But what he did or had planned to do to leave people with no memory of the past – a crowd of devoted fanatics – is an indicator of common self-reflection. We must understand why today the state’s body, while it seems to be where it’s not supposed to be, has a hydra of ever-hungry heads that fail to understand the sense of state. Where do those heads come from?
CHAPTER XII
THERE CAN BE NO TOTALITARIANISM WITHOUT REMIDS
All totalitarian regimes share a problem no less totalitarian in its essence than they are. The conclusions about their totality are just the final point, like an ocean that opens up before everyone instead of the rivers – events – that run together in streams to form that ocean. Still, the drops making up those rivers are people – their thoughts. At the very beginning, when they start thinking similar thoughts, no one knows yet where that might take them. And after a while, this results in a regime, a manifestation of the totality of myriads of thoughts. But who are these people? And why does responsibility for that totality rest with the leaders, not the people?
Answers should be sought in the people’s similarity, of course. With time, people will gather to form an order – first a group, then a political party that brings everyone together in one place or directs them to that place. Before people assemble in a square, their thoughts will get together. And before the similarity of indignation, vexation, and negation materializes (elsewhere in the world), one needs to find the origin of this similarity. The origin of their reaction and the source of their indignation lies in tradition.
Tradition. Tradition-minded people take care to first observe their rituals. And then they respond to crises, all similarly. That’s what the cause of totalitarianism is. Don’t look for similarities in city residents who have lost touch with the place that, while not their birthplace, still holds their roots and is home to their relatives. Refags remember no one, making it difficult to bring them together. Their thoughts are like cockroaches scurrying on the kitchen floor. Everyone thinks they are someone. Everyone is on their own. The totality of Rrefags is yet to merge into their ocean, their own world order. But we are still concerned here with tradition and tradition-minded people. We are investigating why they have their totality.
Crises don’t turn everyone into a Nazi. Many Zerefs don’t really know what the essence of fascism is. What they do and think doesn’t depend on them: Remids do all their thinking. Just to make things clear, traditional Zerefs are like little kids imitating adults. They are provided with ready-made social reflexes, as they would be with food products that someone else grows or makes for them.
Their ancestors are another influence. That’s why Zerefs, just like all traditionalists, are raised by their ancestors and rely on their precepts so often. And their parents, in turn, inherited behavioral models from the parents of their parents. And so on. That’s not to say Zerefs are born conservatives. No one is born somebody. Rather, life itself turns, when it’s born, into a routine, monotonous ritual.
But, among all the reflection groups, the most self-aware conservatives are, of course, the Zerots, or the traditional feudal elite (see my book entitled Hierarchical Man). All the groups – Zerots, Zerefs, Remids, and the Remids are the new elite. Teachers, lawyers, distinguished, honored artists, writers, and, needless to say, public officials. They put in a lot of their energy to appear as the new elite. They sacrificed their lives for their careers. We chose them as the new elite or new teachers, and they didn’t put in so much effort to have someone take away all the fruits of their hard work. A career, including reflection, means work – very energy-consuming work. Some want to grow materially; others, spiritually. Ultimately, they get what they deserve: honor and respect from the public. And then a crisis comes up…
A host of inherited ghosts.
Earnestness came to be a responsibility for everyone. The Eldest sons are much like their fathers, perhaps because they don’t want their fathers to deprive them of their inheritance. At any rate, all eldest sons are earnest and businesslike. When the father is not at home, every tot knows who’s holding the fort.
If you think of Remids as sons of the regime, they are the eldest sons everywhere. Remids are the face of society and the state. Society is only as good as its elite. In the traditional world, even if it takes the form of a state, thoughtlessness can put everyone under attack. No traditional community will jeopardize its fate. Hostile tribes are always around, taking the form of the same state. Only those families can stay alive and well that will entrust rite observance to the earnest sons of the people. Those sons who would rather play and have fun are quite unreliable heirs, putting society and the state at risk.
Hence, every elite is the product of extensive upbringing and control, and Remids are all the eldest sons. Many of them, those who have started a family, are fathers themselves.
During a recession, you might have noticed that all tradespeople are either silent or turn into conditional eldest sons of society. They take on the functions of sacrificers, as it were. But the Refags, the tradespeople, cannot be sacrificers – they only need money and income. During a recession, Refags’ income plummets. They begin to speak in other people’s voices, insolently taking on the functions of the elite (Remids). No one authorizes them to, of course. But if townspeople are eighty percent former migrants, those migrants will not ask permission for rallies. All Refags, even those who are forced by the regime to engage in trade, quickly turn into so-called all-too-common people. If society is really eighty percent boutique, shop, and stall owners, then, of course, they are the people – who else could it be? But they’re not the ones who come up with strategic initiatives. Strategies, as we have found out, are created by Remids from the second-generation intelligentsia; that is, by children of the same migrant Zeremids who choose not to be forced to trade in a market but to learn in any way they can – not to peddle their wares but to write laws. These same second-generation Remids ahead the Refags men and new Zeremids by an entire generation. That means that they have had time to concentrate and think not only of what to do with their lives but also of what they could do for society and the state. At this point, instead of keeping silent and unquestioningly obeying the Remids, the Refags begin to yell out their strategy, something similar to, “Liberty! Democracy!” That is, this is nothing but the second advent of the phenomenon well known in the past as the bourgeoisie. Back in their day, the founders of the strategy, Marx and Engels, participated in similar uprisings of the bourgeoisie and were disappointed in their fellow rioters.
Why did they? Why was the strategy put together by someone other than Remids, the sacrificers? Why did the lower class, those younger city sons, become the archons of the post-industrial world?
CHAPTER XIII
LEGACY
Let me tell you a secret: No one knows what liberty and democracy are during a recession. Everyone dwells on what worries them the most: about their income going down. This is just a form of protest that must somehow be verbally expressed. All the lower classes, the younger sons of the traditional world, rebel against the castes of officials, the eldest sons of the nation’s father, and want his will rewritten. Just so much. There’s no need to look at former traditionalists who recently observed the Soviet rites or switched to feudal rights as a new dynasty of evolution. Neither their fathers nor they were democrats or knew what democracy really was. Nor did they know that democracy had created and continued to create its castes, dealing in whatever they could. Did everyone suddenly think that there was no tradition in the market and that there were no market castes? They had another think coming! The billionaires and millionaires of the developed world showed how to live in their civilized periphery. They showed local oligarchs what to do. And the local oligarchs suffered from provincial complexes. So, why should provincials not have taken those oligarchs with complexes as a model? Castes were still around. It’s just that now they came as money, and because money had become scarce, outrage broke out.