Contempt for those who are one step below, a stupefying feeling of being chosen, a feeling of absolute permissiveness — the reverse side of elitism, the writer Leonid Kostyukov believes.
Recently I was invited to the anniversary of the Second High, and for some reason I did not go to it. And you can’t say that I didn’t love my school …
I studied there from 1972 to 1976, and as soon as I got there, I felt joy. I liked to get up in the morning and drag myself to the other end of Moscow. What for? First of all — to communicate with classmates, interesting and cheerful people. Were we fifteen years old, self-confident, gambling, capable, a product of this school? To a large extent, yes, because our school of mathematics stood out strongly against the general background.
Do I like the teenager that, for example, I was? Were these traits I tried, to the best of my ability, to carefully instill in my children or students afterwards? We are on very slippery ground here.
Human gratitude is worth a lot: to parents, teachers, time, place.
On the contrary, the grey-haired uncle’s complaints about other people’s flaws in his upbringing sound pitiful and by and large do not interest anyone.
On the other hand, my observations show that gratitude for everything that happened to you is often combined with total complacency. And I, they say, drank port wine, got into the police — so what? (He does not agree: he grew up so well.) But I’m not sure that I grew up so well.
I had to repeatedly shake up and revise my life principles and everyday habits, feel shame for words and deeds. I don’t know if I can objectively look at the school that shaped me to a large extent, but I will try.
We despised the people, understanding them as a layer of people who did not pass the competition for universities
Mathematics was excellent in our school. Teachers in other subjects were very diverse: extremely bright and forgettable, dissident and completely Soviet. This, as it were, emphasized the importance of mathematics in the system of school values. And since the communist ideology abounded in contradictions, it could not withstand the criticism of a mathematically oriented mind. Our free-thinking was reduced to its denial.
In particular, the Soviet big style preached tenderness to the so-called people. We despised the people, understanding them as a layer of people who did not pass the competition for universities. In general, we put the competitive selection very highly, having already passed it once and intending to progressively pass in the future.
There is another source of a sense of being chosen: a child, and even a teenager, perceives himself from the inside, and other people — from the outside. That is, he has the illusion that he himself every minute lives a spiritual life rich in nuances and emotional outbursts, while the spiritual life of others exists only to the extent that he sees its expression.
The longer the feeling lasts in a teenager that he (alone or with his comrades) is not like everyone else, the more stupid things he does. This deviation is treated by the realization that you are in the very, very depths like everyone else. Which leads to maturity and empathy for other people.