The Main Disease of Mankind

The world has not become seriously ill all of a sudden, but only now has the painful attack begun to make visible manifestations in such a large part of the body. Not everyone takes the previous period as a remission of the long disease called mankind’s growing up. In the past century, its main attack manifested itself under the name of fascism, which was thought to have been cured by the surgery of World War II. It was believed that the recovery was secured by a certain socio-economic diet with products made in the wrappings of various “isms” (from which communism, prepared with numerous technological violations, practically disappeared). A part of the world, more and more divided into “civilized” and “other,” got eventually called by some as “other” purely on the basis of affiliation with peripheral capitalism or relics of other non-capitalist formations. Disproportions in the development of a variously imperfect planetary organism previously allowed us to pay little attention to the festering lesions in problematic parts of the “other” world. Now they have caused an increased rush of “blood” in close proximity to the centers of regulation of world cash flows, and the “civilized” world has finally come into disarray.

The previous ulcer near these centers opened up at the moment of the collapse of an empire that once offered the world a healing pill against social exclusion and died as a result of its side effects [reference to the Yugoslav Wars and the demise of the Soviet Union]. The departure from the usual way of life intensified the imbalance and led to bloody consequences in the very region where the first planetary war once broke out, continuing some time later into World War II. About thirty years ago there happened, in the language of modern medicine, an autoimmune attack of some body cells against others. Having the greatest tonus, the main center of regulation of the “commodity-money blood flow,” despite the resistance of other organs of the “organism,” decided to settle the opened-up abscess with a full-fledged “bloodletting,” using along the way “radiation therapy” with depleted uranium, inappropriate in such cases, and then froze the wound with an “anesthetic” of the military presence, which requires its own addition and does not allow the wound to heal completely. The then level of globalization and development of information technology makes that conflict more faded compared to the current “bleeding.” This time, the increase in “bleeding” is due to the activation of the impact of an organ that was weakened more than thirty years ago and plays the role of a major supplier of nutrients in commodity-money metabolism.

However, the organism is by no means only about purely material factors and commodity-money exchange, although for the civilization of consumption it is these, first of all, that determine the relations between state-organs. Such a priority of the economy made it possible to form world politics on the basis of very pragmatic factors (Realpolitik) and drive ideological differences (the psyche of the planet-organism) into the Procrustean bed of the clash of civilizations, which, however, often did not prevent all kinds of dealers to collect rent from the opposing sides (you can postpone a war but never a lunch). At the same time, steam from the indignation of the masses with the consequences of the “divide and conquer” policy is from time to time vented towards the “ultimate performers” of the state- and interstate-level horrors that are created on Earth. It has always turned out to be easier to “prescribe” sanctions to rogue states than to force the beneficiaries, who prefer to wage proxy wars, to change the rules of the game. And so it turned out that the head of the “organism” Earth, seized by its own obsessions, was not too keen to notice the problems of other parts of the body, and the heart and the head were not at ease with one another.

Even now, the head practically does not notice the problems of other parts of the body: it is mainly concerned about the gaping wound in its immediate vicinity – indeed, from age to age near is my shirt, but nearer is my skin.

All cells of the organism are both unique in the manifestation of their vital functions and have similarities inherent in one or another organ. This is ensured by the “genetic material” common to all “cells,” which in humanity of the Earth, with its inherent level of evolutionary development, obviously differs in some way from that in other mankinds of the Universe. For the vast majority of people, these manifestations of a different sentient life are still a very distant and abstract possibility, because the Universe as a whole is still perceived by many as a predominantly soulless, inanimate environment, devoid of consciousness in its modern narrow scientific understanding.

Returning to the cell-organism analogy, we can recall that cells of an organism can make up both healthy tissue and tumor tissue, the latter developing at the expense of healthy tissue and leading, especially in case of malignancy, to the death of the whole organism. Very different assessments are given to these or those “cells” and “cell associations” of our planet: the point of view of a single “cell” depends both on its specialization and differentiation within the “organism” and on the environment in which it eventually finds itself. At the moment of an acute attack of the eternal disease of mankind, opinions polarize especially brightly, so to come to an understanding of what was a cancerous manifestation and what was a reaction of rejection of dead tissue is not so easy, as it may seem to the vast majority in the heat of confrontation. Even the history of humanity such as we know it shows how much the assessment of certain events changed at times. It is the wisdom and mercy of the Universe that transformations important and necessary for the organism as a whole sometimes even caused terrible and disgusting upheavals. These transformations, whose end result was little understood by their tools themselves, sometimes led to the extinction of entire states and organ-nations and took a form that could not be justified in terms of the prevailing morality, since the people themselves prevented a more harmonious, better realization of the overdue transformations. That is, humanity as a whole paid a high price for its own short-sightedness.

It is insane to think that organs of the planetary body, if only within the boundaries of its so-called civilized part, have already learned to balance their own interests with the interests of others and to resolve conflicts peacefully. Given that not a single part of the planet has been able to fully identify itself as a reliable and humane guide to the future, the need for radical transformation has been long overdue. It now has the opportunity to materialize in such a dramatic way. This is becoming more and more visible even at the most superficial levels of reality, including the much-emphasized commodity-money and political ones. Discussions about the accompanying cardinal “ideological” transformation of the world order, for which the global crisis of global security has a chance to create conditions through a branching chain of political and economic disasters, did not start from nothing. It makes sense to listen to this, if only so as not to lose sight of the underlying and poorly understood transformation. Even though words about it still refer more to the phenomenon of faith and can convince few people rationally because of the discrepancy between the foreseeable and the apparent, between the declared and the actions. But apparency itself can be deceptive by its very nature.

Despite the two most polar positions prevailing in the conflict region, some perceive the losses of all parties as a sacrifice designed to atone at a high price for the consequences of inept and irresponsible world politics. But such politics was caused by the corruption of human nature that engulfed public life everywhere, which expressed in the established world order, with its regional peculiarities and backgrounds. Each side of the conflict knows how to find justification for its actions in today's information reality, which does not compare in its richness even with the period of the officially last world war. If in peacetime the opposing sides carried out their propaganda, overstating their achievements and downplaying their failures, then in war, which in the famous treatise by Sun Tzu and a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad is designated as a path of deception, manipulation was inevitable. Military and moral facts could be distorted, diversion was a legitimate tactical maneuver. In itself, this did not in any way deny the existence of objective differences in the motives and methods of counteraction, which the parties that won at some stage gave their assessment to; after all, it is the winners who write history. That is why the common history of a victory is vulnerable to revisionism not only from changing regimes, but also from former allies.

It is not surprising that now some facts are still arbitrarily highlighted, others are hushed up, although this happens to varying degrees and in different aspects. However, a certain feature of the modern period of the swing between the visible and the unmanifested on the scales of perceived reality are the previously inaccessible ways of constructing artifacts of reality, commonly known as fakes. Their abundance and their adoption as a permissible weapon of an information war by all global parties to such warfare has led to the fact that the main human masses of the opposing parties carry out their goal-setting on the basis of an incredible mixture of facts and speculation. In doing so, the substitution of the meanings of the phenomena under discussion in the abundant flow of information often becomes so imperceptible that it does not even require the wonders of verbal gymnastics, which has never been the lot of the majority. But how, then, should the broad human masses act most morally, as they cannot, merely at the will of the great multitude of modern soothsayers, make a “quantum leap” and be transformed in an instant, conquering at the same time the delusion of conscious chaos?

The opposing side as a whole can and must, for its own good, fight for its ideals, including freedom and security, although these two ideals in their specific historical implementation may conflict each other. Acting with an inevitably imperfect perception of reality, but guided by the morality generally accepted for it, such a party will thus have reason to avoid disintegration and weakening or disappearing. In the end, the ethics that have developed in different parts of the Earth have a number of universal features and allow one to be merciful towards defeated enemies. Such, at any rate, is the ethics of the Christian cultures prevailing in the region of conflict; it is only a question of how selective and consistent a side is in following it, how successful it is in avoiding tendencies to dehumanize themselves and the adversary. It may also be the case that a split and the preservation of the core of the better part (at least in terms of the judgment of history or heavenly dictates, whichever is closer to one’s views), sometimes even in union with the former enemy, prove salutary. (If it is an alliance not on the basis of ideas, but on the basis of self-interest, or only out of the instinct of preservation, it is limited to trivial betrayal, which is opposed to the concepts of dignity in the tradition of all world cultures.) It is impossible to expect that the parties, each with its own truth behind them, finding themselves in the heat of a bloody struggle, will be able to see the light of a common, superior Truth in all its radiance. (And the old world order, now dressed in the more pious image of inclusive capitalism, still favors those postmodern games that deny even the very possibility of the One Truth.) But the parts of our planetary organism have indeed approached the understanding of the salvific Truth to varying degrees and from different sides, and in the leading role of certain nations and cultures in certain historical periods one can also see a special wisdom of the cosmic world order. Despite this, all of these belong to globally the same level of human development. And so they must find ways to combat naturally flaring misanthropy. All the great spiritual leaders, religions, and moral philosophical teachings have called for this (and offered practical ways to do so).

People tend to look for the guilty and find out who was the first to violate the established order and was the instigator of a conflict. This has always been the case, except that now it is more difficult to do so with information camouflage. But how many seek to understand why the antagonists came to the current state of affairs, why the best opportunities were missed, and whether there are no own sins in that? After all, even in ordinary peaceful life, people constantly forget to try on themselves the biblical maxim about throwing a stone at a sinner. Meanwhile, as early as the Buddha is credited with the words that if one man conquers in battle a thousand times thousand men, and if another conquers himself, the latter is the greatest of conquerors. Therefore, the ability to fearlessly look in the mirror at one’s own imperfect appearance (behind which one can still try to see a universal and therefore perfect prototype or template), as well as the adherence to the golden rule of morality that runs through all spiritual testaments, are among the first and most important components in the preservation and development of human life on earth. For this leads to the understanding by each person of that very spiritual principle and the deep unity of all people, without the awareness of which no political, economic or military measures will help humanity to curb its main disease.