About private property, soul, ideology, moral and ethical values
At the end of the 80s of the last century, when the top of the CPSU began to degenerate, a fashionable tendency emerged to rely on the development of the institution of private property. They believed in her as a panacea for everything. And no one thought about what this is, private property, how it affects a person, what happens to spirituality when contacting private property? The question is by no means an idle one; it has been studied by both philosophers and scientists, as well as the best minds of the church.
What is private property, good or evil in the modern world?
Property is theft
In legal terms, this is one of the forms of ownership, meaning the absolute, legally protected right of a citizen or legal entity to specific property, including means of production. Well, great, nothing bad happened, everything is good and pleasant.
To understand the role of this type of property, it is necessary to understand where it came from in our mortal world. There is a work by Friedrich Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” that is remarkable in its scientific content. It is incredibly difficult or even boring to read. But no one promised you Bushkov’s novel or Ulitskaya’s opus.
You don’t just have to read there, you have to think there. But with this you often have no luck. Erudition will not help, only methods of analysis will help, and this is oh, how difficult it is when the book contains a continuous stream of all sorts of tribes, family ties and the like. Therefore, if you only have enough energy to leaf through glamorous magazines, then all that remains is to shrug your shoulders.
According to Engels, private property, classes and the state did not always exist, but arose at a certain stage of economic development. In primitive society, when the level of productive forces was extremely low, everything was common. But over time, with the advent of iron, some surpluses began to accumulate, and gradually a class of owners began to emerge, which began to appropriate these surpluses for themselves.
Naturally, this could not please everyone, especially those who could no longer obtain these surpluses. But those who began to appropriate these surpluses for themselves began to look for forms and methods to ensure that these accumulations did not pass into the hands of the rest of the community, therefore, an apparatus of violence was required. This is how the state arose.
Of course, the presentation of this process is very, very simplified. In Engels' book, these stages are discussed in detail and supported by numerous facts.
The main thing for us is that private property initially arose as a product of social and class inequality, for the full existence of which an apparatus of suppression was required, that is, the state. And what a state can be, we see in stories our humanity. Moreover, the forms of the state varied depending on the level of development of both the productive forces and science and religion. But the essence was the same - the preservation of material and social inequality. With one single exception - when the Great October Revolution took place in Russia, which destroyed the institution of private property, replacing it with personal property.
In the modern world, the suppression of social inequality has taken on softer forms, but not always and not everywhere. Capitalism cannot be a kind uncle, a sort of Santa Claus with a bag of gifts on his back. It is the prohibition of private property that is the mortal enemy of capitalism, which is precisely why bestial hatred of everything Soviet arises, since socialism has destroyed the exploitation of man by man.
The 1936 Constitution stated that peasants and artisans could own “small private farms” based on personal labor and excluding the hiring of other people. But in the 1977 Constitution, the concept of private property disappeared completely. Now the property could not be used to extract unearned income.
Do you understand the difference?
Private property is intended for extracting unearned income (can you seriously assert that Chubais, Deripaska, Kovalchuk, Rotenberg and others like them are working fruitfully for our benefit?), but personal property is not. In modern Russia, private property is protected by law as the most sacred thing on earth, receiving the name of the sacred principle. Everything is done for her and for her sake. Everything else is superfluous, especially morality and conscience. Remember the saying: it’s nothing personal, it’s business?
One of the great people once said: “Property is theft,” but the favorite and spiritual mentor of liberals, Ivan Ilyin, wrote in his work “The Path of Spiritual Renewal”:
“To substantiate private property means to show its necessity for a person, its vital expediency and its spiritual fidelity. This means indicating those essential properties of man - natural, instinctive and spiritual - by virtue of which private property must be accepted, recognized, approved and protected. However, this does not mean to approve and justify any cash distribution of property and wealth. Usually these two issues are confused, which is completely unacceptable.
The institution of private property may be necessary, expedient and correct; but the cash distribution of property may be incorrect and vitally impractical. It is necessary that things belong to people with such complete, exclusive and lasting security that would evoke in the soul of everyone a complete and inexhaustible will to creative work.”
The institution of private property may be necessary, expedient and correct; but the cash distribution of property may be incorrect and vitally impractical. It is necessary that things belong to people with such complete, exclusive and lasting security that would evoke in the soul of everyone a complete and inexhaustible will to creative work.”
That's it and no other way! Private property, it turns out, is necessary for humans! And even further, Ilyin assures that:
1. Private property corresponds to the individual way of being that is given to man by nature. It goes towards the instinctive and spiritual life of a person, satisfying his natural right to self-activity and independence.
2. Private property evokes in a person instinctive impulses and spiritual motives for hard work, in order not to spare one’s strength and to create the best. It unleashes economic enterprise and personal initiative and thereby strengthens character.
3. It gives the owner a sense of confidence, trust in people, in things and in the land, the desire to invest his labor and his values in the economic process.
4. Private property teaches a person to creatively love work and land, his hearth and homeland. It expresses and consolidates his settledness, without which culture is impossible. It brings the family together by involving them in the property. It feeds and intensifies the state instinct of man. She reveals to him the artistic depth of the economic process and teaches him a religious acceptance of nature and the world.
5. Private property awakens and cultivates a sense of justice in a person, teaching him to strictly separate “mine” and “yours,” teaching him to legal reciprocity and respect for the powers of others, cultivating in him a correct sense of civil order and civic independence, a correct approach to political freedom .
6. Finally, private property educates a person for economic solidarity, which does not violate economic freedom: for each owner, becoming rich, enriches both his environment and the national economy itself: and competition between owners leads not only to struggle, but also to the creative tension necessary for National economy. And the path to organizing the world economy does not go through international communist enslavement, but through awareness and strengthening of the solidarity that grows out of private economy.
Let's try to understand all the points.
If private property goes towards the spiritual life of a person, then how to explain all those crimes that are associated with private property and capital? Are wars really started only by persons deprived of property, and the rich are not involved in business?
Or does the destruction of historical and cultural values for the sake of building all sorts of business centers, shops, and so on stem from segments of the population deprived of any property? And the extermination of entire nations took place against the will of kings, emperors and bourgeoisie?
And on a small scale, aren’t there enough examples when, for the sake of owning property, forgeries, frauds, murders, and raider takeovers are committed? Or are they as moral as capitalism itself?
Well, if you compare socialism and capitalism, the comparison will not be in favor of the latter, since some forms of crime appeared and flourished only in the era of capitalism, for example, the creation of organized crime groups, nepotism, racketeering. So, my friends, there is not even a smell of spirituality here.
What is the best thing that private property creates?
If we mean various entertainment centers, factories, ships, then this is just the accumulation of material values; instinctively a person strives to take the results of labor for himself; the spiritual cannot arise on the basis of private property. Only when a desire for good for society arises, only then does a person begin to think about the spiritual principle. It is not for nothing that Christ expelled the merchants from the temple, for profit and spirituality are incompatible. But the modern world has trampled on the concepts of morality; for the sake of profit, you can kill a hundred people, as at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station.
I agree with Ilyin only on one thing - private property really unleashes economic enterprise and thereby strengthens character. But only.
How can private property create trust in people? If a capitalist, an oligarch and a banker begin to work on trust, then they will immediately go down the drain. And not only in Russia, but also in the enlightened, good West, which our democrats love to pray to. Let us remember all kinds of financial pyramids of the 90s of the twentieth century, the robbery of the people with the help of vouchers, and finally, the depreciation and disappearance of all the money in the accounts of ordinary people in Sberbank. What other kind of trust can we talk about?
The same applies to patriotism and religious perception of the world. How many Russian oligarchs, having robbed a lot of people and taken their capital abroad, became patriots of the country? How many dollars did they invest in the development of science, education, medicine? Or maybe they think day and night how they, patriots, can ennoble, equip and glorify Russia? All we see are queues in European courts, where they tearfully beg to be accepted as our own, bourgeois.
The last point is especially interesting.
It turns out that only private property can raise a spiritually enriched citizen who cares about society. Well, just like the same deputies from Nefteskvazhinsk, who all think about Russia. In fact, private property accustoms a person to isolation, to the fact that “mine” is “mine,” and if you try to poke your nose in, I, based on my Christian virtue, will pierce your belly with a pitchfork. Private property consciousness is a synonym for farm thinking, where the concept of the Motherland is limited to the boundaries of one’s farm, one’s pigsties, cowsheds, chickens and pitchforks. Everything else is alien, incomprehensible, and therefore hostile and subject to destruction.
Belief in the sanctity and necessity of private property naturally led Ilyin to the glorification and justification of National Socialism. Because it is fascism and Nazism that most clearly personify the essence of private property in its absolute form. No wonder P. A. Stolypin dreamed of eradicating communal consciousness and creating a class of owners who would commit any crime for their own benefit.
It is private property that was and is the source of most of the crimes ever committed on earth. Money and private property, supposedly designed to ensure freedom of intellectual and spiritual development, in fact provide their owners with only permissiveness in moral and criminal crimes. If you look at modern justice and how easily criminals who own millions get away with it, you can easily understand the role and essence of private property.
As a result, not only the big bourgeoisie, but also the middle class, which has set itself the exclusive goal of achieving personal well-being, and for which the height of spirituality is the ideal of philistinism, will easily sell their convictions and conscience, calling it just a profitable deal, and will convince themselves that they are working at the same time for the benefit of society.
And now I propose to take a short excursion into recent history and become familiar with the moral code of the builder of communism. Its full text includes the following provisions:
1. Devotion to the cause of communism, love for the socialist homeland, for the countries of socialism.
2. Conscientious work for the good of society: he who does not work does not eat.
3. Everyone's concern for maintaining and enhancing the public domain.
4. High consciousness of public duty, intolerance to violations of public interests.
5. Collectivism and comradely mutual assistance: each for all, all for one.
6. Humane relations and mutual respect between people: a person is a friend to a friend, comrade and brother.
7. Honesty and justice, moral purity, simplicity and modesty in public and personal life.
8. Mutual respect in the family, concern for raising children.
9. Intransigence to injustice, parasitism, dishonesty, careerism, money-grubbing.
10. Friendship and brotherhood of all the peoples of the USSR, intolerance of national and racial hostility.
11. Intolerance towards the enemies of communism, the cause of peace and freedom of peoples.
12. Fraternal solidarity with the working people of all countries, with all peoples.
And now tell me, what's bad about it? Okay, let’s make a nod to the haters of communism and the USSR, remove communist propaganda, the USSR, but the main thing still remains, what makes a person a person. And compare this code with the 10 commandments of God. I also give them in full:
1. I am the Lord your God... let you have no other gods before Me.
2. Do not make for yourself an idol or any image of anything in heaven above, or on the earth below, or in the water under the earth. Do not worship them or serve them; For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Me, and showing mercy to a thousand generations of those who love Me and keep My commandments.
3. Do not take the name of the LORD your God in vain; For the Lord will not leave without punishment the one who utters His name in vain.
4. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Work six days and do all your work; and the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God: on it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your maidservant, nor your livestock, nor the stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord created heaven and earth, the sea and everything in them; and on the seventh day he rested. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and sanctified it.
5. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you.
6. Dont kill.
7. Do not commit adultery.
8. Do not steal.
9. Do not bear false witness against your neighbor.
10. Do not desire your neighbor's house; Do not desire your neighbor's wife, nor his slave, nor his slave, nor his ox, nor his ass, nothing that your neighbor has.
Non-believers can remove those points that talk about God, but, again, what remains?
The remainder is only moral and spiritual. And neither the code nor the commandments speak of a person’s right to oppress others for profit. Things by their nature are common, they are not yours, they are from God. Therefore, the attitude towards private property is a harsh and merciless condemnation. Especially in early Christian writing of the 1st–4th centuries. Such was, for example, Simeon the new Theologian. In his Ninth Catechetical Address he directly wrote:
“The money and possessions that exist in the world are common to everyone, like the light and this air that we breathe, like the pastures of foolish animals in the fields, on the mountains and throughout the whole earth. In the same way, everything is common to everyone and is intended only for the enjoyment of its fruits, but by dominion it belongs to no one.
However, the passion for acquisition, which penetrated life like a kind of usurper, divided in various ways among its slaves and servants what was given by the Lord to everyone for common use. She surrounded everything with fences and secured it with towers, bolts and gates, thereby depriving all other people of the benefits of the Lord. At the same time, this shameless woman claims that she is the owner of all this, and argues that she has not committed injustice towards anyone.”
However, the passion for acquisition, which penetrated life like a kind of usurper, divided in various ways among its slaves and servants what was given by the Lord to everyone for common use. She surrounded everything with fences and secured it with towers, bolts and gates, thereby depriving all other people of the benefits of the Lord. At the same time, this shameless woman claims that she is the owner of all this, and argues that she has not committed injustice towards anyone.”
But there are more important words spoken by Christ himself, who directly and unequivocally said:
“No one can serve two masters: for either he will hate one and love the other; or he will be zealous for one and neglectful of the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”
In the Gospel of Luke, Christ again speaks of the incompatibility of private property and morality:
One of the people told Him. Teacher! tell my brother to share the inheritance with me. He said to the man, “Who made Me a judge or a divider between you?” At the same time he said to them: Look, beware of covetousness, for a person’s life does not depend on the abundance of his possessions.
As Nikolai Somin writes,
“The process of acquisition, growing like a snowball, leads to a spiritual catastrophe, when a person finally falls under the power of mammon and loses his human appearance. It turns out that, contrary to the “generally accepted” theory, which separates covetousness and property, they turn out to be psychologically inseparable. The rich man demonstrates his covetousness precisely by his wealth.”
And anyone who wants to conduct business on the basis of morality (Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or otherwise) will invariably fail in the realities of our society.
Let's return to the code and the Ten Commandments.
Lack of ideology
If you carefully compare both codes, you can see many similarities. At first glance, both Christianity and communism put man first in their theories. The priest will correct me that God should come first, and I will certainly agree with him. But, since the article was written not only for those who believe in Jesus Christ, but also for those who believe in Allah or Buddha, or even deny the existence of God, then I am forced to talk about the minimum that should be characteristic of any person, or rather - one who has the right to be called a person. And this right is not given initially.
A person comes into this world unable to speak or write. What he becomes in his life depends on his parents, then his school and his environment. It is no coincidence that young people, who for some reason began to be called “golden youth” (and I would call them the dregs of society, not all, of course, fit the same brush), the offspring of oligarchs, bankers, top managers and other owners, behave as if the world was created for them alone, that they have the right to dispose of us like cattle, and in fact they consider us cattle, unworthy of licking their feet.
Self-confidence, bragging, greed, acquisitiveness, and arrogance blossomed in them magnificently (I almost said what’s in the soul, but where do these glamorous ones get a soul?), as if illustrating the Russian proverb that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. It was the inviolability of their fathers and mothers that instilled in them the habits of the barchuks and Ivanovs, who did not remember their kinship.
Now there is no connecting rod that would transform the population of Russia, or at least most of it, into a single organism. In other words, there are no spiritual and ideological bonds. In the 25 years since the coup d'etat, the country has slipped into cultural and moral impoverishment.
Perhaps the communist ideology was too present in every sphere of life of the peoples of the Soviet Union, we sometimes laughed at the long speeches of the aging General Secretary of the Party L.I. Brezhnev, but at the same time we all felt like a part of a single whole. A country cannot exist without ideology. Otherwise, it will inevitably slide into chaos. The fall of an empire or country begins small - the national, spiritual and intellectual foundations are shaken. And then the inevitable degradation begins.
Is it dangerous that we lack a state ideology?
There can only be one answer - yes, it is dangerous. The saying goes that a holy place is never empty. And if at the state level no one wants to explain to us how to behave in a given society and how it works; if the urgent need to provide moral guidelines, to determine what is “good” and “evil” is not indicated; if the need to serve a high idea has disappeared; if the goal of society is removed, then confusion and vacillation inevitably ensues, which some mistakenly consider freedom of choice.
There was a destruction of one ideology, with its replacement by the ideology of chewing gum, pop music, thongs, prostitution. Church leaders, with the support of the liberal crowd and snickering bourgeoisie, demand that Lenin be buried and the mausoleum demolished, while masquerading as supposedly Christian dogmas. Like, let’s bury Lenin, and everything will settle down. No, the citizens are good, it will not settle down. Your desire to bury Lenin is not caused by Christian canons - let us remember that the body of the great surgeon N.N. Pirogov still rests in the city of Vinnitsa, and not a single priest even hinted at anything inappropriate.
The modern generation has learned to think only about themselves. The virus of the most terrible individualism has infected almost everyone. When the ideology of a consumer society dominates, promoting a perverted desire to enjoy at any cost, it takes possession of a person in the blink of an eye. Let us remember, dear reader, Vysotsky’s immortal definition of the devil:
“If there is a devil in the world, then he is not a goat-footed stag, but a dragon with three heads, and these heads are cunning, greed, betrayal. And if one bites a person, then the other two will eat him to ashes.”
And it couldn’t be more true. All who betrayed the party and the Motherland in 1991, they were all struck by greed and betrayal. The devil never abandons his victims.
About morality
And in conclusion, a few words about morality.
Modern society has gone far along the path of progress; along with technological development, intellectual development has also progressed. The expansion of freedoms inevitably led to the fact that true values gradually began to be replaced by goals that were similar in appearance, but diametrical in essence. Inner freedom of a person began to be viewed not as the God-given ability of the human will to spontaneously choose good, but as a state of permissiveness, when everything is possible, especially for a lot of money.
Or when only your own “I want” comes to the fore. As a result, morality disappeared, and greed, promiscuity, selfishness, and acquisitiveness took its place. The ability to perform moral actions has almost disappeared, giving way to a sinful perception of life. All this is happening under the slogan of gaining freedom.
The stability and viability of a state is determined primarily by the moral and spiritual level of its population.
How has our society improved and become healthier in the 30 years since the coup d'état?
An unprecedented violation of moral norms and prohibitions continues in the media and culture, respect for traditions and family values is falling, the family is degrading, we live in a society of self-interest and lack of spirituality, and there is an intensive expansion of the criminal subculture.
The Church, which according to its fundamental idea should be an example of spirituality, is increasingly invading the state.
From the traditions of high culture and increased attention to spiritual and moral issues, the country stepped into the quagmire of immorality and spiritless chewing gum, which has so penetrated the consciousness of modern youth that only external attributes have become the measure of faith for them: crosses, visiting church from time to time, tourist trips to holy places for taking selfies and so on.
There is one piquant moment in the history of the church. In Tsarist Russia, the church (all denominations, of course) always defended the interests of the autocracy. And the nationalization of the land immediately deprived the confession of sources of income. I am a supporter of the fact that the church should have its own means to obtain sources of income, priests are people just like you and me, they also need to eat and drink. But, owning gigantic plots of land, the confessions simply parasitized on the labor of the peasants. And the deprivation of such an easy source of existence inevitably led the church to the camp of counter-revolution.
In January 1919, His Holiness Patriarch Tikhon blessed the Supreme Ruler of Russia, Admiral A.V. Kolchak, to fight the godless Bolsheviks. Admiral Kolchak declared a crusade. More than 3,5 thousand Orthodox clergy gathered with him, including 1,5 thousand military clergy. On Kolchak’s initiative, separate combat units were formed, consisting only of clergy and believers (including Old Believers), which was not the case with Kornilov, Denikin and Yudenich. These are the Orthodox squad of the “Holy Cross”, “333rd regiment named after Mary Magdalene”, “Holy Brigade”, three regiments of “Jesus Christ”, “Virgin Mary” and “Nicholas the Wonderworker”. So much for loving your enemies!
Morality and ethics in modern Russian society have long ceased to be the driving principles of man. There is an open decline in morals, supported by the state, because it is much more convenient to control a crowd than sensible people.
Morality and business cannot exist together. Because business and the market are pushing conscience, moral values, morality and spirituality to the margins of life, as factors that prevent people from robbing, stealing, bribing, killing, cultivating and encouraging prostitution.
And no matter what the defenders of capitalism say with their universal grin, but everything we got for the unjustifiably cruel economic reforms of Yeltsin-Gaidar-Chubais, for the ongoing course of dividing society into classes and castes, for establishing a double morality - one for the poor, the other for rich - this is the destruction of the former moral and psychological world of man.
And if the Soviet government recognized the continuity of moral and ethical norms as a result of historical and spiritual development, choosing the best from it, then modern society, led by former members of the CPSU, has chosen a course towards the destruction of not only the historical memory of the people, but also its cultural, spiritual and moral degradation, to the subordination of the spirit to the belly.
But who knows, maybe it will be the SVO that will become the very surgical knife that will cut out the cancerous tumor of immorality and degradation?
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