Not long ago, fifty years ago, it was just a stone’s throw away! – society provided man with a more or less coherent system of values. Socialism was like socialism: stable, solid. With cheapened but quite dickish ideals. Capitalism was a beauty altogether. Especially when viewed through the Iron Curtain.
As a consequence of all this unspeakable solidity, to the user of the value system, the world seemed to be arranged in quite certain blocks of concepts. Often, of course, they looked like blocks of noodles gathered from the ears. It’s like, “We have it all wrong here, but they have it all awful, so we can still live here, and we’re ready to be proud of it. Or vice versa: “Whatever they have wrong there, but here we have, well, general lawlessness, so there – the limit of my dreams.
And yet, in spite of the primitive, there was peace and there were concepts. Their supposed stability prevented us from seeing that those effective “sparks of altruism” that exist in everyone are not simply the qualities of a good person, but the operation of the law through which all natural systems exist.
But selfishness-our inner stuff-is developing. People and concepts are alienated from each other. And in the world of man – in the external and in the internal – there is gradually an enormous amount of detail, with no structure at all. You drink beer with strangers and put your fate on the line. They don’t think of their own people as their own.
And that world and concepts are gone, leaving us with the strain of remembering – what kind of life was that? And as a result – the legitimization of everything in the world.
Fragmentation and destructurization are experienced by everything, from values to social institutions. It is only when all the details of that wild mixture of concepts in which we live tend to be equal – chaos! the victory of entropy! – Only then is it possible to see those very “sparks. And evaluate them.
They are no longer suppressed – those very, noodle-like blocks of concepts and values. Which a society that has risen on the yeast of selfishness has created in man.
To see these “sparks” in ourselves, to appreciate them as a manifestation of a higher law of nature, to choose and build our lives and environment according to the law of altruism-when else has history given such freedom to each of us?
It is finally an opportunity to free ourselves from the dictates of the old concepts and value systems of an egoistic society.
A person now has the freedom of choice that he was deprived of. He is finally free to see society not as his enemy, an apparatus for the suppression of his aspirations, nor as an auxiliary mechanism obliged to promote his personal achievements. Man can finally see society as a living organism, whose care for the good of society will give him a chance to reconnect with the life-giving power of nature.
In addition, all this shredding and grinding of values and concepts gives the individual and society the opportunity to reveal also the real nature of selfishness.
We are capable of appreciating it today. That is, the noteworthy danger of it as a leading factor in the real current development of man and civilization. This means that it is in our time that real factors appear in the field of vision, in the “field of feeling” of a person, which make it possible to make an informed decision about the choice of the path. For society and for each of us.
