Russian Salad #1

I'm picking recent posts from Russian blogosphere and translate them (with minor edits) for your enjoyment. Today we have a healthy serving of social and spiritual commentary.

Picture by Fusion Brain (Kandinsky 3.0), prompt ‘russian winter salad’

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There was a difference between Westen lies and Soviet lies. Western lies used to be instrumental — some people lied in order to deceive others and achieve some kind of a goal. Soviet lies were ritual. People at the podium as well as people in the room knew it is a lie. Both sides knew the other side knows. And the lied still. The absurdity of it drove people insane.

[Source]

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Recently, there has been an increasing concern about the problem of a "demographic catastrophe". They demand some new preferences for large families, the construction of individual houses instead of ghettos etc. This is actually the problem of the entire "white world" (and some Far Eastern societies taking an example from it). And this problem is basically unsolvable.

The only meaningful reason for the depopulation of some "developed" countries is this very "development" - raising the standard of living beyond a certain limit of "sufficiency" and setting life comfort as the main goal of the individual. In the XIX century technological progress and the development of medicine combined with contemporary social norms and belieds reulted in a demographic explosion. After reaching a certain level of comfort psychology of the people naturally changed (if you can live like this, then why not), and then depopulation began becuase children negatively affect the level of well-being and comfort. The instinct of "procreation", of course, could not disappear, but it was minimized — one or two children are quite enough to satisfy it).

The problem of preserving cultural identity is theoretically solvable. Although the inevitable lack of human resources does require their recruitment from the outside, this can be done on a much smaller scale and at the condition of assimilation or by the "shift method". However, this implies a special concern of the authorities for the interests of the indigenous population and the problem of national and cultural identity itself.

But both in the West and in the Russian Federation, the attitudes on this matter are diametrically opposed. In the West, population replacement is given a fundamentally positive meaning within the framework of the "culture of abolition" (conscious rejection of "white" history and culture), which makes non-cultural and unwilling to assimilate migrants become "self-valuable". In the Russian Federation these migrants serve as the "cornerstone" idea of "multi-nationalism" for its government, which it cannot abandon without discarding the Soviet legacy (the core of which is the "Leninist national policy").

[Sergei Volkov]

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Types of Cargo cult

The general cargo cult: my successful neighbor walks into the bakery on the other side of the street every morning and orders a cup of espresso with a croissant. I will also go there, drink espresso and eat a croissant. It will make me successful.

Reverse cargo cult: I've been going to this stupid bakery for a month, choking on croissants, and success is yet to come. Probably, my neighbor is not doing any better, he just skillfully portrays success.

Square cargo cult: for some reason, all my neighbors began to go to the bakery in the morning, drink coffee and eat pastries. I don't understand why this is necessary at all, but just in case I will do the same. Maybe there is some sense in this.

[Nikolay Vlasov]

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Orthodoxy is not a philosophy, but a religious and mystical practice of a character's live communication with his Author, creation communicating with its Creator. This communication is possible only because the Author Himself decided to become one of the characters, the main character of His own work. Jesus Christ stands at the center of the life of the Church because he became a man like all of us.

Philosophy is secondary in Orthodoxy. It arises when an Orthodox person seeks answers to the fundamental questions of his being. He finds them in prayer, and the criterion for the truth of these answers for him is the Liturgy. Orthodox Servive contains a lot of answers to all kinds of questions — and knowing these answers, it is already possible sometimes to detect a substitution if the devil has started an attempt to impersonate God. Hence the false idea arises: to do without the Church. To study the teaching of the Church and use it as a compass in the independent search for Truth. This is a wrong decision, because the devil will definitely catch such a person on some subtleties, because he is much thinner than a person and has accumulated several thousand years worth of experience in corrupting people like this. The right way is to enjoy the fullness of church life and, above all, to participate in the Liturgy not theoretically, but practically. This is a necessary safety technique for someone who has started climbing the mountain of Knowing of God.

[Maxim Solokhin]

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Why did science as an experimental learning of the world appear in Europe, but not in Ancient Greece, China, and Russia? The prerequisites were there. But prerequisites are not enough — a foundation is needed. One needs a fundamental worldview about this very world that needs to be known. And it was different. Both in Greece and in China, the world around a person was perceived as something fluid, constantly changing, always only becoming... Christianity, or rather Scholasticism, changed everything. In Christianity itself, two currents have arisen, two ways to understand the created world. The first method, rooted in the same Greek thought, interpreted God the Creator apophatically, taking Him beyond any reasonable definition and reason as such... This eastern, ascetic way of theology became entrenched in Russia and became a brake on scientific mastery of the world. On the contrary, Western Europe has chosen a different path. In Western scholasticism, it was recognized that God creates with reason, and therefore the world he created is rationally arranged and can be comprehended by any intelligent being. And it should be comprehended because God reveals himself only through his deeds. But at the same time, unlike Greek total rationalism, creation does not arise out of necessity, God creates the world not according to logical laws, but according to his own will, everything in the world is in some sense accidental, or contingent. Therefore, the only way to understand how everything works is to go and check — in experience, in experiment, in practice. This is not just how science arose, but it took root ideologically and received a full carte blanche.

[Source]

And that’s it for today!