ОСНОВНЫЕ ИНСТИНКТЫ

Basic instincts

By Boris Gulko

To the basic instincts of man, named by Freud and Jung, one can safely add two others. One is the feeling of ownership. My eldest granddaughter, 6-year-old Nessa, reproached her 4-year-old sister Odelia: “Why don't you want to share a candy with me? I gave you half of mine. ”

Odelia thought for a moment, and explained: “Because this one is mine.”

I didn’t start walking until I was a year old.  On my first birthday I was given a tricycle. My sister Bella - she is 8 years older than me – saddled it and rolled away.  I rushed after the hijacker - my gift was leaving me!

Another basic instinct, which is in an ambiguous relations with the previous one, is envy. This one is often called “the sense of justice”.  After the birthday of my father's colleague’s daughter, a blond girl whom I liked at that time — she turned 5, and I had 2 more months before this important milestone — I asked my parents if my birthday would again be 2 months earlier than hers? The sense of justice in me has already awakened. Having learned that my birthday will never catch up with her, I was upset and forever remembered the discovery made at that time - there is no justice in life.

Strictly speaking, there is justice. Look at the life of ants. All of them are the same, everyone applies the same amount of labor and everyone enjoys the cumulative results it. Justice is absent only in human society.

Injustice in the lives and destinies of people is discouraging. Everything is unfairly distributed: health, abilities, appearance, racial and ethnicity, place and time of life, spouses, sex. What did I do to deserve the luck to avoid suffering of childbirth labors, discomforts of PMS? Why was I lucky to be born after the terrible war, and not before or during it? My generation is the first in 100 years that didn’t know the miseries of global wars and revolutions. Alexander Kushner writes about this global undeserving luck in his poem:

You think yourself so lucky?

You want to live in Ivan the Terrible times?

Do you not dream of Florentine’s

Black plague or Leprosy?

Want to fly in first class,

But not in a twilight of a shiphold?

Not that everything was rosy in our Soviet success.

Then the door in Paradise quietly creaks

That the door to Hell will slam.

And on the left, the music sounds

And the voice in harmony sings.

And on the right someone shouts

And curses this life.

Pavel Kogan was in the euphoria of his Soviet success. He predicted:

There is such precision in our day

That  boys of other ages

Will probably cry at night

About the time of the Bolsheviks.

Alas, the “time of the Bolsheviks” was the cause of the crying boys of their time. For the life of Kogan himself it allowed only 24 years.

I spent 7 years of my own one and only precious life as a “refusnik”[1] fighting to correct the injustice that had placed me in Soviet life. I’ve spent the next 33 years in the United States.

America is not the first country to try and build a fair society. The first in this business was probably the Greek by the name of Procrustes[2], who stretched the short folk to a fair size and shortened the long ones. The Great French Revolution, which flared at the same time as the American one, in its search for justice, invented a guillotine that shortened the citizens by the height of their heads, folks who  elevated above the rest – by their origin, wealth or intelligence. Among others, it “shortened” the founder of modern chemistry, Antoine L. Lavoisier, who discovered the law on the conservation of matter (also discovered by the Russian scientist Lomonosov). After the completion of Napoleonic wars, the general height of the French became more average, almost according to Procrustes; it was determined that the average growth of the Frenchman decreased by several centimeters. Probably the tall men in war are more convenient target.[3]

The Protestants who created the United States had different criteria for justice than the French atheist revolutionaries. In the Declaration of Independence they wrote down: "All people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The mechanism for achieving the "American Dream" was the "Protestant work ethic" - a religiously based doctrine regarding  the virtue of work. This ethic, together with the laws forged by the  wise founding fathers, allowed the United States to create a society that doesn’t  have a competitor in the history of humanity in terms of prosperity.

But, as the wonderful writer, poet and literary critic Yury Karabchievsky once called his essay, “Everything breaks”, America started to break too.  The country, with new waves of immigrants, first ceased to be Protestant, and then Judeo-Christian altogether.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea of socialism was brought to America. Trying for many years ago to determine for myself the root idea of socialism, I decided that this is a desire for justice. The driver behind this desire is envy. As religiosity retreated backstage in American society, traditional moral values and Protestant work ethic were being replaced by the omnipresent envy that masked itself as the desire for justice.

Americanism - the political and moral system created by the generations of the founders of the United States Unfair retreated in stages.

Americanism - the political and moral system created by the generation of founders of the United States, gradually receded. At first, a century and a half, America was getting rid of the electoral qualifications that provided the most responsible and intellectually advanced members with management and lawmaking. If at least some of these qualifications were retained, Obama, an enemy of Americanism wouldn’t become the President of the country, and Anti-Semites  Ilhan Omar and Rashid Tlaib, wouldn’t be elected to Congress.  Now the leaders of the Democratic Party have set new goals: lowering the voting age  to 16, abolishing the Electoral College, which allows to take into account the will of all states, and also rejecting independence of Supreme Court members by changing one third of its composition after each presidential election. These changes would reduce the “injustice” of American society, leaving, for example, only the political wishes of elementary and secondary school students, as well as kindergarteners, unaccounted for.

Once, in early childhood, I did not sleep at night, waiting for my parents to take me to my first election. However, having thrown the form of the father in an urn, I was disappointed: I wasn’t given a chance to vote. If I were, I would have a choice too! Since then, in the USSR, I never went to the polls.

The injustice of the racial division of American society runs deep. When the rights of representatives of all races were legally equalized, genetic ones remained - races differ not only in skin color, but also in physical abilities and in terms of average IQ. Understandably, a separate member of a race can outperform people from more gifted ones — for example, white can break into the ranks of more capable Chinese, Koreans and Japanese in the technical faculty of a prestigious university. But he can’t change the statistics.

The same picture exists in sports. Once an outstanding Soviet sprinter Valery Borzov, after another Olympiad in which he won a bronze medal in the 100 meter race, proudly declared: “I am the fastest white runner in the world!”, recognizing the superiority of African-Americans in this kind of sport. 

Racial injustice in American society was expressed in the movement “Black lives Matter” requiring, in fact, a special, softer criminal laws for blacks. For example - a statistical approach instead of a specific one:  the percentage of detainees for violations of different races should be equal, as well as the fight against  the “privilege of being white,” meaning the distribution of life success according to some other criteria that take into account race.

Even harder is sexual inequality. According to all conceivable characteristics of a man, men and women are different. It’s impossible to equalize them, although the urinals were removed in the public toilets of the liberal Boston. But even there it is more convenient for men to pee than for women. Feminists still have some work to do in that area.

The teachers complain: the little girl rocks the armored tank, which she was given instead of the doll, and the boy, instead of dressing up the doll, equips her with war armaments. . They assumed that men by nature have  harmful toxicity, and the human race, if it won’t get rid of this toxicity, will not survive. The war against men in the country is still just unfolding.

In the genital area: it was decided to consider any accusations by a woman against a man as inappropriate and true.  I don’t know if women became happier because of such a cultivation of antagonism, but society as a whole acquired a taste of madness.

The Jews have the hardest time in this quest for “sameness” , although I knew Jews in the USSR who were getting drunk as Russians, and in America talking incessantly about baseball. New ideas and knowledge, economic well-being, creative breakthroughs in music, painting and literature often descend to our world through the Jews. Here is  statistics illustrating this: just before the start of WWII, England allowed 10,000 Jewish children from Central European countries to be rescued on their territory, the so-called Kindertransport. Despite the early emotional trauma - the children lost their parents - Wikipedia names significant personalities who grew up among those children among them at least  4 Nobel laureates. If extrapolating: for a million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust, there might have been  400 failed Nobel laureates,  failed breakthroughs in medicine, in biology, in physics, in economics.  

Practical considerations would have make the leaders of the Third Reich to cherish the Jews on their territory in the hope that they would create a super-weapon like the atomic bomb or at least new poison gases, like Fritz Gaber did for Germany in the WWI. Or at the very least, they would find a cure for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases for the elderly parents of the Nazis or for syphilis for themselves, as they were taught to diagnose it by the Jew Wasserman and his “Wasserman reaction”.

But a sense of national inequality forced the National Socialists to seek justice and destroy injustice, although to their own detriment, by destroying the Jews who created it.

Progressive America, while accepting the whole doctrine of socialism, that is, striving for justice, promptly reveals the sources of inequality. In the racial domain, they struggle with the “privilege of whites” by “reverse discrimination”.  The declared presidential candidates  from the Democratic Party offer to pay reparations to black people for slavery, which their ancestors were subjected to. It is estimated to cost several aggregate sums of the national treasury of the entire country. But one can get into a debt for such a good deed.

There happened to be a paradox with Jewish success. I guess that socialist dreams were brought to America at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Bund party members[4]. Three-quarters of American Jews support the Socialist Democratic Party, which, according to a fair assessment of President Trump, has become not only anti-Israeli, but also anti-Jewish. And the most likely presidential candidate from the “democrats” - the old socialist Bernie Sanders - is both a Jew and an anti-Semite, who has voiced a blood libel against Israel.

Socialism has displayed a steady ability to destroy wealth and generate poverty. Therefore, the two basic instincts of Americans - a sense of ownership and a desire for justice - will enter into contradiction. Will the basic “owner's instinct” save Americans from socialist reversal? We will find out about this in November 2020.

Translated by Alla Axelrod ©

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[1] “Figure 1 "refusnik" was a term used to label people who rebel agqainst Soviet totalitarian regime. Usually were ostrasized from the society and often punished by prizon term or sending to concentration camps

[2] In Greek mythology, Procrustes (Ancient Greek: Προκρούστης Prokroustes) or "the stretcher , also known as Prokoptas or Damastes (Δαμαστής, "subduer"), was a rogue smith and bandit from Attica who attacked people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed, hence the term Procrustean Bed.

[3] Napoleon was  a short man, with the nickname “Nabulio,” which mean “little meddler”, also called “little corporal”. He was only 5’2”.  (note added by the translator A.A.)

[4] The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and generally called The Bund, was a secular Jewish socialist party in the Russian Empire, active between 1897 and 1920.