Iakovos Krotov

The human in man appears due to communication. The ability to communicate distinguishes human speech from the signalling systems of animals (including man). The ability to communicate is innate, but it requires activation and may not be activated. Activation occurs thanks to other people, as fire is ignited by fire.

(There are illnesses that prevent the ability to communicate from being activated. There are dramas when this ability is not fully developed, and we can hardly say with certainty what a "fully realised ability to communicate" is. Now, however, we are talking, if not about an "ideal", then about a "healthy" person).

Cogito ergo sum is a description of the most basic communication: with oneself. Man does not just "think", but notices that he thinks, comes into contact with his thinking self. This is not a split personality, but a maturity of personality. I arise ("I" arises) when I communicate with myself. This is how fire arises when a stone strikes a rock. This communication with oneself creates, next to animal egocentrism, human love for oneself.

Can I not answer myself? Yes, and this makes man free.

This is the difference between communicating with oneself and communicating with the material world. Communication with objects, with the "external environment" is not communication in the full sense of the word, because the surrounding world cannot but respond to a person. The stone cannot but heat up when the sun shines on it. When a human being explores the world, the world cannot help but be explored. It is true that communication with the material world can turn into full-fledged communication. This happens when man likens the world to himself, "anthropomorphises" nature. But then it is not so much communication with the world as with oneself.

Communicating with another person is the third dimension of communication.

All types of communication have one thing in common: they are unpredictable. Where predictability begins, communication in the strict sense of the word ends. There is a return to signalling.

God of Communication ar Idol of Consumption

An atheist (I don't remember his name, but I think it was an American atheist, a rare bird) said that it is normal to approach God with prayer, it is abnormal to think that God answers.

Exactly!!! God is not the answer. It is man who answers. Faith begins with the discovery that my seeking God is the result of God seeking me.

Of course, the unbeliever is not seeking God. The unbeliever is looking for the meaning of life or something even more vague. A person may be looking for a religion to help him live. A person may be looking for a miracle or love.

God is like America (not the other way round, God forbid). Columbus was not looking for America, Columbus was looking for India. America got in his way, got in his way, and that turned out to be fortunate. To seek God, one must already believe in God, and people are born unbelievers.

Faith is not a speech, which is inherent in a person from the beginning as a potency and is switched on due to upbringing. Unbelief is primary. Perhaps faith is an illusion, but it is not an inborn illusion.

Of course, it is impossible to prove that faith is the answer to God. The unbeliever will still be convinced that faith is an illusory response to some problem, a cognitive disorder or psychopathology. After all, God does not and cannot exist.

Subjectively, of course, the person of faith often experiences communication with God as a communication in which God sometimes asks and sometimes answers. But there is a strange feeling that God has knowledge of our questions before we ask them. And certainly God has knowledge of what our needs are before we make a request.

Note the difference between a question and a request, petition. "To be or not to be" is an inquiry, "to be" is the petition. Prayer is usually understood to be a request or petition. "Prayer is a solemn request for help or expression of thanks to God or another deity". Marriam Webster: "an address (such as a petition) to God or a deity in word or thought" and "an earnest request or wish".

Such misunderstandings of prayer show how perverted our relationship with God is. "Pray and receive". This is similar to the understanding of love as mutual help.

The whole development of spirituality is a path from a request to a question, just as the development of love is a path from mutual satisfaction of each other's needs to communion with each other, from erotic-sexual satisfaction of each other to life in each other.

Monotheism is not about making all requests to one deity, but about communicating with God. If we ask one God only, without listening to Him, trying to use Him to satisfy our needs, we are not monotheistic, we are heathen, we violate the commandment "Do not make an idol for yourself", we do not communicate with God, we worship God's image, material or invisible. We are substituting God with the image of God.

These days, arguments about monotheism are conducted like consumers arguing about the producer. Is God a monopolist in the production of well-being, health, happiness? Monotheism is about making petitions to the head of the super-monopoly.

If the ancient Jews believed that Yahweh had a wife Asherah, were they monotheists?

If I believe Jesus is God, am I a monotheist?

I am not a monotheist if I treat God as a cash cow or an ATM machine.

If a pagan treats God in a non-consumerist way, that pagan is definitely the monotheist.

After all, any Jew of any time believed that there is a God and there is the Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit. "[T]he Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light".

Is the Spirit of God a second God?

The Christian theologians of the fourth century were afraid to call the Spirit God when they edited Credo.

But what they were not afraid of was praying to the Spirit of God. The Greek prayer "King of Heaven" corresponds to the Latin hymn "Veni Creator Spiritus", and in both texts the Spirit is addressed as God. Luther thus translated: "Komm, Gott Schöpfer, heiliger Geist."

Are we asking about Christ or are we asking Christ? Are we trying to define Jesus or do we see Him with the eyes of faith, hear Him with our heart, respond to Him with our life? If we are looking for definitions, we are idolaters, we are polytheists, we practice magic, we want to command God, and for this we study Him. This perversion can be squared off: we submit ourselves to God so that in His name they oppress other people.

If Jesus lived for us and the Spirit of God is the Spirit of Jesus, then this is monotheism. The faith of communion is monotheism, the faith of consumption and/or domination - polytheism, magism, paganism.

4 May 2024

The world of freedom and the world of slavery: their past, present and future

Let's imagine that it's 1942. You live, for example, in Canada. You are an amateur radio operator, searching the airwaves for radio enthusiasts, and suddenly you hear a not-so-literate English speaker. It is also an amateur radio operator, a German who lives in Hamburg. What will be your first question? That's right: ‘Are you for Hitler?’

Now, in 2024, the first question to ask a person who lives in Moscow and posts YouTube videos in English is: ‘Are you for Putin? Do you approve of Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Do you consider NATO's eastward expansion, the inclusion of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine in NATO, a threat to Russia?’

No. No. No.

I hold in high esteem Naum Chomsky, a great linguist, a noble and wise man, a democrat, not of Congress, but a genuine one. I agree with everything he says about the American establishment. His criticism of the US is all the more authoritative because he lives in the US, as opposed to me. But when he says that NATO expansion in the 1990s was a threat to Russia, I strongly disagree with him.

Russia was and still is a threat to the West, that's the problem. One has to remember that only Russia after World War II included Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria and East Germany in its empire. This empire was still the same Russian empire, only under the pseudonym ‘USSR’, ‘socialist bloc’. But there was no socialism in the USSR, there was totalitarianism. This totalitarianism was created by Lenin, reformed by Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and strengthened by Putin.

Russian totalitarianism is more dangerous than the totalitarianism of China, because Russia is a more militant state. Actually, Russia is a rare example of the garrison-state.

American thinker Herbert Spencer divided all countries into industrial and military. Factories or garrisons. Harold Lasswell, prominent American sociologist, suggested the term «garrison state.»

Russia was a garrison state long before Lenin. What is a garrison state? It is a state in which militarism functions not for the benefit of the inhabitants of the state, not to increase their welfare, but to strengthen the state apparatus. The British Empire was not a garrison state because the inhabitants of the British Isles benefited from imperial conquests. These were both material benefits and political benefits: the British expanded their rights and freedoms. Every military activity of the Russian Empire from Ivan the Terrible to Putin led to a reduction in the civil liberties of its inhabitants.

Russia remained a threat to the outside world even under Gorbachev. Gorbachev was a totalitarian dictator, and a bloody dictator. He was forced to withdraw from Afghanistan and East Germany, not because he was being democratic, but because Russia was then in an economic decline. But he had some resources left, and he used them to try to hold on to Lithuania, Georgia, Moldavia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, and the Central Asian countries. The fact that these countries did gain independence was not the result of Gorbachev's goodwill, but of a weakened economy. In addition, Boris Yeltsin, in order to bring down Gorbachev and take his place in the Kremlin, decided to let Ukraine and other regions go free. But Yeltsin was not a democrat either. As soon as Yeltsin ousted Gorbachev, he began to rebuild the empire. Similarly, Lenin, having deposed Nicholas II, began to rebuild the empire, re-conquering Ukraine, Georgia, and other regions.

The clearest example of Yeltsin's militarism was the war in Chechnya. The West did not stand up for Chechnya, but more than half a million Chechens were killed there on Yeltsin's orders. Why didn't the West, first of all the US, stand up for the Chechens? Because the West was stuck in Iraq. For the same reason, the West reacted very sluggishly to Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008 and to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan absorbed all the energy. President Bush in 1991 urged Ukrainians not to fight for independence, not to annoy Gorbachev, because Bush could not fight both Gorbachev and Saddam Hussein.

It is necessary to remember the hundreds of thousands of dead people of Chechnya in order to say firmly: Ukraine and Poland, Lithuania and Estonia, the Czech Republic and Latvia had something to fear in the 1990s. It made sense for NATO to admit these countries to its ranks to protect them from the Kremlin's jingoism.

Why did the US decide to concentrate nuclear weapons in the hands of the Kremlin?

Because the West was afraid that a civil war might break out in Ukraine, or that Ukraine's democratic authorities would fail to protect their nuclear arsenal and sell nuclear weapons to Iran or Iraq.

This is a very traditional psychology: a democratic country prefers to deal with dictatorships than with other democratic countries. Dictatorships are predictable. Democracy can always turn into anarchy.

There's also a deep-seated racism at play here. Russians or Chinese seem like savages who need a strong hand to bring them up, to teach them democracy and freedom.

The main factor, though, is Western weakness. The West is a conventional designation of the world of democracy, freedom and human rights. But this world is smaller than the world of despotism and oppression. Smaller, though not weaker. During the last few centuries, the West has become stronger than the East, the world of democracy has become stronger than the world of despotism due to very many factors. All these factors, however, are gradually losing their importance. First of all, the West is no longer so far ahead of the East in science and technology as it was in the 19th century. It turned out that democracy alone does not guarantee technological leadership.

For many years, many Western politicians have said that capitalism is the motor of Western freedom, that despotism will never be as economically successful as capitalist democracies. Except that historians know very well that capitalism arose within feudal society, and that capitalists were (and, alas, still are) perfectly capable of making money from both slavery and despotism. Hitler's Germany was a capitalist country.

In fact, even the so-called "communist" countries had capitalism, otherwise they would have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Capitalism can exist without civil liberties and democracy.

As for the superiority of the West, it began in the 16th century with the conquest of America. But why was a handful of Spaniards able to conquer the Aztec Empire?

Why did tiny England conquer huge India? Why did the West invade China? Because these eastern regions were fragmented. These were mosaic despotisms. They stood on oppression, and the oppressed dreamed of freedom. Western colonizers found themselves in the role of liberators. This is how the West embodied the Roman principle of "Divide and Conquer», Divide et impere.

Today, the World of Despotism went into a counter-offensive. This is a completely natural process. The surprise with which the West met this counteroffensive is unnatural. However, the surprise was largely artificial. Government officials like Fukuyama always try to exaggerate their successes. Here they reported that democracy had won all over the world.

Let's return to the war in Ukraine. There is one good news and one bad news. People kill and people die.

Good news: Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not as dangerous for the West as Western politicians make it out to be. Russia will not fight with NATO. There is one reason: NATO's nuclear weapons. However, even if you forget about nuclear weapons, Russia is immeasurably weaker than NATO, primarily in terms of population. And it is not guns or drones that are at war, people are at war.

By the way, here is another good news for you: Iran and China are not planning to attack the West tomorrow. Politicians who represent Russia, Iran and China like Germany, Italy and Japan in 1939 are sly.

The bad news: the peaceful and safe future that Western politicians promised their voters will most likely never happen. Ego, in principle, cannot be for one reason: security is a false ideal, incompatible with human freedom. Freedom is the freedom to be both safe and dangerous. Freedom is freedom to love and freedom to hate, freedom to create and freedom to destroy.

The idea that it is possible to create a society in which a person can walk the streets without fear is both unrealistic and vicious. This idea can be implemented only partially, for some people. It is possible to create such an area for the chosen ones, which will be protected by soldiers and rockets, where bandits and madmen will not penetrate. But even in such a paradise there will be a possibility that a friend will betray, a beloved person will be deceived, a long-term business partner will prefer to ruin you.

Can the East, the World of Slavery, conquer the West, destroy the World of Democracy?

No.

Thanks to the atomic bomb.

Does this mean that nothing threatens the West?

No.

The West is threatened not by conquest, but by ruin. The West may turn into a world of poverty - more precisely, into a world that will be poorer than the East, the World of Despotism.

Even now, many Russians who fled from Russia to the West are surprised that the West does not live as luxuriously as it seemed to them. In recent decades, China has largely overtaken the United States in terms of economic development.

Will a Western man love freedom if it turns out that freedom does not necessarily bring with it wealth?

It seems to me that one should love freedom more than money. Otherwise, we do not love freedom, but money, and we value freedom only as a means to get rich.

Well, should the West help Ukrainians? Of course.

Should the West defend itself from the World of Unfreedom? Of course.

It is important to understand that totalitarianism does not affect some particularly bad countries where people have bad genetics. Totalitarianism parasitises human fears, greed, and inhumanity. Lenin's rise to power was the result of the anti-democratic policy of the tsars. Hitler's rise to power was the result of the bourgeoisie's fear of the workers, and the West's fear of the Communists. They were afraid of Stalin, they supported Hitler, and as a result they had to enter into an alliance with Stalin in order to defeat Hitler.

But how exactly will they defend themselves? What should be the protection?

While the logic of the Cold War is being repeated. However, in some sense, everything became worse. During the Cold War, there were no such sanctions against Russia. There was no such general, indiscriminate punishment of all the inhabitants of Russia.

There is something more important. Harold Lasswell wrote about garrison state as something which can emerge as a byproduct of struggle for freedom or/and security. «The specialists on violence» become «the most powerful group on society.»

I will not dare to give advice to people living in the World of Freedom. After all, like President Kennedy, I am a "Berliner", only my Berlin is not 1963, but 1943. My job is to build freedom within slavery or, more precisely, to try to be free and humane in a world of unfreedom and inhumanity. To be Uncle Tom. I already have a cabin (or. To be more precise, a cabinet), it remains to acquire the courage of Uncle Tom, which I wish for everyone.

15 april 2024

Ten thesis on communication

1

Human communication is proactive.

Humans study monkeys, while monkeys don't study humans. Humans put questions to Artificial intelligence, not the other way round.

Carl Popper classified societies into open and closed types. This is similar to the classification of psychological types into extraverted and introverted. Such division is not specific to humans.

2

Human communication is based on non-human communication. Most if not all processes in the material world can be described as communicational processes. A stone which is heated by the Sun is communicating with the sun. It receives the Sun’s heat and responds by raising the temperature. This is a uni-lateral communication, because the Sun doesn’t intend to communicate with a stone. This is an involuntary communication.

3

Human communication is based on the non-human communication but this doesn’t in and of itself mean that it can be reduced to non-human communication and can’t contain any new tools and new goals, or provide new content.

4

Humans think about communication, first of all, as a verbal process. The use of appearance (skin, hair, clothing) and purely pragmatic activities (building houses, eating) to communicate imply a qualitative difference between human communication and animal communication. They show this difference more than verbal communication. Music, paintings, sculpture and other arts occupy an intermediate position between these (“decorative”) types of communication and verbal communication.

5

Humans communicate in different modes and for different purposes: survival, pleasure, amusement etc. but they always aspire that communication will be based on truth and aimed at finding the truth. It is fundamental to human communication to distinguish between falsehood and truth and to endeavour to destroy falsehood.

6

For all its similarity to animal communication systems, human communication through words, i.e. speech, has a unique property: it infinitely expands both the possibilities for lying and the possibilities for truth. Using metaphors, humour, wordplay and other means, humans turn verbal communication into an instrument of communication, entertainment and cognition, the possibilities of which seem limitless.

The human brain has a huge potential for both positive possibilities and the formation of illusions, but thanks to communication a person can even control their own brain, increasing its positive and negative capabilities.

7

Even when people falsify information, they do it for the sake of truth, and sometimes falsification is a path to verification and vice versa. This makes human communication an incredibly complex, fascinating, and potentially endless process.

8

Humans change in the process of communication. Any healthy human being begins to communicate as any other animal, as an individual in a family, a tribe, or a pack. Communication is a way to attain a personality while belonging to humanity. Emergence of one’s own personhood and emergence of humanity are different processes, albeit they are deeply interconnected.

Humanity is secondary to being a person. A human being grows, rising from individuality to personality. The life of an individual is a story, the life of a person is a history. Personality nurtures humanity through history, in spite of the processes of separation, discommunication, and oppression, which corrode both personality and humanity.

9

Humans are constantly improving their communication, and two inventions have proven to be particularly important to that end. First, the invention of writing. Writing is alienated communication that can exist without the original communicators, even after their death, that can be inherited or be an object of action by other people. Second, modification of communication on the scale of "personal/impersonal”. The main example of impersonal alienated communication is money. Money is impersonal, while literature, which has been developing in parallel with it, allows for a deeply personal communication.

10

At any given moment, the life of any human being can be best understood as a form of communication: both with themselves (intra-communication) and others (inter-communication), both individualistic and personalistic, both inherited and newly invented, aimed at both uniting and alienating through hate and love, fear and hope, war and peace.