Who Herds the Shepherds

There’s a question I’ve been putting off since chapter thirteen of this notebook, and I can’t put it off any longer. The question stopped waiting.

If Earth is a project, if civilizations are experiments, if the “designers” sit on the fifth-sixth floor and set the initial conditions — then what conditions? With what goal? According to what plan? And — most importantly — whose plan? Because, as it turns out, there isn’t just one plan.

There are three. And the people behind them (“people” is a loose term; what stands behind these plans isn’t people in the way Seryozha is a person; but for convenience — people) — these people hate each other. The way surgeons hate homeopaths: on principle, ideologically, down to the grinding of teeth.

Three schools. Three models for what to do with eight billion rats in an aquarium.

On the morning of day twenty-five, when I went out into the corridor for water, a thin stack of printed pages with a paper clip lay on the stool by the door: four sheets, unsigned and without a cover, ordinary office paper. I picked them up, read them standing by the window — slanting sunlight fell on the yellowed pages — and half an hour later returned them to the stool, exactly where I’d taken them from, because the reading had taken considerably more out of me than I’d been prepared to give before breakfast.

The teaching set out on those four sheets began with a thesis that would draw a yawn on any fitness blog: everything alive grows under pressure. The thesis in itself was nothing new. Every blogger with pumped-up shoulders and a “mindset.ru” account had spent a decade selling me the same thought through the washing machines of fitness clubs: “you have to break your comfort zone,” “muscles tear in order to grow stronger,” “Einstein discovered relativity only because he was kicked out of the patent office” (Einstein, incidentally, was never kicked out — for a blogger the factual side is a secondary detail). Teenagers in front of the mirror shouting “come on, come on, come on,” corporate trainings on leaving your comfort zone, motivational slogans on gym towels — twenty years of translated catchphrases had been telling me the same thing as these pages, only in noisy wrapping.

But the author took a step none of the above had taken: he stopped praising pressure for being useful. Usefulness is a category from the vocabulary of a victim who wants to get something in exchange for suffering. Pressure, according to the text, is the only thing that ensures a change of complexity at the level of causal links: it compacts information nodes to a density at which they stop being what they were and, in theory, no longer return to their former state. Carbon under fifty kilobars becomes diamond because under such pressure it can’t be otherwise — and the metaphor here is incidental. The author called this operation by a single word — compaction.

From which it follows that no “progress through dialogue,” “transformation through awareness” or “evolution through choice” is observed in nature; these phrases are three ways of saying one thing: “I’d like there to be less pain.” A legitimate wish, with no bearing on the mechanism. Without pressure, complexity drains away into an assortment of identical copies: the dinosaur becomes a chicken, the human a subscriber to a meditation app. What’s left at the output is a catalogue of optimized models among which there is no longer anything to choose from.

Towards noon Wei Lin invited me for a walk — in the forest: the conversation about the three schools needed a space bigger than a room, and the walls of the dacha (even folded, even non-Euclidean) weren’t big enough to hold what he was going to say. I already knew that this walk was a deferred answer to what I’d read in the corridor that morning.

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— The First School, — he said, — believes that conscious beings should be assembled: assembled from above, by a blueprint laid out in advance, with architecture, hierarchy, and order all already written in. In that blueprint, every man is given his place and his function, and the whole, the entire system, is by definition more important than any single element.

— Plato, — I said. — The Republic. Philosopher-kings at the top, warriors in the middle, workers at the bottom. Third-year syllabus. Again.

— Plato is one manifestation, and there were plenty of others before him and after him: Confucianism, the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Soviet Union. Every great hierarchy in history is an attempt to implement the First School’s project, a school that has always carried three words on its banner: order, control, stability.

— And?

— And every one of them collapsed, because order imposed from above requires suppression of whatever doesn’t fit. And what falls outside the fit is always the most alive, the most unpredictable, the most valuable — precisely the thing for whose sake it would even make sense to build order in the first place.

— Us, — said Kira. (She was walking alongside. Artyom — a step behind. Zoya — somewhere; with Zoya you never know where she is, even when she’s ten feet away.)

— You, — Wei Lin nodded. — Bugs, anomalies, the ones who see more. The First School, at best, controls you; at worst it eliminates you, and without any malice, purely out of logic: you’re a destabilizing factor, and the system can’t contain you without restructuring itself. The First School itself, however, only knows how to build; restructuring is something it fundamentally cannot do — once and for all.

Artyom walked in silence. But I could see how he was listening: with his whole body, like an antenna. A military analyst hearing a description of a familiar system — and recognizing it.

— The army, — he said finally. — The First School is the army: vertical hierarchy, orders, execution. The guy on top knows; the guy on the bottom does. No questions: a question, by itself, is already insubordination.

— Exactly, — said Wei Lin. — And Artyom — you feel this because you come from this system. You’re used to hierarchy. You’re comfortable in it.

Artyom said nothing. Which was more eloquent than any answer.