Every time I get into the Moscow metro, I note to myself how much we are people of chaos, well, practically no one is willing or able to take into account the movement of a person walking towards me. If we compare the chaos in the subway with the movement of cars on the freeway, then we all fly head-on into each other in the oncoming lane and at maximum speed.
Every time I get into the Moscow metro, I note to myself how much we are people of chaos, well, practically no one is willing or able to take into account the movement of a person walking towards me. If we compare the chaos in the subway with the movement of cars on the freeway, then we all fly head-on into each other in the oncoming lane and at maximum speed.
How attentive is the crowd, for example, in the Prague metro, there are no barriers to movement, everyone flows around each other with amazing courtesy, everyone takes into account your approach ahead of time, every Praguer is arranged like a calculator or a smartphone, and we? We are, perhaps, a entrenching tool, one of the simpler tools: shovels, rakes, and even two-handed saws for logging, such a fury with two handles flies at you from an escalator – neither go around it, nor go around.
But, I ask, is there any sense in this rudeness?
And I answer myself. Alas, this is how our history turned out, only people with manual labor could survive, persons without ladies’ nerves, and this vivisection of totalitarianism is still felt in people, especially when they are twisted at rush hour by the whirlwind of the capital’s subway.
Meanwhile, such an answer sins with approximation. I realized this when, by the will of fate, I ended up in Beijing. Well well! Here, the flow of people in the subway was much rougher, and the capital of the Celestial Empire itself is, in short and without offense, a city of solid hard workers. In our crowd, intelligent physiognomies are still not uncommon; in the Chinese stream, only worker-peasant faces and elbows predominate. And what beggars there! It is customary for the Chinese to put on the asphalt, so to speak, “evidence for begging”, sometimes such bodily artifacts and mutilations fall on the eyes that the hair stands on end. In short, they do not stand on ceremony with the emotions of those they meet.
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But let’s try to look at the problem of stampede and savagery in the subway from the other side … So, the two peasant empires over the past hundred years have experienced a wave of significant changes, and both have been seriously affected by the ruling elite. On the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, the intelligentsia of Russia experienced, perhaps, one of the most refined periods in the development of the spirit and intellect. Look through the old fashion magazines of the beginning of the century, what faces, what hats and what waists! No wonder the term Silver Age arose. The paradoxical result of the development of these swan bends of the spirit was the Soviet Stalinist camp, where it was dangerous to wear glasses and hats and no one thought about ostrich feathers on hats.
Where am I heading? And I tend to what Chinese wisdom says: “genius is a disaster for the people.” If even one genius is fraught with such a threat, then the sum of geniuses can destroy civilization to its foundations. Not only we survived the Silver Age, the aura of subtle emotions made its nests of the spirit in the same Austria, Germany and Italy. Needless to say, what evil chicks were born in those ostrich hats. At the same time, a galaxy of aesthetic monsters came to power in Europe in the 20s, who announced publicly that the old world was no good.
The Silver Age’s swan neck was easily broken.
Well, today the situation has changed.
Civilization is a complex living organism, one of the tasks of which is to keep humanity in a state of balance and stable homeostasis. The extremes that Europe and Asia experienced during the two world wars, the civilization of the Old World took into account and turned on the mechanism of a kind of coarsening and stupidity (I can’t find another word). The number of geniuses, in my opinion, has noticeably decreased, but the amount of fools and nonsense has increased significantly. And there is nothing wrong with that, the system of life is insured, total war has been declared on the elite, no ostrich hats, hairpins and dances in the spirit of languid slow fox! We have all become remarkably stupid, and the total intelligence quotient has fallen below the values that were achieved by the 20s. In Russia, this is especially noticeable. That’s why we roll at each other on the streets and in the subways like trucks loaded with sacks of potatoes!
Whether we like it or not, the spirit of shovels reigns supreme.
And don’t be fooled by tablets and other electronics. People got rougher. And dumber. Chaos opposes order. The order is dangerous. Protection from elitism runs like a rough seam through everyone. A tacit war has been declared on the elites – no exotics! No aesthetes-leaders at the helm of the state, from now on only common sense occupies commanding heights, but here is the result: in the subway, a two-handed saw flies head-on from an escalator in the subway, and there is no way to bypass or bypass it.