On the Wings of Hope: Prose (Recognized)

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"Yes, Mr. Samuel, I am addressing you! What, excuse me for the allegorical term, the hell did you decide to ignore this blatant case of violation of our educational institution's charter? Whether it's not one of your tasks to maintain and observe all kinds of moral purity and integrity, as well as spiritual easiness of our esteemed students? Aren't you responsible for keeping in them that feeling of universality, uniformity, and admiration for our governing authority that is leading and guiding them for their personal uniform benefit?

Yes, Mr. Samuel, they are unique – just like every speck of dust that has found itself a refuge in some ancient and obscure folio. They are unique as every grain of sand in a desert, every drop in a puddle, every brick in a wall, every speck in my eye, every splinter in my heel, after all! Take, for example, germs, Mr. Samuel... Pray tell – are these beings both unique and different, right? They are highly self-sufficient and are not tormented by these most unnecessary questions about the meaning of life, their past, present, and future... They are not even bothered by the question about their own nature – and just look how deadly and strong they are capable to be in their unity! Unity as a mean to feel self-sufficient, as an opportunity to feel your "I" as a part of something bigger, something common, unwavering, unbreakable, all-destroying...

This is exactly their unity in uniformity, Mr. Samuel – the stable, grounded, led and guided by us. Catharsis, Mr. Samuel, that's a true catharsis – to feel like a cog in such a verified and perfect social mechanism that they have been building with own hands for so many thousands of years!

"But, Mr. Director, wouldn't it be better and more tempting to give each of our students an opportunity to try to find their own way, to realize their own potential through the manifestation of their creative gifts?"

"Now you sound just like my predecessor, Mr. Samuel, – and he couldn't stay in my current position even for a year, I would like to remind you. And what creative gifts are you talking about? Is it about the writings of so-called scribes of the past decades? Or, perhaps, about this very soul-irritating and disturbing "classical" musical rubbish? Or about these so-called "live" pictures? Or maybe all those silly stone statues? Come on, Samuel, neither this nor a thousand and one other ways of such individual self-expression is able to convey even a gram of that feeling of power that is given to our followers at the moments of the triumph of their collective similar unconscious!

Understand already, Samuel, that if each cog and gear in a clock's mechanism would have its own, selected exclusively by her and her only diameters and sizes – such a mechanism could not work, Samuel. Time would have stopped once and for all! The system would cease working, everything would come to complete chaos! For what reason do you need this chaos of collective conscious? Our entire system of education and upbringing is built to prevent such excesses, Samuel, with the aim of complete unification and standardization of every individual conscience, with the goal of its grinding and cutting to the state of a sparkling diamond!

We help cobblestones to feel themselves like diamonds in the total mass of similar ones. We as masters of our craft grind off every sharp edge, every unnecessary bulge, every unbearable sharpness and turn them into a universal, one-sized, revered and respectable, gleaming stone! Not even a stone – but a genuine diamond, a gear, a cog in the most perfect social mechanism. We grant them a sense of necessity, public usefulness in place of these silly and stupid feelings of loneliness and abandonment by all which are experienced by those unreasonable ones who dared to ignore our skills and traveled their own paths in life. They are almost happy because they are almost needed, and we practically helped them in cultivating of this practicality.

We skillfully limit the number of them working in different sections of our system, different areas of expertise – we even managed to almost unite them with each other on the basis of mutual benefit. They are interdependent and mutually united, Samuel, – yet not by the will of their own hearts, but according to the criteria in the highest degree practical, economical, industrial. Of course, such unity is actually an illusion – that is why wars are so inevitable and never-ending among them.

We give them the meaning of their lives, Samuel. Since childhood we teach them the "adult" views on it, depriving them of every idle creative tastelessness, all kinds of unwholesome internal slackness and lack of discipline, all sorts of stupid and ridiculous childish joy and happiness... Very soon, Samuel, we will imprint directly into the minds of our future offspring all the weight and power of accumulated by humankind knowledge shortly after the birth of these children. They will become ideal members of our united and unified society, they will know their designated by us place inside this society almost immediately after their birth.

We will make sure that they know neither the hunger nor excessive anxiety and unrest, that their life flows in a highly measured and monotonous manner, is verified, predictable and stable. We will go even further and eventually destroy all the creations made by these creative deviants of the past, so that the pernicious doubt does not creep into the souls of the ones mentored by us, so that they never experience the ominous creative ecstasy that sometimes averted some of them from the general social harmony of monotony in the past. You certainly understand, Samuel, that the world in which only a few thousand creates and all the other simply consume, burp and spit out these scraps of spiritual food – that this world lacks both harmony and consistency? That the world with unified canons, norms of life, work and creative delights is much more perfect? And exactly in the construction of this kind of world you are given the opportunity to participate, if you, certainly, have no desire to be in place of the few that have recently marched against... To die for nothing, though for the sake of something?

So, what do you say, Samuel? Why do you keep this painful silence? Don't you agree with me?"

22.07.2011