Doesn't Work

My libertarianism began in the Armed Forces. The Soviet ones. Of course, I didn’t read any subversive books—there weren’t any then. I simply observed and drew conclusions. The army is a rigid daily schedule, a week, month, and year planned in advance, everything according to plan, everything under control. The army is the triumph of law, because the Charter says everything. Well, literally everything, including the distances between bunks in the barracks and “the percentage of fat in mazh.”¹ The army is the embodiment of order: a rigid hierarchy where the commander is not only “always right,” but can easily prove it with extra duty out of turn, the guardhouse, a military tribunal—and most readily—with an unpunishable punch to the face. And so what? It didn’t work. Despite the Charter being the same for everyone, each unit had its own orders, and if you needed something from the soldiers—even something that supposedly fell under their duties—you had to negotiate. After all, you could give an order! You could. Many did. But if you needed to get the job done, better negotiate. Otherwise it didn’t work. And the more non-standard the tasks were, the farther their solutions strayed from the Charter and strict hierarchy.

And here’s what’s interesting. The farther from actual effectiveness, the more our progressive public demands to turn Ukraine into a barracks. So that, you know, martial law, everything under control. Slightly misstep—and immediately, you understand, execution and guardhouse, and whoever didn’t understand—right in the kisser. And then, the public thinks, order and victory will come. It won’t. None of this works even in the army, and with society the matter is orders of magnitude more complicated. The army doesn’t need to feed itself or produce shells and cartridges—it lives on everything ready-made, and that’s why there you can afford to march in formation and live in barracks. But in society it won’t work that way. In society you need to negotiate from the start, paying no attention to the Charter and commanders. Otherwise nothing will work.

And here’s what’s even more interesting. The same public collects money, organizes complex purchases and complex logistics, overcoming serious resistance from the authorities in the process. In this activity, the public demonstrates miracles of dexterity in circumventing laws—it evades taxes and, let’s be honest, engages in smuggling. It’s precisely this that helps it supply the army with everything necessary. But at the same time, these same people demand to give even more power to those who created all these obstacles. What is the correct term for that?

I think the next year or two will be decisive for Ukrainian society, its survival and prospects. Its main enemy is not Putin and not even the local state, but itself—its infantile and naive notions of reality, completely contradicting not only this reality itself, but also the practice that this individual engages in within it. If taxes, customs, laws, and the boss interfere with getting the job done—they need to be ignored and, if possible, eliminated. It’s impossible to seriously expect that the boss will punish and control himself—nothing like that has ever happened or will happen in a Ukrainian’s life. And yet, with some masochistic relish, he demands even more laws, even more prohibitions. They already held elections for the Ukrainian, already introduced new taxes, and—under the guise of reducing expenses—increased expenses and robbed him with devaluations and inflation, and made it clear that the boss doesn’t punish his own, that no one will answer for Maidan, and that if they take something from someone “for the front and for victory,” it will be from him. And nothing. The progressive public reminds me of a healthy fifteen-year-old who yesterday easily beat up two thugs in an alley, but at the same time crawls to mommy for comfort and wails, “Impose martial law, ouch-ouch-ouch!” In general, he has two options—either he will go into adult life and become a hero there, or he will live with mommy until forty-five, get married, get divorced, and start drinking heavily within a year. We’ll see soon.