Putin and the future

The Russian head of state, like many others in the modern world, trying to keep present. But to stop time is impossible.

Recently, congratulating the diplomats on their professional holiday, the Russian President said that “the international situation is becoming more turbulent, and therefore requires more active steps aimed at ensuring strategic stability.”

Stability has long been a political prayer President Vladimir Putin. To anything he urges so passionately and nothing is so eager to maintain the inviolability of the current Russian reality. Even the proposed amendments to the Constitution serve this purpose.

No change — this is the slogan which, according to the President, to guide the country.

And it’s not just political selfishness, the desire at all costs to stay in power. This kind of response that has emerged over the last years all over the world. After all, the current situation is truly unique: for the first time in two and a half millennia we are in a era that has no future.

In the days of Antiquity, in the fourth century BC, Plato suggested the project of the ideal state, based on reasonable, as it seemed, the social basis. This was the first image of a positive future. But in addition ideas of Plato, then there was a variety of ideas about the “Solar Islands”, “Islands of the blessed”, “Arcadia” where people live happily and safely.

Many models of the future gave rise to the middle Ages and modern times, from theocracies Joachim ploskogo and Raymund Lully to quite secular projects Thomas more (Utopia), Tommaso Campanella (“the City of the Sun”), Francis bacon (“New Atlantis”).

And then came the projects of socialism and liberalism, proposing specific social technologies for achieving an attractive future.

Of course, all these projects were not feasible. They represented the ideal, and the ideal — statics absolute happiness cannot be implemented in volatile and spontaneous reality. When projected on her the ideal always distorted. However, such models have enormous therapeutic value: they gave rise to hope. The world could be wrong and even terrible, full of misfortunes, disasters, tragedies — but somewhere out there, beyond the horizon, there is a bright future we eventually will be able to achieve.

This belief is supported generations.

And suddenly it was over.

Believed to be the last utopia, which was a great public outcry, created the American writer Edward Bellamy in 1887. In the novel “hindsight”, which had a huge success in the West, the author described the world in 2000, predicting, among other things, credit cards and supermarkets.

But this seemed to be summed up the ideological trait. In fact, over 130 years after the novel Bellamy, appeared in the literature only two attractive vision of the future: “Andromeda” Ivan Efremov and “World of Noon” created by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Both, note, arose in the USSR, in a short period of “thaw”, when after Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s reforms it seemed that Soviet socialism finds the second breath.

Of course, there were other attempts, but all failed, instantly sunk into oblivion. But these really resonated in the community. The Soviet people and citizens of other socialist countries was their idea of communism is “Strugatsky” and not by how its declared Soviet power.

In General, in the literature addressed to the coming reign dystopia. Authors like began to compete among themselves: who is brighter describe the inevitable death of humanity, who will be able to create the most impressive picture of the disintegration and destruction of our civilization.

It was quite natural. After the two world wars of the twentieth century in which the progress of science and technology were used in order to destroy as many people as possible, the future ceased to be the shining horizon. It was a dark and scary turned into ravenous monster, devouring the present.

This is particularly evident now.

In modern fiction, both Western and Russian, the future is either global catastrophe or worlds to such an extent dark, brutal and alien to us that to live they absolutely do not want.

And even if fiction, which by virtue of their lability is always very responsive to requests time, sees a positive future, then it means that we simply do not.

Nobody wants to have a future. Nobody believes that any change can make the world a better place. Everyone wants to keep the present. It wants the US to remain the sole superpower, wants the European Union, fearing for their fragile well-being, wants China, in anticipation of the coming domestic upheaval. And especially it wants Russia, because here remember the collapse of the USSR and the chaos of the 1990-ies.

Vladimir Putin, declaring stability, only responds to this powerful request. Hence his long and extraordinary popularity. And not only in Russia, but, oddly enough, and abroad.

However, it should be borne in mind a fundamental fact.

Now impossible to keep.

No prayers, no political spells.

Future comes anyway, whether we like it or not. However, the later it comes, the more disasters will be accompanied by.

Now between us and the future is the President of Russia.

But this is not forever.

© 2020, paradox. All rights reserved.