Descent training.

Mood is bad — part of the valuable film was destroyed. The day was intense.

I often wonder: how does a person change, and if they do, in what way? Outward appearance, connections with the environment — yes. And the person themselves changes: their knowledge, needs, interests, problems. But the essence of human life, one’s attitude toward it, toward oneself, toward everything that surrounds you, that you live by — this, it seems to me, is unchanging and, I’m convinced, follows a definite law from birth to death in every generation, every nation. The stages of understanding the world, public and personal aspirations, relationships with people, family, friends, the discovery of the world and disappointments, ups and downs, moral and ethical values — all of it fits, it seems to me, into a definite pattern. And if you were to represent it graphically, I’m sure we’d each find our row of peers, both within a single generation and from generation to generation. The ratio of active people to passive, evil to good, talented to untalented, energetic to idle would turn out to be constant, with only those fluctuations that arise from the tension in society during periods of cataclysm, revolution, war, catastrophe. And that means human essence remains the same, no matter what forms of social life it develops in and no matter how we dress it up, although the environment does influence the formation of corresponding qualities in people, thereby creating an imbalance of one group over another, forcing masses of people to submit to new conditions in order to preserve themselves and survive. Therefore, in organizing life, one should not invent things but proceed from the laws that govern a human being as part of nature, and for that one must study and refine them. Only then can one not change a person, but learn to manage our collective “self” in the interest of all, so that we don’t find ourselves in conflict with those very laws.

After a hard workday, there’s still enough energy, it turns out, for a game of table tennis — V.V. Lebedev (far right) during his vacation with the Moscow Aviation Institute construction brigade on BAM.

Nature is harmonious, but within it a harsh law operates — the strong overcome the weak, and that means violence exists. This is why the struggle between good and evil is constant. And evil frequently prevails.

But from antiquity, people, living by these laws, dreamed of goodness, of its triumph over evil. Hence fairy tales, legends, epics, where — even if only within their pages — goodness was celebrated, preserved in the heart and memory of the people, the belief that goodness exists and will surely prevail; you just have to be patient. And over the long course of human civilization, there formed — and it was bound to form — a doctrine of a society of equals, of spiritual values standing above material ones, and of the consciousness that one person can be another’s friend. This filled the void of its lopsided development.

Today two systems exist, each with its own worldview. In the capitalist world, everything follows a natural course. And each generation grows up in an environment of visible freedom: search, choose, try. If you find your way, you’ll be a winner. Lose, and you end up on society’s scrapheap. Life operates by the rules of gambling. Their art, fashions, traditions, ideals are shaped by these rules. Perhaps not bad for them, comprehensible to them. But it’s their life — one where goodness is not proclaimed, but evil is masked by it.

Our society lives by different laws; therefore our relationships must be governed by our own morality, which means: to fight evil, suppress it in ourselves, and cultivate good. But unfortunately, for a long time we deceived ourselves and others by presenting our system as a guarantor of good, thereby dismissing and hushing up our own vices, which led to distorted forms of illness in our society, with the means of combating them being ineffective and with no guarantees of justice for the individual. We forgot that these processes must be learned to be managed, and that this science — education — is not prescriptive but complex and multi-layered, encompassing labor, art, literature, language, politics. And here it is impermissible to allow the infiltration of tools of influence from another morality into our world. A reliable barrier must be erected against them. We have different paths, though the final goal — the development of humanity with a single life program — is the same. It is a converging process, and I think it makes no difference from which side one approaches its summit. We should not pit our worldview against others, but defend its vitality by our own example.

And one more thing. This concerns the life potential of each of us, which we try to maintain at a high level. But life is life, and a moment comes when the strength is still there, no less than others’, yet the direction of one’s life-orientation vector relative to theirs becomes the opposite — it goes into decline, like the tangent lines of a parabola in its ascending and descending halves. This parabola, like the trajectory of life — how much you load onto yourself, and what kind, determines the heights you reach. And then, whether we want it or not, though often still capable of active work, we’re already oriented by the whole structure of life, the weight of cares, accumulated fatigue, habits or age, downward — that is, away from public interests toward personal ones, which means braking those who are on the way up. This is the general picture. Though there are exceptions to this rule — people who throughout their lives, even in old age, keep their life orientation pointed upward, and it remains the driving force even when their vital energies are low. But that’s far from universal.

Therefore, only a person themselves, through their own conscience and sense of responsibility, can recognize this turning point and yield the road. But as long as the defining factor in society is one’s position on the career ladder rather than the person themselves, with no constitutional means of protecting society from the power grabs of those in authority, that person will fight by every means for the level of opportunities they’ve attained. This has been known since ancient times, but also known from those times is another, more just, humane, and universally equal measure — respect for age, wisdom, and accomplishments, preserving the deference and privileges of the elder. It would seem that in our time, adding a little more — guaranteeing the pursuit of any occupation, maintaining one’s achieved standard of living — would eliminate the fear of giving up one’s seat. But this is possible only when a society’s spiritual world, its cultural and intellectual level, is high.