a lot of likes for it, then this is the limit of happiness. “They saw me, I became famous, I received fame…. And if you try and become popular, you can earn a lot of money. Why try to learn when you can earn money without any knowledge?” Young people cannot be convinced by talking about the harm caused by excessive use of social networks. She needs to be in the trend, in the rut, in the general mix, otherwise you will become uninteresting and become an outcast. You have to be on the crest of the wave. Why think about the bad, you need to live here and now, and also enjoy now, and not someday. In reality, everything is bad, disgusting, terrible, but in the virtual world you can be a god, therefore, don’t give a damn about the admonitions of adults and live the way you want…. To save a teenager from Internet addiction (or any other), we need to offer an alternative. Moreover, we must act proactively, and not wait for him to become dependent. And the alternative is balanced, holistic thinking, which allows you to live a real, fulfilling life. It makes a person strong, humane, with high self-esteem, strong will, benevolent, highly spiritual, emotionally rich, stress-resistant, healthy in soul and body, and intelligent. To do this, it is enough to redirect attention from your invented little world - a shell, to reality and learn to see it, and not imagine it, dragging it through the world of fear. The more relaxed you are, the more concentrated you are and vice versa. Steady attention does not strain, but relaxes, since reality becomes understandable, predictable and manageable, and therefore not scary. You can truly relax only in a state of security... By and large, it is not profitable to think small-town. By thinking holistically, you will achieve what you want faster and will not be in a state of constant war with yourself and the world around you, since confrontation will give way to cooperation. May 30, 2016

ABOUT SMALL THINKING

In Chapter 4, looking back at the disappearance of previous civilizations, I easily became disillusioned with what I was doing, what I had been doing all my life.

How can we not become disappointed and become a pessimist, when all 4 races of humanoid creatures have disappeared before us and, logically, our 5th race should disappear someday, and yet there are already 7 billion of us.

LIFE IS VAIN, WORK IS VAIN,

LET'S EVERYTHING DISAPPEAR AND SO EVERYTHING IS CLEAR.

It’s amazing how easily and simply cunning time manipulates and speculates on a person’s feelings and emotions.

As soon as a person lives in the past and the past, he immediately becomes a pessimist and is disappointed with himself in the present and present.

As soon as I looked into the past for a moment and saw the disappearance of previous civilizations, I immediately came to the hopeless conclusion that our civilization would soon disappear. Disappointment began to appear and a pessimistic syndrome of speculation began in my uncontrolled mind, and logical conclusions in this direction instantly turned me into a weak, helpless, insignificant, pessimistic creature, a bore and a whiner.

Each time moment has its own space, i.e. a specific place of manifestation, therefore each time moment is specifically parochial, and thinking about a specific time moment becomes parochial. A parochial thinker has parochial thinking, either about time or about the place of manifestation of a specific time moment.

An ordinary person has a parochial mindset, and in order to have a global, transcendental mindset, one must become extraordinary.

To think globally, I need to clearly see myself in all moments of the past, present and future time and not talk only separately about the past and see only the hopeless past, which makes me an insignificant, weak, pathetic pessimist, whiner and bore.

In order for me to become an absolute optimist again, I must clearly see all the pictures of my optimistic future, pure, spiritual, immortal, which fills me with the novelty of a new spiritual immortal life.

That's all?

Yes, that's all!

Everything that I do in the present, I do for the past and for the future, but it will no longer be useful for the past, therefore it is meaningless, but it will be useful for the future, so my work has great meaning.

For the present, in the past, all 4 races have disappeared and there is a strong sense of hopelessness from the past, but for the future in the present, they have not disappeared, but have changed and continue to live in our fifth race. Our fifth race will also not disappear anywhere, it will simply change and continue to exist in the sixth race. All my information is needed not by people of the past, but by people of the future, i.e. what I write and upload to the Internet is needed by the people of the future, i.e. to the same earthlings, but only younger, very young, specifically the first newly born generation.

People of my generation do not need my information, because they have their own ossified opinion on everything, based on personal experience of trial and error, and it is quite difficult to convince such people of the opposite and, in fact, there is no need to do this. This means that I am uploading information onto the Internet for people of the future, and not for people of the present.

Thinking about the people of the future, and these are still only children, I become infected with optimism and the desire to live and create for them, to help them, although they don’t know about it yet, they are still very small.

It is easier for people of my generation to NOT UNDERSTAND me than to UNDERSTAND me, which is actually what is happening, for this reason I do not communicate with them. Children, due to their immaturity, cannot understand me either, so for now I find myself in complete isolation, which is a great blessing for me, because it helps me calmly write, print, upload to the Internet and completely engage only with myself, live for myself, but for the sake of the people.

It turns out that in order to be a pessimist or an optimist, you need reasons that make a person such - these are the past and future tense from the perspective of a person of the present.

What to do with the present tense?

The present time is the essence of the causelessness of self-manifestation for the causes of the past and future time. In the present tense, you can live JUST THIS way, without bothering with the reasons of the past and future tense, but first you need to understand these reasons.

I’ll tell you a secret: all people in the present moment live JUST SO, without reason, and reasons appear only for the past and future time, if the view comes from the present.

What if from the past?

What if from the future?

A person can feed himself with memories from the past and, thinking about the future, feed himself with dreams, plans, goals for the future and for the future, i.e. live like a pessimist or an optimist, i.e. constantly be on emotional feed of a negative or positive plan.

A person can know the essence of pessimism and optimism, and this knowledge is enough for him to be neither one nor the other for himself and for his environment. He will simply create, do something, knowing why and for whom he is doing everything, being significant, not being significant for his future.

It becomes only a point of NOTHING HERE AND NOW for EVERYTHING, as for NOTHING.

At this point, he finds for himself a convenient, comfortable, cozy place to stay, where nothing and no one bothers him, where it is always quiet and calm. Everything is harmonized, balanced, balanced.

Tell yourself and understand how your feelings and emotions are affected by the past, present and future tense? How affected are you by these temporary moments?

What effect do they have on your mood and well-being?

What point in time makes you a pessimist or an optimist? I think it doesn’t hurt to figure this out in order to become the master of time, its ruler and not succumb to the provocations of cunning time.

In the story with A.E. Yunitsky’s two points are most remarkable to me: the belief in the correctness of his own ideas and, at the same time, the impossibility of implementing these ideas in his homeland for decades.

We are talking about the scientist and inventor Anatoly Eduardovich Yunitsky (born 1949). At one time, due to the nature of my journalistic activity, I had to meet him. In pre-perestroika times, his idea of ​​​​creating a kind of “ring” around the Earth in near space, on which all major industrial production could be located, caused most people, to put it mildly, to grin and bewilderment. True, not only the regional press, but also such authoritative popularizers of science as “Technology for Youth” or “Inventor and Innovator” wrote about Yunitsky’s bold project at that time. There, a special type of transport was also mentioned in general terms, which today is called STU - Unitsky String Transport.

I will not go into details of the content of the idea itself - anyone interested can easily find information about it on the Internet. The main thing here, in my opinion, is that this is not a fantastic project of a crazy inventor in the style of Jules Verne, but, judging by the assessments of expert councils, a completely calculated and worthy scientific development with a huge economic effect. And Anatoly Eduardovich himself has two higher educations, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the author of 150 patented inventions. That is, he was a completely seasoned fighter for his intellectual property rights back in those pre-perestroika times.

But drawings and calculations are one thing, an actual pilot project is quite another. As soon as the opportunity arose, Yunitsky created a self-supporting scientific and technical enterprise in the second half of the 1980s to promote his idea. He even runs for local government deputies. Then, over the course of decades, there will be many such commercial and semi-commercial structures using their own money or targeted grants.

But Anatoly Eduardovich never manages to build a testing ground for practical testing of his string transport in order to prove all its advantages in practice - neither in the 1990s in Belarus on his personal farm plot near Mozyr in the Gomel region, nor in the present century in Russia Ozery, Moscow region. Yes, projects have appeared for Sochi, and Khabarovsk, and for Stavropol, and for the Khanty-Mansiysk Okrug, and, finally, for Moscow and St. Petersburg. But these were only projects - “agreements of intent.”

And in parallel, as stated in one of the UST press releases, “for the period 2005-2009. Countries such as Australia, UAE, Canada, South Korea, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc. have shown interest in STU developments.”

But why not Russia? Don't “homes” need “fast” and cheap roads? Aren't billions of rubles spent on transporting goods from one end of the country to the other? Or are there simply too many people interested in ensuring that a truly effective development is not implemented - starting from local “budget burners” to real monsters - transnational corporations?..

In general, the sixty-year-old scientist largely “gives up”: the company that owns all the original developments of the inventor Yunitsky eventually appears in Cyprus in 2011 to manage the implementation of the effective Transnet transport project around the world from there. The “daughters” immediately begin to “grow up” in Australia, in Tver, and somewhere else.

The story with Yunitsky seems to be close to logical and not very joyful - from the position of public and state good! - the final.

That is why two characteristic moments in this “eternal” theme of “unrecognized genius” are noteworthy for me personally. The first is Anatoly Eduardovich’s determination and his belief that “the good (and, most importantly, economically profitable) work of his whole life” will come true sooner or later. And the second is a kind of “small-town” thinking of the “environment”, aimed at satisfying almost immediate needs. Moreover, sometimes it seems that this “parochialism” is simply imposed from the outside. Maybe by the same transnational corporations in order to extract more brains from this territory?

R.S.: But, if you think about it, the situation with domestic creative pedagogy (the same TRIZ by G. Altshuller) is similar...

The tragic events that began in Ukraine at the end of last year, 2013, and, unfortunately, continue to this day, have some very striking features that are worthy of careful consideration.

On the one hand, the bloody events in Ukraine are what can be called a rebellion of parochialism against culture as such. On the other hand, this is another attack, an attack of the Western world on the Russian world. How did the considered cultural European elites and crowds of primitive “raguli”, ecstatically entering into a ritual dance called “Khtoneskache - toy Muscovite?” come together in a single impulse against the Russian world.

On the one hand, they are connected by an ancient and strong “pan-servant” relationship. Our President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin rightly pointed this out in his speech on the “Direct Line” on April 17, 2014 (1 hour 26 minutes of the meeting): “The western parts of Ukraine were partially in Czechoslovakia (within modern borders), partly in Hungary (Austria-Hungary), partly in Poland. And nowhere and never residents of these areas were not full citizens of these countries.... The fact that they were second-class citizens in these countries was somehow forgotten. But somewhere there, in their souls, they have it buried deep. This is the root of this nationalism" Well, a faithful servant is like a faithful dog, he cannot fail to obey his master’s command. And the commands, as everyone knows, were received more than once. How many “lords” from Western Europe and America have visited the Kiev Independence Square! Here Victoria Nuland with her famous cookies was an allegory of the sweet Western life. Here Catherine Ashton, again nothing more than allegorically, showed the beauty of this same life. Here, the phantom US senator John McCain allegorically depicted the mental power of the entire North American continent. And German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, without any allegory, revealed himself to be an official pederast, clearly indicating the path that the young Ukrainian democracy should take.

Yes, the pan-servant relationship is obvious. But what can explain the persistence of these relationships, the voluntary readiness for suicide on the part of the “slaves” and their amazing trust in their Western “lords”? It seems that the fact is that both the “slaves” and their “lords,” despite all the differences in external splendor, are quite similar internally in one deep quality, the name of which is “parochialism.” What it is?

Synonyms for the word “parochialism” are the following words: deafness, denseness, provincialism, provinciality, naivety, backwardness, peripherality, simplicity and so on .

We will not be mistaken if we say that parochialism is due to the limited consciousness caused by the individual’s isolation to what he already knows, with a complete denial of the existence of what goes beyond the circle of concepts he has acquired.

Such an individual is proud of what he has learned, or rather, appropriated. That is, only by what exists in his “small place” - a closed area of ​​space, knowledge, interests, information, ideas, etc. In other words, he is proud of what is intended for the exclusive use of “just for himself,” only what seems beneficial to him and serves to exalt this individual in his own eyes. This is all that, as it seems to him, confirms the rightness, righteousness, holiness, immutability of his own opinions, views, habits. The opposite, which at least undoubtedly indicates the opposite qualities of this subject, is declared by him to be non-existent, false, fictitious, not worthy of the attention of a sane person, who, by definition, must agree with the bearer of local consciousness. All those who disagree - get out of the way and out of life, since they are obviously “not worthy of life on earth,” as Afghan ulema theologians close to Osama bin Laden deigned to put it around 2000. It seems to the small-town individual that God is only listening to him. The statements of American politicians that “the proclamation of the independence of Crimea and the proclamation of the independence of Kosovo are completely different things” fit into the classic framework of parochialism. Or statements that “the events on the Kiev Maidan and the events in the American Ferguson are not the same thing.” Struck by parochialism, the subject is ready, without hesitation, to allow himself what for others he considers a terrible crime.

In the intellectual field, parochialism manifests itself as doctrinairism, which, according to the definition of an ancient dictionary, is “narrowness of thought, stubborn unwillingness to take into account the facts of reality; reasoning based on abstract propositions and not verified by facts.”

It was the West that became the main supplier of religious sects. Not surprising - after all, in spiritual life, parochialism manifests itself as sectarianism or heresy. “Sectarianism - 1. The general name of religious associations (sects) that broke away from the dominant church. // transfer decomposition The narrowness and isolation of the views of people limited to their petty group interests". The relationship between sectarianism and doctrinaire is obvious. We can say that sectarianism is doctrinaireism in the field of doctrine. The word “heresy” comes from the Greek αἵρεσις - “ choice, direction, school, teaching, sect,” speaks for itself, since it explains that all these directions, schools, teachings, sects appear as a result of the fact that someone makes a choice of what is desirable from the entire variety of existing ones. An indispensable element in the technology of creating heresy is the selection of some finite part of it from the infinite diversity of all things and ignoring everything else, which is essentially infinite. Parochialism forces one to renounce the infinite diversity of the world in favor of one’s own limitations and narrowness. Parochialism is expressed in the desire to “bend” the God-created world, changeable in its infinite diversity, to fit its unchanging rigidity and limitations.

If we look deeper into this phenomenon, then its root must be recognized as fighting against God, an attempt to isolate ourselves from God, who tires a limited and selfish created being with His endless diversity. In the religious field, that is, in the field of man’s relationship with God, parochialism was expressed in idolatry. Instead of a relationship with the eternal, immense, unknown God, the idolater chooses a relationship with a self-made, and therefore vulgarly understandable, idol. An individual, stricken by the parochialism of religious consciousness, finds it tiresome to deal with God, Whom he must obey. The small-town individual wants to have a God who would obey the small-town individual. Such a “god” becomes a product of local consciousness, replacing the true, Living God for the local individual. This product is an idol, an idol, an idol.

Idolatry did not stand still. Having begun with the production of primitive idols, it subsequently developed to the creation of mental idols, the most dangerous of which are false teachings about the true God, false interpretations of the true Divine revelation. Examples of such idols are the perverted understanding of the Mosaic Law by the Pharisees contemporary to Christ, which served as the basis for modern Talmudism. Roman Catholicism, which wished to replace God, who became man, with a deified man holding the position of bishop of the city of Rome. The wisdom of Protestant “theologians”, continuing the tradition of Roman scholastic theology. Human wisdom is “understandable” to the sinful human mind, since it recognizes in them “its own” and “loves its own” (John 15:19), the sinful understanding. These wisdoms are the “god” who obeys his creator in everything. The world, having fallen away from its Creator and “lying in sin,” is afflicted with the disease of parochialism and therefore it hates both its Creator and everyone who follows Him. Christ Himself tells His disciples: “If the world hates you, know that it hated Me before you” (John 15:18).

The current revolutionary hatred in Ukraine, as well as the entire Western European civilization, are boiled in the Vatican cauldron, which is thoroughly saturated with parochialism, which was beautifully described by F. M. Dostoevsky in “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”: “Oh, we will allow them even sin, they are weak and powerless, and they will love us like children because we allow them to sin. We will tell them that every sin will be atoned for if it is done with our permission; We allow them to sin because we love them, and we will take the punishment for these sins upon ourselves. And we will take it upon ourselves, and they will adore us as benefactors who bore their sins before God.” Permission to sin pleases both the current Ukrainian Svidomites and the Western-oriented “elite”. It’s not for nothing that one of these “elitists,” especially distinguished by his craving for “permitted” sin, declared: “... if you are not Ukrainians, then get out!.. If you are not Ukrainians, you do not hear God!” . Therefore, it is not surprising that both the Western European “elite” and the Western European “raguli” are so unanimous in their anti-Russian hysteria. Russia, despite all the sins of its citizens, does not recognize the doctrine of “permitted sin” and in the Ukrainian tragedy fulfills the words of God: “Save those taken to death, and will you really refuse those doomed to be killed?” (Proverbs 24:11). The West, on the contrary, gave the evil small-town Svidomites its “permission” to kill with impunity all those who did not accept the values ​​of the Kiev junta. Thus, the Western evil small-town condemned millions of residents of Novorossiya to death for not living according to the rules of the Western “shtetl.” At the same time, she is deeply outraged that Russia is resisting the wishes of the executioners. The local doctrinaire is absolutely not ready for this; it sincerely outrages him.

The small-town doctrinaire is not ready for the fact that tomorrow God can offer him something that is not in his little place, much less leave this familiar place. In this respect, he is the complete opposite of the father of all believers, Abraham, who, at the command of God, left his country, his people and set off towards the unknown, strengthened only by hope in God. The small-town doctrinaire does not want to hear from God: “Get out of your land, from your kindred and from your father’s house [and go] to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). In the inner life, this is expressed in the rejection of repentance, which means the renunciation of habitual but harmful sin, in the rejection of self-condemnation, which means the recognition of one’s own imperfection and calls for efforts to change oneself. In a word, spiritual parochialism is disobedience to our Creator, Who calls us from the hatched swamp of our own sinfulness to the Heavenly Fatherland, abandoned by us for the sake of sin - our true home, unknown to the inveterate sinner.

Diverse parochialism permeates the entire Western culture, which grew on the juices of Roman Catholicism, which most famously declared a manifesto of universal parochialism, declaring the bishop of the city of Rome to be none other than the “head of the Church of Christ” and the “vicar of God on earth,” despising the absolutely clear evidence that “Christ is the head of the church” (Eph. 5:23). The Western part of the Church refused to deal with the Living God, Who cannot be enclosed in the rigid, immovable framework of one’s own mental constructs, Who “does not listen to sinners” (John 9:31), but Whom a sinner must obey in order to be saved. And such a framework is a necessary requirement of mental parochialism, which demands that everything everywhere should be “like our little place,” so that instead of the Living, Unknown God, there would be home-made idols everywhere, understandable and obedient to their creators. Shtetlism declares its place “above all else.” In Hitler’s Germany it sounded like “Deutschlandüberalles”; in today’s unfortunate Ukraine it was expressed in the parody-shtetl “Ukrainaponad use”.

Parochialism is not ready to meet life, since life is not going to fit into the prepared coffin of the framework of parochial thinking. Only the corpse of life can be placed in this coffin, which must be killed for this, forbidding it to contradict the clumsy schemes of parochial thinking. And if life cannot be killed, then it is expelled, and instead of it an idol is placed in the prepared coffin - an artificial creation, somewhat reminiscent of life and, unlike it, in everything agrees with any wishes of the local doctrinaire, heretic, sectarian.

This is obviously similar to the representatives of the Western European “elite” and the Ukrainian “raguli”, merging in a single ecstasy of hatred for Russia, which, unlike them, is always ready for the changes offered by life, and is not bogged down in the dead schemes so characteristic of Western doctrinaire thinking. “All countries border on each other, and Russia borders on Heaven” - these words of a Western poet probably mean that life in Russia largely depends not on human opinions and desires, not on human agreements with its neighboring countries, but from the will of God, from the eternal Covenant with Christ. In Russia, more than in other countries, it is obvious that “man proposes, but God disposes,” that everything happens “not as you want, but as God wills.” This closeness, sometimes involuntary, unexpected, of Russia to God, greatly irritates the local doctrinaires. Probably, this is precisely the root of Western eternal Russophobia, or better yet, Russophagia - the desire to “devour”, destroy, exclude Russia from the conditions that determine the conditions of reality, which the local doctrinaire wants to build according to his own will, according to his own understanding.

Western doctrinaires were not the first to proclaim parochialism as the norm of life. They only gave parochialism the paradoxical status of a universal phenomenon, declaring the bishop of the city of Rome the Ecumenical High Priest, and after this the universal obligation of subordination to the Western so-called. to the “Christian world,” headed by this “universal high priest.” They had predecessors who, blinded by the idea of ​​their spiritual parochialism, refused to accept their own Savior, proclaimed by the prophets whom they paid lip service to. Not only did they refuse to accept. But they also achieved a shameful, painful execution in order to convince themselves that they had allegedly achieved the death of a criminal and villain. They achieved His execution not because they were convinced of His guilt, but on the contrary - because they were confident of His righteousness, which infinitely surpassed their own self-made, parochial, imaginary righteousness. According to the picture of the world they themselves created, they were supposed to occupy the top of the pedestal of “champions of holiness.” But contrary to their doctrine, One appeared, whose mere presence destroyed all their constructions and speculations. Local doctrinaireism cannot withstand such an insult and always demands the physical, actual, actual destruction of an opponent who does not agree with it.

The root of Western hatred of Russia is an outgrowth of the root from which the Pharisees’ hatred of Christ grew, which prompted them to commit the most terrible crime in the entire history of mankind - Deicide. But even to those who have accomplished it, God does not close the path to salvation. True, the condition of its acceptance turns out to be unbearably difficult for many - it is necessary to abandon what has been lovingly accumulated “for sebe”, that is, to abandon one’s spiritual parochialism, one’s sinful self for the sake of finding oneself pleasing to God, in other words, to repent of one’s unrighteousness before God, which was previously falsely accepted as righteousness.

Western culture, nurtured by the Vatican, is too deeply imbued with spiritual and intellectual parochialism. This is also expressed in those areas that directly concern Western religious life, both Catholic and Protestant, that is, in the relationship of Western man to God. This is expressed in the attitude of Western man and the entire Western civilization, both to man and to the world. What exactly does this mean? Here are some of the most striking examples.

In church life:

The ancient desire to attribute unique properties to the bishop of the city of Rome, supposedly elevating him not only above any other archpastor, but also above the entire fullness of the Church of Christ, which was subsequently expressed in the adoption of dogmas about the primacy and infallibility of the bishop of the city of Rome;

The unauthorized inclusion in the text of the Creed of the Addendum about the procession of the Holy Spirit not only from God the Father, but “and from the Son” (filioque), which subsequently, despite the legitimate resistance of the prudent part of the Western Church, was imposed for political reasons as the official doctrine and laid the beginning of Western uninspired theology, based on human momentary speculation;

Scholastic theology, based on considerations of human reason more than on Divine Revelation. In addition to his well-known passions for Aristotle and other ancient scholarship, Thomas Aquinas, for example, in “his writings refers to “Rabbi Moses,” revealing his deep acquaintance with the “Mentor.” We are talking about the famous 12th-century Talmudic scholar Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (1135-1204), also known as Maimonides or Rambam, and his famous work, “the wonderful philosophical manifesto of Judaism “Morenevukhim” (“Master of the Lost”)”;

Protestant theology, which has chosen as its main principle the assertion that in order to know the truth, it is enough to read Scripture alone (solascriptura) and “sound mind” (!) for its correct (!) understanding. This actually proclaimed the sufficiency of human sinful powers for the knowledge of God. In fact, this was expressed in the creation of a huge number of different opinions about God, that is, mental idols - “God substitutes”, adapted to this or that theological mind;

In secular life, these distortions of Western church life have consistently led to the following phenomena, the root of which is the same as in Western church deviations - the exaltation of man and his mental abilities and the oblivion of the fact that both man and his abilities lose all meaning in isolation from Source of Life, Reason, Truth - God:

Humanism, which gave rise to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. In essence, it is man-theology, the basis of which was a scholastic way of reasoning with admixtures of teachings frankly alien to Christianity, from which even the scholastics did not disdain to draw muddy worldly wisdom;

Western European philosophy, the largest representative of which Immanuel Kant expressed the manifesto of religious parochialism with the famous phrase: “God is not a being outside of me, but only my thought”;

Evolutionist philosophy, which was accepted as a supposedly “scientific” theory, which, as a supra-scientific philosophical paradigm, subjugated Western European science, which became the “handmaiden of evolutionism”;

The current concept of the so-called. “universal human values”, which proclaimed the entire set of godless perversions of human nature to be the most important “values”.

And the final touch that paints the picture of universal parochialism is the ugly staged action now taking place on the long-suffering Ukrainian land, around which the entire godless universal shtetl performs a vile ritual dance of death, declaring its autonomy from God and unwillingness to live according to His laws, calling for the kingdom Antichrist - the universal parochial god, to whom these parochial doctrinaires are ready to joyfully give all honor and worship, thanking him for “allowing them to sin,” without thinking that this “permission” is nothing more than a bait that entices not who wants to abandon the sin of man into the terrible abyss of eternal destruction.

Archpriest Alexy Kasatikov , rector of the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God “Joy of All Who Sorrow” in Krasnodar, confessor of the Scientific and Methodological Missionary Center under the Ekaterinodar and Kuban Diocese

Ragul, rogul(pl. raguli, roguli, female ragulikha, rogulikha) - a slang word, a disparaging nickname with the meaning “primitive person, uncultured villager.” (Wikipedia).

ASIS synonym dictionary. V.N. Trishin. 2013.

A complete dictionary of foreign words that have come into use in the Russian language. - Popov M., 1907.

Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language edited by T. F. Efremova

“An outstanding master of desecration of classics and obscenity on stage, Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Roman Viktyuk, who feeds on mold in Moscow - or himself representing this mold, demands from the citizens of the DPR and LPR, due to his own high Svidomo status as a Lviv native: “.. .if you are not Ukrainians, then get away!.. If you are not Ukrainians, you do not hear God!” (Yuri Serb. On the issue of curability of cerebral ukrainoma. Russian People's Line)

“Vasily Nikolaevich Muravyov, a successful entrepreneur, millionaire, traveled abroad on commercial matters. After one of the trips, he was met in St. Petersburg by his personal coachman and taken to his apartment. On the street, Vasily Nikolaevich saw a peasant sitting on the pavement, who loudly repeated: “Not as you want, but as God willing!” Vasily Nikolaevich found out that he sold the last horse in the city, but the money was taken from him, since he was weak from hunger and could not resist the offenders. There were seven children left in the village, a wife and father, sick with typhus. Having decided to die, the peasant sat down on the pavement and repeated, as if to himself: “Not as you want, but as God wills!” Vasily Nikolaevich went with him to the market, bought a couple of horses, a cart, loaded it with food, tied a cow to it and handed everything over to the peasant. He began to refuse, not believing his happiness, to which he received the answer: “Not as you want, but as God wills!” Vasily Nikolaevich arrived home. Before going to his wife, he called the hairdresser. He invited him to sit in a chair, but Vasily Nikolaevich excitedly walked around the room, saying out loud: “Not the way you want, but as God wills.” Suddenly the barber fell to his knees and admitted that he wanted to kill him and rob him. After this, Vasily Muravyov, the future Elder Seraphim, distributed most of his fortune and made a contribution to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra” - this is how the Monk Seraphim of Vyritsky converted to the monastic path.

Rabbi Yosef Telushkin. Jewish world / Trans. from English N. Ivanova and Vl. Vladimirova - M.: Jerusalem: Bridges of Culture, Gesharim, 2012 - 624 p., ill., p. 144.

There, p. 142.

Kant I. Religion within the limits of reason alone (translated by N. M. Sokolov, A. A. Stolyarov) // Kant I. Treatises. St. Petersburg, 1996, p. 216.