We were taught to be ashamed of ourselves, our desires. And as a result, they etched out a lively interest in life. Writer Nikolai Kryshchuk about how important it is to allow yourself and your children to do what is really interesting.
You can often observe: a person, from our point of view, is engaged in nonsense, and even passionately, spending a lot of time on it. We ask: “Why do you need this nonsense? I’d like to do something useful.» He replies, «I’m interested.» Or, on the contrary, we try to involve a friend in an enterprise that inspires us at the moment, we almost see the meaning of life in it. And the friend waves it off: «No, I’m not interested.» Likewise about a film or some kind of exhibition. Well, and quite pragmatic: “this is my interest.” In the Soviet years, everything related to interest was suspect, like the word itself. Duty and obligation were cultivated. It was arranged pompously, starting with the «honorary duty» to serve in the army, but the need to subordinate one’s own interests to the public (in reality: state, more precisely, to the class of officials) was always implied.
- Where does deja vu come from?
Simon Soloveichik, a remarkable philosopher of pedagogy, explains this pedagogical experiment on a national scale as follows: “The whole country has turned into a huge educational institution. Scientists, competing, designed a new person, listed his features. Universal education was necessary because the interests of the vast majority did not coincide with the interests of the system. The population of a great country was treated the way unreasonable parents treat an unreasonable child: it is declared that education is in his interests, which he does not understand. Immediately there appeared theories about the alleged complete coincidence of the interests of the individual and the new society. Well, indeed: if personal interests are eradicated by upbringing, then a coincidence will turn out.
Etched. We have become ashamed of ourselves, of our desires. In the words “personally I”, many still see a manifestation of selfishness and selfishness: “Look what a fifa!” Of course, never, of course, it will never be possible to completely eradicate interest in humanity, but it is easy to ruin the life of an individual person. The same Soloveichik believes that everything begins in the family, when a five-year-old child is constantly pulled up and weaned from saying “I want”, “I don’t want”, seeing in this only a whim and spoiled. And when he is fifteen or twenty-five, they suddenly grab his head: “What to do? He is not interested in anything.»
Nothing comes out of a dry sense of duty. They say: «I should marry her.» Or: «Someone has to stand on the assembly line.» Usually these are bad husbands and bad workers. It cannot be said that the Soviet school, which instilled in us a sense of duty, did not understand this at all. No, they said that a person must love his job, otherwise nothing will come of it. And no one sincerely understood that in the combination of the words “must fall in love” the same motive of submission is hidden, but even more subtle, mocking than in the simple command “should”.
- It is difficult for us to part with the Soviet past
Psychologists call this internalization, that is, the transformation of external rules, attitudes and skills into internal motivation. It is necessary for any teaching, the task of the teacher is to interest the child in the subject. In the social sphere, internalization most often leads to conformism. In work, this somewhat obscures the feeling of discomfort, drives it deeper, and often everything ends in a severe psychological crisis. In my personal life, this is a tragedy. A person does not seem to belong to himself, he suffers, he is bored. And Voltaire’s phrase «All genres are good, except boring» undoubtedly applies to life itself.
Does this mean that life can be built on one “I want”, without debt, without obligations? Today we just went to that extreme. A person who is guided only by his own desires is just as unhappy as one who denies himself desires. But we have had a substitution of concepts: interest is often understood as selfish interest, and not love, not dedication to business. Life is woven from objective contradictions. There is, for example, an objective conflict between the interests of business and society, noted by Marx. But to see the reason for it that a businessman does his job with love and interest is stupid. He lacks the civic sense, the compassion, the foresight, after all, that would enable him to maintain a balance of interests. And this, you see, is another story and another topic.