7
If "Soviet Communism" took its own downfall,
then "Western capitalism" has not done so yet.
Everything that irritates the appetite for particulars becomes not only evil,
but distracts from issues that really should be discussed.
Stafford Beer
The profession dissipates thoughts; this is her greatest blessing.
For it is a cover, for which it is permissible to retreat whenever,
When a person is attacked by doubts and worries of a general nature.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Foreword
How much should I say or write in order to share something important with the
world? Do I need to explain
something for a long time, or just to start the
world in
a few words, in some set of commandments, in winged aphorisms? And how long
does it take to spend it? And should this presentation be smooth and uniform, or
should it be a tangle of intersecting, and sometimes open and unspoken,
narratives? Well, if this openness is marked and framed in the form of questions –
since, as you know, correctly put the question – then half answer it. To determine
the predetermined order of what I chose as the material for this book was
somewhat difficult, but not quite: every part of what I would like to tell here has
an independent significance for me. The order is rather determined by the
content of the beginnings and ends of the corresponding sections, but not at all
the fact that another order of presentation is impossible. The texts of these
sections are separate narratives – unconditionally intersecting with one another
and forming in a whole system, meaningfully open on a variety of topics, for
narration is an open thing. At the same time, having a set of materials that were
very interrelated but initially not created as a whole, I tried to observe the
completeness of the text.
What is the book about? Compressing the answer to this question to a laconic
form must invariably lead to a heading. Perhaps there was an option to write a
book, unfolding a narrative from it; but the fact of the matter is that its fragments
arose as independent integrity and objects of my interest before they were
integrated with each other. Therefore, the difficulty of the way back – creating a
title for an already finished book – is that the whole world of their own ideas,