I think it is not a great exaggeration to say: a whole person is almost the same as a failure. Success in personal development and success in modern society are clearly opposite. A whole person, as we know, wants first of all to keep unity in relations to himself and others, to remain true to his own thoughts, not to thoughts imposed from the outside. Such a character is a guarantee of life’s failure. No one needs loyalty to oneself; there is always a great demand for loyalty to others, in this age of big money and small people in particular. Being a person is not a luxury for servants; whereas, unfortunately, what is needed most in the present society are servants. Abandoning all and every authority, value and sanctity, democratic society has retained one authority, one object of worship, one source of values: money, which it serves. Compared to the past, society has become much more homogeneous, with only two (or two and a half) classes: those who have money, those who do not have money, and a narrow transitional band between the former and the latter. Some are masters, some are servants, and some are servants who are preparing to become masters. No, I’m not a socialist. I just don’t see a place for the individual in this simple, very simple society. To serve, personality is unnecessary and simply harmful. To use other people’s services, neither.

When the Bolsheviks ruled Russia, they talked a lot about the ‘development of the personality’, which did not prevent them, of course, from oppressing the mental development of this personality — or rather, from moulding it according to the method of Herbert Wells’ Selenites, putting it in a barrel of ‘the only true worldview’. According to the form of this barrel, the mind developed — incapable, after such treatment, of perceiving higher culture. It is enough to look at the literature that the socialist era has produced: no matter what one says, not a single name from it will be passed on to posterity. Not a single one, including the names of those who fought against this literature itself. But if a known (and not very high) ceiling was set for a personality, it was not suggested to fall below the known level, to get on all fours, moreover, it was forbidden. The enthusiastic words of Chekhov’s character about the beautiful things in man were repeated with respect, but one word was innocently cut out of them — the word ‘soul’. And we must admit that Russia was not then — contrary to Western prejudice — a country of faceless and evil robots. We must even say a terrible thing: if we put aside the moral assessments favoured by the Russian intelligentsia, socialist Russia after the end of Cæsarism (1956) was a healthier society than the one we are now offered as ‘exemplary’. In this society no one denied the existence of truths and values as such; however, it was not the higher values that prevailed, but their reduced, simplified, impoverished reflections, taken from the moral and utilitarian prescriptions of the old Russian intelligentsia, with the addition of a religiously understood service to the State — an idol in the place of God. This the old Russian intellectual did not have; the state was alien and incomprehensible to him. His descendants paid for this indifference and got an idol, demanding and jealous… But now I am talking about something else: the values of that society could be false, because they were based partly on half-truths, partly on the pagan cult of the state, but they still existed. The individual had a certain path of development (not only personal enrichment or, in the words of that epoch, ‘professional growth’), on which, however, he was guarded by an inevitable collision with the state, its beliefs and morals — because there was no area free from state interference in revolutionary Russia. There was no culture, the realm that could be called the home of every high-minded individual. In its place was an education, mostly technical, imposed by the patronage of the state, which is not the same thing…

Neither those patronising efforts nor those values exist now. All abolished by the 1991 revolution. Was it inevitable? I doubt it. The actors of 1991 could have taken a different path. In fact, they had three possibilities. The first was to maintain continuity with the previous order and continue its affairs (more or less cautious reforms). The second was to break with the revolutionary tradition and lead a conservative turn, that is, a return to the national sanctities and values destroyed by the 1917 revolution. And the third, the most dangerous — to start a new revolution, this time of a liberal nature. Under undoubted pressure from the West, due to the undoubted inclination of the Russian intelligentsia to everything liberal, and also due to the exclusively Russian understanding of liberalism as lawlessness, they chose the third way: the way to a society from which the very notion of norm is banished. The mental, moral, and cultural norm in this society has been replaced by success, in pursuit of which, as I said at the beginning, the individual is only an unnecessary, slowing obstacle. The reference to the Western model — the only, for all cases, suitable saving justification of the modern Russian authorities — means nothing. The fact that there, too, the personality is placed in the narrowest, tightest framework of ‘professional activity’ in pursuit of success only shows how far the West has strayed from its own ideals of free and high personal development…

Personality and failure are connected in modern society in the closest, most intimate way. Where there’s one, there’s another. The liberal dream is to blame for this — the dream of man’s liberation from norms and ideals, of free labour for the sake of unlimitedly increasing gains, of a world without inhibitions and restrictions. All these things against which liberalism rebelled — ultimately successfully — turned out to be a mould, a cut, a limit, without which there is no very thing limited by it: no person. ‘To liberate by taking away limits and restrictions’ is to kill. This is how death liberates the soul from its earthly limit. This is how the liberal dream liberated the personality.

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Knowledge and Creativity: Essays on Culture.

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